40% of 'Monument Valley' Installs Were Paid for on iOS, 5% on Android | Hacker News Reader

40% of 'Monument Valley' Installs Were Paid for on iOS, 5% on Android

toucharcade.com

> Either way, this is just another fine example of why the App Store is continually moving towards free to play. Mobile gamers have consistently proven, in shockingly large numbers, that they just won't pay for things- Regardless of how low the price is or how universally critically acclaimed something is. With statistics like these, the typical anger towards developers when free to play stuff is announced seems incredibly misguided. All they're doing is reacting to a market that is saying loud and clear, "We will not pay."

This is why I submitted this story. We've had several discussions about "free-to-play" and IAP on HN, and there's no doubt it can be rather suspect.

But games - especially those with ongoing server costs like ours - can't suffer piracy very easily (and still deal with massive amounts of it).

I know there are gamers that would pay all day long for quality games, but it just seems like "Mobile gamers have consistently proven, in shockingly large numbers, that they just won't pay for things" is the most well-summed-up statement about the race-to-the-bottom app store mentality from users on mobile.

Or you could just not develop mobile games.

> I know there are gamers that would pay all day long for quality games, but it just seems like "Mobile gamers have consistently proven, in shockingly large numbers, that they just won't pay for things" is the most well-summed-up statement about the race-to-the-bottom app store mentality from users on mobile.

If mobile gamers won't pay for things, F2P games wouldn't put so much effort in developing opportunities for IAP. What it seems to me that the behavior of developers shows is that they believe that users of mobile games won't pay for mobile games that are unproven to them, but that once they get into a game, there is a substantial audience that will pay for more of the experience. Otherwise, we'd just see ad-ware without effort going into supporting IAP opportunities.

I would agree, but the piracy numbers don't support it. That said I would have thought that by now Apple and Google would have had some sort of shareware/trial support - and they just don't.

Can't you just have a limited part of the game for free and the rest as IAP ? Some mobile games like Reaper (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.hexage.rea...) implement payment that way and it seems like a very good compromise to me. The only missing part is that Google Play does have a badge for this kind of game, only the classic IAP one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com