The Top Free-to-Play Monetization Tricks | Hacker News Reader

The Top Free-to-Play Monetization Tricks

gamasutra.com

76 pointsadambratt39 comments

These "techniques" are incredibly frustrating to discover for all the gamers who are not likely to fall into these traps. Granted, those are the ones being actively filtered out of the user base for the most part, be it through choice of subject matter or game mechanics - but since these things have become so widespread I became wary of trying out new games in the App Store in general.

The last time I made an in-app purchase was for Elder Sign: Omens, a very simple game of chance that I like primarily because it reminds me so much of the fun I had playing the Arkham Asylum board game. Anyway, they offer a straight deal: a fixed sum (no intermediate currency) for additional content. That's it and I feel comfortable and justified buying that even though it's not a challenging or elaborate game.

I would never buy stuff if a game uses any of the shady tricks described in the article, but what's really poisoning the pool for all game developers is my increasing unwillingness to invest time into games that I don't already know in order to avoid that sort of disappointment. So what they're really doing is ruining it for everyone in the long run.

Maybe straight-up, no-tricks games should have a seal or something ;)

That sounds more like DLC than pay to win. I'm totally okay with it in games. There's a number of games (the most notable is GTA IV in my eyes) that have DLC content that adds a LOT of extra time and fun to the game.

But it can be done wrong to. That's the reason I won't buy BF4. They are intent on releasing DLC before the game. That's just shady and it doesn't add anything to the game.

This is done trickingly in recent games via DLC. The DLC will give some "boosts" like an item that is a bit more powerful than anything you can get early on. It won't tip the end-game but it will tip the early game. Just better enough to make you spend an extra 5 bucks on your 60 dollar purchase.

They do, it's called the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=nintendo+seal+of+quality&tbm...

It used to be that we could say "No pay to win" to indicate that the game didn't use this kind of bullshit.

Unfortunately that term was stolen and repurposed in to an effective lie. "It's not pay to win. The players choose if they want to pay with time or with money." Complete garbage.

More recently we use the term "Ethical microtransactions" because it implies strongly that we are free of the scummy tactics.

I firmly believe that if you don't separate the game design and the business model in to two distinct systems then your game design will be corrupted by it.

> Maybe straight-up, no-tricks games should have a seal or something ;)

A website that curates lists of such games would probably be very popular. Especially if it cross references with other games that make extensive use of the unpleasant monetization techniques.

A benevolent dictator would be more useful than a community run site, unless there were standards and moderation. The Usenet group alt.comp.freeware spawned the website Pricelessware.org. Being Usenet there were frequent bitter angry flamewars about what counted as "freeware". (This was entirely about the monetary cost of the software, and not about open source or other rights.)

This whole 'pay-to-win' thing has made the free to play games go downhill in quality so much in the app store. I don't download free games anymore because I know the majority of them will bombard me with push notifications and 'incentives' to get me to cough up £19.99 for some magic keys.

Here's a novel idea: Charge me £4.99 for the game and let me play it. I don't mind paying for a decent quality game. I would rather pay for a game than download a free one that's unplayable without a tonne of in app purchases.

Unfortunately, most people do mind. That's why this stuff is so rampant. As the article says, when it comes down to paying, people will see £4.99 listed as a price and decide "nah, I have this other game I tried that I can still pay". No sale. However if the price says 'free', people click the install button and think "I'll give this a try later".

Basically, you are still in the minority, and most people do not shell out £4.99 for a phone game. They do, however, shell out 5 crystals for an extra rope so that they can "just beat this stage already"!

It's terrible and preys on human failings. The people who are most likely to fall for this are the people who are least likely to be able to afford to pay the rent. The free escape into a world where they can have positive reinforcement from daily troubles is now giving them negative reinforcement until they pay up. Capitalism is fairly cruel.

It really is a shame and it's a symptom of the whole 'race to the bottom' that goes on in the app store. In a way, I see why people put these practices in place. You can't charge over a certain amount (as you said) without bombing in sales. In reality some of these games need a lot of work to get the out the door. I'm aware of a few app store games that took months of a full studio's time to release. Yet still, people see it's over £0.69 and say 'Nah, that little game isn't worth it.'

