It’s great that the ads are only fifteen seconds and exclusively for other games.” “Plugins can make your game unstable sometimes, but we didn’t have any problems with this one. Hipster Whale decided to use Unity Ads to enable this strategy, and according to Hall the transition was smooth. “We didn’t want any consumable purchases, we wanted to do something that everybody could pay a little bit for if they wanted to, but where it wasn’t necessary to keep paying.”

These coins can be used to buy new characters, but those characters can also be bought with real money or simply with coins collected in the game.īy giving players a choice, Andy Sum explains that they tried to make Crossy Road as transparent as possible.

We just needed to figure out a fun reason for players to watch them,” Hall said.įor Hipster Whale, the answer was giving players the opportunity to earn extra coins by watching ads. “I played Disco Zoo and thought that video ads were a really good way to earn money without getting into people’s faces. To make money, they devised a monetisation system inspired by NimbleBit's puzzler Disco Zoo. He explained that “We wanted it to be free, so that everyone has a chance to play.” Interestingly one half of the Australian developer duo, Matt Hall, said that while he wanted to try to create a mobile game that could generate enough revenue to finance future projects, free-to-play was their first choice. In a post on the Unity Blog, the studio revealed that it has grossed over $1 million from Unity Ads alone on iOS.

Hipster Whale, the studio behind Crossy Road, has shone light on its decision to employ Unity Ads as part of its free-to-play monetisation strategy.

Unity character selection crossy road