Hall is hoping that publishing Crossy Road’s figures will inspire other independent developers to realise that there are many ways to approach freemium without fleecing gamers and over-concentrating on heavy-spending “whale” players. Not every developer wants to make a Candy Crush though. Hall is right that $10m in three months may seem relatively small compared to the most lucrative freemium games: as a comparison, Candy Crush Saga players spent $1.33bn on that game in 2014 alone – more than $3.6m a day. “Opt-in, seamless part of the game and high monetisation - that’s the holy grail of in-game mobile ads.” “The success of Crossy Road with Unity Ads shows that mobile games can make millions of dollars with ads that users choose to watch,” said Laakkonen, according to industry site. Crossy Road had earned $1m from the ads by mid-January, but the game’s Android release has fuelled another $2m since.

That figure was revealed in a separate GDC talk by Jussi Laakkonen of games tech firm Unity, whose advertising network Hipster Whale is using for its game. But, if we changed it … if we followed some of those best practices … if we sold coins and had a ‘save-me’ button and it felt like the other games, would anyone have cared?”Īt least $3m of Crossy Road’s revenues have come from its in-game video advertisements – usually for other mobile games – which players can choose to watch to earn more currency. But someone on the free-to-play business would look at those numbers and think we could make a lot more per user. That’s way, way, way, way, way more than we thought we would get.

Players earn currency from playing that can be spent on unlocking new characters, with no timers, lives or pay-gates forcing them to delay or pay to continue playing as much as they want. Instead Crossy Road took its inspiration from 1980s arcade game Frogger, providing players with a variety of characters to tap across roads and rivers – and ultimately, to splat against or under cars, trucks and trains. “If you make a game that’s only about business, you’re going to get Candy Crush clones,” said Hall.

How the ios crossy road game was made