12 Ways to Turn Your iPhone or Android Game into a Money Machine

Here are some tips for bringing home the bacon when you launch your iPhone or Android game.

1) If a player attempts to make a purchase a virtual item but lacks the currency required, always ask them if they would like to purchase more virtual currency. This has been proven to greatly increase monetization.

2) It’s smart to price IAP bundles of virtual currency between $2.99 and $49.99. That will maximize revenue.

3) Don’t overwhelm the player. Limit currency bundles to 4 or 5 options max. Providing too many choices will overwhelm the user and increase the likelihood that they will buy the cheapest package.

4) Small transactions are not important to free-to-play games. It’s actually the expensive transactions, starting at $9.99, that represent the majority of a game’s generated revenue. In fact, 47% of the revenue earned from in-app purchases falls in the range of $9.99 to $19.99.

5) Once users obtain virtual currency, navigation between their current location and the store should be clear so they can easily make purchases. Best practices suggest limiting navigation to one click.

6) Have massive amounts of virtual items. The more items you have, the more deeply you can monetize players.

7) Make the first purchase option something with incredible value. Once you get a player to make one purchase, the chance of them making a second purchase is much higher.

8 ) For Android, it’s important to secure deals with publishers in other territories (e.g. South Korea, Japan) for additional distribution. Some publishers will pay you to port the game if its high quality. Others might guarantee a revenue amount.

9) There is a new technology to port Android games to the PC with http://www.bluestacks.com/

10) Publish Facebook social actions on people’s timelines when important events occur using the “Facebook verb” action functionality. For example, when a boss is defeated, you can publish a wall post saying something like “Henry Smith has defeated the King Orc!”

11) Try serving video ads that the user can watch in exchange for free in-game currency. AdColony is a good option for this

12) Try serving full-screen interstitial ads when the game launches and once again when the game has begun. Serve no ads for the first few launches, so you don’t turnoff first-time players.

I hope this helps!