Nature vs. Nurture: Unpacking Player Spending in F2P Games
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- In this 2019 GDC talk, Kongregate's Tammy Levy looks at that various factors that drive players to spend money in free-to-play games.
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Okay, so basically:
“Nickel-and-dime’ing” your players doesn’t work. Prices are inelastic, and most players will never spend no matter how cheap the prices are. Lower prices can make potential spenders spend less, so your best bet is to sell higher-value items at higher price points, not try to monetize everything.
Player engagement and repeat spending are very important. You want players to play your game for as long as possible in order to keep the spenders interested and spending. The best way to accomplish this is to make a legitimately fun game and sell things that people actually enjoy buying.
You want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, but mostly so that you can attract players that are predisposed to spending. This means that you don’t want to try to coerce players into spending, because it really doesn’t work. The goal isn’t to manipulate non-spenders into spending on your game, it’s attracting people who are going to spend on games to *your* game.
Overall, the metrics presented in this presentation portray F2P games as primarily luxury services that should be marketed towards people who are inclined to spend their entertainment budget on games. The predatory tactics many players fear don’t seem to actually work, in practice. Seems like the occasional gambling addict is more of an unintentional side-effect than a dedicated marketing strategy. Which makes sense, of course, because such examples are vanishingly rare, and could never constitute a viable market.
I didn't feel like watching this entire video so I'll take this as fact. Now I'm off to twitter.
58 minutes in one comment, dude you are awesome.
The easiness to spend money on the game could itself be called predatory for people who enjoy games but have low self control when it comes to money spending.
@@XQzmeeMusic I don’t think that’s very fair, though. That’s effectively calling any vendor that produces a product people want to buy “predatory”. People need to take responsibility for their spending habits.
"the occasional gambling addict is more of an unintentional side-effect than a dedicated marketing strategy"
lol tell that to Genshin Impact :P
thx for the summary
There are basically two camps of, lets call us broadly, devs. Big and small some of us accepted that there's a mass of people who will buy shit in your game if you targeting and marketing it right. Its all the same shit with little differences, not very creative and UA and marketing do rule the industry. We are just making money providing them with the drug they like. And there's another camp, who plead creative work and ethical practices are not dead, its all our choice how we use it. But most of us deep down feel like if you are the type of person who spends on idle games there is no crime in helping you to "share".
Good video, shame how the community automatically dislikes any GDC videos talking about the business parts (which are paramount to gamedev). Really disheartening when someone's game gets bashed because just 5-10% of it is locked behind payments.
I was enjoying the talk, but after seeing it only tries to maximize revenue, selling for as much as you are willing to spend... makes me sad.
- How much do you want to squish dry your fans?
- Yes.
I was going to give a like because of the interesting insight but I can't put the finger exactly on why this is making me so sad to watch. Lootboxes are a valid option for the speaker, no worries whatsoever, indicating player addiction and whatever doesn't matter as long as the player pays
Sorry that I dislike games designed to exploit vulnerable people like children and adults with addiction with scummy microtransactions and dark patterns directly worsening the life conditions of millions...
@@forestrf Thing is, every single business has one goal, and one goal only: to maximize profits. They don't care if you're a fan or not, like that's not a part of this equation at all. So like expecting a company to care about you because you're a long time fan, or for any reason at all, is just setting yourself up for disappointment. It's unfortunate things are like that, but that's just how it is. So I think any relationship with a game or a company should just be transactional, like I pay this amount and I get this entertainment and that's it. Any other attachment is just generally bad for the consumer because then you end up with people that hate a company but constantly preorder their games and end up frustrated every single time.
@@zed7060 And that's how they didn't maximize profits, by annoying the players on the long run, to the point where lootboxes and other psycological debilities they are using is getting regulated by some governments (see gambling).
I wonder, how much do they lose on the long term by optimizing revenue so much all the time? Do they get or lose players by the microtransactions? what about having people interested in new games and the organic publicity about them? How much does it hurt (or benefit) the microtransactions?
