Fraudulent monetization methods in free-to-play games
Translator's note: After the article was published, the commercial director from King.com, the creator of Candy Crush Saga, contacted the author and clarified several points, after which the author added a couple of comments. Added paragraphs are in italics.
The model of forced monetization is based on tricks with which you can force a person to make a purchase with incomplete information, or conceal this information so that it technically remains available, but the consumer’s brain does not catch this information. Concealing a purchase can be accomplished by simply masking the connection between action and price, as I wrote in the article Control systems in F2P .
According to studies, adding even one intermediate currency between the consumer and real money, for example, “game gems” (premium currency), makes the consumer much less prepared to estimate the value of the transaction. Superfluous intermediate objects, I call them “layers”, make the assessment of the situation very difficult for the brain, especially under stress.
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This additional stress is often served in the form of what Roger Dickey of Zynga calls “gay torment . ” Acceptance is to put the consumer in a very uncomfortable or unpleasant position in the game, and then invite him to remove these "torments" in exchange for money. This money is always disguised in the layers of compulsory monetization, since the consumer, faced with the "real" purchase, most likely will not lead to a trick.
As I wrote in the article Monetization of children , the ability to compare short-term “pain relief” with long-term losses due to waste of money is brain activity, which, according to research, occurs in the prefrontal cortex. This area of ​​the brain completes its development by about 25 years. Thus, consumers under the age of 25 will have an increased vulnerability to the effects of grievous agony and disguise, and the younger they are, the more vulnerable. And although people over the age of 25 can also get caught on a very well built compulsory monetization model, especially if they are not familiar with them (the first generation of Facebook players), the target audience of these products is those who are not yet 25. For this reason, these products are almost always use cartoon graphics and children's characters.
I draw your attention to the fact that although there is a risk of a refund when monetizing those who are under 18, people between 18 and 25 years old are still in the process of brain development, but by law they are already considered adults. It is unlikely that someone at this age who has just received the recognition of “adulthood” will decide to apply to the bank for a refund, citing the fact that it has not yet fully developed. And it turns out that this group is vulnerable and has no legal protection, and this makes them an ideal target audience for such methods. It is not by chance that credit companies are also interested in consumers of this age.
An exception to the above case would be products that actively use the Goods of Excellence , which I will discuss at the end of the article. These products are aimed at a wider age range of users who are vulnerable to such techniques.
King.com was very generous and said that their target audience for Candy Crush Saga is middle-aged women. 80% of their players are women, only 34% of players are younger than 30 and only 9% are younger than 21.
To maximize the effectiveness of the forced monetization model, you should use a premium currency, ideally with the possibility of purchasing it within the application. Having to leave the game to buy gives the victim's brain more time to understand your intentions, which reduces your chances of selling. If you can do one-click conversion in your game, as in many iOS games, this would be perfect. The same effect can be observed in the real world in stores, where buyers with cash, as a rule, spend less than those who pay with a card, due to the layering effect.
Sale of premium currency also allows you to use discounts to wholesale unit of currency cost less. Then, a user who is able to perform simple mathematical calculations (occurring in another part of the brain that develops later) can feel a strong desire to “save money” by buying more. The younger the consumer, the more effective this technique, provided that he knows how to count. Thus, you should try to make the numbers as simple as possible at the time of purchase, and you can add banners to large purchases, explaining to the user how much money he can “save” if he buys in bulk to help very young or other poorly considered buyers.
Compared to using real money, a user who sees a premium currency in the interface is less concerned. If real money were used (no successful game developer does this), then the consumer would see his money evaporate during the game and start worrying. This gives the consumer more opportunity to think, which leads to lower incomes.
A skill game is a game in which your success mainly determines your ability to make sound decisions. A money game is a game in which your ability to spend money is most important. For obvious reasons, consumers like the games of skill much more. A key skill in deploying a forced monetization model is the ability to disguise your money game as a game of skill.
King.com's Candy Crush Saga is doing well. The early stages in the game can be completed by almost anyone without having to spend money, and their complexity gradually increases. They experience the skill of the player, making him feel the satisfaction of moving through his skills. As soon as a consumer is marked as spending money (more on this later), the complexity of the game increases significantly, turning a game of skill into a game of money, as further progress begins to depend more on the use of bonus bonuses than on the skills of the game.
