Mobile & F2P | Jordan Blackman | Why the Best Games Are Winning by Squeezing Less | DD 2026

I'm very excited to be here. I'm also very jet-lagged. I was thinking to myself beforehand, am I more excited or more jet-lagged? I think I think I am more excited. So, um the title of my talk as as you said, thank you, is why the best games are winning by squeezing less. And
[snorts]
uh I want to put some ideas in front of you today about how there might be an opportunity for you to grow your games business while also improving your your users' experience at the same time. Now, before we get into all that, just a little bit about me. Um I've been working in games for about 25 years. I've been in free-to-play from very very early. And I've been a consultant for the last 10-plus years doing monetization and game design. Uh I was at Ubisoft. Uh and there I was a senior producer. I produced CSI: Crime City, which was one of their first successful free-to-play games. And also one of the first

licensed free-to-play games, which was a very interesting experience. Then I was at Zynga as a lead designer working on FrontierVille and CastleVille. And um some of my some of the clients I've worked with include EA Sports, Warner Brothers, The Pokémon Company, Capcom, Nickelodeon, AMC, and and a whole whole lot more. Uh so, that's a little bit about my background. So, I've had a front-row seat to watching this industry grow. And from from that goes from early social games to um mobile and now to live service. So, one pattern that's always been a big part, especially especially in those early games, but is still with us today is what I call the squeeze. And I think it's starting to change. I want to talk about that. So, what is the squeeze? The squeeze is pretty simple. I think we're all familiar with it. It's when the game builds some sort of friction in to the experience and then sells relief to that to that friction, right? So, that could be holding back a resource that the player needs

and then offering it to them. It could be making the player wait and then offering them the opportunity to skip that wait. Or it could be having the player fall behind and then helping them get the power or the access that they need to recover. So, I think we all get this mechanic and we all understand that players don't always appreciate it and it can push players away and hurt the retention of your game. But, there's a right I'm looking for some nods on this that that we're kind of getting getting what I'm talking about here. So, there's a reason that this became so prevalent though and that's because of the way that the market grew. And because a lot of games started growing with paid acquisition, there are there's strong payback pressure, right? You got to payback um the money that you're spending on user acquisition and if you can turn it around faster, then you can buy your users faster than your competitors, you can get more data and on and on and on. So, teams kind of needed to find ways to

earn revenue quickly just to survive. It was it was sort of built in to the mechanics of these games, especially early on. So, this wasn't a mistake. It was a response to the mechanics of the way the industry grew. But, that created a feedback loop, right? Like your competitors are earning more faster, so you've got to do more to beat them at auction and now we're getting to the point where regulators are actually starting to step in. So, what do we do about this? Well, the squeeze comes with it came with like in the water supply with with a mental model and I'm going to call that mental model missed these builds, but I'm going to call that mental model the classic framing. So, this is the model that a lot of monetization meetings end up talking about and it's intuitive. It goes something like this. There's retention and it's fighting your monetization. Uh right? The more you squeeze, the more you're going to push players away, but it's also going to drive revenue. So, there are these two forces and

they're pulling against one another. So, you could give more for free and keep your players longer, but you can earn you're going to earn less. But, if you squeeze harder, you're going to earn more now, maybe pay back your your acquisition cost or whatever it is, but you're going to lose out on retention. But, what if what if this classic framing isn't always right? What if these forces aren't always opposed to each other? So, is it possible that you could reduce the squeeze and increase revenue at the same time? You know, this is also intuitive, right? It also kind of makes sense that oh, if we had our players stick around longer, we could increase the LTV, and this is how a lot of companies work, right? You you If you build a brand, you want brand loyalty, you want to maximize the interaction between your business and your customer. So, this is this is also like a very intuitive thing, but hasn't become as as common in a lot of games, or at least historically wasn't the case. So,

