开发者谈如何合理安排F2P游戏的优惠活动

原作者：Javier Barnes 译者：Willow Wu

打折还是不打折？这个问题要争论起来的话恐怕永远都无法停止：一方面，内购限时折扣能刺激收益快速上升。另一方面，如果处理不得当的话，你的收益反而还会下降。

那么，如何才能避免这些问题呢？我们将会在本文中进行解答，并告诉大家如何减少内购打折或者游戏内容打折所带来的负面影响。

简短的免责声明：这是我之前的文章“IAP packs balance and design”的后续补充。所以，如果你没看过这那篇文章的话，我还是建议你去看下。还有，我不会在这篇文章中讲如何设计折扣方案、如何呈现它们。如果你对这一话题有兴趣，我建议你可以看看Matthew Emery的系列文章“The IAP Merchandising Playbook”。

我应该提供IAP折扣吗？

简短的回答？当然要。我认为在大多数游戏中，提供IAP折扣是个好主意，因为：

·能快速提高收入，提前获得这笔你终会拿到的钱。

这本质上是好事，因为这能够确保玩家会花出这笔钱，即使其中的一些玩家之后会放弃游戏。而且这还能为玩家提供额外的动力继续游戏，直到他们把买来的东西都用光。

鉴于现在F2P游戏市场的竞争激烈程度，你需要充分利用每一个优势来加速获得玩家的投资回报。这样你就可以把这笔钱再用到用户获取上，形成一个比对手更快的循环，实现公司业务的升级。

·你会获得其它途径都无法产生的收入。

有个更划算的交易机会摆在他们面前（或者是因为害怕失去这个机会），玩家可能会被说服购买之前没想到要购买的东西。

对于那些你无论如何都无法说服的非付费用户，你可以把“骨折级”的优惠摆在他们面前，反正你也不指望从这类用户身上赚到钱。

就是要确保你所采用的策略不会导致玩家停止消费： reddit上有《暗影之枪：传奇》的玩家指出停止消费其实可以让他们在游戏中获得更优惠的折扣，并主动鼓励其他人减少消费由此来获得更划算的交易。

·有时你的玩家会期待游戏中的优惠&折扣

不管你做的是什么产品，在某些情况下玩家自然地就会期盼优惠活动的到来。由此就会演变成等活动来了他们才花钱。

很容易想到的例子就是一些季节性的庆祝活动：新年前夜、独立日、黑色星期五……这些都是提供优惠活动的好时机，也可以趁着假期来临之际再争取一些新用户。

比如在黑色星期五玩家会期盼折扣力度非常大的活动，因此在这前一周他们会减少开支，不管你做不做黑五活动，他们都会这么做。

但如果你那天什么活动都不做，他们是不会把这笔钱花出去的，而且可能还会感到气愤。

潜在的负面影响

在开启“所有货币礼包都打1折”这样的疯狂活动之前，我们先来讲一讲要是你出了错，你将会面临那些危险。

折扣活动策划不当招致的最大风险：

·玩家学会等到下一次折扣活动再花钱。

那些成为主要收益来源的玩家通常都是在游戏中呆了很长一段时间的，将来也会继续保持下去。

这意味着付费玩家比游戏开发者们所预想的更有耐心。所以，他们要是知道折扣活动即将来临的话，怎么还会愿意按全价消费呢？

定期、可预测再加上无限制的大力度折扣活动是最常见的错误做法之一，它能够在短时间内带来显著的成效。但是很快这就会演变成你需要高频率地推出这种大幅度优惠活动才能保持这样的盈利水准。

更麻烦的是玩家会记住这些商品的历史价格，然后会把折扣力度不大的交易无视掉，认为这是不划算的。只有在价格极低的时候才觉得好机会来临，因此你就不得不把价格压得一低再低。

很多游戏会采取不同的策略来避免这样的问题。其中最常用且最有效的一种就是在某些特殊庆祝活动期间表明优惠的特殊性，并加上限购要求，或者是加以调整，避免变得可预测。

《皇室战争》每天都有优惠活动，但是开发团队处理得非常好：游戏的促销模式完全无法预料，玩家无法得知特别优惠和每日精选中会有什么东西，而且游戏刻意避开了可以广泛使用的货币。这些优惠每天只能交易一次。

