So it started with an interview with Venture Beat, where a Scopely SVP, Spencer Tucker, gave his insights on how developers spread the monetization of game economies across bigger numbers of players.
Now this article is interesting because it tells us some of the stuff, I think we all suspected but never really could get confirmed (and for very good reasons!)
Please be noted that the Venture Beat article has since its publication less than 24 hours ago, been edited so most of the "bad stuff" is gone. How ever the article has been linked in its original form by other medias and you will find a link to the full article at the end of this.
Below are some quotes from the interview with Spencer Tucker, however, we encourage you all to go read the article in its full version. Its time well spent!
"Hey, someone spent between $1 and $50,” that’s a bucket. We want to determine content to push them above that $50 threshold over a certain period of time. Maybe we price it as a percentage of their last 30-day spend, instead of a fixed actual cost. We do that differently against that entire distribution of the population. The goal there is to move people up in terms of spend velocity between buckets over time and get them more engaged in the purchasing experience, and ultimately treating purchase activity as a retention funnel "
We’ll say, “Hey, we’re going to create a mystery bag. We’ll call that bag the same thing regardless of what bucket you fall into.” From a player-facing standpoint, the bag is called A. It’s A for everyone. The price of A is 99 cents. But the thing that varies is the quantity or the range and probability of the range of items within that bag.
If you do price discrimination, you could say, “Hey, I’m going to sell you this sword for $100, and sell this other guy the same sword for $20.” But then those two people meet online and ask, “Why am I paying this much while you’re paying that much?” They don’t have the context to understand it, so you have a negative reaction from that level of transparency. If you treat the value as the relative thing, the distribution for that value is more probabilistic, like mystery boxes are obfuscated in some fashion. Then you can keep that value exchange behind the scenes. They’re paying the same price, so you attack a price point on a relative basis that moves a lot of volume, but the number of times they have to make the purchase to ultimately acquire that good is variable based on how much the spend over that 30-day rolling period"
We do publish odds. It depends. Right now we have a number of approaches there. We can class content. We’re publishing odds based on a class. Rarity and things like that. Linden: But that would still shift per player too, right? "
"The idea there is to optimize around pushing people beyond their natural threshold. you can push people to stretch beyond their natural limit. We push very hard on the very top segment."
"Audience: You’re effectively training them to keep going back. Tucker: Refresh until you see what you want and buy the thing you want. Chasing the thing you want becomes chasing the refresh, and refreshing that box also gives you progress against some sort of milestone. Audience: Is this all theoretical still? Tucker: We’ll be building that. We haven’t built it yet. Audience: Does the reset cost money? Tucker: The reset will cost money, yes. That’s the key."
"We’re going to say, “These two factions, or these 300 players,” and you pool them all against that fixed pool, now they’re all competing effectively for the same content pool. Then you adjust relative price based on the expected value of that pool. There’s a fixed number of people who get that chase item . You’ve created a social competitive purchasing mechanism"
"It’s not an auction. It’s a system where you buy content, and as that content is purchased, it’s removed from the pool . The idea there being that because you have a whole bunch of people competing for that finite pool, that demand is going to be higher and you’re going to create more spend activity. "
"Those sorts of mechanics are things that we’re going to see more of — the social component, the proxy spending pressure. You’re pushing people to stretch beyond their normal capacity to spend by spending more on behalf of other people in the group. Then the dynamic that exists there is, people who don’t spend will apply pressure to people that do spend, because everybody benefits from that activity."
All above quotes and credits go to this source, New Mobile Gadget/Kevin Scott, who's article features the original interview text with Scopely SVP Spencer Tucker : https://newmobilegadget.com/2019/09/14/balancing-game-economies-is-an-art-and-a-science/
Source Venture Beat/Dean Takahashi, who wrote the article based on a panel session he moderated. Article has since been post edited and uploaded in new version: https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/14/balancing-game-economies-is-an-art-and-a-science/
It is interesting to see how the original Venture Beat article has been cleansed for all the "bad stuff" that would upset players