1. Infrastructure
Previously, we mentioned three types of commercial activities in top global casual games: Battle Pass, Tiered Purchases, and Promotional Events.
These three activities are essentially essential for every casual game:
Battle Pass
A combination of free and paid tiers, setting about 30 reward levels, each corresponding to different battle pass experience points.
On one hand, it motivates players to continuously earn battle pass experience in the main game, and on the other hand, it rewards players with core resources such as items, health points, and tokens.
These rewards are then used to gain experience in the main game.
To obtain better rewards, one needs to purchase the paid tier. This system enables a self-sustaining cycle of resource acquisition and usage.
Tiered Purchases
Leveraging players' desire for free items, tokens, and health points, free items follow paid items in a tiered presentation, requiring the purchase of paid items to continue accessing free items.
Promotional Events
Utilizing players' desire to obtain items and health points at a more favorable price, powerful promotional events are launched in scenarios where users have a strong need, such as after a game loss when there is a great demand for items and coins, stimulating impulse purchases.
Beyond these time-limited commercial activities, there is also a store.
The store offers a rich combination of purchases, an indispensable feature in casual games.
Battle Pass, Tiered Purchases, Promotional Events, and the store form an important part of the real-money purchase system in casual games.
Real-money purchases, after all, involve the actual expenditure of real currency. When making a payment, players need some psychological preparation. The purchase process involves activating the payment system, entering a password, and the path to purchase is relatively long. Various issues may arise due to network problems, leading to payment failures or players regretting and exiting the payment process midway.
In response to real-money purchases, game manufacturers also offer token purchases as a supplement.
After purchasing tokens with real money, these tokens can then be used to buy the needed items and health points.
When spending tokens, the process is almost painless and unnoticeable. There's no loading during payment, nor is there a need for password confirmation; just a click, and the tokens immediately convert into items, health points, or moves.
The ways to obtain tokens are also quite diverse, including winning them from main and side game levels, obtaining them through various event rewards, or by helping teammates to gain health points.
Once the means of acquisition are plentiful, spending them becomes even more seamless. It doesn't feel like spending money, so there's no burden.
The above are the two basic payment systems in casual games: the real-money system and the token system.
Both systems complement each other. Real-money top-ups provide real income for game manufacturers; the token cycle, with its various acquisition and expenditure channels, provides a satisfying experience and painless spending. When tokens are insufficient, real money is used for top-ups.
These two systems are the infrastructure within the game. Like the saying "to get rich, first build roads," once these systems are well established, how can we make players willingly pay?
2. Player Motivation
From the perspective of motivation in "The Art of Game Design": players generally have two motivations when playing games, one is the pursuit of pleasure, and the other is the avoidance of pain. Naturally, game designers will grasp these two motivations to design games that suit them.
Of course, humans are complex systems, and the motivations for doing anything may not be just one or a few. Therefore, the corresponding games are also complex, adapting to various human motivations.
However, for the sake of simplicity, we can slightly simplify and analyze from these two motivations why we pay for casual games.
2.1. The Motivation of Pursuing Pleasure
Royal Match is a match-3 game. The initial levels are effortless, providing a very satisfying experience. However, if it continues to stay in this simple pleasure, after a while, players will find it tasteless, as the marginal utility decreases.
Later levels will continuously add obstacles, and the board layout will also change, making the levels increasingly difficult.
At the same time, hard levels and super hard levels will increase the difficulty further. This makes passing levels more challenging.
The types of levels in Royal Match include: Normal Levels, Hard Levels, Super Hard Levels, King's Nightmare, and Bonus Levels.
Normal Levels: Moderate difficulty.
Hard Levels: Hard levels appear at level 45, and subsequently at every level ending in 5. These levels are quite challenging. After passing these levels, the activity tokens are multiplied by 3 and issued.
Super Hard Levels: Hard levels appear at level 49, and subsequently at every level ending in 9. These levels are quite challenging. After passing these levels, the activity tokens are multiplied by 5 and issued.
King's Nightmare: A special type of level, usually with a story scenario. Many of Royal Match's advertisements use these levels. This level only has 50 coins, with no other activity tokens available. This level can be skipped.
Bonus Levels: Bonus levels can collect a lot of coins and are generally not difficult.
It seems that the more challenging levels are the hard and super hard levels. However, as the game progresses, more obstacles appear, and the combinations become more numerous, making even the normal levels quite challenging.
To pass these levels, generally, items are needed.
