Money for Nothing and your Clicks for Free
If you're making Web 3.0 games, better read this quick
One of the mistakes online game developers commonly make is failing to isolate the metrics they are trying to measure from other noise and variables.? Suppose you have a web game and someone visits the landing page for it.? You’ve got some cool graphics on the page designed to promote it and a “Play Game” button.? A new player clicks it, hits a registration wall, and bounces never to return.? Why???
Did they mistype the URL?? Did they think that the “Play Game” button would take them straight to the game and they were turned off by the reg-wall?? Was the marketing on the landing page the first they heard of the game or had some other marketing brought them there?? Did they just get distracted and forgot to come back?? Were they expecting to see a price for the game and lost interest when they couldn’t get an answer immediately?? Was it a kid who didn’t have an email account or mobile number to authenticate with?
The problem is that if you lose the user before you got to know them, then you didn’t learn anything about how to improve your game.? Same point for a mobile app that someone has downloaded for the first time.? Sadly the mobile app store has already hidden some vital information from you, for example, they didn’t tell you how many people looked at your app and then bounced instead of installing it, or what other games the user preferred to yours.?
Now step back and ask yourself, when a new user first arrives at your game, what is the most important question to answer???
You should have gotten most of those answers from their IP address and a cookie, nobody deletes their cookies that often.? What’s the purpose of registering users BEFORE you let them play the game?
Without a long-winded explanation, a registration wall is the wrong place to address those problems. When your hosting costs are too high, you’re just placing the burden of increasing intent-to-purchase on your marketing budget.? Kids know to lie about their age.? An IP address is all you need to filter a DDOS attack.? You don’t know a stranger's intent-to-purchase yet and you just lost the chance to find out.? An IP and/or cookie is fine for saving game state initially. Registering a new player at the end of a game session is smarter because it provides a clearer analytic signal that the user intends to return.??
If your game is properly designed to be a great ad for itself, the first question you want to answer is; Is this someone who will get hooked on this game? ? Another way to put it is; what experience can I deliver that will maximize the odds that this player will self-return to my game?? That’s it, your entire first experience should be building a relationship with a new user that maximizes their odds of self-returning.? Ideally, you design the first experience to register the user at the END of a great, well-designed, first-play experience.? If they don’t register, just remember who they are if they ever come back.
“Congratulations, you solved the puzzle, and found the key to the magic kingdom, would you like us to send you a link to the portal to the next level?”. <Enter email or mobile #here>
There are a couple of important nuances here. Don’t ask users to do things that are important to you when you haven’t carefully designed the experience to maximize their chances of saying “yes”.? When you just stick a visible “Register” button on the page that people can click anytime, when they don’t click it, you don’t know why.? UX that presents players with lots of choices is UX designed by someone who didn’t have a strategy to acquire and monetize.? If you corral your audience through a play experience designed to get to a “yes” and you don’t get it at the designed point, you’ve learned a lot of valuable information. *You designed it wrong and/or you will NEVER get a “yes”, so put that user to work in some other valuable way.
The most important goal for a new user should be to get them to self-return.? The primary purpose of registering them is to get permission to communicate with them so your marketing automation can try to get them to return.? When you put a registration barrier in front of a game you don’t learn anything about your bounced traffic and you sacrifice the game's opportunity to promote itself. It’s also a mistake to place a registration wall in front of your commerce page for the same reason.? When monetizing fails, you don’t know why and therefore don’t know what to do with the useless user now.? If the game is good and has lots of content, you should be able to incentivize registration separately from monetizing them.??
*I alluded to it, but didn’t mention that the price is always FREE.? That’s what you promise on the home page upfront so that you lose ZERO potential players.? Testing for the ability to pay and price sensitivity belongs deep in the free game, NOT upfront.? If you can’t keep free players engaged long enough to monetize them, you’ve got a bad game, don’t make it worse!?
FTP game design
To summarize, here are the CORRECT steps to online game monetization and why;
Do Hook The Player
Get them straight into the game and get them having fun.? Nothing you ever do will bring them back if the game fails to hook early and deep.? That’s it, #1 goal, strip away EVERYTHING ELSE!? Avoid anything that distracts from getting a player hooked so that when you inevitably lose some players you can be certani it was the game content and nothing else.??
An “Engaged Player” is one who self-returns to the game 2-3 times a week without prompting.? When you have that behavior from someone, they’re usually ready to pay, if they can, and you ask when they are in the right frame of mind, and the pricing is right.? It’s been a few years since I had my hands on play behavior patterns but in my day if you have an engaged player playing after 2 pm on a Saturday afternoon, that’s a good time to ask for the $$$.
Do NOT?
Do Incentivize Virality
Your first goal for a hooked player is virality.? Why?? Because any online game that has zero organic virality, must have a huge marketing budget.? If you put that marketing budget into great viral game design, you’ve created a better game that is its own successful marketing campaign and you’ll get to keep more of the revenue from that game to invest in making it better.??
