You Can’t Win But You’re Still A Good Person v2.0
We removed ads and made it a dollar instead. Go get it!
You Can’t Win on the App Store
The TL;DR is that ads bum us out and were ineffective at generating revenue. We made a grand total of $9.34 from ads and $4.95 from people paying to not see ads. Rather than chasing ad views we’d like to let you play the game without distraction. After all, it’s impossible to win the game but we still think you’re a good person.
The longer version
You Can’t Win But You’re Still A Good Person was designed to be played in short bursts here and there. Ads ended up just not being a good fit for that kind of game. We made $9.34 from showing (as near as I can tell) around 2000 video ads over two years. Five people opted to pay to remove ads at $.99. (I think two of them might have been us.) Our thinking was that if we made the game free and offered that remove ads in-app purchase that more people would go for it.
Extremely narrator voice: they didn't.
I don't blame anyone for putting up with them either! Ads are easy to ignore and comparatively in-app purchases are hard to make.
We could have leaned harder on psychological levers to claw people into coming back to the game to maximize the number of ads they see...but, honestly? We’d rather make a solid experience and let you just play the thing.
The lesson in all of this is that you should have your monetization model decided before you begin coding. We waffled on that and it hurt the game experience. I’m sorry for that although while removing them I remembered that the game is a fun app to fire up and play now and then!
Long term
We’ll see what happens from here. If there’s interest in the game (read: people buy it) we have plans for a few additional modes. My favorite is a meditation mode with no clear end other than to teach you the lesson that the journey is endless and points don’t matter (or do they?!).