Making a Better in-App Purchase Model

We won't be getting into the argument of whether iAP should only be in free-to-play or should premium games have them as well. We'll just focus of iAPs and what constitutes a good iAP design. 

UNLOCK GAME

Games that can not be advanced without an iAP isn't exactly a free-to-play game. And if you have paid for the game, it isn't fair to have something like that at all! On the other hand, not every game has the feature of iAP or microtransactions. The only games, that should have this feature, are games that might be premium game but can be downloaded for free. 

ALMOST THERE!

Ever played candy crush and missed the target with just 1-2 moves? This is a perfect motivation for an iAP. Why? Because, the player has invested too much time in it to quit easily. And the players know that spending on it isn't a bad investment. It's right there, if you like you can just purchase few more moves and reach the target. Or restart the whole thing again and start from zero. These are the moment that every designer should look for. Pin such moments in your game and see if you can give the players a little push to advance ahead.

DON'T RUIN MY GAME! 

Every game has a difficulty graph that has certain pacing to it. Which means, at a certain point the player should find the game difficult. When the player crosses a difficulty peak, the game should give rest to the player and then the graph goes higher to more difficult peak, and so on. Difficulty gives the player a sense of achievement. If an iAP lets the player to advance the whole game easily or most part of the game, than you failed as a designer. The joy of any game is in its challenges. By making it easier for the players, you not only broke the game design but you have basically ruined the whole game experience for that player. The above point, of giving a little push, is misused to become this. If you study candy crush you'll see that even with that little push, they aren't giving away the goal. The difficulty level remains the same, only few more chance. It's like giving hints to a riddle but not telling the answer. 

SELL CONVENIENCE, NOT POWER

One of the biggest mistakes while designing an iAP is when you sell power. Every game has a power against resource ratio. If a sniper costs 10 gold and a rocker launcher costs 50 gold, selling power means you are giving rocker launcher for 10 gold because the player spend real money in the game. It is the evil pay to win. The philosophy that paid customer should have more advantage, gameplay wise, is complete BS. As said in the above point, by making the player more powerful you jeopardize the game design.  Convenience, on the other hand, is the best way to propose an iAP to the player. Most games these days have down time, in form of time to build something or number of sessions you can have per day etc. These are the best examples of how to make people feel good about their iAP that makes it convenient for them to get an item faster but doesn't spoil the game all together. These iAP could make more sense to the player and the longevity of  him in that game. 

NEVER underestimate THE POWER OF CUSTOMIZATION 

There isn't much to say, the title says it all. League of legends and Dota does this perfectly. This isn't a power or convenience, it's just visual aesthetics. Players get it, and it is one of the most acceptable iAP. It just works!

IMPLEMENT iAP AS A PART OF CORE GAMEPLAY

iAP shouldn't be the last thing to do in a game dev cycle. It should be kept in mind while designing the game. Maybe the inception of an idea can be pure and innocent, focusing on just the fun of the game. And then, when designing the gameplay in detail, it can be implemented. I don't think iAP should ever be the inspiration of an idea, as in the core gameplay is designed around it. Which would explain people's hatred for Zynga games. Rather iAP should be wrapped tightly and all around the core gameplay. Say, you have to slay a dragon. To slay the dragon, you need armour and a golden sword. You got the armour but to get a golden sword you'll need 500 blood points. You can get it by killing 1000 boars, or 2000 eagles or $0.99 iAP. Once the fun of the game is discovered, you then start figuring out what is convenience, what are powers, what are the almost there moments, and what could kill the game. These would help decide you iAP design. 

DON'T DISCRIMINATE THE PLAYERS

Just because the player didn't do any iAP doesn't mean that they are stealing from you. Non paying players are the ones that make your game famous. Discriminating them or splitting them is the worst thing you can so. Non paying players are your blessings. They are your advertisers who bring their friends and maybe one of those friends is a paying customer or even a whale.