Are they really maximizing profits this way?
The answer to that isn't as simple as "they all do it, of course it is".
@@forestrf I know it seems very unintuitive but it's extremely likely microtransactions are increasing their profits. Let me try and give an example.
So at the start of this video the presenter basically claims you make more profit if you sell an item for a higher price. This seems nonsensical because well from personal experience, there have been items I wanted to buy in game that I just didn't because they were too expensive. Like if you just lowered the price, me and many others would buy it. But a few minutes later she actually showed data that proved her point. They reduced prices and got more customers but their overall revenue dropped. Think of it this way: if I'm selling something for $100, and only 1 person buys it, I get a profit of $100. But if I drop the price to $10 and I get 8 new customers, I make a total profit of $90, so I'm basically losing money by dropping the price.
I haven't seen actual sales data but I'm fairly certain something similar is happening with microtransactions. Companies have seen that adding microtransactions doesn't really drop the number of sales by much (like have you met anybody that didn't buy a game because of microtransactions? I haven't) but the few people that spend on microtransactions spend so much money that becomes totally worth it to add it into the game.
This GDC talk uses games with predatorial and unethical F2P business models as examples but the info also applies for games with ethical business models, yes they exist. Those who are commenting negatively should not stop at the examples and see the broader picture.
This ^ is just perspective, don't pick sides.
If anything, just absorb the world through another person's lense.
"Please don't call them whales"
Yeah call them Leviathan instead
Honestly Leviathan is a much cooler name, I support this
Whale is an apt description since remoras live off whales. But leviathan is definetely cooler.
I find these F2P monetization talks both fascinating and unsettling. On one hand, it is interesting to know what motivates people to spend money and, on the other hand, that knowledge creates so much potential for abusing the players.
The fault don't fall on the weapon but the killer, the same apply here, we could have the tools to abuse our players but it up to us to do it or not.
and I think there's an unspoken [or sometimes spoken] inherent understanding between developers that f2p players deserve this abuse.
@@pondopondo1497 i dont know, in this kind of game f2p players are really important in terms of marketing. Is hard for games with a low amount of players to ge widely know. So i want to make the feel that yes the player that pays had aventages but the game feels still fair and playable without it.
So these are the people making gaming worse huh ?
Publisher. The soulless entity of gaming.
Nevermind I misread that.
I agree, they should make games and lose money doing so.
@@thomasm9876 they should make games and sell them at a price that gives a decent return. They should not encourage gambling and addiction to profit off other people's misery and leave society to foot the bill. Optional dlc for cosmetic purposes or side quest/expansion, that's not hidden in a loot box is an alternative to f2p. So are subscription models.
Remember, only let business ethics get in the way of your terminology, NOT your determination to fleece players with gambling addictions on your Clash of Clans ripoff. They're not WHALES, they're PROFIT, erm I mean PEOPLE!
To be fair, developers ARE actually trying to make games that people like and they can be proud of. The problem is they're doing so only with the cooperation of publishers via whaling. Until we solve that dependency they're as trapped in this problem as the whales and the minnows. :-( Few artists like creating predatory art.
@@NathanielJordan85
To do something you do not need to like it. And making enjoyable art is not the universal goal. You can keep playing the blame game on where this begins... But we know compliance in unethical practices is unethical wether someone would like to create art or to fleece addicts for their money.
@@NathanielJordan85 there is no such thing as predatory art, but there definitely is predatory monetization. It does not matter who is to blame - we could pass the buck all the way up and say "well the whole system is broken!", which it is, but no matter what, you're left with two choices: you can decide, in this case, to simply not develop F2P games with aggressive monetization design choices, or you can throw up your hands and say "well if the system's broken, then I might as well get paid." People who choose the second option end up at these conferences, looking for the tools, knowledge, and methods to participate more actively in that broken system. They end up on that stage, trading those tools for their own profit, and quietly. pointlessly. impotently. asking that the vultures in front of you remember that their customers are humans. Delicious humans.
@@NathanielJordan85 so more publicly funded, and crowdsourced games.
