Objective: Learn to deconstruct the gaming economy by looking at individual monetization decisions across competitors.
Use material from Chapter 10: The Money Game
QUEST: Look at two different free-to-play live-service games. What types of currency do they offer? How do their approaches to store offers differ? Reflect on your perception of value from store to store as you see how a variety of smaller monetization decisions show up in an aggregate marketplace.
For each game you select, complete the following tasks:
Analyze the monetization choices.
How can players pay? Are there subscriptions? Microtransactions? Downloadable content packs?
Audit the currencies on offer.
Are players paying for everything directly in cash, or are they exchanging cash for alternate currencies which then get exchanged for in-game value or playtime? What types of currencies do you see: hard currency, soft currency, energy, discard currency? Can any currency be earned, and how?
Look at the featured offers in the store.
You can learn a lot about a game and its business model by reflecting on the offers being promoted. Are they limited time? What kinds of discounts are offered? Are they offered in sets from which you must make a selection? Are the offers gamified, like offer chains and loyalty bonuses? Do you feel yourself influenced by the promotions?
Review the categories in the store.
How is the content in the store organized? Are things hyper personalized, or generic? What is being offered, and how much of it offers a gameplay advantage?
Once you review at least two games and their stores, reflect on the following prompts:
Perceived Value
How easy was it for you to ascertain what a good value was in each of the games you reviewed? How did that influence your likelihood to make a purchase? Would you feel confident purchasing quickly, or would you need to do a lot of comparisons?
Perceived Pressure
What did you feel when you were in the store? Did you feel pressured? Would you be missing out if you did not make a purchase? Were you being set up to make purchases that would set you up for success?
Bonus Level: Defying Expectations
It turns out that there are a lot of incorrect assumptions flying around about how players interpret store offers in games. In his 2024 Game Developers Conference talk “5 Things About Game Monetization That Could’ve Saved Millions of Dollars (If Only I Had Known Them Before), Boris Burangulov from MY.GAMES shared somne mind-blowing and hard-won examples of things he’d do differently in the future based on his experience working on WAR.ROBOTS.
Are these surprising to you? If anything, these should be a reminder that you should be data-driven and test hypotheses on your game. What is true for other games might not be true for your players. What Boris’ team thought to be true was not true for their players in many cases.
Starter packs: Split players into cohorts based on initial spending, then offer limited choice.
It’s less about giving players lots of choice or getting “the perfect” item, and more about matching the offer size to a player’s price and value tolerance.
Enhanced visuals: Fancy visuals are only really useful when used sparingly to draw attention.
Based on their results, if applied broadly fancy visual changes will not lead to behavioral changes. Visual tweaks are good for directing attention away from “ugly” offers.
Events and campaigns: don’t forget to design the revenue and engagement drivers.
Gifts, skins, and game modes are fun but they don’t keep the lights on. If your business model relies on incremental revenue from sales, ensure your campaign design includes well-thought-out content that will give players a good reason to spend money.
Fewer offers means… less revenue
Contrary to some cognitive psychology best practices, the observed player behavior in their game was that dropping low-conversion offers resulted in lower revenue with no improvement in engagement. (However, this offset was not proportional: 30% fewer offers to 5% lower revenue – so a sentiment gain might be worth the tradeoff)
High spenders are still value sensitive
Players spending a lot on your game aren’t just doing it arbitrarily. They often have invisible “fun per dollar” metrics they’re calculating on the fly. Changes to the ratio of rewards on offers can result in significant changes to offer success. You may see disproportionate price sensitivity from your highest spenders if you try to quietly cut back.
Decreasing popup offers decreased spend more with high spenders
Contrary to their expectation, reducing popups did not improve performance of offers. Revenue decreased while engagement remained unchanged. It’s unclear whether this was due to the reduced variety of offers or the lack of reinforcement of offers, but this defied the team’s expectations in a big way.
