Mentoring Q&A | 02

• Choosing a monetization strategy
• Practicality: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
• Theoretical: ♥ ♥ • • •

During one of my mentoring session we’re talking about how to best monetize a particular game. This post talks about the most common way to monetize games and some factors that you should consider when determining your strategy.

Monetizing

Great games are no longer the only thing you need to make sure your game is profitable, one of the other facets you need to think about is monetization. There’s simply too many games coming out each day and discoverability – the ease, or rather difficulty of finding your game – has only gotten worse. Developers have long lowered and lowered their prices for their games in order to reach a bigger and bigger audience. And although that strategy was profitable for a short time, the bottom of that downward spiral was soon reached when developers were giving their game away for free. And with that players didn’t have to think about, or know if they would be interested in a game, that moment of friction was completely taken away. However, no one is getting paid if a game is completely free and you start to get a sense of how Free-to-Play (F2P) came to be. 

But does that mean that Free to Play is always the best and most valid option for your game? And the answer is – not always and really dependent on a lot of factors. 

But let’s first list the ways that most games make money:

Monetization Options

F2P Ads Only

Free to Play game that includes ads. Ads can come in different forms with the most popular formats being:

✔️ Banners
These take a portion of the screen and display a still or moving ad.

✔️ Interstitials
These full screen ads interrupt the experience and are triggered by the game. These include stills, video and or playable ad types

✔️ Rewarded video
These full screen ads are optional and triggered by the player, but incentivized by the game. These include video and or playables ad types.

✔️ App Open
Almost full screen still image that’s displayed when the game is loading during boot up, with a small section dedicated to displaying your game is loading.

F2P iAP Only

Free to Play game that includes in-app purchases (iAP) that allow the player to make purchases for in-game items or extensions to the experience, also referred to as micro-transactions.

F2P Subscription Only

Free to Play game that includes in-app subscriptions (iAP) that allow the player to unlock certain aspects of the game for a fixed period of time. Subscriptions are recurring but the benefits will end as soon as the subscription ends.

F2P Donations

Free to Play games that include donations will offer nothing in return for the purchase but it allows the player to express their gratitude to the developers. 

F2P Mixed

A Free to Play game that uses a mixed monetization strategy will adopt 2 or more of the above methods. Currently many F2P games go for this type of monetization, including ads and iAPs.

F2S – Free to Start

A Premium game that offers the beginning of the game for free and unlocks the full game for a price. 

Premium

Premium games charge money upfront and unlocks the full experience. 

Premium + iAP

Premium games with additional in app purchases usually offer extension to the first part. Often revered to as downloadable content or DLC.

Premium + Subscription

Premium games that offer a subscription or require a subscription often are very large scale games heavily focused on multiplayer. Currently the F2P + subscription is seen more often.

Part of a service

Another way to monetize your game is by offering it as part of a (subscription) service. Apple Arcade, Google Play Pass, Xbox Game Pass, Netflix, Epic Free Game are services that will pay a game developer a one time fee OR monthly based on “ player usage” as compared to other games that are part of the service. 

What monetization fits with your game?

So, with these options in mind, what monetization strategy is the best? Let’s discuss some of the weighing factors.

Audience

It’s easy to think that all games are made to pursue the largest possible audience, but that’s not always the case. Educational games could be promoted within school and other education facilities and therefore can be better monetized through subscriptions of premium price, the barrier to entry might be price based at all with these institutions. Some games exist to serve a very small and specific niche that will not look for games in the App- or Play Store.  

However, if you want to reach players directly and through the App- and Play Stores, opting for any of the F2P strategies is the most valid option – allowing players to play your game with the least amount of upfront friction.

Team capabilities

If you have your eyes on creating a F2P game, you need to understand the nature of F2P games and how they monetize. Any of the F2P monetization strategies take a long time to make money. A player that is playing for free needs to have great reasons (value) to pay for something or they need to watch countless ads before you see a decent return. This is the reason why F2P games are always concerned about player retention, and this is where your team capabilities come in. In order to offer your player days, weeks and months of content (rather than hours) you need to have a game that will offer that much content, so the game stays interesting for your player for that long, this content needs to be made by the team.If your team is limited, creating a F2P game might not be the best option.

Ambitions

The ambitions you have for the game also play a crucial part in figuring out your monetization strategy. If your game is a finite experience that needs to have an end, like most narrative driven games that end their plot, creating a F2P game might not be the best solution. Some games are better because they end and reach a finale and creating a F2P game that requires this ending to be postponed might be hurting the experience. 

Not all games are created to make (a lot of) money and may solely exist because the game developer wanted to create a particular experience, which makes accepting donations or a base price premium model a valid strategy.

Great games

Although I think I covered some of the fundamentals of monetization in games, there are certainly other factors at play and each team, each ambition and each game is unique and should be evaluated on its own to see what monetization strategy fits best.

No matter if you are an artistic indie developer or a publishing powerhouse your monetization strategy should be part of the design process. When you’re an indie game developer, deciding upfront how you want to monetize your game will save you the time to think about it later, it will help you understand what’s important for your game. Don’t let it sit in the back of your mind while you are “figuring it out” as it will cause plenty of anxiety and waste your precious development time near the end of your project. If you know for sure F2P is the best option for your game, then it is absolutely imperative that you design your game with the monetization included. You need to design for value with every step that you take. 

No matter what monetization strategy you choose, you still need a great game too!