This is Part 2 of a 2-part series covering the selling of power in PvP mobile F2P games. In Part 1 we explored some of the more aggressive and blunt tools available for monetizing competitive advantage, and here we cover the ways in which it can be done particularly sustainably, as well as discussing the associated potential player and business upsides.

It’s well known that one of the strongest parts of F2P as a business model is that it enables developers to establish a steady revenue stream that they can then use to keep building out the game, giving the audience more of what they want and continuing to turn players into profits. This virtuous cycle is easier to establish if the methods you’re using to make money are highly sustainable. That is, if the monetization model is palatable to the intended audience and therefore doesn’t cause churn, if spending makes the game more enjoyable, and — if you’re selling power — that doing so doesn’t seriously undermine the core design of the game.

Here we cover methods of selling competitive advantage in PvP F2P games that aim to make the most of this potent but sensitive opportunity, while also tending to lead to the healthy and sustainable long-term outcomes touched on above. To be clear, every design decision has pros and cons, so no choice is fundamentally bad or wrong. It’s more a question of whether any given decision steers you towards or away from your intended player experience for your intended target audience and business outcomes, and whether it needs to be complemented with other design elements that will serve to maximize the sustainability of the whole.

To encapsulate the above point, we took a shot at building the following framework that plots various competitive-advantage-based monetization methods and games/subgenres along the axes of a) audience type, and b) the factor (skill vs power) that generally determines success. Therefore, this framework can be used to get a sense of which methods have historically worked best across different types of audiences, and which methods tend to lead to more skill-based or power-based outcomes. The size of the monetization method reflects how broadly applicable it is.

Please note that each of the monetization methods you see below are methods that we see most commonly proliferating the market, and we will dive into each one of them in the rest of the article. There might be more methods that we haven’t captured here, and we’d welcome the feedback to help with further refinement of the framework! Also, the lilac-colored boxes represent monetization methods we discussed in Part 1 of this series, and we won’t be going over them again (although they are certainly incorporated into the content of this essay).

As an example for how to read the framework — Consistent Power tends to be present in titles aimed at a more hardcore audience. It also tends to lead to the player’s chances of excelling at the game being more heavily governed by how much they’re willing to spend for power. On the other hand, Orthogonal Utility is present in many titles across the audience spectrum, and for the most part it lends itself to skill-based outcomes.

Obviously, game designers can apply many different power monetization strategies to all kinds of audiences, but they should be aware that some combinations are less proven out and therefore come with greater risks attached and more new problems to solve. Keep in mind that some of these games don’t only monetize on power. Cosmetics, progression accelerators, additional content, etc. are almost always in the mix as well. Having diverse revenue streams like this is hugely beneficial.

In many cases, the aggressively monetizing nature of one method can be offset by use of another complementary approach to monetization design. Here are a couple examples:

Clash Royale utilizes Categorical Superiority — or vertical progression — in the form of unit upgrades and a leveled-up player castle. The potency of this is offset by Orthogonal Utility, which ensures that each unit or strategy has an effective counter, and also encourages the player to keep a variety of units upgraded so they can adapt if the meta shifts.

In Rise of Kingdoms, the player gains various forms of permanently beneficial Consistent Power in the form of upgrading their base and researching new technologies. In isolation — if this were the only sink for resources and the only catalyst for spend — this would lead to rampant power growth, but the player can also buy Temporary Power (troops can die/be wounded, which is also a sink). These elements counterbalance one another in a way that ensures continued healthy spend while mitigating power inflation.

In each case, use of one technique strengthens the other.

Before diving into each of the power monetization techniques, note that this essay explores these concepts at a high level in an attempt to give a broad understanding of the various options available when monetizing power. As mentioned before, PvP F2P mobile games encompass a huge array of genres and attract billions of people from a wide variety of audiences, and so what’s written here won’t apply in every case. But this material should help to illuminate the possible merits and deficits of different approaches as they are most commonly implemented. Armed with this perspective, one can then adapt the methods to suit the specifics of the game being designed, accounting for genre conventions and target audience expectations.

Let’s dive in!

Sustainable Power Selling Techniques

Not all of these techniques can necessarily be applied simultaneously, and some are only applicable if the specifics of your game design can accommodate them. We’ll be discussing the drawbacks of each method to round out the analysis.

#1 - Orthogonal Utility

What kind of power do you sell the player if simply giving them better (Categorically Superior) stuff will have undesirable side effects, such as leading to power creep and a pervasive perception of pay-to-win? One option is to sell them different stuff — units, gear, or items that provide them with tactical versatility, interesting decisions to make, and a wider array of paths to victory.

