The hard survival of a paid hand tour in free mode

In the free mode of the hand tour platform, paid games in the number of income list is very small. But for children's games and educational games, free plus IAP games are immoral, and parents are often asked to refund their children for not being authorized to spend. For paying games, some developers chose to pay for the download +IAP, but Serge Versille that it was still immoral, his team Wewanttoknow as DragonBox algebra took a paid download and no IAP mode, Although the process of exploring the pattern is very tortuous, Versille is still trying new methods, hoping to give some inspiration to children's shoes that pay games, kids games and educational games, the following are Gamelook compiled posts: dragonbox Algebra has been a paid game for the iOS and Android platforms for 2 years, has won a lot of good player reviews, has been used by education and the scientific community as an example, and even game planning, the White House and the Norwegian Prime Minister have mentioned our games. Our first game never thought we could get such a good result, but even so, our total global downloads are only 250,000 (including all DragonBox algebra's 5+ and 12+ games on both Android and iOS). This level of sales makes life difficult for us because every year we try to do new games. The data so far below say the detailed distribution of 250,000 downloads from May 2012 to August 2014, when the DragonBox algebra 12+ was released in May 2013, the download volume grew fastest and the 5+ version gained a lot of growth, Part of the reason for the big increase in downloads is the American daily, Forbes, Wired, and other media articles such as The New York Times. These media reports played a big role, but our PR and release activities is also a very basic promotion, not that it is easy to do, but we do not invest too much in marketing. More interestingly, our algebra challenges activities have also received a lot of media coverage. In these activities, we give the interested schools a week DragonBox Special edition free use, the special edition is we and Washington University Game Science Center develops together. These activities have led to an increase in game sales, and downloads have since started to slide. So in the spring of 2014, our downloads were reduced, but we launched the DragonBox Elements, which was released in July, and we actually thought the game was as good as the previous one, our players liked it, and the players rated it very well. But two months have passed and downloads are only 10,000, and our sales figures are much lower than expected, but at least in the springPicked up. So we need to do more promotion, because there are still a lot of people do not know our game. When it comes to this, some people may ask, "How can we get more downloads and users if the player's praise and quality media coverage can't drive the growth of the hand-travel revenue?" paid games and free mode choices if you want to get into the income list game, free mode is the only option, Even the "My World", which occupies the position of a long-time paid hand, has failed to reach the top 10. To be exact, "My World" hand in 2011 when the launch of the first place in the income list, but only a few days, and in the top 10 also only a week or so, but the game has become a phenomenon in the world, but in the rankings of the income list is not so prominent. However, if you want to take a special date ranking, like September 9, 2014, we can find that only 2 of the top 100 iOS games in the list are paid games, respectively, "My World" (29th place) and "Endless Blade Ⅲ" (90th place). Of these two games, "My World" is the only paid game that has not joined IAP. Education games are basically the case, the best performance when only one can enter the top 10, the vast majority of high-income games have adopted a free download +IAP mode and pay mode. Applied revenue Distribution (free mode crush) This means that paid games are not the same as most games, however, we must acknowledge the reality of the market in hand. The problem is that our game has a well-designed learning process and a very meaningful overall goal. It makes no sense to make this into a sales package, because a 5-year-old kid who stops in the game doesn't know how to solve the equation. And we're not going to talk about it because we think it's unethical to sell the whole thing to kids after splitting it up. We also see an increasing number of educational games choosing a pay model, which also gives us the best choice. However, as a paid game, if you want to retain users, you must provide enough content so that they can be in the game for several months. Ironically, we have worked very hard to make the game fast for the players to learn the complex process, which is very useful in paid games. But if we want to do it again, we're going to go against the pay model we do. So IAP was abandoned, and the pay model needed significant change. Our only option is to find out how to increase the game's sales in the paid mode. Our next game may still have to choose a pay model. Try to find an effective marketing approach first, making a pay-for-mode game does not mean that we can't do a free demo application, so we can show more people our games and educational values, and we realize that this idea is worth a try, Even though we are worried that people will download the free version and not buy the full game, this can further reduce our sales revenue. We decided this plan in the summer until September 1 to launch the free editionThis。 We tried two ways of marketing (free and half-price promotions) when we announced that DragonBox algebra Lite was online, few people noticed that there were only 150 downloads per day (the number was very smooth). Although the download is not much, but our sales have not been affected, our pay game in the same period of daily download volume between 400-500, so our lite free version of the launch still has great significance. Second, we have to determine whether the price of the game is too high, after all, 5.99 dollars and 9.99 of dollars for most of the pay game is very expensive, a lot of paid games price only 99 cents. So we decided to test the impact of the game's price changes on sales. But we also consider that if the price reduction does not lead to sales, then the sale of the game can be a fatal injury, so we decided to launch the first season of sales promotions to test. So we've announced promotional messages on Facebook and Twitter, and our fans (two total) are about 3,000, and blogs and media aren't paying attention, so there's a limited number of users who know we're cutting prices. In addition to the revenue spikes driven by articles and reviews, our previous daily sales were around 1500 dollars, and many students bought our games during this period, but in addition, the average daily sales were basically flat. The change of income before and after the price promotion (the basic effect is not big) so our promotion activity basically has the influence to the income is 0, sometimes our daily income also will arrive 1300 dollars. On the positive side, we have more users, but from a revenue point of view, the impact of price reductions is limited and can even bring negative results. Next, we will continue to focus on how to improve the virus communication capabilities of our games, plans to add 2 new features for DragonBox algebra 12+, our game audience is children, but the direct purchase is not children, we will not find ways to let children share the spread. So we want parents to get involved in the gaming experience and give them compelling reasons to talk about our games with parents. These features include: The first is a custom achievement certificate named after a child, but this requires parental consent. We want our children to be proud of the progress they are playing, and we hope that parents will be able to pay attention to the game and provide a direct opportunity for highly involved users to interact with their parents. The other is a 2-person photo of each chapter to show the children's Dragons in the game chapters and the problems they have solved. Both parents and children can have fun and we hope that this feature will leave them with interesting memories. We will also try to expand the gameplay and provide a meaningful multiplayer experience, and we plan to develop a special day-to-day challenge function, so that people who want to download pirated games can see the value of our games and buy the genuine ones. We feel that these features can greatly improve the game's ability to play。 Interestingly, some parents feel that their children can be completed within 2 hours of the game should not be priced so high. It's clear that we're happy that parents are so judgmental about our games, but they also reveal that the kids are playing too fast. So this is a bit ironic, but we did notice the problem, so we added a daily challenge, because repetition can increase children's memory, the new features can increase interest, but also help our game Word-of-mouth legend. Of course, we need to do a lot more, for example, in terms of player retention and virus spread and multiplayer, but our small team means that we have to choose priorities, but only step by step.