Free-To-Play buisness model

Free-To-Play business model

 

When to use it?

1. If the platform you are using requires high number of downloads for easy discovery, like Android/iOS app-stores , chrome-store , browser plugins/extensions.
2. If your audience is a "first-time" gamer, which never payed for a game - as this is a great barrier for download.
3.  

What part of the game will cost?

1. For single-player games:
1. [strong]  some levels are free. You need to buy the game to unlock a bulk of additional levels.
2. [medium] some levels are free. You need to buy levels , one by one. It`s a bit weak as if the user need to buy 0.5$ level two times in an hour, s/he will think again whether to buy the next one.
3. [weak]  customization
4. 
   
2. For multi-player games:
1. [strong]  unlock hero-type
2. [medium] customizations which are apparent to other users.
3. [weak ]  experience-boost / weapon-boost.

Unity Networking is easy? part -2-

For a FPS-like game, a good networking implementation need to have few points:
[It`s a summary of  a article on HalfLife networking]

Client-side

• Client-predication - user input cause immediate change in the game , but can be fixed later in the server overrides it.
• Interpolation - always add a delay of ~100ms to all other-users. Even if their ping is really small. Thus when you draw their location you will interpolate real, past positions with the exact positions.
• Extrapolation - on in the case of severe latency problems, the interpolation delay may not be enough and you simply don`t know where the user is right now.  Here you extrapolate future location from the last known ones, but as with any extrapolation, it`s not accurate.

 Server-side:

• State calculations and communications.

• lag compensation - if you trust client shooting-report, no need for this.
  If you don`t and you want to prevent this type of cheating, you will need to get the shooting direction and calculate hits yourself.  As the client is running in old-time, you will need to "re-wind" the players positions and calculate the hit in the old times.

Unity Networking is easy? part -1-

Decisions, Descisions

There are quite a few solutions to Unity3d multiplayer frameworks. The bottom line is you can use the free unity3d native networking for basic-needs or 3rd-party solutions for a cost. I used the free version for prototyping purposes. more details on this towards the end of this post.
I will go over 3 of the options. If you want a more in-detail explanation,see: comparing photon, uLink and unity3d and,  This table includes a dozen options.

Unity itself 

Out of the box unity provides networking-libraries, ability to run a unity instance as a dedicated/non-dedicated server, which you need to host yourself , and a "lobby-manager" called the Master-Server which is hosted by unity and good for low-scale.
Cost : code is free, hosting is not.
Problems:  unkown scale, not-very-mature-code, see:

Photon

Non-unity specific which means server code can`t use Unity physics/colliders.
For very low-scale, provide SaaS (PhotonCloud). but it`s limited to 500 message per second per room, which means, for a fast-moving game (15 update FPS) only ~5 users.  Also the SaaS solution limits the server-logic.
For larger scale or more server-logic freedom, you need to rent and install a dedicated server.
Cost : small PaaS free . For bigger it costs per server and hosting.
Problems: non-unity server-logic, SaaS is impractical for fast/big games.

uLink

Unity based MMO Server, which built upon and improves the problems/scale of Unity libraries.
Cost : for indie 550Euro per title license. hosting not included..
Problems: the cost.

AirBorn Unreal3 mod

One of the best (Indi) art world


video in: http://www.moddb.com/mods/airborn/videos

nwknights

still running ... http://z8.invisionfree.com/NWKnights/

The missing link - a service proposal

After you read the last blog entry it is clear that small casual-games studios are having hard time earning their keep using advertising/sponsorship.
Downloading the full version of the game does seem to produce a nice revenue stream , but is mainly done in the large publisher sites , allowing them to collect "humongous" percentage of the profits.

One solution comes in mind ...
Allow a developer to sell "serials" or "unlocks" for online game versions without the need to download a game version.
Use a service-model (like the "MochiAds") instead of the publisher model , allowing the studio to post the game to the publisher site , egonistic to which publisher is it.

Very high level architecture

• Client side - release public flash API (AS2/3) which allows locking certain features , buying an unlock-code online and submitting it to unlock the game in real-time.
• A server side - customized billing site per game , and a submission site allowing users to configure their game for unlock purchases.

This service earns money by taking a small commission on each unlock-buy.

Time frame: few part-time months of coding.


If it is so simple , why it was not done already?
Not certain.
For the big publisher , the reason is probably that they will not benefit from such a service - on the contrary : they may loose potential buys because they will be performed outside their domain.
For any individual development studio, it is not worth the effort for one game (and may even get them in trouble with the publisher)
But it looks as an ideal service for the independent casual developers out there , and unlike the hardcore-independent game industry (which is unbelievably small) , on the casual market their numbers are quite substantial.

In game advertisment - more details

After you finished marketing the game , and thousands of people play your game each day, how much money will you get from advertising?

There are common measurements for advertisement pay.

• CPC - how much money will you get per ad click (not view , but the rare actual click). This is less used.
  
• eCPM - how much money will you get for 1000 ad-views. This number mainly depends on your target-audience. As lots of publishers want to advertise to the US market , the eCPM for US target will be relatively high, however if most of your target audience is in a remote village in Africa , there are good chances that no one will want to advertise to them and thus the eCPM value will be zero.
  So , what eCPM can you reach? gamesjacket will guarantee a minimum of 0.5$ , which is quite high. Mochiads will not give you a guarantee. It can be a bit more than that , but also a lot less (In the middle-east its around 0.11$)
  

To give real numbers , lets finish with an example: Lets say your game is quite nice and had one million ad views. With 0.5$ eCPM it means 500$. With 0.1$ eCPM it means 100$.
Pocket money , at best.
Very good games (the "blockbusters") can be played tens of millions of times ( by a million or so unique players) and thus can reach thousands of dollars. But thats really blockbuster games. One example is "Desktop tower defense" which reached a 9 million games per-month for the first few months. But even these numbers will only give you 4500$ a month with a small game life-span.
There are few blockbusters that had even a bigger user base , but the numbers are not substaintly higher than the desktop-tower-defense example.

The obvious conclusion from these numbers is that in-game advertisement is only suitable for very small budget games , typically a week to a month overall development time.
Sponsership can add few hundered dollars on top of this , but the real money comes from a completely different monetizing solution. Instead of "play-for-free" solution , there is the unoriginal, old fashioned model of play a demo for free and buy the full game for 9.99$.

Lets assume, on average , the user plays the game 10 times (this means s/he load the flash game 10 times , no matter how much game-over/new-game sessions there are in each game load).
1000 views = 100 unique-players = 0.5$ of advertisment (with high eCPM).

• 100 players * BuyPercent * 10$ = 0.5$
• BuyPercent = 0.5 / (10*100) = 0.0005 (*100 for percentage) = 0.05%

This means that if 0.05% of the players will buy the game , you will get the same money as in advertisment.
But if 1% of the players will but it , you will get 20 times more.
For one million views (100,000 unique players) , this difference can be between 500$ to 10,000$. For a blockbuster , this number can be ten-folds high.

Note that I don`t know what is the percentage of players which eventually buy the game , but big companies like oberon-media successfully use this model , so it probably closeer to the 1% than to the 0.05%