that's all great. This is a good theory, but we need to test it, right? We need data. And what would a test of this look like? Like, how would we know we had a really ideal test of this idea that actually you could grow retention and monetization at the same time? Well, you'd want to run this test in a real free-to-play game, right? In an actual live game. And you'd want to test on a large group of people, right? You wouldn't want to just a small group. We want to know that this is a real effect, so we'd want a big test. And we'd want the test to have a long window so that we could see the long-term effects, right? We're not we're not talking about what happens day-to-day. We're talking about what happens over a period of months or quarters. And we'd want this to be a controlled randomized experiment with some scientific rigor behind it. And of course, we'd want to know the results because while while this test may be taking place inside certain companies, it's generally not data that's available to the rest of us.

But what if I told you that this test actually exists? And it was done and it was published in 2025. Asakura, Netschauer, and Runge in 2025 published in the International Journal of Research and Marketing just this sort of test. It was a randomized controlled trial in a real free-to-play match game match-three game with over 300,000 players, and it took place across 12 weeks. So, it had a huge huge uh group and a very long window. Not only that, but it was a peer-reviewed scientific study. And just, you know, tests like this are very rare, and I have not seen this talked about much. So, so I want to bring this to you today. So, what did they do? What was the actual intervention in this test? I kind of hate the fact that this rhymes, but they eased the squeeze for players about to leave. And maybe that's something worth remembering. Uh but that's what That's exactly what they

did. It is literally what they did. So, they identified their churn-risk players and they eased the difficulty levels in the match-three game for them. Now, if you know anything about how match-three games monetize, you know that the difficulty of the of the levels is how they squeeze, right? So, they they get you close to losing your lives, and they offer you boosts and extra lives and stuff like that, right? So, so essentially what they did was they eased the squeeze for players about to leave. Um now before we get to the results of this intervention, let's just think about it like what would we predict would happen based on, you know, the the classic framework, right? That retention versus monetization framework. So, what the classic framework predicts is engagement would go up, right? And what about retention? Any guesses?

I heard a higher, that's right. Higher, and what about what about revenue? Revenue would drop, exactly. That's exactly what the classic framework would predict. Happier player, worse business. Challenging thing to uh to sell in to your executive team, right? But here's what the test actually showed. Engagement went up, just like the classic framework predicts. Retention went up like the classic framework predicts, and I think we all know what's coming, right? What happened to revenue? What's that? It went up. It actually went up. So, here here's what's really interesting about this. The way this the actual way it worked in this particular case, the the amount of sales on the lives and the and the boosts and stuff, they did go down as you might predict. But this game had another monetization mechanic where as people progress to certain level gates, they would either have to wait for more levels or they could buy more levels.

And because more people made it to those gates, and they made it to those gates in a much happier state, there was more both short-term revenue and long-term revenue. So, this this this revenue effect wasn't like they in their particular case, they did not need to wait weeks to see this stack up based on retention. It actually occurred immediately, um and I'll get to why in a second, but they had to have that second monetization mechanic for it to work. So, if you were purchases inside these rounds, that's what I was just talking about, but players stayed longer. And they reached more of these paid gates. Okay. So, the biggest lift was prior spenders. So, these there were there were prior spenders who were actually sensitive to churn. They got identified. They were eased. And that is the highest value saved. That that's actually a big part of why they were able to increase revenue immediately. Now, the traditional approach, you might already be finding your finding your at-risk

players. But what a lot of teams end up doing is they just try to harpoon that whale, right? They're just like, "We're going to make him a give him a bigger deal. Give him a discount. Make him an offer." And that is not what they were doing in this study. What they did in this study was avoid the offers, don't make the sales, actually reduce the sales, and get them re-engaged into the core experience. So, the study says to ease off. Now, I think one question that might be coming up and that that, you know, you might be wondering about is why hasn't our teams split testing shown the same effect? Surely, we we would have seen this, too. And the truth is, maybe. Maybe you would have. Um but maybe not. And I just want to go over some of the potential blind spots, things I've seen working with companies that might be blind spots for them on this. And maybe some of them will apply to you, maybe some of them maybe some of them won't. So, first is that if your test is really

