If you?ve been a part of the mobile or FB gaming market, you have most likely heard about the term monetization. To put it in short it refers to ways of earning money out of a mobile or Facebook application. This term came up following an interesting situation that app developers were facing in their first days in the business they had huge amounts of visitors but could not figure out how to make money out of it. This includes casual games that were based on gambling, such as blackjack or texas holdem, but were played just for fun. Their main source of income was placing adss in different parts of their app. All this changed when one of the giants in this arena figured out how to make money, and a lot of it, from these casual games. This obviously refers to Zynga poker. In fact, plenty of games developers look on Zynga to learn how to monetize their application and turn it from a nice to have and impressive app, to a very profitable one.So what?s going on in recent days in FB and mobile applications
Monetizing has come a long way since its initial ad placement era. Actually, placing ads is regarded as the least profitable way of monetizing. In current days you have an entirely different approach that includes offering virtual merchandize to players. Those merchandize can appear in varies ways: from getting access to a higher playing level to virtual casino chips. The biggest challenge is to find the item which the players will be willing to purchase while using your app. A great, relatively recent, example is the ?Manager? application which runs for mobile and Facebook users. It is a game that lets you manage a football team and play football games. You don?t see an actual game happening, but you can update your strategy while it happens, train players, buy players and pretty much do whatever a real soccer manager does. The monetizing in this game is very sophisticated you can play for free for as much time as you want and you might even win your first league this way without a problem. However, as you go up to a more advanced stages, the tournaments get harder to win. You need to think about new strategies and mainly buy better players. In order to buy good players you need to have tokens which you need to buy with real money. Once you?ve had a glance of the game and the win of a championship, you?re very likely to spend cash in order to continue to play and win. It is a basic foot in the door technique, and it works great.The following step of monetization
What was, till just recently, a big taboo when it comes to mobile and Facebook games, is slowly finding its way to safe grounds. This obviously refers to the option to play games for money, real money that is. Until now the only way to do that is playing in known online gambling sites which offer a mobile variation for their games. But that is about to change. Around the end of 2012, Zynga has published a press release stating that they are joining up with Bwin.Party and are beginning a process of turning their games into gambling ones. They have not said anything about a formal release date, but the fact that they have published such controversial news is enough to prove that they mean business. On the other hand, they are doing this to try and create a buzz which might help them sniff around and get a picture of the main industry?s reactions to such a development. The interesting thing about this is they completely avoided the use of the word gambling in all of their publications. They systematically prefer using a more innocent term real money gaming. In any case, this announcement opens a new path to a place where no mobile or FB developer has ever gone before. Only time would tell if it?s 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.
