The revenue of the indie developer grew by 41% after he made his games free-duplicated

In August, German indie developer Arnold Rauers switched his games in the App Store to a free-play distribution model. After that, the total monthly revenue of his titles increased by 41%.

Card Crawl
Rauers is the founder and sole programmer at Tinytouchtales Studio.

In total, six games were released under the authorship of Rauers. The most famous of them are Card Crawl and Card Thief.

Rauers told about the experiment with frituplay on Twitter.

For clarity, he shared data for the period from June to September. According to them, the performance of games began to grow shortly before August — just then the developer began to transfer the first titles to frituplay. As a result, Rauers’ projects earned $8.6 thousand in the App Store and received 104.2 thousand downloads. Probably, we are talking about the results for August, but Rauers himself does not specify this.

The chart also shows a huge surge in revenue growth and downloads at the end of August. As explained in the comments by Rauers, this is not due to a change in the monetization model. The fact is that then someone profiled his Gnomitaire game outside of the App Store, but the developer did not track the source.

After switching to frituplay, almost all Tinytouchtales games began to earn through IAP (in-game purchases). Exceptions are Card Thief and Miracle Merchant, which also have advertising and the ability to disable it for money. Basically, with the help of IAP in Rauers games, users can access additional content or speed up progress.

The revenue of the collectible card game Card Crawl, which was released on iOS in 2015, grew the most significantly in a month. In August, the title earned $ 4.3 thousand — an increase of 168% compared to July.

But downloads jumped the most from the younger Card Thief (the year of release is 2017). During the monitored period, it was downloaded 28.7 thousand times, which is 5560% more than in July. At the same time, the project’s revenue decreased by 1% to $ 1.3 thousand.

Note that Tinytouchtales games are available not only on the App Store, but also on Google Play. Some of the projects can also be found on Itch.io and on Steam.