hello I'm here to talk about monetization it's let's go whaling it is about a summary of a huge bunch of behavioral psychology so the tricks on on how to monetize a game well some of you will probably be slightly shocked by what all the tricks I have listed here but I'll leave the morality of it out of the talk we can discuss it if we have time later so let's dive right in first off Wall Street trader and all che got into a fight who won you guys did this is to remind you that a
lot of the spend comes from from the high paying guys the whales and the very best way to get these guys to spend is to get too rich competitive guys to fight each other and tell them I'll give you a slight upside if you pay me next off to remind you that the best way to make sure of both your retention and your monetization is to make sure you have enough of an in-game economy in there the thousand up there is actually clearly low balling it top grossing games have in-game economies worth tens of thousands
that's how you can keep people in there they have lots of things to do to stuff to operate to progress along and that's how you can make them then spend a lot as well since you can for instance give a huge discount on something you know this stuff is worth 150 euros but now I'll give it to you for five if your whole in-game economy is worth less than 150 you cannot do that of course so now a few of these like frameworks on how to think of stuff I've seen suggestions to model what you
sell according to bottle types I assume you're all familiar with bottle types the achievers want to progress in the game the socializers want to speak to other people the killers just want to compete and kill each other and the explorers are the guys who are of the stories and and experiences so this is from will Lutins suggestion to you sell convenience to the achievers which really means foster progress customization to socializers hats n stuff competitive advantage that is paid win for the killers and content for explorers now the reason I highlighted convenience of up there
or progress is that most of your sales will be here customization hats and stuff they're nice but you you'll have a single-digit percentage of your income coming from that if you do both that and progress competitive advantage is good but you can go overboard with it and have an unbalanced game which is if it's too clearly paid to win people will stop playing and content it takes a lot of resources and time to do that selling content is very expensive hardly any team can keep up producing content in in the at the pace needed this
one I like a bit better hook habit hobby this is a model from Dmitry Ravana the Flair games it's a model for how people progress in a game the hook is what gets you into the game to try out a free-to-play game then you build it into a habit that you play multiple sessions every day and then at the end it's the Hobby phase where where people see it as their one of their main hobbies and they put lots of time and resources into it now if we look at this from monitor stations perspective the
hook is where you put up an eye breaker you want to give a really really good deal something that's a no-brainer you would be crazy to turn it down as a player the reason to give a really good deal up front is by making people spend upfront they are also emotionally committing to your game the retention will go up and the first spend is it breaks the ice then they think of themselves as spenders in the game it's OK for me to spend in the game lots of people are otherwise have this wall up I
will never pay for a mobile game so you need to break the wall first the habit is like the main meat of the game this is where you sell the faster progress as we just discussed and the hobby is for the guys who have already maxed out they're the guys who have all of their clash of clans building at the max level they are already there so you can no longer sell progress to them you have to sell consumables this is where you're selling the faster healing times or or faster build times of armies this
is also where you get basically unlimited upper spend there's no limit to how much you can spend in for instance clash of clans so let's go down into some of these more tricks gotchas who hasn't heard of gotchas excellent most of you have so God chose the named after gotcha pawn these Japanese machines which are sort of slot machines that give you collectible stuff on random you get collectible stuff but it's really the same mechanic that we have had in western markets for for collectible playing cards like Magic the Gathering for ages you cannot no
matter how much you spend you cannot directly get the card you want you have to over and over again pay to get a bunch of random cards and hope that the thing that you wanted is in there or then you like trade them somehow if there's what wasn't what you hoped for these are great for for again both monetization and retention because people like the the lottery part of it if you want to look at lookups box you know why it's really a lot more exciting and you give get more content because people cannot immediately
progress to the stuff they want they have to keep trying a few times so it really takes like five times as long to get the collection that they need compared to just progressing and collecting soft currency I'm buying it straight off okay then think about how you want to get get to get to your Millions do you go the King route of having a huge volume of players and a fairly modest lifetime value for each spender or do you go the Machine Cerner out of having a very hardcore game that like 95% of the population
is going to look like what is that but the 5% that actually do play it they will spend a lot just know where you stand on this hot state there's an excellent book about behavioral psychology called Thinking Fast and Slow this is the first thinking I'm telling you that the first thinking mode is what you want the slow thinking is your analytical brain what's 12 times 47 I'm sure all of you can answer that but you have to start your actual thinking brain to do that now if I say complete the sentence bread and everyone
thought butter so that's the first thinking our brain works into these two modes and starting the analytical part of your brain is too much to ask for spend how it applies to games is make stuff immediately useful immediate gratification if you have a level based game and yourself some boosters up front for instance a coin doubler or or some other stuff that will help you people will have to analyze and think it through these things are good for me this will help me progress before they do it and they won't do that if on the
other hand you do like for instance in this temple run once your game is over save me I have a few seconds to spend hard currency and and likely have to continue or similar in candy crush saga at the very moment that I lost I can see I just planned a bit more I can pass it make it immediately useful lost version this is people are much more attached to the stuff they have than an equal amount of things that they can gain which means that if I give you an offer I'll flip a coin
if its tail's I'll take 100 euros from you if it's heads I'll give you 120 euros who would take the take the bet no one no we want we need more gain to offset the loss is felt more strongly we need like 200 against 100 loss 200 games we can score 100 loss then we'll take the deal in games you can apply this by giving people stuff that feels is in their pocket and then threatening to take it away unless they pay up this is lots of level based games do this there are collectibles in
