Fancy In-App Purchases Without the Purchase? Introducing Amazon Underground!

Something that gets me about almost all mobile games nowadays is the fact that they’re either loaded with ad’s or to progress beyond level 1; you need to spend money. While spending 5p/ 5c on progressing to level 2 doesn’t sound like much; it’s the fact that in the back of my mind, if there are at least 1 million downloads and if even 1% of those make the purchase; the company has made money. It may not be a great deal of money, but money is money, right?

Amazon has noticed this and has seemed to be taking the side of the gamers, offering developers to put the games up for free including all in- app purchases (IAP’s) under the scheme “Amazon Underground“. This might seem like a rough deal for the dev’s, Amazon has promised to pay the bill based on the amount of time played by any user. The actual amount to be paid hasn’t been disclosed, but a bit of snooping has dug up that each dev would get $0.002 per minute. Yes, that’s not even an actual amount which you can hold in your hand, but after 8 minutes of play, the dev gets a penny; WooHoo!

There isn’t a great deal of games available at the moment, but you do have a choice of games such as Goat Simulator and Cut the Rope with the price as $0.00 and an additional subheading of “In-App Purchases: FREE”. Just make sure you look for the underground games and apps with the “Actually Free” banner on the image and don’t think that this is a way of new devs to release poor games in search of money, producers such as Disney and Rovio have multiple games on offer.

What are you waiting for? Go get your fill of free games with free purchases and tell us your experiences in the comments.

Thanks to ArsTechnica for providing us with this information.