Harpagia · B2C · idle RPG game
Price in-game purchases between $4.99 and $9.99
Players buy readily in that band; above $9.99 converts worse. No test numbers given
What they did
What happened
In their words
This app replaced my 9-5 ($155K/year)
GusAwesome, that sounds cool. I'm not a big gamer myself. The closest I ever got to gaming was like Pokémon on my Game Boy. But I think it's really cool that you built this. Can you pull up your revenue screenshots or dashboards to kind of show off your revenue, show us that this thing is legit?
KenOkay. Harpagia is a free-to-play mobile game on iOS and Android. The game generates revenue through optional in-app purchases that unlock premium features or speed up progression. A lot of the pricing ranges anywhere from the $2 to $10 range. What I've learned through a lot of monetization experimentation is anything around $4.99 to $9.99, players will generally be okay to spend. Anything that's above $9.99, it's a little bit harder to convert. Over the past year, the game averages over $3 in revenue per active user. The average monthly revenue has been around 13,000 a month, which totaled over 150,000 in the past year. The monthly active users ranges anywhere from 3,500 to 4,000, with daily active users around 5 to 600. The game has reached over 50,000 downloads combined with both iOS and Android, with roughly a 6% conversion rate, which I would consider pretty decent considering the typical conversion rate for games is anywhere from 2 to 5%. My ongoing operating expenses, such as purchasing assets, freelancing art, subscriptions, and so on, is roughly $500 a month. And I did not spend anything on ads, so my ad spend was zero.
GusAwesome, Ken. That is really cool to see. And I'm really excited to get into your background, how you even got to this place, how you grew this game. What were you doing before you were building Harpagia?
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Post screenshots of your rough game on Reddit and stress it's free to playRevenue jumped from ~$1K to ~$10K a month almost overnight, despite harsh comments
- Share big game updates on Reddit every few months, within subreddit promo rulesEach post brought a jump in new players; revenue rose from $10K to a ~$18K/month peak
- Make the game free and sell optional extras that speed up progress~6% of downloads pay (games typically 2-5%); over $3 per active user a year
- Launch after 6 months no matter what, and let real players shape the gameFirst $10 sale within days; ~$150 in month one, ~$1,500 total by month two
- Build a tiny practice app in 6 weeks to learn launching before the real oneTaught AI-assisted building and app store approval; lessons fed the main game
- Focus on keeping players coming back before worrying about making moneyFounder credits it; no separate numbers
Tags: in-app-purchases, price-points, games