This talk on Gacha (loot box) monetisation is one that I'm surprised hasn't gotten more coverage, or generated more discussion. Ultimately Wild Offers is kind of shown to be a panacea to the more controversial Gacha system, but the journey and profitability of Gacha cannot be ignored.
Personally, I am neither strongly for or strongly against the use of Gacha in games. If it's done well, and somewhat fairly, then I believe it's a reasonable stream of income for game developers.
If the game is built around the Gacha mechanic, and the main focus is solely to encourage you to psychologically spend money without providing an equally entertaining experience, then the genuine goal of the game itself, which is to provide you with enjoyment, is no longer the top priority. A game developer's goal should be create a memorable and enjoyable experience for the player that they may not get anywhere else, not to create an addiction.
The difficulty lies in being able to measure and quantify the enjoyment that players get out of a game. But like any statistics or metrics that can be recorded, the results will always be open to interpretation.
Contents
What makes this talk special?
You may be wondering why I think this talk is significant. Let's forget the negative stigma of Gacha, and focus on mobile games that are fun but also generate revenue for the developers. These guys have a large player base, and install count, and with such a large existing player base they're still willing to share the details of their monetisation success.
War Robots (WR) is a PvP mobile game available on Android and iOS. Straight from the presentation you can see in 2019 they had 100+ million installs, and 1.5 million DAU (daily active users).
And as of today in March 2021, you can see that War Robots is still being supported, with a 4.0 and 4.7 star rating in the Google Play Store, and the Apple App Store respectively. As of this writing, the last update on Android was on 9th February 2021.
Vladimir's GDC 2019 Talk
This talk available on YouTube for free thanks to GDC. The talk is presented by Vladimir Krasilnikov who appears to be the current Chief Product Officer at Pixonic, previously Head of Game Design [1]. I think these guys definitely deserve an applause for how honest they are about their whole process, whether one agrees with that process or not.
You can watch the presentation in full here, I highly recommend it, and I've watched it more than once myself.
A Brief Outline
Below is a list of timestamps in the video and the main topic of interest at that time.
- [3:15] Making money: Value Growth Model (sustainable), and Hype Model (burst).
- [5:54] In War Robots, Gacha is their Hype Model
- [7:23] Gacha Implementation Iterative Design in War Robots
- [11:04] Permanent Gachas
- [12:55] Negative Effects on Development Team and Players
- [14:37] Wild Offers
- [21:05] Conclusion
Feature Monetisation Models
In the context of this talk there are two monetisation models, these are just Pixonic's namings for them:
Hype Model
- Easier to design
- Fast returns
- Provide instant value to players
- Create a need for the player that is possible to fulfill
- Easy to measure rates of success
Value Growth Model
- Tricky to design
- Gradual revenue growth
- Create a need that is impossible to fulfill
- Continuously show value to players
- More complex to track success
Gacha Experimentation in War Robots
Gacha events caused revenue spikes every time they were active. The developers went through 5 iterative designs of Gacha events. You can find a more comprehensive break down of each step in a more focused article here.
Lots of low-value items
- 1st iteration: Event currency earned through battles, allowing players to open up chests for usable gameplay items.
Every use of gacha has to lead players to their goals
- 2nd iteration: Every chest being opened added to 'super' chest progression, which provides an item that is useful to every player.
- 5th iteration: Opening a gacha chest would reward the user with more event currency to help open the next chest
Illusion of randomness
- A better player experience can be derived from tailoring the randomness for a better experience, rather than implementing real randomness.
- 3rd iteration: Added premium and cheap chest options. Premium costing for more high quality items, and lower quality items in the cheaper chests.
On the use of hard currencies
- Players don't like to spend premium currency on gachas, event currency is the ideal solution.
Gacha as Long-Term Sustainable Revenue
Implementation
Continuous gachas were implemented, with time boundaries within seasons (a couple of months) that the dev team defined. Special 'seasonal' currencies would only be useful during that single season, and would be used to open gachas. After the season (when a new season begins), the previous season's gacha currency would be converted to other currencies for players.
The implementation of a permanent gacha system increased War Robot's revenue by 2 to 3 times their previous stable revenue.
Negative Effects of Gacha on Players and Developers
- Loot boxes received a lot of negative media attention when EA kept loot boxes in Star Wars Battlefront 2 (a purchase to play game) and made it pay-to-win with item purchases in Nov 2017[3].
- WR players joked about Star Wars characters costing $300 (most expensive WR robot) instead of $40.
- War Robots IOS store rating dropped 0.05 points from 4.650 to 4.600 (significant to the team)
- WR Developers were targetted on social media and were told them they were 'bad' and that they 'sucked'
- Development slowed as team morale was low and the team feared retribution for new features
The Concept of Wild Offers
A system that generates offers for players based on their payment history, style of play and in-game behaviour within boundaries set by game-designers
Wild offers require the storage and analysis of what users bought, what in-game items they were actually building towards or using at the moment, as well as the learned prices they were comfortable paying. It's effectively an automated personalised sales system for each user cohort.
A user and data focused, iterative sales approach was used to design the system:
- Iterative: Offer random items and see what the user buys, then additionally sell supporting items.
- Bargaining: The more the users says No, the more value the user will get for a price (same or reduced).
- Randomness: Noise is added to offers to reduce predictability in bargaining, so that the user doesn't just consistently hold out for the best value.
For WR's audience, they experimented and managed to tailor their Wild Offer system for improved revenue by:
- Increasing offers shown to players from once a day to twice a day
- Hastening the pay level tiwer that a user was in between the $1 and $99 offer prices
- Increasing the initial offer price from $10 to $19.99. The initial $10 value is derived from their data and is the 'comfortable' price their players are willing to pay
The Wild Offer system helped stabilise and increase game revenue after the revenue from their gacha system declined. Below you can see that their percentage of paid users (PU%) graph reflects the initial revenue model graphs (the yellow spike is Gacha, and the growing dark green line is Wild Offers). The negative downward trend in the Wild Offers PU% is explained in the video as a technical bug that stopped showing the offers to users, but that has since been fixed.
Over a 15 month period seen below, the revenue from their Wild Offer system has continued to be stable, compared to their initial Gacha system.
Conclusion
In the case of War Robots by Pixonic - Wild Offers alleviated the pain felt by players, and the developers, from the Gacha monetisation system. Wild Offers themselves can also be seen as a bit controversial - such as when two different players buy the same thing for a different price (this is addressed by Vladimir in the Q&nbps;A time).
The balance between monetisation, marketing, and morals can be complicated. I think the role of a game developer should always be to aim to deliver the most enjoyable game play experience for their players, but this could just be an idealist's perspective. And also different audiences get different forms of joy from different aspects of a game, which could include the monetisation system.
References
[1] Crunchbase, 2021. Vladimir Krasilnikov.
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/vladimir-krasilnikov
[2] Youtube, 2021. Monetisation Design: The Dark Side of Gacha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnCOkQ-f8AQ
[3] Business Insider, 2017. Star Wars game embroiled in contraversy. https://www.businessinsider.com/star-wars-battlefront-2-mess-explained-2017-11
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