Making the player pay for sidegrades rather than — or, realistically, as well as — upgrades not only mitigates many of the problems detailed in Part 1, but it also broadens the possibility space and facilitates a healthy competitive meta.

The most “pure” example of this is in MOBAs, which allow the player to purchase a large variety of characters, all of which have different abilities and playstyles. Owning a bigger selection of heroes affords the player gameplay advantage insofar as they can choose the “right” one for their team’s makeup (or to counter the opposing team), and it also means they can have a deeper understanding of what different characters are capable of when they encounter them on the battlefield.

However, a player who has emptied their deep pockets to purchase a huge quantity of characters can easily lose to a player who hasn’t spent a cent, because the power the first player bought didn’t make them fundamentally better — it just gave them options, and now they have to execute with skill.

Shooters in general also utilize Orthogonal Utility, in the sense that a shotgun is good for close quarters and terrible at range, while a sniper rifle is the opposite, and all manner of SMGs and assault rifles occupy the space in-between. When it comes to playing the arms dealer, it makes good long-term business sense not to sell the player a better shotgun, but to sell them one with shorter range and higher armor penetration, giving them an interesting choice to make.

To see the impact of Orthogonal Utility, let’s quickly compare the iOS US ARPDAU curves for Call of Duty Mobile and Modern Strike Online. Through Sensor Tower, we’ve established that both titles have similar demographics and gaming interests, allowing for an almost apples-to-apples comparison.

The graph highlights the impact of a new season kicking off in each title, which is typically a catalyst for the introduction of new weapons. In CODM this event is marked by a rise in per-player spend, whereas MSO’s audience exhibits a far more muted response. Both titles feature Orthogonal Utility in weapon selection, but MSO’s aggressive employment of Categorical Superiority dilutes the benefit. It’s not worth collecting and utilizing a wide variety of shotguns, since the only one really worth using is the best one. Meanwhile, CODM showcases a vast array of flashy weapons, each one pre-equipped with a set of attachments designed to ensure it feels distinct, while also affording the player a valuable tactical option.

Clash Royale is another strong example of Orthogonal Utility, with different units playing clearly different and often complementary roles. Supercell’s PvP masterpiece also incorporates deep vertical progression (aka Categorical Superiority), whereby each unit can be upgraded to the point where it will stomp all over its lower-level counterparts. This contributes to a pay-to-win vibe, and the prohibitive cost to heavily upgrade units discourages experimentation due to ladder anxiety.

Regardless, it’s the combination of Orthogonal Utility and vertical progression that makes the game monetize so well, giving it long live service legs in the process. Without the upgrading element, Supercell would only be able to sell tactical versatility, and Clash Royale doesn’t have the same skill depth as MOBAs, so that probably wouldn’t end so well revenue-wise.

All that said, this also highlights one of the limitations of Orthogonal Utility: it can be very challenging to continually give players new and interesting ways to win, because any given core gameplay only has so many levers to pull. One of the cleanest solutions is covered in the next section: Temporary Power.

Of course, your core gameplay needs to be sufficiently nuanced that it can play host to such options in the first place, which is far from guaranteed. The more depth and attributes you have in your moment-to-moment, the more hooks you have to create Orthogonal Utility. Obviously if you overdo this, then you risk alienating a mass audience by making your gameplay impenetrable, but if you can strike a balance, then you’ll be doing yourself and your players a favor well into the future.

#2 - Temporary or Consumable Power

Depending on your design intent, this technique is sometimes controversial, but if the power you’re selling to players eventually goes away, then you have the opportunity to sell it to them repeatedly, at a lower price.

This concept of Temporary Power can manifest in a number of different ways, each of which we’ll explore in turn:

• Time-limited Power
• Formats
• Consumable Power
• Season Reset

Time-Limited Power

Garena’s battle royale, Free Fire (which we fully deconstructed a couple months back), takes the rather unconventional step of not only selling gun variants that are better than the base versions but also slapping a time limit on them. In almost all cases, when a player buys a fancy weapon, they only get to keep it for a matter of days.

So how do the players maximize their chances of winning? They buy numerous upgraded weapon variants over and over and over. This gives the game colossal spend depth stretched out over a long period.

