Pokemon Go is a phenomenon and the only way that you could avoid hearing about it, is by living under a rock.
Pokemon Go business model as of now is a “Fremium” – Free + Premium. This business model means that they let people play the game for free, but if you want to advance faster, you can pay for it.
Most fremium games have some sort of scarce resource\idle period which is inevitable to get stuck on without grinding A LOT or waiting a long time… Or of course the business’ bread & butter, paying to get pass through it. With time those waiting periods or resource requirement go up in cost thus, increasing the amount of money the players need to invest in it.
Niantic, the Pokemon company, took some sort of close approach to this. You can buy stuff in game for PokeCoins, which are hard to get, unless you buy them for actual money value. They even added another premium item, a physical product, that will interact with the game and save you the pain of walking around with your phone looking for pokemon rather than just alerting you of pokemon nearby. This fine luxury will cost you about 29.99$-39.99$, price is unclear yet.
Niantic leveraged their followers audience and created a money making machine since they know lots of people, who used to be 8-15 at the time the pokemon series was around, wanted to be a pokemon trainer, and now… here’s their chance!
They saw a need – People want to be pokemon trainers They saw a problem – The pokemon world doesn’t really exist They solved the problem – “Created a world” interwind with the real world for pokemon training They made lots of money for that.
Now, for the real question – Was that the ideal business model for Niantic? I’ll go ahead and say – Probably.. Could they sell the app for money and about 50% of the people currently playing it would’ve bought it? Most likely Could they sell the Pokemon Go Plus on top of the paid app? Again, highly likely Would the same people make so many in-app purchases after paying for the app itself? Probably Not Would the game get so much exposure if it was a paid app? I doubt it…
Now, if you take all of this into account, I think Niantic has much more in store for that game and its’ audience, I doubt the current in-app purchases will be their only profit source. The audience will get used to the current options and will buy the new merchandise – creating more money for the company
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What do you think?
Was it the right choice?
Do you think the paid app option was a better one?
Can you think of a better business model for the game?
Please write in the comment section below your thoughts on this, I’d love to get your input.
See you in the next post,
Dekel
