How to Design In-Game Purchases

alright hey everybody thank you all for coming this looks like a pretty packed room so I'm very excited to be here my name is Ethan levy and I'm here today to present designing in-game purchases so let me tell you a little bit about myself how's the volume by the way I good ok I flew in last night and I still can't hear out of one year so I'm a little worried might have trouble with questions but hopefully we'll get over that so anyways I've been working in the industry for 11 years I started here in Los Angeles where I was a student at USC fight on any other Trojans in the audience and I used to work at pandemic studios oh you go to UCLA I guess I used to work at pandemic studios for two years as an intern and an tester and I actually see the face of at least one person I used to fetch dinner for but in the past 11 years I've contributed to over 35 ship titles in some way shape or form I used to be a producer at EA Bioware's San Francisco office where I was the producer to the Dragon Age legends game and then the design manager of that studio I left about a year and a half ago to become to found a start-up which has since failed and I also like ascended into a career as a monetization consultant I've worked for 18 or 19 different clients on a lot of games free-to-play mostly mobile a little bit of gamification I don't know if you've seen any of my articles online but I'm also waging a war to be the most hated game designer on the Internet these are some of the comments from articles I've written about free-to-play on reddit or Kotaku we've got you are exactly the sort of person who are ruining gaming pure unadulterated to evil Ethan Levy you're a horrible person you're what's wrong with video games and my favorite one is this guy using the glee gif saying but I really hate the condescending offensive effete stereotypical San Francisco attitude I actually had to look up what effect means and apparently because I like working on free-to-play games it means it's time for me to talk to my doctor about cialis um anyways before I get started I like to ask what you would like to get out of this session and be a little loud because as I said I can't hear out of one year right now but you know you saw the title you maybe read the thing in the PowerPoint I've I have like eight hours worth of lecture on free-to-play so I want to make sure that I'm delivering the talk that you want obviously I can't change the slides but I can emphasize or de-emphasize skip over a certain part so what do you hope to get out of today's session got it so how does one design for free-to-play while avoiding the pay2win stigma so hate it out here in the US and Canada and it works pretty well out in China Taiwan and Asia in general got it so what sort of things should you have in your offer catalog got it so what are kind of the price ranges of items people are willing to pay for in the free-to-play game got it so as you have a live game and you operate it over time how can you make sure you're updating and intelligently and not ending up with a just horrible store catalog that actually happened to us on Dragon Age legends we had our store system had a pagination system on the bottom by the time we were live for six months there were like more dots than screen width it was a mess and no but somebody had to go through and actually call the the store of items that just weren't selling ah how do I win over the audience that thinks I'm the Antichrist I don't pay attention to them they're not going to spend money or actually there have been good studies that those people who rage about free-to-play actually also spend the most on free-to-play so I just ignore what they're saying and let the wallets do the talking um one more okay words of wisdom on managing in-game currency so I think you guys are going to be really happy with this session and maybe some of the things that aren't in here I can kind of address at the end with some QA so before I start let me just tell you a quick anecdote about Halloween so I was working downtown the day of Halloween and my fiance got home from her date eaching school and she texted me will you please pick up another bag of candy I'm worried although no one has come yet so she'd been there she wanted me to get another bag of candy we'd had no trick-or-treaters about an hour later when I was ready to go home she let me know that we still haven't had any trick-or-treaters we still had a full bowl of candy and I felt confident that I didn't need to buy another one now I live in San Francisco I live in an urban area where it's not mess I'm in a pretty nice neighborhood but it's not as clear-cut that you can knock on every door and so when I got home it made sense to me why no kids were knocking on the door our door was closed we had no decorations our light was kind of barely on so and we just had a completely full bowl of candy so I put on my Wario hat my Wario gloves and I sat out on the porch and within an hour we had an empty bowl of candy because I finally invited people to join with me in the ritual of enjoying Halloween and getting free candy and I got to meet some kids and see costumes it really made my night much better than sitting there wondering why no one's coming in and that may seem a little silly but this is the story that informs the entire talk when I play free-to-play games the thing that I see the most is that the game itself makes it very difficult if not impossible for a player to know that they can spend money and to spend money easily so the major theme of this talk is about how to make those players who are primed to actually want to spend money within your game how do you make it as easy for them as possible to be aware that those purchases exist and make it easy to make those purchases because those are the mistakes I see repeating over and over I'm going to cover four topics is my game a good fit for freemium is my design built for freemium am i selling the right things and what examples should I follow and for those that take pictures don't worry I'll put all this up on my website later this week famous aspect calm I'll put all the slides in the audio up and I've got slides of audio from previous talks and a lot of articles i've written on free-to-play topics and general game design topics first topic am I ready for microtransactions so the first three slides I stole from congregate they're one of the best freely available data sources on free-to-play game and they basically make the point that when you're making a free-to-play game a long term relationship with your player is the key driver of monetization so you need a game that somebody is going to play for weeks and weeks or months and months and not just a couple days or not just a couple sessions so this first chart kind of shows on the bottom axis the more engaged players are the more likely they are to spend money that's all um this one is really nice it shows kind of revenue breakdown by veteran c-type and basically what is it of players who've played 50 or more sessions across congregates free-to-play portfolio 16 percent of them 16 and a half percent of them have spent money and they account for 84 total percent of the total revenue of the game so that alone should convince you that