The Time-Limited Power approach hasn’t gained significant traction in the West (yet!), but Free Fire’s incredible success in Tier 2 & 3 regions means it’s likely to be quite compatible with those markets. Further, US is Garena Free Fire’s top revenue generator, which means the strategy has merit in Tier 1 regions too, and it might just be a matter of time until we see the strategy percolating to other games in the same genre.

Formats

Blizzard’s masterful CCG Hearthstone utilizes competition Formats — which allow the use of some cards and disallow the use of others — to ensure that recently introduced sets of cards are desirable. This is a soft form of Temporary Power that ensures players want to keep spending in order to remain relevant (while ensuring their old cards are still useful in unrestricted competitive contexts).

When combined with Orthogonal Utility, this gives players lots of variety in gameplay and allows the designers to create and sell many new cards. If everything was available at all times, shifting the meta would be more difficult and balancing would be a nightmare, but the developers have time-limited and segmented the power, giving themselves options in the process.

This structure was pioneered by the venerable Magic: The Gathering, a physical CCG that’s been selling power in the form of cards since 1993, and which had its best financial year ever in 2021. You won’t find much more sustainable live ops than that.

On the flip side, it is well known that Hearthstone doesn’t have the best long-term revenue trajectory. While there are many live-ops-related reasons for that (which are out of the scope of this article), it also wouldn’t be fair to say that everything Hearthstone is doing is wrong. In other words, I do consider their implementation of competition Formats quite strong and a good way to incentivize repeat conversions, and thereby raise the spend ceiling for players.

Consumable Power

Here we’re talking about power that the player buys, uses, and loses, or at least has a chance to lose. This might sound similar to time-limited power, but the key difference is that players lose the power as a result of in-game activities, versus an explicit system-enforced time limit on the power availability. We’ll look at four varying examples of this approach: 4X, build & battle, extraction shooters, and PvP match-3.

In the 4X subgenre — take Rise of Kingdoms — every unit the player recruits has a chance of being wounded or killed. Now the player has to sink resources in order to either heal or replace that unit, and so the power they paid for was effectively temporary.

Clash of Clans takes this to an extreme by discarding every unit in the entire army each time you mount an assault, whether they survived it or not. This doesn’t make as much intuitive sense as the RoK example, but it clearly hasn’t stopped many millions of players from spending billions of dollars.

One can compare this against Supercell’s other, less successful build & battle title, Boom Beach, which allows players to keep any troops that weren’t lost. This more generous approach is so core to the game that it’s difficult to pinpoint the effect this has on the metrics, although it does have the interesting impact on some players of making them feel worse about their troops being killed.

Regardless, it’s logical to say that — given the two titles are otherwise broadly similar — the more demanding economy design would result in greater spend. And just to be clear, Clash of Clans is definitely the more demanding of the two, where the player has no incentive to ensure the survival of their troops beyond the duration of the battle, and any that go unused essentially result in resource wastage. That pushes players to then generate more resources from the base (which takes time and can then be monetized) so that they can enter and win more battles during their session.

It is quite possible that the Boom Beach team realized this and wanted to present a more "player-friendly" and intuitive design, which resulted in the possibility of a “no casualties” outcome, showcased below. But that essentially means a player can use the same units in more than one battle, making for fewer troop-production-related monetization hooks.

A third form of Consumable Power — and here the definition admittedly doesn’t fit perfectly — is in extraction shooters, where the player might spend to purchase a high-quality weapon and then take it into battle, only to die five minutes later. If they didn’t take out “insurance,” or if the gun was looted by another player, then their precious weapon is gone. This case is arguably unproven because extraction shooters haven’t blown up on mobile, although the success of PUBG Mobile’s Metro Royale mode is likely an indicator of where the subgenre might be headed, and therefore we might see this kind of Consumable Power design become more prevalent over time.

A fourth form of Consumable Power is present in competitive PvP puzzler Match Masters, which utilizes boosters in a similar way to Candy Crush Saga and countless other match-3 titles. The temporary nature of this power keeps the playing field relatively level, since there aren’t any permanent forms of power progression, foregrounding skill as a significant success factor, making it easier for starting players to compete with elders.

Additionally, in order for players to maximize their chances of winning, they need to keep spending on boosters, which mitigates the need for the developers to lean on power creep to stay profitable. Since these special boosters (and therefore the power-selling strategy) are an absolutely core mechanic in Match Masters’ PvP battles, attributing the healthily scaling revenue curve (on downloads that don’t scale the same way) to the booster mechanic design and overall sales strategy is a safe assumption to make.

