Use Subscriptions to better monetize your mobile game

Auto-renewable subscriptions give users access to content, services, or premium features in your app on a regular basis. Your app will receive continuous, ongoing payments from players.

Auto-renewable subscriptions give users access to content, services, or premium features in your app on a regular basis. Your app will receive continuous, ongoing payments from players.

Yishi Gong
Sep 06, 2019

Why subscription?

Auto-renewable subscriptions give users access to content, services, or premium features in your app on an ongoing basis. At the end of each subscription duration, the subscription automatically renews until a user chooses to cancel it.

You may be wondering why subscription is becoming a more prominent way for games to monetize today. Some benefits of subscriptions are: Attract and retain players with constantly updated contents and privileges; Receive continuous, ongoing payments from players on a regular basis; 85% net revenue after one year (a great saving on commissions compared to the usual 70% net revenue).

Offer subscriptions in your game

Both App Store and Google Play Store support auto-renewable subscriptions. For our mobile games, you can offer players different content via subscriptions.

  1. Subscribe to receive weekly cards and monthly cards, which allows players to redeem for in-game points daily. By configuring subscriptions with GOP rebate cards, GOP will take care of the recurring payment, and give players the rebate cards accordingly.

  2. Subscribe to receive in-game points regularly, at a more attractive price compared to one-off purchases. GOP will handle sending in-game points to players.

  3. Battle passes, special bundles and other collections of content.
    If you would like to offer exclusive in-game content to players via subscription, game server need to handle sending the content to players according to GOP in app-point-balance-change-event notifications. Such notifications are triggered when players make payment (be it first time subscribe, or renewing).

To offer subscriptions, the mobile game client needs to integrate Garena MSDK Android v4.0.1 and above, iOS v3.0.10 and above. The game server needs to handle subscription related new parameters in app-point-balance-change-event notifications. With Garena MSDK and GOP, your app can use the same checkout flow that is used for the usual In-App Purchases, so users get a familiar, reliable, and secure experience.

In game, it is necessary to display subscription related information clearly for players to understand what they are subscribing to, and the recurring payments.

Here is a detailed guide on how to configure subscriptions, handle subscriptions and test subscriptions: Guide to use Subscriptions in Apple/Google In-App Purchase

Monitor performance of the subscriptions

When you start to offer subscriptions to your players, it’s essential that you monitor the game’s total, new, and canceled subscriptions over time, along with revenue details, to measure performance and guide your decisions. App Store and Google Play Store both provides dashboard for checking sata, insights and reports.

Google Play Store: Review in-app subscription performance
App Store: View Subscriptions Data

Upcoming new features

Grace Period (Google Play Store only)

As some of our games started to offer subscriptions, the high proportion of involuntary cancellation caught the games’ attention. When billing issues arise and payment gets declined - for example, due to an expired credit card or credit card credit limit is reached - subscriptions can be cancelled and user may not be aware of it.

The proposed solution is to support Grace Period (Google Play Store only). By enabling a grace period in the Google Play Console, players are granted an extra few days to fix payment issues. At the aggregate level, Google Play Store has found that apps who activate grace periods see a more than 50% improvement in renewal decline recovery.

Introductory Price

For players who are more price-sensitive, we hope to explore the Introductory Price feature: New subscribers pay an introductory price each billing period for a specific duration. For example, $1.99 per month for three months for a subscription with a standard renewal price of $9.99 per month. Once the duration is over, they’ll be billed at the standard renewal price.

This feature is supported by both App Store and Google Play Store. It could be useful for our mobile games to attract price-sensitive players with a recurring discount without having to offer that discount for the lifetime of the subscription.

  • GOP is going to support Grace Period and Introductory Price in Oct 2019.
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