when you're working on a free-to-play game your first order of business is actually to get a game that players will stay in for days and days and weeks and weeks and months and months not a game that has three or four sessions worth of gameplay and then no compelling reason to come back this one shows the number of sessions before the average player makes their first purchase for a multiplayer game it's an average of 23 game play sessions before a paying player makes their first purchase so all of that just goes to illustrate the point that you need to focus on a long term relationship with your player I like to break games down into their early game mid game and elder game and I'm clearly not the only person who talks about it this way but you need some sort of new early game that on boards players that teaches them how to play and holds their hand and teaches them where to spend money then you generally have a mid game where they're learning the ropes they're exploring on their own they might be playing a linear content and then some sort of Elder game it's really key if you can especially if you're in the more mid core range of free-to-play games that you launched with an Elder game one of the biggest mistakes that you can make is launching your game without some sort of mechanism to keep those players who play through all the linear content to keep them playing day after day in your game and not abandoning for somebody else's game generally this takes the form of some sort of social multiplayer either cooperative or competitive Elder game that ideally is infinitely repeatable or at least largely repeatable with some content that you update maybe once a week or once a month as I said great Elder games are social competitive infinitely replayable and involves some sort of social organism I'll talk a little bit about more about that later um so let's talk about the core loop is my game built for freemium so this is the single biggest place where I see missteps in the world of free-to-play games normally I draw out some core loop diagrams I've actually left them out of this this talk today basically it's a way of looking at what the main sections of your game are that's basically the path of least resistance a player will play over and over and over again if you watch players play your game you'll notice that some players do explore the different menus and look at all the different stuff but a lot of players don't a lot of players are afraid of veering off the beaten path or they're not really interested and so it's really important to look at your game through the eyes of what is the path of least resistance for a new player so let me look at two on two games both of which I really like but one feels like purchasing is very present and one feels like purchasing is not present and that's kind of like my big mantra make purchasing present so major mayhem published by Adult Swim games is great like I really love it it's a lot of fun but it's one of those games where I play for like two hours and I go oh you never asked me for money like not once did you ask me for money or even make it clear that I could spend money so the game starts I'm major mayhem I'm helicoptering in it's loading the level and I copter down and I go it's a shooting gallery game it's really nice appealing graphics lots of fun for me it's like a very gratifying experience because when I play Borderlands I like to be a sniper and this just gives me kind of the bite-sized headshot experience that I love now sometimes when I'm playing it'll pop up this little message try out a new weapon from the Armory and if I'm a curious player I can actually pause the game and go to the store and buy that weapon but this is a popup message in the middle of a game where I'm really focusing my eyes and my attention on this ninjas and this is the only time it makes it clear that oh I can go to a store and buy new weapons when I finish a level I get to the chopper it shows me my results it shows me how I proceed on the objectives and and I immediately load into the next level not once do I see the ability to go to a store it doesn't prompt me to spend money and I could like I loved this game I had a lot of fun but as I said I spent four I played a couple hours without once even being aware that the ability to spend money was within this gate now contrast that to Despicable Me minion rush which I just played for the first time this week and I thought it would be like another meaty Runner and it's it's a really kind of best-in-class example of a runner game it's really very good they've done a great job so I'm sure you've all played some form of infinite runner whether it's temple run running with friends or any of the other ones on the App Store so they do a great job of immersing you in this world of the minions of Despicable Me they really sell the narrative and at the beginning of each level my minion kind of runs in to the level and while he's in it's not interactive except you can see down on the bottom I can spend my premium currency or this is my earned currency first on a boost it actually serves it to me in the first 20 seconds of the level with some nice time pressure and then it also gives me the ability to spend my earned currency meanwhile this is like a small portion of the screen while I'm like watching my goofy minion run and catapult into the level and then I do my infinite running and here I've actually smacked another minion and gotten a despicable bonus and at the end of the level purchasing I you know I hit a truck I hit the glass and here purchasing is present again I have a nice little time pressure and I can revive for 20 coins and continue my run if I'm having a good one this is a trend you'll notice and a lot of new free-to-play games especially the more casual leaning ones that if you lose the level you can spend a small amount of premium currency to continue that run that may be a little too much for some people you know that's up to your choice I haven't seen any metrics on any of these games with this feature so I don't know how much it hurts doesn't hurt yet I hope to in the next six to nine months but just the main concept is every time I run in Despicable Me I'm offered the ability to spend my currency contrast that to major mayhem where I can spend hours playing without ever once knowing that I can spend my currency so it's just important to examine your games core loop examine your path of least resistance and ask yourself our players given the ability to spend money if they wanted to do so let's talk a little bit about the offer catalog and what the things you have for sale are my other new mantra is that purchase a purchase makes a promise if somebody spends money on your game you have promised them future fun and if you don't deliver on that promise then they will quit your game and go play another game and they might even leave you a bad review so think about what you are selling somebody when you are selling them an in-game purchase it's my opinion that if you're selling them the ability to get over to get over a frustration hurdle you are more likely to turn that loot user than to keep them for the long term and in general if somebody spends money they better have a great time in your game Kingdom Rush is