short, you can miss it. Now, the in this particular study, like I mentioned, the revenue did go up right away. So, they didn't For them, the actual length wasn't required to show the result. But it's very possible for a lot of other products, it would be required. That's going to be on a case-by-case basis. So, obviously, the specific drop in purchases at that specific point where they made a change is going to be pretty quick and easy to spot. It's not necessarily going to be so easy to to find the long-term benefits of player behavior, you have to be looking at at the at the data in a different way, and we'll get to that in a second. Um So, what a lot of times might happen is you might kill a winner before you even know it's a winner. I know that um a lot of split tests that I've run, if it's a big product, we might only run it for a few hours. And maybe if it's a smaller product, we might run it for two or three weeks. And then if we're going to run a really long-term test, it's probably a really small cohort, right? So, this sort of

this sort of like big cohort test is definitely uh rare, and it's one of the reasons why you can miss this. Another potential blind spot is the proactive user metrics that some teams look at as their default could miss uh this data because if you're looking if you're looking at like the average revenue per DAU or the average revenue per WAU, right? And every week you're squeezing out players, then your test arm uh is going to be is not going to have those players in the denominator anymore. So, you could actually see you could actually see higher uh revenue per DAU or WAU in the losing variant. Um Now, hopefully, you know, you're you're already doing cohort testing and looking at total revenue and some of these things, but just in case you're not, um this is certainly another way another potential blind spot that I that I've seen with clients. So, another another blind spot is maybe the way you've tested this in the past is just a blanket change to all your

players without that dynamic sensitivity. I'm sure some of you are doing some um dynamic difficulty adjustment already. Um and a lot of times what I see is people use that as a way to drive offers. Um but but in any case, um if you are if you're if you're testing on on everyone, you're not doing what they showed in this study, right? They were able to ease the squeeze, but not on every single player, only on the players that they identified. Uh those are the at-risk players. So, if you were just ease on everything, that's like a that's a weaker intervention, right? So, you you're not going to get the same the same strong effect. And another another blind spot is you might be easing the wrong thing. So, I think one of the most interesting parts of this study was those the way those two monetization mechanics had an interplay with each other. They eased the difficulty of the levels, they did not change the gates. And and so, you know, for anyone, regardless of whether they were they were um

uh in danger of turning. So, what you ease is going to matter a lot, and the mechanics that surround what you ease is going to matter a lot, and you know, the term I'm using for this is revenue migration. So, you you know, if you're if you're looking to potentially ease something, do you have something else where that revenue could potentially migrate to if you have, you know, happier uh more and happier and more engaged players? So, this is just kind of repeating that. They left the old gates intact, and the revenue needs somewhere to migrate to. So, that's the basics of the study and why it might be a different result than maybe what you've seen in your product. But now I want to talk a little bit outside the study, speculate a little bit, because I believe that the upside of changes like this, sort of the the impact and the strength of of this sort of initiative is actually getting stronger over time. So, even if you've maybe tested this in the past, years ago, and didn't get a result, you might find that you could get a result now. And I want

to explain why I think that could be the case. Again, it's not going to be for every product, but it might be worth a shot uh for you. So, let's talk about the way things used to be. So, in the old world, in the before time, uh squeezing was relatively cheap to do. And by cheap, I mean in terms of costing you as the the product owner um or the publisher. Players tended to tolerate more friction, um, before. And the reputation of your product, uh, didn't travel as fast. So, now people are very sensitive, right? They've They've gotten really into games. They've invested money in games, and then they've been burned by those games. And now they are going online, and they're researching monetization. And they know they're familiar with a lot of terms of the art of monetization, because, you know, it's part of the It's part of their experience, too. So, all these things are changing the way the the sophistication of the audience, and therefore, um, how it works. So, alternatives Alternative products, maybe there weren't as many before.