I note that the complexity automatically grows for all players in CCS , when they pass the gate, which I discuss later in the article, the game is not designed to dynamically adjust to the player.
If the transition from a game of skill to a game of money to make quite subtle, the brain of the consumer becomes difficult to understand that the rules of the game have changed. If everything is done skillfully, the consumer will spend more and more money, assuming that he is still playing the game of skill, and he "just needs a little help." This approach is also distinguished by discriminatory pricing, as prices continue to rise until the consumer realizes that he is playing a game for money.
This is my favorite technique of forced monetization, because it is very effective. The method is to give the player a very big reward, which brings him great pleasure, and then threaten to take it away if he does not pay. Studies have shown that people like to receive rewards, and they hate losing their possessions much more than they value the same items, but as a potential reward. To improve the performance of this technique, you must tell the player that he has earned something, and then refute it. The longer you allow the player to keep the reward before withdrawing it, the stronger the effect will be.
This technique is expertly used in Puzzle and Dragons. The main goal of this game is to complete the “dungeons”. To the consumer, the dungeon seems like a test of skills, and initially it is. Of course, when a customer spends enough time to get used to the idea that this is a game of skill, difficulty creeps up quickly, and the game becomes a game of money. Especially effective is that the player must go through several battles in the dungeon, after each of which is given a reward. The last battle is a “boss battle” in which the difficulty becomes unreasonable, and if the player is in the dungeon that he is recommended, then he will most likely lose. Then the player is told that all awards received earlier will be lost along with the endurance spent on entering the dungeon (this can be more than four hours in real time).
At this point, the player must either spend the amount in the region of one dollar, or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which you can get back for another dollar) and lose their progress. For the brain, all this is not just a waste of time. If I spend an hour writing an article, and then something happens and my notes are erased, it will be much more painful that a loss of one hour. The same principle of losing achievement is used here. Note that in this model, the player can be defeated several times in the battle with the boss and on the way to him, which will force him to spend several dollars on each dungeon.
This technique alone is enough to make the consumer pay any level of development. Just in case, PaD uses the same technique at the end of each dungeon in the form of an inventory capacity limit. The player receives as a reward several "eggs", the contents of which should be stored in inventory. If the small space of your inventory is exceeded, these eggs are taken from you again until you pay to increase the inventory capacity. Brilliant!
Progress gates can be used to tell the consumer that he needs to spend some money if he wants to go further in the game. If everything is done transparently, then this is not coercion. For the purposes of the article, I will focus on how this technique can be disguised, to deceive the consumer and make him spend money on something he could not buy if he had been given full information.
Now let's divide the progress gate into “soft” and “hard”. Hard gates are those that cannot be passed without paying. Central buildings in Zynga building games are a good example. All other buildings in the city / base are limited to the level of the central building, which creates a rigid gate of progress. They are made compulsory by the fact that the player is not told in advance that if he pays for the pass, then on the other side he will be met by another hard gate, which costs even more money. Thus, the consumer may think that for his money he gets more painkillers than they actually are.
Soft gates are those through which the player can pass sooner or later. Clash of Clans uses this type of gate, making construction time even more and allowing the user to pay to complete the construction. This method is probably borrowed from games from Zynga, Kabam, Kixeye and others, since it is quite common among games on Facebook. To increase the efficiency of soft gates, these games make it so that the growth of resource extraction in the game occurs faster than the player’s ability to spend them (because building / spending takes so much time). Thus, these "earned" money is lost (taken away), if you do not pay real money. This method combines taking a reward with a soft gate to enhance the intensity of the torment and at the same time masks it, since the consumer can be trusting enough to assume that these effects are random or due to some strategic mistakes made earlier.
