In-App purchase, retention, push, billing management?

Trying to get a feel out to Unity developers to see if something like this could be useful..

The system would do the following:
1. Simple Billing integration of In-App purchase on multiple platforms. (Apple, Google, Amazon, Windows, etc). Use a webpage to manage all products across all platforms.
2. Action/Engagement/Promotion system - Define actionable events inside your game that you can control outside of your game. This allows you to setup promotions to offer things like free upgrades, In-App purchase upgrade, deals, etc).
3. Retention/Push Notifications - Keep the gamers engaged with push notifications. Send push automatically after X days telling gamers you miss them, send push out to all active players in certain segment for new weapon availability, etc.
4. Rewards - Offer rewards based on events you specify in your game. (Login in next 24 hours to get free weapon)
5. Announcements - Schedule in-game announcements or push announcements out to gamers. (New version was just released, go download it!)
6. Reporting - Sessions, Lifetime customer value, etc.
7. Social (FB, Twitter) - Hey, tell your friends about this game and get a free weapon upgrade.

There are a couple of similar offerings out there but I haven't found anything I like. I want to see if others feel the same way.

So I'm looking to get two questions answered:

1. Is this something you would be interested in?
2. If so, would you rather host it on your own servers or have the system setup as a SaaS solution. A SaaS solution would have a free tier.

Thanks guys!

 

That seems fine, but...

seeing that list I can't shake the feeling that something really worrisome happened to the game industry.

 

At least on mobile, IAP is pretty much the only way you might have a shot as an Indie dev. Free games are downloaded 10x over paid and indie devs definitely don't have 10's of thousands in marketing to spend. I think the only way an indie dev can do "okay" on mobile is to try to keep any customer playing using push notifications and with social plugins. Now with that being said, I "hate" spammy tactics like "If you go download that game, we will give you 3 more lives in this game." That's totally not what I'm going for here. It would be more of a rules engine. For example, Prior to releasing the game, you setup an event to fire when the gamer finishes each level. When you launch the game you have nothing tied to this event, it's just there. A month later, after looking at your analytics you notice a lot of players are giving up on level 7. To entice the player to keep playing, you decide to give special reward on that level... maybe a better gun, more points, whatever you decide. Now, when the player starts level 7, they are told about this special reward they will receive. About a week later you check the reports and it's working, great and players are sticking around longer....But what about the players that already gave up? Well, you can send an announcement only to that segment, the segment of users that haven't played the game in X days. You send out an announcement saying.. hey, we miss you come back for some points and oh btw, there is a new reward on level 7. You see 20-30% of those players come back and start playing the game again.

That's the kind of logic I'm thinking about... a rules engine for player engagement and retention.

 

Thanks for your detailed answer. I don't hold a grudge against you or your product, it's just when I see that list of items it triggers something deep inside me.

You pinpoint exactly what I do not like about the current state of affairs. I hate that it seems to be necessary to make a living these days by what boils down to emotionally bribing your players. It's not even about the game itself anymore, it's about compulsion, about vanity items and virtual status. Where is the game in this picture?

You can safely ignore me. This is just a idealistic, hopefully romantic, old-school gamer gone indie who needs to vent a little. But I think there is a thin line between polishing the flow of a game and applying F2P monetization psychology tricks.

 

No worries...I never had a grudge and in fact I am very glad you replied. Maybe most developers feel this way and there isn't a need for this type of system.

 

Yes, self hosted. And source so I can extend to other payment.

 

Sounds cool, but we're probably not doing any more mobile games after the one we're almost done with. It seems like you have a bunch of PlayHaven features and then threw some more cool stuff in too.

I'm sure people would like it, but not necessarily with a recurring cost to them.

 

Thanks for your comment!

I checked out playhaven a while back. I found the UI really clumsy and confusing. Happy to hear you would think this product would be helpful though! So far self-hosting is winning which I expected to happen. One concern would be scaling however. But thats a later conversation. I'm trying to see if there is enough interest first!

 

Use a nosql database like couchbase or mongo, not mysql please