Battle Pass Game Design: Engagement to Monetization

you so yeah there's been a lot of talk about and monetization and engagement so I will probably skip over redundant stuff since I know we've heard a lot about it already but yeah basically for this presentation I will talk briefly about what battle passes fundamentally why it is a great engagement feature why I personally believe it is not a monetization feature as most games have implemented and then stuff about what you should not do with battle pass rewards and finally some tips on how to make battle pass monetize better someone brought up before the presentations started about them afk arena and they have a couple of stackable IPs and you know there's a debate about whether

battle passes a subscription or is it an event or is it just a one-time purchase that rewards engagement um we get into semantics at this point but basically at its core it's a one-time purchase that unlocks content and rewards through a spirit a specific period of time based on engagement and how quickly just I'm not going to go over these I will sort of highlight though that going back to a arena like they mainly just reward you based on like activity within the game but they don't really tell you what exactly you should be doing it's just the more stuff you do the more daily quests and you complete your gonna get points and you're ultimately gonna get rewards I want to highlight that challenges is actually a pretty big differentiator with battle paths and that's one way I would differentiate most battle passes with something like what afk arena did with their three sort of premium unlocks that you see in the

game well I see now after the success of for tonight's battle passes what I saw after class rail came out a flurry of games adopting a mechanic in some cases you know it made sense and in other cases it clearly didn't fit but I'm definitely a little skeptical just blindly adopting a mechanic just because it's worked in a game that is very successful and so I can battle paths are kind of like the new time to chest from class Rio you know four plus years ago in that crime chest worked in class RAL as a great sort of session ender it really tastes like Giovanni said it really paste session length and stuff like that and it works for them but just because it worked for clash Royale does mean it will work in other games and the same thing to be said with battle house I will go into battle paths is probably one of the best engagement features in the created in the free to play space since it's sort

of creation but I really don't believe that battle pass is a monetization feature and I think its reputation as such it doesn't deserve to be seen as a monetization feature now I'll go over that later in this presentation so what is great about battle passes and monetization or engagement feature is that it really allows a game to both give direction to players who are a laughing direction and also to beefs engagement in different areas of the game that players currently are not engaging enough with one of my philosophies when it comes to coming up with new features for a game is what not only what is good for the player what is better for the player experience but also what problems am I trying to solve no game is perfect all games have their issues you know some games will have their you know strengths things are working really well but inevitably

there's gonna be things in your games are just not working the way you want them to and what is great about the battle pass is it's an opportunity to refocus engagement into the areas of the game that are not where you want them to be and we'll get to that shortly I will go through fortnight a little bit because I think we know that battle pass was an amazing sort of success for fortnight I don't know if you understand exactly how big of a success it is um a lot of their battle past challenges do relate to the the Battle Royale sort of gameplay like you know dealing damage killing people stuff killing other players stuff like that that that all you know fits naturally with the core gameplay but when you look at battle past challenges you do see a lot of frankly arbitrary sort of things like

kicking a soccer ball 100 meters or visiting certain areas in the map that really has nothing to do with the core gameplay but yet what these artificial tasks do it just extends the time that players can spend in the in fortnight without getting bored or overwhelmed or just tired of the gameplay it opens up more things for players who may not be as interested in in trying to get to the top of a battle royale it just gives them more things to do more and more time to showcase all the Manatee items they're wearing and things like that it really you know solves a problem of how do you keep up you're very wide audience that has played the game how do you keep them engaged and therefore in the game and continuing to collect and show off the vanity items and this is why you know I poked fun that kicking a soccer ball hundred you know meters it is

actually pretty important because it also solves the problem that fortnight had that is one of the fundamental things about a free-to-play mobile game or at least when it comes to mobile generally free-to-play mobile games you need to allow players to have very short play sessions that still leaves them feeling um satisfied like they made progress and if fortnight just force players to always compete in just the battle rail and try to win you probably would not have as many put people play over mobile like if I have if I'm gonna 10-minute humour ride I that's probably enough times that's probably not enough time to compete and stuff like that so I'm not even gonna try but if I'm in a 10-minute override and one of my battle pass challenges is to kick soccer ball 100 meters or go visit certain places or stand on a roof then fire or whatever even though like I know

