Polish mobile developer Tequila is one of the many companies that's transitioned from a paid to a freemium model.

Indeed, it came early to the experience, starting out in 2007, working with Russian company iFree.

Its first two games were Checkers and Warships, which were embedded on devices in Eastern Europe.

Free to play, you had to pay to upload your score to a leaderboard for the opportunity to win a real world prize, such as vouchers. This generated around $7 million in premium SMS traffic.

A further experiment in ad-funded games didn't work, however, only generating around $10,000 in revenue from 1.6 million downloads.

Sunk your cruiser

The next step for Tequila was redesigning Warships for the Android and Java markets. Launched via the free GetJar store, the game's been downloaded around 1.7 million times to-date.

"Our global conversations to paid transactions is 14 percent," said Paul Flanagan, Tequila Mobile's business development manager.

60 percent of these transactions were for virtual goods, while 40 percent were for high score updates, although this is a business model that Tequila is phasing out. Average revenue per user is around 3 euros.

"But we felt we were limited by a lack of social interactions," Flanagan explained.

Open planet

In turn, this has lead to Tequila Planet, a mobile games platform, which has monetisation in 86 countries and 360 operators, and offers a social platform plus dedicated analytics and metrics.

To-date, it's had 6 million downloads, with 4 million users. There are around 65,000 daily active users, of which around 4,000 are paying for content.

Within the first six months, around $470,000 has been generated.

But this is only the starting point, with Flanagan calling it a seeding process as Tequila opens up the platform for games from third party developers: a process that has been massively success for similar Japanese companies DeNA and GREE.