"Stowaways" in free-to-play games

Today, about 80% of applications use a shareware distribution model. 90% of the money from mobile apps comes from microtransactions. The problem is that only 5% (at best) of the players become payers. The remaining 95% are stowaways. How valuable are they, asks Balazs Juhasz from Jesta Digital on the Gamasutra pages. 

Balaz Juhaz

Why can stowaways annoy you?

• You spend money on them, but they don't spend money on your app.; 
• They use your servers; 
• They flood the customer service with questions and complaints;
• Sometimes they leave bad ratings and reviews (without any right to do so, because they did not pay); 
• You spend the same amount of money on acquiring them as you do on acquiring a paying audience. 

All these problems are solved in one way – by setting a price tag on the application. But who will decide to take this step today? 

Plus, are they so useless (So these bastards are really just sucking your blood?, asks Balaz a little more expressively)? 

Obviously, if they were useless hypes, there would be no shareware monetization model around.

You can always earn money on "stowaways" by placing ads in the application. However, it will bring something only if your application can achieve significant downloads. 

In the case of high virality of the application, the developer can also save decently on advertising (word of mouth has not been canceled: users will definitely tell their friends about the application they like, some of them may well turn out to be a paying player).

And, most importantly, a large number of non-paying players fill the game world. In a sense (from the point of view of a hardened cynic), free users are something like valuable game content for paying users. Moreover, in the case of a pay-to-win balance, they can be a "hanging bag" for "whales". Even if you only sell skins in the game, it is important for those who have paid that there are users in the game who will see that their opponent has spent a lot of real money on a new gaming costume.

Editor's note: We've been thinking that the latter factor may also play an important role in casual games with a mission map (like in Candy Crush). Having a friend at a higher level can stimulate not only an increase in the number of gaming sessions, but also purchases.

A source: http://gamasutra.com