1. Intro
For better or for worse, some degree of monetization is required to fund continued development of the game. This is something most players understand, and they will not complain about it if the monetization system is designed creatively and responsibly. When it comes to monetization, Valve are by far the best in town, and Dota 2 is their finest product. I honestly think they’ve pulled off their monetization scheme perfectly, to the point where the game is better with monetization than it would’ve been without it – yes, that’s how good it is. You could essentially copy everything they’ve done, at least as far as it fits Extraction, and you’d be in a good position.
In general I think the guiding principle when designing a monetization system, should be “how can we create an eco-system of goods and services that make people so excited about the game that they’re willing to pay for it”. If you ever catch yourself thinking “how can we make more money out of this?”, however, then you’ve probably taken the wrong turn somewhere. In the following I will attempt to sort different examples and suggestions for monetization into three different categories to illustrate how it should be done, and how it shouldn’t. The categories are (1) acceptable or beneficial monetization, (2) questionable or borderline “pay to win” monetization, and (3) Unacceptable or “pay to win” monetization.
2. Acceptable or beneficial monetization
Broadly speaking, goods or services that do not have a noticeable effect on player performance. Typically purely cosmetic items or out-of-game services.
2.1 Re-skins
Perhaps the most obvious avenue for monetization, but it still allows for a lot of creativity. So far it looks like SD is aiming for full merc re-skins, which is something I would advise against. Dividing the re-skins into “parts”, for example headgear, boots, weapons, tattoos, and so on, gives you a lot more flexibility with design. You can then divide full re-skins into sets of items that share a name and style. This drastically reduces the manpower cost of each item, which means you can charge a smaller cost for each item, which in turn makes it more palatable for the players to buy items. It’s generally easier for people to justify buying something cheap – or buying for example just a helmet because you want to complete a set.
Separating the re-skins into parts also allows you to add random free item drops in moderate amounts (Dota 2 style), since each item will be relatively inexpensive. These item drops will not only make the players happy (“sweet, I won an awesome hat!”), but it will also fuel further player purchases as players will want to complete sets. An effective way of implementing this is to have two different kinds of drops of at the end of each game: A “treasure chest” (which contains a random item, but the player has to buy a key to open it) drop for each player on the winning team, and a small chance for a random item drop for any player on the winning team.
2.2 Announcer packs
This one is pretty obvious, and leaves a lot of room for fun. It requires that you add an extensive announcer system and invest in voice actors, though.
2.3 Titles
Self-explanatory. Blacklight Retribution has a nice take on this by displaying special titles for beta testers, special contributors, and such.
2.4 “Flair"
Medals, ribbons, buttons, or other small cosmetic items that can be equipped on the player character. An interesting implementation of this could include special medals that can only be bought when the player has achieved some pre-set goal. For example a “Veteran” medal for someone who has reached a certain amount of hours played, or a “War machine” button for someone who has reached a certain amount of kills in a game, or a “Purple heart” medal for someone who has died a certain amount of times during a game. Essentially achievements, but with the option of paying to get a cosmetic item that shows the world what you have accomplished.
This could be made even more awesome by adding special medals for performing well in ladders or leagues. If SD were to ever host a yearly tournament, for example, all the participants should receive (these should be free naturally) special commemorative medals, and the top 3 should receive some sort of gold, silver and bronze medals.
2.5 Taunts
Self-explanatory; gestures and sounds.
2.6 Tickets
Dota 2 has mass-spectating enabled for all its servers (with an amazing spectate system to boot), and allows tournament organizers to add a cost to watch certain games. ESL charges $4.75 for tickets to watch matches in their main Dota 2 tournament, for example. This works very well in practice, and players are allowed to watch the match for free on streaming sites such as twitch.tv if they don’t want to pay. Players who pay for tickets get the benefit of watching the game in full quality in game with additional features, as well as being eligible for special item drops while they spectate the game.
2.7 “Pennants”
In Dota 2, Players can buy a “pennant” item for their favorite team – for example an Alliance fan would buy an Alliance pennant – for $1. Most of the money goes to the team the pennant is owned by, with a small cut going to Valve. This is essentially the e-sports equivalent of buying the jersey of your favorite football team, showing your support for them.
