I recently decided to do a small experiment with the Flash mobile game titles I have in the Nokia Ovi Store. They’ve been there from the very beginning of the Ovi Store at the lowest price point (1 EUR), and over the past months I’ve watched the sales dwindle to nearly zero. In saying that, I stopped marketing the apps at the end of 2009 when I started working for VHA, so to be completely fair I haven’t been putting anything into getting sales – which of course you need to do on any app store to see downloads!
So I wanted to see what the impact would be on an app that’s been in the Ovi Store for around 12 months if I turned it into a free app and continued to do no marketing (apart from what was already out in the open, which really at this point was a listing on oviflash.com). I went into the Ovi Store publish system (which has dramatically improved over the past 12 months in speed and stability) and chose one of the more (surprisingly) under-performing apps in our catalogue – Palleggio. And here’s what I discovered …
From March 2009 through to the end of Feb 2010, Palleggio (a football skills / juggling game) had a grand total of 63 paid downloads. For the first two weeks of March 2010, it had a total of 3302 free downloads.
Where were all these customers before when I was making money off these downloads hey?! So is this really surprising? No, not really – free VS paid is pretty much always skewed in this way. But does the radical jump in downloads indicate that the Ovi Store is easier for customers to download free content? Does it mean simply that Ovi Store customers (as like much of the app store patronage across devices and platforms) are LOOKING for free content? I wonder what I would see if I had a freemium version in there (i.e. a limited version of the game for free, plus a paid version with all the bells and whistles), as is the case with so many titles in the Apple App Store?
And while this might be seen in some quarters as poor app-store-etiquette, I’d be interested in doing another experiment and see what happens to the numbers if I change it back to a 1 EUR price point. If and when I do that, I’ll be sure to post the results here as well 
I’m also working with the Ovi App Wizard to create some free apps that include AdMob advertising – the results of those (Java and WRT) apps through the store will be an interesting read also!
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and comments on your experiences with free VS paid content on Ovi Store.
One thing that I’ve discovered recently is that at some point Ovi seems to have removed all paid content from Ovi Store in Canada. I’m not sure why, or if this is unique to Canada, but it’s one of those things that can help skew the results so strongly toward free content. That said, I’m not sure how much of an affect this could have.
Just looking at the time period where this content went free – on my list of active countries for my own content, Canada is at #15 for paid content, and #52 for free content. In fact, the top 5 countries for paid and free are very different (apart from Italy who apparently like my stuff! AP, is that you?
My Top 5 Countries for Paid Content
1. Switzerland
2. Italy
3. Germany
4. United Kingdom
5. Russia
My Top 5 Countries for Free Content
1. Italy
2. Vietnam
3. Turkey
4. India
5. Saudi Arabia
Thanks for sharing this info Dale, good stuff. Looking forward to see what your download numbers look like at the end of March.
Ciao Dale,
it’s not me, but probably the name of the game! You own me a beer for that!
Interesting experiment, my guess is directly related to how payments works on OVI (beside the free).
Do the stats include both S60 and S40?
Alessandro
hi,
It’s not a surprise.
From my own little experiment, ad based games get more download that paid one (even for a VERY low cost)
It’s becoming even harder because gamers start to complain about ads and want absolutly free games.
I don’t personnaly think freemium is the solution (it’s near the concept of shareware which doesn’t work on every country…)
I personally think the future way to make money will be with micropayments : to pay a very small amount of virtual money to get a special item or to unlock something (a fake shareware version)
It’s why I’m always looking for expirement like yours and others analytics
Thanks for that!
William
Thanks William. The in-app or micropayment solution us also interesting as it’s success IMHO is driven largely by the user experience rather than the technology or concept of pay vs free. We’re doing some iPhone apps with in-app micropayments coming up shortly so I’m keen to see some of the trends around that.