How Duolingo’s new gamification mechanism convinced me to pay
I have been a Duolingo power user for 3 years now. My longest streak on Duolingo is 345 days (till this very day, I am still impressed by myself with that ;) ). I never paid a dime during that time.
But that changed in Duolingo’s March update for me. I paid 60 bucks for the whole year. Even I was fascinated with how quickly I was compelled to pay. So here, i want to break down how that happened a bit more here. At the core of this simple attempt is ‘monetization’.
Disclaimer: I call it March update because it was the new mechanic updated in march for me. I have also come to suspect the new mechanic probably wasn’t released to all users all at once. Some versions may have gotten it a lot earlier. I am not a Duolingo employee so I can’t say for sure. But from a data point of 1 stand point, let me just go with that.
What’s Duolingo?
For those who don’t know, you can check it out here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/duolingo-language-lessons/id570060128
It is current the #2 education app on the Apple App Store. You can use it to learn whatever language you’d like. It has 842.2k ratings on app store. Assuming 1 in 100 leaves a rating, we are looking at a user base of 84 million across the globe.
It’s an excellent feel good app. Many may argue that its not the best way to learn any language. While it’s may be true, the biggest draw is how simple it is to help you establish moments of daily accomplishment. And that feels good.
The way it works is that language lessons are organized into units and groups. Finishing a set amount of units per day awards you things commonly found in other gamified systems such as points, status, ranking or alternatives to that. You can make friends and you can compete with strangers. All of these ideas are not new and their gamified systems are inherently tied to prior monetization models which I will break down below.
Previous attempts at Monetization
I haven’t done a full analysis of all their historical attempts. I only have references for the version prior to their march release. I think for the purpose of this discussion. This is enough to highlight the changes in mechanics.
Their general premise of monetization is fairly straight forward. It is a freemium model + ad supported base version. The base app is free with ads. You can pay to get “premium features”. You are upsold continuously to buy the premium features during your time of use, which is daily for me. It got kind of annoying but never annoying enough to convince me to pay.
I am putting air quotes around the words “premium features” because how non-premium the value props felt. The pitch to upgrade to premium because:
- Streak protection or some other in-game mechanics
- Feeling good about supporting free education
Personally, I was already pretty good at maintaining my daily goals and you can get that streak protection through existing in app currency — lingots, they call it. You can earn lingots by maintaining your streak. Lingots can then be used to purchase a variety of items some are ‘skins’ for you in app mascot while others are more functional.
While it was annoying that time I lost my 345 day streak, I quickly restarted the streak again. I am at 150 day streak now. So the first value prop they had didn’t really matter as much.
Now for the second pitch — “feeling good about supporting free education”, while it sounds good on paper, donation along can’t really scalably support the operations of large businesses. (Just to be future proof, it is rare). I considered a few times to support that mission but I still decided not to because paying out of pocket 60 bucks a year was bit much from a donation stand point for me. If it was like 20 bucks, I’d be willing or I’d like to think.
So as a “power user”, I wasn’t convinced enough to shell out in the last 3 years. Then the march release came, 60 bucks because justifiable. Let’s take a closer look at the changes they implemented.
March Release
Hearts system
The biggest change in March for Duolingo is the introduction of this new item “hearts”.
How this hearts system works is that you can still take as many lessons as you want just like before but now every time you have the answer wrong, you’d have hearts deducted. Once you deplete your hearts before the lesson finishes, you’d have to forgo your progress, or worse, give up on your daily streaks. I don’t exactly remember how hearts are replenished but I remember that it was easier to deplete the hearts than earning them. You can still earn them for free but they have engineered a situation where hearts are scarce by teaching me that hearts are expended faster than I can earn them. I need that resource to perform the core action of the app — to learn. The only reliable way to earn them is to pay.
From a user stand point, it was very annoying when this was introduced. Essentially the way I learned these new words, combos, sentences was through repeatedly making mistakes. So now they are taking it away, I was very upset but I eventually decided to stay because I needed those moments of micro accomplishments.
I didn’t decide to pay immediately. I switched over to trying the premium version for free for 7 days. And afterwards, out of my laziness, I just never turned off the subscription.
Additional upsell features through league system
To properly explain this improvement, I’d need introduce more about the league system.