I'm not gonna win the the the match by entering I can at least maybe make progress on some of these battle past challenges it really the the battle past challenges in my opinion at least really made it so that players could play for tonight on mobile and make progress and and and probably boosted the amount of players who would use mobile to play for tonight versus PC which was superior for actually trying to compete to win in the Battle Royale like I said non non battle challenges let players essentially play for night anytime because they're able to make progress on the different challenges it really boosts engagement because it allows players to choose how they want to progress along the different challenges and really just fixed I think the core problem for tonight would have had if they did not have the battle pass

as Giovanni and Alexander discussed previously I mean I think we all agree that battle pass is an amazing engagement mechanic you could almost you could put it in almost every game I agree it doesn't fit in a lot of games but it is you really just wanted to use battle pass as an engagement and did not worry about monetization it's really hard to see how it cannot work with almost every game out there just because it's an amazing engagement feature doesn't mean it's a strong monetization feature and and again this may also come back to semantics but I personally view conversion and monetization as two different things conversion is really just about that first purchase getting people you know to have some financial skin in the game and I I'm 100% in agreement that battle pass is great for conversion I don't

have numbers but Josef and others said the supercell talk may have divulged some but I would find it hard to believe that battle past does not convert well but just because it converts well does not make it a monetization feature and besides that but you know typically besides that initial purchase the only other way that battle pass has to monetize is purchasing tears and you're gonna see more pressure than that the closer to the end of the season and if players want to get to the end but feel like they don't have the time to complete the challenges at that point they may pay to skip ahead tears but I don't think that's gonna monetize that well either so you have to ask yourself like if you know you as a game team you know say your attentions moderate you're you know on that side everything's you know pretty good but you're really not

monetizing the way that you want to be and you only have time for one feature like would battle pass be the one thing you do and I guess my mind my thought is like sure implement the battle pass get that conversion spike a revenue but what are you gonna do for the rest of the season whether that season is a month long 10 weeks whatever it's gonna be it's gonna be really hard to drive additional revenue once you get your player base into the battle path and this leads me it's sort of like like okay how do i define a monetization feature and I really you know define it along three things one is a feature that has multiple direct and indirect means of driving players to spend which you know battle pass does they have you know it's a one-time direct purchase with

very small other direct purchases if players feel like they need to purchase to skip tiers and secondly I would think a monetization feature would push players to spend multiple times over the course of the game I do think that like you want to get the mood like giving the amount of dev resources it tastes so like build a feature I would I assume you want to try and get as much bang out of your buck as possible and so I would I would think a monetization feature would allow for multiple spending opportunities and not just once every every long while and finally I think the monetization feature is needs to be adaptable enough to allow designers to either add new content and create new spend opportunities or rebalance the feature in order to achieve more spend

and in that case I'm talking about events and things like that where you know looking at data of how players behave and engage with an event you could tweak it so that the next time you run it you maybe get better results I would expect amana's a monetization feature to be able to do that or allow game teams to do that and so like we said I'm battle passed definitely has direct purchases and pretty strong ones at that I know one of the popular questions is what is the optimal pricing point um my my answer to that is a it's it's really kind of relative but not only do you need to look at what value you're offering with the battle pass you also have to compare it with what else you're selling in the game if if you know if your battle pass is offering say $100 the same amount contents in $100 I

ad but you know you're offering it for 15 dollars over the course of 30 days that may be compelling to some players and you can see lighter spenders going that route and heavier spenders going that route as well as continuing to purchase $100 IEP but if if you don't give out enough value and you charge say you know $25 for like maybe $20 worth of value then I might as well go by the $25 ID and get all that stuff instantly there's also just an intangible value to keeping players around in the game longer even if they don't spend there's competitive value there's social value so when we're trying to sort of figure out what is the value of the battle past rewards and what the game companies get from it I I want to just keeping players in the game

