TWIG 145: How FIFA Ultimate Team's new Preview Packs actually boosted loot box sales

okay so the last thing that we wanted to cover so fifa ultimate teams their new preview packs actually boosted loot box sales this came from andrew wilson so overall you've got to hand it to misca he was right the latest ea financial call so he called it out and basically said we saw an increase in engagement we saw a higher rate of conversion of our spenders so if you remember the design they offered players the ability to preview their first purchase pack each day and after previewing there was a daily cooldown preventing players from spamming my inclination is that this would have this would decrease revenue from the boxes likely and say single digits since it retained spend depth but would turn off some players who would see their preview and then refuse to pay for the pack but this overall doesn't seem to be the case so one thing is just looking past the headline here this was happening near the end of a fifa season which typically has spikes of revenue so it's unclear what we're really comparing to like conversion of the baseline a week before conversion season overseas yeah yeah that that is the problem right they

have a huge promo during this time so we don't know whether or not well they're just they're picking out stats just to prove themselves so go ahead sorry yeah exactly so it's like keeping in mind that like andrew wilson is incentivized to make it look good to make sure that people don't feel like they're rocking the boat too much with these types of features and like without daily revenue data which really doesn't exist on console i don't think this is really an open and shut case so it's interesting that he announced that maybe maybe it doesn't didn't have as much impact but i think it's really hard to really say exactly what impact without actually knowing on the ground numbers but yeah calling bs on finance calls isn't really what i want to talk about here i think there's just a greater gender like there is some recent news as well second life is removing loot boxes fifa obviously experimenting australia is now proposing a loot box ban as well as uk there's some age-appropriate design code specifically targeting loot boxes for children so i think overall loot box design is getting more and more scrutiny there's a

chance that eventually they could get removed and i think on a lot of designers minds is what do we do without loot boxes like blue boxes obviously are a very dominant form of monetization on mobile what's great about it is that it drives massive economy depth and spend depth for each piece of content you add you exponentially add more depth to your system instead of say a direct purchase system which is linear you add new content players purchase it if they care about it and that's it so is there a way to recreate this type of exponential depth with a non-blue box system i think it typically breaks down and like any monetization system in a free to play game can be broken down to this that all monetization systems are effectively offering a trade-off of of time or skill or pay right so timers real time loot boxes luck boosters skill and luck power and stats and games is basically game time and skill so when you take loot boxes out

there are kind of a few strategies i think you can shift towards more time skill or cost exponentially higher so higher prices for the assets to directly purchase so instead of one dollar loot box you have 100 per character you can also increase time required to craft so you have you know free to play 2010 all over again or you can be you know shifting to battle pass economies and trying to actually make them into a monetization feature but then you're going to start seeing battle passes that take a lot longer to earn through or a lot more skill required to earn each of those items it's just increasing the cost increasing the friction like the strategy i think most people will try is try to dress up the luck element that regulators won't notice so that's really what fifa is experimenting with what fortnight to experiment with with previews of pax diablo immortals his triangles with riffs warframe has been doing this for a while kind of by entry to a mission that has the random rewards that you want so technically you're buying a ticket you're not buying the reward but it's just one or two stages

removed like taking this further i think the likely scenario is that a whole bunch of developers are going to build out ticket systems where there's tickets to zones which have randomizations of key rewards and those drop rates are higher or give you guaranteed drops if you pay a ticket you get an entrance and or you say placement in an event of a leader board and those rewards or currencies are for the things that you want this can then be kind of a mix of skill look and time and actually turns into say a skill based mini game instead of a loot box to try to get away from this i think additionally to comes from dude that feels like there's a lot of friction there dude yeah i know but but this is kind of where you're you're going to if you're trying to dress up the loot the lucky correct right so it is more friction than just opening and spamming a whole bunch of loot boxes but if you want the same type of thing what you could say is okay there's one ticket that gives you 20 loot boxes or 20 random awards in the

area versus one that's only one so you can kind of batch purchase to kind of reduce some of that continual purchase friction anyways to compensate for loot boxes keep it at exponential depth i think what's ending what's going to end up happening is that it's just going to actually put more strain on developers to produce more valuable live content so i think there'll be more pressure on launching even more characters even more gear pieces than before and then each of those price for that content will be higher and ultimately assets will have to be even more valuable than they have than before the boxes so all systems and game modes that incentivize collection will have to be even stronger than games today offer and i think like pointing to games like warframe and i continually use that example but i think they do a pretty good job warframe is a direct purchase economy that functions pretty well without boxes for their main assets being the characters the warframes and the gear the weapons

so they can only do that because they have so much system depth in promoting that collection of warframes and weapons so yeah i think the box is being taken away it will be a big revenue drop for the industry because i don't think a lot of developers will be prepared for it and i think we can dress up blue boxes there might be some ways to kind of keep some of the benefits but i think ultimately luck taken out of the monetization picture it pushes devs to be more able to design systems that design that support far more assets drive stronger collection mechanics so i think the underlying learnings of mobile ccrpg design are actually poised to go stronger not weaker as loot boxes get removed so i think that's really what the future is going to take like there'll be revenue drop because developers don't fully understand it but the kind of tenants of ccrpg design are only going to be growing stronger what do you guys think i don't know i i still kind of think that ultimately

it'll be about protecting kids from loot boxes which actually i think is is smarter i i don't think they're going to remove loot boxes altogether because i i think it's just embedded with so many different things like roblox would like literally lose half their revenue right but and they target kids that's what i'm a little bit worried about roblox as a longer-term issue for them because i think loot boxes is relatively significant for them but i'm not sure how much but anyway so i think if they leave eliminate the the kids games that have loot boxes age gating or removing that feature or maybe this preview thing will get people off their backs i don't know yeah i don't know i just think that like it's just too embedded it would create huge havoc within this with all the games that are using it and then and then i the the thing i think it's it is a slippery slope to some degrees like how much of this monetization strategies out there are similar to loot box in terms of design in terms of of

how it influences behavior you know we've talked about this before many times like are they just going to go after all free to play modernization you know are they going to end with loot boxes you know i don't know i i think i've missed adam on this podcast like that was a fantastic fantastic uh summary of of everything i have nothing to add i when when i called it out and i said this would probably increase engagement as well as monetization it was just me absolutely loving fifa and i've been playing ultimate team a lot and i was just thinking of myself as a player would i check always what's in the what's in the in the in the packet and would i buy if i would see something cool i said yes and yes and that would get me just into the purchase flow all the time constantly coming back constantly looking and probably will get me buying more so smart move for me a yeah we'll we'll see what happens at scale if they actually implement this thing for the next fifa well yeah i'm excited

i want to see the impact i'd love to see how people kind of work this especially as things like age gaining come in and you start seeing you know people saying okay well if you're under the age gate what game is there left right if there's no way to buy loot boxes do they just not offer any monetization there or are there other other mechanics they go to