iphone pricing. the difference between a dollar
By just comparing the iphone top paid and top grossing lists, you can learn some interesting things about which iphone developers have business people behind them. For example, take the app Cartoon Wars made by Blue which is currently the #5 top paid app selling at $0.99. Then, look at CNN’s app CNN Mobile which is the #6 top paid app selling at $1.99. Now if you go over to the top grossing list, you’ll find CNN Mobile at #11 in the and Cartoon Wars at #30. The difference of a dollar pushed CNN’s app 19 spots ahead of Cartoon Wars. By doing some other comparisons, you can see who is actually capitalizing on being at the top of these app lists.
I think this is the time when you need to have a good business person around, especially in a startup the is mainly developer-centric. Having worked in a successful startup generating sustainable revenues, I regret that we never had a business person’s point of view represented in our company meetings. See, I imagine the cartoon war’s developers to be in awe of the money they’re making right now, so their opinion is probably to not rock the boat. However, a good business person will always look to maximize an opportunity no matter how many millions are already coming in.
When you’re looking to grow the functionality, features, or content of your web application, how do you keep things simple and engaging for new and existing users.
Enter the world of directed (push) user interfaces where in-your-face notices with language that has hints of viral psychology attempt to grab your attention and direct you to different functional areas of a web app. You see this much more in massively popular social web entertainment apps (read: games) because, well, users generally hunt and peck for things when they are in need of something or have a goal they want to accomplish. If they’re bored and killing time, who wants to deal with the hassle of finding something interesting when it can be pushed to them. Of course your die-hard fans will scour every minutiae you have to offer, but, to appeal to casual users, today, you need to be more than a simple single click away.
monetization punchline: Don’t add value. Find user need.
And if you can’t find a user need, create one.
the way to monetize off of virtual goods in social games
Jeremy Liew has a nice article on why people buy virtual goods here. His top reasons, attention in a noisy environment (usually digital gifts), self expression, increased functionality, and convenience is a good list of the types of virtual goods you can offer. However, not all types of virtual goods work as successfully as others. It could be that for users of your game, self expression is less important than convenience and hence will return less revenue.
To put into practice a successful virtual goods offering, you need to go back to business basics. This is first identifying user demand or needs in your game product. And then, measuring that user need. What you are doing here is applying a need-driven framework to your game in order to identify real monetization opportunities.
A simple example most facebook games implement revolves around “Action Points.” Users are given a daily allotment of action points that they can spend to do in-game actions that help them progress further in the game or level up their character. Once you’ve spent your action points, you can either wait for the points to replenish over time, or you can buy more action points with real money. While I don’t have any hard data, I imagine that “buying action points” is one of the biggest reasons why users purchase in these games.
So in the above example, we can clearly see the user need of having a limited resource, the running out of action points. Now, the next step is to measure how many people actually run out of action points and how often. If you find that these situations are frequent and happen to many people, you have a great revenue opportunity.
This all sounds pretty straight forward and obvious, but if you follow through with building a need-framework, where you will most benefit is when you’re already monetizing well, but you want to increase your monetization by offering new virtual goods. By understanding the needs driving your current virtual good sales, you will be better positioned to create new virtual goods that don’t cannabalize sales of your current goods.
Additionally, since all needs in social games are artificially created, this kind of framework can be a tool for generating new game features that have a high return.
the future of digital media content (music) is wrapped in an app?
I’m digging on this wired article that shows a music artist distributing their music as an iphone app that allows the music to be remixed.
I can see this heading towards the freemium online gaming model of free to play, pay to produce.
it just might work.
the 5 minute desktop ideation tool
Like any design thinker, the post-it note is a core tool used in brainstorming ideas and synthesizing observations. Its just an unbeatable visual and tactile way to work with ideas and information.
Working at a startup means things happen pretty fast and not a lot of time is spent on ideation and frameworks, but, rather than implementing ideas shot from the hip, I find that spending some time building quick conceptual frameworks can quickly reveal good opportunities and insights when deciding the next product features.
Of course, the hurdles of doing something quick and fast is always…
1. whatever you need to setup and be ready
2. a blank canvas starting point.
To address this, I always have on hand at my desk an enormous amount of different colored and sized post-its. Since the postits are always there, its a constant reminder to use it if i’m stuck and because its so close at hand its actually easier and quicker to start using than firing up an app on my computer. Additionally, I created a default matrix of post-it notes as a structural element for placing postits just in case I’m at a loss for arranging my ideas at the start.