Another original way to use the gates of progress is to make them transparent, but used as a transition between a game of skill and a game of money. Candy Crush Saga skillfully uses this technique. The game has a "river", the crossing through which costs little money. The game of skill takes place before the river. The player can pay for the crossing, assuming that since the previous skill game was enjoyable (as it was for me), the continuation will be enjoyable. Of course, no guarantee of this is given, King simply shows the river and does not tell you that he is on the other side. And on the other side there is a game for money, and since the first payment is always the most difficult, those who crossed the river are already considered to be strangers. So the complexity mercilessly takes off on the far bank of the river, forcing to use the bonuses of all but the most patient players.
In the mobile version of CCS (which I did not check), the player does not need to spend money or “social currency” (inviting friends) to get through the gate. There is an optional quest that works like a soft gate. According to King.com, 70% of all players who have completed the game have never paid.
The goal of the money game is to increase the sales of bonuses. Bonuses that have an instant one-time effect are “soft” bonuses. Those that remain forever or until they are turned into something else are hard bonuses. The one-dollar "cancel loss" button in PaD is a soft bonus, as are all the upgrades being sold in Candy Crush Saga. The obvious advantage of soft bonuses is that they can be sold as long as the player remains in the game for money.
"Hard" bonuses are such things as, for example, random rare creatures sold in PaD for five dollars for each. Possession of them lowers the difficulty of the game to a level sufficient to advance a little further after each purchase. The technique, which is very popular in Asian games with hard bonuses (including PaD), is to allow hard bonuses to “merge” and turn into even bigger bonuses. This makes the calculations necessary for finding out the true price of high-level hard bonuses very difficult. They may even be completely invisible to the consumer due to the concealment of various percentages of loss. The best hard bonuses in such games usually cost thousands of dollars, a fact that is hidden from the user until he spends at least a few hundred dollars. This puts the consumer in a difficult position, where he must either give up and lose all acquired capital, or “go to the end” and spend an unknown amount to get to the best bonus. Some of these techniques, sometimes called "kompu gacha", are already beginning to be regulated at the level of states in Asia due to their excessive masking and lack of transparency.
If there is a social component in the game for money, it is used as an additional opportunity to demonstrate its "skill" to other players who do not yet understand that they are in the game for money. This is the reason for the existence of mini-leaderboards in Candy Crush Saga to create the impression that you need to try harder if you want to get around your more “skilled” friends. Even the “word-meter” in Words with Friends can be viewed as a soft bonus in a cash game that pretends to be a game of skill. This, of course, depends on whether you think this is an advantage. But if not, why do people buy it?
I described in detail in my article How Pay to Win works that the main key to success in such games is to make the start of the game look like a game of skill, and then shift to a multiplayer money game, which I call the game “ rates. " A game can take place as a game of skill, but it never happens, because as soon as one player spends enough money, the game turns into a game for money. At a certain point, players continue to raise their stakes, hoping that other players will give up. The “winner” (and loser) is the player who makes the biggest bet. The winning bets often exceed $ 5,000, and some Asian game developers who only play betting games like IGG have game VIP sections, for membership in which you have to pay more than three thousand dollars a year.
The target audience here is usually not hardcore, competition-loving players who need an increase in self-esteem, coming from winning a game of skill, but for some reason never recognizing a game for money. Some of my colleagues in the Asian gaming industry believe that this is just a form of demonstrative consumption. I would really like to look at the demographic statistics on these "whales".
The listed mechanic list is not intended to be exhaustive, but provides a brief overview of the basic methods used in games with forced monetization models in order to win the buyer's ability to make an informed choice regarding the cost and value of these products. The thinner the approach and the more your game looks like a game of skill, the more effectively these products will be monetized. At the moment, I would call Puzzle and Dragons the industry benchmark. Although her playing mechanisms are primitive, the depth of the award mechanisms and the commitment to the best practices listed in my microeconomic model of Excellence Products makes it very elegant. In particular, her fantastic use of the technique of taking a reward is quite impressive.
And although it is possible to make commercially competitive games without using coercive methods, this requires much more effort. In the current market, especially with most adults and children who are not familiar with the nature of these products, the situation is still ready for a quick profit, and most likely will remain so for several years. I note that although these methods can be very successful with young and inexperienced players, they find less response among older and more experienced players, and these people represent a group with a potentially very large playing budget.
Finally, I would like to convey that King.com provided data from its game in order to “optimize the fun” rather than profit ...