It's because the app store is an extraordinarily poor discovery mechanism for games if they aren't free - people won't pay for something they can't tell if they will enjoy, and app stores simply don't provide enough information to answer that question.

The app stores are extremely poor discovery mechanisms, full stop.

I won't develop mobile software unless I know there's an alternate marketing channel.

I do believe there's money to be made, but the way to reach people isn't through the store.

This, is basically I always think whenever I see these F2P games.

It's just so frustrating that I can't just pay for the game -- it is getting worse the point that if you don't get those in-app purchases, then these obnoxious ads start popping up on me (I guess to offset the cost that I'm not paying to get their coins or whatever), which basically does not motivate me to buy stuff, rather it just goes straight to uninstall...

Maybe I'm getting old...

What's interesting and gruesome about the "free-to-play" (F2P) game market is this:

Game companies can extract the most money from players if they exploit patterns of human dependence and addiction. An understanding of techniques for creating addiction is---in fact---a competitive advantage.

They're just like casinos in that respect. The worst part is that some people are very vulnerable to these kinds of tactics, often the people who can least afford it.

On the other hand, reinforcement learning requires systems of rewards - meaning that the games do provide something that is intrinsically valuable to the players (i.e. they must enjoy the game or they wouldn't get "addicted" to it).

How could you clearly tell the difference between a game that has been designed to maximise player enjoyment and a game that has been designed to exploit human addiction? What kind of legislation could be used to protect players? Personally I don't know, I think it's a fascinating subject though.

This makes casino look much better then...

With casinos, at least you can convert in-store purchase back to real currency...

Not only you can't do that with in-app-purchase, it often won't survive game uninstall/reinstall, let alone renewing to new device...

an unintended side effect (perhaps) might be that the F2P industry sucks away real talent that could've been working on actual contributions to the gaming genre. Imagine if there is a limit on developer talent/creativity, and that instead of being spent on creating psychological manipulations, they spent their efforts on pushing the boundaries of a genre. How much better off would it be, if there were more games like braid, or FTL, etc, instead of yet another junk game with In-App-Purchases. I m hoping the indie scene will revive creative gaming.

Required reading for anyone who has children and indeed for anyone making purchases of any kind, anywhere.

The Behavioural economics page on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_economics is a little dry but a good source of references. I can only claim to be somewhat (vaguely) aware of the subject but having a good introduction from TFA certainly kicked my critical thinking skills out of their complacency.

On a related note, for anyone interested in this, I recommend reading "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely[1]. He does actual studies and discusses a lot of these things (bias to loss aversion, change in behaviour when 1-layer detached from cash) and more.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...

Interesting stuff. Everything there is straight out of basic behavioural economics. One technique I didn't see mentioned is intermittent rewards. Basically, if you are only rewarded some of the time for performing an action you're more likely to repeat than if you're rewarded every time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_rein... It's the basic mechanism that drives grinding in games like WoW.

Now the big question is, how better games ("skill games") be monetised? Nobody really wants to play manipulative games, but it's not clear to me how you can effectively monetise free-to-play. Any ideas?

On OP's topic, another trick, used very effectively in League of Legends, is to mismatch the cost of store items and the premium currency (in-game cash equivalent). $15 buys 1500 credits, the intended purchase costs maybe 800 - people are more likely to repeat purchase, exploiting the sunk cost fallacy.

Intermittent reinforcement is commonly exploited in the form of thinly disguised gambling in games, it's a huge part of Valve's sales (crates) in Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.

A few common monetization strategies for skill games:

- Selling shortcuts. Players don't really mind being given the options of spending money or additional time in game, barring extremes. Indeed, if not made available by the game vendor, this is often handled by 3rd parties - the market for in game currencies is measured in billions of dollars per year. These shortcuts to a goal can be seen in many games that merely sell additional options which have minimal effect on gameplay.

- Cosmetics and other status items. Team Fortress 2 is a good example - people will buy anything that makes them look different from everyone else in multiplayer games.

- Limited time products. Lots of games have started selling bundles (in denominations like $50 and $200) to early adopters that let them distinguish themselves from those who started playing later on or did not pay up. Path of Exile and anything by Perfect World are examples.