a great series I'll talk about it twice in this talk they sell gems and in the first one you can use gems to build get consumable items that help you win levels now I played for I I bought this game it's a it's a premium game with in-app purchases and I bought it and I spent hours playing it and I got to a level that was a little too hard and I'm one of those time poor money rich players I have infinitely more money to spend on games than I have time to play them if you look at my Steam library I think I've purchased about 400 games and I've played maybe a hundred twenty of them and I still buy games like I don't know why I do it it makes no sense but I'm a money rich time poor player and so when I get to a level where I'm frustrated it's not that the level is cheating me at no point in Kingdom rush did I feel like I was being milked in some games I think for me candy crush makes me feel like this level is impossible like this level is physically impossible unless I play it a hundred times and I get that one random lucky level Kingdom rush I played it it's like the levels a little too hard I value my time I spent my money on a consumable item and I can remember the feeling in Doom the first time that I opened up the command line and typed in the god code and I could walk through walls and I had the rocket launcher and I was like yes I am so powerful and Kingdom rush made me feel that way it like brought back that joy of like I've been struggling and like just barely winning by the skin of my teeth for hours and then now I've spent money and I feel awesome and when I was done using my premium currency I actually bought more premium currency because I had so much fun spending the got you know hitting the god button and I only had that fun because I could contrast it to the experience I had for the first four hours where I was you know struggling and just barely winning and losing some levels so it was that emotional difference that really made me feel like I was awesome but the the larger point is if you're selling somebody something if you're considering putting something in your store not try and think about what that player is truly buying if they are buying that item and it ought to be in my opinion more fun um crossing the penny gap so um a starter pack can be a really effective way to ask for money um a lot of what I do when I work on games is tell people that it's okay to ask for money like I feel like when people hire me they just hire me so I can give them permission to say hi player will you please spend money in this game I've spent hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars working on starter packs can be really nice because what you can do is provide a great value at a huge discount this is card hunter which is a really nice free-to-play game on the browser right now it does a great job of fictionalizing everything like the premium currency is pizza and when you're playing D&D at a table with miniatures like I actually have the D&D experience I never had as a kid playing this game because my group of friends was too emotionally volatile and we could go an hour without someone crying we were bad at the indie so um this game so you've been playing for a while and the pizza girl shows up and she delivers pizza and that's what introduces you to pizza slices which is the premium currency and your character has a crush on the cue pizza girl it's really funny and it really like made me feel immersed in the world but when I go to the store right here basic Edition $25 and it shows me all the things I get you know I get a hundred pizza slices I get all the access to all the levels I get one month club membership they could do a better job of explaining in the screen what club membership is but another point they explained to me the incredible value of being part of the club and what I love about this screen is that it's on the pay wall if I go to the pay wall and I haven't bought the starter pack I see the option and I see a really nice advertisement to buy this starter pack and I've heard from at least one game developer friend when I was discussing this game he's the sort who works on free-to-play but never spends money and free-to-play which I'm sure a lot of you are and he told me this the first game that got him over the hurdle it was this starter pack um the other thing I like about starter packs is that if you're a game that's very shy about asking for money this gives you the ability to ask for money I generally recommend somewhere in the first couple hours of your games popping up in the advertisement for your starter pack maybe five to eight times if somebody seen it eight times and they haven't bought it they're not going to buy it so stop advertising it it's just going to annoy them um I always caution that you have to be really respectful of the player like a long-term player relationship is the most important thing it's more important than any short-term revenue gains you could get this is a game called call of mini infinity and I think this developer has other games that are in the top 500 grossing that are just masters of SEO search terms like call of mini infinities is for SEO like a brilliantly devious game this is the second screen the game showed me I've never seen anything in the game I've never played the game I'm not even looking at a menu and it offers to sell me the starter pack of course I'm not going to buy it like this is a very poorly placed advertisement now I did a live game before I know how this sort of thing happens this happens because on your game team you don't test the experience as a new user over and over and over again and you introduced features post-launch so what I assume happened is post-launch they introduced a starter pack they put in a pop-up trigger for all players who have never seen this trigger buy the starter pack well find a new player I'm seeing this with absolutely no context and I'm never going to buy it and I already get the feeling this is one of those slimy games that's trying to milk me it's a fun game but it's just like you tell the play or something every time you ask them for money um there's a danger to selling linear content in your game this is bloons tower defense for a great game very fun and also like a top grossing game so obviously they didn't they didn't fall into the trap I talked about but it's just a good screenshot for they're selling levels and the danger of selling levels is that you sell levels after somebody has played all your previous levels so if you have a ridiculously sticky game like Angry Birds selling levels can be Bonanza business but this is fake metrics from almost every level based game I've worked on I've worked on some level based games a diner - series has incredible stickiness they do not have that or when I worked on them years ago did not have this sort of player attrition but in general like your curve looks like this so if you're only selling players levels at the end of your experience you're selling to 2% of your total audience there's nothing wrong with selling linear content but it can't be the only thing you sell if it's the only thing you sell you're really limiting the potential pool of players and so generally in a free-to-play game you're going to see drop-off in the