Forced monetization
The model of forced monetization is based on tricks with which you can force a person to make a purchase with incomplete information, or conceal this information so that it technically remains available, but the consumer’s brain does not catch this information. Concealing a purchase can be accomplished by simply masking the connection between action and price, as I wrote in the article Control systems in F2P .
According to studies, adding even one intermediate currency between the consumer and real money, for example, “game gems” (premium currency), makes the consumer much less prepared to estimate the value of the transaction. Superfluous intermediate objects, I call them “layers”, make the assessment of the situation very difficult for the brain, especially under stress.
')
This additional stress is often served in the form of what Roger Dickey of Zynga calls “gay torment . ” Acceptance is to put the consumer in a very uncomfortable or unpleasant position in the game, and then invite him to remove these "torments" in exchange for money. This money is always disguised in the layers of compulsory monetization, since the consumer, faced with the "real" purchase, most likely will not lead to a trick.
As I wrote in the article Monetization of children , the ability to compare short-term “pain relief” with long-term losses due to waste of money is brain activity, which, according to research, occurs in the prefrontal cortex. This area of ​​the brain completes its development by about 25 years. Thus, consumers under the age of 25 will have an increased vulnerability to the effects of grievous agony and disguise, and the younger they are, the more vulnerable. And although people over the age of 25 can also get caught on a very well built compulsory monetization model, especially if they are not familiar with them (the first generation of Facebook players), the target audience of these products is those who are not yet 25. For this reason, these products are almost always use cartoon graphics and children's characters.
I draw your attention to the fact that although there is a risk of a refund when monetizing those who are under 18, people between 18 and 25 years old are still in the process of brain development, but by law they are already considered adults. It is unlikely that someone at this age who has just received the recognition of “adulthood” will decide to apply to the bank for a refund, citing the fact that it has not yet fully developed. And it turns out that this group is vulnerable and has no legal protection, and this makes them an ideal target audience for such methods. It is not by chance that credit companies are also interested in consumers of this age.
An exception to the above case would be products that actively use the Goods of Excellence , which I will discuss at the end of the article. These products are aimed at a wider age range of users who are vulnerable to such techniques.
King.com was very generous and said that their target audience for Candy Crush Saga is middle-aged women. 80% of their players are women, only 34% of players are younger than 30 and only 9% are younger than 21.
Bonus currencies
To maximize the effectiveness of the forced monetization model, you should use a premium currency, ideally with the possibility of purchasing it within the application. Having to leave the game to buy gives the victim's brain more time to understand your intentions, which reduces your chances of selling. If you can do one-click conversion in your game, as in many iOS games, this would be perfect. The same effect can be observed in the real world in stores, where buyers with cash, as a rule, spend less than those who pay with a card, due to the layering effect.
Sale of premium currency also allows you to use discounts to wholesale unit of currency cost less. Then, a user who is able to perform simple mathematical calculations (occurring in another part of the brain that develops later) can feel a strong desire to “save money” by buying more. The younger the consumer, the more effective this technique, provided that he knows how to count. Thus, you should try to make the numbers as simple as possible at the time of purchase, and you can add banners to large purchases, explaining to the user how much money he can “save” if he buys in bulk to help very young or other poorly considered buyers.
Compared to using real money, a user who sees a premium currency in the interface is less concerned. If real money were used (no successful game developer does this), then the consumer would see his money evaporate during the game and start worrying. This gives the consumer more opportunity to think, which leads to lower incomes.
Skill games and cash games
A skill game is a game in which your success mainly determines your ability to make sound decisions. A money game is a game in which your ability to spend money is most important. For obvious reasons, consumers like the games of skill much more. A key skill in deploying a forced monetization model is the ability to disguise your money game as a game of skill.
King.com's Candy Crush Saga is doing well. The early stages in the game can be completed by almost anyone without having to spend money, and their complexity gradually increases. They experience the skill of the player, making him feel the satisfaction of moving through his skills. As soon as a consumer is marked as spending money (more on this later), the complexity of the game increases significantly, turning a game of skill into a game of money, as further progress begins to depend more on the use of bonus bonuses than on the skills of the game.
