It seems like a simple solution to me would be to make the game free, but with most features blocked behind a SINGLE in-app purchase. That way you can download it, play what amounts to basically a demo, and decide if you like the game. If you don't, you've lost nothing, and the game developer gets the opportunity to add an additional step to their funnel and see how many people genuinely don't like their game or are frustrated / confused by it. If you do, you buy it with the IAP and now have the rest of the game forever.
What am I missing here? Is this hard to do? Or prohibited somehow?
Disclosure: I'm not a mobile game developer, so maybe I'm missing something here about the rules of the app stores.
It's not necessarily difficult, and it's not prohibited, it's just not very profitable. The problem is you're cutting out the whales. You might have a $5 gate, and get 2% of people converting, whereas unlimited IAPs might only get 1% of people converting. But now some of that 1% can (and will, believe me) spend $30k a year on your game. And almost all of them will spend more than $10.
Games used to do this somewhat frequently, they just don't anymore because it leaves so much on the table.
Also the much lower RPUs will make paid acquisition unprofitable, and paid acquisition is the only reliable method. App stores are great if you get featured or by some fluke work your way to the top of the charts, but for 99.9% of developers, you're either doing paid acquisition or getting no substantial amount of customers.
As I understand it, "whales" tend to be less "poor gullible fools maxing out their credit cards" and more "extraordinarily wealthy people that enjoy wasting amounts that seem ridiculous to us but are truly nothing but a drop in the bucket to them." The term "oil prince" is trotted out sometimes, and people like that really do exist: I don't remember his name, but there is a very real "oil prince" who likes to go on twitch.tv and shower random (mostly female) streamers with thousands of dollars. It is an utterly bizarre experience seeing screenshots of these events, where, say, a teenaged girl is playing a game in her parent's kitchen with a webcam trained on her, the caption is something like, "wow, $person just donated $20,000 to me! thanks!", and the entire family is in the background with their mouths agape in shock.
I hate these glorified slot machines, I hate the companies that make them, and I do think it's unethical to prey upon children and regular people with bad judgment, but my guess is that the average "whale" is far too wealthy to deserve your sympathy. As a different example of the same idea, do you feel bad for the celebrities that spend hundreds of dollars for a drink at an exclusive club?
I spent over $400 on a certain free-to-play stronghold-building game, over a few weeks, after intending to spend only about $5 or so testing it.
It was very interesting to introspect on the self-rationalization, etc, all the while understanding that I was BS'ing myself and also understanding the tricks they were using. It was addiction, pure and simple.
Now, part of the reason I didn't stop sooner was that I can afford that, although it's not a good use of my funds. That was actually built into the rationalizations: Oh, if I'd taken the car to work today I'd have spent $20 on parking, and $15 on lunch, so I'll just take the subway and bring my lunch tomorrow ...
Would you do that again? (If $400 is a non negligible amount of money for you).
Or would you rather avoid temptation by not installing such games in the first place?
I run one. When I've done cursory searches on our whales, I find people who appear (at least from LinkedIn/Facebook) to have great jobs. I don't get the impression the large guys can't afford it, generally speaking. I am sure it happens.
I trust that what you are saying is accurate for your company. (And, thanks for saying it. That's one data point I hadn't heard before.) It is at variance with things I have heard about other companies. I am, unfortunately, not able to elaborate.
Good article that got passed around in my office on Friday. People who are 'gamers' and by extension people who make games tend to look at "whales" as gullible stupid people but a lot of us tend to exhibit the same behaviour about other things all while congratulating ourselves for not pay 5 bucks to support a game we've played for 50 hours.
That said I think there is a really really fine line you have to walk to keep your IAPs "ethical" and it's very temping (and profitable) to fall on the Candy Crush side of things.
Oh, Candy Crush does this too? (I have honestly never played it so i don't know). Well apparently there was a little exploit to bypass the wait (without paying). My GF told me about it (yes, she's addicted). You can just change you local clock and the game thinks a day has passed and tada! free lives.
Do you mean him searching for open-source information about his customers that his customers voluntarily put on the web, or him saying it to us?
If someone spent $30,000 on my digital cards, I'd look him up so that I could sleep at night and not worry that his kids are going hungry because of this.
(I'm not someone who sells these kinds of things, so I'm fully aware this is largely armchair quarterbacking.)
