The Top F2P Monetization Tricks

by Ramin Shokrizade on 06/26/13

[The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gam
asutras community.]
[The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra o
r its parent company.]
[UPDATE: Alex Dale, the CMO of King.com, has graciously taken his time to clarif
y a few points related to CCS, and I have edited this paper in a few places usin
g italics to show the updates]
Coercive Monetization
A coercive monetization model depends on the ability to trick a person into making
a purchase with incomplete information, or by hiding that information such that
while it is technically available, the brain of the consumer does not access th
at information. Hiding a purchase can be as simple as disguising the relationshi
p between the action and the cost as I describe in my Systems of Control in F2P
paper.
Research has shown that putting even one intermediate currency between the consu
mer and real money, such as a game gem (premium currency), makes the consumer much
less adept at assessing the value of the transaction. Additional intermediary o
bjects, what I call layering, makes it even harder for the brain to accurately ass
ess the situation, especially if there is some additional stress applied.
This additional stress is often in the form of what Roger Dickey from Zynga call
s fun pain. I describe this in my Two Contrasting Views of Monetization paper from
2011. This involves putting the consumer in a very uncomfortable or undesirable
position in the game and then offering to remove this pain in return for spending
money. This money is always layered in coercive monetization models, because if
confronted with a real purchase the consumer would be less likely to fall for the
trick.
As discussed in my Monetizing Children paper, the ability to weigh this short te
rm pain relief vs. the long term opportunity costs of spending money is a brain ac
tivity shown by research to be handled in the pre-frontal cortex. This area of t
he brain typically completes its development at the age of 25. Thus consumers un
der the age of 25 will have increased vulnerability to fun pain and layering eff
ects, with younger consumers increasingly vulnerable. While those older than 25
can fall for very well constructed coercive monetization models, especially if t
hey are unfamiliar with them (first generation Facebook gamers), the target audi
ence for these products is those under the age of 25. For this reason these prod
ucts are almost always presented with cartoonish graphics and child-like charact
ers.
Note that while monetizing those under 18 runs the risk of charge backs, those b
etween the age of 18 and 25 are still in the process of brain development and ar
e considered legal adults. It seems unlikely that anyone in this age range, havi
ng been anointed with adulthood, is going to appeal to a credit card company for
relief by saying they are still developmentally immature. Thus this group is a
vulnerable population with no legal protection, making them the ideal target aud
ience for these methods. Not coincidentally, this age range of consumer is also
highly desired by credit card companies.
The exception to the above child targeting would be products making heavy use of
Supremacy Goods, which I will discuss near the end of this paper. These product
s target a wider age range of users that are vulnerable to such appeals.
King.com was generous enough to point out that their target demographic for CCS
is middle aged women. 80% of their players are women, only 34% of their players
are under the age of 30, and only 9% are under the age of 21.
Premium Currencies
To maximize the efficacy of a coercive monetization model, you must use a premiu
m currency, ideally with the ability to purchase said currency in-app. Making th
e consumer exit the game to make a purchase gives the target's brain more time t
o figure out what you are up to, lowering your chances of a sale. If you can set
up your game to allow one button conversion, such as in many iOS games, then obvi
ously this is ideal. The same effect is seen in real world retail stores where p
eople buying goods with cash tend to spend less than those buying with credit ca
rds, due to the layering effect.
Purchasing in-app premium currency also allows the use of discounting, such that
premium currency can be sold for less per unit if it is purchased in bulk. Thus
a user that is capable of doing basic math (handled in a different part of the
brain that develops earlier) can feel the urge to save money by buying more. The y
ounger the consumer, the more effective this technique is, assuming they are abl
e to do the math. Thus you want to make the numbers on the purchase options very
simple, and you can also put banners on bigger purchases telling the user how m
uch more they will save on big purchases to assist very young or otherwise math-im
paired customers.
Having the user see their amount of premium currency in the interface is also mu
ch less anxiety generating, compared to seeing a real money balance. If real mon
ey was used (no successful game developer does this) then the consumer would see
their money going down as they play and become apprehensive. This gives the con
sumer more opportunities to think and will reduce revenues.