first 5 to 15 minutes and you can optimize that drop-off but it's inevitable you're going to lose players but after that after that time you want to make sure that you are offering players at every level the ability to spend money in your game you don't want to be selling to only a small fraction of your audience um some games sell permanent Goods some games sell consumable goods I like to make sure that games have a blend of the two and I really push for consumable goods and consumable goods tied into that core loop it depends on the economy of the game so like Despicable Me you do not spend any currency in order to run you can run forever for free and play forever for free in a game like backyard monsters you are spending currency every time you play the game right I spend resources to make units I spend units to play the tower offense game I spent and currency to play the tower defense game everything I'm doing involves spending currency and it's all tied nicely into my core loop a danger a lot of games make is that they have consumable purchases but they're either not tied into that core loop or they're like really hidden within the game they're not surfaced very well in a way that like Despicable Me they make it really easy to pay um a lesson I like to talk about from Dragon Age legends is we sold 13 dollar swords and the first day we put 13 dollar swords in if I remember correctly we had a bonanza day like it was the best sales day we had had in the live operation that game and so we put in more high-priced items and players like dumb players were happy with the purchases but the thing we discovered a couple months down the line excuse me was that if a player had purchased a 13 dollar sword at level 8 it was so powerful they didn't need to buy another $13 sword to level 40 and even then they maybe didn't have to and a lot of players did not make it that far into the game because we did a really poor job of managing the linear content we didn't have an elder game players were always playing our content faster than we could deliver it to them and we didn't have something and we just lost users and so it's my opinion that had we sold a equally powerful sword that you got to use 4-5 battles for a quarter we would have made significantly more revenue off of that concept than off of the $13 permanent items so it's not to say don't sell permanent things within your game but it's just to say there's a danger and there's a balance and in general I lean on that consumable side of the economy and a little bit away from the permanent goods economy unless your game has a unique economy system to bring up Kingdom rush again something that a lot of games don't do is offer something that you can buy for money like they have their currency packages right Here I am buying gems I tried to buy something for five hundred and I need to buy more gems but what Kingdom rush also has is heroes that I can buy for dollars and a lot of games only sell premium currency packages and don't have items that you can only buy directly for cash which is something you can do now on the App Store and on the on Google Play and what I like about that is that you know it's my opinion as a designer that there's no such thing as a perfectly balanced economy like you can do your best and if you're monitoring with metrics you can catch exploits as soon as you put them in but you're more likely than not to slip up to make it easy for players to grind for currency in some sort of fashion or in general to make it the players I mean you actually want to make it the players don't have to spend money that if they're really dedicated to your game they can get everything for free so this is why I like to tell people that it's good that if your game supports it to offer something that you can buy only directly for dollars and if you look at top grossing items on top in app purchases on Kingdom rush frontiers it's not currency packages it's heroes so luxury items this is an extreme example I think the majority of games cannot support justifiably a $500 gun but one of the biggest things I tend to work on with developers is asking them and telling them to raise their prices and generally offer things that cost more a friend of mine worked on a game called the less sorry trying to record it so I can put the slides up later a friend of mine works on a game called blastin dead zone he gave a talk at the flash game summit and after about a year of live operation of a free-to-play social MMO the biggest lesson he learned was that in pricing when you're introduced an item start much higher than you think is reasonable and in terms of item power start much lower than you think is reasonable and then adjust until you're happy with the sales numbers that it wasn't until he started operating in that fashion that he started to feel like he was getting the amount of revenue he needed from his free-to-play items so I don't think you should be go like the lesson isn't go sell $500 items but it is don't be afraid of charging $7 for something don't only charge $7 for something but don't be afraid of it don't be afraid of charging $20 for something if you think your game can justify it if your item can deliver enough value these sorts of high priced items I think work better on the more mid core games targeted at the male gamer a little older a little in the you know 18 to 35 and up range you know I don't think $500 purchase has a place in Sonic - or my little ponies rusher you know more kid focused games similarly really do a lot of analysis on on your offer wall and look at other games in the space and analyze kind of what their packages are what price points they're selling it and what the volume discounts they're offering are it's a general practice that the more money somebody spends the more currency you get for free the thing that I've learned is that let's say you're working on a very casual focused slot mechanic game those games give like 10,000 free currency relative to the base package for a hundred dollar package like they really either have to or want to deliver a lot of value to get someone who spent a lot of money whereas a more core focused game like a clash of clans I think they give about a 30% 30% free volume you know free currency they're more high-priced package a lot of developers that I tend to work with you know they think of their pricing as relative to other items on the app store and so when they first show me their offer wall it's like $1 $2 $3 $7 and I try and push them up I try and push them to like the $3 to $20 range not all games can support $100 worth the value but in general you can probably support somewhere in the 10 to 20 dollar range and don't if somebody's in the store and they're looking at a $1 game versus a $3 game next to each other that's a meaningful comparison if they're caught within your world they're in a monopoly they're no longer pricing games relative to games on the CMAs or or other games on the App Store they're pricing their packages relative to each other and so it's okay to ask for more money and so really just kind of look at top performers in in your audience in your genre there are a lot of good metrics you can look at you can look at their store you can look at their price points you can then go into