How not to monetize your game(?)

edited in General
So theres this game called Infectonator (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/520220) and it's stupid fun and everyone should play it.

Today, to my major excitement I saw it had a sequel! (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/603478)

But it has such in your face self promotion that I felt I was turned off from what was an otherwise excellent game. Do you guys think they harmed their income with the way they presented the premium parts of their game? If so, how could they have improved it?

Comments

  • edited
    I really liked the original. Gave this one a look now.

    I think the blatant punting of premium stuff at the beginning is just plain clumsy. There is no way a player is going to start spending money on a free game before they have even played it.

    I don't think they've actually sincerely tried to monetize this. They're asking for money in the form of a donation and give the player the pretty much the same content regardless of how much they spent.

    So what's weird here is that they've slowed down the progression of the game to make the player want the "donation" more. Which seems a little conflicted to me.

    I do like that the extra content is at least partially extra fun goodies. I don't think it works in a game like this to ask people to pay to get ahead (Mighty Eagle style) because conquering the world with your zombies is somewhat undermined if you paid to speed up the process.

    I think including a Nuclear Bomb (clear the level) item in the paid for content is just plain poor design.

    So on one hand they don't actually seem to be milking their players in an unpleasant way, on the other hand their implementation for their monetization seems like a careless afterthought hobbled together from bad advice on the internet.

    I think it's fair to assume a segment of the players of the old version have been turned off by the payed-for content...

    But their old game had no monetization... And splitting advertising revenue with portals is a cruel mistress.


    Still like the game though :)
    (Though I prefer to play premium games myself)
  • I think the only major concern is, indeed, the worry that one may be "missing out" or otherwise unrealistically hamstrung by not paying for extra content, reducing the fun of the game to unsensibly low levels if you're NOT putting any cash in.

    Which can be soooooomewhat problematic. I gave this a try as a player new to the series (didn't even fire up the original's link, I just went straight for 2) and although I wasn't directly offended by all the promo stuff going on, I started to feel a little put off by the fact that I clearly didn't have enough money or resources to do anything interesting / powerful in even the first couple of levels (this strikes me as a grind-based game to a certain extent, but c'mon! Could I have not at least gotten more than 3 kills in a round by now?). It makes me wonder if I'm going to continue having this "barely effective" feeling throughout the rest of my game experience.

    If the same had occurred in a game where it wasn't obvious that they were pushing premium content, it would be far easier for me to give it the benefit of the doubt: that, okay, I start off somewhat weak but can probably be expected to progress and become MUCH more effective as I get used to the game or put a reasonable amount of time into it.

    In context, however, it's easy to have the warning flags raised. Whether this is a fair assessment or not is yet to be seen, but it's possible that players may jump to the same conclusion as me.
  • Actually, I think the TL;DR is:

    If the monetisation stuff is thrust too visibly / frequently at the player, it's easier to assume that ANY difficulties, slowdowns or other obstacles faced are artificial gimps instead of natural, well-fitting challenges.
  • And now, having played some more: yeah, I really think this is it in a nutshell. I'm actually kinda hooked on this now, but I think it nearly lost me before I even started getting into it for the abovementioned reasons. Which seems a shame.
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