BattlePass Game Design: Q&A With Top F2P Designers and Product Execs

you hey folks welcome to a special battle pass Edition QA we recently hosted a surprisingly well attended digital conference on battle paths and we actually have the speakers from that event here with us today we've got Giovanni Ducati from scope lee alex milk macmillan from social point we also have jeff wit from j wig consulting so guys i have to say i got incredible feedback on the event that we had and we seemed to have a lot of interest in follow percents as well but the focus of our discussion today is going to be on some of the follow up questions from the events and talks there were about 25 or so follow-up questions but in the interest of time we couldn't cover them so i thought we could just have this session today where we go over let's see the top 10 questions in the interest of

time and and answer a lot of those outstanding questions but before we start maybe we just do real quick intros actually maybe starting with you Jeff yeah I've been in the industry for over a decade now mainly with mol free-to-play and for the last four years I've been consulting on everything game design yeah I love panels like these because it allows us to really break down features and and learn what works and what doesn't Alex it's been six seven years now coming in from more of an analytical like monetization background and I'm currently working at social point in in charge of most religions and a few other things here Giovanni hi everybody my name is Giovanni I'm a director of product has Copley and prior to scope lis I was a blizzard for a couple of years where I

was focusing on hearthstone in eSports alright then let's jump right into our questions so we've got 10 and the first question is how is battle past doing in some of the casual games that we discussed and in that event there were some names that were brought up like Idol miner play right play Rix's match three games and games like that so what do you guys think well so you know in a lot of these casual games you know Oh awesome times they'll have a lot of events running and you know really there's no compelling reason for players to do all of them they're just there to do to focus on to shake things up and so the good thing about battle pass in those cases is it could actually motivate you to play those events they otherwise maybe wouldn't just to progress within the battle path so I think for casual games that rely a lot on the vents like kind of key players busy day to day having a battle pass as a sort of centralized

metaphor those players could be beneficial I don't have any sort of KPIs that suggests that this is the case but I could see it happening for sure yeah I can also weigh in and just in terms of revenue like the talk that Giovanni and I gave was on the Tale of Two Cities meaning that implementing bell paths can't have different results based upon the type of game and so we saw clash of Clan in particular had a pretty big increase in revenue so just looking at revenue like classic clans was clash well it had big revenue impact but I would say the one that stood out to me the game I guess you could kind of consider casual is mini clips a ball pool if you look at since they introduced pull paths just by revenue like it's basically gone crazy and so the key takeaway there whether it's a mid core game or a casual game from my perspective is what is the type of economy or the type of monetization system for the game and so for games where you introduce a battle past you

can give out a lot of rewards where you've got more of a consumables based economy those are the type of games I think where you're going to be able to monetize your users against the ballot paths but then also drain your economy of the rewards that you give out for the battle pass but I don't know if you guys have any other thoughts in terms of some of the other casual games and battle pass in those games you're right for 8 ball pool so for like garden scapes or like a match 3 for example like you could tell that the battle pass is working if players are using more of those consumables to help them win more matches to complete the events so that they progress in the battle house so it's all about whether the battle pass is actually sinking more of the stuff that you want players to use to to complete their matches and casual games we'll just have to look at how the player inventories are decreasing if the battle pass is implemented okay so if no other comments the next question for

games that cannot give lots of non-economic reward so meaning for games that give I would assume Cosmetics is battle pass a good idea or should they skip it altogether yeah I'm happy to give a first view on this one starting from what we discussed last time in the clash of clans versus clutch for y'all presentation yeah battle pass or the effectiveness about us depends on the ability to have a deep and scalable economy so from my point of view as long as these two conditions are met balla path should be sustained however I think it's really hard to imagine that there is nothing in the game that can be given to players if they find that they find it worthwhile so if you think about perks that can improve the quality of life of players that are all improved our gameplay experience overall there must be some and for example in class we talked about the one gem

donation I don't think players would pay for that but that is a work that is meaningful and effectively adds value for the battle pass it's a it's basically a non-monetary value so if you find three or four of these things when you add them into battle paths you can give a fewer economic rewards if you really cannot find any which I you know I doubt it but if you really cannot find any and you're only forced to give power and economic rewards on one hand your solution space could be more limited but then the question becomes is better past a good idea for your game altogether and so the question becomes you know is there any cannibalization from below pass and secondarily you know are the retention benefits from below us enough to offset any potential IP cannibalization I think you know as Mattias Joe talked about in the presentation we did last week you should see battle tasks from an LTV standpoint

