How to Create a Monetization Strategy for Your Game

Want to build a game business or just finance your creative lifestyle? Here’s a high-level look at developing your monetization strategy.

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Figuring Out Your Strategy

You might already have a game you want to make in mind, or maybe you’re still figuring out what you want to do. For the sake of this article, I’m going to bucket games into two different types:

• Live service games (designed to keep players continuously engaged)
• Standalone games (designed for 1 to a few play throughs)

If you still need to figure out what type of game you want to make, you should consider current player sentiment, what you’re familiar with, and your development resources. Do you have the interest or even the resources to support a live game and to keep creating content? Do you want to balance an economy? What do you want to be known for?

Monetization Models

• One-time purchase: players pay for the game and that’s about it, maybe DLC
• In-app purchases (IAP): resources can be purchased in store or in the flow of the game
• Subscriptions: a one-time recurring cost to players
• Battle passes: a time-bound, progression-based purchasable pass
• In-game marketplaces: creators (or players) and consumers drive the marketplace and your game takes a cut
• Ads: in-game ads that earn from advertisers

Do Your Market Research

If you already know the type of game you want to make, take a look at similar games in the genre and analyze them. It helps to make a list of games you expect to compare to and analyze what’s in them. It’s helpful to know:

• How is it priced?
• How long is the game?
• Is it replayable?
• What’s the aesthetic?
• What does the user interface or flow look like for purchases?
• What mechanics are they using for purchases?
• What monetization mechanics are players in that genre already familiar with?

I like to collect a backlog of store user interfaces so I can analyze the prices, content, and mechanics of each and identify trends for the top revenue games in the genre.

Brawl Stars In-App Purchases

You should price your game and it’s purchases accordingly to the genre you’re in and what players will expect. You can always discount any full price later, and you should! Always be experimenting with discounts whether you have an in-game store or a single, full price on Steam.

Take a look at Sable on Steam:

They’ve priced their game at a decent price for the genre and the amount of gameplay, and change the discount based on trends and sales. A tip I picked up is that reviews on Steam typically account for 1–3% of sales of a game.

This tweet shows that genre is pretty important in how earnings could look for your game.

Iterating on your Strategy

Once you’ve figured out what your strategy is, don’t forget to:

• Create a goal. Like x amount of purchases per user, or per day, or in total.
• Model your assumptions in a spreadsheet to find the gaps. Do you need more items sold, more users, different mechanics, or do you need to change the pricing?
• Experiment with discounts
• If you have creators in an in-game economy, can you give them extra levers to sell their goods, like ads or tips?

I’ll also leave you with the idea that you can list other goods for sale that are related to your game, like the Celeste soundtrack

or Neko Atsume’s phone wallpapers

Happy game making!