Mastering Effective Spend Depth in Gaming by Jakub Remiar

Everybody upgrading everything is nice, but it literally won't happen for 90% of the players. Payers.
Not players. Payers.
Okay. As I said, this is very genre-specific.
Some games like, again, Survivor.io, they have pretty straightforward upgrade inventories based on HP damage scaling. So that's of course normal and pretty straightforward.

Then we have stuff like Candy Crush or Puzzlers where we don't have inventories or HP damage scaling or like gold money upgrading.

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ah uh hello hello uh this is two and a half gamers podcast uh again this is one of those solo episodes where we focus on one topic and go through it through kind of a more detail in this kind of learning fashion. So yeah, this time is my turn.
And today I'm going to talk about economies, game economies and spend depth. Like a favorite topic of mine and I guess a lot of people in the industry.
It's kind of a little bit of, I would say, a mirage that everybody keeps talking about, but nobody actually, you know, shows know shows how to do so yeah today I want to go through some kind of practical example and pretty much dive deep into like how these things work get some terms out there and like how to kind of approach some things and yeah let's hope we learn something together okay Okay, so let's roll the presentation. So as I as said the focus will be the economies and their spend depth so what is spend depth by its sense sometimes you can hear these kind of giant numbers associated with certain games and yeah like this game you can spend that much there and so on so forth so this is what spend that basically means is that it's a money value representing the total amount of money the user can spend in a game until there's nothing else to buy that's how we would define spend that this can be a little bit of clunky because you know games especially free-to-play games are content driven so their game is serviced so they add more and more content therefore this number keeps increasing but for now let's kind of stick with this one the more more important term is effective spend because effective spend means a specific set of resources needed to get to the end game access all the endgame content and those are two different terms and yeah before we start you know adding anything into the game let's first try to understand which of these means what on some kind of practical example so what is effective spend that you can think of effective spend as you're pretty much fully upgraded deck on last league in Clash Royale, or fully upgraded deck of characters in Empires and Puzzles, or fully upgraded inventory in Survivor.io, which is pretty much like the set of things that were able to carry you to the end game.
Because you didn't really need to upgrade everything, like all the characters, all all the equipment it's just that like kind of one set so how do we actually calculate this thing and get to the actual numbers the dollars of this um so let's continue uh and stick with clash royale for now so what you do is you go to the anchor prices of the shop every game economy has this

kind of a hard currency if they have a hard currency or could be just a currency and the

basic anchoring meaning the base prices for those like small and high price points where you have

the amount of hard currency that you can buy for real world money this is the connector that's why

it's called anchoring because anchoring the economy to the real world value. What you do is, you know, you check and you see how much it actually costs based on these gems in these values.
Usually there's a discount. So always like the smallest pack has the worst price and a hard currency per dollar.
And then it goes up all the way usually to something like 50 discount on the highest one like those hundred dollar packs so you see it's like pretty much half of it and we get some numbers finally so what we do then is that we go into the content of the game and calculate how much stuff actually cost and how much because now that we know the how much one hard currency gem in the economy costs we can then recalculate it to soft currency for instance that we need for upgrade costs or like how many chests we need to buy or open you know to get all the cards for a specific character to upgrade so suddenly we take all these things and count them up yeah they are they are up And we end up with something like this. Beware, this is an old spend that Clash Royale currently I think is way beyond 120 characters.
So this is just old, but for the example purposes is enough, doesn't matter. So we have here, for instance, let's imagine this, this was done like at the point where Clash Royale is like this.
So we have all the common cards, all the rare cards, all the epic cards, all the legendaries, all to get the 104 cards. And we see that the total shard value, I mean the actual shards that we would need to kind of get in order to get all these cards to fully max level would be something like 14,000.
And then we would need to have also the goal to upgrade those cards,

which would be something like 6,000.

So therefore, if we all count this up,

we see that the whole economy can absorb something like 20,000.

And by that time, if we calculate it hopefully right,

we have everything upgraded.

But this is really everything. And I mean, every single card in the game.
Do we really need that? We probably don't. So if we, again, look at the effective spend depth, because the deck has eight cards.
So we, again, I just created a random number deck here where there's like two legendaries, three epics, two rares, one common. Again, this is just my randomness here.
And by those numbers, you see that it's a completely different number. It's like one-tenth of the original, which is like 2k to upgrade all these.
You also need to keep in mind that in order to kind of get to the end game, you even won't have the cards at the beginning that we now have upgraded in the deck so you need to upgrade also some cards along the way so this number is for this specific game it's probably higher but again nuances we won't go into detail principles are what really what we care about so what i'm just trying to demonstrate here that you see that you still need to count with a much lower number in order to account how strong the economy really is. Because, again, everybody upgrading everything is nice, but it literally won't happen for like 90% of the players.
Payers. Not players.
Payers. Okay.
As I said, this is very genre-specific. Some games like, again, Survivor.io, they have pretty straightforward upgrade inventories based on HP damage scaling.
So that's, of course, normal and pretty straightforward. Then we have stuff like Candy Crush or Puzzlers, where we don't have inventories or hp damage scaling or like gold money upgrading we have levels and these levels usually drive booster consumption because you know we fail we want to skip the fail state get those plus five moves so on so forth so this is a different spend this would be something like averaging out like how much boosters you use per X amount of levels in order to get somewhere, yada, yada, yada.

