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Comment by hesdeadjim | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the market doesn't support selling a premium game at prices that allow anyone other than a small studio to keep the lights on.

We've been in the game since the beginning so I've seen the transition from selling a game at $4.99, then $2.99, then $0.99, and finally free with IAP. Despite being very successful we didn't enjoy that trend, but instead just adapted to it.

It's purely a response to the mobile consumer's spending habits and their complete unwillingness to psychologically accept the "risk" that the $5 or $2 game they bought might not be as fun as they hoped.

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In my opinion, this whole paradigm shift is partly the result of a lack of trust in customer reviews. If customer reviews could be trusted to be authentic, people could look and see that the game is rated five stars and make their decision based on t trusted to be authentic, a lot of people would make their decision based on a game's rating. Instead, app developers have gamed the system by paying for reviews (e.g., the infamous 2008 case of one developer earning hundreds of thousands in a single month after paying Amazon Mechanical Turk users to download his app and rate it 5 stars, among many others), etc.

The result is an unwillingness from many consumers to risk more than a single dollar for a game. I, for one, used to pay up to $10 for good games (e.g., I've purchased all 3 N.O.V.A. editions for $7.99 or so), but these days I am reluctant to even spend a dollar on an app.

It also has to do with how people value their time. On the PC, I'm willing to do some research before I plop down 60 bucks on a game. On mobile it would be the same amount of work for me to research, but I'm only looking at spending 2-4 dollars. In that scenario just going with the free option and deleting it if I don't like it makes more sense.

That's a shame. If I have a trial version and like the game, I'm happy to pay $3 or $5. If it's a comprehensive, open-ended game, I've paid up to $10 (haven't seen anything priced higher).

In the race to the bottom, everyone loses.

What about trial versions? Are they supported by the app stores already? Seems like they'd solve the psychological problem.

In the early days of the App Store, people solved this problem by publishing two apps, a free "lite" edition and a for-pay "full" edition. Not sure why this isn't used more. Maybe because it's a hassle to migrate data (game progress, saves, etc) between apps, but I thought at least in modern iOS versions, multiple apps can share a common bundle ID prefix.

Part of the problem with that is that nobody wants to pay for the full edition, which goes back to the classic problem with demos of freeloaders who just keep playing the demo.

The solution that Nintendo stumbled on is to limit the number of uses to a demo, after which the demo is no longer playable. Unfortunately, this would require absolute cooperation from the app store, be decried as a terrible practice by many, and be moot on rooted phones.

I've always been happy to pay for the full edition. Unfortunately, most phone games are absolutely terrible. I think that's why the trials fail: it's really, really hard to make a great game. It's the same problem with trying to turn any creative pursuit into a predictable business.

I really think it's more than that for many people. The game Jetpack (Joyride) for instance, offers a paid version. I do not know a single person who purchased it, but I know lots of people who were extremely into the free one. Same with Fruit Ninja, and Peggle.

If nobody wants to pay for the full edition after trying a demo version, I would assume the game is not engaging enough to warrant desire to spend a few dollars on it..?

There's a lot of games out there, and most of them are just cranked out rehashes or predictable and dull.

That was a hack to work around not having IAP.

The problem with strategy is that your whales only pay once, even if they would be happy by paying thousands of times.

Conversion on anything trial-like, is going to be very small, and likely worse than even an upfront purchase because you will hit some people who are satiated with a small amount of trial gameplay or people who decide not to buy after playing.

Keep in mind that the best premium apps have lifetime revenues in the low tens of millions, and the best F2P are in the billions.

Do you have a source for those numbers? I'm curious about what % of the top-grossing apps are considered "the best"

i.e. if 1% of apps are making billions but the other 99% are complete flops, it seems ludicrous that anybody would try to enter the market as this stage.

This reminds me of some reading/watching I've done in the past about how video game demos can actually hurt sales in the long run[1] which sounds very similar to what you've stated.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us6OPbYtKBM

I hear this argument so often that trials hurt sales because people decide not to buy after playing. This is the benefit of the trial to the end user; I can see if I like the game before I put money on the table. Even if the game is stellar, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

The inverse of this is likely just as true, sales are not made due to there being no free trial so someone just doesn't bother with it at all.

This is basically what a number of episodic games do - for example, the Ace Attorney iOS ports and the iOS versions of the assorted Telltale Games series. You can download the app for free and access the first 1/5th or so of the game, and an in-app purchase unlocks the rest of the content.

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