Update

Brainbean Offers Insights into Designing Freemium Games

Brainbean has been downloaded nearly 700,000 times, but fewer than 2 percent of those folks have spent money in the app.

Brainbean has been downloaded nearly 700,000 times, but fewer than 2 percent of those folks have spent money in the app.

When Brainbean hit to the App Store in June of this year it quickly climbed to number three, powered by solid reviews and its price tag of free.

The game, like many in the learning space, was free to download and play, relying on in-app purchases to pay the bills.

But for developer Tanner Christensen, he also saw a market that traditional brain-training apps were missing.

“Curious why traditional brain training games focused solely on ambiguous intelligence tests, I wondered what would happen if I created a game that actively engaged players in creative thinking,” he wrote on his site.

It garnered some really positive reviews from Apple users and app review sites.

“If you are looking for some brain games for yourself or your children, consider Brainbean from Tanner Christensen. The colorful app offers a variety of creative and cognitive games that provide a stimulating round of mental calisthenics,” wrote Kelly Hodgkins at Tuaw.

The app is one of the popular wave of brain training tools out there and with its colorful interface and clean design also benefited from being appropriate for older kids or adults to use.

We reached out to Christensen to ask him some questions about the game and how his decision to go freemium affected his design and marketing.

Making the “Freemium” Call

Gamesandlearning.org: Why did you decide to pursue a model of free download and then an in-app purchase to unlock other content?

 Tanner Christensen: I have developed a number of apps in the past, each following a pay-up-front model. While those apps have done fairly well, there was a moment when I realized they weren’t touching even a fraction of the potential audience they could be.

That moment came when I switched one of my apps (Oflow) to “free” just for a weekend. That one weekend it was downloaded nearly 60,000 times (the most any of my apps had been downloaded in their lifetime up to that point), so I thought there was a good market out there that wasn’t getting my apps at all due to the price. The iPhone and iPad market alone have hundreds of millions of people using them nearly every day. If my apps were only getting 100,000 downloads total, that means less than 1% of the total market were ever even seeing my apps.

When I had the idea for Brainbean I knew that the only way to reach a larger audience would be to create a very low barrier to entry, which in this case meant it would have to be free. That paired with a detail-rich design and research-backed idea would give me a better shot at success.

I also knew that I would need to make at least some money from the app if I was going to maintain it, so IAP made sense. If I saw enough interest in the IAP, my plan was to leave my full-time day job and instead focus my energy on building out the app and others like it. That was encouraging throughout the process because it was a big experiment to me, to see what was going to happen and how I could make it work.

Gamesandlearning.org: When did this decision come in your development cycle?

Tanner Christensen: Even before I began developing Brainbean, I knew I wanted to experiment with in-app purchases, I just didn’t know how. About two months into the seven-month development process, I figured out a way to implement additional games for a small fee.

In Brainbean there are eight mini-games, each just 60 seconds. I had the idea to present an interface with eight or so games, so I thought I would make half of those games free to play and half unlockable for a nominal fee. This approach has always made sense to me; you can download the app and get a good experience, but for less than the cost of a coffee you can unlock a few additional games for added fun.

My hope was that parents, educators, and other players would enjoy the free games enough to pay for unlocking the additional ones. In doing so they would not only get more games to play, but also show their support for me as an independent developer, ensuring I can keep working on the app and future apps too.

Interestingly enough, it hasn’t worked out that way.

How In-app Changes Things

Gamesandlearning.org: How did it change the way you may have approached the game’s design and structure?

Tanner Christensen: Knowing that I was going to do IAP was always in the back of my mind, so I don’t think the realization of how they would be implemented changed much of my process for building the app.

Many apps in the Apple App Store are following this freemium model now. I think the app market isn’t really surprising any more for many of the people who own an iPhone or iPad, so they’re used to seeing hundreds of apps that do similar things and if one costs $0.99 but the other is free, why not go with the free version?

Developers see this and think: “I still need to make money for the months of work I do, so I’ll add some bonuses to the game for a small price.”

What’s coming to light now is that freemium with one-time purchases is not a very sustainable model. It makes more sense to have “consumable” purchases, which can be added bonuses in the game that players can consume and then re-purchase as necessary. All it takes is 1,000 people playing your app and spending $1 a week to make some decent money (at least from an indie standpoint).

