Kiip - Helps Monetize Achievements

[HarryBalls]

I came across Kiip thru an article on Business Insider. Kiip enables developers to make money specifically from achievements. It looks interesting. How many different companies' SDKs are you willing to add to your apps?

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-...rtising-2012-5

[Bormaley]

thanks, you right have nice day

[Applewood]

Harry - none mate. Tried several of these things and they make zero dollars. I ask them how much they are prepared to front up these days, and none of them will offer a bean. Stick to the core markets and ignore this fluff - a lesson hard learned.

@Bormaley - you forgot the spam sig. Does that come later?

[lennard]

Yeah, I was trying to figure out Bormaleys monetization scheme. Maybe he's just a super friendly guy?

Anyhow. I signed up for the Kiip Indie Fund based on encouraging conversations I had with them. They gave us a "test" version of their Web SDK which clearly... hadn't been tested. At some point a new business guy got involved and told me they didn't have a web SDK yet despite the fact that I had been having communications and access to such an SDK a month earlier. I sent him our test results and the email thread with their tech. guy... Eventually they postponed their Indie. Fund release by a month but, given how things have gone with the web version of their API, I don't think we were in the running after all. Bit of a time sink for us with nothing to show for it. YMMV.

[electronicStar]

I agree with Applewood, if you can attract enough traffic to make money out of these things, then you'll probably be better off working by yourself and keeping all the income.

[HarryBalls]

Thanks for the input.

Lennard - It looks like they position themselves as a mobile app rewards network. The person you were dealing with should have just said no we don't have an sdk for web games.

Applewood and Electronic Star - I see this service as a way to add incremental revenue to your business rather than taking revenue away from you. I would think a game developer would have to weigh the service like Kiip's value add to the user's experience vs the implementation effort & time vs additional revenue.

At the end of the day you can speculate all you want but until you try any service that may help you make more money you are just guessing.

[Applewood]

Trust me, this is based on experience and not apathy or cynicism.

We've tried many monetisation schemes, partly due to curiosity whilst we had some free time. Some took time to put SDK's in, others just worked, in a couple of cases they did the grunt work for us when we gave them the source.

None. I repeat, NONE of them have ever made more than a few days worth of income from the usual channels. I get probably an average of 10 mails a week from "a man with a plan" attaching an 8Mb PDF trying to get me to partake of this latest venture X. If any of them made real money, we'd all have heard of them already.

All these options are making margins out of the margins. Including all these "other" app stores.

One in particular is worth commenting on. iDreakSky got in touch with us and offered to localise our game into Chinese and promote it on China Mobile - the primo provider in China who's well known to be hard to contact. Wow, thought we. Not only do we get in front of a coupla billion people, they'll even pay for the hard work. Bing. Two months later, we've made about $1,000. That's our biggest success so far for a TOTAL income from unusual streams. This is for an app that still does about $1000 a day on Google Play. YMMV, but I doubt it.

The latest of these is going live in a week or two - WildTangent. Keeping an open mind on that one as it's actually genuinely different, but when our first royalty check comes in, I'll still be gobsmacked if there's four digits to the left of the decimal.

[lennard]

Harry... they did have an SDK. It just wasn't debugged and shouldn't have been released unless they were willing to at least work with a developer who was going to send them detailed feedback.

Paul - I think you are mostly right although it's new concepts like freemium that change our industry and Kiip's notion of giving players prizes for playing games is a compelling idea. I loved it the moment I heard of it - if they can find advertisers willing to pay for the ride. That said, as explained above, my experience with them wasn't great.

[Applewood]

I actually agree lennard. The problem is that all these brand new ideas are just that. The people behind them put almost no investment into making them go large so they expect us to do it. You can give your own prizes away pretty easily without any help if that's what this one is about.

[lennard]

It more or less is with the twist that the prize sponsors pay you to do so (it's advertising with an angle and, in that competitive business, that's a plus).

BTW, we are going to have a monthly leader board for Endless Empires and I'd like to give prizes away for that event. I'll be putting up a pitch for giveaways before that starts.

[HarryBalls]

Thank you for the feedback. When are you going to make a game called "GobSmacker"?

[Applewood]

Today I just had the one reach out. From someone wanting us to put in a shop interface so they could sell GLWG in Israel. Now how many sales do you think that would net us exactly? I've nothing against that group of people but they're not exactly known as a gaming nation huh. Why can't Israeli phone providers just put google play on their phones and stop pissing about.

[HarryBalls]

How much additional revenue either total or per users per month would a monetization service have to provide for you to consider the efforts worthwhile?

[Applewood]

That's of course relative, I have five people to pay and some company profit to make.

I think as a working formula though, anything that takes over a day or two (total) should make at least a tenth of regular sales from one of the major outlets, otherwise you'll just get bogged down squeezing pennies in ever decreasing circles, instead of making your next big thing to sell on the major outlets and hopefully get some real cash.

The problem is, none of the fringe schemes have so far made anything like a tenth ime. Putting modesty aside a bit, our games been fairly successful on mobile. Not epic, but good enough to not be able to blame the game itself for poor monetising. (2.5 million mobile owners have at least tried it so far, even if they didn't all pay for it.)

Here's another angle, advice we've taken ourselves albeit a bit later than we would've with the hindsight I'm offering. If you have something selling well, instead of trying to make other versions that sell poorly on fringe platforms, make a sequel and sell that well on the major platforms instead. (Well, fingers crossed - you know what I mean.)

10 Time management.
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