January 5th, 2007 by Pascal Besteboer Posted in Analysis & Editorial | 1 Comment »
Arjan asked
me to do a little write-up of ClickPayGo from Chillingo seeing as we
(OrangePixel) are the first ones to start using it in Java games. So first let
me explain you what ClickPayGo actually is.
is developed and hosted by Chillingo.com the guys behind clickgamer.com, and straight
from the ClickPayGo site here is a little explanation of what it is:
is a FREE wallet/account system that allows you to re-download your purchases
at anytime, instantly. Think FREE "download insurance" and much more!”. Read more for some interesting details.
Sounds
fairly normal doesn’t it?
Now the
interesting part of ClickPayGo is that it has a neat little API that you can
call from any application / weblication or java midlet. So what this boils down to is that in your
great looking game-menu you can now have the option “buy” and taking the users
email and password you can get payment from their wallet and thus unlocking new
features.
We started
to use it in some of our latest games where we provide a free “shareware” like
demo version which is limited to a set amount of game-time or a couple of
levels. From the menu the player can then “buy” the full version using her ClickPayGo
account and the full game gets unlocked and all their money belongs to us!
more interesting look at this will reveal a couple of things. First, the
advantage for players. They get to check out a demo first before they buy the
full game, and when they decide to buy the full game they don’t have to re-download
it ! You just unlock it on the phone. The
next advantage is that you get a much better control over your game price as
well as a high percentage of the revenue (I believe it’s 85% but don’t hold me
on that).
Seeing as
ClickPayGo is a wallet-system, it doesn’t really care what kind of products you
sell, so you could also sell virtual products. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t
mean you have to rip people off, I just mean you can also sell game-items, or game-credits
if you wish.
Imagine you
create a MMORPG game, and give it away for free. Now people love free games so
it should be a really big success. The first area in your RPG is free, however
when people want to start doing certain Quests or extra features, they will
have to pay some cash. This is where ClickPayGo can start to become
interesting. You can start selling 200
game-credits for $2, and with those game-credits a player can buy new equipment
or pay the toll for a new quest ! The prospects
are huge.
You can
even extend all this to subscription based gaming, which of course opens up a
solid stream of revenue as long as you keep your game interesting and updated
with new quests or items! WoW!
The only
huge downside at this point is that it is not well known yet. Although
Chillingo claims to have about 35k users it is still a long way from being a
standard. However with the help of developers, and I am especially looking at
the independent ones out there, this could become a very interesting way of
marketing your games.
We will be distributing
more shareware versions of the games with ClickPayGo support, and hopefully
more developers will look into this.
If you like
to have a look at how this could work, check out our Shareware version of
RocketBoy2 over at Getjar.com: http://www.getjar.net/products/7614/RocketBoy2
shadow says: 
