![]() Looking at Asphalt 8's success (albeit very early in its career), the iPhone version has already been a top 100 top grossing app in 122 countries, top 10 in 61 countries, with a US top grossing position of 15.įor iPad, the numbers are 130, 67 and 30 respectively, and for Android, they are 46, 14 and 59. (Clearly, this is somewhat artificial given that Gameloft can price the cars however it likes.)Įven so, I've spent $1.99 buying the D class pack of cars to speed my way through the game's opening stages. The D and C class packs are the most generous, although in all cases you're getting at least a 100 percent discount on the 'Credits value' of a pack. In this way, we can see that the pack of S class cars and the mixed Standard Pack are the worst deal if you compared the cost of buying those Credits with cash (which you can't do) to the actual cash spent. However, by buying it directly, it 'only' costs $9.99.Īlthough you purchase the packs directly with real cash, Gameloft also breaks out the value of each of the packs in terms of Credits. We can see Gameloft values this car pack at 122,000 Credits, which would cost us a minimum of $20.53 if we bought that amount of Credit with cash. Called the Standard Pack, it costs $9.99. There's also a mixed pack, which provides one of each class. (You still have to upgrade the cars indvidually, of course). Their price ranges from $1.99 for 10 class D cars to $99.99 for 10 class S cars. More significant are the six packs of cars.Īsphalt 8 contains five classes of cars D, C, B, A and S so five of the packs give you 10 cars of that class. Unlocking Season 2 costs $0.99 (or earned stars), and you can't unlock Season 3 until you're unlocked Season 2. The minor one is unlocking the next set of tracks, or Seasons as they are called. There are two other things you can spend your credits on. Something else to note is at this stage of the game, Gameloft doesn't make you wait for your car's upgrades, as is standard in other games, but this may occur later on. ![]() This is a missed trick to get players into the store environment and spending virtual currency. Instead, you start the game with a default car and 1,500 credits so you can upgrade some parts. Unusually, though, Gameloft doesn't start you off with a bunch of currency and a choice of cars to buy as do Kabam's Fast & Furious 6: The Game and NaturalMotion's CSR Racing. In terms of what you can do with your Credits, the most common task is to upgrade your car's components, of which there are four elements. Gameloft's Despicable Me: Minion Rush had a ratio of 1.5 and most other games I've checked range from 1.3 to 1.7. Looking at the Discount Ratio (effectively the additional per dollar currency you're given for spending $99.99 compared to $1.99), it's a generous 2, or in percentage terms 100 percent. As is now standard, there are 6 transaction bands, ranging from $1.99 to $99.99. You earn these slowly by playing the game, and you can buy them. The main menu UI is pretty confusing, offering lots of different options, without highlighting a Play option, but the tutorial is fairly self-explanatory.ĭigging into the game's business model, there's a single hard currency, called Credits. Of course, we get the usual impolite Push Notification prompt. In design terms, though, there's no reason the game shouldn't be treated as F2P game, and given Gameloft's recent success with Despicable Me: Minion Rush, I'd be surprised if it doesn't switch all its big brands to pure F2P.įiring up the game, it loads quickly, without any updates required (but the original download is a sizeable 842 MB). After all, the game has been simultaneously released on iOS and Android. I think this is mainly because Gameloft wants to generate a bit more revenue on a per user basis, while limiting its initial bandwidth costs when it comes to the multiplayer mode. ![]() The first thing to point out is that Asphalt 8 isn't technically a F2P game as it costs $0.99. It's still a work-in-progress, mind, and this week, we're playing Gameloft's Asphalt 8. You can see previous columns here, and we're posting screens showing the different techniques we come across on our Tumblr page.Īs for the concept behind Monetizer, it's an attempt to quantify the opening 10 minutes or so of significant free-to-play games to check out the early user experience and monetization techniques. Following on from my speech at the Develop in Brighton 2013 conference, we're running a weekly column called Monetizer.
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