Much harder to calculate, but

it still has, of course, spend them.

And it's never-ending because they keep adding

40 levels every two weeks now

at 15,000 or what.

Then we have Coitmasters

or pretty much social casinos.

Similar setup where

there's never-ending content where we're still upgrading that resetting city to do soft currency and getting the energy and stuff like that again it's probably possible to calculate just much more harder but again still it's possible it's just depends on how i would recommend to calculate this you assume average player engagement and based on that average player engagement meaning like this amount of sessions per day this amount of like levels played per day roles per day you assume you assume and you balance around that of course once you have the actual game data you double check that and adjust but in the first for like when you start the economy, you assume there's just no other way. Sorry.
So let's continue with the RPG because it's, again, as I said, very straightforward so we can dive deep into it. One thing that I also want to mention is 4X, because 4X has infinite depth economies, meaning that 4X economies work on destruction of property, which never happens in all the other games which is super powerful mechanic meaning that the soldiers that you like takes you so much time to hire them by and like farm resources for they can be actually killed permanently in those battles because again my army gets killed and i don't know 30 of the killed gets moved to the hospital the other 70 gets killed permanently because the hospital capacity cannot accommodate from that so they're dead and i literally lost the progress even if i bought it with money that's why these economies keep getting so money hungry because there's literally destruction of property similarly also to something like eve online where you read about these giant battles on the internet where all the starships and everything can go clash against each other and there's like millions evaporated during the process because it takes so much time to farm for them and then they're destroyed forever permanently so this is this is somehow similar i don't think so that this this mechanic has been um like uh explored properly in other genres forex is is, I think, the only one that's going for it because it's so cutthroat and, again, very specific.
But, again, we won't talk about it anymore, just saying that this is the mother of all economies. Moving on, so let's get to the basic example of something like Survivor.io.
So how we actually create the spend depth now?, now that we know what effective Spandep is, what Spandep is, like how do we increase it? So Survivor.io launched August 2022, if I remember, with six slots in their inventory, and that was it. Weapons were giving you attack damage, the armor, belt, and boots were giving you HP, and that was nothing else.
Six slots just there. Immediately, I guess the team very, very swiftly recognized that this is just not enough because people were kind of buying it off the shelves like there's no tomorrow and getting it to the end of progression, which is the death of any game where you get to the end and there's nothing else to do so they immediately add another inventory which is called tech parts which basically doubled the inventory size because suddenly we don't have just six slots we have 12 slots where there's three more additional slots for attack and three more additional slots for hp with some abilities flavor and stuff like that but what's really important that they just added another progression layer here,

whereas these things have their own gacha,

these things have their own kind of separate inventory.

So pretty much think of it as like doubling the inventory

that you have, like Control-C, Control-V.

You add a little bit more flavor into it,

and suddenly you have doubled the spender

because, again, you need to buy the first one already,

which is there, and then the second one. What what happens afterwards like how do we go from here we create another layer again in this case it was pets which was added later where again because we're scaling the economy with hp and damage the pets gives us hp and damage so we get Pets to choose, upgrade and move around, so on and so forth, merge together on a similar gacha based, like merge gacha based manner.
Again, very simplistic. So I guess you see where this is really going.
Later on, they added outfits. These are a little bit different as, yeah, those are like one time thing i guess and you can really upgrade index straightforward but the important part again which is rescaling hp and damage because when you're adding these progression layers on top of each other the other important rule is that they kind of need to be equal with each other so let's say imagine that your overall player power is like 100 and i don't know 20 is coming from base inventory 20 from tech parts 20 from pets 20 for some something like this because if you just prioritize one over the other players will just go after the best one and ignore the one that's not giving them enough kind of performance for their resources.
So this is also like, beware, like you need to also do this properly. Otherwise, you will kind of make it irrelevant.
So make sure that these things actually impact the player progression in terms of those statistics properly. Yeah, so what happens afterwards, we end up with base inventory.
Again, I'm making this up, but just to give an example, 10k spend depth for the base inventory. Then you get tech parts, which is not a 10k spend depth, so we effectively double that.
Then we have pets, which isn't that robust, but it's still kind of robust, so 8k spend depth. And then we have Outfits, which is 6K spend depth.
So suddenly we add something like 34K, which started as a 10K, kind of easy game. The other important thing to notice here is that because this gets pretty bloated, as you see here, compared to our previous character that was starting with like very low stats.
Suddenly it goes into hundreds of thousands. You need to be aware that at some point these things stop working.
You can just increase the numbers all the time. That just needs to be also interesting functionality to base this upon to have new vectors of progression, not only in terms of stats, but also in terms of skill, in terms of strategic depth, so on and so forth.
Again, it's a content treadmill. So in order to add all these progression layers, you also need to support them with new content.
So it's not only that we add tech parts into the inside layer character is like super strong on the content that already is in the game we need to add also a lot of content that is just much harder because the only way to go against it is again to properly fit your second inventory of tech parts because the content is just so much harder and content that is based on hp damage scaling just so easy to balance because you just increase these numbers of hp and damage and there you go again imagine something like world of warcraft like every expansion they just increase the level cap very like significantly so they create an entry point for new players but it's still same hp and damage and they were already I think once World of Warcraft had

