July 5, 2013 at 08:37Who will take the crystal pack
F2P games usually sell in-game currency. Some - just one, others - just a few. Some - at retail, others - in bulk. The problem arises if the project initially existed in the conditions of unobtrusive frivolity, allowing players to specify the desired amount of virtual “tugriks” for purchase themselves, and then suddenly decided to switch to wholesale trade. And in general, is the imposition of currency packages with a flexible discount system economically justified economically? We tried to answer these questions by successfully surviving the difficult, painful economic reforms at Tanki Online.
The root cause of the change was our desire to increase revenue per paying user (ARpPU). And before rushing into the abyss of desperate reforms, we took a series of trial steps in the form of discounts. A temporary decrease in the price of content or crystals (the virtual currency of Tanki Online) somehow pushed the audience to increase their expenses. In general, these experiments were successful, but remained at the level of one-time shares, while we needed a system. And we built it on the basis of the batch sale of crystals.
As you know, an innovation in business will not work if it does not benefit your customers. Therefore, in an appeal to the players, we focused on convenience and benefit. Firstly, we simplify the purchase decision and minimize the time for its adoption, offering a choice of only five options. Secondly, the larger the package, the cheaper each crystal in it costs the player.
I must say that the buyer does not know how and does not like. You can recall the report of Sheena Iyengar on the problem of choice. If you have not watched, we strongly recommend that you go to YouTube and drive “Sheena Iyengar” in the search bar.
The bottom line is that the user, going to the supermarket and seeing more than a hundred kinds of apples there, will be very happy with such freedom, but in the end he is unlikely to make a choice that he will be satisfied with. And if you imagine that there are only, say, seven kinds of apples, then the choice will be made fairly quickly and painlessly.
So it is with us - before the introduction of the batch sale mechanism, the player had to calculate how many crystals he would need. Take with a margin? Or, conversely, smaller, and the rest to accumulate? Head bursts with questions. And the difficulties did not end there. Having determined the number of crystals, the player drove it into the appropriate field, estimated the amount in real money and only then proceeded to payment. Too long. Too dreary. We wanted to reduce the decision-making process to one intuitive click.
But before letting the old payment mechanics under the knife, we turned to market practice and that’s what we learned.
1. Packages should be ordered by size. Either from top to bottom, or from bottom to top - depending on what logic the design of the payment page implies.
2. There should be a bonus in packages. This is a simple incentive for users to buy.
3. The larger the package, the greater the bonus. At the same time, the bonus should grow a little faster than the size of the main package amount, so that it doesn’t work out, which is more profitable to buy two small packages than one large one.
4. By default, the package in the middle should be selected. It is necessary to transparently hint to the player that it is the purchase of a medium-sized package that is average, i.e. most popular solution for other users.
In order not to be unfounded ...
How many packages do? This was the next question that required careful study. As a result, we decided to dance on the size of a person’s short-term memory. Experts usually call numbers from five to nine points that a person can simultaneously keep in short-term memory. We chose six - a good number, even, you can nicely and symmetrically arrange packages on the page.
So, we decided on the basic principles for calculating packages and their number. Further, we fixed the minimum and maximum packages based on the prices of game content. It would be wrong to equate the most expensive game item to the size of the largest package. But it’s right to make them of the same order.
And then - a matter of technology. We uploaded the sizes of all payments for a certain period, looked at how many crystals our players buy. And to our surprise, we found that users have long identified a kind of “package” for themselves. Statistics showed that the audience with an enviable constancy takes quite certain amounts of crystals. Portions of 500, 1000, 5000 and 10 000 crystals were the most popular.
Having at hand the basic principles and limitations, the number of packages, as well as the size of the minimum and maximum package, and based on existing statistics on the preferences of players, we reduced the calculation of packages to the simplest linear optimization problem. Such ones are well solved, for example, in the add-on “Solution search” for MS Excel.