Royal Match has 3 types of items, classified on the Royal Match official website as follows:
Power-Ups: Mainly items that can be synthesized from the same color pieces on the board, can be used directly on the board.
Boosters:
Items that can make your level passing easier, which can be purchased or obtained from events.
Divided into Pre-level Boosters and In-game Boosters.
Among them, Pre-level Boosters are selected from 3 items from Power-Ups. The names, range of action, and activation methods of these three items are consistent with Power-Ups. It's just that they can be purchased and placed on the board in advance, without needing strategic synthesis. (This is how Royal Match handles it, other match-3 games are slightly different.)
To pursue the pleasure of passing levels, items can be purchased before and during the levels.
Pre-level boosters can be purchased before the level starts, and once purchased, they are placed directly on the board when the level begins.
In-game boosters can be purchased during the level, and once purchased, they can affect the level.
These items are purchased with tokens, and the purchasing process is almost unnoticeable as long as the tokens are sufficient.
If the tokens are not enough, you will be redirected to the Shop, prompting you to purchase recharge tokens.
2.2. The Motivation of Avoiding Pain
Mainly to avoid the pain of loss.
If a level is failed, a lot will be lost.
To avoid these losses, after a level failure, you will be prompted to spend coins to add 5 moves.
This utilizes the "Loss Aversion Principle."
Loss Aversion is a core concept in behavioral economics, introduced by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in Prospect Theory. It describes the human sensitivity to losses being significantly higher than the preference for equivalent gains, i.e., "the pain brought by loss" is approximately twice the "joy brought by the same gain."
The core view of this principle is that people are highly sensitive to the loss of what they already have.
In the game, this is very intuitively reflected in the winning streak mechanism, i.e., reset upon failure.
Royal Match has 3 very classic winning streak mechanisms:
1. Pre-level Item Winning Streak Mechanism—Butler's Gift
"Butler's Gift" is a three-stage winning streak mechanism that allows players to receive pre-level boosters at the start of a level.
The more consecutive levels a player wins, the more power-ups they receive at the start of the next level.
Winning once grants the first stage gift, where players will receive 1 rocket and 1 propeller at the start of the level.
Winning twice grants the second stage gift, where players will receive 1 rocket, 1 propeller, and 1 TNT at the start of the next level.
Winning three times or more grants the third stage gift. Players will receive 1 rocket, 1 propeller, 1 TNT, and 1 light ball at the start of the level.
If you fail, regardless of the stage, the rewards are reset, and you can only accumulate from stage 1 to stage 3 again.
2. Super Light Ball Mechanism—Super Light Ball
When you reach level 292, you will see the entrance to the Super Light Ball.
To obtain the Super Light Ball, you must pass 10 levels or rounds.
When you activate the Super Light Ball, you will double the effect of the light ball. (The Super Light Ball will replace the original light ball's position. The light ball can only eliminate 1 color of pieces, the Super Light Ball can eliminate 2 colors of pieces, and when combined with other items, the effect is also double that of the original light ball.)
As long as you do not fail any levels, the Super Light Ball will remain activated.
When you fail a level, the Super Light Ball will reset.
You need to start over and pass 10 levels or rounds to reactivate the Super Light Ball.
When the game tells you that you have failed a level, you will lose Butler's Gift, Super Light Ball, and some players are likely to spend 900 coins to buy 5 moves, allowing them to successfully pass the level.
3. Peripheral Event Winning Streak Multiplier Mechanism
Peripheral events also set some winning streak multiplier mechanisms. For example, the Archery Arena event.
Archery Arena is a limited-time event with 50 players competing.
During the event, players collect targets by defeating levels, and their rankings are determined based on the number of targets collected.
Normal levels can collect targets at a 1x multiplier. Players can also collect additional targets by challenging hard and super hard levels.
Players can increase their multiplier by winning streaks, thus collecting more targets. Winning 2 times can get a 5x multiplier, winning 3 times gets a 10x multiplier, winning 4 times gets a 20x multiplier, and winning 5 times gets a 100x multiplier.
If a player fails a level, their multiplier will reset.
When the Archery Arena ends, players will receive rewards based on their rankings.
When the event's winning streak multiplier and other winning streak mechanisms are all at risk of being lost, there is a high likelihood of wanting to recover these losses, thereby using tokens for purchases. If tokens are insufficient, then real money top-ups will follow.
The above are the reasons why players are willing to pay.
The main game being fun is the most fundamental and crucial point, other aspects such as the well-established commercial system and alignment with user motivations are the driving systems. To make players willingly pay, these systems must complement each other, and none can be missing.