Skill Games vs. Money Games
A game of skill is one where your ability to make sound decisions primarily dete
rmines your success. A money game is one where your ability to spend money is th
e primary determinant of your success. Consumers far prefer skill games to money
games, for obvious reasons. A key skill in deploying a coercive monetization mo
del is to disguise your money game as a skill game.
King.com's Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game p
lay maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slow
ly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player
, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consu
mer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps
up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression
becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills.
Note that the difficulty ramps up automatically for all players in CCS when they
pass the gates I discuss later in this paper, the game is not designed to dynam
ically adjust to payers.
If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, th
e brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game hav
e changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assu
mption that they are still playing a skill game and just need a bit of help. This
ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going
up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game.
Reward Removal
This is my favorite coercive monetization technique, because it is just so power
ful. The technique involves giving the player some really huge reward, that make
s them really happy, and then threatening to take it away if they do not spend.
Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what t
hey already have much more than they value the same item as a reward. To be effe
ctive with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned somethin
g, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player t
o have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful is the effect.
This technique is used masterfully in Puzzle and Dragons. In that game the play
primarily centers around completing dungeons. To the consumer, a dungeon appears t
o be a skill challenge, and initially it is. Of course once the customer has had
enough time to get comfortable with the idea that this is a skill game the diff
iculty goes way up and it becomes a money game. What is particularly effective h
ere is that the player has to go through several waves of battles in a dungeon,
with rewards given after each wave. The last wave is a boss battle where the diffi
culty becomes massive and if the player is in the recommended dungeon for them t
hen they typically fail here. They are then told that all of the rewards from th
e previous waves are going to be lost, in addition to the stamina used to enter
the dungeon (this can be 4 or more real hours of time worth of stamina).
At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their reward
s, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their
progress. To the brain this is not just a loss of time. If I spend an hour writ
ing a paper and then something happens and my writing gets erased, this is much
more painful to me than the loss of an hour. The same type of achievement loss i
s in effect here. Note that in this model the player could be defeated multiple
times in the boss battle and in getting to the boss battle, thus spending severa
l dollars per dungeon.
This technique alone is effective enough to make consumers of any developmental
level spend. Just to be safe, PaD uses the same technique at the end of each dun
geon again in the form of an inventory cap. The player is given a number of eggs a
s rewards, the contents of which have to be held in inventory. If your small inv
entory space is exceeded, again those eggs are taken from you unless you spend t
o increase your inventory space. Brilliant!
Progress Gates
Progress gates can be used to tell a consumer that they will need to spend some
amount of money if they want to go further in the game. If done transparently, t
his is not coercive. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will just be on h
ow this can be layered to trick the consumer into spending on something they may
not have if they had been provided with complete information.
Now let's break progress gates into hard and soft types. A hard gate is one where yo
u cannot advance if you do not pay up. The central buildings in Zynga builder ty
pe games are a good example. All other buildings in a town/city/base are capped
by the level of the central building, forcing a hard progress gate. What makes t
his coercive is that the player is not told that if they pay through that gate t
hey will just be presented with another hard gate soon that will cost even more
money. Thus the consumer may assume they are getting more pain relief for their
money than they are.
A soft gate is one where the player can get past the gate, eventually. Clash of
Clans uses this type in making building times ever longer and allowing the user
to spend to complete them. This is a method presumably borrowed from games made
by Zynga, Kabam, Kixeye, and others since it is a common Facebook game conventio
n. In order to improve the efficacy of the soft gate, these games also make it s
o that resource generation in-game increases faster than the player's ability to
spend these resources (because building/spending takes so long). Thus these earn
ed resources are lost (taken away) if real money is not spent. This is a method o
f combining reward removal with a soft gate to increase the pain level while at
the same time layering, as the consumer may be gullible enough to assume these e
ffects are coincidental or due to some strategic misstep they took earlier.
Another novel way to use a progress gate is to make it look transparent, but to
use it as the partition between the skill game and the money game. Candy Crush S
aga employs this technique artfully. In that game there is a river that costs a ve
ry small amount of money to cross. The skill game comes before the river. A play
er may spend to cross the river, believing that the previous skill game was enjo
yable (it was for me) and looking to pay to extend the skill game. No such guara
ntee is given of course, King just presents a river and does not tell you what i
s on the other side. The money game is on the other side, and as the first payme
nt is always the hardest, those that cross the river are already prequalified as
spenders. Thus the difficulty ramps up to punishing levels on the far side of t
he river, necessitating boosts for all but the most pain tolerant players.