and therefore really consider the retention and given benefits more than the short-term revenues and I think you don't want to make it you know you don't want you don't want your telepath to not have anything or not have any non-economic reward because then you're basically forced to give too much value so you really should find something else to beef up its its recipe yeah plenty of uses pretty cool I mean to me really almost any reward is good because the thing about the battle pets it's a way to dish out resources like economic or not based on this it's kind of a milestone right so Allah is about initially when fortnight came out passing only word for cosmetics I mean that was stuff you'd hear like at the beginning you know and see ultimately any reward is good but probably anything

pretty tangible would be more attractive silly that competing consumables like this for fortnight a lot of other games are also getting you like monsters like I guess the raid was looking example given I think anytime you have this kind of permanent tangible thing more than economic cosmetic and go like creamy and consumable because I think prune it's probably be a bit more powerful in Kakuma work you see I mean plant versus zombies trees and cell phones now they have a battle path it's really like consumables it's clash royale this right extent is the same you know like you lose that flash you lose that appeal I think and what makes it really engaging exciting you know it's so I don't say anything if you if your game is Montana on something you could fit into a battle past but you're probably going to be more successful if you focus on incriminating tangible stove resin consumables right I mean I think one of the points that you mentioned Alex in your talk was making sure that the battle pass is worth it right so that you're delivering another not you so that's one of the things I worry about with MedX given Bauhaus is like if you are

gonna go that route then try to understand what the impact on your content cadence is and one of those gonna be worth it because and the thing that we've seen with fortnight is as players have you know they've continued to get certain a certain amount of cosmetics and it's like well how much more do I need and so then fortnight has to do these integrations with like Marvel and Star Wars and blah blah blah influencers and then gets increasingly they got to step up the scale so I would just say watch for that and then the other probably example to look at is if you look at Call of Duty mobile what they have done it's kind of like a almost like Compu Gacha system where you know you like do you tie those cosmetics to actual bonuses or perks of some kind and that's a slippery slippery slope but they've kind of have a system where you have to get the full cosmetic set to unlock the unlock the whatever then the booster whatever so you know that would be another way of thinking about cosmetics as well okay any other

comments or should we move on to the next question oh yeah well I would just say that you know I mean economic rewards are gonna be just more valuable than cosmetic I mean I think maybe whoever asks that question may have been probably seeing too much on cosmetics because that's what for and I did but for tonight doesn't have stats in the game that doesn't have a stats meta that they had players follow but just like just like everyone else said you just have to be careful that you're not giving out too much value for the money that you're charging for the battle pass compared to your other sales otherwise you will cannibalize your your own monetization it will be interesting to see what the array did or what the implications for raids economy were I mean Jeff you talked about you know how their first dollar tax was very generous and hence my point on hey you give out too much value sure you know there's a cannibalization impact and then it becomes okay are the benefits from the boosted engagement retention more

valuable than the potential hit that we're taking I mean in the case of raid I could tell you it definitely was negative for two reasons one is you see it cleared dip in their revenue during the battle pass on a panty also the fact that they haven't run a second season since April where the crew solid one I mean you could sprinting down I don't mean and speaks more to like the balancing than messing itself with you I think you definitely can't bounce in a way where you're not giving up too much value the problem with rate is because their first season set clear expectations if they ran a second season gave way less value would they get as many people into it maybe I don't know but it's definitely riskier than if they had given less stuff out in the first season the whole conversation and not expectations we

will touch upon it when we talk about pricing and you know so I think we should leave that for that point I think there is however a big consideration on anything you do for about a box because it's a recurring thing do it again and the success of battle paths will depend not on how it does the first time but how it does for a long time right so you know we should be having that lens in mind that you wanna make something they're sustainable successful and repeatable and a no-brainer purchased for most players lifts up your engagement okay next question when is it a good time to introduce battle pass in the life cycle of a game I think the short answer is always it depends I think I think the answer is it depends on the other features that your game has I mean I think it's hard to give an answer to a question like this but you know battle pass if you look at its benefits it provides you know it has a

goal system and has a reward road and both of them provide short and medium term meta or engagement basically and so you know to answer this question you have to figure out what else does your game have that accomplishes B is these goals you don't have any matter well you should probably launch with it if you do have a lot of other things though maybe if this is less important this is a roadmap prioritization question more than you know how important battlepacks is holistically because you cannot really answer that right there may be one consideration in terms of also if you view battle past in terms of Salem I know we had some discussions around that during the event but if we go into a highly recessionary depression area environment depending on how the economy winds up going then I do think that introducing something like a battle pass to basically increase conversion and decrease rpm giving more value to the

