Last month we were invited to tour the office of Aurora Feint Inc, developer of the recently released Android version of Open Feint. While there we were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity of conducting a pair of one hour interviews with some of the top men that work there so we could ask them questions about their software as well as more general questions about developing for the platform.
What follows below is the continuation of part one with Jason Citron (Founder and CEO) and Eros Resmini (VP Marketing & Developer Relations). This interview has been altered from the original recording for the purpose of readability.
Read the other parts here:
How does Aurora Feint make money if you don’t charge for usage of the software?
Right now we have two revenue streams. We take a share whenever someone purchases a game through OpenFeint, so if you open a friend’s profile and open a game, click buy, go to the app store, Apple will pay us a cut; on Marketplace, Google doesn’t do that so we don’t get revenue from there. But we don’t make a lot of money from that anyway, so it’s kind of alright. The other thing we do is the Free Game Of The Day promotion, we do a revenue share on. When a game will go free and move a million free copies and a developer switches it back to paid and then new word of mouth and virality causes the sales to lift, we’ll take a cut on that lift in sales. So if a developer was selling a hundred games before and a thousand games after we’ll take a percentage from nine hundred per day for up to three weeks. So if the game does well and the developer makes money he gives us a cut. We’re on the same team as the developers is how I’d like to think about it, if we’re not helping developers be successful, we’re not doing our job and the other half of it is that if we’re not making people have more fun with their game then we’re not doing our job.
Have you thought about having developers pay to have games spotlighted?
Yes, we’ve thought about it and we’ve been approached by unnamed large publishers to do that, and we’ve said “no thank you” to date for two reasons: 1, We really want to make sure that players and developers feel that this is a network about quality and not about being paid to get put in front of folks. 2, We have tried very, very hard to keep Open Feint a level playing field and the minute you start to entertain those types of ideals that slips away. Now in the future, I could see us coming up with advertising programs like Free Game of the Day, which are sort of collaborative with developers and anyone can use I think that’s a very interesting place for us to continue to innovate.
Are there any plans to bring Aurora Feint to Android?
If I have anything to do with it, YES! (Jason Jumps in: I would love for it to come out on Android, the problem is I don’t have enough resources). You’re not the first person to ask that so every time I hear that it reinforces my desire to work to get that done. We want to do it, but we’re trying to do a thousand and one things.
What is Open Feint trying to achieve on Android?
It’s simply to kick start the game industry on Android and that’s it. Everything we’re doing boils down to trying to get developers building games, people playing games and buying them and then it’ll create this positive feedback loop where people buy games, developers see people making money, developers make more games, people are like “cool more great games!” and they pay, it’ll be this good fly wheel. Right now I think it’s the other way, where people aren’t really buying games, so developers weren’t really making games, so then people stopped looking at the marketplace because there were no good games and nothing really changed. So a lot of what we’re trying to do is bring the games over, work with the carriers and Google as well as these other large companies to get the games promoted so that people who’ve stopped looking at the marketplace, do look and then convince our developers to the success of the early adopters that there is something here, and then hopefully to kick start that whole thing.
How does the free App a day work for developers that are used to getting paid for their game?
It doesn’t work quite as well on Android, but on iPhone you can change your price whenever you want to. So what developers say is, I’ve either got an old title that isn’t doing too well or a new title that I just want to get installs on, I want to maybe use an old title to introduce a new title and just basically drive up installs. What we can do with free game of the day is basically say that we’ll get you a ton of eyeballs, some of the glory stories we’ve had have been 1.6 million downloads in a single day with this program, so it drives a lot of adoption for the developers, the players are excited because they get really good content. We’re judicious about who gets into the program. Then on the back end when they turn it back to paid, that virality that happens because there’s all this playing happening with that new free title generally lifts sales for them, so they see a benefit from it and obviously because they’re connected to something like Open Feint I can see what my friends are playing. If those friends are downloading those free games, again it moves that virality needle for them. We’ve seen some really good successes on the iOS side. The problem from what I understand on Android is you can’t easily toggle your pay to free so the model we’ve come up with on iOS doesn’t quite translate yet but we’re in the background trying to come up with something that’s cool like that, because I think players would love it especially on Android where I think they’re still getting used to paying for high quality content and then the developers who are trying to figure out a cool way to make money on this platform will have yet another promotional mechanism, so I hope it gets there soon and we’re talking to Google on this.
How does Aurora Feint make money if you don’t charge for usage of the software?
Right now we have two revenue streams. We take a share whenever someone purchases a game through OpenFeint, so if you open a friend’s profile and open a game, click buy, go to the app store, Apple will pay us a cut; on Marketplace, Google doesn’t do that so we don’t get revenue from there. But we don’t make a lot of money from that anyway, so it’s kind of alright. The other thing we do is the Free Game Of The Day promotion, we do a revenue share on. When a game will go free and move a million free copies and a developer switches it back to paid and then new word of mouth and virality causes the sales to lift, we’ll take a cut on that lift in sales. So if a developer was selling a hundred games before and a thousand games after we’ll take a percentage from nine hundred per day for up to three weeks. So if the game does well and the developer makes money he gives us a cut. We’re on the same team as the developers is how I’d like to think about it, if we’re not helping developers be successful, we’re not doing our job and the other half of it is that if we’re not making people have more fun with their game then we’re not doing our job.
Have you thought about having developers pay to have games spotlighted?
Yes, we’ve thought about it and we’ve been approached by unnamed large publishers to do that, and we’ve said “No thank you” to date for two reasons: 1, We really want to make sure that players and developers feel that this is a network about quality and not about being paid to get put in front of folks. 2, We have tried very, very hard to keep Open Feint a level playing field and the minute you start to entertain those types of ideals that slips away. Now in the future, I could see us coming up with advertising programs like Free Game of the Day, which are sort of collaborative with developers and anyone can use I think that’s a very interesting place for us to continue to innovate.
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That concludes the second part of the interview, check back tomorrow where we continue our talk with Jason and Eros and we discuss DRM and their new PlayTime system
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