Do not let the high cost of access to kill online games

Since 2011 to 2012, the developer's spending on acquiring users has largely supported the mobile industry. With the holiday approaching, this situation will become more apparent. And for the companies in the industry who are buying or selling traffic, the experience they gain is constantly being infected and engulfed by this bad habit.

When to charge

In the 99-cent Apple App Store era, most developers will set the game a few days to avoid time, and then will return to normal prices, in this way can get a good ROI.

There is a simple way, I believe almost every company will be used, that is, rushed to the top of free list to get a lot of downloads. However, this "successful approach" will make developers addicted to the leaderboard results. And over time, they are no longer focused on the quality of the game but rankings, and they still use this method to run the next game.

Seize this world

The above approach is flimsy and will eventually be stifled by the rise of free-to-play, but at the same time developer free games will inevitably get user fees.

Beginner access to user activities may cost you 100,000 US dollars, few developers have the financial resources involved in the war. However, developers turned from creators to providers, offering their in-game advertising slots to the highest paying buyer. The focus of the industry has also shifted to groups funded by venture capital, generally large mobile social game publishers.

They first entered the free-to-play mobile market, while establishing their own huge user base and strong overall revenue. Although not socially sticky, they often mimic the casual gaming mechanics on Facebook.

However, the quality of these games has really increased in the past few months as publishers find it more difficult to compete. Some newcomers to the market often have extensive experience in developing host games, both in terms of graphics, sound effects and gameplay, as compared to previous games.

Re-training studios costs a lot of money and is a waste of time, so a simple, inexpensive way to buy users is to earn less and less for their in-game lessons.

All the impact

Look at the current revenue list you will find things have changed. True, there are a lot of good brands, such as Beeline's Smurfs'Village from "Smurfs Village" and DragonVale from Backflip, a mobile travel company. In the past these brands have attracted a large number of loyal users, it seems almost impossible to enter the top 20.

At present, many gambling games have begun to enter the market to compete. NaturalMotion's racing game CSRRacing and Supercell's "Tribal Warfare" ClashofClans is a very interesting new game representative. In particular, CSRRacing's monthly revenue was as high as $ 12 million. NaturalMotion announced loudly that they did not pay for the user. Instead, the quality of the game detonated the market. Of course, this was demonstrated by Apple at the WWDC2012 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Have a certain relationship.

Suspicious effect

However, my biggest fears of looting the user war are not that it does not work. It works only for a particular type of gaming company, but it loses the balance of the entire ecosystem. We are desperate to establish a worldwide mobile social network, which we discussed many times before.

For social networks like GREE and DeNA, user acquisition is a key part of their high-risk business model and they have a ton of spare cash to compete for users, and they are the ultimate goal.

This is why GREE recently agreed to sell its games directly on the platform of cross-promotion company Chartboost. After players download GREE games via Chartboost Ads in iOS and Android Game Developers' Games, GREE will pay developers $ 3.5 / install and there is no limit.

DeNA did not disclose its plans to acquire users in detail, but Rageof Bahamut, the long-standing card-to-play game against iOS and Android platforms, knows more about DeNA's profits than Rageof Bahamut.

In line with his peers

This means that direct competitors Zynga and Glu Mobile are involved in the war to snatch users, and Zynga and Glu Mobile must be on the alert that their users are taken away.

Companies that were supposed to pay more attention to other marketing methods plunged into a whirlwind of burn-in because their competitors were doing something like this.

Ironically, however, the frenzied acquisition of users has had an impact on the industry as a whole, with small developers having to make a lot of games to make sure things are sold and big distributors make sure quarterly earnings will not Lead to user loss.

However, all this bottom line is that we are in the game industry. Any company that buys users should think hard about their business model.

English 原文: Opinion: User acquisition is a waste of money, and will eventually kill the mobile games industry