What affects LTV and the money a player spends during the cycle? First of all, high-quality gameplay. Gameplay affects LTV directly: the more interesting the game, the more money the player will pay. The second is the quality of monetization from outsource game development.
Video game monetization models
F2P as a business model came from Asia and is very popular – it is considered more profitable than other models. Of course, subscription and DLC win in this regard, only the players want the games to be free – they do not want to pay for the game, do not want to buy it and pay a monthly fee. 81% of AppStore users play games using the F2P model. There is a myth that there is right and wrong F2P. At the same time, there is supposedly an opportunity to make a light F2P model, where the player plays for a fan, while the content itself does not affect the balance.
But the player always wants to be better, faster, and more beautiful than others, and do not forget about this when thinking about monetization for your project.
In-game purchases
If some services cannot be bought in any direct way, this is a direct way to monetize. Sometimes these goods are the building blocks for the game. When it comes to in-app purchases, we always mean the pay wall, which you can’t go through without paying. A prime example is Candy Crush Saga, where certain levels are nearly impossible to complete without purchasing certain items.
Promotional model
When a game economy is implemented in the game development life cycle, the developer can always allow the player to influence this economy (discounts, sales, various mechanisms perceived by the player as buying something cheaper). With this model, prices are initially inflated, as a result, when the promotions are launched, the player believes that he is receiving a discount. The principle works here: the player may miss the opportunity to use this promotion. It is said that this is a unique offer, and if he does not use it, he will lose it.
Here attempts begin to give the player a slightly different game development process step by step: to turn it into a casino. The excitement of winning, based on greed, works always, and flawlessly. If a player is given random mechanics, then we will get quite interesting consequences – players spin the roulette wheel, players pay and forget a little about the game itself. At the same time, their original goal was to get a thing or game currency that is played out in these mechanics. Only upon obtaining these items can we hope that the player will return to the game.
Inline ads
Advertising is one of the best and easiest ways for aspiring developers to increase the profitability of their projects. Now the mobile games market has a large number of traffic needs, so advertising brings a pretty good profit. At the same time, there are a lot of ways to insert ads: paying currency per view, skipping time to complete actions, buying specials. opportunities, increasing the currency for entering the game. Novice developers are afraid of this method: they think that the player will leave them. But here you need to understand that it would be better if the player leaves the game without bringing money? Better to let it go through monetization, but with a profit.
Selling content
This method is now widely used in PC games and on consoles, while it is on the big rise of the game development process flowchart. It has not yet found application in mobile games, so developers have the opportunity to try this method and get additional. profit.
Selling gameplay
Gameplay is at the heart of all games. Moving along this process, the player perceives the game as a whole. The balance of the gameplay is often based on a parabola or hyperbola: at first, everything happens very quickly, and then gradually slows down. It is here that the points where the player is willing to pay are located. Paid – went up sharply.
There are statistics on payments of the first day. In the first 24 hours, the player enters the game about 20% of all their payments – this is the largest peak of all payments. The first days – 18% of the total earnings of the game. At the same time, fewer and fewer users remain in the game for the duration of the game, so if we turn the screws on the first day of the game launch, we will get less money than we could have made from the game. A player who plays for 30 days pays 60% more money for content than a first-day user.
A recent report from Mobile Games found that when the question of whether to pay to play or watch ads was raised, 73% of gamers opted for the ad-funded model of game funding. Another misconception that prevents developers and publishers from using ads is that ads will reflect badly on in-app purchases. But we have observed many customers and noted that 86% of developers who implemented ads in their apps remained at the same level or even increased the number of in-app purchases (according to Facebook customers).