Amazon launches Pay Per minute app support for developers

https://developer.amazon.com/public/sol ... nderground

Amazon Underground includes a new monetization model where Amazon pays developers based on the amount of time your app is used. With Amazon Underground, you can turn 100% of your Android users into revenue generating customers. You get paid starting from the very first minute your Amazon Underground app is used, and you will continue to be paid for every minute of use by every customer. With Amazon Underground, you can focus less on monetizing and more on creating great user experiences. Most Android apps are eligible for Amazon Underground. Getting started is easy. Just create a developer account and submit your app today.

hm.. doesn't really seem worth it based on the calculations. but maybe someone more experienced with this sort of thing has a better understanding of it.

I guess it all depends on how many players you can get... it's interesting, certainly nicer than throwing ads in everyone's faces. Thanks for linking this!

Thanks for the input Geoff, but given you have 10 posts in the past 10 minutes, I do wonder if you have some ulterior motives.

So apparently, every 1 HOUR of play gives you 12 CENTS.. So a person would need to play for 9 hours to earn you $1.08

But what if a person just plays it for 5 minutes or less?.. You get a penny or less.

Obviously you won't make much money with this system, unless your game becomes incredibly popular and/or has a ton of replay-ability.

Prominent I think that is the idea behind it, to make it worth it for people to create games with greater and more durable content, instead of doing cheap clones with ads (which does not help anyone), as making big games currently on mobile is.... kind of... not worth it economically wise.

Also it can be seen as 9 player should play one hour to make you earn 1$, which is not that bad to be honest (sure, it will be less abusable than advert powered content, but I would not say it is a bad thing.)

However I wonder how they can mesure said time without needing a constant internet connexion..

I can see the reasoning behind trying to make a better game to garner the longer playing times- but after a certain point, if development of the game has some publicity, the attention on it gives you a sense of how well received it might be when released. At that point, why not just sell it for a fair price?

I would rather sell a good game at a fixed price, and then maybe once sales have decreased, make it available on this sort of platform at a later date.

This sort of strategy makes more sense to me- Develop the game with intentions on selling it at a fair price, and then think about this sort of thing after the game has sold.

I don't think this system will affect the quality of content available, because if it is easy to add your game, anyone will do it even if the game isn't great.

Prominent as far as I saw, this is only availiable for games that are paid ones on other markets, so it can be an afterthough decision in case the price is actually the issue preventing people from buying it (I mean, how many percent of users of the play store can actually buy a game, it requires a way to buy things off the internet, then there is the issue of how manynpeople are willing to pay), and that also means that all those completely free with ads game cannot be concerned with this, which should cut-off quite a good chunck of those designed-for-profit-only games.

However the question is: is it worth it for the user.

Well suppose you did something like a rpg with tons of grinding. Ads would be out of the question, and micro sales can push users away.

The stores are full of crap, this is one way to encourage some quality, but yeah they need to offer a bit more incentive than 12 cents.