Game manufacturers are sounding the alarm, because the established monetization schemes bring less and less profit, and intrusive advertising scares the buyer away rather than attracts. Tinyloot has found an unexpected solution to the problem. The service will pay users money for the time they spend in the game.
Game developers spend large sums on monetization experts and psychologists to figure out how to get users to buy their product. So far, we have to bet on advertising or pay traffic providers for downloads, which, however, does not guarantee any result. Why not spend the same money in a more profitable way? Oliver Kern, an expert in the promotion of electronic games, and Micha von der Meer, a game developer and former head of IT at Booz Allen Hamilton, offer a simple solution.
You need to pay users for playing a specific game. According to the creators of Tinyloot, the money that could be spent on advertising goes directly to the target audience. If users really like the game, then the process will start in the opposite direction, and they will invest in the project.
Investors, including Chris Lee (co-founder of Media Molecule) and Reinout te Brake, founder of iQU, have already invested about €50,000 in Tinyloot. The service also benefited from the sponsorship of SoftLayer and Cloudant (both companies are part of IBM), along with Microsoft. PayPal cooperates with Tinyloot to guarantee the stability and security of payments.
“The service will radically change the entire cash flow,” says Oliver Kern, one of the creators of Tinyloot. The players are getting rave reviews, even though they sometimes can’t believe it’s true.”
Haarlem, a company based in the Netherlands, has already launched an app on the Dutch Google Play. Several thousand players receive small payments.
A source: http://venturebeat.com