longer even if they don't spend further there is value to that it's really hard to calculate but we shouldn't ignore that aspect of the battle path and keeping players around so we talked about direct purchases which battle passes have now let's talk about indirect monetization and this is I think where a lot of battle passes fall flat so you know a good example of what indirect monetization is is needing to spend on other parts of the game in order to go through in order to progress in the battle path and 8 ball pool is a great example of this in 8 ball pool you know you get points for the battle path by not only doing you know matches 1 vs. 1 matches against other players you get more points the higher the table you go

but you also do it by completing daily missions and so because engagement an 8 ball pool has an entry cost there's a fee - you have to put coins down on the table in order to engage depending on you know that there so because you have to do that then almost by definition you are gonna be sinking more coins if you're playing more than you would otherwise without the battle pass so I don't know numbers on a ball pool but I'd have to imagine that based on you know so the daily missions they use for their pool pass as well as if players are playing higher tables than normal they're just gonna get monetized more off of chips than they did before pool paths entered that is great example of indirect monetization that is driven with the battle pass unfortunately most games don't have that because most games either the the

engagement activity is either free or its input is too cheap to really make a big difference in ma ization um it's you know some challenge you know so challenges tend to focus on engagement meaning you know how many times you do an activity it rarely sort of focuses around stuff that probably would monetize better so like stat checks or level tier checks and I guess I use you know a couple different game examples like in raid for example if one of the challenges was the feat level one ad spider in a minute and a half or less a lots of spenders probably I've gone to level 100 100 80 spiders then but maybe they need you know it takes them 2 minutes and 40 seconds to beat that stage if they

didn't wanted if they really wants to get that final reward and they really needed to beat the spiders then in a minute and a half and if the game was far enough to do a sale of like a hero or a heroic women set that would make it easier to beat the spider faster you could get indirect monetization that way because you're presenting a challenge that with the right purchase of stats whether it's stats with heroes or stats with equipment it will make it easier for a player to sort of complete that challenge that sort of challenge if more battle passes heads things like that I think you would see a lot more in direct monetization with the battle pass then how they currently are same thing with galaxies in Star Wars Galaxies of euros this is several years outdated but you know there is a when Yoda was first introduced you know they had this sort of

where you know you needed to get five Jedi heroes of various star or star tears in order to sort of fight Yoda if you had a challenge like that where you have to get you know defeat you know 7th or Yoda with five seven star Jedi characters you know you you know you would get some you would get some spenders to engage with that now there's another question of is it bad for four players to reach the end of a battle pass early and my answer like most everything else is it depends like if you know people are getting to the end in 40% of the season that's probably bad but if they if someone who's really engaging gets the end by 80 or 90 percent of the season I think that's fine and what that sort of leeway does is if players are super engaged but they

don't want to spend that much they would avoid these challenges that are more spending oriented because they know that they don't have to do all the challenges to get them they only need to do 75 80 85 % so versus spenders who may not have the amount of time that non spenders do to engage or lighter spenders do to engage they will spend to do these challenges because they don't it makes up for the time that they would spend doing the the more time focused challenges and so having a little leeway so that you know if you did have challenges like these that more or less requires some players to spend to complete you let those players you don't want to spend that they don't suspend them you just have to take more time to do the other challenges and not those particularly I think that you could strike a nice nice balance there but um other examples of challenges that might indirectly monetize are you know get X

characters to Y stars are higher that's you know and then also you know in the case of clash royale if you have a challenge and clash royale doesn't do challenges we will get to that later but say they did do challenges in the way that for tonight does a challenging class route could be get five legendary cards to level four or higher again would you know would this drive a ton of players to spend maybe maybe not it would probably get some and and and that's that's what you you don't need full participation to make a positive impact on your modernization you just need your your your more dedicated spenders and to spend a little more and hopefully you will bring up lighter spenders this has been a little more as well I mean most 100% purely engagement oriented challenges just don't work

