When you play games, it’s always about having fun & dedication. Sometimes you win sometimes you loose so try and try again to defeat this terrible Darksouls boss.

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When it comes to monetize a mobile game, there are some actions to take. But you must keep in mind that it’s a long run, and sometimes like playing Dragon’s Lair, you have to try several times to find the perfect recipe.

This is the first of a weekly series where we’ll pick a monetization strategy we liked, trying to analyze and understand why it works.

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Our thoughts and hypothesises are based on our Intent Framework, as well as past experience running monetization experiments for thousands of players.

Just remember, mobile game monetization is not about one thing, but ensuring the game experience is aligned with purchases intents. The shop experience should elevate the game experience.

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In this first article, I’ll talk about Overlook – Loot, Merge & Manage you gear

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To summarize what this game is about: A turn based RPG with a a big emphasis on gear management.

Looting items is something players always loved doing, since the first Elder Scroll and the depth of its’ possibilities. Lately, we’ve seen many games taking this into account, crafting advanced equipment management system, to ensure your sword is never sharp enough.

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This campaign is triggered right after I tried to upgrade a building but didn’t have enough resources to do so.

As we said in our Intent Framework article, Monetization requires education: players need to understand what they can buy in the game, but first they need to understand what they can do with their virtual currency.

At this stage, I just learned that I needed coins, wood and iron to improve my facilities. What I didn’t know is that I can quickly purchase it through in-app purchases.

Secondly, this in-app purchase is telling me what is it worth:

“Enough resources to upgrade this building 3 times!”

This is great, because the player don’t need to do any calculation, they can understand exactly how much value is the in-app purchase for them, at their specific stage in the game. It also means that the app calculated exactly how many resources (of each) the player is missing (using variables).

This is a strategy we talked about in our previous article as well.

🧪 Summary:

– Aligning in-app offers with the current user’s progress as well as the resources / items they’re missing is a great way to improve conversion

– Displaying what value the user will get from an offer is a great way to make things simpler. This helps avoiding manual calculation (when the offer includes multiple virtual currencies)

Well done WHAT (games) team!

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P.S.: Please send us your game! We’d be happy to try it 🙂

Cheers.⚔️🧙‍♂️

If you’d like to team up with us or need some extra support with managing game analytics/growth tools, remember that we’re here to help!

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