Apple and look at their top-selling items and see which packages are selling the best and try and figure out how their discounts and how like all these badges best value popular how these free items how do they actually affect the sales and in general what you'll find is that these packages have a way you try and kind of anchor somebody on a price like if I look at this card hunter thing this $50 package was selected by default when I got there and it's not because they're trying I mean they are trying to get me to sell the premium package but it's my hypothesis that what this does is that it makes this 20 dollar package look a lot more attractive than if I had no package selected by default or if I had the $10 package selected by default they're trying to anchor me at a price point to make other price points look more attractive so that's kind of my take on on how I analyze various price points casual games have to give away more currency mid core games can give away less currency you could maybe Intuit from that that mid core games are delivering more game value for the currency that somebody's spending let's talk about some ui/ux best practices what are the things the steps that I see that I think people most commonly skip first one is to teach players to spend a lot of games don't ever show you where you have to go to spend money and they also don't necessarily show you the value of spending money and I'm talking about your in-game currency here so this is Batman Arkham origins you might have seen I did an analysis piece on Arkham origins versus injustice gods among us recently on game industry international just talking about how Batman doesn't sell as much stuff as injustice and for two similar games one is injustice is still performing better than the newer game with the better intellectual property so if you find that interesting it's a good piece that's out there something Batman does do very well is it teaches me how to spend my currency and it doesn't in a narrative fashion that I find really nice so Alfred talks to me he shows me to go to the store this is something I've noticed recently actually in a lot of games is that I hate the overly guided tutorial where it just shows you bouncing arrow after bouncing arrow on screens that you have no context in my personal behavior as a player is I just like press all the buttons as quickly as possible and I'm seeing some head shake so I bet you all do too this is much nicer in my opinion which is that they show you the same thing which is the arrow but they also give you the information as to why you're pressing the button and I feel like this is a much more player focused approach the overly guided tutorial I feel like is the product manager like you're actually optimizing for a metric but forgetting about your players this feels much nicer so this tells me basically go to the store you can buy bat suits ask me to confirm my purchase I have my bat suit and it asked me to equip it and then it takes me into combat pretty nice and simple and what's nice about that is that it teaches me where I go to spend my currency and what I get what my options are and how I exit out you'd be surprised at how many games never show you where you go to spend currency I I go back to major mayhem that's one of my biggest gripes with that game is a free-to-play guy is that like it never takes me to the store tells me to buy sniper rifle and then shows me how awesome I am afterwards like when I did that I felt great like I had a lot more fun once I had the sniper rifle equipped so teach do you have a question uh-huh yeah yeah yeah and I think you guys did a great job like the onboarding process in Arkham origins relative to injustice and relative to a lot of games is really phenomenal I think hats off to you basically it's a great great first time user experience okay first taste is always free this is from CSR classic and this is a lesson that from CSR I I've been saying this in conferences for a year and a half and I'm really surprised more games don't do this so it's even better in CSR classic but Here I am with my beat-up classic car and like the game is all about restoring classic cars to their former glory like it really does a good job of tailoring the experience to an audience so here I am in my totally beat up janky looking car and very early on it introduces me to my favorite feature in the game which is this daily battle three times a day I get a loaner car and the loaner cars are what they sell for premium and earn currency this is where they make their money is on selling premium cars and so three times a day every day I get to see what it's like to play with a shiny new hot better car like here I am with my POS car and here I am three times a day it lets me know what it would be like if I spent money and it gives me a reason to come back every day which is really a nice added bonus and so I'm really surprised that more games don't take this tactic of having a battle arena or having I don't know just something where every day you have a reason to come back and you get a taste of what it's like if you were a player who spent money it delivers value for free players and it will also hopefully get some players off the hump and teach them why it's important to spend money if you have a competitive game where you're earning premium currency I think it's important to level the playing field now as somebody asked before about pay to win and in my opinion if you have a free to play game unless you are not selling items that impact game purchases it's impossible to completely alleviate the stigma of pay to win what it is possible to do is kind of Douce the impact of it and one way is through those social organizations I talked about before you can let more high-level players or rich players help poor players another thing you can do is give players a path to earn plenty of premium currency clash of clans I think does one of the best jobs of earning of giving out premium currency while teaching players actions that are beneficial to the game a lot of games give one or two for like leveling up so last night I played the new Deer Hunter game which is well done but really weird like it's it it kind of glorified shooting a deer in a way of it like I play tons of games where I shoot guys in the face and I have no problem with the slow-motion head explode but like when it's a cute deer it's totally weird for me but so every time you level up you get like one currency and then or no you get it's maybe one or two no it's one and then you go to the store and a gun cost 99 and it's like I'm never going to grind I mean some players are going to grind until they hit 99 to buy the sniper rifle but the Gulf air is so wide whereas clash of clans starts you with 500 premium currency and then they give you the opportunity to earn a lot while also teaching you the game so this is something that I think can help it helps smooth out because it helps give those free players a taste but so look for ways to do this look for ways to give you know level the playing field it's never going to be completely level and you know if you go with the game that completely avoids pay2win unless you're a unicorn like League of Legends is a unicorn idea in theoretically all champions are equal but