they're not going to monetize like one of the worst things you could do with a battle pass in my opinion is to ask players to do more of what they're doing already unless them doing more would make them monetize somehow so like the first challenge sort of example I have is from raid it says fill or decreased earn meters a hundred times in arena so there are you know abilities that allow you to do that and as and as long as I have at least one here that does that over the course of ten weeks using that hero in the arena I will fulfill that like I need to I need to get arena medals that's part of you know sort of what the game pushes us to do and you know asking me to do that it's not changing my behavior it may at most it's maybe I'm focusing on the arena a little bit more

but that does not make me any more likely to monetize and before clattering like using crowns to advance through the past well like I mean sure maybe it gets players to play six matches a day instead of four or like you know or whatever but like if they've already spent on the cards and as Giovanni pointed out earlier like the cost get incredibly high like it is so costly for me to get better that yeah maybe I'm playing a few more matches and then that's great for engagement but I'm not likely to monetize anymore and if anything I may just get frustrated that now I'm playing seven or eight times a day instead of my normal four or five and then you know um clash of clans you know the the challenge is you know would might I spend to get around those or might I

spent like finishes more quickly maybe but if I feel like I could just do those in my ordinary course of playing the game I can I'm not going to monetize so I feel like you know as good of an engagement tool as battle paths is it's also what kind of makes it not a monetization feature because most of the challenges most of what we're asking players to do are not designed in the way to push them to monetize and I think that is a problem if you're going to call battle past a monetization feature which I don't rule of thumb generally like challenges should not require core actions especially if engagement and those core actions are working like on our chair you know they use a number of kills if I'm really into our chair and

I'm you know playing over and over again like I'm naturally going to get through the battle pass by just by like I normally do and if our chairs main concern is engagement or attention that may be fine because it keeps me playing on maybe playing more but I'm gonna get those rewards but if Archer implement this in a way that was not just about conversion but they also want this to boost monetization elsewhere this is not going to do anything for that it's gonna help with conversion but once that player is converted you should expect no more monetization to come from this implementation of the battle pass and you know just generally my rule of thumb is that players will avoid spending if they have to like theirs now to Alexander's point right there there is something to be said like if I really enjoy playing a game I will not III don't think players will balk at spending in the game but they still need

to be nudged a little bit so like if I'm enjoying playing a game and I want to play it for two hours and you know the the various whether I'm out of energy or there's other sort of limitations stop me at one hour yeah I'll throw a few bucks in the game so I really enjoy the game and I want to play more but if I'm but if I'm able to play for two hours for free I'm gonna play two hours for free and doesn't matter it doesn't matter how much like I'm enjoying the game generally you should assume that players will avoid spend if they can and if when it comes to a game that you enjoy if in battle past if I feel like I can get through all the challenges without spending just by playing more and and and and choosing to focus on different things I will do it and I will probably not spend and you know when you're designing and balancing your battle paths this is a safe assumption to make and you know if if I'm wrong if you're wrong if people are willing to spend to

get around that that's fantastic but I just in my experience having worked in this industry for over a decade I just I I would never count on a player spending unless they're nudged at least a little bit to do so through you know the design of challenges or what they're being has to do or what not and unfortunately battle passages doesn't have that many spend opportunities you have that one great direct purchase which is again great for conversion and great for a purchase every season which I can by itself is valuable but if if you if this is supposed to be your your Hail Mary for four massively boosting your monetization overall you just don't have that many spent opportunities to do that outside of that initial spike in purchases and another thing it's just

it's really hard to recalibrate a battle pass one of the things I mentioned that what makes a good monetization feature is the building for design to extend content by adding new stuff or recalibrating the existing content and it's it's hard once once a battle passes or live you instantly create expectations for what players will get based on both the battle past milestones themselves but also what the challenges are you may have some depending on how you're designing the battle paths you may have some leeway in rebalancing weekly and daily challenges that have not been unlocked yet but you run a massive risk of violating player expectations if you go back and rebalance challenges that I've already been unlocked and if you rebalance rewards on you may be able to reiterate from one battle past to another but then again like you know player expectations

