Detecting Intent to Purchase

Intent to purchase

What is it, why is it important to measure, and how do you do it?? One of the concepts I’m surprised rarely comes up in discussions about gaming metrics is measuring intent-to-purchase.? Intent-to-purchase is the consumer's predisposition to purchase a game they haven’t engaged with yet.? Did they see an ad about the game, hear about it from a friend, or just stumble across the URL while surfing?? I have friends who bragged that their bloated downloadable games with huge paywalls in front of them had a 14% conversion rate.? I’d hear this and ask, “Is that because everyone who tries your game buys it?? Or because all the barriers to playing your game ensure that only the people most determined to purchase it actually reach it?”??

I was that annoying friend that just that had to break it to them that a high conversion rate is a design failure.? It just meant they were losing vast sums of possible revenue due to their clumsy user onboarding design.? A GREAT onboard design will always have a very low conversion rate because it should reach a huge, expanding potential audience and be so engaging that you can afford to take your time converting your users to purchasing.? It’s great if your game is so popular that simple word of mouth causes it to have a high intent-to-purchase rate but then the friction to playing it prevents you from learning how viral the game really is because the paywall drowns out the valuable virality metrics.??

How do you measure intent-to-purchase?? Without making sweeping assumptions about the business model, you put your pricing options on the landing page and a big “Buy” button.? You have to lead with the pricing in order to be sure that the ONLY reason someone would hit buy is that they INTEND TO PURCHASE, you don’t want to be wondering if they were just trying to find the price.? But now you’ve created a different problem.? That message may scare away all the potential buyers who land on the page with a low intent to purchase!? This is a fine strategy for a game that is not designed to be a great ad for itself.? Offering console games online as Stadia and Microsoft do is an example where you might as well ask for money because none of the games being offered are designed to be good at selling themselves.??

You can’t measure intent-to-purchase upfront without scaring away your low intent-to-purchase visitors.? If you’ve followed my other articles on how to design online games to be their own ads, then this is not a problem because you designed your games to not rely on heavy marketing spend to acquire players.? If players arrived at your game with a high intent to purchase because other players recommended it, you already knew that because you tracked your internal virality!? If they arrived at your game via online marketing campaigns your marketing tools told you that.? No matter how they arrived, you still shouldn’t try to convert a high intent-to-purchase player abruptly.??

Why? High intent to purchase players are also the people who return to a game on their own.? Everyone who bounced off your page and never came back had low intent to purchase!? These are the rarest most valuable users you’ll ever find, if you try to monetize them in the dark, you’ll lose money and valuable information about a player you can rely on to come back. Sure if you made a crap game with poor analytic control, a bird-in-the-hand is better than nothing, but we’re talking about good online game design here.?

In the retail game world a game is a boxed product you stick a price tag on and the consumer decides to pay it or not.? In the online game business each game is a carpet vendor in a Turkish bizarre trying to maximize the money they get from every sale.? The price is different for an obvious tourist who walks up vs a local, if you can’t differentiate between the two you loose a lot of money to the vendor next to you also selling handmade caprets.? You can always tell when retail game people are the ones making the decisions about an online game offering like Stadia, the pricing model reflects their naivete about how online game marketing works.? Somebody with a huge resume in retail gaming but with no experience in online game design got that job.??

A well-designed online game converts players to purchase at the point of MAXIMUM intent-to-purchase.? The goal is to know when someone is at their MAXIMUM intent-to-purchase.

When is player at the point of MAXIMUM intent to purchase?

In the retail world it’s the moment they pick up the box at Walmart.? They might have been willing to pay for the game sooner but because the transaction couldn’t be performed anywhere but at the store, there was only one opportunity to sell the game.? *I know Amazon exists, it’s the same point, nobody buys a game on Amazon who didn’t already intend to purchase it, that’s a 100% conversion rate online sale.? Retail game marketers are almost completely blind to individual gamers state of intent to purchase. They just have to slap a price tag on it and pray that their big media buy pays off. ?

In the online world we can have metrics that tell us this information if we know how to interpret them.? Here are some examples of metrics that turned out to be really valuable for detecting when a player in a FTP (Free To Play) game is ready to buy.

1. Playing after dinner during the week or after 2PM on a Saturday afternoon.? *Don’t make people fill out a tedious commerce transaction during their lunch gaming break.??
2. Self-returning to the game 2-3 times a week
3. When they achieve a goal intended to unlock new content in a game that has been tested and tuned to achieve maximum conversion

Knowing when and where your players will hit their MAXIMUM intent-to-purchase in a game is extremely valuable because not only can you be confident that your game is making all the revenue it can make, but it also gives you confidence as to how to handle everyone you can’t convert to purchasing at that point!