my champion that I've purchased may give me an advantage over this weeks free champion so that's not a pay to win model it's just like paying for my preference but they are the outlier they are like the 99.9 percent Isle and what they do isn't going to work for most games so you're probably going to have to do some pay to win games unless you build one of the best games in the world so that's just a little takeaway there um advertise your goods like there's nothing wrong with showing players the ability to spend money Fairway Solitaire I love I think it's a great solitaire game that takes kind of the golf theme and it's a really fun game they do a good job of just like minion rush offering you the ability to spend money in the play field and then on the main menu right there $0.99 buy the whole thing so they give you a couple hours of content for free like it takes you probably two or three hours to play through all the free levels they give you a daily course that you can come back and play every day for free and when you're in the menus you see the ability to spend $1 to unlock the rest of the levels like this is this is go straight back to Halloween open the door make it easy for your players to spend money in your game um games are more fun with friends in general now that we're moving more and more away from the social realm and more into the mobile realm you know it may be like I feel like I remember stat on bejeweled blitz maybe 20 or 25% of their players signed in with Facebook but those players who do see social pressure every week they see other player scores and the whole incentive to spend money in that game is to earn a higher score and so if you see all their players scores you get some social pressure there was some research published by TinyCo last year that Facebook users are 60% more likely to be pale payers in their game now obviously correlation doesn't mean causation maybe people who are more likely to spend are also more likely to engage with their friends but in general I think you can prove that social structures and social pressure can do a lot to influence a player to spend money in a game and that there's a lot of value to asking somebody to spend money and asking someone to engage with their friends and giving them some insight into how their friends are scoring and where they're at their game introducing some competition um I talked before about the importance of an elder game and life is crime by red robot labs really emphasizes how important this can be and how impactful can it can be at GDC online last year Pete Hawley who's their chief of product I think at red robot Labs talked about this game it's a mafia war style game with location-based elements so we could fight to be a the king of El Cholo down the street which is my I love El Cholo I'm going there tomorrow night the best but if I really loved El Cholo I can fight to be the king of my office or the king of the school that's that's an activity they see a lot is people fighting to be on the top of the chart for their favorite coffee shop or their school and um six months into the game they released gang warfare and Pete said that totally revolutionized their game it instantly tripled player retention and doubled revenue six months post launched with the single feature they threw out their entire product roadmap and focused everything else they were doing on this game versus gang warfare and I know that every person who's in here operating a free-to-play game would love to triple their retention and double their revenue with one feature like that's what we're all doing you almost never get the Silver Bullet right like you launched your live game and maybe you're you're making money and you're like a really hit game but I think the more common experiences you launch your game you're doing alright and you keep launching feature after feature hoping for the Silver Bullet for them the social gang-on-gang warfare was a silver bullet and if you look at midcourt games like I think it's this social competition and these social organisms that really convince players to spend in big numbers a final note I'll make is on optimizing the path to purchase this is tiny castle this is a game I worked on and worked on the combat system on this game these screenshots are really old so for all I know they've changed this completely because they're really good product management driven organization they update their games all the time but while we were in the run-up to launch I I noticed ok let's say I wanted to spend money in the game if I want to spend premium currency Here I am I'm about to upgrade my bank so I clicked my bank I get this green I spend my earned currency that's clicked number two I have to place my I bank because it no longer fits in the previous spot that's clicked number three if I wanted to spend premium currency I have to know that I can click my bank again click number four to see this button finish instantly so clicking that is clicked number five click number six finally finish six clicks in plus knowledge I had to already acquire to know that I could spend premium currency like this is the whole point to get somebody to spend their premium currency so they hopefully buy more contrast that to backyard monsters unleashed recently released by Kixeye if I want to upgrade my Katri I click to select it I click this little upgrade button that's two and then three right here I'm given the option here it's 1500 ones and 15 minutes that's what it'll cost if I want to upgrade my resources right next to that completed instantly premium currency button and what's great about this is that if you play backyard monsters in a normal session you will see the ability to spend money over and over and over again right it's not in your face it's not blocking your progress it's not an annoying pop-up they're just making the ability to purchase present they're making the path to spending that premium currency very clear how many people have ever run a banner advertisement on the web right you know that it takes thousands and thousands of impressions of an advertisement to get one person to click at once and then they jet out of your website in like two seconds anyways but I have a theory that operating a free-to-play game is very similar you need to generate lots and lots of impressions of the ability to spend money in order to convince people to convert to a payer if nothing else mobile gaming is about short sessions and it's about moan treadmill and it's about making things very very easy mobile gaming is Comfort gaming if you look at where people are playing these games they're playing on the couch maybe while watching TV they're playing in bed first thing they do when they get up in the morning or thing they do to unwind when they are going to sleep they play on the toilet let's not pretend people don't play on the toilet so hopefully you can take the lessons from this talk and use them to make it easy then when someone's in bed or someone's on the that they can spend five dollars in your game and have a great time doing it so this is me you can email me follow me on Twitter I have plenty of articles previous talks and other things on the blog on my website so please get in touch and with that I'll open the door Florida