I am brainstorming ideas to make my game more profitable, and one idea I have is to require players to pay 1 Facebook credit to play for that day. 1 Facebook credit is $0.10 USD. My thought is that this may increase my game's ARPU to a level that I could afford to buy new installs.. because currently a player costs way more for me to acquire than I will ever make off of him.
First time players would get to play for free, but if they come back the next day they would have to pay (or maybe they would just play a very crippled version of the game). I would also explain to them that they can easily earn 1 Facebook credit by watching a short TrialPay video or completing some other offer. Or, they can make a 1 time payment of 30 Facebook credits to unlock the game forever.
Obviously I would alienate a lot of players. But I suspect the majority of players I alienate would never spend money on my virtual goods anyway. And advertising revenue for games is pathetic unless you are a huge company who can make big deals, so I don't think the loss of advert eCPM would be significant.
This idea seems to me to be a lot like the old arcade games days when you would drop a quarter into a game you wanted to play. What are your thoughts?
Thanks,
Shawn