One of the top performing new games in the latter half of 2010 has been LOLapps’ Ravenwood Fair, which is currently building toward 4.5 million monthly active users. While Ravenwood feels similar to FrontierVille in some respects, the title has many other unique features in terms of both game mechanics and theme.
LOLapps CEO Arjun Sethi gave a presentation at today’s Social Gaming Summit East on the game’s success. We’ve embedded his slides below; most interesting are slides five and six, which show a breakdown of international users and a stellar 10 percent rate of paying users.
Besides the fun of the game — which is never easy to replicate — Ravenwood follows a strategy of its own in getting players to pay. While some companies have raised virtual goods prices to deal with the 30 percent or more of revenue they lose when using Facebook Credits, the cheapest goods in Ravenwood cost just one Facebook Credit, or about 10 cents.
Those 10 cent goods are consumables used to build new attractions at the Fair. In later stages of the game it can take quite a few 10 cent buys to get a building finished, if you’re not willing to grind through the game, but early on players can get by with just a few Credits here and there.
“We’re setting a price point to let people get engaged in the game early on, charging 1-5 credits instead of 39-49 credits,” Sethi told us last week. “You’re starting to see in some games, it’s $6-7 dollars for items. But if your price point is $20-30 a month, how can you pace and price your game charging so much for goods? I don’t want someone to come into the game for a week, spend all their money and never come back.”
The initial purchase, Sethi thinks, helps drive players on to buy the goods that make up the bulk of LOLapps’ revenue: energy refills and items like the Beaver Chop, which lets players take out trees in a single chop for a short period of time.
Source: Inside Social Games
Thursday, December 2, 2010