Casual Game Price Points and Conversion
There’s a good interview here with C.J. Wolf of iWin, discussing some experiments they did with pricing for their casual game Family Feud. It’s rare in this biz to see any hard data on conversion rates, so it’s particularly cool to see not only F.F.’s conversion rate data, but the results of their experiment on how the C.R. was affected by price point.
The standard for this biz is $19.95, with a 60 minute free trial.
Apparently, they first tinkered with the length of the trial period. At 60 minutes (and a $19.95 price point), the game had a conversion rate of 0.9%, but the conversion rate went up to 1.3% when they cut the free trial period to 30 minutes.
Next, they experimented with price (I’m assuming these results were with the 30 minute trial period, though that’s not explicitly stated):
_________Conversion________
Price_______Rate______Yield
$19.95______1.3%_______$.26
$24.95______1.1%_______$.27
$29.95______1.1%_______$.32
The conversion rate is sales per completed download. The yield is revenue per completed download – i.e. the product of the prior two columns.
As you can see, though C.R. slipped a bit at the higher price point, it was more than offset by the higher price point.
I’m not sure that these results would hold with the majority of casual games. F.F. is a bit of an outlier in several respects.
First, it’s an established brand that people are familiar with, and there’s no way for a consumer to buy an equivalent product from someone else for less money. i.e. they don’t face competitive price pressure from others at $20.
Moreover, consumers might be more comfortable with both the shorter trial period and the higher price point given the familiarity of the underlying license (and game mechanics).
Finally, I’ve played iWin’s version of F.F., and frankly, there’s not a lot there. Yes, they recreate the game reasonably faithfully, and I do enjoy the television show, but the game gets repetitive and boring quickly. I stopped playing after 20 minutes. So a shorter trial period probably makes sense. But for a game with a longer backstory and more varied gameplay, I think you might more effectively hook the consumer with the traditional 60 minute trial. I’d love to see others experiment with this and publicly reveal their data.
January 10th, 2006 at 10:55 am
> I’d love to see others experiment with
> this and publicly reveal their data.
Well, um, you have a game out there Phil, why don’t you experiment a little? 🙂 Interesting stuff though. Price, as long as it’s within the bounds of reason, seems to have much less to do with sales than the game itself. There are plenty of people out there with the disposable income where the extra 10 bucks doesn’t really matter much.
As far as the 30 minute (or less) vs. 60 minute trial period though, I’d hate to see it become the norm for it to be the former. I purchased Zuma a while back, with its 60 minute trial. On the other hand, Fairies has a 30 minute trial period, but I had no interest in buying it because of that. Even though it was “pretty,” it was too much the same as what’s already out there. And that’s the main downfall of the casual game market … too many clones with revamped graphics and storylines. It all gets a bit boring, or at the very least, predictable, after awhile.
January 10th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Yeah, when I see guys selling games for $5.95 or $9.95, I wonder why. Half the battle for me is getting me to go downstairs, grab my wallet, get the credit card, enter all the info, and hope that I’ll neither be scammed nor spammed afterward. I don’t have any real price resistance up to $19.95. OTOH, because I’m used to seeing casual games at $19.95, it’d be a much harder sell for me to plunk down $29.95 or more for something.
January 10th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Oh, and it would be pretty hard for me to do the experiment myself. At the moment, I’m not even selling Bonnie’s Bookstore myself, though I have the right to, and probably will, add that feature to my website. Still, as a one-off game web site, my traffic is too small to do a multi-part A/B test like this and have a large enough data sample to make the results meaningful.
I think iWin did all this testing BEFORE putting the game out to other sites, using a limited release on their own web site (which does get a fair amount of traffic). I’d guess they used random cookies to determine which users saw which offers, but I don’t know that for sure.
March 16th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
[…] Of course, as production values rise, budgets for casual games will likely rise as well, and eventually these costs may be passed along to consumers. There has been some discussion of changing the common $19.95 price point for casual games (Casual Game Price Elasticity, Casual Game Price Points and Conversion), but this does not appear likely to change in the near future. […]
June 17th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Does anyone know what the average player name registration conversion rate is for an online game site? That is, of the total number of new people who hit your homepage, what percentage of them can you expect to actually register a player name assuming the site is well-designed?
June 17th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Not sure what you mean…
Most sites don’t require you to register a player name at their site. Of sites that do, I personally have no knowledge of registration rates.