player but making up for by conversion I think battlecast is a great vehicle for something like that and so kind of if you view IEP s as you know whether it's so there's this discussion about in recessionary environments how people tend to avoid luxury goods which I interpret is kind of like the higher end whale purchasing behavior and it becomes more of a substitute good for entertainment then you definitely want to deliver more value so that I would actually think a bit more from that perspective and more from the perspective of like prioritizing your development roadmap in terms of like whether you use expected outcomes or however in terms of the features and the things that you're going to roll out for the game it's not so much the lifecycle of the game but where it makes sense from a development priority perspective and then the economy that's how I would think about it yeah I definitely would wait until you have solid player data before introducing it just so that you know how to shape your challenges to get

players to engage in the game the way you want them to oh I see that's if you can watch it right out of the gate you're kind of sort of I guess you're telling players what you want to do but you don't know how they would act without the battle pass and I think right using the battle pass to fix sort of player engagement problems and sense of problems I think is very useful so I would I would personally want to see how players react or engage in the game first and then introduce battle paths to sort of fix behavior that you don't like right so actually I Jeff to your point I think I stand corrected I would actually do what you're suggesting which is get a baseline to data first it could all happen in soft-launched right like you can get all that data and soft launches you want in then introduce battle passing launched before card launch but I definitely want at least a small period later but life cycle does matter in the sense that you should get some data first okay I totally agree all right next question so now we're gonna roll into pricing is a topic and

so the first question around pricing is how do you decide the price should you change it and then would you test it and how would you test Bella Paz pricing yeah I had a pretty strong point of view on this last time I want to be able to articulate it a little bit more clearly so I think pricing is tricky because once you said it it's done right and changing it afterwards changes expectations reactions if you increase it after it can cause an outrage right if you decrease it players could think oh you know we push them and they lower pricing and that's not a place you want to be in anyway I think when folks think about what's the right price point they fall into the trap of thinking it as an optimization question between how do I make it low enough that you optimize conversion and how do you make it high enough that you get a bit of an uplift in terms of revenues I think that's a wrong way to

think about it because in the Animas and the assumption that bass was primarily a monetization feature what I think is not primarily an engagement and retention feature which also has a conversion and potential benefit so I think you get a better bang from your buck if you make it low enough that it becomes a no-brainer purchase and you get as many players as you can on it now I think there are better there are you know if you take this argument to an extreme then you can say oh just give it over all for free I would say no to that too because I think there is a benefit in having a conversion opportunity because you know if you're a non payer and you start spending you're more likely to spend after or hopefully that's the case for you again you know even if you are a payer making a nominal payment can make you feel more about emotionally invest and so you almost sign up for it so I think the point is just like the

clash of clans theme you did the pricing should be low enough to like the $5 number sounds great to me to maximize breadth of conversion and again you have to leave on the table the thoughts oh I could be making a couple more dollars if it were 10 or 12 or or or 8 and again as I was thinking earlier you should really think about it from the point of view of okay well players want to buy it again after is it a no-brainer purchase that players want to make on a repeated basis because then you get the all of the benefits in terms of retention and engagement on a repeated basis which will lift up your LTV to the point that it will be much more than the body you get from the from the Delta dollars from five to for example we wouldn't be asking that question about an offer like when you

lost an offer in a lime shank oh well you have offers from the start you know and I think ultimately develop as is it's a tool you could maybe use it to try to guide people towards engagement more monetization more I see a potential for both you know as far as monetization goes I mean I've seen a lot of good things like working during Luis day like on the monetization front and as a general rule battle past or not I seen I mean testing is to me is always the way to go and I think to your point giovani estate clear expectation is one thing for sure but also I have observed many times the players are way more resilient and then we give them credit for you know and we could start off with something it's probably better to start high go low but I think in general testing is gonna be better for you all the time because you'll be able to land on like what is the right price how do you get it to maximize your value for that you know in general Bello pass or not if you have the price in your name you probably be testing that out because the odds of you getting it right closed are pretty slim

you one point what you said that I don't fully agree with like I think testing when it comes down to pricing could make players feel like you're reaching for their pockets and I think that could have long-term body destruction from a brand loyalty standpoint so you know if your game is a small game that players don't have a lot of emotional connection to fine you can test anything you want if you have like a fillet tidal I would be very cautious on doing all sort of price testing because players would be like oh this is the brand I I love and trust and now you're like claiming me to see if you can get one more dollar you know I think it's uh I would I could consider pricing testing the price in a case by case yeah it's great we've got some controversy here and it's I think perfect if we don't completely agree in I do you on it I will push back a little bit on you to in terms of like in terms of like I would say that I actually do