And the biggest thing is probably that when when we were experiencing hyper growth, you know, uh, users were easier to replace than they are today. The The value of your user now is much greater, uh, to you, because they're they're going to be much more expensive to replace. So, that era is over. This is what I'm talking about. Players are much more informed. They're They've They've researched your game. They've looked into it on Reddit. They've been burned before. And the market's a lot more crowded. We're not just competing with games anymore, you know, we're competing with social media, with vertical video, with all these different things. And just the the bar is a lot higher, and there's more options. There's a lot of value out there for players. And And I think this is an important one. We're going to come back to this a little bit later, but monetization is actually becoming a marketing driver for for products. So, publishers are realizing that monetization isn't just about driving LTV. It also impacts

acquisition costs. Um, and And I'm going to show you a little bit how that how that's changing, um, the way that the kind of dynamics of our market. So, one way that it's changing is this rising sensitivity of players. So, every year more and more players are sensitive to being over squeezed, right? They're going to be more likely to move on if you squeeze them too hard. They feel the friction, they resent it, they they post about it, whatever whatever it might be. They'll leave your product over it. And look, squeezing people always had a cost. It was all It always had a negative cost, but that cost is rising. And adapting to that is going to make or break a lot of products moving forward. So, all this is creating basically a a change in the feedback loop of the market. The old loop is we got to pay back our acquisition cost quickly. Um so, we need to squeeze more. We need to out squeeze our competitor. And it was this feedback loop pushing pushing the industry

towards more and more monetization. But the new loop is hey, if I'm if I provide a better experience, if people if the audience sees that monetization in our game is fair and uh relatively painless, then they're going to come to our game. So, we can actually market our monetization uh and and so, the squeeze is starting to slowly unwind. And one of the big indicators of that is seeing companies talk about their monetization when they pitch their game. So, for example, Marvel Rivals announced pre-launch that all their heroes would be free to play. You know, this was this was in response to some of the Overwatch stuff that had gone down. And Helldivers 2 had pre-launch coverage where they touted their war bonds as not being pay-to-win, as not being on a timer, as not being FOMO driven, as not expiring. These were complaints of players in the market in other games that they are addressing as a

competitive advantage. It's monetization as UA. Or at least as brand. And Deep Rock Galactic launched their battle passes touting it as 100% free, even though you had to buy the game to even play them. Um So, but these are all different companies using their monetization decisions uh in this way. And I And we're going to see more and more of this. So, this is something This is a trend that that is going to be continuing. Pity timers, due protection, earnable hard currency, uh dust systems. These are all innovations that are there um to provide value to the player, to increase retention, and to kind of change that dynamic. So, the business question is not do we squeeze or don't don't we squeeze? Do we monetize or don't we monetize, right? Um I I we're still in a world where most games aren't going to be cosmetics only. But, the question is how much pressure do we actually put?

And And where are we on that on that line? And I want to I want to try to give you some frameworks that might help you kind of ask that question. So, now I want to talk about fisheries. Right, a fishery is a renewable stock of fish that's being used for commerce. And it replenishes, if it's managed well, it will stay healthy. But, if it's over-harvested, it will collapse. Now, in my opinion, this is just a a much better kind of met fishing-related metaphor uh than the whole whale hunting thing that people talk about. Because this is how live This is how live ops actually actually works. And it's interesting because in the '50s, they developed a model for fisheries to actually solve this problem of like, well, how much How many fishing boats should we allow out there to optimize um this fishery without killing it?