to kind of re-roll the numbers back because there

were just too many zeros which

happens on games that are live

20 years and so on so forth so

yeah this is just very

important to understand

because even though it sounds easy once you

know it like it's not that easy

yeah as I said content

bloat is real so beware because

at some point this hits diminishing

returns and you can just add an

I'm going to go, and then it won't. Another advanced example here that we can go into is Conquest Arial from MiHoYoYo where it's not only like inventories it's also another like gacha based vectors through the event banners because again the content width let's say so we have exclusive gadgets there with characters that are rotated every three weeks and again you can get them only through that time, then they get maybe somewhere in like half a year later or something like that.
And you need to have those characters because those characters are part of the elemental system. And in order to tackle all of the challenges of the game, we need to have different themes and different elements of those characters.
So again, another vector that we added into it, instead of just single inventory for a single character like in Survivor.io. And these characters have, again, many progression vectors because we have the base character with his level.
We have his light cone, which is pretty much based on the same premise as the character itself. Again, another gacha, another specific token that you need to find for fully upgrade, so on and so forth.
Then we have his skill tree. Then then we have his inventory which is another game of itself because these pieces can roll stats that are you know like Diablo inventory where it's like it can roll anything from defense to hp damage critical strike whatever and you're going after the best combinations which has very very low percentage chance to actually roll because you don't want to with, like, a crit piece gear on a defensive character, whatever.
So it gives you a lot of longevity in order to kind of fully equip your character. Then you have Eidolons, which is the duplicates of your character from your gacha, where even though you got the character, it can be just so much stronger where you get these duplicates because it literally unlocks these skills which are very very powerful yeah and as I said

each character represents a team

role so we are not

again only going for like

team dynamic because for instance

here the team is four slots so like four deck

slots but we need different teams

for different challenges and the game even

requires us in some parts

to kind of bring more teams that are fully equipped so So it's not only four, it could be like 12, basically, fully upgraded characters. Suddenly we are talking years, years of playing this game in order to get to this point.
Of course, if we not smash our wallet on the game. So, yeah, this is, again, very important to understand understand because these characters, as they're added into the game, they're usually, as I said, tackling the content of the game.
But again, this is a little bit more advanced part where in Honkai Star Ale and all these quad-based RPGs, you're also going around synergies between these characters, which create multiplying effects. Therefore, it's much more harder and like deeper to kind of go there and to add more content, sorry, more spend depth into the economy because again, with each specific character we can add a lot there.
Okay. Hopefully you learned something today.
Yeah, feel free to let us know in the comments or join our Slack, where we have dedicated channels to that. There's a game design one, for instance, or the general one, where you can ask questions.
But TLDR, just for you know, and what I want you to take from this one, make sure you understand the difference between the spend depth and the effective spend depth, what these two numbers mean for your game and how you can increase them. Make sure that you know how to actually calculate them, how you calculate them against competitor games because that's also a very good metric.
And like, oh, Remo, how much spend depth should my game have? And like, the answer is like, how much your competition or your competitors have in their have in their economy spend. You can go and calculate, do it as a homework, basically.
It's not that hard, but again, it takes time and practice, and it's a great exercise to kind of go. So yeah, make sure that you understand this.
And then once you know this, make sure that you also understand the point here where how these progression layers are added

because it's not just about adding fancy new toys for your character to play with but you also need to add the content to support it so those characters and new toys can be used in content that is actually driving the usage of them that is requiring them because if it's not that then then again, the game fails.

Anyway, as I said, thank you very much

and see you on... that is requiring them.
Because if it's not that, then again, the game fails.

Anyway, as I said,

thank you very much and see you on one of the other solo episodes.

Ciao. Thank you.