Thoughts on Player Education, Progression, Conversion and Retention

[spring trellis]

Idea: Playing our games should be an education in economics. Slowly guiding free to play players into our economic and fun universe by keeping their upfront investment as small as possible should be our goal. While they improve their playing skills and have fun, they should learn how ownership and a DAO can improve on their existing experience with games and game companies.

Background:

We need to accept that most new players don’t like to invest in game items besides cosmetics and want to experience the full and fair game play without being asked for additional payments beyond the upfront cost of the game.

On the other hand they know that in order to make a game and for them to get new games, the game company needs to make money.

They also like to win and make good money from their skills, whatever else they tell you. They just don‘t want to be manipulated. They want a fair world, this is why they play in a game or want to be in the Metaverse and not in the corrupted real world.

If we can therefore slowly educate them and show them the benefits of ownership and a DAO instead of a traditional game company and do this while they play for free or almost free, we can maybe convert them into traders/investors/land owners/DAO members.

Details:

Let’s view our games from the perspective of a gamified education in economics.

We assume our players just heard from Illuvium, start a free run and have lots of fun catching T0 Illuvials.

When they are done with a run, we should show them what they have caught/won and what it is currently worth on the IlluviDex market.

They will be surprised that there is someone who would pay for their Illuvials.

Basically we are matching a free to play gamer with a crypto person, who is already used to paying for game items and knows the value of ownership.

The DAO could also be the buyer in case there is no initial market for T0 Illuvials, just so that they can sell it for a small amount and learn from this experience.

So we let them sell their T0 Illuvials on the IlluviDex for fuel. Maybe it is enough to pay for their next run or they need to match it up with some of their own money to prevent boting.

They can now slowly build up their inventory and become more and more entrenched in our universe.

But what if they don‘t like to pay for their next runs?

Maybe we can offer them to play with the inventory of someone else? The owner of the inventory agrees to share a percentage of whatever the free player catches, the rest is kept by him, but our free players get a chance to advance as players and develop their skills without spending any or much of their own money.

This sounds crazy, but it is something Yuga Labs is doing right now with DooKey Dash quite successfully. Rich owners of Bored Apes find Pro players or friends (e.g. the best Fortnite Player Mongraal) to play the DooKey Dash mini game for them and agree to share the future wins with them. Once the Pro Player finds out about the fun and earnings potential they buy their own Sewer Pass so they can play on their own and get all earnings for themselves. Player conversion at its best.

But back to Illuvium.

As a kind gift for new players they get free fuel from the owner for their next paid run with his inventory and so they start their first free/paid run.

They were successful, caught a few high tier Illuvials and now they can keep some, but the rest goes to the owner of the inventory they played with. There are of course lots of details that would need to be fleshed out here.

The better player they are, the more the owner of an inventory might be willing to pay for their next runs and be willing to share with them, so they have to add less of their own money and have higher earnings.

This also gives players from low wage countries a chance to spend according to their ability. They need to grind and trade up until they can afford higher priced runs with their own money, so they can keep their catch fully to themselves.

[spring trellis]

I fully agree with the basic assumption that the market should decide how much a run in the Overworld costs.

But I have some concerns in regards to bringing new non-crypto players into our ecosystem and long term retention.

Even telling new players to play our game for free and them having real fun, won’t necessarily make them pay for their next run.

They would need to calculate how many Illuvials they can catch in a paid run and how much they would be worth now or later to justify paying for a run.

And if they are not used to such thinking (they are non crypto people or not even free market advocates!) they might never start a paid run to find out.

Even 3 USD can be too high in low wage countries or in the current high inflationary context. And a run could become pretty expensive, once the crypto people start figuring out the potential of Illuvium.

Sure they can play for free while the price is too high for them, but maybe they would have paid 1 USD instead of let’s say 20 USD. But now they are playing for free or not at all and are lost to us revenue-wise.

Maybe they never even come back to play, because they don’t watch the price for fuel, so they don’t notice when it becomes cheap again.

Am I missing something that solves this problem already or maybe it isn’t a problem at all?

[spring trellis]

Yuga does something interesting with DooKey Dash:

They let everyone pay for a Booster Pack with ApeCoin to increase their score by a certain percentage and have a few other improvements in gameplay for a certain amount of time.

But as long as you have a Sewer Pass, which you can borrow from someone else or buy, you can play the endless runner game for free as often as you want and you still have a chance to be in the top ranks without any booster.

Translated to Illuvium it could mean buying land as the Sewer Pass equivalent.

You (or someone else you let play for yourself) can now play all tiers in the Overworld for free and without time restriction and have a (small) chance to capture that rare Illuvial even with a Tier 1 land and good skills.

Your land produces fuel or you buy additional fuel, which allows you to pay for improvements in the Overworld e.g. you can forge better equipment for your ranger, which increases your chance to capture better Illuvials.

Some of these improvements could also be time restricted e.g. spend x amount of fuel to increase your weapon efficiency for x minutes while you play in the Overworld.

Basically the difference to the status quo would be unrestricted game play with a small but realistic chance to catch that top Illuvial given enough time and skill and a chance that can be increased with real money in as small increments as the player can afford.

[spring trellis]

I should also add that there must be an entry point into Illuvium that has a small fixed price like usual games have.

Maybe land buying can become a subscription based buying process, where they pay 5 USD per month until they own a basic Tier 0.5 land, but they can already start playing from day 1 on.