My hope was to make Brainbean entertaining and valuable enough where customers would unlock the additional games, then recommend it to their friends or co-workers, so I could have at least a small version of a sustainable model. With enough exposure that model could absolutely work, I thought. It hasn’t really turned out that way though, so I think if I had to do it over again I would try to think of a way to implement consumable purchases like power ups, time extensions, and other things. All of which I’m experimenting with now to see if I can implement them into an update for Brainbean.

Gamesandlearning.org: What percentage of downloads connect to actual in-app purchases?

Tanner Christensen: Brainbean has been available in the App Store since June 5th, since then it’s been downloaded roughly 675,000 times. Of those who download the app, barely 2% of people have purchased something from within the app. It’s really disappointing to see those low numbers. I’m still making quite a bit of money from the app, but certainly not enough to make it a full-time job.

I’m also a little surprised by the numbers. When I made Brainbean, I built my own analytics platform to track usage within the app, I can see that the average user opens the app about 10 times a month, which means there are more than 600,000 people who are using the app fairly often but haven’t found enough reason to unlock an additional game (or all of the additional games) for just a few dollars.

However, occasionally I get support emails from children who ask me to unlock all of the games for them, I have to reply and say “Ask your parents to unlock them for you.” That’s a tactic that is clearly not working.

Gamesandlearning.org: How does the product being an educational tool for kids and adults affect your approach?

Tanner Christensen: Brainbean has been my first education-focused app. It was a lot of fun to work with that approach because everything could be a bit more colorful and stylized, whereas more professional-centered apps have to be void of any unnecessary elements. I think there’s a tremendous need for quality (and fun) education apps, since many educators are beginning to implement iPads and software into their curriculum. The theory goes: these kids are growing up in an age where iPhones and iPads are a part of every day life, let’s find a way to add educational elements to that.

It made sense to build Brainbean in such a fun and colorful way too.

A large part of creativity is having fun and incorporating some aspect of “play,” so I wanted to build that into the app. When I first began working on Brainbean, I was surprised that there weren’t any education apps focused solely on creative thinking. I knew I was onto something worthwhile from the get-go. It was also through feedback from my nieces, as well as my mother and sister (who are both teachers), that I was able to fine-tune the app as I went along and make decision that I knew would resonate with both educators and children.

In-fact: watching my nieces play with early version of Brainbean and seeing which games they liked most (and which they liked least) helped me decide on which games would be locked and which ones would come free out of the gate.

A Few Words of Advice for Other Developers

Gamesandlearning.org: What would you tell another designer are the upsides and downsides of the approach you followed?

Tanner Christensen: Developing Brainbean took almost a year to do, I designed and developed it entirely on my own, and as a result it was both painstaking to make and also hugely rewarding.

All of the endless hours of work certainly paid off in the end, because I can get on Twitter or YouTube and search for “Brainbean” and see real kids talking about it. I firmly believe I wouldn’t have been able to get into all of the hands of those players if the app had even cost a dollar.

The freemium model worked well for exposure, and even if the app isn’t making tremendous amounts of money, it has given me an opportunity to connect with more than half a million people around the world. Not many other developers can say that their app will reach 1M downloads within four months. Taking that opportunity and utilizing it to create exposure around future app updates or my next project is huge, I think.

Tanner Christensen, Brainbean creator

Though, as I mentioned, if I had to do Brainbean all over again, the only thing I would change would be experimenting with consumable IAP. Having something that players can purchase with a real benefit, but then have to purchase again if they enjoy it, would likely increase my total monthly revenue and make it tremendously easier to keep working on the app or future apps.

Gamesandlearning.org: You have seen a ton of downloads of BrainBean and I wonder would your next product follow the same monetization strategy?

Tanner Christensen: I don’t think I’ll do many pay apps again in the future, the numbers behind them just aren’t there at all. Like I mentioned: the app store is too over-saturated and it’s extremely difficult to stand out. However, I certainly want to try to find a way to make more money from the freemium model.

In-fact, a new project I just started will follow the freemium approach but have consumable IAPs. If that doesn’t work out, I’ve recently been considering moving away from independent development and focusing on my day job or something like consulting. Enough people know my name from the work I’ve been doing that I think I could do fairly well at that. So we’ll see!