·高价值物品囤积过多导致经济膨胀

不要忘了，付费玩家是打算在游戏中长期呆下去的，如果高价值资源也打折打得非常厉害，他们中的大多数人将会毫不犹豫地以更快的速度消费，因为他们知道，从长远来看这是能够帮他们省钱的。

如果开发商不能妥善处理这种增加的资源流，这将会成为营收方面的一个长期障碍，因为这些关键付费用户群体将坐拥一个庞大的硬货币金库而没有足够的地方可以消费。因此，他们也就没有理由去买内购礼包了。

如果你没有意识到资源过剩的现象，情况可能还会更危险：开发团队可能会试图通过连续、循环地推出更优惠力度更大的活动来应对基准收入降低（因为优惠产生的效果会越来越差），从而为系统注入更多的货币，使问题进一步恶化。

因此，开发团队应该时刻注意游戏关键资源的库存，注意平衡，而且优惠应该结合其它消耗机制，比如一个需要玩家出钱出力的活动，或者是提供一个大家都想要的物品但是需要消耗额外的货币……

在Monster Legends中，内购物品会做定期式的大促销，但是通常会伴随消耗宝石的线上活动或者是时间非常短的限时活动，为的就是把玩家的宝石库存控制在一个合理的范围内，不会贬值。

·实际上，你的收入可能会因此减少。

优惠活动会产生所谓的“宿醉效应”，也就是在活动过后的这段时间，玩家会因为各种原因限制自己的消费（内容太多，消费过头了，所以需要节省……）。

这就需要你留心关注一下，因为在某些情况下，宿醉效应造成的损失会超过之前活动所带来的收益。优惠力度大的尤其要注意这个问题。

Tom Hammond提出了一个很好的建议：以7天或14天为单位观察你的游戏收入，确保你没有在不经意间造成损失。就比如一项优惠活动今天能为你带来15万的收益，但也会在接下来的7天内造成2.5万/一天的损失，因为玩家手上有太多内容了，没必要再消费，那么实际上你总共还是亏了2.5万美元。

·优惠活动会拉低游戏内容的价值

我所说的“拉低价值”并不是单纯地指付出更少的钱就能获得内容。这可以表现为几种不同的方式（而且经常被忽视）：

首先，贬值意味着某个东西的感知价值受到损害。在之前我写的关于IAP的文章中，我已经提到了付费玩家之所以付费是因为免费游戏中的虚拟物品对他们来说是有很大价值的，根本原因还是在于他们对游戏的热爱。换句话说，他们付费是因为觉得这钱花得值。

优惠活动从某种意义上来说就是在侵害这种价值与金钱之间的关系。不过，如果谨慎行事，之前的价值状态应该不会受到影响，这次的优惠活动只是一次例外、一次机会。

但是定期针对同一个物品推出优惠活动会促成一种新的价值感知。这意味着永久地破坏了原先金钱和价值之间的对等关系，玩家很难会愿意用原先的价格来购买。就比如说，如果你有一个物品是花40欧元买来的，但是经常会打折到20欧元，玩家最终就会觉得这个东西不值40欧元，只值20欧元。

贬值的第二种表现方式就是减少内容的可玩时间。付费通常是加速玩家的进程（尤其是他们可以花钱直接跳过进阶过程中的某些步骤）。如果你的endgame玩家把内容都消耗完了，他们的留存率就会变得岌岌可危。

如果进阶内容创造成本很高的话（就比如以叙事向游戏《梦幻家园》），这种过快的消耗速度就会变成很棘手的麻烦。

在包含循环性meta的竞技游戏中，玩家过快达到endgame阶段会迫使开发者加快内容发布的速度，这也可能促使玩家不愿意消费，因为你缩短了竞技内容的时效性（为什么我要买这个“最强单位”？下个月就又有狠角色了……）。