Please, don't call them whales! Anyway, here's a shitton of data on how to identify, entrap, and fleece susceptible and vulnerable humans who are totally not whales.
If you watch the talk she's referencing, they're generally rich people actually. It's a great talk tbh, much better than this one imo (though I'm not a business person)
@@alaharon1233 If a practice ensnares both the rich and poor alike and it's inconsequential to the rich and harmful to the poor then it's a shit predatory practice.
@@alaharon1233 Also justifying unethical actions because you happen not to like some subset of people in it is moronic and morally bankrupt.
@@SamiKabbani loser poor human piece that having a communist profile picture to self-smoothing yet desperately accepting free stuff or money if someone else offers it.
@@JohnSmith-ox3gy I... wasn't doing that
« Don’t call them whales cause its a person that we respect » oh thats why you slow progression down and make mechanics of instant gratification through microtransaction ? Manipulating people to spend more is sooooo respectful
Money money money money money money money money...
I really appreciate insightful talks like this. Thank you!
edit: this vid has crazy dislikes. Those who disliked it, can you guys tell me why?
probably because of the pure analytical view on how to most efficiently make money out of players? I guess?
No idea why others are disliking it but her stats are junk.
1. R^2 isn't correlation. To be fair though they are similar and explaining it as correlation to an audience is easier. The 0.46 value is actually really really high because what it's saying is 46% of the variation in Log(ARPU) can be explained by the Log(Sessions). For a single variable that's a really good metric.
2. Using a regression with so few observations is basically me looking around a desert and saying there's nothing in the world taller than the tallest sand dune I can see. An example of this "bad method" is at the 20:40 mark in the vid where you can clearly see that if she simply hadn't chosen to add in the 2 bottom left games in her analysis then the entire slope of the line would be significantly different so we know her analysis can be heavily impacted by outliers. Meaning that for these games this might be true but for a different one? Who knows?
3. She looks at the Natural Log of everything which tells you that the data she's looking at is very non-normal. This is standard when looking at non-normal (normal data looks similar to a bell curve and inorder to run a regression you need the data to be normal) but taking the log of averages is pretty odd and makes me think she's mining her data a little too hard. BUT, I could be wrong and all she had was the average values so you do what you gotta do.
4. At 30:46 her precents add up to 108 which is weird. Also ignoring that she doesn't prove that there's a significant difference between the 32% and the 28% for all we the audience know there were only 108 2nd time purchases and from such a sample size we don't really know if there's a difference. There could have also been other factors involved as to when those 1st and 2nd purchases were made such as an update that changed all game timers to take less time so the value of the "gems" became less valuable. Her reasoning from this is actually correct and is due to the anchoring effect which she explains quite well.
5. The Log(ARPPU) and Log(%buyers) chart is kinda bad due to over fitting. IN GENERAL any R^2 value over 0.85 you are over fitting and you should really prove why you’re not. In this case the high score of 0.89 is most likely due to high correlation between Average Revenue and %Buyers. Which as she said makes sense but is still overfitting.
6. Every chart she makes looking at the different groups individually is bad and she should know better than to say look at this tiny sample size let’s do some regressions. She probably could have done an ANOVA test to show differences. But adding in another method while presenting is not easy to do.
7. She never shows a chart with the repeat purchase % vs arpu and instead goes into case studies. This is could be due the regression she ran didn’t support her narrative due to the INSANE range of the precents. OR (and probably more likely) she thought man it would be kinda boring to do the same thing for the 5th time. But her not doing it for all of them with the other issues I already mentioned doesn’t fill me with confidence.
8. Her charts are poorly made. They need keys. Like I have no idea what the purple lines are on her charts at 43:36 and 43:45 are. I think they are revenue but they could just as easily be a moving average. And quite often they need Y-Axis like the one at 49:00. The one at 49:35 is worse as it might need 2 different Y-Axises with different scales which is a big no-no when displaying data unless you really don’t have any other choice (the client is adamant about having it).
