[casual_games] Downloadable Game Pricing

[Alex St. John]

Hey Isreal.  We have such a system except we "rent" a game for sessions for smaller transaction prices of 1-6 tokens worth around .25 cents each.  A session in our world is full access to the game until the user voluntarily ends the session or leaves the game idle for more than 45 minutes.  We've been market testing session based play and we find that placed side-by-side with a game purchase and no other marketing about 1/3rd of our audience opt for buying a WildCoin plan instead of a $20 puchase.  
   
  We did find a problem however which was surprising.  We found virtually no price elasticity below $20 for purchasing behavior, (6%).  So when you put a $5 offer next to a $20 offer, you are often just negotiating yourself out of $15 bucks with the folks who take it.  WildCoin plans do beat a $20 purchase for total value after a couple months, but that's because they're linked to renewable billing.  This led us to conclude that we should raise the base price point of our WildCoin plans because the low prices weren't winning many more new customers but were costing short term revenue.
   
  The other problem with a $5 offer is that it's still too expensive to sell wholesale to advertisers to sponsor.  One of the reasons we optimized WildCoins for around a .25 cent value is that at this price they can be bulk sold to advertisers to give away.  A signifigant % of the WildCoins consumers spend in our service have been purchased by advertisers like Coke and given away to consumers for free.  
   
  -Alex

 
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