最后，即使你可以通过更新相对廉价内容摆脱上文的所有问题，但是，让玩家过于频繁地接触到新内容也会削弱它们的新鲜感。

如果新内容是跟之前的东西差不多只是量更大（如大多数RPG游戏），或者其机制与玩家已经接触过的非常相似，你就会面临着玩家容忍度逐渐变差的风险，也就是说他们可能很快就会开始觉得这游戏变得无聊、重复内容太多了。

总之，所有这些问题的根本缘由都在于打破了优惠的黄金法则：你不应该让玩家彻底满足。

理想的做法

·保持优惠活动的特别感。

玩家觉得这是一个好机会然后抓紧时间付款——这就是优惠活动带来的好处。所以你应该确保玩家对优惠活动永远都有一种惊喜感，而不是认为这是预料中的事。

这是否意味着你不能定期提供折扣？完全不是。

办法之一就是避免硬货币本身打折，因为硬货币打折意味着游戏经济的所有东西都会被贬值。专注于一组随机的物品：折扣是可以常驻的，但玩家并不知道某个特定物品什么时候会打折，可能很长时间你才会等到。

将它们与特定节日和庆祝活动关联起来也会有一定的帮助，当然如果你不断地打折，单靠主题活动是无法避免玩家将其视为可预料的事件。

利用定向用户群组也是一个很好的主意，可以专门向不会打破经济平衡的用户（如非付费用户）提供大力度的折扣，同时定制其价值。

·避免玩家无休止地利用优惠活动

限制玩家对优惠商品的重复购买次数可以让你安心放出超低价，不用担心这会对整体游戏经济造成影响。

实现这个目的的最简单方法就是对优惠活动加以限购，就比如《荒野乱斗》每日精选能购买一次。如果想要更温和一点的做法，那就规定购买价格会随着购买次数上升，就像《动物王者: 对战游戏》一样。

《荒野乱斗》《7万国觉醒》中都有明确限定优惠礼包的购买次数。商品的性价比提升了n倍，但开发者们又不用担心这会对游戏经济平衡产生长期影响。

·如果是硬货币打折，记住要通过其它方式消耗

我们在上文已经讲过资源过剩所带来的风险：这个东西已经“泛滥成灾”了，玩家为什么还要买呢？

因此，持续关注付费玩家所持有的硬货币数量是很重要的。就算是对于很少做优惠活动的游戏来说，这也是一种十分有效的方法。

如果玩家开始囤积货币，这可能表明优惠所提供的内容并没有被有效消耗，或某些新加入游戏中的奖励危及到了稀缺性。

·避免恐慌式优惠

很多公司是以每小时为单位来监测营收情况的，如果收入明显低于每日预测，就会开启短期优惠活动。或者他们监测到鲸鱼用户或其它类型的付费用户在特定月份的消费额低于预测值，他们就会推出一堆预设的优惠活动。

这种做法是能起到不小的帮助作用，但同时也可能会非常危险——如果开发者们把优惠活动视为一个当现实偏离预期就可以按下的按钮。

仓促推出的折扣活动可能会给经济平衡造成意想不到的负面影响，最终导致收益效果更进一步地偏离预期。甚至还有可能破坏精心策划的活动或者新内容的发行。

不要为实时数据而着急做出决策，可以以7天、14天或者更长的时间为单位，观察平均的波动值。

我个人是非常赞同指定一个明确的负责人把控游戏整体经济和收益，监测当前的营收还有确保能在未来创造更多利润。

如果你正在组建一个产品管理团队，我建议不要让某些成员专门负责策划&运营优惠活动，一定要从整体的角度来分析游戏经济的表现和健康状况，而不是单单基于优惠活动的效果。否则你做出的决策只能适用于短期，很有局限性。

·制定计划、遵循计划&迭代

针对长期（2-3个月）进行合理预测、制定计划是一个很好的做法，确保无论哪些优惠活动正在进行都能与其它的消耗活动配合得当。

跟其它线上运营活动一样，回顾先前优惠活动的实际表现并与预测数据进行对比，进而调整模型，这是非常好的做法。这不仅可以促使你更准确地预测未来收入，还能帮助你发现预示着机会或者风险的波动。