@@SomeDude-wc6ny I suspected it would be full of confirmation bias.
51:55 Summary (Key Takeaways)
:)
Thank you😭 it's quite long when you find it randomly
Greed and respect can't be together..
Yes, go ahead and brag about Kongregate, that was butchered into oblivion soonafter.
This is why Free to Play is a corrupted model that should go away.
I wish I didn't hate F2P but there is no FREE lunch. Devs have families to feed and publishers have a profit to make.
And, as we seen, they have recoup the money with only 5% of players.
Then comes the FOMO, the loot boxes (yes, she avoided the word but it is there) the psychological manipulation.
And the CEO/Publisher scooping up 99% of that income, but it's our fault for not spending enough.
higher ARPU comes at the cost of lower "turnover" and lower user acquisition - it might often be better not to force higher arpu, because it the cost per user is relatively low, if you can attract that much more players
F2P is a very bad model. It may work- though it does not work as it should.
No one should be spammed with “buy this crap in order to win the game”
And designing games to be pay to win is literally destroying the game industry.
Soon there will be nothing left of it
Yeah, but that's not inherently F2P, it's this predominant predatory version. Part of why LoL saw such success is it did not do anything like that. The digital deckbuilding games Ascension and Star Realms actually have a really cool F2P model where the base set is free, but if you like the game and want to try more content, each expansion is a DLC, and they all feel quite worth it! It's very 'the first taste is free', but honestly as someone who remembers demos and shareware in the 90s, that's not a bad thing... F2P could be the 21st century version of that; pitch a game, get a player base, and sustain the development of content for the crowd from those that can help support its development, but it just hasn't been. Mostly we seem to leave that to Patreon and Kickstarter, but then it's private early access forever, instead of public F2P which could likely make a better game for everyone playing... if we just figured out how to fund development without gross publisher shenanigans.
tl;dr: F2P isn't the enemy of games; capitalism is the enemy of art.
Sidenote:
People are always quick to interpret things in pictures. The whale is not used as an insult but as a metaphor. I know it's been fashionable for a while to get triggered, but excuse me, if someone is looking for a knot in a cacao, he will find it even if it's not there. It's not worth bothering with them, because that's when you make a mountain out of a molehill.
And the whale refers to the fact that they are the ones who take the big bite, while the other small fish bite nothing or unnoticeably little compared to them.
🤚
Bro, what are these comments? She presents you tools (to literally hunt your food) and you guys are just flaming 1 sentence. They are tools. If you don't like them, don't use them, or do a sliding scale with that you're fine with. But this atm is the behavior of a 3-year-old. It's not adding to any discussion positively. Also, the presentation doesn't judge (mostly, like 99% of the time). It's just raw data
"If you don't like it, don't use it." I heard that argument somewhere before, just with "buy" instead of "use". Which is alright, up until the point where it's the only thing you can buy.
Caring for the psychological and monetary well-being of people with addictive tendencies is the behavior of 3-year-olds?
Man, glad to hear that 3-year-olds nowadays are much more mature than a lot of adults.
I'd like to go more into detail about the responses to this comment. (In no particular order. just from top to bottom)
'"If you don't like it, don't buy it." [...] Which is alright, up until the point where it's the only thing you can buy.'
I get what you're saying but the formulation is rather weak. For example, if you have a demo for a game that is distributed for free and then after the demo is finished it only lets you continue the game if you buy it. I've never heard people complain about having the ability to play a demo. But it would fit your wording. I think that what you meant were games that slow your progress to a halt and you basically have to buy to continue. It's the equivalent of getting a drive a car, but with every mile, the engine gets slowed down until walking would be faster. This is certainly annoying but I think has nothing to do with the things presented in this talk. She talked about "Hyper casual", Idle, Midcore games. Basically, those that you can find on Kongregate, her platform. At least I couldn't find any games on there in my quick search which would fit that paradigm. Rather than this talk, you should write those to EA. But at the same time, FIFA is a thing.
