We are working on it as it’s a very big demand. So far we have an initial test of native extensions, which is a requirement for ads.
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Sorry to be bothering with the ads question since you probably get it alot, but I’ve been planning on making a mobile game and the Defold Engine would greatly benefit the making of it, but it is of course a problem that it currently does not support ad revenue.
Do you think that ad support will be integrated by the end of the summer or beginning of fall, or will it be even later than that? If it is planned by that time we will probably choose to make th game in Defold otherwise we will unfortunately be forced to look for other engines.
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If it’s crucial, you should probably look at other engines. We are not in a position where we can firmly commit to release dates for external users. One part is that we have to prioritise King’s teams first, in case anything comes up. The next part is that we want to do a new type of extension system (which ads would be based on), and that requires an amount of RnD. Lastly, we want to release when the particular feature is awesome, not just because a promised date has arrived. We understand that this makes it problematic for external teams to plan around Defold, but that is the nature of this game engine. The good and bad of not having a business model around it so to speak. We hope that the long term benefits of all this will make it worthwhile though. Sorry for the inconvenience!
(Also remember that it’s possible to do ads with dynamic textures as long as you can authorize without an SDK, the thing that’s currently missing is the ability to integrate a 3rd party SDK. Video is not currently possible either.)
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The current status is that we are still working on the extension system itself. It looks really promising and incredibly cool, but still quite far from production quality. I hope we can show some demos of it soon.
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I remember that Revmob had a lua implementation for Corona that used http REST API (before they added them native plugin). If anyone is interested in ads, maybe they can dig it up and do a port to Defold.
/Fuscy
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I came across this site https://enhance.fgl.com/ that promises to add all kinds of stuff in an app without the dev doing anything.
I’m curious if anyone has tried it and if it works for Defold. It would be awesome if it did.
Fuscy
I signed up and started the setup process, but on Step 2 it became obvious that it won’t work:
“Some SDKs to be included in the Enhanced app will require you to add our simple Drag and Drop library before uploading. As the name indicates, this is a very quick and easy process.”
A .jar file needs to be included in the Android app and a line of Java code needs to be called when an interstitial ad should be shown.
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Interesting… so it’s dependent on a library that they provide.
Are they including anything that doesn’t require the library. The “Some SDKs” part gives me hope.
Thanks for testing this @britzl
Fuscy
I’m thinking that the jar they provide is a tiny wrapper (28kb) around all the SDKs they inject in the resulting APK, and from what I could tell it seems to be needed for all SDKs:
Interstitial ad:
FGLEnhance.ShowInterstitialAd();
Reward ad (video):
FGLEnhance.ShowRewardedAd(FGLEnhance.Placement.PLACEMENT_NEUTRAL, FGLEnhance.Trigger.TRIGGER_USER_ACTION, OnRewardGranted, OnRewardDeclined, OnRewardUnavailable);
Analytics:
FGLEnhance.LogEvent("event_type");
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Maybe in the future they’ll support Defold 
Everyone keeps using SDKs when all they do is wrap REST calls.
Oh well… the search continues.
Thanks @britzl
Fuscy
Hey @Fuscy,
Developer of Enhance here - thanks for checking out our product!
Support for Defold is on our roadmap, so I’ll be sure to PM you once we have it ready.
Also, you’re totally right that most providers just wrap rest calls. This was one of our motivations when developing Enhance - rest calls generally don’t provide a good user experience, and the CPMs tend to be far lower on average than actually implementing the SDKs like Enhance does.
Let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions which would make our service particularly useful for Defold users!
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Thank you for coming back to us here on the forum @FGL_Luke! I’m not sure I understand what you mean here? Are you’re saying that if I use an SDK to show my ads instead of downloading and showing them myself using a REST API I will earn more money? Except simplifying the life of the developer, what does the SKD provide that I cannot do myself?
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On average, yes. I’m sure it will vary network-to-network, but in order to get the highest CPMs we’ve generally had to implement the SDKs. There are a few reasons behind this - in short, the advertisers prefer that you use their SDKs as it allows them full control over their display. They also can do better targeting, and can deliver more advertising formats.
SDK integration also makes it far easier to negotiate direct deals with ad networks. We do this for our “fully managed” service where our FGL ad ops team will actively mediate and tune your ads in order to get the best CPMs. We’ve found that advertisers are far more open to guaranteeing higher rates if we are doing a full SDK integration as it allows them to more easily ensure the quality of the ads delivered; from both an implementation and tracking perspective.
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I see. Thank you for elaborating!
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What a sad day it is when you find something so perfect and amazing, but it doesn’t have such an important feature. I really didn’t want to use Unity either…oh well
Sooner or later you might switch to use IAP or subscription model if you’re seriously making games. Ad will leads the engage ratio down. iAd network was closed EOM June. Eventually, Google play will mark an Ad label to the game. Players’ve been not willing to accept Ads since they have a lot of choice of good free or IAP games recently. It’s more naturally to add add to video/news but it seem to be Ads are not good for apps/games nowadays.
Paid app model is not a good approach also as players are not accept to buy a game except a flagship.
Although there’s a lot of articles said about that I still want to touch and feel the truth. I’ve created some games to research on it and the answer is the same.
This is a fireside chat that could be better suited for the slack channel but I’ll chime in with my opinion as well.
Ads are here to stay and there’s a projected $100+ billions poured by companies in mobile advertising in the future (if it hasn’t been reached yet). That is a huge increase which is being translated in ecpm. In the past a great ecpm was slightly above $1 where now having $6+ is expected. This will grow as more and more companies go into mobile advertising.
Some players understand that the developer has to make money somehow and ads are accepted. Some players also want a No Ad IAP but they’ll never buy it. Usually that IAP is bought less that 1% usually 0.1%.
Some are completely against ads as they’ve become jaded by too many spam ads. These users usually turn another leaf when presented with rewarded opt-in ads.
As everywhere, excess is bad. Having too many spam ads or iap will turn the user away and lower retention, engagement and long term ltv. But… in casual games like King’s, the conversion is ~2% on average. This leaves that 98% of players who won’t make a purchase… ever.
BTW ads are a quantity game and there’s not much you can do to drastically change this kind of revenue: mediation, different types of ads, a new hook… but in the end you depend on the advertiser.
With IAP you could with just a few core players, beat ads easily. IAP leaves you the control on the strategy and you don’t depend on the whims of the market (too much).
My 2 cents.
Fuscy
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I might as well link to the DefAds project in case someone finds this post and is wondering about ads in Defold:
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Have you some progress in question of adding native ADS SDK like Unity ADS or AdMob ?
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Well, yes and no. We had a team offsite a week ago where we discussed plans and roadmap and the state of extension system was discussed. We have a very clear picture of how it should work and a lot of the implementation is done. Some finer details remain and I can’t recall what we said about a tentative date for a release. @Axel and @Sara/@saracederberg do you have more information?
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