I note that the complexity automatically grows for all players in CCS , when they pass the gate, which I discuss later in the article, the game is not designed to dynamically adjust to the player.
If the transition from a game of skill to a game of money to make quite subtle, the brain of the consumer becomes difficult to understand that the rules of the game have changed. If everything is done skillfully, the consumer will spend more and more money, assuming that he is still playing the game of skill, and he "just needs a little help." This approach is also distinguished by discriminatory pricing, as prices continue to rise until the consumer realizes that he is playing a game for money.
Withdrawal of the award
This is my favorite technique of forced monetization, because it is very effective. The method is to give the player a very big reward, which brings him great pleasure, and then threaten to take it away if he does not pay. Studies have shown that people like to receive rewards, and they hate losing their possessions much more than they value the same items, but as a potential reward. To improve the performance of this technique, you must tell the player that he has earned something, and then refute it. The longer you allow the player to keep the reward before withdrawing it, the stronger the effect will be.
This technique is expertly used in Puzzle and Dragons. The main goal of this game is to complete the “dungeons”. To the consumer, the dungeon seems like a test of skills, and initially it is. Of course, when a customer spends enough time to get used to the idea that this is a game of skill, difficulty creeps up quickly, and the game becomes a game of money. Especially effective is that the player must go through several battles in the dungeon, after each of which is given a reward. The last battle is a “boss battle” in which the difficulty becomes unreasonable, and if the player is in the dungeon that he is recommended, then he will most likely lose. Then the player is told that all awards received earlier will be lost along with the endurance spent on entering the dungeon (this can be more than four hours in real time).
At this point, the player must either spend the amount in the region of one dollar, or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which you can get back for another dollar) and lose their progress. For the brain, all this is not just a waste of time. If I spend an hour writing an article, and then something happens and my notes are erased, it will be much more painful that a loss of one hour. The same principle of losing achievement is used here. Note that in this model, the player can be defeated several times in the battle with the boss and on the way to him, which will force him to spend several dollars on each dungeon.
This technique alone is enough to make the consumer pay any level of development. Just in case, PaD uses the same technique at the end of each dungeon in the form of an inventory capacity limit. The player receives as a reward several "eggs", the contents of which should be stored in inventory. If the small space of your inventory is exceeded, these eggs are taken from you again until you pay to increase the inventory capacity. Brilliant!
Gate of progress
Progress gates can be used to tell the consumer that he needs to spend some money if he wants to go further in the game. If everything is done transparently, then this is not coercion. For the purposes of the article, I will focus on how this technique can be disguised, to deceive the consumer and make him spend money on something he could not buy if he had been given full information.
Now let's divide the progress gate into “soft” and “hard”. Hard gates are those that cannot be passed without paying. Central buildings in Zynga building games are a good example. All other buildings in the city / base are limited to the level of the central building, which creates a rigid gate of progress. They are made compulsory by the fact that the player is not told in advance that if he pays for the pass, then on the other side he will be met by another hard gate, which costs even more money. Thus, the consumer may think that for his money he gets more painkillers than they actually are.
Soft gates are those through which the player can pass sooner or later. Clash of Clans uses this type of gate, making construction time even more and allowing the user to pay to complete the construction. This method is probably borrowed from games from Zynga, Kabam, Kixeye and others, since it is quite common among games on Facebook. To increase the efficiency of soft gates, these games make it so that the growth of resource extraction in the game occurs faster than the player’s ability to spend them (because building / spending takes so much time). Thus, these "earned" money is lost (taken away), if you do not pay real money. This method combines taking a reward with a soft gate to enhance the intensity of the torment and at the same time masks it, since the consumer can be trusting enough to assume that these effects are random or due to some strategic mistakes made earlier.
Another original way to use the gates of progress is to make them transparent, but used as a transition between a game of skill and a game of money. Candy Crush Saga skillfully uses this technique. The game has a "river", the crossing through which costs little money. The game of skill takes place before the river. The player can pay for the crossing, assuming that since the previous skill game was enjoyable (as it was for me), the continuation will be enjoyable. Of course, no guarantee of this is given, King simply shows the river and does not tell you that he is on the other side. And on the other side there is a game for money, and since the first payment is always the most difficult, those who crossed the river are already considered to be strangers. So the complexity mercilessly takes off on the far bank of the river, forcing to use the bonuses of all but the most patient players.
