I’m trying to understand how small mobile or F2P game developers think about ads.

For people who have released a free game, how do you decide whether to add ads or not?

Do you usually look at:

- player retention

- session length

- number of daily active users

- ad placement

- rewarded ads vs banners

- expected revenue

- player complaints

I’m especially curious about small indie teams, where the decision is not obvious. Sometimes ads can help support a free game, but they can also hurt the player experience if added too early or in the wrong place.

How do you decide when ads make sense?

As a player, ads are something that will make me uninstall a game immediately 9 times out of 10. I realize I might be in the minority, but the google playstore is already riddled with ads and in-app-purchase riddled low quality crapware/shovelware games and seeing ads makes me assign the game to that category.

I have better things to do with my time and attention than to sell it to "free" games that in turn sell it to advertising companies.

I know it's a hot take, but I advise you to explore other ways to monetize your game. Whether it's cosmetic or QoL features, or asking for donations here on itch or on a platform like ko-fi or patreon. You could even set up patreon rewards like early access to updates and voting on new features and being involved in thd development. If your game is good and you build a stable following, this might become more profitable than ads. 

In my opinion, if you upload a mobile game on Itch that has ads, it is a game that is so bad or violates some quality guidelines (like shovelware), that google would not accept it.

And all such games I have seen on Itch were crappy shovelware slop. Usually made with those cookie cutter template websites that promise non coders you can make a game with no experience. The adservices are already included. And a lot of those I only noticed because the developers whined about not having their shovelware slop being indexed right away.

Also in my opinion it is actually forbidden to upload such games to Itch without making it clear, that it is adware. Not telling people shifts a game from having ads to the category of malicious adware imho. On google you can see such things before downloading at a formal systematic level. Itch has no such facilities, because it is not an app store for mobile apps. You need to spell it out.

/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-obtrusive-advertisements-...

Any projects that contain malware, spyware or adware are prohibited and will be banned from our platform.

For people small indie teams who have released a free game, how do you decide whether to add ads or not?

A small indie team is a small game studio. You are not talking about a bunch of friends releasing a fun games for the fun of it, or are you?

A game studio will make the decision how to market and monetize a game way before release and not after release. It is a business. They need to pay their own wages. While you can do things without having a business plan, it is also a quick way to failure.

Anway, Itch is not a good platform to monetize games with ads, microtansactions, in app purchase and so on. It is not even the right platform for typical mobile games. The users here will be cautios about such things.

Thanks, this is useful context. I think the platform distinction matters a lot here.

On itch, I can see why ads would feel like a bad fit, especially if the game does not clearly disclose them before download. Players here seem to expect either paid games, donations, community support, or optional extras rather than mobile-style ad monetization.

For mobile app stores, the decision may be different because rewarded ads or opt-in ad moments are more common, but even there I agree it should not be added by default. It probably only makes sense if:

- the game already has enough retention

- the ad placement is optional or clearly separated from core play

- players know what they are getting

- the ads do not turn the game into something that feels like shovelware

So my takeaway is that ads are not just a revenue question. They are also a platform-fit and trust question.

We decided to go without ads for BigTwo multiplayer cardgame and it got us a very small player base. After this we made Word-EL ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ which is a multiplayer wordle game for the Greek language and we added almost immediatly advertisements but with the option of buying an adfree version.  This one has much much larger player base. Now we released WorldeWar which is the same but for the english language and we are doing the same thing again. Here on Itch you can play the game for free without advertisement. We hope we can generate a playerbase this way.  

That is a really useful comparison, thanks.

The split between platforms makes a lot of sense to me: on itch, keeping the game free without ads can help with trust and discovery, while on mobile stores an ad-supported version plus an ad-free purchase may be more acceptable because players already understand that model.

What I find interesting in your example is that the ad decision was not only about monetization. It was also connected to distribution and player-base growth.

It sounds like the practical strategy is:

- use itch as a low-friction, no-ad discovery channel

- use mobile stores for the ad-supported version

- offer an ad-free purchase for players who want it

- avoid forcing the same monetization model on every platform

That feels like a much better framing than asking “ads or no ads” in isolation.