If you have been around the mobile or Facebook games market, you?ve most likely heard about the term monetizing. To put it in a sentence it refers to ways of making money from your mobile or Facebook application. This term was first mentioned as a result of an intriguing situation that games developers were facing in their first days in the business they were getting vast amounts of visitors but had no idea how to earn money out of it. This also refers to casual games that were gambling oriented, like blackjack or texas holdem, but were played just for fun. Their main source of income was placing adss in different parts of their app. All this took a turn when one of the pioneers in this field figured out how to make money, and a lot of it, out of those casual games. This obviously refers to Zynga poker. Actually, plenty of games developers use Zynga to learn how to monetize their game and turn it from a big potential, impressive app, to a very profitable one.So what?s happening in recent days in mobile and Facebook applications
Monetizing has come a long way since its first ad placement days. Actually, placing ads is regarded as the least profitable format of monetization. Lately you have an entirely new approach that is based on offering virtual merchandize to users. Those items can appear in varies formats: from getting access to a higher games level to virtual casino chips. The biggest challenge is to find the thing which your users will agree to buy while using your game. A fantastic, fairly recent, example is the ?Manager? app that is available for mobile and Facebook users. It is a game in which you manage a football team and play football games. You don?t see an actual game happening, but you can change your strategy while it happens, train players, buy players and just about act like real live football manager does. The monetizing in this application is very sophisticated you may play for free for as long as you want and you might even win your first league this way with no problem. However, as you go up to a more difficult stages, the tournaments become harder to win. You have to come up with better strategies and mainly buy better players. In order to buy good players you need to have tokens which you must buy with real cash. Once you?ve had an experience of the game and have won some a championship, you are most likely to spend money in order to be able to play and win. It is a classic foot in the door strategy, and it actually works.The next step of monetization
The thing that was, till just recently, a big taboo when it comes to mobile and FB games, is gradually finding its way to safe grounds. This obviously refers to the possibility to play games for money, real money that is. Until now the only possibility to do that is playing in known online gambling sites that offer a mobile variation for their games. Now it seems that is going to change. Around October, 2012, Zynga has published a press release stating that they?ve joined up with Bwin.Party and are beginning a process of turning their games into gambling ones. They did not say anything yet about a formal launch date, but the fact that they have issued such controversial news is enough to state that they mean business. On the other hand, they are doing this to try and create a buzz that will help them sniff around and get a picture of the reactions of the industry to such a development. Something to take note of is they avoided using the word gambling in all of their press releases. They constantly prefer to use a more innocent term real money gaming. In any case, this announcement opens a new path to a frontier where no mobile or FB developer has ever gone before. Only time would tell if it?s a false alarm or it?s actually here to stay.
About the Author:
Daniel Craigen is an app developer who's been in the mobile and Facebook gaming industry for the past 4 years. You can find more articles by him in his site, where you can play and win with full access to a Real money gaming experience as well as free casual games.
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