Game Economy Design Essentials Part 2: Best Practices

Today we’re looking at best practices for creating a framework for crafting a game economy that keeps your audience persistently enthralled and coming back for more. 

But first - a special thanks to some brilliant minds who helped bring this article to life: Javier Barnes, the Senior Product Manager at Tilting Point brought a seasoned and veteran perspective to our writing and helped craft the narrative.

And thanks to Nick Murry, F2P Product Consultant at Games Consulting. His PocketGamer Masterclass on Game Economy Design and Optimisation added great contribution to this article. Nick is an 11-year veteran of the F2P industry.

Thanks!

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Table of Contents:
 

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Today, we’re getting serious about action. With the right formulas in place today, you’ll have less to think about, plan about, and stress about tomorrow. And while that doesn’t mean you’ll be home-free, it does mean you’ll have a much more lucrative grip on your economy from Day 1.

Your game’s fullest profitability -- and most satisfied playerbase -- is waiting. Let’s take a look at the best practices it takes to get you there.

Let’s go.

Players get frustrated

We’ve all seen it happen: players enter a game, pulled in by an invigorating premise. They move through their first play session and things are okay. They continue on to their second, and then their third -- and then they start to realize how, to get to the place they want to be in the game, it’s going to take a long time.

Accumulating wealth is hard. 

Getting access to resources is hard. 

They have two choices: spend out of pocket or wait -- for what feels like forever -- to have any sort of power in the game at all.

In the real world, this scenario can be seen in full in Coin Master. As soon as you leave the game’s FTUE, you have 18 whole stars to call your own. You’re feeling good -- like the whole world is at your fingertips. And then you open the leaderboard. What comes up? Thanh, the #1 player in your country has… drumroll, please… 52,403 stars.

That’s only 52,385 away from where you’re standing.

Obviously, faced with this reality, you’re turned off. Players are frustrated, they’re annoyed, and just as quickly as they entered the game… they leave it. 

And this happens more commonly than you’d think. Even though to us it’s predictable and critical to avoid, to some game economists, the severity of this scenario’s outcome -- let’s call it Scenario A -- isn’t as clear. But that’s just one of the less-than-ideal scenarios I have for you. So? Let’s take a look at Scenario B.

Players enter a game. Something about the game premise has spoken to them, so they’re ready to be engaged. Their first play session starts, and they’re given enough in-game wealth to make empowered decisions. Without spending any of their own money.

They can buy what they want, arm themselves with the best tools, and advance through content as quickly as they’d like to. They’re rolling in it. And that wealth continues on through play sessions two and three.

It’s awesome. It’s energetic. It’s completely autonomous -- with a little effort here and a little time there, they can achieve anything they want. 

But then the fourth play session rolls around. And the fifth. And the eighth. And guess what? Nothing’s changed. 

They’re getting everything they want, every time. They’re accumulating more and more currency, and they’re acquiring more and more resources. The excitement of killing it, the liveliness of being able to achieve whatever they want to achieve -- it dissipates. It’s easy. It’s too easy. It’s no longer fun.  

And the other thing to think about here? How fast content is getting burned through. Satisfying, compelling, high-quality content doesn’t just create itself -- and if you’re giving players the opportunity to progress with no real barriers to entry, your team is going to have to keep up. That’s quite a load to hold on their shoulders. 

They’ll have to pump out top-notch content constantly. They’ll have to adhere to demand and run marathon after marathon on the content treadmil, and they’ll have to ensure -- at the same time -- that they’re holding the players’ interest. Not just creating more of the same, but creating more and better. 

Because if things get boring, players will leave. If they stop getting clear-cut objectives, exciting challenges, and spruced-up variations from your game, they’ll find ‘em somewhere else. So while you might have two months’ worth of perfectly planned, well-balanced content up your sleeve, players in this scenario could burn through it in two days -- and leave you stranded. Abandoned. Desperate for new material -- even if it’s less-than.

The real-world result? You have good (or even great) short-term and long-term retention, but you’re constantly hustling to add more content -- and nobody is spending. Per-user in-game currencies are skyrocketing (which you know because you track them), but you’re not monetizing. And your in-house people are exhausted.

Let me give you a little secret. The solution? It comes down, in totality, to one best practice. 

Supply Early, Demand Late. 

If you want to avoid the two doom-and-gloom scenarios outlined above, this is your key. 

Here’s how you do it: 

Supply Early: 

This tip falls into three branches. First: give your players enough to feel special as soon as they enter the game. Like we saw in Scenario B, there’s a unique sense of empowerment that comes from offering players wealth, or resources, before anything’s really started. It makes them feel in control -- and wanted. It makes them feel like the game’s theirs for the taking. So leverage that. Hook them.