In the mobile version of CCS (which I did not check), the player does not need to spend money or “social currency” (inviting friends) to get through the gate. There is an optional quest that works like a soft gate. According to King.com, 70% of all players who have completed the game have never paid.
Soft and hard bonuses
The goal of the money game is to increase the sales of bonuses. Bonuses that have an instant one-time effect are “soft” bonuses. Those that remain forever or until they are turned into something else are hard bonuses. The one-dollar "cancel loss" button in PaD is a soft bonus, as are all the upgrades being sold in Candy Crush Saga. The obvious advantage of soft bonuses is that they can be sold as long as the player remains in the game for money.
"Hard" bonuses are such things as, for example, random rare creatures sold in PaD for five dollars for each. Possession of them lowers the difficulty of the game to a level sufficient to advance a little further after each purchase. The technique, which is very popular in Asian games with hard bonuses (including PaD), is to allow hard bonuses to “merge” and turn into even bigger bonuses. This makes the calculations necessary for finding out the true price of high-level hard bonuses very difficult. They may even be completely invisible to the consumer due to the concealment of various percentages of loss. The best hard bonuses in such games usually cost thousands of dollars, a fact that is hidden from the user until he spends at least a few hundred dollars. This puts the consumer in a difficult position, where he must either give up and lose all acquired capital, or “go to the end” and spend an unknown amount to get to the best bonus. Some of these techniques, sometimes called "kompu gacha", are already beginning to be regulated at the level of states in Asia due to their excessive masking and lack of transparency.
If there is a social component in the game for money, it is used as an additional opportunity to demonstrate its "skill" to other players who do not yet understand that they are in the game for money. This is the reason for the existence of mini-leaderboards in Candy Crush Saga to create the impression that you need to try harder if you want to get around your more “skilled” friends. Even the “word-meter” in Words with Friends can be viewed as a soft bonus in a cash game that pretends to be a game of skill. This, of course, depends on whether you think this is an advantage. But if not, why do people buy it?
Betting Games
I described in detail in my article How Pay to Win works that the main key to success in such games is to make the start of the game look like a game of skill, and then shift to a multiplayer money game, which I call the game “ rates. " A game can take place as a game of skill, but it never happens, because as soon as one player spends enough money, the game turns into a game for money. At a certain point, players continue to raise their stakes, hoping that other players will give up. The “winner” (and loser) is the player who makes the biggest bet. The winning bets often exceed $ 5,000, and some Asian game developers who only play betting games like IGG have game VIP sections, for membership in which you have to pay more than three thousand dollars a year.
The target audience here is usually not hardcore, competition-loving players who need an increase in self-esteem, coming from winning a game of skill, but for some reason never recognizing a game for money. Some of my colleagues in the Asian gaming industry believe that this is just a form of demonstrative consumption. I would really like to look at the demographic statistics on these "whales".
Last thoughts
The listed mechanic list is not intended to be exhaustive, but provides a brief overview of the basic methods used in games with forced monetization models in order to win the buyer's ability to make an informed choice regarding the cost and value of these products. The thinner the approach and the more your game looks like a game of skill, the more effectively these products will be monetized. At the moment, I would call Puzzle and Dragons the industry benchmark. Although her playing mechanisms are primitive, the depth of the award mechanisms and the commitment to the best practices listed in my microeconomic model of Excellence Products makes it very elegant. In particular, her fantastic use of the technique of taking a reward is quite impressive.
And although it is possible to make commercially competitive games without using coercive methods, this requires much more effort. In the current market, especially with most adults and children who are not familiar with the nature of these products, the situation is still ready for a quick profit, and most likely will remain so for several years. I note that although these methods can be very successful with young and inexperienced players, they find less response among older and more experienced players, and these people represent a group with a potentially very large playing budget.
Finally, I would like to convey that King.com provided data from its game in order to “optimize the fun” rather than profit ...
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/185830/
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