Hi all, was wondering if anyone had worked out the kinks with adding admob when making games for mobile devices. I know there is an older thread on this topic but those posting on it still seemed to be having issues.
I have no problems getting game demos up and running on my android but the process still seems to be a little unclear and no solid solution posted to incorporate adds, in app purchases etc. I would assume I would not be the only one out there trying to do this or is everyone just focusing on desktop projects?
I am at the point where I am looking for alteratives to monogame eg Flutter Flame engine and other game engines where the process seems more established but I would love to stay with monogame as it is what I enjoy using.
If there is someone in the Monogame community who is successfully making it work i would love to hear from you.
I implemented Interstitial Ads (via Google Admob) and in-app purchases in a game we released last year, Party Words (https://partywords.kelsam.net/). The big problem with google ads is their API is, or at least was, constantly changing in large ways so half the info you can find about using it outside of their own docs is probably outdated or outright wrong. After trying several libs without luck, I ended up writing my own handler for the ads, GDPR ads tracking consent, etc. It was a huge pain. I do not recommend it. Unless you really REALLY believe you’re going to make significant money from these ads, just save yourself the trouble and maybe put in baked-in ads for your own games or some such (an update we’re actually planning for PW, even after all that work to get gAds working).
In-app billing (in our case, for DLCs) wasn’t too bad though, thanks to Plugin.InAppBilling (GitHub - jamesmontemagno/InAppBillingPlugin: Cross-platform In App Billing Plugin for Xamarin)
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Hi, thanks so much for the response. Will definately check out the in-app billing. Congrats on the release of party words. Looks like a lot of fun.
Yeah, I agree with everything that was mentioned above. I used to maintain an AdMob for MonoGame library, but it was a huge, huge headache. Google introduces breaking changes nonstop, and Microsoft is pretty slow to update their Xamarin wrappers around all the various Google libraries.
I’m pretty bearish on ad-based games now: The experience is terrible for players, and you’ll need to show a LOT of ads to make any money at all. I switched to a subscription-based model built on RevenueCat, if your game design lends itself to subscriptions I’d highly recommend it.
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Hey mate,
Thank you for sharing this information.
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Yes, I got Admob and IAP working since 2012 on both iOS and Android.
You need to look at the documentation from Microsoft Xamarin or MAUI rather than from Monogame. The implementation is more a MAUI or Xamarin thing used by other Xamarin developers.