[casual_games] Different Payment Models

[Brian Robbins]

Lots of great thoughts in this thread, thanks everyone for sharing so far!

One thing that it seemed like everyone kept coming back to, but I
believe is a completely flawed assumption is that users are paying $20
/ sale. Based on my own experience (which I can only generalize due to
NDA's, etc) this just doesn't seem to be the case.

In a recent example we were seeing average net per sale of game of
right around $3 / unit, but our revenue share's should have provided
much, much higher than that. After digging into the numbers I
discovered two main reasons for this:

1 - Many distributors/portals have very large deductions for
bandwidth, marketing, etc off of the price a consumer pays. The
developer royalty comes after these deductions.

2 - More surprising however was the percentage of games sold at a
discount via package pricing models or other "club" type of plans. In
many cases we were actually getting the appropriate % of revenue after
a reasonable deduction for costs, but the end consumer was only paying
$6-$10 for the game, not the $20 everyone expects.

This is something that everyone needs to start keeping a much closer
eye on as we're already devaluing our product very significantly, and
I believe is doing more to hurt the download model than many of the
other factors mentioned already.


-- 
Brian Robbins
Casual Game Visionary for Hire