It depends on the business, but in general I give a supplier my information so that they can supply me with the goods I request; inform me about that process; and invoice me.
Using that information for other reasons without informing me is a clear, unambiguous, invasion of my privacy. It's probably not legal in the UK.
Tl:dr yes, it's creepy. Especially in the context of a game dev.
There are CRM plugins that do it for you automatically when you view records. At the low-end, when I go into Mailchimp, there's a pay plugin (that I don't use) that puts up social information. If anyone emails me, Rapportive brings up their social profile to the right of the email.
My question is: why is it unsavory when a game developer tries to get a customer to pay more, but not for any other startup? If Amazon improves its recommendation service, or another etailer a/b tests checkout flows, they're a genius. When a game developer does it, they're evil.
My theory is that a lot of it is back-rationalization. People just have a gut reaction against it and search for any reason they can find to argue that it's bad.
The main reason it's different for game developers is that in most instances, in-app purchases will undermine the integrity of the game more significantly than for other kinds of apps. Indeed that is the main point of the OP ("There is no game here.")
If you add a rule to chess where you can pay cash to put a taken piece back on the board, you don't have chess anymore. Additionally, consider that videogames are often escapist entertainment that people play specifically to get away from real-life financial pressures or wealth-based status sorting.
There are all kinds of ethical ways to get your most dedicated customers to "pay more" (what's the MBA-speak term for "trying to get everyone to pay exactly as much as they're comfortable with"? I can't remember). There are pre-order bonuses, special editions, purely cosmetic items that don't change the gameplay, mission packs, "mission pack sequels," actual sequels, "pay what you want," donations...
It gets "unsavory" when you're focusing more on designing the perfect skinner box than actually creating a game. I think games are all about the feelings and mental states you get into when you play them. An action game gets your adrenaline pumping, competitive ones especially so. Strategy games require incredibly deep thought to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Puzzle games really stretch your brain to the limits of logic (or maybe they're just bullshit). From my experience, the games that people malign when they talk about mobile games and "social games," on the other hand, promote nothing but anxiety, and use it as a tool to wedge themselves into your subconscious so that you will fork over more cash into their creator's pockets. See the common practice of games based around waiting for something to happen, and bugging you with an alert whenever it does. I don't think very well of people that create things (I won't dignify them by calling them games) that do nothing but prey on anxiety, compulsion, and our attractions to flashing lights.
It's the difference between creating something that people will pay $50 to experience, and creating something that is engineered to repeatedly exploit our basest negative emotions. These games are in some senses worse than heroin, because at least heroin is fun while it lasts.
Jonathan Blow does the topic far more justice than I can at the moment (what am I doing, it's way too late to be drink posting on HN...) in his talk "Video Games and the Human Condition"[1], if you're interested. It's nearly two hours long, but I believe it's very much worth your time.
As for "why do other startups not get shit for this," I think there's a big difference between A/B testing different versions of your game's site to see which version results in more "conversions" or whatever it's called, and designing your entire "game" around frisking people at every turn and being the best darn frisker you can. Not to mention the ones obviously marketed to children, which reasonable people agree is one step removed from turning up at your local elementary school with a trenchcoat full of free samples.
(I have no idea who you are or what games you make, so don't take these comments personally, this is just my general opinion of the mobile games I've tried. If it (or especially Jonathan Blow's talk, because he's much more eloquent than tired, drunken me) rings close to home, however, it might not be a bad idea to download a pack of the 1000+ NES games and try a few at random for a reminder of what playing a real game is like)
I think these games are more targeting "addiction-forming" (which is MBA speak for what any sane person calls "drugs").
The same sort of thing happened so mid-90s pay-per-second or pay-for-items games on what we now call dumbphones (ie. java games). They were regulated, essentially demanding up-front information about what they charge and an option to disable it on the telco contract (effectively giving parents a way to disable it for kids, and everyone a way to disable it for themselves), and their market completely dried up. This happened after several high-profile court cases where the telco was preventing from charging large amounts to kids (think $30k-40k). You can't find them anymore at all.
As far as I'm aware those things are still going, the one I remember was Jamster (though they use different names in different countries, so it was originally Jamba):
> Do you feel it's ethical to take $30k a year from 'the whales'?
I don't have any essential ethical problems with the question. I have two concerns.
(1) They're called "games" when they're not really "games."