And then make sure it’s clear that if they leave, they’ll lose everything they’ve obtained. That all of the time they’ve invested so far would be for naught. Once you have their attention securely in your hands, it’s time for the second branch: give them the resources they need to explore the best of the best. The premium economy. Let them feel immersed -- and let them feel familiarized.

Why? Because players are always more likely to spend if they know, firsthand, what they’re spending for; if you give them a taste with a free demo now, they’ll want that premium lifestyle for themselves later. And they’ll be ready to pony up for it.

And finally, we’re at branch #3: give them a feeling of glory that they didn’t see coming -- and ignite anticipation for what’s still left to come. Yes, of course I have an example for you: if you grant players a 4-star character right at the beginning of their play journey, they’ll be overcome with the sense that they’ve received a hidden gem. But the truth is, that character will eventually require a lot of resources from them. This is great for your non-paying players who also get access to high-quality content they’d normally have to spend to earn.

Another idea? Set up content calendars that send players gifts (which actually impress them) when they reach D+3 or D+7, for instance. The surprise will keep them immersed, simultaneously enjoying the thrill of a new gift and wondering when the next one will land in their laps. 

But an important note to make here is: what’s deemed high-value early on won’t necessarily have the same effect on your players down the road. If we look at CSR2 and Racing Rivals, where the games are oriented around car fans, receiving a car is obviously exciting at the beginning of the game. But then the value shifts from wanting a car -- a blank canvas for racing -- and wanting the upgrades that’ll really make it stand out on the course.

So, in order to keep players invested in the game for the long haul, our branches tell us that you’ve got to give them supply early on. But not just any supply. Hit them with the supply that they actually want -- the supply that sparks excitement -- and you’ll be giving your game the space it needs to monetize and retain.

Demand Late: 

The problem with the first scenario we outlined earlier was that the player never got a chance to meaningfully advance. The problem with the second scenario was that all the player ever did was advance. With this best practice, your goal is to find that sweet, sweet middle ground -- giving your players the feeling of early-onset victory by Supplying Early, and then confronting them with… challenge. And that’s where Demanding Late comes in. 

Your players have wealth. They have resources. They’re sitting pretty in their third play session, and they’re rolling right along. But then the challenges -- they get harder. The rewards get fewer and further between. Accumulating wealth or experience is made progressively more difficult, and when they look at the offers and items that’ll get them to their next win-moment -- they can’t immediately reach them. Challenge.

The goal? A nonstop cycle of stress and relief. Of hardship and of ease. They progress, they’re faced with pressure to monetize, and then they progress again. The second the cycle halts, the game is -- you guessed it -- no longer sustainable.

Let’s look at that in action: in CSR2, players enter the cycle by acquiring a car and cheap upgrades. This is their easy progression -- their early supply -- and they’re satisfied. But then, their progression is slowed down; the necessary upgrades to remain competitive become expensive, requiring the player to engage in other game activities in order to accumulate enough to proceed. Then, there’s catharsis: the enemy crew is defeated, the player earns the next tier’s car, and the whole cycle repeats.

But if you’re sitting there thinking -- how do we, in practice, instill the ‘demand late’ challenges without killing our retention? -- I’ve got you covered. The key is: always make sure you’re providing a visible path for progression.

There are two ways to do it. First, you need to be equating engagement with clear opportunities to advance -- if players can see that a certain amount of time/effort will get them where they’re trying to go, they’ll be more likely to engage. (Real-world game Battle Passes goes a step further by making monetization an accelerator of the value of playing time, so going that route is an attractive option too.)

Second, in every event or content cycle, you must be providing a layer of easily accessible content -- and leveraging that content to produce subsequent opportunities for monetization. There’s a difference between cornering your players, requiring them to spend for progress, and giving them the option to spend.

When you phrase things like, “pay to avoid losing the opportunity” or  “pay to extract the maximum value from your time,” you’re empowering them to decide for themselves. And players love autonomy. In fact, they love it so much that it keeps them coming back.

Still with me? Still breathing? You did great -- and we’re most of the way through the meat. But there is some news I have to break to you here: the Supply Early, Demand Late best practice is not one-size-fits-all. In fact, for different genres and business models, it can look pretty different. And… it should.

If we have a 4X strategy game with a positive ROAS on D180 and big long-term retention and ARPPU on one side, and then Idle Tycoon with crazy fast ROAS but poor long-term retention on the other, we’re going to be witnessing some vastly different monetization tactics at play.

For instance: Idle Tycoon will likely add monetization to the ‘Supply’ stage of the cycle, because if they wait until the later stage, they’ll lose players -- and their chance of monetizing. As a result, their economists’ focus will be on how to effectively integrate monetization tactics without repelling players; tactics like progress accelerators will be leaned on. Heavily.

It goes without saying that the progress pacing of both genres will look different. Progres