My process is very simple. I start putting down my thoughts, information I collect from our analytics, any qualitative user data from our forums, surveys or stories shared, and inputs from other team members that I think are useful. I bucket each statement I write down onto a different color postit and I start arranging everything until things start making sense. Its nice to be able to see relationships and perspectives and shift them around visually. Usually, I can find a compelling direction within minutes that I can then get developed right away. And what’s nice is that as I learn new things from what is tried, I can add it to my framework on the spot. And when I’m done, I just clear the postits into a pile. Design thinking at the speed of web development!
In the picture below, you can see me working through some viral marketing features for one of our games.
who do u want to work with?
Here’s what i look for..
* Want to be the best in the world at what they do
* Want to do great, impactful things and have fun doing it
* Passionately care about the details
* Makes decisions fast. Acts fasts. Cares about results.
* Can think big picture, especially when making the little decisions
* Teaches me something new every day
* Is T-Shaped, a competent generalist that has deep expertise in one area.
* Complements me. My work, ideas, process become better-stronger working together.
* No ego
* No bullshit
* Nice
be candy-sized.
When deciding on revenue generating features for free to play games, one of the toughest decisions is to decide whether or not to create for-pay features that give a player in-game advantages. The dark pit you’re trying to avoid is creating an “unfair” game where your users can “buy their way to the top” or “pay to compete”. This is an incredibly hot issue with gamers and even the slightest perception can cause a lot of outcry.
Of course, you can avoid this issue by building for-pay features that focus on socialization, personalization, or convenience. So far, though, we’ve found that features that provide in-game benefits generate the most demand and revenue.
So, if you want to take advantage of this opportunity, the question becomes, what is the right metaphor and approach to coming up with these features.
One direction that users will steer you towards is the pay-to-win direction. People who are engaged in your game will always seek out the “push to win” feature and may pay lots of money for it. The downside of this is that it creates an unbalanced game. Even more importantly, once the person has “paid to win” you have pretty much removed the interesting game challenge. At this point boredom sets in quickly and your user will end up leaving the game.
The opposite direction is to dumb down the value per price of your for-pay features in order to preserve game balance and the perception of fairness. The problem with this approach is that the value of the feature can get so watered down that there will be a lot less demand because players will just be disappointed on what they get for the money they spend.
I think the right answer is to take the candy-sized approach. Buying candy is a “micro transaction” that gives the consumer a brief burst of a sugar rush that lasts only a short period of time. The important point here is the time aspect. You can allow someone to buy a great game advantage if the benefit is limited to a brief window in time. This allows you to create for-pay features that are attractive and have good user value, but, don’t confer any real permanent advantage that players can hold over other people in the game. It also fits within an mmo player’s lifecycle. Players are always constantly moving in & out of small tough challenges and short-lived situations. A couple of examples are: one-time use virtual items which are consumed after they give you a benefit (healing potions) and time-limited benefits, like 30 second invulnerabilities.
By providing a simple single click option for users to get temporary relief from a challenging game situation, or a boost in reaching their immediate goal more quickly, you can create the kind of mechanism that creates satisfying, yet continual micro-transactions that can drive strong revenues.
Users as game fixtures
So the #1 ranked queen of knighthood has been #1 for a long time. So long that she has become a part of the game landscape. She is most famous for being the biggest dungeon for one of the biggest alliances on kh. During the early days of kh, when alliances were fairly aggressive, many alliances would steal other people and pass them into her dungeon where she would keep them as prisoners. Some of the most memorable in-game moments involved people gathering together to break free of her dungeon. What’s interesting now is that she is still an oft-talked about topic by people who were never even around during those days. New players gossip and speculate about her even though they have never interacted with her or experienced her dungeon. Stories are passed second and third hand down to new players in a way that turns it into fable.
Its like being able to be around during the actual days of beowulf and then being able to watch as a story transforms into a legend as time unfolds.
This kind of community created narrative seems very powerful as it has impact even after the original users have long uninstalled and left the game. I think that this kind of thing seems only possible within a game setting.
signs of social strategy…
…are real indications of a truly social game.
Social strategy is something akin to politics. It is tactics at convincing other people to cooperate and play the game with you in some beneficial way.
Like any game, knighthood favors people who spend more time playing it. But at higher levels, it favors larger groups of players who are all actively playing. The larger your team of active players, the more advantage you have. Its not enough just to “join a group”, but to also participate and help each other out. Being able to have cooperative play in an asynchronous way is also extremely beneficial This game framework provides enough “pressure” for players to socialize in a strategic way.
Here are some signs of social strategy.
People who tend to be more friendly and helping when new players ask questions to come across as benevolent. Usually advice given to new players is followed by a “join me” if you want more help.
People who advice on how to craft a message in order to “convince” other people’s friends to install the game.
People who are sharing tactics on how to recruit more people, like joining special interest groups, friend the people in the group, and then send game invites to them.