During a game, the amount of players with pennants equipped for either team in the game is shown prominently in the spectator HUD, turning it into a competition between different groups of fans. Players spectating a game with a pennant equipped are also eligible for random special item drops if their team performs some special action (for example a double kill or a team wipe) or if their team wins the game. During the final of The International 3, Na’Vi alone had over 60 000 pennant holders spectating the game – that adds up to a lot of money when you consider that the tournament had 15 other teams as well.
2.8 Tournament “crowdfunding” items
Essentially, items from which a certain percentage of the cost to purchase them goes to the prize pool of a tournament. Valve has done this masterfully with “Compendiums” for their yearly Dota 2 tournament, The International. It would take too much space for me to explain properly, so please read about it here and here. According to my rough calculations, Valve sold Compendiums for a staggering total of ~$7.6 million, of which 25 % was added to the tournament prize pool (~$1.9 million, for a total prize pool of ~$2.9 million) of The International 3.
The cosmetic items suggested above would work particularly well if the players are given a way to prominently display their loot during games. Blacklight Retribution has a nice implementation if this in their post-game score screens, where the top players on the winning team have their mercs displayed full screen and have the ability to use their taunts until the map rotates.
3. Questionable or borderline “pay to win” monetization
Broadly speaking, goods or services that could potentially have a not-insignificant effect on player performance.
3.1 Re-models
By re-models I mean items that alter the silhouette of the player, as opposed to re-skins which don’t alter the silhouette. Potentially acceptable if the difference is very minor and doesn’t affect merc recognition.
Giving the player an option of for example buying a headgear replacement for a merc that normally has a large hat, that replaces it with a much smaller cap, and thus reducing the visual size of the player ingame, would be highly questionable.
3.2 League of Legends style champion/merc acquisition
There is a sliding scale here, going from acceptable to pay to win, depending on how much a player has to play to earn permanent access to all the mercs without paying for them with real money. League of Legends is pretty far on the pay to win side of that scale in my opinion, considering it would take at least a year of playing 5+ matches a day to earn all the champions.
If your primary goal of not giving all the players instant access to all the mercs is earning money, then I think you’ve fallen into the pay to win trap. However, if you instead change your motivation – and design accordingly – you can actually turn this into a beneficial feature for the players. Your motivation should be that merc acquisition is primarily a feature to guide new players to playing the basic “easy to play” mercs until they learn the game, and then using the merc acquisition as a “game within the game”. If designed correctly, players will find entertainment in choosing which merc to unlock and when, turning it into a collectible mini-game. People love collecting stuff!
The key element here is to make it relatively easy to earn enough currency to buy a merc just by playing the game. It also has to be permanent: once you unlock a merc, you keep it forever. None of that renting items rubbish – even just having the option to rent detracts from the experience.
3.3 “XP bonus”
Or other ways to earn persistant currency/experience faster. Whether or not this is acceptable depends on how the rest of the monetization system is designed. If the monetization is designed responsibly, with no purchases required to access all the features that have an impact on player performance within a reasonable amount of time, it should be acceptable.
3.4 HUDs
This is a controversial one. If the only way to get an acceptable HUD arrangement or crosshair is to pay, then this is pay to win in one of its purest forms. If, on the other hand, a reasonable amount of different HUDs and crosshairs are available for free, then this could be acceptable.
4. Unacceptable or “pay to win” monetization
Broadly speaking, goods or services that have an appreciable effect on player performance.
I’m not going to write much about this, since it should be pretty obvious, but some examples are: Special ammo that does more damage or has other properties than default ammo, special weapon modifications, mercs that can only be permanently unlocked by spending real money, and limits on how many hours/matches one can play for free within a certain amount of time – typically with some system that allows you to pay money to be able to continue playing.
5. Conclusion
This is just a fraction of the different possibilities. Many other interesting avenues remain, for example some sort of betting system, where players can bet items on the outcome of tournament matches – thus further increasing interest in competitive play and adding more entertainment for spectators.
Hopefully this will give some food for thought to both Splash Damage and the players on this forum. Please post your own suggestions below, and I will add them to the OP. Unless they’re rubbish. In which case I won’t. Because that would be silly.