Monetization

Step 1: What are you Selling?

Every top grossing free to play game primarily sells the means to progress.

You must define the core progress for your game. What do you see players building over a long period of time?

Step 2: How long will it last?

If what you’re selling won’t last, you won’t be successful.

Look at your base gameplay — do the stats scale?

2 basic tools you can use to evaluate your scalability:

a. Model your Progression

that’s how long your system should last.

b. Test your Beginning Game, Mid Game, and End Game

Step 3: Why do I care?

Making virtual items valuable is not easy, but thus far most free to play games have focused on 2 ways to do this:

a. Visual Progress & Tease Long Term Vision

#1 The Saga Map

#2 Base Expansion & Building Progress in Clash of Clans

#3 Characters in Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes

b. Social Pressure

From: https://mobilefreetoplay.com/mobile-monetization-101-the-first-steps/#step-1-what-are-you-selling

Live ops

Live Ops can take a great game and allow it to thrive for decades.

It’s about building up an effective toolset so that product managers can keep a game feeling “fresh” with as minimal effort as possible, and about ensuring that the game’s core systems are flexible enough so that years of additional content won’t break the core.

Live Ops can be broken down into 5 key areas:

1. Content Delivery (New cosmetic item)

2. Offers (Feature items/ Bundled items / Discounted items / Come back offers)& Promotions (Local notification / Social media messaging / Message-of-the-day / In-game mail / Teasing )

3. Events (Fun / Monetization / Content / Marketing / Tactical)

4. Community Management

5. Continual Product Improvements

Also, ask yourself:

Will your economy sustain all the extra currency coming in from promotions?

Are the rewards from your events important enough to a player’s core progression that they will be willing to engage & pay for it?

Can your base mechanic be changed in multiple ways, add new mechanics on top of it in order to sustain new content and new events for years?

Variety is key — to minimize burnout or decreasing impact of promotions and events its about ensuring you have enough variety in them.

From: https://mobilefreetoplay.com/bible/mobile-live-operations-best-practices/

From: https://www.slideshare.net/gwertzman/effective-liveops-strategies

Punishment design

Reasons that a game may punish players:

1. Punishment creates endogenous value.

(Resources in a game are worth more if there is a chance they can be taken away.)

2. Taking risks is exciting

(Risk terrible consequences makes success much sweeter.)

3. Possible punishment increases challenge

Types of punishment:

1. Shaming

2. Loss of points (Carefully!)

3. Shorten play

4. Terminated play

5. Setback

6. Removal of powers (Carefully!)

7. Resource depletion

Last tips:

1. When punishment feels random and unstoppable, it makes the player feel lack of control, which is a very bad feeling.

2. Is there a way to turn these punishments into rewards and get the same effect?

From: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/0123694965