How to make players BUY more

What are your strategies to make the player buy more in-game ?

 

Make the cars unique through logical attributes like speed, handling, etc.
Don‘t make people unlock all of them at once through iaps, have each car be unlockable separately for a smaller price.
Focus on the gameplay, make it interesting to keep players engaged. If they enjoy playing the game, they will be more likely to want to drive better cars.
Spend time refining any driving systems as to give each car a different feel depending on the attributes.

else you will probably have to give more info about your game, because there‘s not much to evaluate

 

The cars are already unique, each of them has its own traction, acceleration, top speed and handling.
They can also buy coins to unlock the cars separately

 

Make a few cool race tracks that the player can buy.
Gamers like games with lots of race tracks.

Also, if you could provide a bit more info about your game, that would help us give you better advice.

 

How can you reasonably expect anyone to help when you've provided no information whatsoever as to your game, monetization model/IAP prices, or analytics?

"I made a cake and nobody bought it.... why?"

I don't know..... maybe it's the wrong flavour for your target market, maybe your cake tastes bad, maybe it smells bad, maybe you used dirt and rocks to make the cake and so it looks unappealing. Maybe you made a sugar-heavy cake and you're trying to sell it to diabetic grandparents... who knows?

The fact that you think adding more cars will fix your problem is an issue. Cars don't attract and keep players... gameplay does - yet you give no overview of your game except for "The game has 24 realistic cars at the moment."

Cool, who cares though?

What can you do in the game?
How much are you charging for IAPs?
What language(s) have you released in?
What platforms are you using?
What is your 3/7/30/90 day retention rate?
What is the average session length?
DAU?
MAU?

etc

Here is some info that might get you started. I would like to help but you provide no information that I can use to potentially figure out how to improve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ_IypauY2g

 

Without knowing anything about your game (other than it has cars), I'd say the best strategy is to make the game better and more entertaining. Installs is a pretty limited, borderline meaningless metric. That's equivalent to how many people walked into your store for the first time. What you really need to track is how long they are staying in your store, and how often they return to the store. If all those numbers are good, then you can start figuring out how to get more sales out of those people.

But if almost everyone walks into the store, and doesn't see anything worth even looking at... figuring out how to monetize people who immediately leave to never return is a pointless exercise. You're not going to get ad revenue, since they aren't coming back to see any, and no one buys items for games they don't actually play.

So since you didn't mention any retention and play time data, I'm assuming you either don't have any or aren't paying attention to it. I'd focus on getting that going so you can figure out what your situation is. If no one does anything but just install and then uninstall, then your first task is to improve the game to get people to play it longer. You'll probably find that improves sales without doing anything specific around encouraging sales. But after you're happy with your retention numbers, then figure out how to encourage more purchases.

My 2 cents at least.

 

Loot boxes aka gacha is the answer to your question.

Don't ever sell any in-app content directly. Sell everything solely through sealed prize boxes which will produce some random low quality content but with a small % of getting best prizes. This way somebody who wants to get one specific prize (e.g., a powerful car) will be forced to spend hundreds of dollars to finally obtain a car which could be unlocked just with one $5 IAP otherwise.
All IAP content should be also available in the game for free, but take years of daily boring grinding to unlock. So that players will be forced to pay again and again to actually unlock anything, while still honestly (and foolishly) believing that the game is 100% free and nobody forced them to buy anything.

If you were earning $1 per day through direct IAPs, you will earn $10 after switching to gachas. And if you were making $1,000 per day, you will make $10,000 with gachas. Disregardful of the quality of your product, loot boxes/gachas will always give you way more money. That's how it works, proven time and again, by countless other games, and yes, it's as disgusting and manipulative as it sounds. But it gets the job done, always.

 

Do your players/customers even use the InApp-Store? Usually, Free2Play games use the InApp-store as a way to let people buy stuff with the currency that can be earned by playing, in order to get them into the store regularly. It's advertising to your audience.

 

Hello guys, thanks so much for your kind answers
So this is the game : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.titisoftware.americancardrivingsimulator
USA-like map with real landmraks, american cars, you can drive freely, collect cash on the road, collect chests on the road (there are basic, epic and legendary chests) with different rewards.
I'm planning on adding some missions too, parking, races,stunts etc

- How much are you charging for IAPs?
- For unlock all cars I charge 18-19 dollars, I compared it to other car games and I think it is normal. For the rest it depends, I have IAPs for as low as 3$ too

- What language(s) have you released in?
- English

- What platforms are you using?
- Android

What is your 3/7/30/90 day retention rate?
- Day 1 17-20%
- Day 7 2%

- What is the average session length?
- 8 minutes

DAU?
- 350

 

This is going to be quite comprehensive so I hope you can find something useful here (and I hope you don't take anything personally).

The fact that you didn't individually list out all of your IAPs is a massive red flag (imo). It tells me you either:

• A) fundamentally don't understand the information you require in order to properly assess and improve your game
• B) you were too lazy to bother listing them and expect a magical quick-fix.

You can't just throw a game on the play store, add some IAPs, and call it a day. Not if you want any sort of meaningful income or community to form around your game. However, it's worrying that even after I listed out some basic info you still gave the bare minimum answers so I'm going to try and help guide you.

So I think it would be best to go through the myriad of issues and address each one individually in terms of complexity:

1) You seem to have no idea about your target market. For a start you need some kind of benchmark in terms of retention/conversion rate etc. This information is available everywhere so you have no excuse not to know. This is from Unite 2020 which can be found on Unity's youtube channel.

