Fernando Piquer Mena, head of technology at Zinkia Entertainment told us about the role of independent developers in the video game industry.
The talk was quite interesting since it is possible that most people who start in the world start as an independent developer and little by little they will grow.
Obtaining profits as an independent developer is a key point of success or failure, and the key, as Fernando said, is to make free games in which you only have to pay to obtain certain improvements (powerups). These payments or micropayments can be made through mobile via SMS, although the important thing is to be open about payment methods since each person has their own preferences in that regard. In addition, he emphasized that it is much better to have many users who pay little rather than a few who pay a lot. To do this, they gave us the example of World Cap, a flash cap game created by them, which has 700,000 registered players and 270,000 regular players, who can improve their caps, change the color, etc., through micropayments.
For people looking to advertise their products, this type of page is really useful, since it significantly increases the stay on a website, which considerably increases the chances that a certain ad will be seen by a potential client. Additionally, you can search for sponsors (In the case of a soccer game you could unlock boots from a certain brand that would allow you to shoot harder, or something like that).
To be successful on these sites, the key is to offer free content and upload it to download pages such as Download.com or minijuegos.com. There is also the ādistraction factorā, which consists of the fact that in games or virtual worlds such as Second Life, in which objects can be purchased with real money, an exchange of money for points is used, thus preventing the user from backing out on any of their purchases.