Halfbrick, developer of popular mobile game Jetpack Joyride has recently made a very interesting use of dynamic store-fronts. You might remember that Jetpack Joyride started it’s life as a premium/paid game and until recently was still paid on PSN. It’s not easy going from a paid game to free 2 play, you can ask EA, if you need convincing. The move requires a complete mindset change and this last trick by Halfbrick truly shows they have adapted to the new model.
So what did they do? If you haven’t heard already (or read about it on Gamasutra), Halfbrick recently added a new item in their store “The Wave Rider”. Adding items by itself is not so rare in games but the unique part about it was that “The Wave Rider” was sold for $4.99 as an early bird offer with a message that you can get the item for free in 4 days. This ‘time-to-free’ move was a big success for Halfbrick and resulted in 400% increase in revenues.Here is how Halfbrick could have done this move:
Preparation
Using SOOMLA Store Editor, Halfbrick almost created a store-front. They nearly selected the theme Scorched Hill and then customized it with the wizard to match the design of their game. Integrating the store is as easy as calling a storeOpen() function and it supports equippable products, upgradable, single-use and anything else a game like Jetpack Joyride needs.
Adding The Wave Rider to the Store
Adding the new item to the store is easy as clicking a few buttons. Halfbrick could have done this in less than a minute by dragging the image to the screen and updating a few text fields. Of course, the wave rider still needs to be implemented in the game.Changing the Price
This is the easiest part with SOOMLA. With a few button clicks, Halfbrick could have changed the price of the item in the store. As soon as the price changes in the dashboard it’s is magically being updated on all end devices without any need for the users to download an update from iTunes / Google Play.
Analyzing the Results
Without any need to implement additional analytics, anything that is economy related gets reported in SOOMLA analytics. If you think about it, this is almost anything you care about in the game anyway.
Disclosure – we don’t know if halfbrick is using SOOMLA or not. It really doesn’t matter though. Any developer that wants to have a dynamic store-front can signup for a free account at http://soom.la and have all this power in his hands.