(2) The socio-economic implications of a system where it's easier and more profitable to sell to 50 people willing to pay $30,000+ than to 1.5 million people willing to pay $2.
It's the exact same question whether it's ethical to take that amount of money from the whales in casinos. Because that's where the term whale comes from, synonymous with high rollers. It's the exact same scenario, except that in casinos, whales have a chance to make it back. But even in casinos, the rich people who can afford to be whales know that they're just throwing away their money. They're not like the poor stupid ones who go bankrupt with gambling debt.
I worked on a system where we could see these people's behavior. I recommended that we take the top X and refund their money. They had problems, and it was unethical for us to continue to bill them. Senior management said, "No." Which was appalling to me. It would cost us nothing, all virtual bits anyway. To see the greed of taking a sick persons money is kinda depressing.
The system I worked on did 40M in revenue. We are talking about 10 people spending 5k a year (ish). So 0.5% of revenue for product that never even got activated? Refunding is the only correct response.
Sure. The games (generally) aren't doing anything illegal or unethical. If someone has the spare money and the inclination, why would it be unethical to allow them to spend it?
Remember that there is a lot of money out there. If you're a millionaire, a billionare has 1000x more money than you. His $30,000 is your $30.
Would you think it is unethical for iTunes to take $30k from someone who purchased a large amount of music, tv and movies?
What about someone who spends $30k to get their Aston Martin repainted in chrome paint?
People have to be careful here - this is clearly consensual behaviour as long as they know how much they are spending as they purchase. Everyone wants to compare to gambling - I detest gambling and never do it - I would cautiously support moves to rein in an ever-expanding gambling industry - but at the same time if people want to spend money on entertainment, even all of their money, I find it hard to come up with a suitable argument. People can spend all their money on all sorts of weird obsessions, but these shouldn't be reasons for outlawing the behaviour for the majority of people who get along just fine.
>People have to be careful here - this is clearly consensual behaviour [...] //
Right. Many apps are designed to be effective Skinner boxes bypassing the brains logic to push at the base responses in order to initiate a "player" to want to continue without engaging their executive functions. Games like Candy Crush and Bejeweled play ever trick possible to part users from their cash.
It's more like having a bar and when the mark is drunk you waft a cheeseburger under their nose, flash subliminal messages on the video screens, pay beautiful people to sit eating cheeseburgers, tell them all their friends ordered one and finally selling it for 3 tokens [$1000] because you know they won't then notice the cost. Oh plus wash that burger down with a beer that's suddenly $500 because arbitraryTimeLimit just ran out.
Most obsessions that people spend silly money on aren't carefully designed to be obsessions. Those that are - smoking, gambling, drinking - are often tightly controlled.
Nightclubs, so far as I know, don't have systems of their own currency specially designed to hide the dollar amounts of their drinks, for example. They also, where I am at least, have to post prices and are by law required to stop serving people who're drunk [though I hesitate to guess how often that law is flouted].
Your position on gambling seems contrary to your position on other for money gaming.
A gambler comes into a casino, which I own. I know this gambler personally, and I know his style. However much he comes in with, he bets it all on black at the roulette tables. If he wins, he places the bet again, and again, until he loses. This time, he has come in with what I know to be his 17-year-old child's college fund. The fund is in his name, and is legally his, but is intended for paying for college. If he loses it, he will not have enough time to build it up again before the child graduates high school. I allow him to bet and lose the money.
How the hell would this be ethical, no matter how consensual and non-coercive it is?
What would be unethical is if you tried to coerce him into somehow not spending it.
The money is not a college fund. Your customer's previously-held inaccurate predictions of the future turned out to be false. He changed his mind. Your assertion that it "is intended for paying for college" is false. It is intended for paying for roulette.
It is not your right to choose for others how they spend their money.
Stop trying to control other people because of your certainty in the belief that you know what's best for them.
That view is insanely simplistic. Sometimes people do things that are against their own interests because they are in the clutches of an addiction. In these situations, it is sometimes OK for someone to step in and overrule them. Sometimes it's not just OK, but morally necessary.
It can be better to temporarily infringe someone's rights if it stops them from doing something that they will regret for the rest of their life.
> It can be better to temporarily infringe someone's rights if it stops them from doing something that they will regret for the rest of their life.
