Here’s an interesting read on how Ngmoco justifies the freemium model for being the only way they’ll release iPhone games these days. If you’re in a hurry, money quote (heh) is
We’re just finding that, with paid, you can’t make any money…
Now that, Dear Readers, is an absolutely classic line. Classic, we tell you.
… There’s only a handful of companies that are able to charge more than three dollars for a game. Gameloft, EA, Square Enix. Anyone else, they charge more than two bucks, no one’s even going to look at their game. There’s no way that we could have built Eliminate, for the cost per install or cost per SKU that we would have sold, to actually be able to make back that money in the timeframe that we wanted to. It’s funny, because people are saying that they’re willing to pay, but when push comes to shove, they’re actually not willing to pay. That person that says they’re willing to pay $10, they’ll probably wait for it to drop to 99 cents before they actually purchase it. What they really want is a $10 game for 99 cents. What we’re giving them is a $50 game for free. That’s really our stance right now.
Indeed. As it happens, we’ve just bundled off into review this morning a bit of an experiment into applying these principles to the non-gaming world; our IAP-centric reboot of the Poses series comes in free ‘Poses Sampler’ and paid ‘Poses Professional’ (with extra poses and features) versions, with the current three apps all being purchasable as content packs in either. It’s going to be just absolutely fascinating to see how that works out, indeed.
h/t: digg!
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