questions it's a small room but please use the mic because I'm really having trouble hearing today [Applause] anybody you mentioned the so you can turn it up first you know the games making a lot of money so do we know that whether people are making that we can I mean it's chart position is crazy so we can assume that that overall their UI is really great and I think they do a good job of allowing you to spend money so clearly they're selling things that players want I was just using that as an example of if you're one of those free players who's never going to spend their price in the amount of premium currency they give away is almost prohibitive to ever making a purchase sorry my sinuses are really giving me trouble today I'm really sorry about that so the ice was you offering up as cash cash as opposed to in-game currency do you think they need to be consumable or do you think they need to be permanent oh um so going the kingdom rush example and if somebody is spending straight cash and your money they should be getting something of value so like that's in Kingdom rush you're buying heroes that make the game significantly easier and I think that's a good model I mean I could there's no reason not to run the experiment but if I had to guess if somebody is spending straight money and it's not on a currency package it should be on something permanent that significantly boosts their experience right well in candy crush yeah that's true in candy crush you can spend 4 levels but you can spend 4 a lot of things let's assume that my what oh so the if I understand the question your game is infinitely replayable like it's an infinitely replayable so in the question then was what sort of Elder game do I need you don't you actually [Music] what should be your early game okay so if you have a game that is a kind of an elder game only game and there are plenty of examples of that for example bejeweled blitz I would say is an elder game only like there's no difference it's just an infinitely repeatable action so what should be my early game I would suggest some sort of onboarding process that allows the player to fail in a controlled environment my personal experience as a gamer is that if I go into a multiplayer game and I lose instantly my resources are stolen by some high-level player or like again back to call of mini infinity launch into a level instantly get shot it shows you the gun like somebody shot me with a seven dollar gun like my first experience so if you have a social only game you're onboarding process should probably be something that allows the player to learn the ropes in a controlled environment and allows him or her to fail in a safe way without feeling like they're just getting destroyed I wrote an article on League of Legends recently somebody said it took them a week as a seasoned player it took them a week of practice before they were able to play like in any sort of decent fashion now as I said League is a unicorn it can get away with that but if you're trying to compete with League and that's your first time user experience you're you're never going to take their users away oh thank you let's say thank you for the great talk I really appreciate it you touched on this briefly but I would like to hear sort of a deeper analysis of it as far as like the whales or the the high-value users in your opinion does it hurt or help you from a revenue standpoint long term to have the 200 the 500 the $1,000 item I've heard of both ways where some people say why not have it because someone will buy it and if one person buys it then it's worth it but I would be more interesting the counter-argument of I see that and that upsets me or that pisses me off that you think you can get away with that right so the the question in a nutshell is if I'm selling luxury goods am i afraid that how do I do it in a way that doesn't scare players off basically so you can know that the vast majority of your audience on any free-to-play game probably 98 percent or more are never going to give you a dollar and so rightly so if they see in the store an item for sale for 20 50 $100 it may injure them and more make them more likely to leave the game so what I would recommend and and I've recommended this experiment to somebody who had a mature live game and I haven't followed up to know if you ran or not but don't show those items until somebody spent money if somebody's never spent money hide items in the store that cost more than X dollars right like don't show the $500 item similarly so like I know that people who again from last stand dead zone people who have bought the hundred dollar package have bought it multiple times they're very happy with their purchase so if somebody buys the hundred dollar package that's when it's okay to make a $250 package available to them because they're the type of player who might like it so just be intelligent just run a really intelligent store and don't show people things that are going to anger them if they're that sort of player that that would be my advice that's the experiment I would like to run how much time left you okay so the question is kind of what is my opinion on pay2win do I think opinions of gamers will change in the u.s. over time so yeah one thing at a high level I I'm sure everybody knows it but like in general Asian markets don't have any problem with pay2win mechanics that's what all their games are like or that's what they're used to out here we have and in the the let's call the the British colonized country so America New Zealand Australia Canada Ireland you're you're going to get more resistance on pay2win more and more studies show out that come that we're kind of dealing with a very vocal minority there like there was a great story there was a great GDC presentation by Ben cousins on Battlefield Heroes years ago where they did a study and the people on the forums who complained the most about pay2win mechanics also spent the most money and that's there was another study recently they kind of confirmed that sort of thing so I actually don't think it's where it really hurts you is in your customer ratings because your star rating really affects whether or not someone is going to download your game um I do think in general over time the gamers right now who are being raised on free-to-play games who are probably never going to buy a Playstation 4 like the eight-year-old playing Smurfs village is probably never going to own a dedicated gaming console he might I hope he does I love my console games but I think as we age it'll be more and more of a minority and it'll be the most vocal minority but that really has an issue with it but in general my philosophy is like it's all about a long-term player relationship so if you're pay to win mechanics churn your users if they do things that make it more likely than that for your player to quit then they're going to hurt you in the long run even if you might see short-term revenue it's really that if you can have a game with an 18 or a 36 month relationship with a player that's where you're really going to be making a lot of money and making someone feel great they love your game anybody else all right thank you so much for your time I really appreciate [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 48,317