think it's valuable to do some optimization in terms of pricing for like progression based games right so if you're like kind of like what we talked about in our talk if you're if you've got a game like clash Royale where you aren't pushing players forward and progression based upon the battle past then I would probably be really interested in seeing like in terms of your pair buckets what you will see is like you're gonna see a downward shift and so if you because instead of like what would the impact be from you know an RP curve perspective or you know basically having the higher conversion and lower ARPU and just understanding what that impact would be because you know that that could have an economic impact on your game so that's one thing I would probably at least want to try and measure although I guess you could make the argument that you know the higher engagement certainly would long longer-term be better for your game as well but yeah and I do think that the the trick here is trying to understand it I think you also has to do with time

frame right like what are we like you week if we measure this on like a two month a three month time frame but the impact is like for some of these games some of these games have five year time frames and so you know some of these things are just inherently not measurable if we unless we take into consideration extremely long time horizons so that's the tricky part that I do think to you know kind of agree with you in the sense that sometimes when we do analysis we could do it in the wrong way and reach the opposite result based upon whether we fully understand what we you know what we're testing for me you know this is where battle paths and subscriptions really kind of are very similar in that you can any sort of testing that games are doing now for subscriptions probably can't apply the battle pass because essentially what you're doing is one cost for an aggregate amount of rewards that'll pass just adds additional cost of engagement to get those rewards but

to me any sort of testing that games do with subscriptions I don't see why it wouldn't necessarily work for battle pass they seem comparable elite at least to me if no other comments then the next question is recurring subscription versus one-time IP by AP which one to use and is there a difference for this issue based upon genre subscription really nothing really successful comes to mind you know like so I mean just based on that or probably stay super cautious to like new forces unit unless you have something really compelling more new in that direction Europe oh yeah yeah I I will say that maybe I don't know maybe that's an opportunity

as well because I have seen a few games where a pretty meaningful amount of revenue comes from subscriptions like 20 30 % but I totally agree with you Alex that I haven't really seen a lot implement this maybe maybe that's an opportunity or maybe it's you know but when nobody else is doing it we should be worried III think you really have to look at what the challenges for the battle password gonna be like if it's something that players are guaranteed to do every day it's probably safer to do subscription if it's like a more hardcore game or mid core game like RPGs where maybe like if a battle pass that a lot of PvP challenges you wouldn't want to automatically assign players into that cuz they may look at and say they don't want to do PvP don't charge me for that so I I want to use this subscription for RPGs and strategy games now I have a similar opponent view to my prior answer I think subscriptions to me

feel almost like a shady tool because if you look at the amount of money on subscription that subscriptions that comes from people forgetting about them and then this thing making money over time it's not a good feeling when that happens and you know anything I do in game I try to do it in a way that you know I wouldn't want to treat players you know with I don't want to be treated as I mean so and if I create a trap that players can fall into it forget about it and feel bad about it I don't want to do it because I think it can detract from the long-term again value creation which i think is more valuable than anything else that you can create if you have the brand loyalty and that trust that players having you I think it's I think that's a good point like people will continue to download a supercell game because you know you can always trust supercell and so yeah I mean the so to

the extent that you create great player experiences that is true okay next question really important question value so how much total economic value should you give up front and total versus the price this is I mean again it's kind of like depends on you know what what what the game is what they're doing I just just a few things to be aware of one is that because the Bala Paris is engaging the player for you know between a month to ten weeks have a long day shape you know they have passed last for there is you know intangible value for the increased engagement and retention that it brings for sure but ultimately you'll want to also compare what you're giving out to what else you're selling in the game like going back to raid the problem with raid was not necessarily how much value is giving is how much value is getting compared with what it was selling and like one of the examples I had in my

presentation was literally for just one milestone they were giving the equivalent of what they sell for $15 in a sale and that's just for one milestone so for me like why would I buy that sale if I could just get it eventually in the battle pass so just be mindful of what else you're selling the game and make sure that like you're not making that sale obsolete by the way you're giving out on the battle pass I think between the unfair in total I mean Kevin would you say it really depends on the game the balancing but the two key nodes in my experience are like the first node before you even have any engagement at all and the last one and if you were to super simplify I would say you probably want to be giving out like on the paper PES value for people to buy it what's not having done any progress and put like something value at the end of the pass you don't try and get them the string name along so to speak so how much do you really put on your game but I think you probably want to be thinking more strategically as to what do you give at what point in the past that