此外，它还能降低滥用意外折扣的概率，并将更多的注意力集中在精心安排的限时活动上。计划是恐慌的天敌。

苹果公司提前计划了逐步降低设备价格，通常会与新一代高性能产品的公开关联在一起。同样地，你的计划应该包括确定热门内容什么时候打折，以及当它什么时候会被更新、更强大的东西所取代。

Q&A

-如何发现优惠活动会造成贬值？

这是个特别复杂的话题——在我看来，你必须把经济不同阶段的几个指标放在一起对比从而得出结论，而不是看一个具体的KPI。

还有要说的就是，你无法通过直接询问付费玩家来得知是否造成了贬值。根据我的经验，玩家对于游戏盈利策略侵略性的感知大概也是可以划分成几个级别的，从“太贵了”到“行是行，但如果更便宜些的话游戏销量会更好”。你必须跟着数据走。

我认为，当你发现以下这些迹象时就需要重新审视优惠活动：

·同样的活动所带来的收入开始递减，而且这并不是因为游戏玩家数量减少。
·在没有优惠活动的时候，游戏无法产生可观的收入。这可能就是基准收入遭受严重影响的最明显表现，游戏现在已经高度依赖折扣活动了。
·宿醉效应影响时间变长，强度变大——就是指在折扣力度极大的优惠活动后收入跌入低谷的时间。
·付费玩家的硬货币持有量上升，远超于正常值，主要获得途径就是内购。

-如果游戏过于依赖优惠活动，要如何解决？

正如我们之前看到的，高频率地推出大力度折扣活动会迫使游戏不得不一直保持这个节奏才能获得收益，从而也加速了前面讲的那些问题的出现。所以，如果你已经陷入这种棘手的境地中了，你要怎么才能摆脱？

说实话，我不认为这个问题有什么完美的解决办法（或者确实存在，但我不知道），但我可以给出两个建议：

我之前用过的一个有效策略就是在经济上增加一环，然后尝试逐步将盈利的重点转向这些新的领域。

就比如说，引入新的货币，但它的价值不会通过优惠活动来表现。你可以把这种资源设定为获取最新游戏内容，或者其它高价值元素的唯一途径，让endgame通过这种方式展开。

如果经济中出现问题的部分是在游戏中起到较为关键的作用，无法让用户忽略它们（就比如是硬货币），那该怎么办？

在这种情况下，你可以往另一个方向走：在endgame经济上增加新的一环，然后把不健康的做法都集中在这块地方，逐步改善系统中更关键的部分。

举个实例吧：在Monster Legends中，我们通过引入新的货币（Heroic Orbs）逐步减少了原先硬货币的优惠活动，新货币是抽取新角色Warmasters的唯一途径，它是非常强大的单位。优惠活动逐渐围绕着Orbs展开，关于宝石的活动越来越少了。

总结

如果你使用得当，优惠活动确实你能够给你带来非常可观的利润。但你一定要多花些时间确保这样做不会对未来的长期收益造成负面影响。

关键的是，你应该对优惠加以限制，不能让玩家赚到满足（这样经济才不会崩溃），玩家应该对优惠永远都有一种惊喜的感觉。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

It’s a never-ending debate: On one hand, temporary discounts on IAP prices will generate a quick spike on revenue. On the other, if badly managed they can harm the baseline revenue.

To discount or not to discount? And how to do it to avoid issues? In this article we propose an answer, and share some tips on how to limit long term negative effects derived from running offers on IAP prices and other game content.

Quick disclaimer: This is a short follow-up to my article on IAP packs balance and design. So you may want to check it out if you haven’t already.
Note also that I won’t speak here about how to build and present those offers. If you’re interested on that, I suggest you to check this amazing article from Matthew Emery.

SHOULD I RUN OFFERS ON MY IAPS?

Short answer? Yes.
I believe that, in most games, running discounts on IAPs at it’s a good idea because:

·You will accelerate revenue that would’ve been generated eventually.
This is inherently good because it will secure that spending, even if some of those players then churn. And it also provides them extra incentive to keep on playing until they deplete their investment.