Mathematically virality also generally tends to have the highest recoverable value per player whether a player ever ends up paying for a game or not.? Incentivizing virality can be a good place to register players as well.? The first player you want to be able to reach again is the one that just arrived!? Ideally, registration and virality incentives are opt-in.? There’s a loot chest that gives you a reward every time you auth with a different major auth platform, Google, Instagram, Twitter, etc.? Every time you verify a new email or phone number.? Every time a friend you referred verifies an email or a phone number you provided, etc.? A good one for friend invites is “send a friend a gift via email or mobile” and reward the player if/when the friend opens the gift (thus creating and verifying the friend's account)? Remember people's friend lists, they’re important to monetization and player re-engagement later.?
Opt-in registering a user and verifying a means to contact them in the future is your #2 game design priority.? Opt-in rather than forced registration is important because again, you want to be absolutely clear that when someone starts a registration process and fails to complete it, the problem was the registration experience NOT the timing or circumstances of imposing a registration demand.? We want analytic signals that are clear and meaningful, not muddled and ambiguous as to how to interpret them.? If you can’t incentivize an opt-in user registration then you know your game just isn’t hooking them yet and that’s the real problem.?
Do NOT
A player you can’t engage can’t be monetized directly.? Get them engaged, and get them into a social group as fast as possible.? Incentivize DON’T punish!? All carrot no stick, the stick should be the inability to get access to great new game content, not anything that impairs the game experience.? Give people a way to earn the same things they can’t/won’t buy.? Most of your non-payers will be kids with no means of paying save for persuading a reluctant parent. Put them to work as marketers and as content for your premium players.? Make being a marketer and content fun too.? If you throw a kid gamer out for not paying, they’ll find a game that doesn’t do that and tell all their friends to play THAT game.
Do Incentivise Engagement?
With (Ad supported) loot boxes, discoverable cheats, and edgy humor.? Once you’ve registered a user and have a verified means of communicating with them, the goal is always to get them more hooked.? People want to feel special so an email or SMS that they’ve won a gift or a friend has sent them a gift or an NPC has sent them a message can be well received as long as you’re not spamming them.? A user who actively engages with messages is welcoming them, a user who is not engaging is best left un-nagged unless you have a really compelling new offer for them.? This is where friend lists really matter, a user who can’t be engaged but you have permission to communicate with can magically come to life when someone they know invites them.?
It sounds strange but discovering a bug/cheat is fun!? If you think you’ve found a fun/interesting cheat, you want to show it to people!? Give players things to discover about your game that they want to talk about.? The same goes for humor.? If a game is funny, people want to talk about it and show each other how it’s funny.??
领英推荐
Why does the WildTangent Polar Golfer bear swing a golf club one-pawed?? Because he plays Golf like crap and doesn’t care, it’s a CASUAL Golf game.? Real golfers will want to talk about it.? They may think it’s funny, they may hate it, we don’t care as long as they tell someone!? This game came out of our studios at a time when Tiger Woods was starring in this iconic Nike ad.? We had our artists create a gif animation of our bear doing the Tiger Woods thing as our load screen.? Click-aways during the game load went to nearly zero and everyone immediately had a funny/cute thing to say about the game to their friends before they’d even played it.??
Humor is very effective at rapidly engaging people early in a game and also very effective at getting them to show the game to others.?
This was my favorite FAILED example of edgy content.? My marketing folks and game developer would NOT go along with this suggestion.? Crystal Maze was basically PacMan with a Laura-Croft meets Nintendo look to it.? The antagonist character in the game is The Grim Reaper.? If she stands still too long, Death comes and kills the cute little girl with a scythe!? I loved it, it was lite but edgy.? I said we need to feature the Grim Reaper equally with our hero Lilly so that people who see the promo images for the game need to find out what The Grim Reapers' relationship is with Lilly.? That’s an image with a story behind it.? To my great surprise, the team hated it, it was too dark and scary to have The Grim Reaper featured standing behind Lilly in the promo images with his skeletal hand on her shoulder.? I wanted my teams to feel ownership of the game they made so I didn’t demand it but I did make sure they watched the much slower adoption metrics for it than games that featured edgier intros.? It accumulated players and sold well over time but it was a slow hit because it lacked a strong viral punch to drive dialog about it.? I would have loved to have seen lots of negative comments about how The Grim Reaper was too scary on our forums.??
*Some of you reading this are thinking; “That’s not edgy or scary at all!”? I talk more about this in a later article but most game developers are not aware of the powerful gaming dynamic between parents and their young kids.? One of the things we aspired to in all WildTangent game designs was to make a game that mom or dad would love to play with a toddler in their lap. My team's assertion was that the more prominent presentation of The Grim Reaper violated the toddler-in-lap design principle.? Basically, our games had to be toys for toddlers banging randomly on the keyboard and fun games of skill for adults trying to play them at the same time.? Nothing engages a parent with a credit card more than a game they enjoy that their kid DEMANDS.? Anyone who has ever read the same storybook to their toddler a thousand times gets this principle.? Tragically most game developers aren’t moms with toddlers so you never see these kinds of game designs outside of Nintendo.??
