Ads & In-App Purchases: Designing a Balanced Mobile Game Economy

A game economy refers to the system for a mobile game that manages the distribution, acquisition, and utilization of in-game resources, currencies, items, and rewards. Game economies are designed to provide structure and motivation for players to engage with the game, progress through its challenges, and accomplish different goals. To achieve this, it is crucial that the game ecosystem has a balanced economy through the use of both ads and in-app purchases.

Why a Balanced Game Economy is Necessary

A balanced economy in a mobile game is essential for player satisfaction, engagement, and retention, as well as for the financial success of the game. It ensures that players have a fair and enjoyable experience, whether they choose to play for free or make optional purchases. A badly balanced economy often results in negative player reviews, complaints, and backlash on social media, which can be harmful to the game’s reputation and potential for success.

Designing a Modern Balanced Game Economy

Designing a balanced game economy is a critical aspect of game development, especially for games that involve in-game currencies (leading to in-app purchases), resources, or micro-transactions. A well-balanced economy can enhance player engagement and enjoyment, while an unbalanced one can lead to frustration or exploitation. Here are key steps to design a balanced game economy:

Define Your Goals:

Understand the primary objectives of your game’s economy. Do you want to encourage player engagement, create a competitive environment, or drive revenue through micro-transactions?

Determine the Core Currency:

Identify the primary in-game currency or resource that players earn or purchase. This could be coins, gems, energy, etc.

Set an Economy Scale:

Decide on the scale of your economy. Will it be small, medium, or large? Smaller economies are more straightforward to balance, while larger ones offer more complexity and opportunities.

Establish a Sinks-and-Faucets System:

Create ways for players to earn and spend the core currency. Sinks (ways to spend) and faucets (ways to earn) should be balanced to prevent inflation or scarcity. Common sinks include purchasing items or upgrades, while faucets can consist of completing levels, winning bets, or achieving goals.

Consider Player Progression:

Design an experience curve that determines how quickly players progress in your game. Ensure that the core currency rewards align with this progression curve to maintain engagement.

Analyze Player Behavior:

Monitor player interactions with your economy to understand how they earn and spend currency. Collect data and use analytics tools to identify trends and potential imbalances.

Create a Feedback Loop:

Implement feedback mechanisms such as player surveys, forums, and in-game analytics. 

Test and Iterate:

Regularly test your game’s economy with real players, and be prepared to make adjustments based on their experiences and feedback. Iteration is key to achieving balance.

Set Fair Prices: If your game includes micro-transactions, ensure that the prices are reasonable and provide value to players. Avoid creating a pay-to-win environment that can turn away free players.

Prevent Exploitation:

Implement anti-exploitation measures to prevent players from abusing the economy. This includes measures against cheating, botting (use of bots), or other unfair practices.

Communicate Changes:

Be transparent with your player community about economic changes. Inform them through patch notes, in-game announcements, or community channels to maintain trust.

Monitor and Adapt:

Continuously monitor the game’s economy as it evolves and adapts to player behavior, updates, and changes in the gaming landscape. Balance is an ongoing process.

How We Implement a Balanced Game Economy

We tend to design a balanced economy for our mobile games BlackJack by Murka: 21 Classic and Crazy Slots: Royal Casino Game even though they have in-app purchase features. We followed key principles for designing economic balance. Let’s discuss the steps we followed to find the best solution. 

Set an Ultimate Goal

First, we designed a plan for if the game is free or for paid users. As our Games are free to download for any user of the marketplaces (Play Store and App Store), we planned for another way to monetize our game. We integrated both ads and in-app purchases (IAP) for our games to ensure a balanced economy.

How to Monetize Your In-game Economy

We implemented both banner, interstitial, and rewarded ads in our games. Rewarded ads are where the user gains some rewards after watching a full-view ad whereas interstitial ads come after a certain period of playing and the user will not have any reward for watching it, also can close the ad anytime without watching. Also, we planned for which pages we were going to implement and what ads. We also provide a remove ad option to users by one-time purchase plan.

Need to Collect More and More Data

To design a perfectly balanced game economy that does not force players to resort to in-app purchases, we need to research the players’ behavior first. The game economy is an ongoing process, it’s not anything like ‘Set and Forget’. We need to collect and analyze data from players and design the store based on the players’ behavior. 

If the game is in the pre-released stage, it’ll be difficult to collect real user data, we use an own-made game simulator and debugger to produce dummy data to predict users’ ‘Spending and Earning’ possibilities. With those data, we start our system design process. Here are simulator and debugger images from the internal system of Crazy Slots: Royal Casino Game.

Using our own-developed slot simulation mechanism, we produced an automated large amount of user data within a short time.

On the other hand from our debugging mechanism, we can add any value of coins and gems for testing and also can go to any level directly. Also, there is a log tracking system where we can view the game’s progress with detailed data.

