Pocket Gamer.biz, one of the leading games business sites, has included opinions from three Adrian Crook & Associates‘ designers in their latest Monetizer Mavens article (part of their ongoing Mobile Maven series).
The Mobile Mavens are a “panel of experts drawn from all sectors of the mobile gaming industry” to give their opinion on particular topics.
Our guys gave their thoughts on which games had integrated monetization into the user experience well so far this year.
First up was Wes Leviton. Wes has great respect for Defender of Texel by DeNA.
“DeNA has developed and refined a process of creating low production cost content by way of competitive events that feeds and sustains an eager player base of long time, highly engaged players.”
“Perhaps the most impressive aspect of their event execution is that there is always a special event for players to engage with, complete with new heroes and fighters available for purchase.”
“I would encourage anyone looking to create competitive revenue driving events to spend some time with Defender of Texel. The design of their PvP and PvE events, coupled with their layered leaderboards and rewards structure is truly brilliant.”
Next, Jordan Blackman. Jordan gives his two cents about the need to bring out your inner athlete and keep the content rolling, if you want to get paid. He uses the example of the long running Game of War: Fire Age.
“Just like the perpetual motion machine, the dream of an app that just keeps making money without putting energy into it is just that, a dream.”
“Sure, design your game to keep content affordable to produce and easy to integrate. But stepping off the content treadmill is also stepping off the gravy train.”
“EA took a page out of Clash of Clans’ book, starting the player off with plenty of hard currency, with the opportunity to earn more via achievements. This eases the player into the game and shows a more mature approach to paid user conversion than we’ve seen in the past from large console developers on mobile.”And finally, Kevin Oke. Kevin brings in Real Racing 3 to show how “a fun, highly polished game with beautiful graphics, impressive track designs” can keep a player engaged by spending hard and soft currency.
Real Racing 3 offers many areas to of upgrade, repair and skip if paid in hard currency. “This does two things. It gets the player used to the instant gratification of being able to pay their way past grinding, and helps to drain that wallet full of hard currency they were given during onboarding.”
