I’ve covered a few quick wins that helped increased Dare the Monkey’s in-app purchase revenue. Now it’s time to reveal the change that gave me the biggest revenue boost.

Dare may be the little hero of my game, but other members of his tribe are also available to play with for a small fee. When designing the game I was confident that character unlocks would be one of my biggest revenue drivers. However I was initially disappointed with the low volume of purchases. Maybe people just didn’t like the other game characters I’d designed. Thankfully that turned out not to be the case.

After driving into my analytics and also asking a few friends who were enjoying playing Dare, it became apparent that many users just weren’t aware that you could purchase additional characters. There were a few reasons and it turned out they were similar to some of the things I’ve talked about in previous posts. The first was related to visibility, the other was timing.

game-over

Users often didn’t spot the Character Select button

Characters could only be purchased from the Game Over screen. The reasoning being, it was a screen the user would frequently see. However there were some problems with this logic. The first being that, from the Game Over screen, the user had to press the “Character Select” button in order to be taken through to the Character Select screen. The user had to be naturally curious enough to press that Character Select button before they could even see the characters that were on offer.

Secondly, as I’d learned from my issues with the Unlock Next Level button, users were typically so eager to retry the level that they wouldn’t even notice the “Character Select” button – they simply weren’t spending enough time in the Game Over screen to notice anything other than the “Retry” button.

game-over

Forcing the Character Select screen at the start of each level

In order to make the Character Select screen more visible, I decided to place it right in front of the user’s nose. Instead of waiting until they got killed, I opted to display the Character Select screen at the very beginning of each level. I showed all the available little characters and asked the user to pick a hero before proceeding. It meant that every single player of the game was immediately aware that characters were available for sale. Not only that, they actually got to see all the characters without having to explicitly press any buttons.

By showing the character select screen at the right time, and also making the available characters more visible I was able to significantly increase the number of character IAPs I was making. It was a huge win and resulted in 4-5 times more character purchases than before!

  1. Smart thinking! Amazing how a small change can make such a big difference. Congrats!

    Bobby Farmer