probably does make some finance president before looking at all right so it kind of sounds like the factors that people should keep in mind are one like what feels good what would feel good to a player so from the player perspective two would be what is the relative amount of value compared to the other sales and different things that you've got going on in the game and then third is what is the economic impact which is like kind of focus of the talk to Giovanni and I gave but I think the tricky part here is if you're if you're taking the more the product managers view you would really want to understand what does that demand elasticity curve look like but that's the problem is that because you're not going to be able to like ideally like we talked about raid raid ideally would have been able to get a lot of different price points and understand what the demand elasticity was but because they didn't they went with something probably a little bit too generous so I would probably focus on the other stuff I think we have talked about the total value you should be giving and effectively how you

know you can find the optimal of that through comparison comparing with other offers you have in the game and that could be something you can be taxed easily do I think I want to talk a little bit about when to give this value and I think there are three points in time there are three moments in the battle paths that are quite important to nail the first one is right after purchase so immediately after you make the Battle Packs purchase what you get and how big is it share of total rewards the second moment is how do the first few months don't feel like you know you have you know milestone to to like five ten how much money do you give and that to me is a critical point for a reason and I'll say it shortly and the third one is at what point do you in the battle path journey do you put the chase like them you know it can be in the very the very end can be somewhat around two-thirds or 75% of the

other way so on the first point immediate value I think it's a no-brainer to put some immediate value because especially if you have problems with conversions you want to lower those purchase barriers as much as you can because again this has to feel like a no brainer purchase to broaden your the number of players that are signed up secondly the second point I talked about is the first few milestones in terms of how much money to give I think this is often overlooked but some games do this quite well both the past four clans about the past doesn't well here are some puzzles past as well basically if you put the first few milestones quite near each other and give quite a bit of value there if players feel like oh see it was worth it it was worth buying it because see how much stuff I got back so the progression you make in the first

three days I think should be a very positive and quick and fast progression as so those few milestones are first early masters are key to being in the last bit of where you put the chase item link this really depends on the game right so if it's if if the chase item is the main and only or only reason for which players bought the Battle pass I think you should not put it at the end because then players unless you make it very easy players are not gonna finish it they won't feel good about it and therefore the battle pass again therefore in that case I would make it somewhat doable so it can be 2/3 or 3/4 of the of the way if instead like in the clash of clans and sorry and by the way if you look at the rework of in parts of puzzles paths of Valor it did exactly this the main chase item was at the very end the better parts were super hard

when they reworked it because players complained they put it maybe around 2/3 or 3/4 of the way if you look at what Afrikaans did they put their skin at the very end except for a few cases I think that's fine because players want the skin but it's not the primary reason for buying the box I think the economic value you get and perks that you're getting clients are amazing and so the skin feels like the icing on the cake but it doesn't feel like the main I would say the one last comment I would have on this question is really understand the kind of game that you have and so if you have a progression based game like a clash Royale you have to be careful with the value that you get right or or a raid if you have a consumable based economy in-game yeah you can mess up yeah go ahead experiment you know do do whatever and you can easily recover because you can drain your economy but if you have a game where it's gonna be hard to backtrack be careful do not be very very

careful all right yeah I would say that it'd be helpful to treat sort of player's progression through the battle pass the same way we look at events right like if you have you know a hundred tears and the time it takes a player to get from you know tier 1 to tier 10 is a lot of work or too much worker doesn't feel good yeah there's they know there if getting to ten was such a difficult chore there's no way they're gonna be able to get to a hundred so you'll want to make you know the challenges in the first I'd say half two thirds of the battle pass not super difficult at least doable from players four perspective and they if they put in the time but you know the closer that they get to that chase prize if the chase price is at the end the more you could probably ramp up the difficulty and actually make them work for it in the hopes that maybe they'll

monetize on their way to getting that chase prize well one way that you can also do this is to segment you are your bela past you can segment the goals you can segment not the masters because that's immediately obvious but I think is some segmentation of what LiveOps goals you can get and maybe not the point because that's also very visible but you know if you're a high engage player you can really finish it very fast if you make it too easy if you're a really player you can feel you know it's a daunting challenge and therefore you won't bite again so what do you guys think about potentially opportunity to segment I like segmenting the problem is if you have a popular game these days like they're posting challenge like the weekly challenges online and stuff so if you're gonna segment the challenges that kids that goes back into like aid the a/b testing to risks where if players see what the week's challenges are

opposed that are different from theirs they could they could be pissed I mean but normally I like segmenting to make sure that every player is challenged but uh it could be risky for sure okay so moving on to a different topical area tactics and optimization and the first question here is duration how long should bow pass be is there a max and are there differences by genre I'm history content production it depends like if you're releasing like if you're RPG game which like a character like then probably you have to like take into account on your products but I feel like I'm the more I don't think pragmatic but like more mad because like the bunch here because when it comes to testing when it comes to releasing your reality is the short of the battle past more often you could have one out there you know and chances are if you have the right if you've optimized right you're probably look benefit from that so I mean but it really it down to like what are you giving if you're just getting consumables then you have to tie

