If you've been following our recent blog posts you'll hopefully know that our tiny indie studio, Hogrocket, shipped its first game at the end of last year. During this series of mini post-mortems we have been sharing our various successes and failures as honestly as possible in the hope that other developers can profit from them. Thanks very much for reading!
We had shipped Tiny Invaders at the end of 2011 - our first game unleashed onto the mammoth App Store ecosystem. It was a premium title, selling for a variety of prices. Eventually, like most other devs, we settled on the low price - tier 1, or 69p. Since launch there has been lots of interest in Tiny Invaders, some of which has converted into direct sales. Most notably we had a brilliant feature from Apple in its keynote announcement for the iPhone 4S. The game was on stage and everything! Such an exciting time!
Jumping on the bandwagon
We knew that we had to jump on this huge opportunity as soon as possible. It's unlikely that we'd be able to secure such a huge PR coup in the future; it was now or never. We took the decision to make the game completely free to play, and then sent out a press release announcing our plan. It would only be free for a couple of days, so if people wanted it they had better get it right now! And tell your friends! Turns out that this was a pretty good plan, and resulted in almost 100,000 downloads in a few days. Amazing stuff!
Unfortunately for us, we didn't monetise these people in any way. We simply didn't have the time to set up advertising arrangements, or retrofit the game with in-app purchases. We had to act on the keynote feature there and then, and this was the trade-off that we made. Essentially we ended up giving our game away to one hundred thousand people, completely for free.
Still, 100,000 downloads isn't something to be sniffed at. In fact it's an awesome privilege for a start-up developer to have that many gamers playing our first title at all, regardless of whether they paid for it or not. From that point on the gauntlet had been thrown down; we knew with future Hogrocket titles we'd have to try and match this level of exposure. Free sounded like a great price point to aim at. But why wait for the next product? Why couldn't Tiny Invaders be free?
We started investigating this train of thought - how could we make Tiny Invaders permanently free to play? It's not just a case of changing the pricing details in iTunes Connect - you need a monetisation mechanic in order to try and claw back some of the revenue that you didn't generate up front. We decided to follow the demo/shareware model - make the first "world" free, and then users could optionally choose to pay and unlock the rest of the game. It's a great option for users as it takes the risk out of trying new games, especially from unknown quantities like Hogrocket. We were confident enough in our game that we thought enough people would choose to pay so that we could continue to eat... it was worth a try.
Free way
First problem - it wasn't possible to take the existing game and make it free with an in-app purchase to unlock the rest of the levels. Those who had already bought the game would suddenly find themselves kicked back to the free version; we had no way of telling who had already given us money and who downloaded it for free.
We were facing something that other developers have also found out the hard way - it's very difficult to move a product from premium to freemium, although it's trivial to do it the other way around. In the end there was only one way of achieving our freemium aims - to launch an entirely new product on the App Store. Hence Tiny Invaders Free was born. It would sit alongside the premium version of the game, in a kind of two-pronged strategy for increasing awareness.
So, we now had our free product. But how much of its content should be free, and how much should the user have to pay for? Where does the demo end, and the paid-for product begin? Well, it's a sensitive issue and we talked about it a LOT. Eventually we reached a consensus; we decided to give away quite a lot of gameplay: 15 levels or about 20 to 25 minutes worth of real game time. Considering the average session length on the premium version was about 4 minutes I think this is fairly generous. Perhaps it might even be too generous? At this stage it was impossible to tell...