Product Teardown 10 — Monetization Structure of Marvel Avengers Alliance by Tencent
I am not a Marvel fun. Actually the only marvel movie I watched is The Avenger. I do, however, play a lot marvel theme games. One of them is Marvel — The Avengers Alliance, developed and published by Tencent.(I also recommend playing Marvel-champions by KABAM, Marvel by Netmarble. All of them are great games.)
One thing that always interests me as I am playing games is how the game make money. More specifically, how the game monetize its uses? Or how the game set up goals and then encourage people to pay to achieve those goals?
In this post, I am going to analyze the monetization structure of Marvel — Avengers Alliance, and also, why the monetization strategy is designed is such way.
Core Loop and Gameplay
The game is designed around a very simple core loop : battle and level up. Players consume energy to start a battle, and gain experience after each battle. There is a time to control energy refilling, which creates a short play session that player can enjoy within a few minutes, and at the same time, creates a waiting period to avoid play fatigue. There are three types of battle modes: a campaign mode in which players experience the game’s story line, a PvP mode in which a player can challenge another player, and a PvE mode where you advance as long as you can until you are defeated by big bosses. In each battle, you get coins, crystals, hero elements, all of them are needed for leveling up. And in leveling up, you consume coins, crystals and hero elements. The resource system is balanced in this way. It’s a common core loop.
The gameplay is very simple. You choose your heroes and they will fight . During the fighting, you can choose which power-ups/boosters you want to use so as to create more damage on enemies. There is an auto-combat button. If you press that button, your heroes will fight completely automatically, choosing the best tactics on their own. (PS: if you choose auto-combat, you literally do nothing but watch the game runs itself. Lots of Chinese games are designed in this way. I haven’t completely figured our why. I think there should be a product teardown on this topic)Actually, the gameplay is so simple that I think it becomes boring after I played several campaigns. Again, it’s not an unusual gameplay.
Goals and Retention
The core loop immediately create two goals — a short term and long term goal. In the short term, players want to win the battle, or experience the storyline; In the long run, they want to level up so that they could build the best team among servers, or become the best player among friends. As we discussed previously, the gameplay becomes boring after several repetitive battles, especially when you choose auto-combat mode, so I think the long term goal is hard to achieve because players will lost motivation of engaging even in short term goals. The long term retention is a big concern.
To fight against that, Avengers Alliance adopts a RPG-like system to help players creating goals in games. The heroes are designed within a tier system( see picture).
First, heroes have their own stars. The more star a hero has, the more powerful he/she is. Second, for each star, there is a tier system, T1, T2, T3. The higher tier a hero is in, the more powerful he/she is. Laster, for each tier, there is a level system. T1: L1 ~ L15, T2: L16~ L40, T3: L41~L80, etc. Although hero ( avatar) doesn’t change anything ( visual appearance, outfit, weapons, etc), players do see their avatars changes every time they level up.
In this way, there are at least three goals for player to pursue: get a higher star hero or level up to higher star rank, level up into higher tiers, and get to higher levels.
Monetization Structure
Unlike western games which have very simple currency systems, Avengers Alliance has a complicated one. Diamond is the hard currency. You need money to get diamond. Coin, crystals, medals, hero element are all soft currency. They are closely interconnected to form a strong monetization structure.
Now let’s look at how the leveling up system use resources and where those resources are generated.
Take “Hero Element” as an example. To level up, hero elements are need to fuse a hero from low star tie to high star tier. There are two ways to generate hero elements: 1) recruit( play casino to get it) or 2) purchase in in-game store using golden or purple medals. Those medals can be purchase by playing casino again or got through PvE or PvP which consume energy.
Ideally, we want hero elements are generated through PvP or PvE because those are tied to core loop. By sending players back to the core loop, developers create an interaction that drives players to experience the game content, get the loot, level up, and then back to game content again. In this way, players become more and more addictive to the game(both emotionally and physically), become more and more familiar with game content/character, etc. That’s the way to increase product lifecycle. Indeed, this is the most challenging part of game design- create a fun game experience that people want to come back!
In my opinion, gameplay of avengers alliance is not designed very well. It becomes boring. Sending players back to the core loop won’t help them level up. There comes the recruit / casino / lucky draw part. You don’t have to play the repetitive PvP/ PvE to level up. Now you can play casino/ lucky draw to get necessary materials. While solving the boring problem, it creates another problem. Players don’t need to go back to core loop to level up. As a result, they don’t experience the game content, they don’t interact a lot with the gameplay, and they play the game without actually playing it. This definitely doesn’t help to create user loyalty, long term retention, brand image and IPs.
On the other hand, casino/ lucky draw gives developers many leverage to monetize users. Look at the boxes that are highlighted in black in the picture. By limiting the loot a player can get from PvP/PvE, game developer can force people who want to level up to play casino to get what they need. Furthermore, by setting the probability ( RNG — random number generator), developers can decide how much many a play need to pay to level up to the next level. This is the trick of monetization structure of avengers alliance, as well as of other Chinese games. The same logic applies to tier and level system.
What about PvP/PvE? What if I keep playing PvP /PvE to get necessary materials? PvP/PvE consume energy. Energy is refilled by a cool down timer. So there is a certain amount of PvP/PvE you can play. If you want to shorten the cool down, you have to use diamond to refill. But there is another limit on diamond refill. To go beyond that, you have to purchase a VIP account. Event with VIP account, there is still a limit. Soon or later, you probably have to go with the casino way.
Why monetization is designed in this way
The system has a very long and deep path that contribute to monetizing and it is very aggressive. This is a very complicated monetization system.Can it be simpler? The answer is yes. But why it is designed this way. Here are the reasons, I think
(1) Chinese developers are influence greatly by Japanese developers. Casino /lucky draw is a common monetization way in many Japanese games. When one game is introduced into China, many others follow.
(2)It is effective. Period. Developers have more levers to pull when monetizing in this way.
(3)Weak game design. Generally speaking, game designs of Chinese games are weak. By weak I mean it is not fun enough, it is not engaging users in long term, it doesn’t create a strong purpose for people to come back to game. Weak game design creates goal setting problems.If you have a weak game design and you tie monetization to the core loop, you arenot going to retain user very well, let alone monetize them. By creating sub-goals such as badge, gems, developers can move users towards achieving those goals and monetize them along the way.
(4)User preference. Engaging game design usually gives users a lot freedom to choose. Players need to think hard and come up with multiple ways to arrive a winning strategy. This need play invest time, emotion, intellectual in the game. Chinese users lack the experience of western users who play pc, console game since childhood. Many of Chinese players play their first game on mobile. Facing in-depth gameplay, Chinese users usually don’t get it. They want something quick, easy and fun. A casino way is very easy to understand. Moreover, it allows new users to catch up with advanced users very quickly, as long as they’re willing to put money in.
In the long term, I doubt this type of monetization strategy will dominate Chinese games. As player become more and more familiar with games, play more and more good titles, they will favor a more in-depth and engaging gameplay, not just putting money in and leveling up.