LET PLAYERS EARN THE CURRENCY AS WELL

Soft currencies are your friend. It basically means that you are making your players get used to economy. The flow of cash makes it easier for players to spend actual money in the game. On the other hand, it lets the non paying players interested in the game. Soft currencies reduces the impact of "the-evil-iAP". It basically lets the players know that they are not forced to spend money on the game. Ofcourse, it will take a lot more time to earn that much money to buy an item, which can be dramatically reduced by a simple iAP. Any game that gives you choice over payment walls are always welcomed by players. And may turn some into paid players as well!.

KEEP THE iAP THRESHOLD LOW

The first one is the most difficult. Once the player makes their first purchase, they are more likely to make another easily. Keeping the initial iAP to the lowest cost definitely help making their first purchase. Soft currencies also play an important role in helping with the threshold. 

IMPLEMENT METRICS IN YOUR GAME

Some people might not exactly like this one but boy it works! Any additive social game is the result of metrics, period! Whatever i have written isn't possible without metrics. What works and what doesn't, can only be known using metrics. There are great third party systems like flurry that does a great job. The only problem with metrics driven games is the misunderstanding and it's misusage. This can be another topic all together. But if done properly, it can be very lucrative. 

Conclusion

I think not every game should have iAP, just like not every game should be free to play. Having iAP does not guarantee revenue in profit. iAP works when done right. You can't get the iAP right in your first attempt. It's a process of iteration and refinement. And no, you can not just copy iAP model of one game to another, unless you copy the whole game. Every game has its own economy, iAP should be based on that economy. 

In my opinion, iAP designs are in its infancy. There are only handful of games and examples of good iAP. Most of them follow almost similar pattern. There might be better iAP models out there which are still unexplored. 

Why we do, what we do in a game.

While traveling back from India, from my friend's wedding, I got hold of a book by Rolf Dobelli called 'The Art of Thinking Clearly'. At first, it seemed like just any other book, however as I kept reading, I realized that it actually answered lots of questions of player's behavior in a game. Here are few of them that I'm sharing.

Social proof
Social proof states that an idea/action is more appropriate if it is performed by larger group of people. People tend to act in certain way just because they feel that a behavior is acceptable because more people are doing it. Which is complete nonsense. This would explains things like most popular products or restaurants, trends, viral youtubes, and flappy bird. Most advertisers use this behavior to sell their product because they know people tend to copy others around them, also known as the herd instinct. Popularity is the only reason why flappy bird was so successful.

Reciprocity
We live in a society with social obligations. These obligations comes from the fact that someone did something for you and you have to 'reciprocate'. Reciprocity is the back bone of social behavior, both good and bad. Good reciprocity would mean returning back a favor, whereas, bad reciprocity would mean revenge. Ever played a game where as soon as you start, it asks for iAP? What do you do? You delete that app! Why? Because you are not obligated or owe the app anything to give them back. Free to play model lives on this idea. They give you so many things for free that you end up feeling obligated. And so if you do an iAP you don't feel that bad! Same with gifting system, attack and revenge, and so on.

Authority bias
We are born to follow an authority. If you disobey God, you are rejected from heaven. Every authority wants us to feel that way. You have to follow your parents, doctors, teachers, boss, government etc. Authority bias is a behavior where you tend to do more things based on authority over things based on free will. Because it is so deeply rooted in our system, people are both following and desiring authority.
Authorities crave recognition, which explains doctors with white coat, uniforms and badges in Defense, separate cabins for bosses etc. Authority recognition is more evident now than ever, with employee of the month, badges, getting a interview in a local newspaper etc.
This craving for authority recognition is the reason why people spend hours in a game to be in top 10 of the leaderboards. Even a small, killing spree is a powerful recognition in a match of DoTA. Achievements, badges, hats they all come from authority bias.

Contrast effects
The word cheap or big or good is comparative word. These words only exist because there is something to compare with. Similar to childhood concept of hot and cold water bucket. An item is cheaper because something is more expensive. Contrast effects is such a powerful idea which basically explains the discount madness. Contrast effect forces you to believe that something is cheaper because it is under 75% discount. At this point, the player completely ignores the fact that s/he is still paying for that item. You might never buy an item or an app for $0.99 but you are likely to buy it for the same cost if it was on sale. 

