There’s more than just you, your game, your players, and advertisers willing to pay you. To truly set yourself up for success, having a basic knowledge of your options and how to evaluate them will be critical. At the most basic level, an IAP plugin allows you to seamlessly integrate purchasing in your game, while ad networks allow you to sell ad space in your game at scale. There are other middlemen in the industry such as ad mediators, who help you manage several ad networks. make sure to take note of your budget, the scale of your game, and the dedicated resources you have on hand
You might choose to implement an IAP solution natively through your development platform. Alternatively, you might decide to leverage a LiveOps (Live Operations) provider, which is a company or a part of a company focused primarily on helping you optimize management of your game after it is live.
Deciding between these routes depends on:
1.Your unique needs and balancing cost
2.Ease of implementation
3Robust feature sets
indie developers, by contrast, may opt to leverage a low cost or free solution already integrated in their game development platform to cover the basics. Unity offers such a solution to enable developers to get started at no cost.
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Lets Make Money
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Ad Networks:
Reach: Get a sense of how much demand flows through any network you are evaluating, and compare them to other networks.
Gaming vs non-gaming: Ultimately, the total revenue driven by these networks is what matters most, testing both networks will give you a sense of whether the specialization or the broad reach delivers more value for you over time.
software development kits (SDKs) : Install able packages that enable their use, have varying implementations. Make sure that any time you add a new SDK you are able to get a read on whether there is an impact to crash rates, lags in gameplay, or poor user experience. For these reasons, you typically shouldn’t add more than one new network at a time.
For an indie developer, using mediation at all may not be necessary until their monetization reaches a greater level of maturity, scale, and complexity.
Ability to measure the interplay between ads, IAP, and gameplay
Ads may be cannibalizing revenue from IAP, or disrupting gameplay if they are not placed with the player experience in mind. Any one metric may go up as a result of a change, but an analytics provider should be able to measure the total value across all revenue and user experience touchpoints.
User-level revenue: help you further tailor how to deliver content or custom experiences to users of differing value.
Cost over value: value impact should be greater than any associated cost of the analytics provider. If it isn’t, you may want to seek an alternative.
What type of currency could you include in your game?
include things like lives or power-ups which facilitate game progression.
In the case where your game does not have an in-game economy, your ad networks or mediator may give you the necessary level of detail for your needs, including revenue, eCPM, and fill rate.
eCPM- Cost per mille, also called cost per thousand, is a commonly used measurement in advertising. It is the cost an advertiser pays for one thousand views or clicks of an advertisement.
certain high revenue ads or IAP
may create poor gameplay experiences
causing players to leave.
The most basic level
of insight is total revenue driven by each
individual monetization source.
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On the other side of the spectrum,
full lifetime value attributed across ads and IAP
provides the optimal level of
insight to act on in growing your game.
Analytics Providers Scenario:
A hypercasual game with players
who play a few times and then stop
For example, a hypercasual game may have a lot of users who play a few times and then stop, in which case a measure of success may be revenue generated over a shorter window like 7 days. A game targeting mid-core or hardcore gamers, on the other hand, may look at revenue over 30 days as a greater indicator of success as it more closely mirrors a typical user’s behavior in this type of game.
While “lifetime value” implies an infinite view of revenue, most lifetime value analysis measures the revenue driven over a specified time period, commonly 7 days or 30 days.
Consider your KPIs for success.Key Performance Indicators evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages.
Links:
https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/monetization-solution-providers?courseId=5dde9eceedbc2a0955f55963&projectId=5e4e59c6edbc2a0fb7640b00#5e4feb43edbc2a09e55e1476
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/add-ons/services/billing/unity-iap-68207
https://connect-prd-cdn.unity.com/20200311/3ada936d-46a9-490c-84eb-de60fcc18128/Monetization%20Course%20Glossary.pdf?_ga=2.56231403.1589767996.1584885242-654715253.1574481545