Games without any multiplayer elements would likely find it hard to use these.

xbox live points uses the mis-match premium currency tactic - often you will have a few hundred left after a purchase, and it makes the "next" purchase seem cheaper because you already have some "left over" from the previous one which would go to waste unless you spent it!

devious tactics. this is why i don't buy premium currencies, unless i can exactly spend it all on the item i want.

League of Legends is an excellent example of a free-to-play game where purchases don't seem manipulative.

IIRC, they've said that they make most of their money out of the cosmetic aspect ("skins").

The other thing they do is to enable people to pay to get the new game characters ("champions") faster than the free players (who have to "grind" to get them, and carefully consider their purchases).

The more honest way to monetize games (especially skill games) is to be generous with what you give out for free and monetize things that are superficial or provide variety without providing advantages. Valve's Team Fortress 2 is the prime example of this. People pay lots of money for decoration (e.g. hats), which have no in game consequence (besides looking cool) or they pay to get hold of certain weapons that provide variety of gameplay without necessarily making the game easier (e.g. the sniper's bow and arrow is roughly as powerful as the rifle, and still requires a lot of skill, but once you see someone else with it, you do want to try it out).

Fundamentally, the free experience you provide in your game has to compete with any other activity the potential customer doesn't have to pay to do. The potential customer could play any of the games they already own, or they could go for a walk or surf the Internet. Either you have to be generous with the basic free experience or you have to use sneaky tricks to get the customer to play. Being generous with the free experience also means not giving paying customers an advantage in competition. No-one likes being beaten by a worse player who has paid to be overpowered.

This is a really tricky subject though. For example, providing a demo version of a game and charging for the full game is definitely not sneaky, right? It also seems reasonable to provide a time trial of X free days before you have to pay for the game to carry on. That doesn't seem like a bad thing either. What if you wanted to be more generous so the customer could keep playing your game as long as they liked (as with a demo) but they also got a taste of the full version of the game (as with a time trial)? Well, I guess you could have a demo version of the game that also gives you a free 10 minutes of the full game every day. Is that okay? It seems okay at first glance, but, it's also kind of close to being a reinforcement learning manipulation. If you made the free time period a little bit random, or made it happen at a random time during the day, then you'd have something definitely manipulative.

I think there are new fair monetization strategies to be developed regarding cooperative play. Games like Clash of Clans make use of cooperation to inspire purchases, but that game can be manipulative. However I think that monetization through cooperative groups can be done fairly. For example, in a game where people formed clans you could allow a member to buy items that, once bought, gave a copy of that item to everyone else in their clan. I'm thinking of something like clothing with a custom emblem that the player can design, that sort of thing. This would allow players to be generous towards their friends, and pay real money to confer superficial status towards themselves within their clan and their clan within the wider game world.

Another interesting new way to monetize skill games would be to monetize through imbalances. Extra credits had a discussion about interesting gaming imbalances, but the general idea would be to regularly slightly change the balance of the game, so players have to change their meta-strategy (i.e. loadout/character/class choices) to keep up. This can then be used for monetization, so players have to keep up with the latest purchase in order to compete with everyone else. So, for example, you might start selling a new frost wand that's a little overpowered, and so everyone wants to play as a wizard. But wizards are slow moving, so a few weeks later you introduce an elf bow that blocks frost. Elves are quick moving, so they're really good against frost wizards. Now everyone wants to be an elf. So a week later you introduce a special move you can buy for trolls that has an area effect (making it easy to catch fast moving elves) that is especially powerful against un-armoured foes (very bad for elves in your game). Now lots of wizard+troll teams are popular, so you introduce a new sword for barbarians etc. etc.

I honestly don't know if this latter methodology is manipulative or not. On the one hand, it means that the game is kept fresh and, because the required skills change over time, it prevents more experienced players from becoming utterly unbeatable by new players. On the other hand, it does seem a bit like a cheap way to squeeze regular payments out of everyone. Maybe a non-manipulative way to do this would be to allow players to ditch their character and play as a new one (with the right class and items) for free, but charge them for having multiple characters. That way you could buy one of each class and then have complete freedom in the game, or you could not pay anything at all, and all you lose are the superficial ways you have customised your character.

> Another interesting new way to monetize skill games would be to monetize through imbalances

i feel planetside 2 did a bit of this (tho i didn't play it long enough to feel the effects).