And given how competitive the current F2P market is, you need every single advantage you can to accelerate your player’s return of investment. So that you can reinvest that money into buying users faster than your competition and escalate your business.

·You will generate revenue that wouldn’t have been made in any other way.
Since players may be convinced to make a purchase they were not expecting to, due to the sense of opportunity of getting a better deal (or the fear of losing it).

In general, long term non-paying users that there’s just no way to convince to pay are free game for presenting them with the insanely aggressive offers, since you were not going to make any money from them anyway.

Just make sure you don’t follow an easy-to-stop pattern: On this post at the RAID: Shadow Legends reddit, engaged players have realized that shutting down their spending gets them the best deals in the game, and actively encourage others to limit their spending to get them. Yikes!

·Sometimes your players will expect offers and discounts on your game.
No matter what you do, on some situations players will organically expect offers to happen. Therefore generating to some degree the don’t spend until an offer effect.

A clear example of this are seasonal celebrations such as New Year’s Eve, 4th July, or Black Friday… These are great moments to held offers as well because your game is likely to have an extra flow of users since the players will have more leisure time.

Players will expect big discounts on Black Friday and therefore moderate their spending on the week prior, etc. This is going to happen no matter if you plan to run Black Friday offers or not.

But if you don’t run any offer on that day, they won’t spend the money and might be mad.

Potential negative effects

But before we all start running hyper-aggressive discounts of 90% off on all your currency packs, it’s worth talking about the dangers it involved if you make mistakes.
The biggest risks of a badly managed discount strategy are:

·It can teach players to avoid buying until the next good offer.
The players that generate most of the revenue are usually the ones that have been in the game for a long time already, and plan to remain for a long time too.

What this means is that paying users have more patience that what game developers running offers tend to think: So why would they buy something at the full price if they know that soon enough it is going to be a big discount on it?

Running aggressive discounts with high periodicity, in a predictable pattern and without no limitations is a common mistake that will provide great results short time.
But soon it will generate a situation where the game needs to run constant, aggressive offers to keep on generating any significant revenue at all.

What is even more problematic is that players will remember the history of the deals offered to them. And therefore ignore lower discounts as bad deals, and only have a feeling of opportunity when the offer is extremely aggressive, thus forcing you to lower prices even more.

Most games employ a wide range of strategies to avoid this issue. Among them the most popular and effective ones are justifying their exceptionality under some special celebration as well as adding a purchase limit, or simply setting them up properly to avoid predictable patterns.

Clash Royale runs offers every single day, but in a way that strongly gates their access:
The pattern is unpredictable (the player doesn’t know what stuff will appear on the Special Offers and Daily Deals, and they actively avoid offering wide-use currencies) and the offers have strict limits (can only be bought them once per day).

·It can overflow the economy with valuables.
Remember that paying users are playing the long game here: If offered a valuable resource at a great discount, most of them won’t hesitate on spending at a higher pace, knowing that it will save them money on the long term.

If the developer fails to deal properly with that increased flow of resources, this will a long term handicap on revenue generation because key groups of paying users will be sitting on piles of hard currency with not enough places to spend them.
And therefore, they will have no reason to buy IAP packs.

Not realizing this resource overflow can even be more dangerous: the developer may try to counter the low baseline revenues by running even more aggressive offers on a continuous cycle (because the offers will be less and less effective), thus injecting even more currency on the system and worsening the problem.

As a consequence, developers must monitor the balance of key resources on the inventory stocks, and offers should come together with mechanisms to drain the extra resources from the economy (like a demanding event, or maybe an attractive item offer where players can spend that extra currency…).

In Monster Legends we used to run heavy discounts on IAP with certain periodicity, but offers were synchronized with a range of gem-sink liveops, or the critical final hours of big time limited events, in order to make the players gem stocks return to the usual values.

·It can actually make you make less revenue.
Offers can generate what’s called a hangover, which is a period where players limit their spending for whatever reason (having too much content, having went overboard on their spending so they need to save…).

This has to be carefully checked, because in some cases the loss generated by the hangover can exceed the profit. This is particularly dangerous on big offers.