No, this is false. You're incapable of guessing what other people may or may not regret with enough accuracy to use it as a justification for infringing upon the rights of others.
Furthermore, most are heavily influenced by societal norms and customs, making this even more dangerous a justification when used against the rights of those with eccentricities or nonstandard tastes or lifestyles.
It's never ok to infringe upon someone's rights.
A question: how do people find themselves "in the clutches of an addiction"? How do they escape? Could it possibly be their own free will to decide to smoke the first cigarette, or their individual decision to walk past the bar without going in, on their way home from AA?
Not at all. However, any responsible guardian of someone drinking underage should be subject to the appropriate penalties for neglect. It's not a child's fault when they make an error.
Let's take another example, even more extreme. Suppose I run a pawn shop. Somebody comes in looking to sell goods that I know are stolen. I buy them from him. This contract is entered by both of us consensually and without coercion. It is also entirely immoral.
People are social creatures. Trying to ignore that and treat everybody as isolated individuals ignores those.
That's a baseless assertion -- legality and morality are independent and only coincidentally aligned. Unless you want to start telling us about the ethical necessity upheld by the farm subsidy bill.
Clearly it would be immoral for you to intentionally provide a source of liquidity for stolen goods. How does that show anything about your gambler?
They are both separate examples of contracts that are consensual and without coercion, but are immoral, both for different reasons. My goal was to find a counter-example to the statement that "All consensual and non-coercive transactions are ethical.". Once that example was found, expanding from there.
They were discussing morality, not legality. There is a difference. You can base your decision to do/not do something because (you feel) it is immoral, whether it is illegal or not.
Often legality and morality do align (but really not as often as you'd think), and this is fortunate, because it allows good people an easy mental short-cut for weighing one's actions based on legality (and punishment), as well as protecting the weaker-willed parts of society that often end up on the wrong end of moral decisions by people like sneak, who'd let people drink themselves to death because if everybody was completely free they'd surely decide out of their own free will to do what's best for them and nobody would ever prey on the weak-willed like that, ever.
All consensual and non-coercive transactions are ethical.
Another contractor and I are bidding to build a website. The customer is a guy in his 90s who wants a website for his antique furniture shop. The customer requirements aren't water-tight as he's not really into computers. For example they don't say the website should be accessible from the public internet or that I should hand over the source code and hosting credentials. My competitor has bid $1000. Is it ethical for me to bid $900 then later to demand an extra $200 to connect it to the internet, work that only I can do?
In most jurisdictions, that would be in violation of laws. The laws are created to prevent shady operators, like people who go around 'fixing' the roof for old people. They agree to the work, then get charged a fortune for overages, which usually just amount to painting the gutters.
Another example is the phone scammers offering 'virus fixes'. These are generally in violation of different laws.
When I was a consultant in the construction industry world, our contracts all had an clause requiring a "reasonable standard of care". Basically, if something would be reasonably expected to be included (say accessing a website from the public internet which is the reason it's being built in the first place), you need to provide it.
Whether software contracts include that same kind of verbiage, I don't know.
It sounds to me like you've redefined 'consensual' to make your philosophy produce the results you want.
Both transactions were consentual and noncoercive. There were no threats of violence. An adult business owner signed a contract for services which were provided exactly as specified. The customer didn't have to agree to the first, poorly negotiated contract. And they don't have to pay extra for the extra services later on - it's entirely their choice.
It's no more extortion than if you need a new ink cartridge for your printer and you find they're expensive.
I put it to you that the situation I've outlined is unethical, even though it's consensual and non-coercive.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
A half-way competent attempt to examine this issue would need to dig deeper into the meaning of "consensual", "non-coercive", and the fact that we are engineering these products, knowing that these cognitive biases (defects) exists.
Your dogmatic quote meets none of these criteria, and is frankly a pathetic attempt to address this complex and well-studied problem.
Addiction by itself is absolutely not a choice. Whatever it is that someone tried or was coerced to try that eventually resulted in that addiction may or may not have been a choice. A person may indeed, with appropriate support and resources be able to break their addiction, but they remain afflicted with it throughout the rest of their lives. Why do you think most people who were once addicted to alcohol must remain eternally vigilant to never touch the stuff again?
