I have been looking at different mobile game developers' Play Store pages and noticed their entire game libraries are all free or all paid, with free games being a “demo”. I plan on making cross-platform games on Steam and mobile, as well as a few free-to-play mobile games with ads and IAP, all of them Simulation/RPG games with the same graphics style (3D models with PBR textures). Is offering both freemium games and paid games a good business model, even if the freemium games are only on mobile and the paid games on many different platforms?

NOTE: Along with games, I also plan on making a gamified education platform that is basically an open-world sandbox-type game combined with an education website. Either this or a freemium game witll be the game I start with when starting my own game company.

@StrangeShroom Successful game companies are not doing things that way. It's either all freemium (F2P apps) or paid apps with all of their free apps being “demos”! I know it's a good idea to stick to a genre and graphics style, but still…

I am not running a business nor am I a lawyer, but apparently you found that people are in the business either for money or for fun. Unless the platform disallows other forms (and I doubt that but I am not a lawyer), I see no reason why you can't do what you want to do.

The question is perhaps is how this approach is better than other alternatives, how does it make reaching your goals better / faster / smarter / etc. In terms of competition, how does it give you an edge wrt the other publishers?

Offering both free and paid games will allow me to tap into multiple different kinds of markets.

Are you a company?

I'm guessing not, in which case I question the value of looking at how companies behave. “Free” mobile games produced for profit are a toxic hellscape of micro-transactions and ads; a company producing them needs to be extremely focused on minimising costs and maximising the rate at which they throw games at the wall to see what sticks. That's a very different from the model of paid games which are much more focused on quality and developing a brand and ideas that players will want to buy into. For a studio, it's extremely difficult to straddle both stools. For an individual, you can move from project to project with much greater ease.

@Irusan, son of Arusan I am currently an individual, but I eventually want to start a company.