' Yes, we are whining (and I'm trolling) but we have legitimate concerns about where the priorities sit'
I like rage/disappointment. It's good fuel to motivate you to change things. If you fall in this category, don't waste your time writing YT comments on a talk that is 2 Years old. Make your own game with a better monetization model. Or write a meta-study about different monetization strategies and show those "bad" guys how to really make money and the players happy. Just do something productive and don't cry. Crying doesn't change anything.
'[...] Are you offering me a fun game that costs an amount of money to get all the content, or are you offering me an open-ended money pit that will try to trick me into spending endlessly?[...]'
So this is a discussion about pay to play and pay to pay. The first one is a game and the other one is a scheme. I think the part that is controversial here is the "trick into spending". What exactly "tricks" you? Graphics? Basic Psychology? And why are super-markets allowed to pull those and people don't revolt but when it's in a game people do. Also, it seems that this is only brought up when there is no game behind it. If you have nothing to play, but just a place to spend money, that's not a game guys. You don't have to say "they are ruining those games" when those things never were games to begin with. (Most of those "games" are just status representing numbers. If you want them, go get a degree or make a seminar or something. You also get numbers in the end to flex with and have done something useful.)
'Caring for the psychological and monetary well-being of people with addictive tendencies[...]'
No you don't. It's that simple. If you would, you wouldn't be here commenting. Those people are drawn to online casinos more than games. And if you camouflage a casino as a game, it's still a casino. If you want to actually do something for those people with addictive tendencies, go to people fighting against online casinos.
The people spending those huge amounts of money on games are not those that can't afford it to a big percentage. Of course, they are also in games, but not predominantly.
People spending that money are looking to be better than others; not through skill, but through their real-life status. Those games serve as an extension of their real-life wealth into the digital realm. And besides those you also got people who spend over time. If you had a wow subscription since launch you probably have spend ~2k only for the subscription alone. Even league of legends employs some, if not most of the shown things in this talk. I've never heard people complain about Riots monetization model. It's again not about the what, but the how. And pretending to care about peoples psychological state in game's marketing/advertisement because it's harmful is just pretentious.
@@actionistrespoke8478 Ever heard of this thing called electricity? Awful thing. Responsible for all enegy based weapons. And weapons kill stuff. Super harmful. Let's not do this.
It's not about the what, but the how. And I would be pleased if you could elaborate further where this is nihilism.
@@AddGaming. just wanted to let you know that you are 100% correct on every word you said. I don't even feel the need to post a comment detailing what I think because your words do it better than I would. Thank you.
P2w =/= f2p
This is the data I wanted, but not the conclusions I was hoping for. :'(
- A player who regularly spents $15-40 on any F2P game I play for more than a week, and laments that more games don't have what seem like sane price-points for their digital goods (or often even humane/ethical digital products to buy to support games I like).
well, this the reality of what game developers care
What some care. Many on the mobile f2p specially, though AAA is adding this shit since long ago on paid games. But not always developers, publishers instead forcing devs to implement this stuff to generate the revenue they want
Shocking that people running a business are concerned with earning money so they can pay their mortgages and feed their families...total scumbags. No nuance to consider what so ever.
Thank you for this insight. What is scary though is that her business language is currently used in education.
It's a shame GDC is lowering it's standard to give this crap a platform.
Its a shift in the industry and thereby a shift in where the profits are.
Imo it's actually good that this stuff is up on GDC, since it gives more insight into how companies try to exploit people. These companies share a lot of exploitative practice amongst themselves, but the consumer never gets to see what they're thinking. By watching a talk like this and making this info accessible to reporters, we as a community can understand exploitative practices better.
That said, I agree that there could be more talks like th-cam.com/video/vVwu4RDChsY/w-d-xo.html , where the presenter is trying to talk about avoiding negative pitfalls and (not a GDC but) th-cam.com/video/tWtvrPTbQ_c/w-d-xo.html
Its still interesting even though its very sad. Kinda like knowing how web journalism follows google trends more than their own ideas
"These people are not whales. They're worth more than whales."
