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.
The service 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: “ClickPayGo 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!
An even 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.