A bit about the league system
About a year or so ago, Duolingo first rolled out this league system, replacing leader boards. Their original leader board system faces the challenges of all leader boards — the top 10 dominate and continuous to dominate while the bottom 50% users never bother to do anything.
The psychology behind this was an interesting one, I originally learned about that through the Coursera Gamification class here (https://www.coursera.org/learn/gamification). The idea is that lowly engaged users, once recognize from the leaderboard that there’s no chance to move up, they just give up.
This is really the fallacy of leaderboards, a feature to motivate the unmotivated but end up reinforcing and making the already motivated become more motivated and discourage the folks who actually need motivation. Not to mention because of this equilibrium state, the leader board eventually becomes very stale in each respective segment. It’s always the same folks at the top changing position and it’s always the same folks who are stuck at the bottom.
I was in the constant Top 3 within that league, while it felt good, I stopped paying attention to it after a few months since nothing really happens.
Then Duolingo rolled out their league system. The idea is really a simple one. As opposed to introduce a long leader board where all users are ranked against each other based on points as seen below.
They instead broke this long ranked list into leagues where users across multiple languages can compete such as the following:
The way this league works is that:
- You start from Bronze league and each league contains 50 contestants.
- If you are in the top 10, you can advance to the next league
- If you are in the bottom 10, you will be demoted
- If you are in between, you will just stay in the same league.
This really worked wonders. Having this set up allows for:
- You are always competing with folks who are in the same range as you are. If you aren’t, the league demotion or promotion system will clean this up overtime. This would ensure that competition would remain meaningful.
- The local leaderboard is always in motion. Some folks are demoted and promoted constantly.
- The promotion and demotion zones provide opportunities of interesting scenarios. If you are at the edge of the demotion zone, you may rush to do a series of lessons and overtake those who just above you and making that guy demoted. Similarly, if you are at the edge of promotion zone, you can pull the same maneuver to advance to the next zone.
Overall, these are really interesting scenarios but folks who are just in the middle will probably just stay there overtime and things will still be stale for them.
Introducing the “XP ramp up challenge”
The idea behind this is that you can earn xps faster by doing the same thing if conditions are met within the allotted time. So if you take advantage of this feature, even if you are stuck in the middle of the league table, you can advance into the top 10 without having to do a whole lot more just like what I did. If without the xp ramp up, I don’t think I’d be able to enter into the top 10 or even have a shot at the no 2 position in the league.
Translating this into layman terms, completing 1 unit of lesson awards you somewhere between 10–20 points. Completing 1 lesson roughly takes me 10 minutes. So if you want to score in the thousands in the traditional sense, you’d have to actually use the app to study thousands of minutes which are hours after hours in a given week (kinda like take a collegiate language class).
So this xp ramp up challenge becomes a golden ticket to those who are stuck in the middle without wanting to do too much additional work to make it to the next league. This is inherently very valuable. Duplingo is certainly aware of this value they are creating to the users. They devised a mechanic to capture the value they have created through “timer boosts” see blow.
What I didn’t explain in detail is that if you fail the xp ramp up challenge within the allotted time, you will not be able to reap the rewards in boost in xp. Here again you can see they have managed to create another situation of artificial scarcity. While I haven’t bought one yet, I can see how tempting it is to actually buy one.
The greatest thing about this page is that it is inserted at a time of maximum user perceived value. I remember at this page I was thinking “boi, I need to get that xp”. The fear of losing at that moment is the highest for me. I am sure that one of these days, I will probably buy again — I already shelled out 60 bucks a year for the premium version.
The fact that the Duolingo team is able to add these innovations to the app really impressed me. There are a lot of things to be take away with the way they are executing innovations that builds habits, interesting interactions.
Learnings
- Creating moments of artificial scarcity is an important moment prior to monetization
- Leader board innovations around leagues and promotion and demotion are very powerful to create a fluid ranking list
- Always insert monetization page at the moment of maximum user perceived value
I really enjoyed writing about this, especially the part around tearing down Gamification mechanics employed by Duolingo. I think none of the tricks they are using are entirely new. A lot has been borrowed from practices of mobile gaming or just gaming in general. These are concepts such as loot boxes, energy refill, ranked challenges and so on. I am fascinated by these mechanics and I want to learn more about them.
