A "How to monetize your game 101" kind of talk at Google GameCamp on-line coupled with some best practices and blunders I've made or encountered.

1. Special offers as the
way to improve
monetisation in a
mobile game
2020-11-05
Mirek Pikhart, Head of
Monetization & BI

2. Obligatory introduction to Geewa & myself
● Geewa is a Prague-based studio working mostly on f2p
PvP mobile games
● The most successful title is Smashing Four, currently
around 350th - 400th place among top grossing games
● I joined Geewa around in early 2018 as a data scientist
with finance background
● Managed to build a small analytics team inside the
company, slowly pivoted to monetisation over time
● Responsible for game economy updates, special offers
and monetisation of new features
… it will be short, I promise

3. The three big questions on delivering great offers
● What to offer?
○ The problem of finding desirable content for the player
○ How personalized should the offer be
● For how much?
○ Not everyone is willing to spend $20 on a mobile game
○ On the other hand, if you offer a $5 deal to a person that was
willing to spend the $20, you lost $15 in opportunity cost
● When to show?
○ Not all placements and timings are equal
○ This is probably the broadest question - from basics like not
overwhelming the user to specifics like “is the user more likely
to buy after winning or losing a match”
… or at least offers good enough to generate revenue

4. What to offer? (1)
● Before you start coming up with a complex solution,
identify what you currently have on hand
○ There’re only so many offers you can create with four chests
and two currencies
● It’s also important to understand how your current
monetization system is set up
○ Once you start introducing new avenues of monetization, you
need to be careful of cannibalizing existing income streams
○ The offer is only good if it makes you more money than you
lose from other revenue streams while implementing it
… before you even start, you should have a plan, really

5. What to offer? (2)
● Using our data as example, we can see that our baseline
revenue decreases over time as we introduce more and
more sophisticated offers
… be mindful of cannibalizing your existing revenue streams

6. What to offer? (2)
● But if you include the additional revenue from the
included offers, the picture doesn’t look so grim
… be mindful of cannibalizing your existing revenue streams

7. What to offer? (3)
● The problem we’re trying to solve is to find the product or
the combination of products that is the most desirable
for each player
● There are several approaches that can be taken and
we’ve tried all of these at some point
○ The fast - do it randomly, measure results and remove the least
performing products every iteration
○ The “eyeballing it” - look at your data and come up with some
rules based on what you find out and basic logic
○ The fancy - hire a data scientist and have him crunch the data,
do some feature engineering and build a machine learning
model
… let’s move forward

8. What to offer? (4)
● Once you start generating very personalized offers, you
decrease the interest in gacha, at least for a portion of
your playerbase
○ Those users will only respond to personal offers from that
point
… the pitfalls we fell into

9. What to offer? (5)
● Just moving your spenders from one product onto
another by releasing a similar, superior offer
… the pitfalls we fell into

10. For how much? (1)
● Is personalizing price worth it?
○ The universally expected answer would be “yes”, but there’s
more to it
○ First analyze your user base, define segments of users that play
your game and measure the difference between their habits
and purchasing power
○ If you market exclusively to a specific audience, you would
probably get little results
○ Also be aware of avoiding potential legal issues with pricing
discrimination
… probably one of the most asked questions in every industry

11. For how much? (2)
● How to approach pricing personalization and the most
common strategies
○ Regional pricing I. - setting different prices for the same
product on a country basis
○ Regional pricing II. - offering different product bundles with
different content and price on country basis
○ Based on user history - look at price points user bought in the
past, serve him either the most likely to convert, or one slightly
above
○ Based on out-of-game data - deliver content and price based
on information like geolocation and device model
○ Based on in-game data - deliver content and price based on
models that utilize your in-game features
… probably one of the most asked questions in every industry

12. For how much? (3)
● Regional pricing is a pain, especially when Apple is
concerned
○ You can’t set your own prices, have to use pre-set ones
● Pricing based on user history performed well for us
○ It’s however recommended to assign more value to recent data,
either through a weighing function or other restrictions
● Pricing based on out-of-game data has some merit, but
it’s probably inferior to user data
○ We only use it for starter pack segmentation, where we lack any
user history to work with
… what worked for us and what not so much

13. When to show? (1)
● There are several major ways to determine offer timing
that most games use
○ Calendar-based approach
■ Match offers to important dates, e.g. Halloween
○ Progression-based approach
■ Spread offers over user lifetime by tying them to
milestones reached in the game, e.g. level or rank
○ Trigger-based approach
■ Your game sends an event that prompts showing an offer
■ Prompted by anything, e.g. losing a game, unlocking a
new character, being flagged as about to churn
… timing matters

14. When to show? (2)
● Creating custom triggers will be different for every game
● It’s important to test how long it takes for the offer to
show and minimize the delay
● You can always test the more common ones
○ Testing conversion on offers after winning/losing a game
○ Testing offering a certain strong character after losing to it
compared to offering it at a random time
… looking more into the triggers

15. When to show? (3)
● Using triggers paid off when user is close to levelling up a
character
○ We immediately show him a gacha offer that guarantees
enough resources of said character to level him up
● A combination of offer timings works for us right now
○ We have “big” offers that look nice connected to the calendar
○ We have several offers you unlock progressing through the
game
○ Then we wrap it up by making a offer with high likelihood of
conversion when we can
● However, be careful of showing too many offers at the
same time
… some of our more recent attempts

16. Summary
● There are many ways to set up offers
● Not putting all your eggs into one basket is important
○ Having multiple independent offer systems helped us a lot, because
something always fails
● Monetization is an iterative process
○ Never stop attempting to improve your current setup
● Test everything before going all out
… wrapping it up

17. Special offers as the
way to turbocharge
monetisation in a
mobile game
2020-11-05
Thank you for listening!
Feel free to ask any questions you have...
Mirek Pikhart, Head of
Monetization & BI