This is the second in a series of 2 blog posts where we analyze how Ski Champion performed on the Apple App Store. In part 1, we took a look at download numbers. In this post, we will focus on monetization.
Hi again ! Thanks everyone for the kind words. Let’s now look at Ski Champion’s financial performance (or lack thereof), how we explain it, and the lessons we learnt for our next titles.
In the course of over 2 months since its release as an IAP-supported free app, Ski Champion has netted Majaka a grand total of (drum drum drum) … 450 € ! Yup, not missing any K there, that’s 566 US dollars for our American friends. Not the best ROI for a €22,000 project? Well, read on.
Weekly sales, installs and average DAU
We set out to make Ski Champion with the following goals in mind :
- Key goal 1 : release a game quickly to test the iOS waters
- Key goal 2 : get as many installs as possible
- Secondary objective : maybe make some money if we could
From that perspective, Ski Champion exceeded our key expectations (shipped in 2 months, 230K downloads), but didn’t meet the secondary objective.
Our company business plan never accounted for any revenue from Ski Champion, though we certainly did hope for better in our wildest dreams. Because we knew we would make mistakes with this first game, we kept the feature set to a minimum in order to ship quickly, and elected out many possible revenue streams to save on development time.
Let’s now look at our monetization strategy, and have a closer look at how revenue was spread.
We sold playtime and levels
Ski Champion monetizes through In-App Purchases of Coins packs. These Coins can then be used by players for 2 things :
- Purchase extra Ski Passes : every race costs a Ski Pass, much like Hearts in Diamond Dash. We also give out Ski Pass for free (more on this later)
- Unlock a Slope : there are 2 ways to unlock a slope, by getting medals or by purchasing it for 12 coins
We kept the store to a bare minimum. Players purchase Coins packs with real money. They then use Coins to purchase Ski Pass.
The key idea with the Ski Pass system was to sell items that were both simple to implement, and consumable. We meant to give fans of the game the opportunity to spend large amounts of money if they ever fancied it. A fixed price-point sets 2 barriers, and the power of free-to-play is (in theory) to lift them both: price as a minimum barrier to entry, but also the high cap to how much a player can spend.
We added the option to pay to unlock a slope, because why not, but never expected much from it. As it happens, we have no reliable way of knowing whether the few players that purchased Coins actually used them for Ski Passes or Coins (though we suspect the former). We did set that up in our Flurry analytics, but actual payments were flooded into a sea of fake payments from jailbroken devices. Here we were, thinking piracy would not be a concern since pirates would have never turned into payers anyway!
Freemium is no silver bullet
Now, although we’re okay with Ski Champion not bringing in any significant revenue, it’s fair to say that our monetization strategy didn’t work at all.
With 258 Coins packs sold for 230 000 downloads, Ski Champion has a payer conversion rate of 0.1%.
So there you have it, a warning to our gaming peers. Beware the industry myth according to which, in a freemium game, 1-5% of players will end up spending money. Those are the numbers you typically hear at conferences or in the press here, here, there too, and hey look even in software too.
Good games can definitely reach those metrics. But farm a product out to fast and brace yourself for disappointment.
Of course, we always knew that Ski Champion would monetize poorly. We just thought that meant edging closer to the lower end of the 1-5% interval. How naive.
We realize now that it can be a dangerous misconception. Does it stem from the fact that many f2p developers never actually purchase virtual items ? Do we have such a hard time understanding what goes into the mind of a payer, that we just assume an average 1 to 5% of people are crazy enough to spend money pretty much regardless of the game they’re playing?
In retrospect, of course not. This is far from a rant against free-to-play, or against the press. I am glad those numbers are shared. But to reach that 1-5% conversion rate, the game has to be awesome, it has to engage & retain players over a long time, and virtual items have to bring amazing extra value. I hear you : “duh, obviously!”. Well, it was far from obvious to us when we set out to make Ski Champion, and I strongly suspect it still isn’t to many aspiring free-to-play developers.
Freemium is nice but you have to do it properly
Here is our explanation of why Ski Champion monetized so poorly :
- Our main monetization channel, the Ski Pass, does not add any value to the game. Rather, we removed value by artificially limiting playtime, so spending money simply makes up for it.
