Bucking the Trend: Why Supermagical went from freemium to premium

Hi there! Let me introduce ourselves: we are Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team, aka most likely the game developers with the longest name in the industry. And as I’ve been led to believe by my mom, also the coolest.

We are the makers of Pro Zombie Soccer (Editor’s Choice and Best of 2010 on the App Store) and last year’s Supermagical (Editor’s Choice and Best of 2012 on the App Store).

Following our publisher’s advice (and also the current trend), we released Supermagical as a free-to-play game. We struggled from day one to hit the right key with our players when it came to finding a satisfactory percentage of paying users. We weren’t even close. The reasons? We believe there are several;

1. Not enough downloads! Despite being an insanely polished, very fun game for all ages, and despite the glowing reviews and features, people just weren’t interested enough to download it for some reason. The name itself? The icon? The screenshots? Well, we just don’t know! 
2. Was the game was too short in comparison with the everlasting likes of Candy Crush Saga or Clash of Clans? Well, maybe. Supermagical was conceived as a console-like experience. Just an adventure (with 20+ hours of gameplay plus two multiplayer modes) that people could enjoy, finish, and move on to the next thing. Your usual paid game at the end of the day. Only that it wasn’t!

So, after a year of changing item prices and adding new features to no avail, we sat down and gave this thing a real hard thought. This is what came out of our heads:

1. We totally HATE F2P! Honestly, we’re just hardcore gamers who aren’t really into the whole free-to-play model. But hey, it was the new cool trendy trend! We HAD to do it!
2. We always felt like people weren’t getting everything out of the game. We crammed a lot of things and details and items (and even more things) into a year and a half of hard work, and people just weren’t seeing them because some of the item prices were too high. Players were missing the whole experience as a result. That really breaks your heart as a game creator.
3. And giving away our game for free? Well…we can now say “been there, done that,” and we are still not comfortable with the idea.

“Hell, let’s put a price to that mother@#$%^&!” we shouted, almost all at the same time. And that’s exactly what we did. We priced that mother@#$%^&, going against pretty much every mobile development strategy out there. So, yes. We are weird.

Of course, it’s still unclear if the game is going to be a better earner for us. We know that a lot of people out there simply do not want to pay for mobile games. But as creators, and this might sound a bit silly and naïve, but we feel that people who pay for our game will be more likely to enjoy all of the work and effort we put into it.

And that alone makes Supermagical better.

You can now buy Supermagical for $0.99 on the App Store.

Enrique Corts is the founder and artist of Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team. You can find them on Twitter at @SuperMegaTeam. Learn more about their games by visiting http://www.supermegateam.com/.

Enrique Corts