Playing the "no one's pointing a gun to your head" card and claiming it is therefore "non-coersive" in defense of targeting and manipulating addictive behavior may very well be profitable but it's delusional and downright dishonest to everyone, including yourself, to think it isn't exploitive and conducive to serious personal and social issues. You need look no further in the historical record to see how this plays out than the tobacco and alcohol industry.
There are quite literally thousands of documents that disagree with you on that, especially when it comes to physical addiction. Your response demonstrates a misunderstanding as to what addiction is, even if you happen to have experienced it first hand.
If you're really interested in continuing to debate whether your perspective of addiction should be adopted by others feel free to search Google for "addiction" or "is addiction a lifelong problem" or if that's something you don't have time for start with the first Google result I pulled up: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/subabuse99/chap2.htm
There are plenty of other, better, sources that will provide more thorough descriptions of both the physical and psychological characteristics of addition. Practically all of them acknowledge that addiction, once attained, does not grant an individual the luxury of choice as you entertain it. One can certainly choose to seek the tools to control the impulses of addiction through willpower (be it internally or externally inspired), but that will never mean they can choose to make the underlying addiction go away and never bother them again at any point for the rest of their lives.
> All of AA and everyone who's ever quit smoking stand as evidence
Have you ever met a "former" addict? Plenty will tell you it's not as simple as that, unless you're using your own novel definition of "choice," "free will," and given studies generally show genetic predisposition is a factor, "born with."
The issue for me is that if you went to every smoker and said "Do you want to just quit now, cold turkey, no repercussions, no cravings?" I think the majority would say Yes. But the majority don't quit on the spot like that because addiction is a tough thing that can wrap tentacles around your brain.
Because they can't quit. They can't even bring themselves to want to quit. The actions are muscle memory, the thought of smoking brings pleasure to them. Even people who've successfully quit miss it.
Nope. Think British selling opium in India, ethical? And notably, selling a variety of addictive dopamine stimulants [including cocaine and methamphetamine] other than games is considered to be unethical.
I think every time I hear "you should eb ashamed" the free market guy SHOULD stand up and say NO, morality is actually whining that someone should be coerced into doing something they wouldnt want to selfishly do. If there is a market for your thing then caveat emptor.
Screwing your clients? The market will decide whether you can keep operating.
Providing a dopamine fix may be being coercive. It's a reward that may be manipulated by those with few ethics. Certain types of marketing, similarly, may be considered coercive. Coercion isn't limited to physical violence.
Seriously, though, it doesn't even pass the laugh test. People control their own circumstances. Making those circumstances available to be chosen does not alter the source or responsibility of those decisions.
Smokers choose to smoke. Gamblers choose to gamble.
Proof lies in those who subsequently choose to stop.
You always have free will, even if you aren't using it at the moment.
You are assuming that what one person can do, the rest of the population can do with a similar amount of effort. This should be self-evidently false.
Some people can stop addictive behavior with relatively little effort, other people need external help and tons of effort, and other people will literally prefer to die before stopping.
The only way to say that the latter two groups "don't actually want to quit" is to redefine "wanting to" in terms of "being able to", which makes your argument circular.
The issue is that you'll run into the Gasketball problem of having 100,000 players but limiting the amount of things they can buy (should every player be worth $1.99 IAP?). It's just a math problem, and the reality is that you want to do it like League of Legends where you can never run out of things to buy for a long time, but of course whilst not being annoying like most mobile games are currently.
I think it's better for players to enjoy a game fully for free (if you're doing IAP), and then provide ways to monetize that enhance their experience. Ramin Shokrizade has lots of amazing blogs about this: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/914048/
Definitely: I think the only real solution for the industry at this point is finding better ways to monetize with IAP that don't mix so heavily with the gameplay. And League of Legends is a great example of keeping the gameplay separate from the monetization.
No pay to win, no timers, no paywalls that ruin the experience: we need to go back to building games as entertainment experiences, and find ways to monetize with things like skins (purely aesthetic so they don't disrupt gameplay, but can make you look cool when you play with your friends).
Unfortunately the sad truth is that for the majority of mobile games if you charge up front you will not have enough sales volume. And a single $1.99 IAP has the same problem because while you might get 10x downloads from being free initially, you'll still only get your $2 from <10% of them, and $2 LTV is not nearly enough to support a game (+ some gamers like those here might be willing to support a great game with more than $2 but won't have the option to do so in this setup).
