Is 80 minutes trial a new trend?
18 08 200960 minutes trial is a standard in casual games. It’s accepted by customers, developers and portals. We got so used to it that we don’t even check it. Imagine my surprise – yesterday I downloaded Airport Mania First Flight from Reflexive. I played it for a short while and when exit reminder appeared I thought that it’s wrong when it said that I have 74 minutes left. It took a while to notice that the full trial is 80 minutes long.
Airport Mania was made by Reflexive so I had to check if it’s just with their games or all games. Of course I don’t have the time to check all games so I downloaded just one more – Tales of Monkey Island. And it has 80 minutes trial too.
Doesn’t it make your life harder? When everyone had 60m trials you could optimize that first 60 minutes and set a tipping point around 60 minute to get a better chance of getting a sale. Now you either leave it unchanged and let Reflexive customers get past that point or make two versions. Eh….
(BTW. No need to rush to Reflexive Game Center Solution – Tales of Monkey Island are not available to affiliates)
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Reflexive experiments a lot with different trial times. One recent hidden object game I tried from them had a trial time of only 20 minutes! I had to blink to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.
In my opinion they’d be better off sticking with 60 minutes like everyone else. Giving the customer an inconsistent experience is a big no-no, and probably loses them more sales in the long run than fiddling with the trial times looking for a “sweet spot.”