Should you Exclude Payers from Watch 2 Earn

What you'll learn

Economy Strength and Player Wallet Size

Player Differences and Incentives

Potential for Payer Distraction

Strategic Implementation of Watch 2 Earn

In the past we have made several articles on the watch 2 earn mechanic and how it works.  In this post we want to tackle a particular aspect of watch 2 earn — whether or not you should provide this feature to your payers.

The initial gut reaction may be to simply say “why not include all users - more money making opportunities”.  However that may not be exactly correct.

The real answer depends on several variables and aspects of your game.  When deciding whether or not to expose your payers to a watch 2 earn mechanic, these should all be taken into consideration

Economy Strength / Player Wallet Size

One of the biggest factors to consider is how strong your economy is and the health of your players wallets.  If your game is one where users currency and wallet size influences their game play relevant to other players (such as a poker game) then you will want to be extremely careful about allowing users to artificially bloat their wallets.

Another aspect of wallet size is around creating demand for the watch 2 earn mechanic.  If you player wallets are often bloated with plenty of extra currency, your users, both paying and free alike, will have very little reason to engage in your watch 2 earn mechanic.  Your view count may be very low and your conversion rate even lower.

Player Differences

Paying users often expect a little bit of special treatment.  This can often be handled by giving them better access to premium content, early releases and other such components.  If your watch 2 earn components are very loose and expose the rest of the user base to a method to place them on an equal footing with other payers, then that may damage the incentive for payers to pay.

For this reason we also advise implementing a watch 2 earn strategy that places appropriate limits on how much a non payer can earn from the feature within a given time period.  This will help to mitigate how much influence the feature has on your valuable paying user base.

Payer Distraction

Another critical consideration is whether or not your watch 2 earn mechanic will get in the way or distract from your in game currency sales.  If that is the case then you could end up launching a feature that costs you $1 to make $0.10 on return.  Let’s look at an example.  If you have a user who is an active payer there is a high probability that when they run out of in game currency, they will likely purchase additional in game currency.  When that user runs out of coins, you have the choice to present them with a dialog to either purchase coins or watch a video to earn free coins.  If the paying user chooses to watch a video then you have just earned maybe $0.50 when you could have earned $10 on selling them a larger currency package.

Conclusion

So - should you exclude the watch 2 earn mechanic from your payers?  Possibly not but just make sure that you do not encourage your paying users to use the watch 2 earn mechanic over their traditional paying mechanisms.  For example you may want to still allow them to interact with the feature, but don’t advertise it.  Instead advertise the watch 2 earn mechanic to players who have not paid yet and likely will not pay within your game.