Virtual Goods News

Today ngmoco made two key moves regarding their suite of freemium iPhone games. The company both launched a new title in Touch Pets: Dogs and released a vital update to its already-existing Eliminate freemium FPS. 

Touch Pets: Dogs will use a similar model to Eliminate's to drive sales of its in-game microtransaction virtual good, dog food. Your virtual pet will remain awake in the game (and able to interact with you) only when you've got a sufficient quantity of dog food, which the pet slowly consumes. When you're out of dog food, your animal goes back to sleep... or you can spend real money to get more dog food immediately. Dog food microtransactions begin at $.99.

In Eliminate, ngmoco tweaked the rate at which its main virtual good, energy, will recharge for players. You can only gain experience from bouts in Eliminate while you have energy available and can pay to get more when you run out (or just wait). At launch, your energy meter in Eliminate would recharge to full in 4 hours. Earlier this week, ngmoco tweaked that rate such that energy would recharge completely in one hour. 

This caused a huge boost to Eliminate's peak concurrency numbers. The game had a peak concurrency of 4700 users on Tuesday when the tweak was made, up from 4500 over the weekend. Ngmoco announced that the change was made so fans of recently-released console shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, could make the most of their time between bouts with Eliminate. 

Following the one-hour recharge tweak, Eliminate soared up the Top Grossing charts to a new high, the #6 position. Clearly the shorter recharge time also increased engagement to the point where more players we