- Retention is low . The difficulty curve was rather poorly balanced at launch. While the base gameplay is rather addictive (we think), it gets old quickly due to lack of polish and features
- We chose to be very generous with our free Ski Passes, perhaps to a fault : the player starts with 100 (we’ll test 50 soon), can easily get an extra 40 (rate App and subscribe to mailing list), and 15 refill every hour once you get down to zero (we’ll test every 3 hours soon too). Most players never even use their initial 100 Ski Pass.
So all in all, it was down to a mix of a flawed system and poor implementation. We will definitely apply those bits of learning to our next game.
One thing that *did* work : revenue followed a power curve
IAP prices ranged from €1,59 to €79,99 at launch, and were later halved with no noticeable effect on revenue.
As said earlier, 258 In-App Purchases were made by players, for a total of 450€ in net revenue for Majaka (after Apple’s cut). While these numbers are certainly too small to carry statistical evidence, it’s interesting to note that ~20% of payments accounted for 60% of the revenue.
We take this as proof that it’s important to give players the opportunity to spend as much as they feel.
Could it have gone better?
As with download numbers, there are many ways of monetizing Ski Champion that we intentionnally left out:
- Upgrades : sell faster skis, cool outfits, etc. Those are not consumable and would have made balancing the game more complicated
- Bonus items : consumable items such a “miss gate once” or “turbo boost” would have turned Ski Champion into a more arcadey game, and with more features to develop than we could handle within the timeframe.
- Slopes sold as extra content that cannot be unlocked through gameplay : we thought we’d rather give slopes for free (non-consumable) as a playground for players to happily use and hence purchase lots of Ski Passes (consumable). Here’s an analogy I often use (jokingly) : if the price of oil keeps going up, it may become profitable for the likes of Shell or Exxon-Mobil to give cars away for free (the App) and build lots of highways everywhere (the levels) so people buy more gas (consumables).
- Display ads for other apps : perhaps we should have tried. We’re about to experiment now. Back then, we thought ad revenue would be marginal compared to revenue stemming from in-app purchases. Our plan was to update Ski Champion with cross-promotional ads only.
Final verdict
We spent 22K€ making Ski Champion. Most of that money was spent on programming and art, things neither myself nor our Creative Director Gaël could do ourselves. The way we see it though, the project brought us much more than €450 :
- What do you know, we can treat ourselves with a nice meal or buy an iPad3
- We got Majaka off the ground and began to make a name for ourselves
- We reached 200K+ players
- We made mistakes and learnt a lot in the process
Such was our plan, from the beginning.
What are we on to now? Why, of course, make more games. Our next title will have a much more serious focus on generating revenue, and will introduce a cool, innovative monetization channel that we can’t wait to try out live. So stay tuned and be sure to follow me on Twitter (@NicolasG_B) or Majaka on Facebook to be kept posted !
Thank-you for reading,
Nicolas
Anything else you would like to know? Do you have experience to share with conversion rates and the freemium model? Let us know in the comments section
Hey guys, thanks for sharing these – I find these business postmortems to be really addictive!
We had similar experiences with our “Monkey Drum” app – a really pathetic conversion rate. In our case, the conclusion was that freemium isn’t compatible with educational kids’s apps – many parents probably disable IAP (and we even explain how to do this in the app.) We ended up making a separate paid version, and it’s done fairly well so far (after being picked up by Apple for the N&N feature.)
However, this post got me to wondering why your conversion rate could possibly be so low, so I downloaded Ski Champion to check it out. I would suggest that maybe you guys are thinking a bit too much about your monetization efficiency, and not enough about the basic UI and mechanics of your game. What you have here has the potential to be a profitable game (especially with this many downloads!) but there are a couple immediate issues that I’m guessing are turning away most of your downloaders:
1. The initial screen doesn’t have an obvious “play” button. The card at the top functions this way, but without an obvious button, the first thing I did was click the little user icon with a plus on it, and ended up being taken to a page with a chat, email, and gamecenter icon, with no “back” button. It wasn’t clear to me what the purpose of this screen was – telling your friends, inviting players? I honestly still haven’t figured out how to get back to your main menu from this screen, short of exiting the game, killing the app, and restarting! This was confusing, and I can see a lot of people just giving up at this point because there’s no obvious path to play the game from here.