*cough* you might want to brush up on your google skills * cough*

Again... this makes me question are you just unaware of this information (and how important it is to being successful) or are you just a bit lazy?



So now with some kind of benchmark you can go about fixing the more serious issues.

2) Providing an "unlock all cars for X" IAP is a bad idea. Your fundamental goal should be to get the player acquiring and customising cars through a variety of different methods (none of which are IAPs)

"So how do I make money?" I hear you ask... well, personally I think you are using the wrong model.

You should have 20 cars or whatever... maybe 1 - 3 are unlocked by default (for a new game). The player can unlock most cars by doing challenges (races, time trials, etc) and then for "super" cars - the only way to acquire them is to "beat" an AI driver in a 1-on-1 race.

Your monetization should be around credits/premium currency and upgrade times to a certain extent.

Allow the player to customise their car (different parts, different colours, etc) but maybe have some kind of "installation time" or "upgrade time" (upgrading an engine from lvl 1 to lvl 2 for example). You could also extend this to premium skins/cosmetics and car-effects (a cooler nitro boost etc)

You could have a "garage" section where the player can customise their cars, by different car parts from an in-game market for cash (or credits) and then go back to free-roam or start a race etc.

You have to give the player a reason to invest in your game. Something to look forward to (and an upgrade system is a solid progression system for long-term retention).

- Players do various tasks (races, free-roam, drag-races) to earn cash and credits (95% cash 5% credits) and unlock cars.

- Players can spend cash on buying car parts and upgrading their car (player installs a lvl 4 engine... takes 7 minutes but can be insta-completed for 20 credits)

- Players can unlock super-cars by beating an AI in a 1-on-1 race.

3) You've apparently stopped responding to reviews

"This is a very great game but please add a minimap to see where I'm going" (7 thumbs up)
"At the start at the game it literally f*cks you up if you don't buy premium jeez" (9 thumbs up)
"I love the game but it keeps crashing when i press pause menu" (10 thumbs up)

I get it.... reading a lot of negative feedback/reviews is tough and demotivating but it's making the issue worse. New players are going to come to the game and see that even though you updated it today(?) you are not replying to some legitimate comments.

"This is a very great game but please add a minimap to see where I'm going"

Do you have a minimap in the game? if not, why? if you do... why have you not responded to that comment saying so?

4) Your game is nothing special and the graphics are "ok" at best. You don't seem to really have much content or reason for people to stick around (8 min avg session is subpar)

5) Consider expanding your audience.

https://unity.com/products/unity-distribution-portal

6) Your store page is bad. (The description is good... but you're wasting image space)

First Image: "Drive American Cars"
Second Image: "Discover Real Life Landmarks"
Third Image: "Drift Challenges"
Fourth: "Collect Chests and Win Awesome Prizes"

Why is "Drift Challenges" third? That's much more interesting than "Drive American Cars". How many people do you think land on the page, see "Drive American Cars" and think lol nope. Never to return...

You only get one impression so show your best content in those premium spaces (the first image especially).

7) You don't really seem to have any gameplay (no races, etc) "just" driving around is not fun (imo).

Ultimately...

I think you have a lot of learning to do in terms of monetizing a game. You can't just expect to go in blind and make money because this stuff is complex.

7) https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityAnalytics.html

8)

9)

10)

 

Thanks so much for your reply, @Havyx !

 

Forgot to mention Unity Remote Config

https://unity.com/remote-config

"Remote Config empowers you to change application configurations remotely in real-time; increasing iteration speed and facilitating deployment and tuning of software."

 

In german, it has one review that says "it's buggy". People who use or consume your product primarily remember one thing about your product: How you made them feel and you don't have a lot of time to do so. TripleA games put a lot of budget in the first half hour, i guess for mobile games, this is less.

Okay, i'm downloading it now. I need to see it for myself.

I did, and i played a few minutes. So my first impression was that the menuscreen seems slow. I dont know how to show fps on android, but its below 25 for sure. Rotating the car on the title screen feels slow. In game, driving the car is the same. I set the visuals to low, still slow, still lagging, still framedrops. My phone is an 2017 Huawei M10, so nothing that good, but the game doesnt look particularly advanced either. That alone would make me delete a game after 2 minutes.

The ui in the menu seems not very thought out. The in game ui has at least 2 buttons that don't seem do anything, and i'm not sure about a few others. Whats the + and - buttons? Those are really small. Using reverse gear seems overly complicated. Is this supposed to be a simulation? For a fun racer, it's too complicated for a simulation it looks too inconsistent like a 20 year old fun racer. I am also not sure whats the purpose of the game. I can drive around and collect money. And then i can buy more cars to drive around and collect more money? The driving is not fun, the controls are annyoing. There's no clear goals, missions or anything motivating.

Conclusion: Okay, i would not buy in your game, as i would not even play your game. A successful game needs a rocksolid core gameplay loop. This game does not have that.

PS: I saw three ads. Enjoy your... 0.01 cent or whatever you get per ad ;-)

 

Thanks for your feedback, @CortiWins

 

This sounds so evil lol

 

Not many people like your game, they aren't going to spend money.

You can still make money from such games, but it has to be through hammering people with ads.

 

True. But when some people see too many ads, they have a tendency to uninstall or delete the game.

 

Only 20% of people come back after day 1, and after 7 days 98% of people have not logged back in to the game. The point here is to extract whatever value you can out of them in the brief window while they are playing.