Season Reset

This technique involves packaging up the competition and purchasing of power into seasons, with the end of a competitive period signaling not only a reset of the rankings, but also at least a partial reset of the player’s power progression state.

EA’s Madden Mobile — initially a primarily PvE title, which later transitioned to a real-time PvP-focused title in mid-2020 — has employed this Season Reset strategy quite sustainably for a number of years, with each reset coinciding with the conclusion of the NFL season. Here the real-world analogue probably makes the power reset quite intuitive and therefore more palatable to the target market.

We can see a gradual overall drop in the spiky heights of the monetization mountains that Madden Mobile has managed to scale with each season, due to a declining audience. But as a business model playing out over seven years, it’s arguably pretty evergreen, especially considering that this title acquires from and retains an almost exclusively North American market.

In the graph above, you will also notice the black revenue line, which is Madden NFL 22 Mobile Football — the new game EA released after shutting down the first one. One might ask why the follow-up title wasn’t able to boost Season Reset revenue with an improved system design utilizing learnings from the previous game. On further investigation, we found that EA wasn’t able to transfer the entirety of the old player base, resulting in only the core audience migrating. That resulted in a much higher ARPDAU trend, but with a much lower DAU baseline — effectively canceling each other out and resulting in revenue numbers that simply carried on the declining trend from the first game.

Interestingly, in the past, EA has cleverly kept the money rolling in despite the impending reset with a “2 for 1”-style offer that allowed players to purchase something towards the end of a season and receive something of equivalent value at the start of the next season as well. This IAP design, combined with players earning valuable functional and cosmetic rewards based on their final season standing, encourages players to continue to invest even when the end is nigh.

Another noteworthy exploration of this approach can be found in Supercell’s casual autochess title Clash Mini, which resets a big chunk of the power progression each season, while also allowing players to keep some of their upgrades permanently. In some ways this can be seen as a method of converting the selling of power into a bimonthly subscription fee - any serious player will be spending to get their competitive potential up at the start of each season, and the overall price can afford to be relatively modest since players are expected to pay it more than once. Powerflix, anyone?

The potential of this approach is demonstrated in the below ARPDAU line. Observe the jump coinciding with the start of each new season. It’s interesting to note that a simple balance and bug fix update was enough to spike ARPDAU as well, so evidently the game’s fundamentals are very much in flux. Since it hasn’t yet left soft launch, Clash Mini’s monetization seems likely to change radically over the coming months. It remains to be seen whether the seasonal partial power reset aspect succeeds, but the pieces in place seem promising.

Temporary or Consumable Power Pros and Cons

Each of these is a clear example of Temporary Power — of the player buying something with the knowledge that it won’t be theirs forever — which is therefore an opportunity to make money from that player repeatedly without them amassing a huge amount of permanent power that creeps up and causes problems over the months and years of a successful game’s live operations.

At first glance, this might appear to be a largely developer-serving approach, but it can have benefits for players as well. For instance, if you know that the player’s possession of power will be temporary, you can sell them a big chunk of something awesome and exciting without it necessarily having that deleterious stacking effect over time.

For some players, temporarily owning a highly desirable thing for a short period (as in Free Fire) would be preferable to very slowly and expensively upgrading something permanent (as in Clash Royale). In this sense it’s a viable, high bang-for-buck alternative monetization approach to the randomized power progression found in many titles. Similarly, like a subscription service, the fee you charge for power access can be much lower because the temporary nature of it means you’re more likely to make that amount of money from that same player repeatedly. Additionally, if an appreciable component of the power dynamic in your game is temporary, then the scope for early players to be able to compete with elder players is greater, since the playing field won’t be tipped quite so far in the mature player’s favor.

Of course, there’s also a major downside to Temporary Power, which is that players are much more likely to spend on things that give them permanent utility. If you look at an offer and you know it’s going to be beneficial forever, it’s very easy to see it as a valuable long-term investment, and therefore convert.

Spending for Temporary Power looks downright ugly by comparison, but if the purchasing of that power earns the player something that they do get to keep — such as an increase in their competitive ranking or a new avatar border that signals their veterancy — then the ephemeral benefit of the spend is likely to be more acceptable. Similarly, if the Temporary Power is being purchased to complete a specific and urgent goal that has a valuable reward, then the fact that it’s impermanent might not sting quite so much.

On balance, a combination of both Consistent Power and Temporary Power is arguably the most viable business model, but the sustainability-enhancing aspects of the latter are critical to consider in the long run.

