Free-to-play might be dominating the mobile market, but there's still money to be made by going premium.

Some developers, such as ustwo and Chair might agree with that opening statement, however, a growing number of studios reckon that free-to-play really is the only option.

Speaking about their views on monetisation at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2014, Trials Frontier developers Justin Swan and Kari Silvennoinen, explained that they simply 'had to go free-to-play' in order to remain competitive.

No alternatives

“We had to go free-to -play. It's a truth of the market. Yes we wanted to make the most fun game possible, but we also wanted to monetise,” explained the RedLynx duo.

“We knew we had an amazing piece of core gameplay, but it's not the core gameplay that's going to monetise our game.”

Of course, the team were understandably wary about becoming shackled by the model, so, instead of using freemium as a development framework, they chose to use it as a monetisation 'decoration'.

“We wanted to decorate the game with free-to-play,” explained the pair.

“We wanted to give every type of player a different way to spend, and we think it worked pretty well. So far we've seen some good profits.”

You can see all the talks from Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2014 here.

Pocket Gamer Connects is the biggest mobile games show in Europe, which brings together the best speakers and delegates from across the industry and from all over the world.

To-date, Pocket Gamer Connects has been held in London and Helsinki, and the show will be heading back to the UK in January 2015.

To find out more about the latest show, head on over to www.pgconnects.com.