The dark side of Gamedesign Document. Part 3: Monetization

Dark Side of Gamedesign Document

Part 3: Monetization

To start this part, I would like to ask you one question: in your project, who does this? A Gamedessigner or a Businessman.? If the answer is a business, then here, the hidden-name men are hated here. Why does Gamedesigner hate Businessman? Most of the answer is that you make the game, which also expect more players, play as long, the more praise the game the more like, RIGHT ?, and the other all thought of sucking blood, killing their own users. Frankly, I do not deny this view, but disagree at all.

So what if you are the person doing this part, what will you do? Making games is to make money, and make money to make more games so as much as possible - User is a shopper, we satisfy them so they pay, not to be just praised by them . So collecting the maximum amount of revenue on a dedicated user group or collecting a small amount on a large clientele, is what GD needs to clarify from the beginning, and transfer that thought to the document. Please protect it against Businessman, so that it may be reasonable to modify but keep the spirit of that model. If you choose the wrong model then bear. So how do you know if you choose the model that is right or wrong. Take care of who your customers are, who exactly? Pay your money for it or roll up the loophole to hook up wherever you are but information such as gender, age, ... the level of payment of the user in the same line from which to target a group. Learn more about the tastes of the group to get more features or content that is more relevant to the group, as well as adjust fee collecting way based on the user’s payment habit. And again, the Monetization model will need to adjust to gameplay to match. Let's take a look at this example. Let's try to analyze the difference between a Western and a Asian game:

The two games are all in the form of building - the army is deployed to attack, having the general but the two branches are completely different, and both have unified Gameplay - Coreloop - Monetization with that set of customers.

And let's see how your "Money" runs in the Clash of Clan Coreloop:

                              Clash of Clan Coreloop. Source: Internet

A picture more than a hundred lines of text. So I recommend that you draw this flow in GDD for easy understanding, do not write descriptive text

But it is not the end here, choose a model then you have to do more details. Let's try with a lesson on "Physical Selling", how many implementations will we have:

A. Stamina is expressed in two forms.

   • Usable form, 1 Stamina strength ~ 1 match

   • In the original form, 5 Stamina strength is enough for 1 match

B. Stamina selling has two ways:

   • Sell different types of "Stamina Restore bottle", each having different values

   • Full Stamina restore

C. Stamina selling prices are two ways:

   • Price fixed, equal to each other

   • The price increases gradually, the next time the purchase is higher than the previous one.

D. Limit of Stamina purchases per day:

   • Unlimited

   • Limited, base on VIP level

Let's try to see how the following two games have solved this problem:

                                     Plus Football 2014                                       Big Win Soccer

Just for notice, you will see the above two examples, I all "blame" the reason for the difference in the model and the implementation of Monetization is due to customer set. You may also know that these two sets are different, so I will talk a little bit about how this difference affects gaming features. Comparison on Clash of Clan - Big Win Soccer and Hero Dota – Plus Football 2014 as follows:

First is the general psychology:

                               Clash of Clan                                                Hero Dota

Then the game's way of bringing features to serve players:

Mini game: Reading the correct name of feature and arranging them by appearance time.

As you can feel, compared to the diversity monetization of Asian, Western games are simple and do not “suck blood”, I will not comment, because it is the way of looking at each person on the characteristics of the market. Understanding the market, you will come up with the most feasible plan.

In summary in this article, I recommend that you study the monetization early, clarify it as much as possible, avoid the situation at the end of the project and start adding it and the game will become bullshit. You should be the monetization maker, because you know your game the most, and control the way it is, do not drop the spirit child into the hand of others.

Next part, we will discuss about thinking inside of outside the box.