Crossy Road pulls in $1 million from ads
Unity touts Hipster Whale's success with integrated advertising feature
Crossy Road is the latest free-to-play phenomenon, and Hipster Whale's Flappy Bird-meets-Frogger homage has grossed over $1 million in ads from the iOS version alone. That's according to a post on the Unity blog, touting the company's Unity Ads offering.
Hipster Whale used Unity Ads to let players opt-in to watch sponsors' videos in exchange for in-game coins that could be used to purchase new characters. Advertising isn't the extent of the game's monetization, however, as players can choose to pay for new characters outright at $1 a pop.
"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," Hipster Whale's Andy Sum said.
The blog also underscored the use of Unity's Everyplay replay-sharing functionality in Crossy Road. To date, nearly 250,000 players posted videos to the game's video-sharing website.