into something meaningful and like is that something meaningful like an event is it like a list of challenges that lasts for a week a month whatever so there's no recipe for that but see that's for sure is that if you have meaningful loops the shorter the loop the more you don't have those bell peasant out again if you use it as a monetization tool you know yeah I feel like that's the way that a lot of people are coming about they're about path length is kind of cut starting from the production side and seeing what they need to deliver and then working backwards but I don't know I I'm not I don't have a good answer there's another component right I think when you're when you're telling players Oh sign up for this because it will last two months three months it feels like a long time and even if the purchase price is low you may feel like you're not you know willing to sign up for your engagement for so long so I think I think you should make it as long as players feel that it's rewarding and meaningful and not daunting because I would not sign up for a three-month bypass even if it were

five bucks because I would feel like you know but I think you have a good point in the sense that you know is there is there some perception of value for two words the length of the past and so a five dollar pass might be like okay people are saying yeah that's about a month and then like a fifteen dollar pass might be like well we expect two or three months so maybe there is some value to duration yeah and then there's also the value to the actual right because of course if you can make players find out for a long time then you get you know the retention benefits and if you have a two-week bypass you're not gonna gonna get them or you're gonna get as much basically okay for me you know really there's only two things play company should be aware one is making sure that your players could understand when the next season is gonna be if you go overseas and cadence so like five weeks would be pretty bad because you know it's hard to tell what

what one five week period versus another five week period is if you're if you're think about doing five weeks just do it by month or do it by you know 30 days or whatnot but secondly make sure that the battle past duration doesn't conflict with any other sort of timing cadence you have so like if a game has a three week event cycle where every three weeks the same cycle repeats three weeks may be a good time to battle past because players already used to the events happening in three weeks cycles that know they're your not having them you're they're not needed to learn anything new about the timing and battle past 1800 new event cycle new battle paths it's those sort of synergies with other timing Cadence's in the game could be helpful for players I totally agree with that I think it's a good thing to keep

in mind the rest of your lineup schedules so that you can make better past boost your engagement in a meaningful and and clearer way I think if you were able to align both your life schedule and your better path to the calendar month that would be even better so here's the the main plan that you exactly right so sounds like we actually wound up with a pretty decent response here which is if I'm summarizing what everyone has said and for in simple terms one think about the content production impact and so from a production deliverable perspective how long will that take - the perception of value to the length of the past three - just point like what our players going to be able to easily understand and so you know like a three and a half week cadence is very hard to understand a month or two months or three months is a lot easier and then forth again to just point like what are all the other dependencies from events and other things like that so sounds like we've

a decent response on that one as well so that's great and if no other comments we're getting close to the end here question eight difficulty tuning so how difficult should it be what percentage of players should completed versus if it's too easy does that mean it loses its exclusivity should you consider segmenting it what is the right amount of time effort stretch that players need to put into battle paths to finish it I mean I think all this comes back to like they really need to be question is what do you want to achieve was about past you know like if your goal is engagement then obviously you're gonna want to balance in any way you push people to like maybe go a bit beyond what they're accustomed to you know I see if you're going to use it as a tool to increase monetization and this is one thing I can't like this is how I approach it but it's also the one thing which I've seen a few times is if you're not monetizing on people speeding up the battle pass

basically you gain nothing by making it difficult I think so I mean it's more of a monetization ceiling as a general rule I feel like sometimes there's a tendency to wanna make people jump through hoops and I think this is one case where you call it benefit from not doing that if most your monetization is on the acquisition part if you're gonna have battle pass down a cyclical basis then chances are you're gonna benefit from making it easy because more people who get to the end are gonna buy it at that point if your non buyer and people who buy it you probably have a better percentage of buyers buy the next one right if you buy you get to the end you're probably way more likely to buy the next one if you buy it you in half way through you're not gonna buy an excellent up so I would say unless you benefit in some way from making it hard I say once people are willing to spend weight to give you like the quarians battle pads I think that should be your goal and I think we're testicle like make it rewarding make it easy to get right now I would say that one I think one other aspect to think about is

