If you have been a part of the mobile or Facebook games market, you have probably heard about the term monetization. To put it in short it means coming up with ways of making money out of a mobile or Facebook app. This word was first mentioned following an interesting situation that games developers were facing in their first days in this market they were getting vast amounts of visitors but had no idea how to earn money out of it. This includes casual games that were based on gambling, like slots or poker, but in a fun mode. Their main source of income was ad placement in different parts of their app. All this changed when one of the pioneers in this field figured out how to earn money, and a lot of it, from those casual games. This obviously refers to Zynga poker. In fact, a lot of games developers use Zynga to learn how to monetize their game and turn it from a nice to have and impressive app, to a very profitable one.So what is going on these days in mobile and Facebook games
Monetizing has developed quite a lot since its initial ad placement era. In fact, placing ads is considered the least preferred form of monetization. Lately you have a completely different approach that includes offering virtual items to players. Those merchandize can appear in different ways: from tips for reaching a higher games level to online poker chips. The challenge is to find the item which the players will agree to buy while using your game. A great, fairly recent, example is the ?Manager? game that runs both on Facebook and on mobile. It?s an app in which you manage a soccer team and run football games. You don?t see an actual game happening, but you can update your strategy while it takes place, train players, purchase players and pretty much do whatever a real live soccer manager does. The monetization in this application is highly sophisticated you may enjoy the game for free for as much time as you which and you might even win your first championship this way without a problem. But as you go on to a more difficult level, the games become harder to win. You must come up with better strategies and mainly get professional football players. In order to buy good players you must have tokens which you need to buy with real cash. The moment you?ve had an experience of the game and the win of a championship, you are most likely to invest cash in order to continue to play and win. It is a basic foot in the door technique, and it actually works.The following step of monetizing
The thing that was, or maybe still is, a big taboo in the world of mobile and Facebook games, is slowly finding its way to safe grounds. This of course refers to the option to play games for money, real money that is. Until now the only way to do that is playing in specific web gambling sites that offer a mobile version. Now it seems that is about to change. Around the end of 2012, Zynga has issued a press release stating that they?ve joined up with Bwin.Party and are beginning a process of turning some of their games into gambling ones. They have not said anything about a formal release date, but the fact that they have issued such controversial news is enough to state that they are dead serious. On the other hand, they are doing this to try and create a buzz that might help them sniff around and get a picture of the reactions of the industry to such a change. The interesting thing about this is they avoided using the word gambling in all of their publications. They constantly prefer using a more innocent term real money gaming. In any case, this publication opens a new door to a place where no mobile or Facebook developer has ever gone before. Now we have to wait to see if this is a false alarm or this is going to become a reality.
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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