I usually consider Wednesday to be the first day of GDC, so we'll call today the day before the first day.

Premium to Freemium: Pivoting Monetization Method for Best-Selling Apps

Paul O'Connor of Appy entertainment talked about how they "pivoted" (that's a business-speak way of changing course on something) their business from selling premium apps (as in, pay $X to get the app) tofreemium apps (as in, pay $0 to get the game, but you have many chances to buy stuff inside the game).

Paul opened with what to me amounted to an apology for all this freemium stuff. He quoted a famous investor guy who made millions shorting stocks during the US's Great Depression of the 1920s. The quote is "Markets are never wrong. Opinions can be wrong." Paul's reasoning is that because the market has spoken and very cleary shown that freemium makes more money, then it's what we all should do. This is an interesting and terrible argument. On the one hand, it's a playing-to-win argument, but playing to win applied to real life situations has the problem of the real life situation not having a defined goal. Certainly the goal of life is not to make the most money (if it were, his reasoning would be ok), but such a goal would have us conclude that selling cocaine is what we should all be doing because the market has spoken. People really like cocaine. Yeah it's hard to sell here, but maybe we could invest in offshore cocaine selling, etc.

I found the entire apology mysterious because I was probably more likely than most people to be critical of whatever he was going to say next, but actually he never really said anything that controversial, or even that specific, so it's not like any apology was really needed.

Anyway, the possibly more relevant point here is that Paul is telling us that there is no debate on this freemium thing--that ship has sailed. He showed stats of how 75%+ of iOS apps are making their money that way, so your choices are do it or be irrelevant. Much of the GDC echoed this same idea. It's freemium or die. The people saying this (including Paul) further note that it's possibly the best time ever to be making games so far in the history of games because the access developer's have to digital distribution + the freemium model means success is more attainable than ever.

Paul told us how Appy Entertainment switched over the game Trucks and Skulls to a freemium model. They did this by doing a major update to their game, rather than releasing a new game. They wanted to keep the momentum, player base, and app store ranking. They were also very cautious about keeping their existing players happy. So this switch involved taking nothing away from players who had already bought the game, it just added more new stuff that could be bought with coins (new in-game currency) and new ways to grind for coins.

He said that in figuring out which activities should give coins, that it's best to tie it to stuff that players want to do anyway. For example, they already want to compete on leaderboards and their game already rates your performance up to 4 stars on every level, and players already want to try to get the highest rating on each of the 100+ levels. I thought it was an interesting distinction in that you (the developer) also want to tie rewards to things YOU want, like things that help the game overall. But anyway he emphasized only thinking about giving coins for what players want. Also, after this switchover, all players got just a few coins for free, to encourage them to try using the store.

He didn't really touch on whether you can by in-game advantages, but my guess is yes and that that ruins Trucks and Skulls as a competitive game, but I don't know, it wasn't really stated. You can definitely buy more trucks though, which seems fine.

The craziest thing Paul told us is that zero players complained about this switchover to freemium after the fact. He was very worried about this, but says the new version was actually a better game. He expected it to be not really better, just to make more money, but said that the rewards system with coins made it a more intense experience that got people even more involved. He said he personally checks all their facebook/twitter/etc ties to the community, so he would know about any complaints and that there were LITERALLY ZERO people who complained. The problem with this story is that that is completely impossible. I hope it's self-evidently impossible to make any change in a game and have literally zero people complain. I mean seriously, what? Anyway yeah, freemium is loved by all, and their revenue increased dramatically. Number of downloads were 9x, and revenue 5x.

Paul says one mistake they made was not having any expendable items. A freemium model really needs a nearly unlimited cap on how much someone CAN spend if they really like the game, but Trucks and Skulls is capped at the relatively low cost of someone buying every truck/item they have. So lack of expendable items is considered a serious fuckup in the freemium world, as would be mentioned later in the day by other speakers. Remember, freemium or die is the theme.

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Mike Drach is the head writer at forumwarz.com, a site that lets you role play what it's like to troll people in forums. You create a character from the classes of: Cam Whore, Emo,