Unlock features for downloads

Last week someone posted about someone lowering the price of their game for more tweets as a marketing tool. I was thinking it was a good idea but what if your game is free. After thinking about it I thought maybe unlocking features at download milestones. Like at 10000 I release new maps, 50000 gets new characters, 100000 gets multiplayer, and so on. Not sure if someone has done this but I thought I'll share it anyway.

 

Why not just make the game good and charge a fair price for it?

 

I'm not that good lol. I just make games as a hobby. If I happen to make some money then awesome, but I'm not going to plan on it.

 

Getting people to tweet about a product tells other people about it. Getting someone to download it does not.

 

This is not a good idea if you are planning to earn anything from making your game.

Either you charge money for it, OR you have funding through patreon, OR it is completely free.

When it is completely free, you have no reason to care about number of downloads.

So basically, for a free game I see download milestones as pointless.

 

Good points but I still feel it's not as bad a idea you think it is.

Social media would be generated by people whom already downloaded the game and want the extras. They can spread the word anyway they want.

As for money, personally I'm not worried about making money myself. I just enjoy making something form nothing. But for people that want money it would come form ads or in app purchases. With that you would want as many downloads you can get.

 

Or I could make a game and sell it for money.

 

I realise that's the intent, I just think it's less direct than the example @BoredMormon showed us.

In that example, you tweet about the game and the price drops. One action, immediate(ish) consequence.

With yours, someone downloads the game. Then, assuming that they liked it enough to bother (how many mobile games do you play twice? Even really good ones often get a short attention span these days) they might encourage others to try it out. Then some extras might be added at some point in the future, dependent on something you don't really have much of an influence over (because most people don't have enough friends to make a dent in significant download figures). I think your reward is better, but the action required is less specific and the consequence/reward is several steps removed from the action.

Both of those things can be fixed, of course.

You mean when it's free and has no ads, right? I know downloads and ad views aren't the same, but you need the former to get the latter.