If you?ve been a part of the mobile or Facebook gaming arena, you?ve probably heard about the phrase monetizing. To put it in short it means coming up with ways of earning money from your mobile or Facebook app. This word came up as a result of an interesting situation that app developers faced in their first days in the business they were getting huge amounts of users but had no idea how to earn money out of it. This includes casual games that were based on gambling, like slots or texas holdem, but were played just for fun. Their main source of income was ad placement in different parts of their app. All this changed when one of the pioneers in this field figured out how to earn cash, and a lot of it, from those casual games. This of course refers to Zynga poker. In fact, many games developers use Zynga to learn how to monetize their application and turn it from a big potential, impressive app, to a highly profitable one.So what?s happening in recent days in FB and mobile apps
Monetization has developed quite a lot since its initial ad placement days. In fact, ad placement is regarded as the least profitable way of monetizing. Lately you have an entirely new approach that is based on selling virtual merchandize to players. Those merchandize can appear in different ways: from tips for reaching a higher playing level to virtual poker chips. The biggest challenge is to find the item which your users will be willing to purchase while using your app. A great, relatively recent, example is the ?Manager? application that runs both on Facebook and on mobile. It?s an application that lets you manage a football team and run soccer games. You don?t see an actual game happening, however, you can change your strategy while it takes place, train players, purchase players and pretty much do whatever a real soccer manager does. The monetizing in this application is very sophisticated you may play for free for as long as you want and you might even win your first league this way without a problem. However, as you go on to a more difficult level, the tournaments get harder to win. You need to think about better strategies and mainly buy professional football players. To do that you have to have chips which you need to buy with real cash. The moment you have had a glance of the game and the win of a championship, you?re most likely to invest money in order to be able to play and win. It is a classic foot in the door technique, and it works great.The next stage of monetizing
The thing that was, till just recently, a big taboo when it comes to mobile and Facebook apps, is slowly sneaking in. This of course refers to the possibility to play games for money, real cash that is. Until now the only possibility to do that is finding specific web gambling sites that offer a mobile variation for their games. But that is going to change. Around the end of 2012, Zynga has published a press release stating that they are joining up with Bwin.Party and are starting a process of turning their games into gambling ones. They have not said anything yet about an expected release date, but the fact that they have issued such controversial news might be enough to prove that they are dead serious. On the other hand, they?re just might trying to create a buzz that will help them sniff around and get a picture of the reactions of the industry to such a development. Something to take note of is they avoided the use of the word gambling in all of their publications. They systematically prefer using a more innocent term real money gaming. Whatever it is, this publication opens a new window to a frontier where no mobile or FB developer has ever gone before. Now we have to wait to see if this is a false alarm or this is going to become a reality.
About the Author:
Daniel Craigen is an app developer who's been in the mobile and Facebook gaming industry for the past 4 years. You can find more articles by him in his site, where you can play and win with full access to a Real money gaming experience as well as free casual games.
No comments:
Post a Comment