is a powerful thing and so for those who asked like you know what should optimal pricing be I would err on the side of it being higher because it's much easier to lower the price of the battle pass from one season to another it's much harder to increase the price and so just be aware of player expectations if you are trying to meddle with a battle pass within the season but also from season to season and finally the economic stress isn't enough B if you're giving away things of value be very careful because you know because battle pass is likely a one-time purchase for most players you know you you need to sort of look at how much it is being how much was being given away

over the course of 30 days or 10 weeks versus other one-time purchase opportunities in in the game Andrade is a textbook example of not heating this advice so I don't know how many of you have played a grade when they did their only battle past season but they gave away the farm like for I guess I think the base price was $24 you got four to five heroes a seven of them unique you've got multiple armor sets of five stars and six stars dozens of some like dozens of rare and above summons gems energy silver glory so many other stuff and I'm using these two screens to point out just how crazy this is so if you look at the the left pick I've circled to six star epic sets for HP and HP plus

shield just given as a reward and compared to like a set that they sell for someone at my level or you know at the level I was when I was doing this and like it's it's crazy like why would I buy this twenty dollar set when I'm getting these full sets are better at least if I wanted HP and stuff and they have the speed sets and they're at different tiers as well like really when this came out there's really no need for me to spend on anything else except energy and unfortunately for a their energy economy is is is god-awful like it's they really themselves in a bad position and this I'm not surprised at all that we haven't seen a second battle path since her first one ended in April we may never see another one if they choose to do another one it will probably not be as

lucrative they literally gave out hundreds of dollars worth of IEP value for $25 IEP so don't don't be raid well you just say that so finally you know for my last few minutes I'll just go over some thing ideas I came up with that you can possibly make battle past monetize more one is focusing challenges on things you could monetize we've kind of discussed that I'll this recap a little bit of what we what we've discussed the second is adding more monetization opportunities after the milestones are complete because in one way you've been viewing the battle past as an event some people say it's a subscription some people say it's you know a core feature you know but it could also be viewed as an event if you look at all its characteristics and then finally you know all the battle passes are used to

drive core game engagement but I feel like that'll pass there's there's more opportunities to connected with other events that are going on the game because you know events are typically used to monetize so going about the 8 ball pool we've already discussed indirect monetization because of having entry costs in the game but what about games that have no entry costs like for clash royale for example I think if you if you took away so saying there's still the point system for the tiers but what if instead of getting points the Crown's you got points by the chests that you open so a silver chest maybe gives 10 points gold chest maybe 30 points you know whatever whatever balance is suddenly you're putting the progression not on the earning of the crowns but the opening of the chests and at that point depending

on how you balance your battle pass it's possible that you'd get spenders who normally would not pay to speed up just because like we we've already established the card upgrade cost just get super high now maybe they're gonna upgrade spit pay to speed up the chests because they want to get to the end of the battle box and that's you know I have no idea how players would receive this but I'm pretty sure it would monetize better than it does right now energy is a good sort of activity cost but in many games energy is just way too cheap and I I feel like I'm thinking on raid a lot but here's another example of just how cheap energy is like a $15.00 purchase and raid like you know but because you convert gems to energy like gifts me know 2500 to 3000 energy which between that and how much free energy the battle pass gave as rewards plus the free energy I get in the game naturally

I I only spent besides buying the battle fast I got two tier 100 with just buying energy and maybe I bought one of these like it's it definitely monetized like maybe I would not have bought energy if I didn't have a battle pass but I got way more bang for my buck than if I just didn't engage with the battle pass at all and you know if we if we look at a battle pass as a type of event you've seen a lot of other events you have your event milestones and then that I've been on the milestones you have the leaderboard and I feel like a lot of battle passes kind of get lazy once you get to the end like oh you get the end then you get some generic for reward for every X amount of points you get after that why not experiment with leaderboards at the end of the milestones like it seems to do well for events and again if your challenges are

such that they could push indirect modernization having a leaderboard to rank those most hardcore players who get to the end will keep them engaged in battle past challenges going forward but that extra competitiveness maybe gives you more opportunities to monetize towards the end of each season which is exactly what you want because right now with battle passes you have a spike at the beginning of the season as people get into it but if you had this sort of elder season monetization you you you could get a spike towards the end which is way better than just having that initial spike and finally um you know a lot of games have sort of their event cadence and you know some some players may try all the events but some players may just try the events that they think they'll do the best in or some may take a break because it's a busy week but if