Do NOT
Do Ask For Money Just Once
If your game is designed properly your analytics should provide a clear signal that the player is hooked and ready to buy.? They’re self-returning regularly, they’re playing at a relaxed time of day which makes it easier to take the time to complete a commerce transaction, they’ve told friends about it, they’re at an exciting content junction in the game, and they’re not kids with no means of payment. You should know an adult with a means of paying is looking at the screen when you ask for the $$$!
Example 1: <Ideally this happens after 2 pm on a Saturday afternoon>?
?“Congratulations, you’ve completed level 25, defeated the Wumpus, and opened a portal to the misty realm of mysteriousness!? Would you like to purchase another 50 levels for $1?”
What is special about the structure of this offer???
Don’t worry we’re going to get more than a dollar for this game but in order to understand your business, you need to separate identifying players who don’t have the ability to pay from the problem of maximizing the revenue from each paying player. The goal is to get clear analytic signals.??
After the player has verified the ability and intent to purchase for a dollar, UPSELL them on more!? Examples:
Obviously, the right upsell offerings depend on the game design but the idea is to present the user with a menu of upsell options that helps you determine the buyer's price sensitivity.? Ideally, you want players to volunteer to pay you as much as they can afford.? There are also types of price sensitivity that are worth detecting.? The example lists a price-sensitive but not commitment-sensitive offer, a value-sensitive offer, and a commitment-sensitive offer.
There is a perception in social game design that you should only sell virtual goods with decorative value and require people to earn goods of play value because otherwise, people will complain that players can pay to win.? So? People will complain about all payment models except free.? The problem with this approach to game design is that cheating is fun, talking about cheating is viral, and there’s a lot more money to be made selling people the things they want to buy instead of the things you let them buy.? In general Time = Money, if you design a game (that requires developing some skill) that lets players avoid grinding in exchange for cash, players who pay will be less skilled and will become more dependent on paying to advance in the game. Some people will never become particularly skilled which is why mixing in some luck to avoid excluding those folks is also a good idea.? It’s also important to note that many casual/social gamers aren’t particularly competitive.? A strident obsession with fairness is mostly a kid behavior, tired adults (the audience with an actual ability to buy anything) trying to relax often don’t care if other people are paying to win.?
Contrary to popular belief it’s perfectly fine to let people buy advantages in a game providing;
The huge power and value of the WOW gold mining economy is that trading virtual goods between players for real money became part of the fun.? This is likely to be your future, successful NFT economy.
Do NOT
Conclusion
Be aware that the dynamics between kid gamers and adults are extremely complex and nuanced.? No kid has the ability to buy a game from you without persuading a parent to perform a transaction for them.? Kid and parent identities blur online, they often share the same accounts and devices and kids lie about their age.? Kids are highly vocal online, they can be very viral and they are often the ones who introduce their parents to content.? Adults often don’t have the time or interest to be particularly vocal online, they don’t tend to tell their friends about the games they waste time on and when they buy games it’s often NOT for themselves.? ~50% of game purchases by adults are for kids.? The main reason a parent buys a game for a kid is as inexpensive daycare.? This makes the world of game pricing and analytics extremely complex and nuanced.? It’s very difficult to properly monetize a game if your analytics doesn’t do more work than just tell you how your game is performing.? Good analytics also needs to tell you specifically how to improve your game.???
In order to get clear analytic signals, it’s valuable to break out each analytical question you are asking of the consumer and craft and refine gameplay and UI experience designed to systematically incentivize and reward each specific behavior in isolation from the others.? *There’s an advanced topic on how to ask multiple questions with the same UI and math the answers for each question out of the composite data.? I would title the article “Intro to linear algebra for marketing analytics”, but for the sake of discussion, the success of most online games would improve dramatically if game developers simply learned how to prioritize and isolate the metrics they’re trying to optimize for.
Incomprehensible magic math tells us that even if we can’t understand the magic math, there are some fundamental principles of viral game design worth mastering.
Notice that I wrote an entire Web 3.0 game article without mentioning crypto?? That’s because if you don’t master this stuff first, you’re dead before you collect a single Bitcoin.? The crypto monetization business has its own strange dynamics that are irrelevant if you don’t master analytic control in game design first.? The main reason this article is for “Web 3.0 game developers” is that they are trying to pioneer a new monetization method for gaming that nobody really understands yet, and their games are not welcome in established distribution channels that exist for all the games that suck at self-virality.? The Web 3.0 guys have no option but to learn these lessons immediately, while the traditional game developers have established channels they can rely on to remove adoption friction and do their marketing for them in exchange for ~30% of their revenues.? The Web 3.0 guys are doomed to burn VC dollars that should have gone into their game on Google ads and traditional media if they don’t learn social game design and monetization quickly.