things like puzzle and Dragons you collect along the way if you didn't finish the level they'll take it from you now pay to continue a bit office and scarcity plays into the loss aversion if there are rare cards up here and you see see the Goblin going with this clocks tick tock I'll take it away from you I'll take it away from you they the scarce they go away this is a brilliant way to get more people to spend more subscription does anyone recognize the guy he is the builder from clash of clans the point
of this is the builder has a very specific way of working if you spend your hard currency on this guy you will only get the benefit from him if you then keep coming back to the game very often so it drives both retention and monetization build stuff that that makes people come back to your game a lot in order to get the value out of that the IKEA effect this is to say stuff that we put work into we value more highly you know a key really sells your cardboard stuff it's but you value it's
still somehow slightly higher because you actually built it yourselves the model over here is from a psychology book called hooped how to build hooking products this is how we build build habits there's a trigger to remind us to do something then we go do an action we get the variable reward just like the gotchas we get the lottery ticket and then to really hook it down we need to ask people to do something for us do a little bit of work because then they become an emotionally attached to that and then we set up the
the next trigger either internal or external the external trigger mean means really a notification in our case internal to that people have in their minds that you know I started building that power or I planted pumpkins that means I need to come back in eight hours so that's the trigger and then we go round and round and and we have the habit anchoring is fun anchoring means that when we don't know the price of stuff the first price we hear suggested for it becomes our anchor and then we compare everything to that for instance an
iconic example black pearls black pearls when they first came on the market no one wanted them because they're dull and black and don't look very nice they were the guy who had them told his his summer trainee or whatnot to just dump the price of them and get rid of them the summer trainee understood it wrong and actually hike the price by fifty fifty percent or a hundred percent and then suddenly they became these objects of desire even more special I think is this if I ask all of you to write down the last two
digits of your social security number and then I have an auction like imagine this is a fancy bottle of wine and you get to bid on auction here the people like me might last - did you see my social security number or 99 I'd be the higher price on this then the guys who have like 10 or 0 5 just because I've wrote down a high number on a paper will anchor my my thinking on on what goes next so how to use this in the game some games immediately when you are in the tutorial
they suggest to you you should buy this good YP for 50 euros or something like that I go like oh that's expensive I'll never do that of course no and I expect them to say no then again I come back back like a few sessions later and suggest they buy it for of for 15 so that's a good value because my anchor was at 50 social proof so this is we are herd animals we tend to do what all the others do you all sit quiet listening to me because that's what all of the other
guys do they were here so especially when people are similar to ours to us this means that you should have the socially accepted way of behaving in your game should be paying you want to tell people for instance there when a clan member of theirs spend REO ap money you want the whole clan to know because then that becomes the socially acceptable way of behaving you buy absolutely do not want to tell them that the majority of people in your game never spend money that's poison never tell them that availability means that the stuff we
hear a lot about is the stuff we judge as likely to happen this for instance can tie into gotchas if there are rare gotchas not every player will see them every session that's like the definition of rare which means that they will think that it's not likely to happen that they get one of those which means that you should tell them about it which means every time a clan member gets one of the rare things you should broadcast it to all of the others like your friend got this rare legendary thing then they will not
judge it more more slightly the right amount of choice this is a famous jam experiment they put up a stall in a supermarket with 20 different jams you know the tape have a taste here then then you have a discount go buy some and then they had a control group who had only five jams to taste now for the one with twenty a lot of people stopped by and tasted jams but for the one with six a lot more people bought because they they know that that's the best one that's the one I want if
there are 20 there's too much choice we just get get anxious we choose nothing there's a bunch of data on this that whales take longer time time to convert this is just another reminder for you to have content for a bloody long time the core loop go through through the store have an example Hill Climb racing because it's so fantastically minimal and nice you do your action your in-game your core game there and you go straight into the to the meta game where you do the upgrades and then back there so the loop always goes
through the metal stage where your store where your your spending money labeling technique I haven't seen this actually done in a game but it's interesting it should work if we tell people they are a certain way if we complement them on on being nice good citizens they are more likely to behave as nice good citizens so you should actually tell your players that they are generous individuals who have a taste for good art and and want to support their their game developers by paying you and buying a piece related to that also to telling people
the reason to do something makes them much more likely to actually follow through and do that spend because reasons no reason don't don't even have to be that good in order for this to work and lost here are remember there are four ways of progressing in in games in general you can have a skill game based game you can have a luck based game you can have a game where just progress by grinding or you can pay to to progress make sure that your games aren't too skill based I made that mistake myself a to
skill based game you don't get people to pay for pay you because there's no reason to so make sure grinding and paying are legitimate versions of progressing in the game thank you that's it have your questions any questions too nope okay well thank you very much thanks I'll give one more in case you didn't have questions reciprocity is a very very strong mechanic if I give something to you if you give something to me I feel obliged to give something to you to trigger that however we need three different criteria the gift needs to be
unexpected personal and significant not it can't feel like something I gave to two to everyone which makes this a real challenge to do as part of the game but I think you can incentivize your players to trigger reciprocity between each other but that's a challenge for you guys thank you
