In August, indie developer Arnold Rauers decided to make his mobile games free-to-play on the App Store. As a result, his revenue has grown by 41%.
Card Crawl
Rauers, the founder of one-person studio Tinytouchtales, shared a few metrics on Twitter, showing the positive impact the F2P model had on his titles.
He released six games in total, with Card Crawl and Card Thief being the most popular ones. Overall, downloads on iOS increased by 280% after going free-to-play. “While Card Thief is downloaded the most, its revenue declined by -1% but Card Crawls rev increased by 168%,” Rauers noted.
After going Free with my games on the App Store in Aug here’s a look at the data so far (Jun 1st-Sep 1st). Dls on iOS up by 280% as expected, Rev up 41%. While Card Thief is dl’ed the most, its rev declined by -1% but Card Crawls rev increased by 168%. #GameDev #Mobile #revenue pic.twitter.com/mgvzqu6SrK
— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) September 3, 2021
Since going free-to-play, Tinytouchtales’ titles generated $8,600 in revenue and 104K downloads in total. There also was a huge spike in revenues and downloads by the end of August. According to Rauers, it happened after Gnomitaire got a feature outside of the App Store (but he couldn’t track the source of it).
The developer is now monetizing all his games through different forms of IAPs, including full content unlocks, Ad/timer gate removals, and feature unlocks. He also noted that he doesn’t use in-app ads to monetize his titles.
Outside of the App Store, Rauers’ games are presented on Google Play, with some of them also having Steam and itch.io versions.