Thank you. Hopefully we can get this sentiment to expand in this industry.
Abosolutely, right after we're done rebranding Human Resources to People Manager or whatever. The term was an honest slip-up some time ago and it stuck because it reflects reality and industry attitudes towards consumers in the F2P space. Even wider if you look at something like EA's FUT.
A whale can be worth millions of dollars in meat, but the biggest players are worth millions. The thing that makes the players worth more than whales is the quantity.
It was a great talk thanks for this, very informative
the amount of negativity in this comment section is disappointing
The (non-)amount of any ethical considerations whatsoever in this talk is disappointing...
Let's go whale hunting together happy happy, no negativity here!
Disregard all the arguments against whaling because they bring us unpleasant emotions!
Don't listen to consumers crying over such petty things as their finances or psychological health!
Keep shooting the harpoon gun untill they stop moving, feast on the meat of the whales!
More disappointing is someone saying the « whales » are people they « value and respect » when all they do is suck as much as they can from them through roulette mechanisms, and classic mouse wheel mechanisms. The topic is interesting but the way to present it is so hypocritical it kinda hurts
These comments are sad. Gamers have never had it so good. Every year is another great year for gamers, but you would never guess that because of how jaded they are.
Every year brings new good stuff. That doesn't mean all new stuff is good. Comments are sad here also because of how to get that spending going: psycology and manipulation towards spending as part of the game core, indeed something that makes the game better and fun, right in its core.
Well, the talk is exclusively about F2P games. So does the "Every year is another great year for gamers" actually also apply to (non-predatory) F2P-games?
When Genshin Impact (84 metascore), a grindy newly dressed gacha games revenue dwarfs Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild (97 metascore) masterpiece it is easy to project rest of the trajectory for the industry that we have seen going this direction for a while now without a sign of slowing down.
Look guys, we have a dozen currencies and energy mechanics! Isn't buying 0.1% of a chance to get that waifu you want so much better than paying 20$ for all of the anime titties? How about all these AMAZING deals, grab them before they go away forever!
To be fair, I have never played a game that didn't use proven predatory practices in order to manipulate players into playing longer.
The entire concept of DLC is to release games in an unfinished state in order to sell the remaining portion in order to get more than $60, but everyone seems to be okay with that pricing model. Then games as a service release free DLC constantly with an option to skip forward using money. It is a case of picking your poison at this point, but it is all still some tasty poison.
@@JohnSmith-ox3gy However, this talk shows that possibly only 2-5% of people playing Genshin are actually spending money on it, where as everyone spent $50 on BotW unless they stole it. If someone has just as much fun (subjective) playing Genshin for free as they do paying $50 for BotW, then in their case, Genshin is objectively the better game from a cost perspective.
All these children down voting this crack me up.
lmao none of them more than 3 minutes
For every F2P video on this channel, there are 50 people bitching about how F2P is bad.
How do you guys think game companies manage to release updates years after the initial release? By the base $40-$60 price tag? Grow up.
Yeah, the disappointing conclusion of only 5% players being spenders is that everyone wants good games, but aren't willing (or able?) to pay for them. Meanwhile whales be spending $1000s of dollars to power up a character in a game, and I can no more understand that then I understand MTG players paying 100s of dollars for cardboard (honestly, the MTG players make more sense!).
So what you're saying is that any company releasing a full priced game can only support it with updates if they have a F2P game with predatory pricing on the side?
Okay, so what F2P side game is supporting Hello Games?
Put differently: F2P games with predatory pricing schemes have very little to do with full price titles.
DLCs, Sequels, subscriptions, merchandise, donations, crowd-sourcing, raising upfront costs, episodic releases, remasters, taxes on player trading, pay for playtime, cosmetic only premium and season passes?
What updates years after the initial release are you talking about? They don't exist.
@@not_ever League of Legends, Path of Exile, Elder Scrolls Online, Team Fortress 2 (to some extent), CSGO, Dota 2, WoW, Candy Crush, literally any Supercell game. I could go on