you if you tie battle past challenges to the events that are running at the same time you could actually boost engagement in those events and if those events have direct and indirect monetization opportunities that is another way you could use battle paths you improve your monetization you're doing it indirectly through the events that you are also running so that's just some stuff to consider to summer to summarize on battle paths is incredible for engagement especially in games with little to no direction or if engagement and core systems is low battle paths may be one of the most powerful conversion features ever to hit free-to-play but that does not mean it is a monetization feature unless it allows the game to monetize more through higher engagement games giving stats or other things of value should be careful about how many rewards they give with battle bus and and and you know Giovanni was absolutely

right like the depth of the economy matters here I had done some slides on this but yeah if if your economy is deep enough you could be as lucrative as you want with your battle pass rewards but just be careful it's not just about how deep your economy is its what you're offering in the battle path compared to other things you're selling and even if you have a super deep economy and you can give out a lot more in battle past that value of the battle path should not be so far ahead of other possible sale opportunities unless you're okay with them getting cannibalized and then finally you know battle passes by no means perfect and there's a lot of room for improvement and I would encourage a lot of studios to at least think about you know what what is their game like what do their players need and how can I improve battle paths not only

do what we already know does well but also improve other aspects of the game that maybe it's not as obvious and how it's been applied so far but um that is pretty much it for me and I approach should have put this slide in beforehand uh I am currently free to consult on game design so feel free to reach out and even email me I will also post or I also get my Lincoln link and then you know that we send out and oftentimes it I just enjoy talking shop so if even if it's not about consultation if you ever want to talk shop or anything I'm just timmi up all right well thanks for that Jeff I think there were a lot of settle points in your talk that maybe we could actually discuss as far as questions Jeff one question coming in is what is your opinion on how riots TFT has implemented the ballot pass this seems like much of it can be completed just by

playing normally I haven't looked at rights battle past but again it's kind of what are you looking to accomplish with your battle path so if you have a high de da you and you're fine with monetization it could be that engagement is all you want you want to engage in retain your players in which case why not make a battle pass that players can get to the end of if they just do moderate to slightly heavy engagement every day I think that's perfectly fine if engagement and retention are the things you care about the most but if rights was hoping to boost monetization from this more than just the initial purchase then it's probably whacking to have so many people just be able to get to the end by just a little more engagement but I definitely would like to look into that like I like I said I haven't really examined that particular battle pass okay one other

question in empires and puzzles battle pass points are a game based on daily challenges plus past challenges here if I miss out on certain days then I really can't complete the entire battle pass this sometimes D motivates me and I usually don't participate with the same rigor after that so is this something we should avoid while designing battle passing games well so it goes back to that original question of you know allowing people to to get to the end before that last week of the season so like if in the case of you know in the case of raid I was I got to the end at like week seven of a 10-week season and I was mainly you know logging in doing you know more or less all the daily tasks I sometimes skip a challenge for two if I just didn't get around to it you know in the evening for the most part did everything and I did for the most part mostly weekly challenges unless there was one that was

just ridiculous and I still got to the end by by you know week seven so I think it's fine if you shouldn't expect players to have to do every single challenge to get to the end and allowing them those who do every single challenge and early gives wiggle room to those who those who don't have the time to do this much but it also means like if you want to monetize more on completing challenges by paying that sort of pressure may push the player to do so and and and I didn't say this in the presentation but the pain to skip tears if you're gonna make your challenges if you want to indirectly monetize on your challenges don't have that feature because in many cases it's going to be less expensive to skip a tier then to

like buy a lot of stats and complete the challenge so just be careful about that but um yeah that I think a nice grace window for people who made during parts of the season not have had as many times complete the challenges the daily challenges can make up for it elsewhere and the good thing about battle pass is that the weekly challenges are always available which i think is good yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]