[casual_games] Re: Version jumping

[Adam Martin]

If this is affecting "a lot" of your users, isn't that a sign of a
deeper problem with your market and product targetting?

i.e. wrong market (in which case ignore them and try to focus on
people who don't do this), or wrong pricing (so wrong that your
customers would rather muck about and jump through hoops than pay you
), or wrong product (after a couple of hours they find they don't like
it enough to buy it - or there's not enough left to justify it)?

Adam

On 08/10/06, Ron <lists at rzweb.com> wrote:
> > - Has anyone experimented with this? What do the
> > portals feel?
>
> I have spoken to one portal about a way for the game to know if it's in the
> try-to-buy period, and they were very against it, mainly because they didn't
> feel that the devs would use it effectively (i.e. turn off the wrong
> features, show an incomplete game, etc).  They felt that the user should
> have a true experience in the try-to-buy period.  I don't agree.  I think
> building "demos" that people can play (maybe forever) is a much better idea
> that just letting them play the whole game for an hour.  As I've stated
> before, I think the try-to-buy model is very broken and costing us a lot of
> sales.
>
> I think the issue you bring up could turn into a huge problem.  I have used
> this technique many times when I need to explore a competition's title for
> longer then an hour, but I always figured the "casual user" wasn't going to
> go to the trouble, but that might be changing.
>
> Hopefully this is something the portals will get on top of quickly.
>
> Ron
>
> Allan Simonsen wrote:
> > We're seeing a lot of our users bypassing the 60
> > minute demo-timeout by changing providers (getting 3
> > or 4 different 60 minute sessions downloading the same
> > game from Reflexive, BigFish, etc).
> >
> > I'd argue that this endangers part of the casual games
> > business model; if we wanted the user to have a 5 hour
> > trial period, we'd probably offer him or her that in
> > the first place.
> >
> > We're seeing a lot of players focusing on the
> > single-player campaign (the story mode, or similar).
> > Once they've finished the campaign, their motivation
> > for actually purchasing the product drops
> > dramatically, even if there's still additional puzzle
> > or community modules that they haven't explored. That
> > some of the portals don't interrupt the play-time at
> > 60 minutes (effectively allowing the user to play as
> > long as he/she wants, provided they don't close the
> > program) doesn't help.
> >
> > So.. solutions. The simplest path is probably to
> > implement a maximum playtime in demo-mode, using a
> > registry key or similar to ensure that irregardless of
> > distributor, the demo-version can only be played for
> > max 60 minutes. You'd need to check against the DRM
> > wrapper(s) to ensure that purchased versions don't
> > have this problem.
> >
> > - Has anyone experimented with this? What do the
> > portals feel?
> >
> > - What are the DRM APIs that you'd need to support on
> > this? Has anyone looked at doing an abstraction layer
> > to simplify supporting all of the common APIs?
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > Allan Simonsen
> >
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