At the end of the day, when people invest in an entertainment experience they want to be entertained. And thinking about money and waiting for timers during the experience only reduces the amount of entertainment we get out of it. So we need to find ways to design IAP that is separate enough from the core experience, and yet still works well enough to fund the games we want to play.
It's nice to hold up League of Legends as a shining example of IAP done right, but the fact is that there are plenty of excellent games with vibrant communities that couldn't even dream of having 5 million concurrent players. Riot does fine with very little marginal revenue per player, but not many other games can do the same, especially on mobile.
> It seems like a simple solution to me would be to make the game free, but with most features blocked behind a SINGLE in-app purchase.
This is pretty much what id Software did in the 90s with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake and most people in the industry thought they were nuts and it would never work. Obviously it worked extremely well (the difference being it was levels that were gated instead of features, but same concept).
There are several highly rated games that do this. If i remember correctly, "Where's my water?" is one of them.
One other great example i recently experienced was BADLAND. Its a really cool game in which they give you a level pack called "Day I" for free which has 40 levels. If you want the second set of 40 levels (which are way cooler btw), you have to purchase those. Also, they let you purchase multiplayer levels (6 of those are free btw). So just as you said, they let you demo their game and if you love it, you buy the rest of the game.
But one thing i REALLY loved about the devs was that that they you EARN the extra levels. If you unlock a certain achievement, you get the Day II pack for free! So that's like the devs rewarding their biggest fans. (I unlocked those levels for free btw).
Disclosure: BADLAND is also powered by video ads. You can pay a little to turn them off. There's also the option of a small fee that's not enough to buy the levels, but it lets you turn off the ads.
Sorry, I haven't read your reply and replied with almost the same thought. It is not hard to do and many developers already do this, Triple Town by Spry Fox is doing exactly that for example.
>It seems like a simple solution to me would be to make the game free, but with most features blocked behind a SINGLE in-app purchase.
This is the strategy of the Ouya - games on the market have to have a free, playable demo of some type in order to be included. I think it's great, and I'd like it even more on a mobile device since my phone isn't brand new and this would let me quickly find out whether the game will even be playable.
Not only this, developers shouldn't shy away from charging what they think the game is worth, $5, $29, $59, $99, whatever. If the game is good, people will pay it.
I would bet the higher that price the less likely the sale and also the more likely the piracy. Charging even $5 for a game will likely drive your actual installs and sales through the floor. If you make a good product but most people can't justify paying for it, they'll just find an alternative means of playing it. Also the pump and dump industry in the app stores especially in gaming is another thing you have to worry about. You make a good game at a $10 price tag within a couple weeks you'll find your exact game with slightly altered graphics and a similar name that will be under cutting your price point. This used to be much worse, but unless you're a big studio like EA, Rovio, or King it's still a problem for you as a little guy.
I remember paying ~ £5 in the 80s for 8bit games on cassette tape and considering it a bargain. I remember when Street Fighter II came out on the SNES ~ 20 years ago. It was priced at ~ £65-70 and people snapped it up (I DO remember considering it expensive, in relation to the normal price for SNES games which must've been about £30-40).
If prices had kept up with inflation, 'budget' games would be about £12; blockbusters, over £100. Games are well undervalued on app stores, and exploitative rubbish is the result. I've personally paid reasonable small amounts for some of the classic games (e.g. Monkey Island) and am on the lookout for good modern games at about the same price point.
Price elasticity is strong, but the original comment is presumably assuming you can make a decent revenue with a non-minimum price tag.
For instance, imagine a game listed as free:
- a freemium model let you play 15 levels and asks for 4.99 to unleash 500 more levels, maybe let a 1.99 option for 100 levels; this should convert 3-5% with a million testing players; v.s.
- free-to-play with locking levels every 10 levels that are so hard you have to use bonus, that would convert 1% to pay for either a Golden Orb for 1.99, or a Golden Blast for 5.99, etc. each who may or may not make a difference, and appease your frustration, and work only once. You get a couple of whales (desperate, clueless players) who pay 50$ a month, but even with a larger distribution (two to three millions players) you don't break even.
The idea in the original comment is not that a price twice higher will double sales, but more that having a price tag (which free-to-play games deny having) makes sense for good games.
What am I missing here? Is this hard to do? Or prohibited somehow?
Disclosure: I'm not a mobile game developer, so maybe I'm missing something here about the rules of the app stores.