ABSTRACT
Making games for social and mobile platforms and monetizing them using new techniques can restore a great deal of power to your development teams. However, as the cliché goes, with great power comes great responsibility. Modern social and mobile game design and monetization can free you from the tyranny of top-tier publishers. And since these games typically are built for much less money up front, they can also liberate teams from unwieldy budgets that, paradoxically, as often as not end up restricting creativity. Yet the freedom that comes with mass-market social and mobile game development and in-game monetization has its own type of price. The monetization techniques themselves, as well as the unique nature of the audience you’re courting, will force traditional game designers to think about game design differently and react much, much more quickly than they would with traditional retail console or MMO games. If you set your prices incorrectly, or try to charge for the wrong types of “products,” you’ll lose sales. But luckily, there are no rules on what you can, must, or even should charge for! Perhaps you charge to play as different types of characters in your game. Or maybe characters are free but equipment costs. The flexibility about which features and content your users can be asked to pay for gives you huge latitude, but also puts a heavy onus on you to get it right or to change things quickly if you turn out to be wrong.