Cost fallacies
Cost fallacy is when you think you have invested on something too much to quit it. This, from developer point of view, is a pitfall. I've worked on a project to see it grow bigger and bigger, and eventually fail, because cost of developing the application became too much  for the scope of the application. The only option left, from the management point of view, was to increase the scope of the application to recover the cost. This meant increasing the development cost and time. Eventually this became a cycle and you get the point.
This behavior is seen in players as well. Players invest so much of time and energy in a game, that they fall into cost fallacy. This results to them eventually doing an iAP to recover their 'lose'.
The right answer or solution to this problem is to not look at what is lost but to focus on what you have. Money gone isn't what you have control of, but focusing on the left expenditure and cutting cost at the right time might save your loses.

I'll be posting another discussion where I'll elaborate on these ideas but from iAP point of view. How to help players do an iAP and make them feel happy about it. 

USER INTERFACE FOR MOBILE

When I was given the task to design the GUI for my first game, I didn't really have much resource to look upon. And after lot of trials and errors we did come up with something decent. Same process went with all the other games. You try and then you fix. However, few things became more obvious and with every new project we had a more clear vision for the GUI. Here are few of the things that might make your GUI better. 

Micro UI vs Macro UI

Most of our games are mobile, and since we did all our GUI without any prior experience in GUI, we decided to hire a guy who had experience in UI. The problem with the new artist was that he was from PC background. His GUI looked great on PC but when you see it on mobile it looked too clustered. Too many things happening all over the place. We couldn't blame him completely, our game had tones of features. However, his approach to the problem was very PC. PC handles micro tasks very well. Games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends are best examples of micro tasks. On the other hand the most micro thing you could do, on a mobile, was dial numbers. Ofcourse, this was before smart phones came out. With the introduction of smart phones, people tend to think that mobiles can handle micro tasks as well. It can but not with ease. Mobiles are still macro tasking devices. Which means you should always have interface that does macro tasks. Macro interface will bigger and fewer buttons. The interface shouldn't let you handle micro tasks in form of thousands of buttons. It should be organized into multi-tasking buttons, eg, start button changes to next and next button changes to exit and so on. 

Feature supporting form

I have always been a supporter of form with purpose( feature over form). GUI is the medium to communicate between hardware/software and the user. So ofcourse, feature holds the most importance over design. However, since you have a new variable of micro vs macro, once the features are finalized, the design takes over. Based on the macro design, sometimes it's important to tweak the functionality. That does not mean you have to competely change/remove the feature, it just means to fit the feature based on the design. Maybe automate few system, or reduce few steps. Best example is an iPhone over old smart phones with stylus and keypad. iPhone had all the features, even more than any other old smart phone, but it understood the macro tasking concept. One button to rule them all. 

Flow of nature

GUI is nothing but natural flow. I feel like having a redbull. If I have to go out to get myself a redbull, I'll probably skip it. However, if I'm going home and I saw redbull in the store on my way, I'll probably buy it. The concept is simple. Every pop up and every button is a result of not just the need but should be in my way. I know I have to upgrade my weapon, but I will only upgrade it before the match. Maybe that's when I'll use premium currency to get the upgrade done sooner. 

I need it now and here

Players don't want to go inside a menu with thousands of click just to ask for some item from a friend. Everything that a player would need should be in front of him. The GUI should be smart enough to provide the player with everything s/he needs then. Most iAPs happen because it showed up when it was needed. 

This point should not be confused with the point above. This point is addressing the immediate need, if it's not present there then, it probably won't change the flow of the game. Like save me, or ask a friend or use power ups. Being available then can increase the frequency of the usage. The point above is for things that you'll do it eventually, however you'll wait for it till the very last if it's not in the path. 

Consistency 

This one is universal. Every button, every text, every color have to be consistent. If the player has to keep thinking what a certain button does all the time, you just lost his game experience. Best GUI are those that are almost invisible. If i don't have to think about my navigation throughout the game, that's the best GUI ever.