I recently released my first game on Android, very much a commercial endeavor but with a model that I somewhat expected too friendly for its own good - ad-free demo, single IAP for the full game. It made $10k over the first month and so far it seems to be still accelerating. I'm yet to release on iOS, I expected the Android port to be a drop in the bucket but this is going to go a long way in sustaining me as an indie game dev.
Yeah, the game first released on Steam last year and had a decent following from that, ~15k sales and ~200k activations from a charity bundle.
> Is there any backslash from the demo-only players (eg. leaving bad reviews since they need to pay to access full game)?
There is some backlash, but honestly much less than I expected. I tend to politely respond to these reviews that they're unreasonable, and like half get removed or adjusted. In general there have been far more people explicitly grateful for this model, saying they probably wouldn't have picked up the game otherwise.
Thanks! I think it's a good model and I wish app stores supported it better.
If store would indicate that it's a free demo and display the price for full version, user's expectations would be managed better, as many skip or just skim over a description.
I recently released my first game on Android, very much a commercial endeavor but with a model that I somewhat expected too friendly for its own good - ad-free demo, single IAP for the full game. It made $10k over the first month and so far it seems to be still accelerating. I'm yet to release on iOS, I expected the Android port to be a drop in the bucket but this is going to go a long way in sustaining me as an indie game dev.