Compare this to a Netflix subscription or a battle pass where they own nothing after they stop the subscription.

This way they earn part of the earnings from other players, experience real ownership in a game DAO and produce their own fuel for our games and even own the Illuvials they catch on their land or the open land.

Buying a piece of land is almost like buying a game upfront and then playing for free and the entry price should be as low as possible.

[spring trellis]

I would like to make this point a bit more clear:

The Overworld currently tries to make the trader/investor and skill based game player happy at the same time. People with both mindsets and skills are hard to find.

An investor style gamer would of course spend some time walking around in the good looking peaceful regions like Crimson Waste with great music and sound to find that rare Illuvial hiding behind a plant.

But he would probably prefer to pay some extra money to go on an automatic Illuvial hunting mission in ILZ or pay some hard core gamer to play in a more skill based region e.g. ShardBluff to find that Illuvial for him.

The skilled hard core gamer wants that challenging region and focus completely on improving his skills, but not think about money or investment at this point.

[spring trellis]

This is the same reason why I would advocate for ILZ to become THE mobile Illuvium game, especially for investor style gamers.

We should be able to catch Illuvials just in a more abstract and mobile friendly way compared to Overworld. I see ILZ as the Pokemon mobile app, but on your own land instead of walking around in the real world in AR.

The Illuvium DAO could sell as many land plots as their are potential buyers, if their is an upgrade path (credits? step by step e.g. pay for exploration of mines and sediments to gain access to more resources?) from Tier 0 to Tier 1 and potentially higher.

The Overworld would become the 3D version of Illuvium, potentially also showing your ILZ land and its buildings in a future version.

I just see the motivation to own your land and build it out with the potential to capture Illuvials as such a big draw to the Illuvium ecosystem and ILZ and Overworld to be a good separation between different style of gamers.

[spring trellis]

We could also create a market to match up investors with skilled gamers.

An investor could start a bounty hunt and agree to pay for expenses and a certain bounty to find a rare Illuvial.

A gamer gains by removing cost from his game play and having real goals to play for. The only risk to the gamer might be a decrease in reputation score or skill ranking, if he/she fails to find that Illuvial.

It is a kind of guild system, but built into the game economics. One might also say the gamer is abused and is paid for grinding, but if the game is fun, then having real paid goals to play for isn‘t really work.

It is fun.

And it adds a social element to a single player game. An investor could use the ILZ mobile app to contract an Overworld gamer to find that rare Illuvial and use chat to stay in contact. The investor could even watch the gamer stream his runs.

[spring trellis]

The best real world analogy would probably be horse racing. Rich people own horses and let someone else breed them, skilled jockeys ride their horses. Everyone does what he/she does best and earns good money. Which could actually be a nice game idea for Illuvium. And a first version doesn't even have to be 3D, a simple but good looking mobile game to attract players and work out game design issues might just be right.

[forest fern]

There are quite a few points you've made in this manifesto, I'll address them individually.

1. You're basically describing a scholarship in most of this first post. Player without assets gets paired with an investor with assets, and there's some kind of sharing of earnings. I'm generally not a fan of this model. Having the ability to rent Illuvials is reasonably compelling, but making a scholarship a main mode of gameplay would be bad. If building a competitive deck costs more than about $100, our price point is likely too high, and we're blocking too many players from participating. I'd advocate for a lower price point instead of a scholarship model.

2. You mention giving a kind gift to new players. If that gift has fiscal value, people will abuse that system. The core of this idea is solid, but the implementation you suggest is extremely exploitable. There are better ways to entice new players to participate in the paid economy.

[forest fern]

You're coming at this from the perspective of an investor. People pay for games and get no financial benefit from paying for games. The same can apply to Illuvium, with the caveat that you own your assets. If the game breaks down to a spreadsheet of "Can I realize EV in a run", things are not working as intended.

Price points are definitely something that can be discussed, but you're assuming a lot here considering there isn't official pricing yet. I'd likely advocate for pricing comparable to mobile games, as the price points mobile game dev companies set are based on years of market research. Typically the entry point for a mobile game's paid experience is between 0.99 and 1.99. I'll reiterate that pricing has not been set yet, so we can probably withhold judgement on whether it's too expensive until pricing is set.

[forest fern]

This sounds like an insanely good deal for landowners, and really not a good deal for anyone else. It's a fundamental change to the game's economics, and IMO not a change that would help onboard players beyond the first 20k or so. I'm not in favour of making land into a "you eat for free" pass. The functionality of land is pretty well defined, and was when people purchased it as well. It produces Fuel, and you have a chance to generate Blueprints.

At the end of the day, is giving a bunch of stuff away to land owners for free going to be good for the DAO? Will it increase revenue? I don't believe it will.

[forest fern]

An idea like this is certainly interesting to me, as we discussed here: #🗻〕land-owner message

I like the idea of allowing IL:Z to exist with an economic end-game, but to have that end-game apply to everyone, including non-T1+ land owners, albeit on a lesser scale than T1+ owners.

[spring trellis]

Thanks for reading through this and your good responses. I don't expect to have the right solutions and even less expect them to be implemented. I just felt the need to write them down and for the council to know them. What happens next should be left to people who have a better understanding of the plans for Illuvium. By the way the example with Yuga and DooKey Dash is not necessarily around land ownership, but about bringing new players not accustomed to crypto, ownership and economics into their Yugaverse.