A superb advice by Tom Hammond, who is one of the best accounts to follow on LinkedIn regarding F2P.

·It can devaluate the game content.
What I mean by devaluation is more than just players getting access to content at a lower price. Devaluation acts in several additional directions that are often overlooked:

First, devaluation also means a damage on the perceived of value of something.
In my previous article about IAPs we already mentioned that paying users pay because the value to an extreme degree a virtual item on a free game due to their love for the game. In other words, they pay because they think the product is worth the money.

Doing an offer is performing a small aggression against the relationship of value and price. Nevertheless, if done carefully the previous value status quo should remain unaffected, the offer being just an exceptionality, an opportunity.

But regularly running discounts over the same product can institute a new status quo instead. This means, permanently damaging the equivalence of money and value, and therefore making harder that the player pays at the same price.
For example, if you’ve a unit that costs 40€, but which is constantly being offered at 20€, eventually player’s will feel that it isn’t worth 40€, but 20 instead.

A second type of devaluation is decreasing the playable time of your content. Paying usually accelerates the progression of players (specially if they can use the money skip steps of the progression). And if your endgame players run out of content, their retention will start to suffer.

Players consuming game content faster than they should can be particularly problematic if that progression content is particularly expensive to generate, such as in narrative-driven games like Homescapes.

In competitive games with rotative meta, players reaching endgame content too quick can also force the developers to accelerate the release of new content, which may also make the players reluctant to spend because you decrease the usefulness time of the competitive content (Why should I buy the “most powerful unit”? It will be replaced next month…).

And last, even if you can shrug off all previous problems with the release of cheap new content, allowing your player access new playable content too fast also devaluates the novelty value of your content.

If the new content is just the same thing with bigger numbers (like in most RPGs), or has mechanics that are very similar to the ones that the player has already seen, you risk that the player starts to see the game as boring and repetitive faster.

Summarizing, all these issues are born from breaking the golden rule of discounts and offers: You should never provide enough to your players.

Best PRACTICES

·Maintain the sense of exceptionality on any offer or discount.
The main benefit of offers is that the player detect a sense of opportunity on them and pays, so you should make sure that players never take them for granted.

Does this mean that you can’t run offers regularly? Not at all.
One way you can achieve that is by avoid discounting the hard currency per se, which means devaluation over everything on the economy, and rather focus only a random set of items: Offers are constant, but the player won’t know when this specific item will be discounted, and it may take long.

Linking them to specific holidays and celebrations will partially contribute to it, but of course if you do discounts constantly, by itself alone the thematic mask won’t avoid that players take them for granted.

Making use of targeting is also a great idea to present aggressive offers exclusively to audience that won’t break the economy (like non-paying users), as well as tailor its value.

·Protect the economy by avoiding players exploiting offers endlessly.
Limiting the amount of repeated purchases on offers will allow you to be very aggressive with the discount ratios without fear of generating an issue for the overall economy.

The easiest way to achieve this is by limiting how many times that an offer can be bought (daily deals of Brawl Stars can only bought once). A softer approach is adding an incremental price that rises with every purchase (like Zooba does).

Both Brawl Stars and Rise of Kingdoms explicitly mention that their offer packs only allow a limited amount of purchases. This allows them to deliver insane discount values (x5, x8…) without risk of generating long termed unbalances to the game economy.

·If discounting hard currency, remember to sink it.
We already mentioned the risks involved on overflowing the economy with resources: without scarcity, what reasons do have players to buy?

For that reason, it’s very important to monitor constantly the stocks of hard currency of the different profiles of paying users. This is a great practice even on games that don’t run offers often.

If players start stocking currency, it may be an indicator that offer contents are not being drained for the system, or that some game reward is injecting an unexpected flow of resources on the economy which can endanger the scarcity.

·Avoid panic offers
Many companies monitor revenue on an hourly basis, and are able to activate short term guerrilla offers if the revenues are significantly below the daily forecast.
Or launch a bunch of preset offers it they detect that whales or other segments of paying users are below the forecasted spending on a specific month.

