[General Topics] Degineth:
I’ll try to keep this short with the focus on the numbers and what they mean.

On April 26th I launched a new game, Quantum Bouncy Bits which follows the “pay what you want” model, without any other means of monetization. The game is free, it has no ads, and the users have the option of playing the entire game without paying anything.

Before developing the game I did some research and all numbers pointed to the fact that only about 2% of people donate. The rest of 98% will choose not to pay anything.

So, from the start I knew that the game won’t generate any real money and most definitely won’t generate as much as ads would, but I still wanted to test the numbers out and create this experiment for myself and for my own curiosity.

The “experiment” turned out to be more insightful than I originally anticipated and gave me a good glimpse into the behaviour of mobile users which I will share below, full transparency.

**Number of downloads and ratings:**

* The game was featured on the front page of XDA-Developers. For those not familiar with the site, it’s the go-to portal for android developers with a very large userbase and audience. Despite the large audience the game only received about 500 downloads in the 6 hours it remained on their front page.

* The game was also featured on /r/android hot section with 140 upvotes. Reddit’s community proved to be an amazing source for feedback and discussions while not so much in terms of downloads. Considering /r/android has 500k subscribers and a constant ~2k active users at any given moment, the game received only 400 downloads. However, the feedback I received was invaluable and a lot of the improvements they suggested and bug fixes were fixed in my next update.

* The “spotlight” was gone the next day and the number of downloads dropped dramatically, as expected. Even with this push, the game was nowhere to be found on the Play Store organically. It was on spot 158 on the “top new games” and nowhere on the “Trending” list. I found this very odd because there were other games with far less downloads and far less ratings that were on the top of the “Trending” category.

* Since then, the game has received 3k downloads with a steady decline of downloads/day until now where it sits at around 50 downloads/day and continuing downward.

Because of the nature of the way the game asks for donations brought a very big number of ratings which brings me to my next point:

**The structure of the model:**

* When the player reaches level 20, they are prompted with a 2 messages explaining that there are a lot more levels to complete and that they can pay what they want for the game.

* A final message appears where they are asked to pay one of the 4 tiers ($1, $2, $5, $10) and a button that says “I don’t want to pay”.

* When the users pay any sum, they receive a “thank you” message and then they continue the game.

* When the users choose “I don’t want to pay” they receive a message asking them to rate the game on Google Play or to “Continue without rating”.

**Statistics and percentages:**

* The game now has 3.2k downloads.

* 1.3% donated.

* Out of those that donated, 30% chose the 2nd donation tier ($2).

* Only 1 person donated $5 and nobody donated $10.

* Despite **American players being 42% of the total userbase they made 85% of total donations.**

* All other countries combined make for the rest of 15%, despite accounting for 58% of downloads.

* On May 1st I introduced 10 new levels and added a “skip level” button for $0.99. I expected this to cause some controversy, but it didn’t at all (except for 1 guy). The game could still be completed without using the “skip level” feature and it still has no ads.

* 7% of of players paid for the “skip level”.

**Conclusion and final thoughts**

It appears that US players are more inclined to donate than any other country, for which I am very grateful and I have the utmost respect for the people that donated.

People are much more inclined to pay for something that benefits them, even in a very small manner, which is expected. I initially didn’t think the “skip level” button would be used but I was very wrong. Even with this small benefit the percentages are much higher than donations and I can only imagine that IAPs in games where the player actually receives something generate a much higher number of payments.

This has been, and continues to be, a very interesting experiment and a good glimpse into this pay model. I will continue to calculate these numbers and if there’s interest in the conclusions I will be making another post in a month and see how the stats hold up.

I want to publicly thank all the people that donated, they give me the motivation and drive to keep on making games, and the feedback I received was truly amazing, so thank you as well to all the people that rated the game. You’re awesome!

If you want to try out the game for yourself, you can Get Bouncy Bits on Google Play, and as always, I’m listening to any feedback you may have. If you have other questions please feel free, I will be watching this thread and answering all questions.

OP notes: This is from a reddit thread but I thought it was a good place to discuss it here.