I have the Coronal Ejector. It should make me happy. It shoots an enormous fireball that vaporizes all but the strongest nearby T.O.O.L. enemies. Indeed, in Glu Mobile's Gun Bros. game, the Coronal Ejector "was developed to jumpstart dying solar systems."
I should be happy with it. But then there's "The Kraken."
"If annihilation had a portrait, it would be of you, holding this gun, screaming, as every living enemy within a mile was vaporized in an instant, leaving behind only smoldering boots, a T.O.O.L. helmet, and regret," the Gun Bros. armory advises of The Kraken.
It's a tempting gun. Whereas the Coronal Ejector's "power" is rated at 420, The Kraken is rated at a whopping 1,500. Imagine how many T.O.O.L. (Tyrannical Oppressors of Life) bad guys I could vaporize with that gun!
The only hitch? The Kraken costs $3499 warbucks. This equates to roughly $500 real-life U.S. dollars. (A package of 710 warbucks in Gun Bros. costs $99 in real life, so The Kraken costs $488. In real money. It's almost as expensive as an iPad 2.)
To be clear, I didn't pay any real money to purchase my beloved Coronal Ejector. The more you play Gun Bros., the more warbucks you earn. The Coronal Ejector represents the rewards of more hours of playing Gun Bros. than I care to admit. But there's The Kraken, in the back of my mind...
The Kraken is just a tip of the iceberg in Glu's Gun Bros. game. The game itself is nothing particularly special; it's basically an advanced version of the old Smash TV game in 1990s-era arcades, but the dizzying array of business models, monetization schemes and all-around stickiness that Glu has managed to pack into Gun Bros. is truly stunning. It's a game that I think represents the future of mobile gaming: Free-to-play, addictive and dangerous to the bank account.
"It's been one of our top games for quite a long time," said Mike DeLaet, Glu's vice president of sales and marketing. DeLaet declined to provide specific sales figures for Gun Bros., which now is available on Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS, Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android, Facebook and Chrome OS. "There's not many two-person shops who can build a game of this quality."
Glu as a company decided two years ago that it would stop making paid gaming titles and would instead switch to the freemium model, offering free-to-play games and trying to make money on ads and in-app purchases. And, according to Flurry, the freemium model is catching fire. The firm recently found the number of freemium apps in the top 100 grossing games list in Apple's App Store jumped from 35 percent in January to 65 percent in June.
Released in October 2010, Gun Bros. was Glu's first stab at the freemium model, designed from the ground up to be free-to-play. And the game appears to have struck a chord. Gun Bros. today is still among the 100 top grossing apps in Apple's App Store, and it ranks in the top 30 in Google's Android Market. The accomplishment is significant considering most successful freemium games--think Words with Friends by Zynga and the free version of Chillingo's Fruit Ninja--are puzzle- or board-style games. Gun Bros. is an action game, through and through--I routinely kill hundreds of T.O.O.L. bad guys each time I play.
So what are the premium elements that go into Gun Bros. that make it so successful? First, the game leverages an ingenious mechanism to ensure users keep coming back. After you play a round, you can immediately access the warbucks you've earned to buy new weapons, or you can invest your warbucks in the Gun Bros. "refinery" for up to three days. So, for example, if you earn 1 warbuck while playing, you can immediately spend that warbuck on new guns, or you can invest it in the refinery and in three days you'll have 4 warbucks to spend. This keeps users coming back to the game to spend their investments.
Moreover, like a virus, the game encourages users to spread it. You can earn warbucks if you get friends to join the game and play with you. (There is an advanced multiplayer setting on the game that allows you to play and talk with friends at the same time. Most of the conversation involves yelling "Watch out behind you!")
But once you get into the revenue-generating portion of the game, Gun Bros. really shines. First, users are treated to a pop-up ad when they first start the game. Then, in the game's menu, a banner ad is carefully placed to appear like it's part of the game. Glu's DeLaet said Gun Bros.' banner ad click-through rate is around 1 percent.
Further, the banner ad inventory in Gun Bros. isn't just derived from Apple's iAd or Google's AdMob. It's drawn from around a dozen different mobile ad networks, and Glu swaps out ad networks depending on which is paying out more at the time.
Next up, users can proactively earn warbucks by watching video ads. For example, I earned 1 warbuck by watching a movie trailer for an upcoming comedy. Glu's Paul Armatta, Gun Bros. senior executive producer, said that the company proactively limits the amount of videos you can watch (and warbucks you can thereby earn) so that users don't abuse the game's "economy" by watching hours of video ads and earning hundreds of warbucks.
"There wouldn't be any challenge," he said, explaining that more than 80 percent of users would probably watch videos for warbucks if they could.
Users can also earn warbucks by completing a series of actions. For example, I could earn 95 warbucks for signing up for Netflix, 1 warbuck for "liking" Tapjoy Games on Facebook, or 19 warbucks for getting an auto insurance quote through QuoteRocket. These are the same sorts of calls to action that litter most advertisements on the Internet, but in Gun Bros. they represent a means to an end (purchasing The Kraken). As DeLaet pointed out, if you were already thinking about signing up for Netflix, why not do it through Gun Bros. and earn some warbucks while you're at it?
Of course, the in-app gun and armor purchases represent the bread and butter of Gun Bros.' revenue model. Glu's DeLaet said that some users do complete actions like subscribing to People Magazine, but the majority of Glu's Gun Bros.' revenue comes from purchases of digital goodies like guns and armor. (The Kraken is Gun Bros. most expensive gun, but there are plenty of other weapons that are cheaper.) Though DeLaet declined to provide specific revenue figures, he said in-app purchase rates vary by game, and that some games have 10 percent of users conducting in-app purchases and other games have 2 percent of users conducting in-app purchases. He said advertising helps monetize the other 90 percent of users who don't buy stuff in the game.
Now, here's the kicker about Gun Bros.: It's not a simple operation. Glu's DeLaet said that the company currently employs 15 people just to update and maintain the game--a game that's around a year old. (He wouldn't say how much it cost Glu to initially develop the game.) DeLaet said the 15-member team currently is working to build a new world for players to explore, an effort geared to make sure existing players keep coming back for more.
And that's the trick. It's relatively straightforward to build a game that includes in-app purchases and banner ads. Most mobile companies are also capable of adding multiplayer functions and app updates. But to combine all those aspects into one free-to-play game that is geared toward the action and adventure crowd is no simple task.
Gun Bros. is Glu's attempt to "make a compelling game that makes a player want to spend money," said Glu's Armatta. "We don't first say, ‘How can we make money on this?' We say, ‘How can we make this fun to play?'"--Mike Dano
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