The few that we added “on our own” was the intuitively assumed rounding to thousands of crystals. And after that, we looked at household appliances stores and subtracted the ruble from the price of each package. It was 100 rubles, it became 99 rubles. It was 3000, it became 2999 rubles. The minus the ruble is an ancient, but surest trick of the marketer.
However, not everything was smooth, and some nuances had to be taken into account, having already built the system as a whole.
1. Prices of the type "99.9" - this is fine, but not from a technical point of view. If for 99 rubles we give 5,000 crystals, how much should we give for 100 rubles, given that the price of one crystal is exactly two pennies? It turns out that it’s also 5000. And for 99 rubles, 50 kopecks? And for 101 rubles? Everything is clear to a person, but, unfortunately, billing is not a person. So at the price of beautiful prices for us, even small, but crutches in the code have become.
2. And what if the person came to the terminal, holding 150 rubles in his hand, and we have packages of 100 (99) and 300 (299)? Most terminals have not yet learned how to hand over change. But what if the user pays via SMS? You can’t create a package for every SMS price point. But what if a player has a $ 10 prepaid card and intends to spend all of them? Thinking over these questions, we waved a hand and left the user the opportunity to enter an arbitrary amount. Now the entered amount is optimally scattered into packages, and the player receives the full bonuses from these packages on top. Strictly speaking, this rule is not exactly a batch sale of currency, but rather a stepwise discount on crystals, but we have come to terms with this violation of the originally laid down principles. Also, one of the packages had to be sacrificed to this logic and design.
3. Finally, the third problem we are faced with is the problem of “beautiful” amounts in other currencies. We calculated prices of the type “9.99” for rubles, and if the user pays in dollars or euros, then all the beauty disappears. But we did not want to change prices for different localizations. Beauty requires sacrifice when it comes to price discrimination.
Finally, everything was settled, and we brought the packages to the base. In this form, they are preserved to this day.
We have reached our goals. Buying crystals has become easier and more profitable for the user. Well, we are not in the loser - ARpPU grew by 30%. Win-win.
What's next? A lot of thoughts. For example, targeted packages. Knowing how much the player pays, form packages specifically for him. The decision is obviously controversial, but there is also its lite version - not to show large packages to a player who has not yet donated, so as not to scare him away with large amounts at the stage of getting used to the game. And you can, as in "Kinder Surprises", invest in packages of a more favorable face value a random game item. But that's another story.
The root cause of the change was our desire to increase revenue per paying user (ARpPU). And before rushing into the abyss of desperate reforms, we took a series of trial steps in the form of discounts. A temporary decrease in the price of content or crystals (the virtual currency of Tanki Online) somehow pushed the audience to increase their expenses. In general, these experiments were successful, but remained at the level of one-time shares, while we needed a system. And we built it on the basis of the batch sale of crystals.
As you know, an innovation in business will not work if it does not benefit your customers. Therefore, in an appeal to the players, we focused on convenience and benefit. Firstly, we simplify the purchase decision and minimize the time for its adoption, offering a choice of only five options. Secondly, the larger the package, the cheaper each crystal in it costs the player.
I must say that the buyer does not know how and does not like. You can recall the report of Sheena Iyengar on the problem of choice. If you have not watched, we strongly recommend that you go to YouTube and drive “Sheena Iyengar” in the search bar.
The bottom line is that the user, going to the supermarket and seeing more than a hundred kinds of apples there, will be very happy with such freedom, but in the end he is unlikely to make a choice that he will be satisfied with. And if you imagine that there are only, say, seven kinds of apples, then the choice will be made fairly quickly and painlessly.
So it is with us - before the introduction of the batch sale mechanism, the player had to calculate how many crystals he would need. Take with a margin? Or, conversely, smaller, and the rest to accumulate? Head bursts with questions. And the difficulties did not end there. Having determined the number of crystals, the player drove it into the appropriate field, estimated the amount in real money and only then proceeded to payment. Too long. Too dreary. We wanted to reduce the decision-making process to one intuitive click.
But before letting the old payment mechanics under the knife, we turned to market practice and that’s what we learned.