In the mobile version of CCS (which I did not test) a player does not need to sp
end money or "social currency" (friend invites) to progress past the gates. Ther
e is a "quest" option which acts as a soft pay gate. According to King.com, 70%
of all players who have completed the game have never made a currency payment.
Soft and Hard Boosts
The purpose of a money game is to promote Boost sales. Boosts that have an insta
nt one-time effect are soft Boosts. Those that stick around either forever or unti
l they are converted to something else are hard Boosts. The $1 un-defeat button in P
aD is a soft Boost, as are all of the power-ups sold in Candy Crush Saga. The ob
vious advantage of soft boosts is that you can keep selling them as long as the
player stays in the money game.
Hard Boosts include things like the random rare creatures that are sold in PaD for
$5 each. Having these in your stable effectively lowers the difficulty of the g
ame enough to allow you to get a little bit further with each purchase. A techni
que that is very popular in Asian games with hard Boosts (PaD included) is to al
low hard Boosts to be merged to allow for even bigger hard Boosts. This makes the
math involved in figuring out exactly how expensive a very high quality hard Boo
st will be, daunting. It may even be completely invisible to the consumer due to
the various drop %s being hidden. Thus the best hard Boosts in these games typi
cally cost thousands of dollars, a fact that is hidden to the user until they ar
e already invested for at least a few hundred dollars. This puts the consumer in
the difficult position of giving up and losing the equity already purchased, or
going all the way and spending some unknown large amount to get the top Boost. So
me of these techniques, sometimes called kompu gacha, are already facing regulatio
n in Asia due to their excessive layering and lack of transparency.
In money games that contain a social layer, this social layer is used as an adde
d incentive to show off your skills to other players that may still not realize th
ey are in a money game. This is the purpose of the mini-leaderboards in Candy Cr
ush Saga, to make it look like you need to try harder to beat your more skillful f
riends. Even the word-o-meter in Words with Friends can be considered a soft Boost
in a money game disguised as a skill game. This would, of course, depend on if
you considered it to give an advantage. If it didn't then why are people buying
it?
Ante Games
As described in detail in my How Pay to Win Works paper, the key to these games is
to start off with the appearance of a skill game and then shift to a multiplaye
r money game that I call an Ante game. The game could proceed as a skill game but
never does since once one player spends enough money it becomes a money game. At
some point players keep raising their antes, hoping that the other players will
fold. The winner (and loser) is the player that puts in the largest ante. It is n
ot unusual for winning antes to be over $5000, and some Asian game developers th
at make only ante games like IGG have VIP member sections that you have to spend $
3000+ per year for the top level of membership.
The target audience here tends to be non-hardcore competitive gamers who need th
e self esteem boost that comes with winning a skill game, and who for whatever r
eason never recognize the game as a money game. Some of my peers in the Asian ga
ming industry suggest that there this is merely a form of conspicuous consumptio
n. I would love to see some age demographics for these whales.
Last Thoughts
The above mechanics are not meant to be exhaustive, but give a basic overview of
key techniques used in coercive monetization model based games to defeat a cust
omer's ability to make informed choices about the costs and values in these prod
ucts. The more subtle the hand, and the more you can make your game appear to be
skill based the more effective these products will monetize. Currently I would
consider Puzzle and Dragons to be the state of the art. While it's gameplay mech
anisms are simplistic, the depth of its reward mechanisms and its adherence to m
ost of the best practices listed in my Supremacy Goods microeconomic model make
it quite elegant. Its fantastic use of reward removal in particular is quite imp
ressive.
While it is possible to make commercially competitive games without using coerci
ve methods, this is a lot more work. In the current market, especially with most
adults and children not familiar with the nature of these products, the environ
ment is still ripe for fast profits, and likely will continue to be so for a few
more years. Note that while these methods can be very successful with young and
inexperienced gamers, they find less success with older and more experienced ga
mers, and this population represents a group with potentially very large gaming
budgets.
Finally, I would like to relay that King.com feels that their use of data in the
ir game is for the purpose of "optimizing fun", not profits...
Original Article: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/194933
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