When someone hits their MAXIMUM intent to purchase behavior and doesn't purchase… they probably never will!? Why?? Assuming your pricing model is right, it usually means your player is a kid. I’ll talk about how to monetize kids in a separate article but the short answer is that detecting maximum intent to purchase and failing to convert is a strong kid signal.? Kids have no means of paying which means your goal becomes to convert mom or dad to purchase.? Parents buy games for their kids for entirely different reasons, (as cheap childcare) so your upsell strategy needs to change dramatically when you’ve detected a kid.

What do you do with players who won’t purchase?? Don’t nag them, they probably can’t pay you!? Also, don’t punish people who can’t/won’t pay with ads, the incremental revenue and negative experience aren’t worth it.? Kids are great at viral marketing, let them earn their free play by promoting the game to their friends.? Virality is usually the most valuable use of a hooked player who can’t pay you.? Kids are low-value ad targets, if you want to earn meaningful ad revenue, that’s another kind of game design challenge I’ll discuss later.??

If you have designed your game to do a great job of channeling players into a state of (measurable) maximum intent-to-purchase and they don’t purchase, then you don’t need to punish players who don’t pay with a degraded play experience either.? Then what did payers, get for their money if the paid experience is the same as the free experience?? They’re not the same, your free players are now game content and their job is to engage and recruit more players.? Don’t punish them, put them to work… in a fun way…it’s part of how you DESIGN a great online game to be a successful ad for itself.? *Grinding is also not ideal, multiplayer games like Fortnite are the most successful examples of games that turn their free players into content for their paying players.

Because retail games are not designed to do this, they are a terrible tool for acquiring new users in an online game or game service.? *See Stadia.? The same goes for mobile games.? There was a brief era around 2010 when pure social gaming really thrived (Zynga) thanks to Facebook. It was a time before mobile appstores and the death of Flash forced online game developers into the appstores.? Appstores destroyed social virality as a means of marketing games taking us back to the retail world of game pricing.? Consequently, most mobile games are also terrible at self-marketing and the art of designing games for virality has been largely lost.?

Free-to-play mobile games lead a troubled existence.? They’re stuck between two worlds because they are buried in a sea of other games such that they have to spend marketing dollars to support their discovery, often by buying ads in other crappy games to promote themselves.? Appstores restrict them from access to the information they need to measure intent-to-purchase and the functionality to self-promote.? It’s worth noting that the most successful mobile games like CandyCrush, Roblox and Fortnite achieved their status on mobile by being FTP games on the open internet first.? It was the FTP downloadable PC game that did all the marketing work and user acquisition for the mobile game.??

Some of you reading this may reasonably feel indignant that I don’t address the annoying spammy messaging behavior of social games.? Social games with great analytic control aren’t spammy.? You can immediately identify a game with poor analytic control because they resort to fishing for customers with hand grenades instead of fishing poles and effective lures.??

The Crypto Games

With this foundation in place, we can now talk about Web 3.0 crypto and NFT games. Like the most successful web only social game in history... Axie Infinity. Even as a crypto failure today it has a market cap hovering around 1B/dollars. Is your failed mobile game worth a billion dollars? At a primal level a crypto game like Axie Infinity where players are grinding away in a shockingly dull web game to earn speculative cryptocurrency and promoting it like crazy to their friends is no different from a 2011 Zynga Farmville game where players spammed their friends with game invites and virtual gifts. In a crypto "play to earn" game the few winners in the Ponzi scheme, can't shut up about how rich they got to everyone who hasn't joined yet. You may angrily point out that it's a giant Ponzi scheme! ...but gambling is also a FUN game.

If you make video games for a living then you are in the business of selling people anti-productivity applications designed to maximize the amount of time they waste clicking buttons for no productive purpose... Get over yourselves. Don't argue with the customer about what you think they should enjoy. :)

*I can't tell you how many failing know-it-all game developers I've spoken to who think they are assuming some position of moral authority by hating NFT and crypto-grinding games. Nope, you are just not listening to the market. They want something new!

So Axie Infinity is a fascinating example of a new kind of Roblox, Minecraft or Club Penguins whose organic virality was driven by an entirely new form of content virality. I'll discuss how that insight can be converted into well designed next generation Web 3.0 games in another article. The point is, crypto has an important role to play in next generation gaming, most game developers new to online game publishing just don't understand how to apply it yet. We can clear that up!