1. Packages should be ordered by size. Either from top to bottom, or from bottom to top - depending on what logic the design of the payment page implies.
2. There should be a bonus in packages. This is a simple incentive for users to buy.
3. The larger the package, the greater the bonus. At the same time, the bonus should grow a little faster than the size of the main package amount, so that it doesn’t work out, which is more profitable to buy two small packages than one large one.
4. By default, the package in the middle should be selected. It is necessary to transparently hint to the player that it is the purchase of a medium-sized package that is average, i.e. most popular solution for other users.
In order not to be unfounded ...
How many packages do? This was the next question that required careful study. As a result, we decided to dance on the size of a person’s short-term memory. Experts usually call numbers from five to nine points that a person can simultaneously keep in short-term memory. We chose six - a good number, even, you can nicely and symmetrically arrange packages on the page.
So, we decided on the basic principles for calculating packages and their number. Further, we fixed the minimum and maximum packages based on the prices of game content. It would be wrong to equate the most expensive game item to the size of the largest package. But it’s right to make them of the same order.
And then - a matter of technology. We uploaded the sizes of all payments for a certain period, looked at how many crystals our players buy. And to our surprise, we found that users have long identified a kind of “package” for themselves. Statistics showed that the audience with an enviable constancy takes quite certain amounts of crystals. Portions of 500, 1000, 5000 and 10 000 crystals were the most popular.
Having at hand the basic principles and limitations, the number of packages, as well as the size of the minimum and maximum package, and based on existing statistics on the preferences of players, we reduced the calculation of packages to the simplest linear optimization problem. Such ones are well solved, for example, in the add-on “Solution search” for MS Excel.
The few that we added “on our own” was the intuitively assumed rounding to thousands of crystals. And after that, we looked at household appliances stores and subtracted the ruble from the price of each package. It was 100 rubles, it became 99 rubles. It was 3000, it became 2999 rubles. The minus the ruble is an ancient, but surest trick of the marketer.
However, not everything was smooth, and some nuances had to be taken into account, having already built the system as a whole.
1. Prices of the type "99.9" - this is fine, but not from a technical point of view. If for 99 rubles we give 5,000 crystals, how much should we give for 100 rubles, given that the price of one crystal is exactly two pennies? It turns out that it’s also 5000. And for 99 rubles, 50 kopecks? And for 101 rubles? Everything is clear to a person, but, unfortunately, billing is not a person. So at the price of beautiful prices for us, even small, but crutches in the code have become.
2. And what if the person came to the terminal, holding 150 rubles in his hand, and we have packages of 100 (99) and 300 (299)? Most terminals have not yet learned how to hand over change. But what if the user pays via SMS? You can’t create a package for every SMS price point. But what if a player has a $ 10 prepaid card and intends to spend all of them? Thinking over these questions, we waved a hand and left the user the opportunity to enter an arbitrary amount. Now the entered amount is optimally scattered into packages, and the player receives the full bonuses from these packages on top. Strictly speaking, this rule is not exactly a batch sale of currency, but rather a stepwise discount on crystals, but we have come to terms with this violation of the originally laid down principles. Also, one of the packages had to be sacrificed to this logic and design.
3. Finally, the third problem we are faced with is the problem of “beautiful” amounts in other currencies. We calculated prices of the type “9.99” for rubles, and if the user pays in dollars or euros, then all the beauty disappears. But we did not want to change prices for different localizations. Beauty requires sacrifice when it comes to price discrimination.
Finally, everything was settled, and we brought the packages to the base. In this form, they are preserved to this day.
We have reached our goals. Buying crystals has become easier and more profitable for the user. Well, we are not in the loser - ARpPU grew by 30%. Win-win.
What's next? A lot of thoughts. For example, targeted packages. Knowing how much the player pays, form packages specifically for him. The decision is obviously controversial, but there is also its lite version - not to show large packages to a player who has not yet donated, so as not to scare him away with large amounts at the stage of getting used to the game. And you can, as in "Kinder Surprises", invest in packages of a more favorable face value a random game item. But that's another story.