Freemium Regret on the App Store

30 free levels is still too much. You need to drop it to about 10 levels, and then start charging. Level 10 is where you get a lot of people eager to keep playing, and the rate of abandonment doesn't drop, so to me, this is the best place to make them pay. If they won't pay at level 10, they won't pay at level 30.

And I think you are right, you are being nice. It's strange that you don't want to use standard monetization techniques, yet you complain when you don't make any money. It's sort of like the "nice guy" who gives everything to the hot chick in class, and then when he asks her out, he's shocked when she declines, saying that she wants to be friends.

There has to be a give-and-take between producer and consumer, and the best producers know how to balance that properly.

If you give your users a good experience, then they should pay to support your development costs. Saying you don't like pop-ups or you don't like ads is frankly nonsensical for someone who is trying to make money. There are ways to do both tastefully, and at this point, people realize that in-game ads are a necessity of life for a free product.

This game is a clone of "Flow", which has about the same amount of free content, yet has generated several million dollars in revenue from in app purchases.

I don't think this was a strategy error. 100 free levels is not too much when each level only takes 10 seconds.

This game may also just be suffering from not being interesting enough to convince people to buy. Setting the amount of free content lower may move the 'buy or not' decision earlier, and reduce dropoff, but it's still likely that some percentage of your players just aren't engaged enough to pay after already having played the game for a while.

This particular class of design problem mostly affects games, so it can be kind of strange if you're used to developing software. A good way to think of it is by looking at a program like a ringtone creator or icon editor: Very often, you grab a ringtone creator or icon editor just to create one or two ringtones or one or two icons. After that, you literally never want to use it again (or at best, maybe you want to use it again 6 months later). The group of people who use an app like that every day is vanishingly small. So, if you build one of those apps and you give away a fully-featured version, most downloads will never convert into purchases.

Wait. Are you really doing that badly? You are converting, I'd guess based on your data, about 5% of your download base, which is actually very reasonable. But you are losing like 25% immediately, so your conversion of active users is actually quite higher, maybe 7.5-10%. You may be focusing on the wrong metric. I would consider instead focusing on getting downloads higher.

Additionally, I wouldn't offer the bundle packs but instead sell everything individually. I read a great article a few weeks ago on making in app purchase work for games. (I write productivity apps.) One of the things they said was have lots of ways for people to spend money. Only a small percentage of people spend so you need them to spend a lot. The comment was that the best performing games are generating upwards of $50/spending user, all via in app purchase, all from like 1-2% of the download base.

This is a common rookie mistake unfortunately. My company has been in the business for over three years and making level content the basis of a freemium strategy has never been anything but a failure for us. The prevailing consumer attitude seems to be be a sense of entitlement, e.g. I downloaded this app or paid a pittance for it, I should get everything without having to pay more. The irony is that once they decide they like it, they are more than willing to blow lots of money on items that allow them to cheat or customize their experience.

Edit: I would also add that this is not unique to a platform like iOS. Riot, the company who makes League of Legends, makes lots of money primarily selling skins for heroes you can play in the game.

After downloading your game, your prompt of "try one more" is an invitation for me to quit playing and do something else. I think something like "next" would be better but even better would be to just directly dump people into the next puzzle.

Freemium is really hard to get right, but Apple is really pushing everyone that direction. The changes in the search results over the last few months have heavily favored free apps.

I just tried a free promotion in one of my apps, and sadly didn't take enough advantage of it. I just added ads, and didn't worry about adding an IAP to get rid of them as I was planning on going right back to paid (only showing ads to free users). Sadly I got quite few bad reviews for the ads being "too intrusive" (only 2 ads in the whole app, 1 popup and 1 interstitial, i think they were just too close together in the workflow). I think if I had the IAP there would have been less excuse to give a bad review. Don't like ads, then you should give me money.

That being said, I made more money both yesterday and today each than I did in the last month of it being paid. It's also showing up significantly higher in the rankings after 11k downloads instead of a couple paid downloads.

Seriously, 100 levels, how many people (% of userbase) are going to finish all 100 and still want more? Clearly no thought whatsoever went into this strategy.

Even 30 is too much, 15 max.

Games that I really like and have purchased, I would be hard-pressed to complete 100 levels before growing a bit tired of the game. I can only think of perhaps two games that I have gone that far.

Perhaps I'm not a loyal gamer or a super-fan of any game. But I do buy games, probably 1 or 2 per month. With 100 free levels it's most likely that people like myself would never even get to the stage where purchasing this game was necessary - even if I loved it. And if there was no reminder, I may not even really think about it.

It's wonderful to be a nice company and to give away something really fun for people to play. But, there's no need to be so nice that you can't stay in business. Especially with games at $0.99 or whatever, it really is not asking much for people to pay a little to help support the game that they enjoy.

I think it will be nice move to restrict free level's to a max 10 level's,and then may be few more level's unlocked on the basis of his timing's or point's collected while playing free level's,for.e.g if his avg timing come's out to 2-3 sec he will get additional of 5-10 level's..

A 25% immediate bounce out rate is to be expected for a free, no-expectations, no-commitments download. Meanwhile, 50% of users making it to level 20 is really good! Work on levels 20-25 to reduce their steep drop-offs then move the pay point from level 100 to level 20.

Did this come before or after Flow Free?

You should test the level cutoff concurrently. Try 5, 30, 100 in a multivariate test. Spend enough ad dollars to get a comfortable level of significance within a week. Roll up the test for everyone. Make sure you don't tell anyone how many free levels they'll get until they hit the wall. Repeat. :)

30? Try 5.