Crossy Road pulls in $1 million from ads
Unity touts Hipster Whale's success with integrated advertising feature
Crossy Road is the latest free-to-play phenomenon, and Hipster Whale's Flappy Bird-meets-Frogger homage has grossed over $1 million in ads from the iOS version alone. That's according to a post on the Unity blog, touting the company's Unity Ads offering.
Hipster Whale used Unity Ads to let players opt-in to watch sponsors' videos in exchange for in-game coins that could be used to purchase new characters. Advertising isn't the extent of the game's monetization, however, as players can choose to pay for new characters outright at $1 a pop.
"We didn't want any consumable purchases, we wanted to do something that everybody could pay a little bit for if they wanted to, but where it wasn't necessary to keep paying," Hipster Whale's Andy Sum said.
The blog also underscored the use of Unity's Everyplay replay-sharing functionality in Crossy Road. To date, nearly 250,000 players posted videos to the game's video-sharing website.
Glad it's proving successful for them, financially, but they must worry that players are just putting up with ads because they're trying to avoid paying the monetisation charges.
I would be amazed if ad revenue didn't make up fully 99% of their income as most people in our similar style games won't even pay the dollar to remove the adverts. My advice would be to remove all the crap, stop getting complaints like Jed Ashforths and double down on advertising. That's what we're doing and it's the only thing that ever worked as expected!
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Paul Johnson on 19th January 2015 8:34am