Those can be great practices, but they can be dangerous too if offers are the button that always gets pressed whenever reality deviates from the forecast.
Rushed offers they can generate unexpected unbalances on the economy and end up generating bigger gaps on the forecast than the ones they were trying to solve. It can also ruin carefully planned events or new content releases.

Don’t take rush decisions based on realtime data, use a 7-days or 14-days rolling average instead (or longer). Is this the first crossover ever on a mobile f2p design article? Maybe.

These kind of actions should be taken without thinking on the rest of the monetization holistically. Due to that, I am personally a great fan of having a clear owner of the entire game economy and revenue. Someone who is in charge on handling the current revenue but also guaranteeing its ability to create more in the future.

If you’re building a product management team, I would advise against having roles whose function is exclusively to create and run offers and will be evaluated based on how well the offers performed instead of an holistic view of the game economy performance and health. That is likely to end up in near sighted decisions.

·Have a plan, follow it and iterate on it
Having solid forecasts and plans for extended periods (2-3 months) is a great way to make sure that whatever offers and discounts the game is running are properly synchronized with their sinks and located in sweetspots.

Like any other liveop, it is an excellent practice to review the actual performance of the offer versus the forecast, and adjust the model. Not only this will allow you to predict future revenue with more accuracy, but also you’ll spot fluctuations that may indicate opportunities or risks.

Additionally, it will decrease the chances of abusing unexpected discounts and focus more on the carefully timed actions. Plans are tha natural predators of panic.

Apple plans ahead the progressive lowering on the price of their devices, usually linked to the announcement and release of superior ones. Similarly, your plans should include a prevision on when your hot content is going to be discounted, and when it’s going to be replaced by a newer, more powerful stuff.

Q&A

How to detect when offers are CAUSING DEVALUATION?

This is a particularly tricky topic and – in my opinion – is a conclusion that has to be reached by putting together several indicators on different points on the economy, rather than looking at a specific KPI.

Another point here is that you will not be able to know devaluation by asking paying users directly. In my experience, the perception of aggressiveness of a game monetization by engaged users is likely to range from “it’s too expensive” to “it’s ok but the game would be more profitable if it was cheaper”. You’ll have to go to the data

I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume that offers need to be reviewed when you detect several of these indicators:

·The same offer starts to return diminishing benefits, without the decrease being explainable by the fact that the game has less population.
·The game can’t generate significant revenues when not running offers. This is possibly the biggest indicator that the baseline has been very damaged and the game is now addicted to offers.
·The hangover is becoming longer and stronger. Meaning the time of diminished revenues after a powerful offer or discount has been offered.
·Hard Currency stocks of paying users are increasing and are way higher than the regular values, and the main source are IAP purchases.

How to fix a game that IS ADDICTED TO offers?

As we’ve seen before, running an aggressive schedule of discounts may force the game to keep on running them in order to make any money, accelerating the issues previously mentioned. So if you’re on that trench already, how can you get out?

To be honest, I don’t think there is a perfect method to solve this (or, if it exists, I don’t know it), but here are my 2 cts.

A successful strategy I’ve successfully used in the past is to build new healthy sections of the economy and then try to progressively focus the monetization towards on those new, healthy areas.

For example, introducing a new currency and establish a value around it of being valuable and not present on offers. This resource could be only way to get the latest gameplay content or some other high value elements, thus quickly making the endgame revolve around its acquisition.

But what if the compromised parts of the economy are too core to make feasible that players ignore them (for example, if it’s the Hard Currency)?
In that case, the opposite can be done as well: Build new sections of the endgame economy and then focus the unhealthy practices on them, progressively healing the more critical and permanent parts of the system.

Case example: In Monster Legends, we were able to decrease the amount of offers on hard currency by introducing a new one (Heroic Orbs), which was the only way to access a new set of super competitive units called Warmasters. Offers and discounts progressively started to focus more on these new Orbs, and less on Gems.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Offers can be extremely profitable if done right, but it’s extremely worth spend extra time making sure that they don’t cause harm to future revenues.
The key learnings are that offers should never provide enough to players (so that the economy doesn’t break), and that your players should never take offers for granted.

(source: gamasutra.com )