Game Monetization: How to Encourage Players to Purchase

The more engaged players are the more likely they spend money. When players really enjoy the game, they want to find some ways to experience more fun and it is a good chance for you to provide them choices of in-game purchases. When making a free-to-play game, it is important to build a long term relationship with your player. Let players play for weeks and weeks or months and months and not just a couple days is the key driver of monetization. There are several kinds of game that could build long relationship such as social game, competitive game, infinitely games and games involves some sort of social organism. Social pressure and friend competition would greatly stimulate their buying desire.

It is also important to make purchase present. It means that let your players clearly know they can purchase to get more fun in game. For example, in a free-to-play game you can show the button of revive purchase to let players to choose to pay for revive and continue current game. As a game designer, I need to ask yourself are the players given opportunity to spend money. There are some example of games that are too "shy" to ask for money, their purchases buttons are hard to notice and players do not really feel they need to purchase something in game. It is mainly because the purchase system is not in core loop or not surfaced well. If it is really hard to design purchase during the game experience, starter pack might be a good choice to give ability to ask for money. Using discount starter pack could quickly attract players' attention and it is one of most straightforward and easiest way to design in-game purchases.

Sometimes, the difficulty of game could be a good way to encourage players to purchase. If difficulty makes the game experience really tough, then players tend to purchase some weapons or buff to enjoy the smooth experience of achieving. The sharp contrast compared to the struggling experience would stimulate the purchase desire. The reason why player buy is mostly because they want more fun. So when I design NBA live activities in summer intern, I should keep thinking of how the purchase can make experience different and more fun, how to encourage them to buy and how to make it easy to pay.

We should be cautious about selling permanent things in game. There's a danger when we sell permanent goods rather than consumable goods and there's a balance that we should considered when design some permanent goods in game. For level based game, it is not wise to only sell linear content, because from survey results only 2% of the players purchase linear content and it limits the potential pool of players.

NBA Live sells NBA cash with which players can purchase packs with random elite players. With stronger players in your team, your game experience will be greatly improved, for example an elite player with value above 80 runs quicker, makes better shoots and has quicker response than an average player with value of 67. It is much easier to control the elite players in teams to win and when players face difficulty or meet some tough rivals in game, they are more likely to try in-game purchases. The lowest good price is 0.99$ for buying one elite player which is quite friendly to newcomers.