Equations, Planning, and Data Assumption

With the analyzed data we try to interconnect the balance of different components of the stores. For this, we use an Excel sheet to create an equation for the correct data assumption. After all the analysis we select the one equation in which data-cluster makes the best match for our game economy. Also, we need to interconnect the balance between the ‘Spending and Earning’ amount. How much earning we are giving for how much spending is the most important thing because we have to provide transparency to players to be worth every penny they are spending on this game.

In our Crazy Slots: Royal Casino Game we set balanced store chips like the Excel file. We interconnect all the packs with how much we are offering for the credit upgrade. For more expensive packs, we are offering more than users can get before. The main part of the balancing calculation for any store design is to interconnect and make the pack price value-for-money for both parties. For all the calculations to keep aligned, we also produced equations, so that they can be used easily everywhere.

Breaking Down the Currencies

First, need to set the initial currencies balanced. For example, we used Coins and Gems in the game Crazy Slots: Royal Casino Game. Initially, we gave a certain amount of coins and gems to the player to start and keep playing and increase satisfaction towards the game. When a player has found more interest in the game and wants to purchase more coins they can do it by in-app purchases (IAP).

If players are not very interested in the game and are happy with slow progress then they can go for other rewards like watching a full-view ad and earn some coins. We didn’t bind users by any ‘Must Purchase’ condition. Users are free to choose how they play in our game. 

In-App Purchases to Balance Economy Scale

We need to design balanced in-app purchase plans with our game economy. We gave options for both small packs and little big packs for players to buy. Players can choose any small pack with a small amount of money and can continue the game without facing any problems. Players also can choose a large pack to gain more coins at once. Both are value-for-money packs for players, they just need to decide how much they want to spend. As an example here is an image of a store from Crazy Slots: Royal Casino Game.

Sinks-and-Faucets System in our games

As we are talking about card games, here players bet an amount of coins and earn a certain amount of coins or players can also lose the bet amount. So both Sinks (ways to spend) and faucets (ways to earn) coins are very transparent to players. Besides in-app purchases (IAP) we have free coin-earning facilities here. Like, players will get a specific amount of coins for every game over and also will win some gems after ending specific levels.

Design a balanced Player Progression and Player Motivation

We need to design a balanced and transparent player progression map where players can easily understand the progress of the game they are doing and also have a clear scenario of the earning growth. With this map, players will find the motivation to play the game. For player motivation, we designed different reward systems based on different player progress. For example, we planned daily rewards, hourly rewards, level-up rewards, fortune orbit, and goals for different levels.

Monitor Player Interactions and Collect Feedback

It is very important to understand your player’s behavior toward purchases. Which packs are mostly purchased by the users, which are not, and which are most popular, all need to be under observation. Remember, a balanced economy is never a constant thing, you always need to update and balance it based on your user’s behavior. We also integrate a system of collecting user feedback for BlackJack by Murka: 21 Classic. Users facing any problems or queries can contact the team directly and be able to give feedback on anything about the game.

For a balanced economy design, there is no shortcut. We always have to collect players’ interactions, and only then be able to design a balanced economy. Because the system needs to be changed accordingly, it’ll be very stressful to change the code every time. So we integrated the Google Firebase Console to analyze users’ data by keeping an eye on Google Analytics and Crashlytics. We also used Firebase Remote Config to update game data anytime without facing any problems. By integrating Firebase Remote Config into the system, we can change any initial value easily from the Firebase console. As an example in the below image, we can see the JSON file of coins & gems’ initial value from Crazy Slots: Royal Casino Game.

Balance Between In-app Purchases and Ads

For ads, we have interstitial and rewarded ads in both games. Rewarded ads will support the players who don’t want to spend much money on purchases but also want to play. Also has in-app purchases (IAP), where we designed a balanced economy for the user fairly and clearly. We also implemented cool-down time in rewarded ads to balance collecting rewards by watching ads. By using cool-down time, there is a limitation to watching too much-rewarded ads.

There is no forced environment to the ‘Must Pay’ system. We gave a relaxed vibe to all users who ‘don’t want to pay but play’ and who ‘want to pay and play’. We balance the game economy by interconnecting both in-app purchases (IAP) and ads.

Be Transparent about the Game Economy

Because it is an ongoing process, changes on the in-app purchases (IAP) pack are very usual here. But for any live game where many users are playing regularly, we need to be very transparent about the changes we are making. So our platform will be more trustworthy to players. For making any changes, we can notify users by using push notifications, pop-ups, emails, or through in-game chats (if a chat system is available in the game like BlackJack by Murka: 21 Classic). 

Conclusion

Remember that balance in a game economy is not a fixed state but an ongoing process. It is a complex and ongoing process that requires careful design, monitoring, and adjustments based on player feedback and data analysis. Player behavior and the gaming environment can change over time. Hence, be prepared to adjust and fine-tune the game economy accordingly. The goal is to create an enjoyable and fair experience for all players while achieving our game’s objectives.

This page was last edited on 11 December 2023, at 10:58 am