Cash Prizes for monthly winners?

Has anyone ever considered giving cash prizes (% of ad revenue for example) to monthly winners/leaderboard placings in order to entice a lot of people to play your game?
Does this violate any of the terms etc from Google?

A decent app can generate huge sums of cash in a month from ad revenue, but it seems us developers are a greedy bunch and want to keep it all to ourselves as I cannot find a single app that actually gives something back to the users.

Thoughts?

You could give virtual currency - that is just for your app - and then have some ability for users to send it to one another (!).

Thus if you award some virtual currency to one user, they would be able to share that with friends - and thus it would have some value to them (as opposed to just using it within the game).

As long as that virtual currency is not convertible into real currency (if it is a huge game it is possible that a real-world exchange could emerge if goods within your game are valuable - as I think some of the Korean massive multplayer games may have ?) - but it should not trigger any money-laundering issues for the developer one would think.

It’s nice idea. Would be interesting to find some documents, which will state that it doesnt violate GP policies. However, the gambling type of games is prohibited in GP, dont know if it will also go under that.
I see here two ways of progress:

  1. You want to share some % of revenue to users, and say it is valuable %. For example, userA for being in the top 1 at the end of the day/week will receive 20$ (I think it is valuable %, as for playing a week/day(if you got a big income from ads)…). That can bring to you a lot of traffic… if you will share with some valuable amount of money.

  2. You want to share some small % of revenue, and it is Not valuable. Say, the same situation as above but 1$, or less. As it is small amount of money, would be wrong to share it with users, you could buy some game/ or use @adforandroidapps solution. Give some in-game virtual currency, that can be used in ALL your games and which is transferable.

Problems:
For the 1 situation(Valuable amount of $): Maybe for the first time you will have true loyal users, who really play your game and gets to the top charts, but after you will have a lot of damned hackers who want to break your system and get in the top all time. So, you should have some real strong security, which is a lot of work and difficult. If you are indie dev and do it all alone, you will be overload with the job to do…

So, not only hacker problem, but the realization problem… How would u transfer that % of money? Wire(it costs 20$ to transfer, so you transfer 20$ for another 20$?))). Paypal?- what if they dont have Paypal… So, you should find some money transfer solution…

When it is not valuable amount of $. It really doesnt make a sense to be transfered to user’s account. Instead, you could buy for them directly from the market a game, that they could choose. But I think it is not possible so far… You can’t buy and gift it for someone (maybe I’m wrong not sure).

So, as you can see you have a lot of problems and jobs to do. That’s a reason why no one is rewarding with real money.

I was typing this before the post above

It would seem there are a few “win prizes” type apps on the market, where users watch videos and download apps etc to accumulate points that they can then cash in or use to enter draws for gift cards and even paypal deposits…

I am not affiliated with these apps, but a quick search turned up “Prize per day” and “Tapporo”.

I would have thought this type of thing, encouraging/forcing people to watch ads and download apps, would be against most advertisers terms and conditions?

And I’m sure there are some poker apps like Poker Stars or whatever, where they actually use ‘real money’.

If this kind of thing can go on, surely then giving a cash prize for leaderboard winners etc is ok.

Imagine if you’ve already got a game that has a leaderboard, and its fairly popular, then you start offering real $$$ for monthly placings etc. I could see that enticing quite a few more people to come and play and current players to play more (further increasing your ad revenue). Just look at your facebook page, how many annoying “share to win this prize” posts do you get from some people!
Of course it would encourage people to try and cheat as well, but you should be able to stop that easily enough.

I think if there is an alternative available to the user - for example you give them a trickle of coins every day etc. - or they can buy it with Google Payments - then that makes it ok.

Since the Google clause is that user should have an alternative i.e. should not be stuck (can’t move forward in app) at an ad or if forced to buy it.

When you give a trickle of coins - that essentially opens up a new channel by which user can “earn” that over many many days.