Improving Gacha (Loot Box) Monetisation Design

Improving Gacha design through experimentation, based on a presentation by Pixonic's Vladimir Krasilnikov.

This article focuses on a small part of the aforementioned presentation, specifically the part where Pixonic implemented different types of loot boxes - improving through iteration.

Vladimir's GDC 2019 Talk
Anatomy of a Gacha Model
Gacha Experimentation in War Robots
Gacha as Long-Term Sustainable Revenue
Conclusion

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 you agree 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.

Below is a list of timestamps in the video that will be of interest to this article.

[7:23] Gacha Implementation Iterative Design in War Robots
[11:04] Permanent Gachas
[12:55] Negative Effects on Development Team and Players

Anatomy of a Gacha Model

In the context of this talk there are two monetisation models, these are just Pixonic's namings for them. The most relevant one to Gacha monetisation design is the Hype Model.

For a further analysis of both models, please see a more comprehensive article here

a graph showing the hype vs growth revenue model

Slide 3: Hype vs Growth [2]

Characteristics of the 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

Core Aspects of Gacha

Having lots of low value items
Every use of gacha leads players to their goals
An illusion of randomness that's a better experience than actual randomness. Real randomness can feel unfair.

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.

a graph showing revenue spikes every time a gacha event was run

During every gacha event, revenue spiked up considerably[2]

Gach Design Iterations

1st Iteration - Halloween 2016

A simple implementation to test the feasibility of Gacha with players, it was ultimately successful.
Only one Gacha chest is available.
You can only buy chests with Event currency earned by playing battles in the game.
You can win Robot gameplay parts and currencies. This satisfies the first requirement of having lots of low value items.
The only UX (user experience) feature added is that you can open multiple chests in one tap

2nd Iteration - New Year 2017

The implementation is still only a single chest, but opening chests adds to a progression bar, which after being filled, will reward the player with a 'Super' item. This 'Super' item will be useful to every player. This satisfies the requirement of making every Gacha chest count towards something guaranteed to be useful to the player.
UX update included notifying every player when a 'winner' achieves a 'Super' item by completing the above progression bar. This was used to create social pressure to encourage other players to partake.
Hard currency (player purchasable currency) is added into the possible winnable items from opening chests. This increases the average value of what you can get out of a Gacha chest.

3rd Iteration - Lunar New Year February 2017

Two more chests are added, for a total of 3 different Gacha loot boxes for the user to choose from.
A cheaper loot box with lower value items, and a more expensive loot box with higher quality items was added relative to the original loot box.
Users started to question Developer's approach to selling in-game items.

4th Iteration - War Robots Birthday April 2017

No event currency was used, and only hard currency was used to open loot boxes instead. Players felt hard currency was too valuable to use for this purpose.
But now winning hard currency in a loot box creates a loop whereby that currency could be used to again to open even more new loot boxes.
This use of hard currency only was an unsuccessful experiment.

5th Iteration - July 4th 2017

Return to using event currency to open chests, and not hard currency.
Continual use of the currency Gacha loop by allowing players to win event currency, to again encourage them to further open more loot boxes.

Permanent Gacha - September 2017

Event currency is replaced with a special currency known as 'Keycards'.
Different coloured Keycards represent different time-limited seasons.
You can only use a particular Keycard for the current season.
Old Keycards from previous seasons are converted into other currencies.

Gacha as Long-Term Sustainable Revenue

Implementation

As mentioned above - continuous gachas were implemented, with time boundaries within seasons 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 finished (when the next new season began), the previous season's gacha currency would be converted to other non-primary currencies for players.

The implementation of a permanent gacha system increased War Robot's revenue by 2 to 3 times their previous stable revenue.

The permanent gacha system led to a sustained increase in revenue[2]

Potentially Negative Outcomes of a Gacha-focused Game

I think this a great opportunity to highlight issues that Pixonic dealt with at the time of their Gacha implementations. Although this is somewhat dated information, some of it is still worth considering today and they can be worth noting as risks in a project.

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 (price tag of Star Wars characters at the time).
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 they were 'bad' and that they 'sucked'
Development slowed as team morale was low and the team feared retribution for new features

Conclusion

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.