Ads and Privacy Concerns - tough choices regarding game monetization
Summary
Let's face it, when you make a game, you want people to play and enjoy it. If you are trying to make a living out of making great games, then you have to somehow earn money from the people playing. This article is about the journey I took with Earth Matters monetization.
Approach
When looking into monetizing games to help out charities, I thought ads would be a good way allow people to play for free, commit a little of their time to watching an ad, and help the cause. I worked on balancing Earth Matters in-game purchases, so that if you watched a rewarded ad after every completed level, you could play the entire game for free. Doing so would still generate good revenue and ultimately help out the charity.
This required some careful design around the in-game currency system. I had to determine how much things should cost versus how much you get from watching a rewarded ad, and how many coins you get if you ultimately go ahead and make a purchase. All of that balancing as it contributed to the game design is probably worth its own article, so enough on that for now.
The plan was to use Unity's built in Ad APIs, and keep things as simple as possible.
Journey
I waited until pretty late in the process to actually implement the ad-integration. After doing a fair amount of reading, it looked like just using Unity's solution was the way to go. The whole market of ads is surprisingly complicated when you factor in ad-mediation. It's not really complicated from a coding perspective, it is complicated from a trying to make the best choices when considering revenue. There are various ad networks, and you configure how, when and who is able to purchase ad-inventory. Not having ever done it before, I was going to use whatever default values I could find.
Since money is involved you have to provide financial information. Luckily for the different App Store integrations, I already had the financial stuff taken care of. But since the ad stuff is yet another business partnership, you have to do the financial configuration again with the ad mediation service. Not to mention, you have to declare to the App Stores that you are going to use ads, and this triggers a little more scrutiny of your app.
At this point I should probably mention that to publish an app in either the Apple or Google stores, you have to fill out your user-privacy profile. This is regardless of whether you use ads or not. There are a bunch of different questions to answer for each store where you describe what user information your app collects and how it is used and/or shared. I should also mention, I'm kind of big on privacy. I don't want to collect any information that isn't necessary, which means I'm not really collecting anything about anyone playing my games. However, that all changes when you enable ads.
Unity provides App submission privacy information for Google Play Store and Apple App Store as follows:
https://docs.unity.com/ads/en-us/manual/GoogleDataSafety
https://docs.unity.com/ads/en-us/manual/ApplePrivacySurvey
Conflicted
While I suspect these days people just accept they are giving away their information, it really bugged me that it would be going to a 3rd party where you as the player, nor I as the creator, get any say in how it is used.
While I understand that to advertisers, information about people is valuable, it really irritated me that they the advertising provider was going to know more information about my players than I would. Because they collect so much information, filling out the app stores privacy configuration was a polar opposite to what I originally had for earlier game releases. In order to launch Earth Matters with ads, I would have to go from declaring I track nothing to declaring I track location, User ID, Device ID, Purchase History, Product Interaction and other usage data.
I'm not okay with that, so I had to rethink my monetization plans.
Conclusion
I removed ads entirely, making Earth Matters completely playable for free, but really tried to make some good-value convenience purchases available. Time will tell how well I did as I gear up for its release here soon.
Until I figure out a way to provide in-game ads without divulging your private information, there won't be any non-Gold Medal Games ads in any of our upcoming releases. I do not want your private usage information, and I'm not about to pass it along to others just to make a buck.