Game with a charity push

[akaliel]

Hey all, I have a game I released on Android and iOS. I had a WS Universal version planned to, but of course, none of the third party tools I was using supported Windows Store (App42 for leaderboards, Unity Ads, and Soomla for in-app purchasing).

So I've yanked out the Unity Ads and Soomla and am waiting for App42 to fix a bug with Unity 5.0.2.

Once they fix this my plan is to release the game in the WS for free with no monetization. You'll earn the currency in-game, as opposed to watching ads and purchasing it.

On the main screen I've added a button that launches a video I made. It tells the simple story of my son who has Type 1 Diabetes. And there's another button which takes players to our donation site.

I'm no fool, I know that if I have 10,000 downloads I still probably won't get any donations. But even still, I'd rather have people playing my game for free, than not at all. Since I'm a devout Windows Phone user I didn't want to be like all the other devs that treat our platform like it's diseased.

I just wanted to know what you guys thought about the charity angle. If I can even get 1 donation, it'll be worth it.

Here's a link to the Android version if you wanted to see the game I'm referring to. This isn't a plug, I'm not trying to use this forum to promote the game.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.BundyGames.LetterFarm

 

[Spyros P]

Have you followed the same strategy on Android and iOS? Has it payed off at all?

As a user, I think that this approach might have worked for me. I do know that if I liked a product that was offered to me for free, would have tempted me to donate, if that was easy to do, instead of having ads and buy prompts thrown to my face every two minutes.

I don't know about the charity part - I mean, I would watch the video, but distance in this virtual world sometimes makes us too cynical to care.