One thing I have noticed a lot is people complaining about adverts, saying that it's ruining the game experience. Research based on my own statistics from my games; numbers are rounded and from when the game was at peak.

Stats:

The question I have is should I even bother to add adverts into the game this time?

Last time I used the money from the adverts to pay for advertising my own game, this time I have someone for marketing. If this game gets double the players(1000 000 downloads needed) I could be seeing $500- $600 a month from the adverts, that is actually not bad.

Without adverts I could also get more happy players, this could mean more sales from micro transactions. Including the adverts later when I have more players is a bad idea, I have seen games crashing down in popularity because of things like this. If I am going to have adverts in game it should be there from the start.

All in all, there is as much argument for me to include advertising in my games as against it.

I'd recommend trialing a small amount of ads and see what kind of rate you get - number of new players per $ sort of metric. You don't need to jump in with $100-200 - start with a smaller amount and see what happens. With online advertising you can scale it from there to determine how much money is worth, provided you don't target too small an audience with your advertising.

I've done this with GameDev.net in various ways to attract small amounts of growth without breaking the budget.

Scout, you mentioned some pluses and some minuses that you are trying to juggle to make this decision. I think a decision grid could help you decide. After filling in some pluses and minuses, you get to decide whether including ads is "worth it" to you or not (worth is entirely subjective, so only you can determine the worth). 

If you have a sufficiently large user-base, you can A/B test them. Split into two or more groups, show more ads to one group, less to the other, see how each affects the micro-transaction rate in that group.

Successfully monetising with ads generally warrants a fair bit of data analysis and tuning to optimise revenue.

1 hour ago, Tom Sloper said:

I think a decision grid could help you decide.

You have something for everything on that page. Really impressive. Thanks for this.

1 hour ago, swiftcoder said:

If you have a sufficiently large user-base, you can A/B test them. Split into two or more groups, show more ads to one group, less to the other, see how each affects the micro-transaction rate in that group.

This is a good idea, I could try it with my players I still have left. Although I should be careful, they are the most loyal players I have; I wan't them playing my next game.

1 hour ago, khawk said:

I'd recommend trialing a small amount of ads and see what kind of rate you get - number of new players per $ sort of metric. You don't need to jump in with $100-200 - start with a smaller amount and see what happens.

I do plan on doing this. My past games has shown what is more effective so I can down scale a bit.

I guess at the moment my main question breaks down to: Is it worth showing adverts in my game, if all I earn is a low $0,005 - $0.006 for each player?

 Especially if players complain so much.

12 minutes ago, Scouting Ninja said:

I guess at the moment my main question breaks down to: Is it worth showing adverts in my game, if all I earn is a low $0,005 - $0.006 for each player?

There's always the old adage.. something is better than nothing. 

I like the A/B testing idea to help answer that question. Anything involving human reaction generally needs some level of trial. It's difficult to predict how people will respond without testing the response.

Quote

 Especially if players complain so much.

The similarity to managing GameDev.net is striking.

12 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

All in all, there is as much argument for me to include advertising in my games as against it.

It is a plan to get paid.  Unless you are doing it purely as a hobby, you need to find ways to get paid.

Ads are a way to help get paid. Microtransactions are a way to help get paid. DLC is a way to help get paid. Expansions packs are ways to help get paid. Full-priced games are a way to help get paid. Shareware is a way to help get paid. Mandatory online access is a way to help get paid. 

Each method can be avoided by people willing to lie, cheat, and steal. 

Assuming you want your game to make some money, you will need to include methods for getting paid.  People generally dislike paying for things, but if they enjoy the game they will generally tolerate it.  

10 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

 Especially if players complain so much.

A difficult lesson is that if the potential customers aren't complaining then you probably aren't charging enough.  You need to balance out the complaints against the actual purchases and players.

Something that I don't think has been mentioned yet, but probably should be... Providing an in app-purchase of $1 to remove all ads is a common way to at least partially satisfy both parties.

If a player takes that option, you've converted a $0.006/month customer to a $0.70/life customer (that's 10 years at their ad revenue rate!). And they can't in good faith complain about the advertising anymore, because they could opt out for less than the cost of a candy bar.

13 hours ago, khawk said:

There's always the old adage.. something is better than nothing. 

So true. There have been some times where I was very happy with the little money the game brought in.

2 hours ago, frob said:

Assuming you want your game to make some money, you will need to include methods for getting paid.

I really want to break the revenue mark this time.

I am indeed a hobby developer that was why the success of my last game is so important to me. It's my first game ever, that I developed, that made profit.

1 hour ago, swiftcoder said:

Something that I don't think has been mentioned yet, but probably should be... Providing an in app-purchase of $1 to remove all ads is a common way to at least partially satisfy both parties.

Well there it is! 

A fantastic fix that allows me to keep things as they are and provides only solutions; well there is bound to be some unexpected problem.

I have seen this in games before but not once did I think about using it. Thanks for pointing this out.

Thanks for all the answers; really all of you have provided me with extremely useful info. I have new hope for my game and some tests to run.

It was such a depressing topic for me, now I am actually excited about trying new things.

16 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

That means you need either 30 000 players for the first month or need 5 000 players to keep playing your game for 6 months. Both these goals are a bit extreme for most games

In my limited experience with mobile games, it seems they fall into two categories - ones that get over 10k new downloads per month, and those that get under 1k. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground. Just success and failure. Don't plan around how to maximise revenue from a failure; plan to succeed. 

Also don't aim for a 0.006 ARPU, as even a successful game would only deliver coffee money for that. A 0.30 ARPU will deliver a living wage from a successful game. As above, this can involve ads and IAP.