I was with a few friends as they were playing their first games of the beta and it seems that right now the game doesn’t convey the right messages when it comes to monetization. Dirty bomb was quickly discarded by some of my friends as “Pay-to-win bullshit” and if it weren’t for their friends, they’d be likely never to touch it again. First impression is key to F2P titles and right now, Dirty bomb doesn’t seem to make a good one. The issue lies more with the impression than with the business model, and I believe it can be worked out fairly quickly using a few tricks. (“Get to level 7 to play with your friends” gives a terrible first impression too btw, this needs to go ASAP)
Level ups and credits earning curve:
What you want to do is making credits earning very fast at the beginning and slow it down drastically as the player gains more and more experience, using some kind of logarithmic curve. Allowing players to unlock lots of shiny stuff is a great way to get them hooked to the game, as opposed to making them bump into a grinding wall straight off the bat. The game already kind of does that as you get something like 25k out of the blue in the beginning but it’s terrible at explaining it and it’s not good at all because you don’t feel like you earned it.
Right now, the very first monetization impressiion comes at the end of your first game, let’s get into the head of a new player: You just played a 15min game and barely won, you don’t have a positive K/D yet but it’s ok because you felt useful dropping ammo packs to people so you feel good about yourself and this first win. You check the endgame menus “sweet, 100 credits, what can I buy with that”. Then you go back to the menu ans see that the least expensive mercs are 30000 credits… On top of that, random cases are 1000. “This is P2W, I’m leaving”.
Now let’s see how to fix that. First of all you need to make it so the first game automatically gets you to level 2, then you get a special “level up reward” screen and you give lots of shiny stuff to the newbie: “Sweet I got to level 2: 10000 credits and 5 cases, wow that’s very nice, let’s open them.” Then the newbie opens his free cases which is fun and feels good, then he checks the mercs screen “30k? Sweet, I’ve already done a third of it! Let’s play an other game!”.
That’s what you want to do, give a lot of stuff to the new players as level rewards, and make the grind only starts to appear as the XP amount you need to level up gets bigger and bigger. For the sake of the argument, we’ll assume games last 10min on average and that the game has 15-20 mercs available, which means there’s room for giving some away.
-Level 2: 10 minutes in, end of first game, you get to , you earn 10k XP and 5 cases.
-Level 3: 30 minutes in, end of your third game, you earn 10k more XP and 3 cases. “I’ve only played three games and I’m almost done unlocking my first merc already!”.
-Level 3: 50 minutes in: : 10k XP and 2 cases “Yay, I only started playing this game today and I’m unlocking stuff already, that’s awesome”
Then you make the cases disappear from level ups because people start to realize they are randomly getting some at the end of games.
I won’t go too much into details but you really need to give away free mercs in the first few hours of play, unlocking stuff gets people hooked and helps new players distinguish themselves from one another. Letting people choose is a better idea than a lolesque free mercs rotation. Chances are they’ll make terribly uneducated choices anyway and will feel disatisfied with what they unlocked, which is good.
The first three mercs need to be unlocked fairly quickly, I’d say within the first week of casually playing the game. Then you get a steeper curve towards the fourth one, but you get to unlock ranked matchmaking at the same time. From now on the logarithmic curve starts to flatten out and levels stop being relevant: grinding game XP and the daily missions becomes the only viable way to get in-game currency. I’m saying “grinding” but it really shouldn’t be as steep as it is right now though: if the grind wall appears almost unclimbable, you’re not encouraging players to pay, you’re pushing them away from the game. If you spend more than a couple of days grinding to unlock a single merc, there’s probably something wrong with the monetization, especially since you’re choosing between merc money and case money.
This leads me to what I think the most important part of the merc monetization is: You don’t want to make people buy mercs because the grind is too long, you want to make it so they have better stuff to do with their ingame currency than buying mercs. Even if getting new mercs for free is fairly quick, it should be pretty clear that all this currency could be better used buying cases and cards.
My suggestion is to add the ability for people to buy the specific loadout card they want for a tremendous amount of in-game money. Now here’s the trick, you do not allow cards to be bought with real dollars, this leads people to believe: “Look, the game is not pay-to-win: you can only buy cards with in-game currency”. But in fact, you are given a choice: you either spend your currency on unlocking mercs or you are spending your in-game currency on getting new stuff for the mercs you already have. This is a true convenience choice but it’s not unfair at the same time, you’re not paying because you don’t have the time to unlock mercs, you pay because you’d rather spend that time on something else, something more fun.
Making the daily missions grind interesting and learning experiences:
The Currency grind needs to be enjoyable and “earning 14k support XP” or “Put Proxy in your squad but no need to use her” is a freaking terrible way to do it, make the mission more concrete and make it so they encourage teamplay, supporting and intelligent play. There should be both easy and hard ones. Some of them could be as easy as “rezzing 15 people in a single game”, or “Provide your teammates with 6 ammo packs in a single life”. But you should also introduce stuff that encourages people to play their class well: “Heal more than 1000HP with a single healing station”, which encourages good station placement, “Give ammo packs to people who truly need it” which encourages being more aware to your team’s needs. There could also be “Kill both an aura and her station with a single grenade” or “Wipe the objective from several enemies with a single airstrike”, “Kill someone who is about to defuse a bomb with a proximity mine” which encourages using the killing classes well.
Cosmetics:
It is a shame that you aren’t using cosmetics because it’s the best source of revenue: The Dota2 and CSGO markets are great examples but I’m also thinking about games like Loadout. I don’t usually put any money into cosmetics but the Loadout cosmetics were so cool and so well integrated into the game that I just couldn’t resist and that I paid a lot. It also allows players who have the money to support the game without feeling the “I’m paying to win” shame (that’s my case). Also, if you have a great cosmetic system that earns you money, it means you can afford increasing even more the in-game currency flow, which gives your game a better reputation, increases your playerbase etc.
On top of that, cosmetics is the only long-term revenue because, unless your game is blatanlty p2w (clash of clan etc.) that’s the only thing people will keep paying for in the long run. Once your core player has played the game a lot and they have unlocked all the stuff want, the only things they’ll pay for is cosmetics. Indeed I don’t think you’ll be able to create a steady flow of new mercs like LOL does because DB is an FPS game and your options are limited, and the content you can add will start feeling redundant fairly soon.
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