In just a matter of two months in existence Crossy Road has managed to pull in over 1 million dollars in ad revenue.
And this number doesn’t even include the in-app purchases that are available in the game. These video ads only play when the game offers them to you, and if you choose to watch them you are rewarded with the in-game coins to purchase playable characters. If you choose not to watch the video ads, you can still play the game normally and earn coins, it’ll just take a little longer.
This is a great turn of events for mobile gaming. The biggest focus for monetizing mobile games has been to create time gates that you have to pay to get past. For example, after you fail a level a certain number of times, you have to wait an hour or pay real money to play again.
“We didn’t want any consumable purchases, we wanted to do something that everybody could pay a little bit for if they wanted to, but where it wasn’t necessary to keep paying” – Andy Sum
Hopefully mobile developers can take a lesson from developer Hipster Whale, as you can bring in plenty of money from your game without deconstructing it with pay walls and in-app purchases. You can create a game with ads people can opt-in to watch and in-app purchases can be limited to cosmetic changes and not game breaking advantages.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to try Crossy Road, it is very similar to Frogger and is available on both iOS and Android. You can choose for yourself which store you would like to get it from as it is available of iTunes, Amazon’s App Store, and as of recently Google Play.