2. Once I actually got into the “first run” I was presented with a big “start” button. When I click this, instead of starting, I go to a “pause” screen, instead of starting. There’s a “resume” button that at first glance looks to be greyed out. When I click this, I go back to the “start” button. The first time I managed to get my guy to actually start skiing, the pause screen background UI was stuck on top of the screen while my guy was in the background skiing.
Once I got the game working (still not sure how,) it was actually pretty fun! But at first glance the game feels pretty broken – this is death for a free app – nobody will see any value in it until they can play it.
These are both really trivial issues, but are probably turning away a big majority of your users. Both issues should have probably been caught by your testers (you are testing right?) and would probably take minutes to address.
I’m also curious if you’re tracking app launches vs. actual ski runs – how do the two compare? You should be able to tell if what I’m suggesting is happening or not.
IMO, this app deserves a quick update – you’d probably double your revenues pretty easily with a couple hour’s worth of fixes and UI tweaks.
(also with regards to my other comment – note that I’m on an iPad 3. I did notice some text was cut off the edge of the screen, so maybe these issues are different at iPhone aspect ratios?)
Hi Aaron,
I suspect most issues were because you played on an iPad3, as Ski Champion came out before. We were made aware there were UI issues, so there’s an update in review at Apple at the moment which should hopefully address them.
We do miss a “play” button though, no excuse for that
That said, I’m not sure there’s any sort of “quick win” still lying within the game that could make it significantly more profitable. We’re going to display Chartboost ads and have tweaked monetization in the upcoming update, but more as a test for future reference than out of real hope to make money. We’re on to bigger and better things now !
Thanks again for taking the time to give feedback, I do appreciate it.
Cheers,
Nicolas
My name is Michael.
Hello Michael
Thanks for sharing
Thanks so much for sharing your experience. We hear so much “happy talk” about freemium, especially for games, that is good to get more of the whole picture.
We wish you were here in Silicon Valley and could speak at our Freemium Meetup!
http://www.meetup.com/Freemium/
Thanks for the writeup. Here are some issues I discovered immediately upon trying your game:
1) The buttons don’t look like buttons. The “+” skiier icon does not make it clear to me what it does. In fact, I still don’t know because I never pushed it.
2) The user interface for choosing a run is very slow and chunky moving. Most iOS interfaces are smooth and move with some elasticity. It was also not obvious that I had to swipe to see other courses.
3) After a race is over, you get ‘menu’ and ‘restart’ options. Neither one sounds like progress. I didn’t want to use a menu, and I didn’t want to replay that race. As a result, I wanted to close the app right then.
4) Once I did hit ‘menu’, it took maybe 2+ seconds to get to the menu screen. That was way too long and made me think the app had frozen and that it was cheap/bad/unreliable. Responsiveness is key! This is on an iphone 4.
5) Once I got back to the menu, it was not obvious that I had unlocked a new course. Nothing ever told me that I had unlocked it.
Hope that is helpful! The actual gameplay itself was fun and if the user interface flow had worked better I would have continued to play new levels and maybe tried to beat my times on existing levels, given proper incentivization. Facebook integration (a la bejewelled blitz etc.) would help with that too.
THanks for your feedback Dan, very helpful. On our next game we’ll definitely try to work more on the UI. It’s so time-consuming, yet so important!
Hey guys, nice write up, excellent information.
I agree with some of the critiques in the comments above and have a couple more points to add. I actually do think you could have a hit here… I remember downloading it the second I saw it when it came out… a really good downhill ski game would be friggin awesome for IOS.
First off, I agree with the above, it’s a bit confusing when you first open the app. I ended up in game center 3 times before I could get to the game start. There are no instructions, nothing about the ski passes, no idea how to play.
I think one of the biggest problems is it is really really unforgiving. If you miss a flag, you’re out, start again. If you fall you’re out, start again. People HATE that kind of treatment, it makes them feel bad. A scoring system that takes missed flags and how hard you fall (taking time off to get up and get going again) and letting you finish your run would be much better. Maybe have the unforgiving mode be an expert setting and make the easy and medium be more forgiving. I realize Temple Run gets away with it, but the difference is you have a start and an end, not endless. The mindset is you want to get to the end, no matter how long it takes, and be able to practice through the hard parts so it’s easier next time.