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: vc2oNgRPTR0

Length: 57min 10sec (3430 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/jack121013]

Cool video, very informative. Also, very sad that the state of mobile gaming is more or less manipulating the playerbase to encourage spending and taking advantage of the sunk cost fallacy. Why can't we just set out to make great games? (Oh ya, $$$$$$$)

[u/Joker41NAM]

Note that this talk is from 2013; CG obviously listened.

[u/Hermitthedruid]

Very informative, thank you.

[u/queyew]

He is absolutely right. People who really hate the game quit. People who love to hate the game spend.

[u/PalpatineForEmperor]

Thanks, I hate it.

[u/rockseiaxii]

A lot has evolved with mobile games since this. On top of that, the guy in the video has only worked with mildly successful mobile games, not the big hits that domniate the market today. The problem with CG is that they haven't adopted methods that other successful games have introduced.

Although this game does make a decent amount of money, I believe SWGoH could have done better if they had introduced tactics that Asian game companies use to avoid user fatigue (which results in extremely loyal players quitting).

[u/imnotsteve74]

Holy shit. I just started watching this, but I think this is probably a resource that everyone that comes on this board should take the time to watch. I think....But right off the bat before he even starts he pretty much just shuts down any of the opinions on most of the people in this sub. And basically like your title says, just ignore them and watch the money flow.

EDIT: This guy is so boring and also not funny, but at the very least this video should make 2 things clear. 1. Games are created to make money and 2. Most of the people that complain are in the minority and probably spend the most money.