So, that that's actually a solved problem. And here's what it looks like for for fisheries. This is a simplified version of the model. If you're if you're interested in more detail on this, um Schaefer, I think is is the academic behind this. But this is a this is a simplified model that will do the job for us today. And and the idea is as you fish more intensely, your yield at first goes up, and then it declines. It's a dome shape, right? Pretty straightforward. Um there's an optimal middle point. Okay. Now, actu- actually, the optimal point is not technically the middle. That's for reasons we don't necessarily need to get into, but it is it is kind of interesting. Um but there's an optimal point. It's actually a little bit before the middle. Uh Now, let's just swap it over to our world of live product revenue and squeezing intensity, because squeeze is

the kind of monetization that pushes people away. So, you know, there's going to be an optimal amount beyond which you are actually hurting the the business, not just the users, but also the business. And that's when there's this opportunity to have to have all the all the arrows point up, right? So, the question is where is your game on this curve? My hypothesis is that many games are actually over-harvesting and could benefit from dialing back if they did it in the right way, because like we talked about before, the way you do it and the mechanics you actually have, which mechanics you choose to ease, who you choose to to to um to ease, all these things matter, right? So, how can we check? How could you check in your game? Uh what could we do? So,

that's a good question. I think I think if you come away from this wanting to check, uh that would make me very happy. So, the study that we looked at, it didn't just supply proof, it actually explained a method. So, let's look at what that method was in a little bit more detail. Basically, target your at-risk players, ease a real squeeze I'll also say ease the right squeezes, and measure revenue in the right way. So, let's start with find your squeezes. You're going to need to find the monetization points that are also churn points. Now, this could be common examples would be like difficulty boosters and design resource shortages. I don't think I don't think I doubt anyone has energy mechanics, but maybe you have something along those lines. Those sorts of things. I think you know what mechanics

are frustrating your players and likely where those churn points are. So, start there. And then once you've found those squeezes, we need to find out who um it's costing you. Who you're frustrating. Who is actually getting pushed away. And the way we do that, there's some fancy tools that can do this, but you don't need them, okay? You you can do this uh with pretty simple with pretty simple tools. If you think about every player on this line, they're either engaged, degrading, or churned. We want to find users who are degrading, and those are the users that we want to focus on for this initial test, at least. Um Now, how What are What are signals of degrading? It's going to depend on your game, but it could be that they are repeating a level over and over. Could be that they're running low on lives. It could be that their, you know, kill-to-death ratio is is off. There's There's it's going to completely depend on your product, right? But um you're

going to know what those are and we want to look for those to kind of identify what players we want to um what players we want to target. And you might want to also take a look at how many of those players are prior spenders because that's going to be a big clue but how fast you're going to get results. Because if you know, like we saw in the study prior spenders are are drive um a big portion of the result. So, if you have no prior spenders in this group that's a sign that that maybe you're going to get less out of this test. Or at least that it might take you longer to see those results. Does that make sense? Seeing some nods. Okay. So, don't hunt your fish. Feed them. Like I said before, what a lot of teams do is the when they identify someone who's at risk, they make them just that one more offer. They they go for the harpoon. And I really want to encourage you to try something different, which is to feed them with progress, feed them

with quality, feed them with experience, feed them with content. Take those at-risk players and and get them engaged with the core experience that you've worked so hard to build. Give them a win. Uh smooth smooth out their experience. Keep them progressing. That's what I mean by feed, okay? And then of course you got to measure it. We need to we need to measure it and make sure that we're actually um that we're actually measuring the right things in the right way. Measure the overall relationship. Total revenue, right? If you're doing ARP Dow or something like that, you could you could very easily miss this. And ideally you're doing cohort measurement. And make sure you've got enough users for enough time that you can actually see a meaningful result because what can also happen is I've certainly had this happen in tests where you you want to run a long test, you end up doing a small cohort, and it's just really it's really noisy. So, again again, it's

going to depend on the size of your product what you can do. Um but be prepared for um the fact that it might be noisy to before you actually get to a result. None of this is charity, right? I don't I don't want to present this as something you're doing uh to charity because I think that's going to be a really hard way to pitch this to your publisher, to the to your executives, your product managers, right? We want to We want to pitch this as being a real business win, potentially. Not you know, you can't promise that, but you can at least use the study to show that there's the potential. And um you know, I want to talk about Costco as a business metaphor for us. I'm I'm just curious because I cuz I don't think there's I don't know if there's Costco here, but does anyone know Costco? Just curious if you know what Costco is. Okay, a lot of people know it. Oh, that's good. All right, so so for those of you who don't, Costco is a very popular kind of like mega grocery store in the United States, but you can't just