#3 - Unreliable or Narrowly Applicable Power

If the power you’re selling isn’t always available or doesn’t apply universally — if it’s only useful in specific circumstances — you can sell players much more of it without running into serious trouble. This is because every drop of power they buy isn’t flowing into one big bucket that they can then pour out all over another player in order to drown them and win. Instead, their purchased power is separated into lots of smaller buckets, and sometimes the game hides the ones you want, or a bucket might be filled with water when what you really need right now is concentrated, flesh-melting acid.

Convoluted metaphors aside, let’s explore a couple of different ways that a game’s design can dilute the power, slow the pace of power creep, and make the monetization model more sustainable.

Unreliable Power

Here we’re describing power that can’t consistently be brought to bear on an opponent; it’s there, you’ve paid for it, but sometimes you just can’t find it.

In Free Fire, for instance, you can own 20 buffed gun variants, but it’s the luck of the loot draw that determines whether you actually happen to come across one of your precious upgraded weapons when you’re out and about, searching through randomized spawns.

This fickle access to power not only means the player has to buy more of it in order to maximize their chances of success, but it also means that other players are less likely to be pounded with the pay-to-win sledgehammer. Both are arguably good for your game long-term.

Similarly, if you buy an awesome card in Hearthstone, just having it in your deck isn’t enough to benefit; you need to actually get it in your hand to make use of its potential. Furthermore, the player has to have enough mana to utilize it, so timing is a factor, too.

Essentially, chance and circumstance are modulating factors on how much benefit the player derives from the Unreliable Power they’ve bought.

Narrowly Applicable Power

In Golf Clash — just like in real life — there are an array of clubs the player can buy, but each type is great in one scenario and terrible in most others. The player can spend a bunch on a shiny digital driver, but it won’t count for much when they’re stuck in a sand trap.

In some ways this is akin to the Orthogonal Utility dynamic discussed earlier, but the distinction comes from the fact that the player is being placed in situations by the game, and they have to hope they have the right tool for the job — or they need to have spent enough to ensure that their toolbox is full and diamond-plated to optimize their win rate.

We can compare this against Tennis Clash, where the nature of the gameplay means that only one type of Narrowly Applicable Power — a character and their gear — can be utilized at any given time.

Both games employ a similar monetization mechanism, but the sports themselves dictate its effectiveness. In golf, it is essential to use different golf clubs in different situations to maximize the chances of hitting the perfect shot. Golf Clash takes advantage of this inherent design by incentivizing the player to carry a wide range of (preferably upgraded) golf clubs into the game, so that the player always has something fitting for every situation. In other words, the need to own many different sources of power to succeed in Golf Clash means that players must spend heavily, reflected in that title’s monetization efficiency. Of course, there are many reasons behind Golf Clash’s excellent monetization metrics, but their golf club merchandizing strategy is likely a key contributor.

Meanwhile, in tennis, success in the sport comes down more to the individual wielding the racquet versus the racquet itself. That’s the case in the real world, and Tennis Clash carried on that metaphor to its virtual world. This is not to say that the individual doesn’t matter in golf, but just that different golf clubs affect the shot very differently, and the range of those differences is smaller when talking about tennis racquets.

Unfortunately, the addition of a new character in Tennis Clash has a modest impact on ARPDAU and certainly not a sustained one. It should also be noted that Tennis Clash hasn’t added any new characters between March 2020 and March 2021, and they haven’t added any others since. This could very well indicate that the development cost of adding such a power source isn’t worth the return on investment, and arguably because players simply don’t need them in order to win and therefore don’t buy them.

Narrowly Applicable Power is also present in Free Fire’s character upgrades system which features skills that only impact very specific attributes or only trigger in certain circumstances.

Garena could have made leveling up a character increase their base health or overall damage % — as in Modern Strike Online — and then the obvious next step would have been to give more rare/expensive/new characters higher HP and damage output in order to incentivize acquisition and continued power creep spend. That design choice would have created a Large Power Gap between a low- and high-level character and consequently between a non-spender and someone with cash to splash.

This choice to utilize Narrowly Applicable Power means that it’s still worth having and paying for, but in a way that fragments the power, reduces the sense of pay-to-win, and also gives the developer more opportunities to add numerous new characters during live ops.

Unreliable or Narrowly Applicable Power Pros and Cons

In any of these scenarios only some of the player’s power can be brought to bear at any one time. Therefore, not only do they have to buy more of it in order to optimize their chances of winning, but new power items can be added to the pool without necessarily causing players to drown in its depths.