whether you're trying to train your players on a specific habit right and so if you have and that would speak to not having variable difficulty because similar to like how clash Royale in their system it's you know what to expect every day you're kind of trained okay this is what I'm gonna do every day so I mean yeah there's I would say that aspect of it as well any other comments you know I I like I'm a big believer in sort of the 70% you know that's quasi arbitrary but somewhere in that ballpark it takes 70% of the time of the battle path to complete it because it gives players options to you know if they're busy one day I can't devote the time it's fine if they miss a day or two here they're they still can complete the battle pass if they engage heavily in the days that they can't play or or they could spend to get there I definitely would not require them to play heavily every single day at the Battle of past to completed because Alex's point like you

want them to come back for the next one you don't want it to be too grueling for them and Plus you know especially for like RPGs or strategy games spenders are already used to spending to make up for time they're not playing so even if you have it at 70 percent of the duration if a spender hasn't engaged enough they'll still spend to complete it it just how much they're gonna have to spend depends and how much they were a little play during the duration of the battle path but definitely leave some wiggle room in case players either are too busy or they just don't want to do challenges that like they don't like yeah I would add repeating what I mentioned earlier that to me the biggest factor to determine whether a battle paths has been successful or not is the percentage of repeat purchases meaning if in month one you have 80 players in a month till you have 40 well something went wrong and even if the price is low when you get

lots of players to try if then it's excruciatingly hard then you're effectively messed it up it's actually easier to correct from to hard tuning as opposed to too high of a price because then you can just make a little bit easier and it's less obviously apparent but I think we probably on this point it's easier to err on the side of making a little bit easier to the Czech intend to generate the daily law gas which could be very very strong I think one point though that I wanted to tease out from Alex's comments some games monetize based on the level of engagement of players to daily sessions so for example think about casino games because you know games make money every time the player decides to to spend more or even like coin master right so for those games you know if you can get players to stretch their engagement to be longer then you actually can have a

meaningful benefit from from not only the initial revenues but from from stretching basic stretching what they would have normally done and so again you have to be able to do it carefully because you don't want players to feel bad about it or you want players to if you like they've overextended but there are meaningful benefits and again some games like some RPG games are very very different but some games instead of made that way and you want to make sure your about a can I will know and this no one really asked about this but like most battle passes have the option to buy tears and stuff like that for games that monetize off their battle pass beyond just the initial in a purchase you should probably think that out like if for example a pop oh I don't recall if Miniclip allows players to buy tears but if a ball pool if you're trying to push players towards higher tables to like

sing currency you may not want them to buy be able to just buy to your progress because you want them to buy currency values thinking more of it or if you are gonna allow them to buy tears probably make it a little more expensive than a game that has just engagement just because the more a battle pass is supposed to monetize for you the less you want players to undermine that monetization by just buying the tears outright unless they're priced right all right cool so second to last question we're almost done here very important when I think what KPI is should be used to value how your battle past is doing I mean you probably have a bunch and this is I would say in my experience it combines most monetization and engagement but you probably want to be having some kind of funnel who's progressing like throughout the nodes and how fast that's happening you know so I mean what percent of people are getting to node X with an X

amount of time how long do you take for people to complete it back to like just point about the difficulty of the challenges and one would you think is interesting is looking at where do perches occur I'm coming absolutely and relative terms also that one that's really gonna give you a good insight of where do you want to bring players like you see that most players are actually buying the past once they reach the end ok well that could be good incentive to say ok let's make more non-payers non-buyers get to the end if you see a higher ratio of people on node 17 buy it well maybe you know that's the reward they really have I think anything that has to do is tracking progression and see how that turned into monetization for something that's gonna help you keep on iterating optimizing that so I guess you know you have your broad KPIs you know things like you know sessional any number of sessions obviously on the engagement side that you can look to see a battle pass increasing monetization like for an exist like this is another sort of benefit to like adding battle

pass after a diamond slide you can see clearly what the the changes are so like for 8 ball pool they should be able to see you know players playing at higher table sinking more coins stuff like that that's good to track like basically what what are the challenges requiring players to do and are they doing them those are basically on the engagement side what you're going to want to track and then for monetization if you intend the bauhaus to monetize by sinking more currency then you should see higher purchases increasing the amount of purchases for that currency while the battle path is active okay so look I mean this is obvious but I would look at our pool now TV because the measures include everything right includes conversion and you would retention and your cannibalization and other parts of the game so I think it's good to have almost like a hierarchy of

of metrics you start with high level and you see is overall a real overall better off or or not and then in either case I understand why they happen because conversion or because retention or because a position or basically and so I would build like a little tree of KPIs that are meaningful for this group and and then I will also look of course that the optimization that can be done in terms of progression and funnel and all the other things there yeah so to your point Giovanni I think it would be very important to not only have like the direct metrics in terms of the battle pass itself in terms of how the battle cost is doing a lot of the metrics that Alex mentioned in terms of like you know how many people complete having a funnel all that kind of stuff but then the secondary metrics in terms of the impact to your spender buckets are the conversion you know your your ARP you but also for especially for progression

