With some notable exceptions. Some spend tens or hundreds of dollars on a single game. If you're building a game for a large company like EA, you're probably forced to take the most lucrative path. EA's not an atelier for starving artists. And if you're a small, struggling game studio, you probably can't afford to leave money on the table. So what's the solution? If people are unwilling to pay reasonable prices up-front for games, how besides in-app purchases does a game company profit from their work?
This is an honest question, because I also generally hate how IAP is integrated into most games. I'd much rather pay up-front. It seems like a simple solution to me would be to make the game free, but with most features blocked behind a SINGLE in-app purchase. That way you can download it, play what amounts to basically a demo, and decide if you like the game.
If you do, you buy it with the IAP and now have the rest of the game forever. What am I missing here? Is this hard to do? Or prohibited somehow? Disclosure: I'm not a mobile game developer, so maybe I'm missing something here about the rules of the app stores.
It's not necessarily difficult, and it's not prohibited, it's just not very profitable. The problem is you're cutting out the whales. Games used to do this somewhat frequently, they just don't anymore because it leaves so much on the table.
Also the much lower RPUs will make paid acquisition unprofitable, and paid acquisition is the only reliable method.