This approach is highly dependent on the particular subgenre of game you’re making, but if you can make space for it, it will serve you very well. However, if the power is sliced too thinly or diluted too far, players will see it as bad value and they won’t spend, so — as always — there’s certainly a balance to be struck.

Healthy Power Dynamics

So you’ve managed to design a game using some or all of the above techniques. Now, what benefits will that bring to your game in terms of player satisfaction and business upside? (Note that a number of these are effectively inversions of the negative impacts listed in Part 1, so we won’t go into great detail in those cases.)

#1 - Robust Live Service Options

If you’ve engineered a game with many paths to victory — and therefore the player needs to buy many different things in order to win — then you’ve also created a scenario where the game can be added to extensively throughout live ops while reducing the chances that you’ll sail dangerously deep into the rocky waters of power creep. Not only will players remain engaged as you continue to refresh the meta, but they’ll keep spending on the newly added items in order to stay tactically nimble and relevant.

#2 - Lively Meta

Following on from the above, a game that’s rich with sidegrades will likely also lead to a robust endgame, fit to hold players’ attention for an extended period as they explore and endlessly debate the nuances and optimal strategies of the diverse toolset you’ve sold to them. That’s good for long-term retention, positive community engagement, and monetization.

#3 - High Conversion Rate & Spend Ceiling

If the power purchase options available in your game are valuable and reasonably priced, then players are more likely to convert. If spending makes the game experience better — because it gives the player more ways to win (or new things to unlock) — then that player is likely to spend again. And if players are repeatedly purchasing a wide variety of valuable items — because ownership of them is temporary and they need a lot of them in order to maximize their win rate — then the spend ceiling is pushed higher the longer they play the game. All this equates to strong early conversion rates and a very healthy LTV curve. Say those words to any PM and they’ll need a bib.

#4 - Limited Sense of Pay-to-win

The tighter the relationship between money and power, the more of that “pay-to-win” stench will hang around your game. Use of the above techniques can help to act as an air freshener, enabling you to integrate selling of power as a revenue stream while keeping community sentiment relatively non-toxic.

This also has the benefit of ensuring that any wins the player gets are more satisfying, because they didn’t just spend their way to victory, they had to apply themselves as well.

#5 - Esports-Ready

The less pay-to-win your game is, the more fair the competition will be, which means that player skill and strategy will come to the fore as determining success factors. Once that’s true, you might have built something that gamers want to play seriously, and fans might want to watch en masse — a great way to build buzz about the game and acquire new players organically, keeping your UA costs down.

#6 - Healthy Matchmaking

A smaller disparity in power levels between the best and worst players means that your matchmaking pool is contained to a narrower band. This is good news for the time it takes to get into a good fair fight, and — since the worst thing that can happen to a PvP game is for its player base to miss hitting critical mass and peter out — it’s also good news for your game’s longevity.

#7 - Fresh and Evenly Paced Core Gameplay

If your players are buying sidegrades rather than upgrades, they can expect to encounter opponents utilizing a wide variety of strategies, which ensures the core gameplay remains varied and vital. Since you’ve built a monetization scheme that doesn’t rely solely on power creep, you can also be confident that the pace of play that you perfected when you labored over the fundamentals of the core gameplay will still be intact even once you’ve furnished the player with numerous power-spending options.

Conclusion: How These Lessons Can Benefit Your Business

What are the possible collective KPI impacts of utilizing the techniques described above, and of capitalizing on the potential benefits?

• Increased retention: This happens due to a combination of varied gameplay, a sense that the competition is “fair”, tighter matchmaking pools resulting in shorter wait times, and the fact that spending on the game makes it more enjoyable while maintaining core gameplay pacing.
• Sustained spend: This results from the increased need to spend in order to remain tactically relevant and maximize chances of success, and the temporary nature of power resulting in repeat conversions, with potentially bigger bang-for-buck.
• More viral growth: This flows from the lively meta that exists when there are many ways to win, the resulting esports potential of the game, and the relatively low toxicity of the large community that can grow around a low pay-to-win and highly watchable game.

Monetizing power in a competitive setting is undoubtedly complex business, but it’s potentially also incredibly lucrative. By utilizing some of the more sustainable monetization methods described here, by ensuring your business model is compatible with your target audience, by choosing the right approach for your particular subgenre, and by utilizing complementary tools to maximize both short- and long-term success, hopefully you can strike the right balance. And hopefully this essay series has helped you do just that.

A big thanks to Thomas Baker for writing this essay! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.