Chase Shi, the director of product at Blizzard Entertainment, shared his thoughts on creating a successful F2P game with over 2,000 LinkedIn followers.
In Shi’s post, he outlined three key ingredients needed in making a F2P game successful:
- Design a product with emotional value
- Build a game with longevity for a target audience
- Design the monetisation – not the shop
According to Shi, the duty of a product manager is to make sure the valuable design/dev efforts are not wasted. He stated product managers can accomplish this by asking the right product strategy questions:
- Who are we making the game for?
- What is the player journey (D1-D30+)?
- Can existing players enjoy the game for years?
- Do new users want to join the game after years?
Gameplay meet monetisation
Shi didn’t fail to note his definition of a great F2P game as, “A coherent experience where gameplay and monetisation are tightly intertwined. In another word, monetisation is a part of the gameplay.”
He went further by stating that project managers should start the monetisation design even during the prototyping phase. He states, “Monetisation design is not just about the shop IAP design”, and, “The perfect monetisation is presented to players in an elegant way where the shop is clean and simple but the incentive-to-pay is deeply rooted in the economy and game systems.”
This post by Chase Shi is coming only weeks after the successful monetization of Diablo Immortal, a F2P game by Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo Immortal earned $49 million in its first month, with over 10 million downloads.
Despite the established success and Chase Shi’s LinkedIn post, Blizzard Entertainment won’t extend Diablo Immortal’s microtransaction strategies beyond mobile.