If you?ve been a part of the mobile or Facebook gaming arena, you?ve most likely heard about the term monetizing. To put it in a sentence it means coming up with ways of making money out of a mobile or Facebook application. This word was first mentioned following an intriguing situation that applications developers were facing in their first days in the business they had huge amounts of visitors but had no idea how to earn money out of it. This includes casual games that were based on gambling, such as blackjack or texas holdem, but in a fun mode. Their main way of earning money was ad placement in different parts of their app. All this changed when one of the giants in this field figured out how to make money, and a lot of it, from those casual games. This of course refers to Zynga poker. Actually, plenty of games developers look on Zynga to learn how to monetize their application and turn it from a big potential, impressive app, to a very profitable one.So what?s going on in recent days in mobile and Facebook games
Monetization has come a long way since its first ad placement days. In fact, placing ads is regarded as the least profitable form of monetization. These days you have an entirely new approach that includes selling virtual items to users. Those items can appear in varies ways: from tips for reaching a higher games level to virtual casino chips. The challenge is to find the thing which your users will agree to purchase while using your application. A great, fairly recent, example is the ?Manager? application which runs both on Facebook and on mobile. It is an app that lets you manage a soccer team and play soccer games. You don?t see an actual game happening, but you can change your strategy while it happens, train players, buy players and just about act like real live soccer manager does. The monetizing in this game is very sophisticated you can manage your team for free for as long as you want and you can win your first league this way with no problem. But as you go on to a more difficult level, the games become harder to win. You must come up with better strategies and of course get professional players. In order to buy good players you need to have tokens which you must buy with real money. Once you have had a glance of the game and the win of a championship, you are most likely to spend money in order to be able to play and win. It is a classic foot in the door technique, and it actually works.The next stage of monetization
What was, or maybe still is, a distinctive taboo in the world of mobile and Facebook apps, is gradually sneaking in. This of course refers to the possibility to play games for money, real money that is. Until now the only possibility to do that is finding known online gambling sites which offer a mobile version. Now it seems that is going to change. Around the end of 2012, Zynga has issued a press release stating that they are joining forces with Bwin.Party and are beginning a process of turning their games into gambling games. They have not said anything yet about a formal release date, but the fact that they have issued such controversial news might be enough to state that they mean business. Alternatively, they?re just might trying to create a buzz which might help them sniff around and get the reactions of the industry to such a change. Something to take note of is they avoided the use of the word gambling in all of their publications. They constantly prefer to use a more innocent term real money gaming. Whatever it is, this publication opens a new door to a place where no mobile or Facebook developer has ever gone before. Only time would tell if it?s a false alarm or this is going to become a reality.
About the Author:
Daniel Craigen is an app developer who's been in the mobile and Facebook gaming industry for the past 4 years. You can find more articles by him in his site, where you can play and win with full access to a Real money gaming experience as well as free casual games.
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