Drop ski passes and make unlimited runs… this is also very frustrating to a player, knowing they have a limited amount of tries to perfect a slope. Even though you’re giving out a lot of passes, it’s always in the back of someone’s mind that their game will be useless in 10 more tries… Monitize getting to the next slope (but also make a free way to get there, maybe a certain time on the current slope, or collect a certain amount of coins.
And personally… I would love to see the camera from behind the skier looking down… it’s very disorienting to basically be skiing backwards. Even though you have the flag markers to help navigate, it would still be better to actually see the turns and flags coming at you… that would be my dream ski game, and I’m sure a lot of the downloaders would agree… maybe I’m just describing temple run on skis, but I think that would work better than what you have now.
Having said all that, the artwork and animation is great, I think you could have a serious hit if you implement some of this stuff…. good luck!
Came across your blog post today. After seeing some of the comments here, I tried downloading your game to see. (Using an iPhone 4S.) Just to qualify my advice, I’ve been doing indie game development as a company owner for 7 years, now with 7 employees. So I think I know at least a bit of what I’m talking about.
What I can conclude is that your UI is definitely killing your game’s potential. To the point that I wouldn’t read much into your monetization results. You’ve got to get the basics right because what happens is people will try your game only once and if they can’t figure something out, they’ll never open it again. So usability is what you need to focus on and fix first before tweaking monetization parameters will do you any good.
Just my experience as a player: I downloaded your game, and opened it. I expected some kind of title screen first, but it seemed to start right at the level select screen. OK I thought, so I tapped at the first big box on top which I guess was the first level. First time I didn’t complete the level, but on second try I did. Once I did complete it, a ‘pause’ screen showed up. I didn’t want to pause, so I just hit resume. What happens next is nothing. My skiier is just standing there. I can’t figure out what to do next .. I’m just stuck. Home button pressed and because I don’t want to experience that frustration again, I probably won’t open the game again. (Maybe I’m just dumb and missed something?)
The quality of the actual game graphics and animations is way above the UI experience. You need to get players hooked before you can hope to have them pay. And you need to make the process of playing as easy and unfrustrating as possible before you can hope to have them hooked.
I know at this point you’d rather move on to focus on your next project and that is probably a smart choice, but
- just make sure your next project doesn’t have the same problem and goes through proper live user testing (where you watch live people try to play your game.)
- don’t read to much into your monetization results, whether regarding your game’s implementation of it or the free2play model as a whole. It’s a bit surprising that you’ve done so much analyzing yet still seem to miss the biggest issue as many here have commented.
On the positive side, I think you really nailed the marketing aspects and have bookmarked your previous post for reference
Regarding the gameplay aspects, I didn’t get far enough to see, but if the game introduces new stuff as you progress, then that will be a good hook. If it is just the same gameplay but just different tracks, then that can be another reason why the game isn’t engaging people enough.
blaargh above has some good ideas.
So what I wanted to say was that usability comes first, then addictive gameplay, and then monetization. You’ve got to focus in that order, but it seems you’ve got it backwards.
BTW I tried opening the game again and yup, I’m stuck there and the crowd is cheering. Tried tapping everywhere on the screen and can’t do anything. Only think to do is force-kill the game – which I’m sure many users don’t know how to do.
I got my wife to try the game. First time she tapped on the ad that showed up. Second time she tapped Game Center. Third time she tapped on the user profile icon thing. Fourth time she tapped the level and started.
She took about 4 attempts to complete the first level. When it ended it didn’t show a pause screen. Guess I ran into a bug the first time I tried.
Instead it showed a dialog with Menu and Restart as the two options which is quite confusing. My wife chose ‘Restart’ and asked if it had only 1 level. I think it should definitely show ‘Continue to Next Level’ instead. With maybe ‘Play this Level Again’ and ‘Select another Level’ as smaller options.
So there you go, another user with problems just beginning to play.
Hi non, thanks a lot for taking the time to test the game, both your wife and yourself, and give us this valuable feedback. Much appreciated !!
We weren’t sure about a “next level” button because a player cannot always progress to the next level, he needs to win a medal. But in retrospect I’m sure we could have found a way.
Very interesting to hear about your FET too, definitely taking notes for our current game
We were aware UI was perfectible, but I think everybody’s comments has greatly helped us realize it had a much heavier impact on the game’s performance than we thought.
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