walk in and buy. You have to pay a membership fee. And the way Costco works is they don't really make any money from the stuff that they sell. They only make their money, their real profit comes from the membership fee. And so, their business works when people renew their memberships, and it doesn't work if they don't renew their memberships. And And so, all the policies at Costco are about protecting that user experience so that they renew. They have like basically an infinite return with My parents love Costco cuz they can just return anything. You know, they don't need the receipt. Maybe they they don't have the box anymore. Maybe it's been a year. I think it's hilarious, but um but that's the kind of business Costco runs, and it's because of their model. So, my point is, you know, they protect the lifetime of their customer value and that's similar to to easing the squeeze. Yeah, member member friendly is their

model. So, you know, and and to bring that back to us like every game's going to have a different audience with different expectations, a different amount, you know, when we saw that that squeeze curve that's going to be different that whole curve, not just where you sit on it, is going to be different for every game. Every game has its own curve. Um so, let's just summarize the method here. Find your squeezes. Where are players paying to get relief from the friction you've created? Determine who's at risk by looking at signs of degradation. Ease off. Don't make offers. Reduce the right squeezes for the at-risk players and keep them progressing. And then measure the whole relationship. And if you want to kind of know like what to test what what's a summary this is this is a good screen to like use as your as your um memory of like what you might want to actually go try. That's what this is this screen is built for. So, I'll leave this up for a second um because this is something that you can then go back and like, "Oh, yeah."

Um and and by the way, if you if you, you know, if you have any questions about like what what was that study again or whatever, you can just reach out to me and I'm happy to share all that with you. Everyone got this who I see a few more phones up, so I'll wait wait another second. Any questions about this? We'll we'll do a little discussion afterwards, but Okay. So, what does this not mean? What I want to make I want to make sure it's clear what I'm not trying to say. I'm not saying you don't ever squeeze or squeezing has stopped working across the industry. Of course, it's still a part of of many businesses. And I'm also not saying you should never squeeze or it's wrong. I'm I'm hoping that people can right-size and maybe maybe dial back and I think that's going to be a very important scale for teams over the next 5 to 10 years as we see this reverse ratchet in monetization. So, the study proves that easiness squeeze can grow total revenue. And I

really hope that you will, you know, consider giving this a shot or building this thinking into what you're doing. It doesn't prove that it will, but it does prove that it can. And you don't hunt at a fishery. Okay? Uh I just hate the concept of whale hunting. A live A live service game is much more like a fishery. You have a population that you're managing for long-term health. Manage it, tend it. And yes, you can fish it, too. So, look, we got into games to build things that people love. And the science of monetization is starting to catch up with that. The old playbook asked us to build friction and then sell the cure. But now we can start to do more and more building things that players love and managing the pressure thoughtfully so that we can keep players around for the long long term. And I hope I hope you'll give it a shot. Thank you so much.

[applause]
Okay.
And I I know we have a little bit of time. I'm happy to have a discussion or however you want
Exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much for your lecture, Jordan. And yeah, we have uh quite some time for a Q&A right now. So, if you have any questions, please raise your hand and I will bring the microphone to you.
Thank you for sharing the insights. Uh if I clearly understand, uh we can reframe this uh in that way that uh everything in segmentation like uh segmentation by user or player behavior. And because you give an example that they is like is squeeze squeezing but only for particular uh players, not for uh everyone.

