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Backflip to cross promote its 1 million daily active users to sell paid game Tunnel Shoot

The power of free leveraged

Backflip to cross promote its 1 million daily active users to sell paid game Tunnel Shoot
2010 has seen a huge shake up in business models for most mobile game developers.

While vanilla paid downloads on iPhone remain the biggest revenue stream for many, everything from free promotions, free-to-play and in app purchases, and ad-funded releases, as well as experimenting with other mobile platforms, are being attempted.

Even developers such as US developer Backflip Studios, which has carved out an impressive business from free ad-supported iPhone games, is looking to shake things up.

Upselling the network

It's still releasing new free games of course. Its latest - Strike Knight - was downloaded 1.5 million times within ten days of launch, generating around 500,000 sessions a day at about 5 minutes each from 250,000 unique daily users.

Backflip's got four more free game planned for release over the coming two months as well. But in the meantime, it's going back to basics with Tunnel Shoot.

A 99c release developed by fellow Colorado developer Team Phobic, it's an attempt to go back to the glory days of the 2009 App Store, where a high quality, simple pick-up-and-play arcade game could generate relatively high revenues.

Cross-promotion promise

For most other developers, those days are long gone of course, but thanks to its huge install base of games - which generates more than a million daily active users - Backflip reckons it can drive downloads of even a paid game.

"It's an experiment to see whether by publishing Tunnel Shoot and cross-promoting it using our in-app advertising network, we can do better as a publisher, and for Team Phobic as a developer, than it would do on its own," explains Backflip's CTO Dale Thoms.

Indeed, as other publishers with similar high activity user bases such as free-to-play specialist ngmoco argue, it's the availability of what's effectively an off-portal promotional and discovery tool that will be key to making the most of the increasing fragmented mobile gaming market of late 2010 and 2011.
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.