Eberhard Dürrschmid, CEO of Golden Whale considers how modest changes to a mobile game can have a profound effect on monetization – and shares advice on nudging players to power your growth.

Modern life is full of nudges. We might not even notice, but we have our decision making subtly guided in all kinds of ways. These nudges aren’t instructions or mandates. Rather, they take the form of simple interventions that encourage certain choices. And they increasingly have a substantial role to play in growing the IAP revenues of mobile games.

In perhaps the most famed real-world nudge, in 2009, authorities at Amsterdam airport placed small fly-shaped stickers on the inside of urinals. Travelers could not resist taking aim, and spillages were reduced by 80%, bringing down cleaning costs significantly. A tiny intervention, then, made a large difference – and this strategy is replicated all over the world.

These things are part of a ‘choice architecture’ that populates our surroundings; a concept made famous by the 2008 book ‘Nudge’. Popularized just a handful of months before Apple’s iOS App Store was launched, its academic authors Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein solidified the idea that small changes can prompt significant behavioral shifts – which brings us to mobile games.

NUDGING TO SPEND

Making video games is ultimately an exercise in understanding and encouraging certain player behaviors – and nowhere is that more true than in the mobile realm. Win streak systems, for example, can motivate players to make performance boosting in-app purchases to maintain their run of success, hooking into their desire for accomplishment. ‘Social catalysts’, meanwhile, might let players see their performance stats compared to others, motivating spending to improve abilities and increase standing. Those nudges can certainly impact a game's success, and are established parts of the mobile ecosystem. But what if we could be more precise, meticulous, and granular with in-game nudges? That is already something that is entirely possible – and already being elevated by the arrival of sophisticated machine learning-powered game optimization tools. And in the current mobile market, where IAPs are increasingly critical to revenues, small changes can make significant differences. Considering that only 1.83% of mobile gamers make an in-game purchase, a typical free-to-play game that could convert just a fraction of a percentage of users to spenders could have a monumental impact on its bottom line. The potential impact of nudges around IAP is profound. It might be tempting to pick a cohort from your audience, and concoct ways to nudge their spending behaviors as a mass. In reality, though, this approach is more effective when targeting demographic slithers, or increasingly, individuals. Equally, targeting a single-digit percentage of your user base who can be converted into spenders – or spend more than they already do – offers the most realistic strategy in terms of return on effort and investment. Essentially then, developers need to customize the choice architecture of their games to precisely targeted player groups.

IDENTIFYING YOUR NUDGEABLE SPENDERS

Identifying which audience groups and behaviors to nudge towards increased spending is key to success here. Users that browse your IAP offering without spending, that only pick up free items, or that frequently bail at checkout offer straightforward examples of ‘behavior groups’ just a nudge away from increased spending. Another strategy is to choose players with distinct play behaviors. Perhaps you see a player cruising through your game’s deliberately challenging pinch points, while oddly faltering at easier levels. Or maybe a small selection of your players relentlessly focuses on just one type of consumable. Again, you may have identified nudgeable users that make up a manageably sized but impactful group. Looking back can move you forward here. Pooling and analyzing your historic user data can help you build a framework to identify behavior-based groups. Live data can then be fed into that framework, letting you constantly monitor and understand your nudgeable groupings.

APPLYING THE NUDGE

Nudging players to become spenders ultimately comes down to optimizing communication, price points and even level design. You can start by looking at and refining the nudging your game is likely already doing, meaning time-limited offers, push notifications, and those pinch points that suggest to a player that IAP is the solution to progress. The next level comes in augmenting your existing player encouragement systems with game system refinements – ideally at a personalized level. In a match-3 title, for example, with some careful adjustments made to spawn point locations and delivery rates, that game can adapt its challenge to nudge individuals or specific player behavior groups to IAP purchases. Elsewhere you might use pricing localization figures as a basis to layer on personalization, and even add predictive values.

This is all a “permanent experiment” - don’t be afraid to dynamically A/B test, modify prices, and constantly adjust game system parameters to zero in on the nudges that are most effective. Increasingly, you might also want to consider machine learning-based tools which can essentially enable game systems to increasingly self-learn about player behavior, dynamically balance features, and automatically personalize content to nudge IAP spend. Finally, where possible you’ll want to apply your nudging touchpoints and strategies across your ecosystem , meaning not just your native game, but also any other brand touchpoints such as your webshop, Discord server and email marketing.

THE FUTURE OF IAP NUDGING

Ultimately, a shift in behavior of a fraction of a percent of a single mobile game’s audience can make a profound difference to growth, profitability, retention, and more. Subtle adjustments to a game’s choice architecture offer an impactful, direct, highly practicable method for shifting that behavior.

With increasingly capable technology, it’s certainly possible to personalize games for every individual user. That will mean nudging players in all kinds of engagement rich, powerful monetising ways, potentially seeing everything from a given level’s design to dialogue delivery being tailored to individual players. For now, however, economic realities dictate that the focus is on in-game spend, and perhaps most importantly, potential spenders. Become literate today in the concept of nudging players to engage with IAP, and you’ll be priming your company and future games for a future that is already dawning.