Mobile Designer Daniel Cook on Why the 99¢ App Model Doesn’t Work

Following on the heels of Pippa’s annoyance at Order Up!! and its shameless in-app purchasing model, I’ve read a very interesting post from Spry Fox LLC’s game designer Daniel Cook on Google+.

In it he explains why they’ve decided not to go with the traditional 99¢ sales model and instead are pursuing the free-to-play route.

“There’s a specific revenue graph that you see for a typical packaged or downloadable game. You get a big spike of money that slowly trickles down to almost nothing. These are hit games in a hit driven industry with hit shaped revenues.

This has some fun psychological implications. When the money is good, it seems like it will never end. As a result, teams tend to overextend themselves. They hire on additional people, and they take on more ambitious and exciting projects…

…At some point, the money starts fading. The next game or port suddenly needs to be a success. You make decisions that start matching what the market is doing. You start listening to experts. You start looking back on your past success and trying to emulate them. All this makes it more difficult to comprehend and react to new opportunities. You’ve gone from a fresh new success to a fragile bloated company…

I’ve come to the conclusion that long term, the hit-driven model found in disposable, packaged games is an anti-developer business model.”

He goes into much more depth on why this is the case in the full post.

Instead of churning out hits that do well and fade away, Cook’s dream is to build games as long-term services and relationships with his customers. He wants steady streams of revenue that grow and to retain his independence.

Sounds like every entrepreneur’s dream and I wish him well. I just hope he finds a model a bit more compelling than the currently-popular one of making the game slow and filled with periods of not-playing unless you pay for a speed bump. I’ve seen it with Tiny Tower, I’ve seen it with 8 Realms and now we’ve seen it in Order Up!! To Go. That’s not what I call fun.

TripleTown’s model seems a little less punishing in that you do start out with several thousand bushes (the smallest building block for your town) and you can earn the in-game currency by playing games. However, I used about a hundred bushes in my first couple of games and earned enough coins to buy one, so I suspect that earning currency isn’t a sustainable long-term model for the gamers. Or perhaps I’m just not that good at it yet.

Have you seen any games that do the free-to-play model well?

[via @SpiltMilkStudio]

TripleTown is free for iOS 4.1+ and Android 2.2+

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