ABSTRACT
Making games for social platforms and monetizing them according to the 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 game design and monetization will free you from the tyranny of top tier publishers and unwieldy budgets that, paradoxically, as often as not end up restricting your creativity. (Just ask anyone who has attempted to build a AAA retail product how “helpful” publisher oversight can be, not to mention the vast sea of accounting that goes along with a sizable budget.) Yet the freedom that comes with social games 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, force traditional game designers to think about game design differently and to 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.