The kind of techniques described in the article are horrible indeed.

But there's a good kind of F2P. There are games that you download for free, which are essentially a demo. Once you finished that, you can buy the full game via IAP, this is pretty brilliant from a player's perspective. It's a shame that we use the same term for that.

I suppose the good thing about F2P in general is that it might just bring a very important message across to the general public: There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Likewise IAP that don't affect gameplay seem to me to be a fairly innocuous way to monetise your player base too, but they probably only work well in multi-player games where they tap into people's desire for individuality and display.

Valve has become a master at this of course, even if they did almost stumble into it by accident when they starting making TF2 hats. They're going down the same route with DOTA2 IIRC.

Its unfortunate that it doesn't make enough money to just sell levels as their IAP. The app store competition is very darwinian, and the "strongest" survives - where strong means profit generating.

This is a great list of all the things I never want to have in any of the games I work in. Otherwise I would feel as a slimy cheat.

> This is my favorite coercive monetization technique, because it is just so powerful. The technique involves giving the player some really huge reward, that makes 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 they already have much more than they value the same item as a reward.

Eechh...I would hate to play a game like this. It's not just the money factor, but the feeling that I'm being extorted, and that paying is the only way to succeed in the "life" inside this gameworld. This kind of decision would immediately make me ask existential questions like, "Why do I care so much about my status in this virtual world?" and then quit playing.

Then again, I'm someone who is a complete sucker for "Show your appreciation by tipping the creator" type of pitches, maybe even giving more than I would pay for the game's upfront price (in terms of dollars, for mobile games). There's the "reward" of "I'm being such a good gamer, recognizing the hard work of this developer"

I'm a sucker for this but not for games but for music on bandcamp. The "Pay as much or as little as you like" gets me paying more than I'd pay elsewhere every time.

I experimented with a pay-what-you-want model for a language learning game, and it was always hugely motivating to see players choose to pay 4.99 instead of 0.99. Financially, half of our income has come from players paying more than they need.

On behalf of non-coercive indie game devs, thank you!

Some of the tricks in the article are unbelievable.

>At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their progress.

I can't imagine playing a game that threatened to take away my items if I didn't give them money.

its insidious...i would instantly stop playing as soon as i find out, no matter how good the game is.

I'm not a fan of these tactics at all as a developer or a consumer. The simplest way I've found to avoid these games is to cross reference the "Top Free" and "Highest Grossing" lists on the play store.

Under-developed "rational" brain before 25 years of age is a funny meme. Most readers should stop here.)

Difference in spending between cach and credit card attributed to "layering" is another meme. Correlation is not causation. The effect is, probably, based on the fact that there almost always bigger sum of money on the card than in cash in a pocket, so, the loss seemed less significant.

As for monetization strategies, it seems that nothing can beat "status items" (same as in so-called real life) such as "armors", "cloches" and all those "things" one could display and compare with others.

But so many papers..)

> Under-developed "rational" brain before 25 years of age is a funny meme.

What's funny about it? It seems to be backed by science [1] [2].

[1] http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html

[2] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647...

Because one cannot reliable test such assumptions due to multiple very different factors in play (multiple causation). "Prefrontal cortex as the seat of rational brain" is just a meme - a huge over-simplification, as rationality itself.

It is more sane to talk about control of emotions - ability of an activity in one region of the brain interfere with, or tame other activity in a different region, which requires "training" of appropriate "networks" via repeated exposure to certain behavioral patterns (experience). This could be attributed to ageing, that adults just had more practice of self-control, but it will be just another meme, because each process of maturation is unique, due to almost intractable number of factors involved.

Even cross-culturally, my beat is that if some could compare group of "typical US students" with a group of Asian "Buddhist monks" of the same age, there will be significant differences in prefrontal cortex activities.)

Read some Marvin Minsky for great good.)

wow, there's some really subtly evil techniques in there...and yet, these techniques are netting the business owner millions in revenue.

I really wish its possible to earn similar revuenu, but with "clean" tactics (i.e., making a really fun game that also has artistic value). Unfortunately, it seems reality isn't so.

Minecraft made $240 million in 2012 and did nothing besides provide good gameplay with regular updates.

Evil tactics like these are not needed.

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