We made a slight pivot in this months survey to look at pricing. More specifically, we wanted to get a sense of what a character skin, or emote, or any other in-game add-on is worth from a players perspective.
So, let’s imagine you’re a developer, or product manager at a publisher, or in some role in gaming where you have to assemble a DLC bundle for a game and determine the optimal price. Now, let’s take it up a notch and imagine you have no internal data to help your decision-making process and you’ve been told that purchasing data from an existing company like NPD is just too expensive, what do you do?
You can obviously comb the stores and look at competitor pricing for products that are similar to yours. This is where a lot of people/companies stop, but we'd like to propose a different route. One that will maximize both player and product utility. (1)
Believe it or not, for around $3500 you can quickly get an estimate of what your players would be willing to pay for your bundle, what they would be willing to pay for of each of the individual components in the bundle, and which components you should include in the bundle.
It is a tool that we’ve never seen used in video games, but it’s one of our favorites, it’s the tried and true Conjoint (Discrete Choice) Survey. We like it so much that we created one for a DLC package ourselves so that you would have some general guidance for your next DLC bundle making session.
Quick info on the Conjoint…when conducting a conjoint research project your asking players to make a choice between a variety of product concepts at a variety of prices, and when you’re done you have a pretty accurate picture of how much a consumer is willing to pay for your game, add-on, or DLC.
For our conjoint experiment we included the following components as our bundle options:
Playable Characters: Premium and standard
Cosmetics: Character skin, character tint, Emotes, Weapon skin, Character voice lines
Weapon: Premium and standard
Price: Three prices ranging from $6.99-$14.99
When our survey was complete, we ended up with the following partworth scores for each bundle component: (2)
What you should see immediately is that not every component is desirable to the players we surveyed. This is a big win because you now know which components have value to the player and which do not. If you decide to sell character tints, but your competitor opts for emotes, you’ll drive very little revenue and even worse, your players will be happier playing a game other than yours. And YES, this is real information you can use the next time you are creating a product or bundle for your players!
So, what should we charge for our DLC bundle? Let’s say our bundle is made up of the most valued options: Premium Character, Character Skin, Emotes, and a Premium Weapon. By looking at the extremes of the partworths we find that one partworth (Util) equals $.3. (3)
Now it’s simple, just multiply the total sum of the partworths by $.3 and we find that consumers are willing to pay $8.29 for our DLC package. You can even infer the value of each component in the bundle. A premium character equals $1.74, Emotes equal $3.01, and so on.
So, the next time you want to sell a character for $4.99 and new emotes for $.99, you should probably give it a second thought. Your products will have a higher player utility, and your game will have a higher ROI if you take a look at things from the players point of view.
Comentarios