based games like the impact on your economy how much further are you pushing players are you just moving basically drawing revenue for things like that okay last question guys this is a this is more related to the talk given by Giovanni and myself in terms of clan clash of clans versus clash Royale so what should clash Royale have dumped him implement a more successful bow path maybe Giovanni maybe you should start on this one I think the the first thing I would say is rewatching that presentation from I know Joss the lead designer on Castro Clarence before about Abbas he said how they have fixed a bunch of things in the economy that were not working properly so just do the recap one is they increased players desire to progress and that was done by

changing the match making algorithm I know it's a little bit and nerdy boy but that was key because players before didn't have the incentive to progress because it was about you know optimizing against what that algorithm was saying secondly the introduced consumables third they sped up the rate of progression third they flattened the curve before it was very I'm talking about the upgrade cost curve it was a very exponential curve and therefore players had no real incentive so basically the first point is go back to your economy and fix that economy we talked about how class reals economy could be deeper to be more or more scalable and so the first thing I would do is go back there and fix all the things that you need to fix and again to me the number one thing that should be fixed is the fact that cars don't move past a certain threshold once you you

maximize them it's basically done and because the game is so hard you are not able to you don't have incentives to play with multiple cards and so the second thing still on the economy bucket is create more of a need for players to go abroad somehow class Raja has not been able to introduce alternate game modes that provide the incentives and the excitement for collecting more broadly they trying to weigh the clan wars and somehow that didn't work to me them be an interesting conversation to be had like you know why clash of clans was able to see such a major uplift with social and Roy wasn't that's a separate point so once the once those things are done then look at battle path itself we talked about how class early hours about a pass was disproportionately more generous from an economy standpoint and

so you know I would first find other perks that are meaningful to players and improve their quality of life without doing damage to the game I think in the presentation we had last week or the week before I called out as a question that removing sessioning by making the crown chest not deal anymore but you know a free-for-all to be accessible whenever you want being potentially dangerous so I would add perks that are there good improve quality of life and and I would also fix that economy so lots to do but I think I got focusing only on bypass is probably the wrong starting point I mean my coma is gonna be cute very short but I think it speaks a lot of stuff we were discussing today is like basically battle POSIX monetization feature but

you can't fix a broken economy and I mean I'm a huge fan at class reality it's kind of like the innovation brought was a game clean all that but I think that game made a lot of money despite it being like a really very poorly designed economy I mean you're never gonna change tanks in clash Royale it comes at point you're not gonna spend two 300 bucks 19 grand could one of your cards by one level then you reach a point where there's your maxed out so I feel like this is probably very good to monetize very early in the funnel the first few leagues but after that you've got listening to buy and spend money on so battle pass or not it's gonna be really hard to monetize progression beyond like I don't know what arena it is but like eight like that top say that's a you know yeah I think we have all felt in the initial excitement from the fast loving you're like okay dog you know

there there's a route that clash Royale could have taken I don't know if their players would let them based on player expectation but you can imagine that's royal doing two things one is having like a unique card or set of cards along the battle path sort of reward schedule so that engaging in the battle pass is the only way to get those cards I don't know if players with I don't think players would like that but that's what they could have done and if they tie that to progression being tied not to earning crowns but to opening chests I think you would have monetized way better you can imagine if like battle past points were earned by opening chests whether it's you know the the time chest from winning matches from the chest you get from getting you know ten crowns buying chests if all those things gave you points to go to progress through the battle pass and the battle past rewards were unique cards that you could only get through battle pass I am

90% confident that like that would have boosted monetization more than what they did but again that's very like money-grubbing especially the pay to speed up aspect of opening chests and I don't know if players would have let them do that but like a new game with no player expectation might want to consider just having more ways to like having the earning of points to get through the battle past be connected with more something that's more likely to monetize and just pure engagement oh yeah that's interesting yeah I think nothing good idea I mean yeah again maybe not well the players have clear expectations about what to expect and that might violate the expectations so who knows but I think that would work better than my bit yeah it does feel like clash morale is kind of needs a revamp similar to what they did with clash of clans but anyway that's it for questions you guys have any final

messages for our audience otherwise we're all set alright well that's it folks I'll leave contact information for all of our great speakers here in the show notes so check that out but guys thanks so much for the follow-up Q&A and for anyone interested just go to the game makers website to sign up for future events in the future all right that's it thanks guys [Applause] [Music] [Music]