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PocketGamer.biz23 Aug 2016

Egg Inc.'s neat self-pricing Piggy Bank IAP

Key insights

6 takeaways

01
The game supplements this Piggy Bank system with traditional monetization methods, including rewarded video advertisements and hard currency packs priced between four and fifteen pounds.
02
Egg Inc. utilizes a 'Piggy Bank' system where players accumulate premium currency through routine gameplay actions like researching upgrades and purchasing items.
03
The Piggy Bank features a fixed monetary cost to unlock, but the amount of currency received scales based on the player's time and engagement levels.
04
The mechanism functions as a long-term retention tool, incentivizing players to remain engaged with the game to maximize the contents of the vault before committing to a purchase.
05
This model allows players to determine their own price-to-value ratio by choosing to 'crack' the vault only when the accumulated currency exceeds the value of standard store offerings.
06
Developer Auxbrain uses this system to offer a player-friendly alternative to the aggressive monetization tactics and stagnant pricing models common in the mobile free-to-play market.

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Transcript

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.biz i'm john jordan and today we're looking at egg ink so egg ink is one of the latest clicker excuse me just destroy that drone um one of the latest clicker idle games so idle games are games that kind of play themselves while you're not doing anything obviously there has to be a point in playing them so as you can see i'm playing it now and i'm tapping on the screen and creating little hens and the little hens are running into the hen house and the hen house is where they lay eggs an unseen process and that's how i make money you can see it top of the screen and see how many hens i've got oh miss that drone bother um 100 uh 1363457 um so they're making uh you can see here so the my shacks not quite fully i can upgrade them obviously the other thing about clicker games is you basically create money you get money for doing stuff and then you spend that money

doing different things so i can research comfortable nests or nutritional supplements or better incubators or excitable chickens oh there's a drone there we go so it's just that the drone thing is just another little mission you have to destroy some drones and get some currency so what why are particularly looking at egg inc um in some many ways it's a very um kind of traditional clicker um in terms of it follows the trajectory of clickers so um as you can see before so that's my current mission take down drones gives me little things to do um i can get boosts so i can spend some of this egg hard currency i can watch videos so in um rewarded videos where you watch a video ad and get some currency or a big um one of the big things big changes in the mobile games monetization system that have made these games more valuable before it was very hard to uh

very hard to make money off these because no one really spend money in game because they're not very deep experiences um and advertising rates were very low so got some cash and i sold some got my reward for my dreams told to me so there we go currency is zooming up my eighth currency so anyway um but the really nice thing about the monetization in this game is as i say kind of all ideal games have in-app purchases i mean you wouldn't really release a game now without any app purchases i suppose but um it's just a really nice i mean it's a small thing but a really nice little um technique that they have so if we go here so you can see here down the bottom is the traditional shop i can spend um 399 pounds for five dollars and get a big crate of eggs so 1500 eggs obviously the moment we've only got 16. it's not remaining um and there's bigger transactions i can make you notice it doesn't go up to most other games will go up to like um 100 the most expensive in-app purchase in this in this game is 15 pounds so

effectively 20 but what's interesting here is the piggy bank so the piggy bank you see the top there this is a um a way of kind of collecting game progress really i suppose so if you click on it so we see the piggy bank at the moment there's 168 eggs in there and the piggy bank grows every time i research or buy something in the game um and then what i do is to crack it open i get the stuff that's in there as you did with the piggy bank but you can see the price of a piggy bank is two pound 29 so maybe three dollars um that price stays the same so at the moment i can't actually buy this because it would be it would be nonsensical because the price i could if i'm going to spend a bit more i get you know 10 times as much effectively so the developers lock that until the kind of ratio is bigger than what you would get in that purchase but what's really interesting is if you um play this game long enough i mean if you're going to buy some more things so just research some random stuff

come on my dough other things i can research here with the hard currency so now if we go in so the obviously pigment has gone up because i've just done stuff so you can see if you start playing this game for a long period of time obviously you have to be a fairly long period of time um to get up to over 1500 but if you really worked at it you could probably get the piggy bank up to ten thousand millions you could do if you spent enough time on it um well certainly you could get the piggy bank up to say two thousand to a half thousand and then instead of paying the money the set amount of in-app purchase money which is you know they've been defined by the developers effectively you're setting your own price um for the in-app purchase you make so you're setting that price by waiting until you crack open the piggy bank which is just a very nice technique it's a very nice kind of open technique how it worked yeah how well it works only the developers the us company called aux brain um can

can tell us they have a look at the metrics and see but just it just feels a very nice way of putting in a kind of you set your own price for an in-app purchase which you know it's not going to be for the i mean this is not a game where you know you have people spending thousands of dollars in it so in a sense you're not you're not devaluing a wider you're not kind of cannibalizing sorry a wider revenue stream but just a very nice way of thinking about monetization and doing something different and being creative and that's kind of i guess monetization at the moment in free to play mobile games has become a bit um kind of boring and a bit kind of set in stone and everyone sort of does it the same way but there's always space for innovation um also obviously innovation that also makes you kind of more money than you would otherwise do is probably the best kind of innovation but obviously that immediately gets copied by everyone else but just just a nice little touch there from from uh from egg inc and that kind of just just caught our attention so we thought we'd do a quick video showing you all about it so thanks for watching um maybe you

should download egg ink now um i'm playing it on ipad available for android as well so check out egg inc and have a look at that monetization option thanks for watching

Summary

The idle game Egg Inc. utilizes a creative monetization strategy centered on a self-pricing Piggy Bank in-app purchase (IAP) system. While the game employs traditional monetization methods—including rewarded video advertisements and standard hard currency packs ranging from approximately four to fifteen pounds—the Piggy Bank feature offers a distinct alternative. This mechanism functions as a progress-based savings account that accumulates premium currency as the player performs routine actions, such as researching upgrades or purchasing items.

The core innovation lies in the player’s ability to influence the value proposition of the transaction. Although the monetary cost to crack open the Piggy Bank remains fixed at a low entry point, the amount of currency contained within grows proportionally with the player’s engagement and time spent in the game. By delaying the purchase, players effectively set their own price-to-value ratio, choosing to unlock the vault only when the accumulated currency exceeds the value of standard store offerings. This creates a psychological incentive for long-term retention, as players are encouraged to play extensively to maximize the contents of their Piggy Bank before committing to a purchase.

This approach represents a departure from the increasingly standardized and often stagnant monetization models prevalent in the mobile free-to-play market. By allowing users to define the utility of a transaction through their own gameplay habits, the developer, Auxbrain, fosters a more engaging experience that avoids the aggressive monetization tactics often found in the genre. While the specific impact on revenue metrics remains proprietary, the Piggy Bank serves as a notable example of how developers can innovate within established frameworks to create more player-friendly and compelling monetization loops.