Uh doesn't mean that like the uh the key of success it's segment your users or uh by behavior.
So so I think the study has a lot of important takeaways and certainly the the value of segmentation is in there. But it but it kind of suggests mechanically that for some games you wouldn't need to. It's not that it would it doesn't seem to me that based on the mechanics of how this worked, you need the segmentation to get a result, but you're likely to get a stronger result if you segment. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. Anyone else? Oh, sorry.
Uh thanks for the presentation. Really really insightful. So uh this clearly works on like raising the LTV, right? Like you you retain players for longer. They have more opportunities to monetize in your product and you flagged that you have to have other avenues for them to monetize across the

year original squeeze. Um
[clears throat]
Did they do any test across multiple products with different retentions? Uh because like immediately in my head is like, "Okay, I can do that if my game retains well enough. So if I keep them in the game, they won't churn a week later just because they run out of content or something else put them out, right? There are only so many valves I can control to keep them in the game."
So so I if I think I think I understand your question, no, they only tested on this one live match-three game that they didn't say what match-three game it is. They didn't say what geos they used. All that was kept private but um I think the answer to your question So, you want to know like well, what if your game retains terribly, would this still work? And I think the answer is like clearly not, right? Like if your game is terrible and people don't like it and and you know what I mean? Like you have to have enough other elements working. Um but also probably if those things are true this isn't going to leaving this stuff in isn't going to help you that much either.

Does that Does that address your question? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. I just I just think that's that's the past. You know, I I obviously still exists today but I think it's more of the past than it is the future um for those dynamics that I that I talked about but that's true. And and some games also have really good retention but they want to squeeze you again because they still want to get their payback right away. Yeah.
Okay. Awesome. Any more questions?
Yeah. Sorry. So, uh I think I uh I hope I understand clearly that uh we would take a group of players that could just stop playing. We [snorts] make the game easier a little bit on in the in the place where

uh there are blockers. And uh we hope that they will play and they will pay us uh in the next uh uh in in in the next uh features or in the next uh places. So, my question is that we put them back to the main loop with the other players after the blocker or or we just still have them in the like easy game mode that will just put them in the little monetization phase or That That That's my question.
Yeah, that's a really good question. I I think that's something you could you could test. Um it's probably going to depend on the player. What I think a better That's certainly not something that's in the data, right? That wasn't in the study, but I I I think like ideally you would more just keep the mechanism that detects degradation, right? And so you would put them back in the main group, but keep the degradation mechanism in there. So that whoever starts to degrade goes back into your ease group. Does that make sense?

But this is me speculating. This isn't something that was that was in the study.
so something like a check if somebody can can we will put the flag on, yeah?
Yeah.
And uh get them going, yeah?
Yeah, and then you would unflag at some point.
Yeah, so actually the uh if you you could play the way to make the game easier for you if you don't pay, yeah? Actually. Yeah, because the game will flag you to us the certain player so you can go further.
Well, it's not flagging you based on whether you paid or not. It flags you based on whether you're degrading or not.
Um
But if you played worse and showed signs of degradation then you would you would fall into the Yeah.
All right. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Hi. I I I get the feeling from the presentation that squeezing less is more

effective with the games that have multiple systems features and gameplay mechanics. Because the simpler the game obviously the simpler is the monetization system. So how to I mean, should I develop more the game to give her more features or try to squeeze from something that is already like bare minimum for the game. For example, point and clickers, endless runners, that's games with really closed and simple loops. And it's harder probably to squeeze something out of that simple loop.
I question that premise. I don't know. I question that premise because match three is a very simple game. Free-to-play games tend to get complicated through these mechanics naturally. So, I think endless runners have plenty of mechanics to work with. Um so I yeah, I do question the premise. I think most most games are going to have

enough, you know, these are two mechanics. I mean, it's basically like selling lives and then selling content. Um so I don't think it I don't think it takes much, but yeah. Theoretically, if the game is ultra simple, there might not be enough to to to have a revenue migration that revenue migration effect.
Okay, great. Any more questions? Okay. I think that would be all uh of the Q&A section. And then, so uh once again, thank you Jordan so much for your lecture.
Thank you.
[applause]