Mastering Effective Spend Depth in Gaming by Jakub Remiar

Speaker 1 Everybody upgrading everything is nice, but it literally won't happen for like 90% of the players.

Speaker 1 Payers. Not payers.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 As I said, this is very genre-specific. Some games, like

Speaker 1 again, Survivor.io, they have pretty straightforward upgrade inventories based on HP damage scaling. So

Speaker 1 that's, of course, normal

Speaker 1 and pretty straightforward. Then we have stuff like candy crush or puzzlers where we don't have inventories or HP demi scaling or like gold money upgrading.
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Speaker 1 Hello, hello, uh, this is two and a half gamers podcast.

Speaker 1 Uh, again, this is one of those solo episodes when we focus on one topic and go through it through kind of a more detail in this kind of a learning fashion.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, this time it's my turn, and today I'm gonna talk about economies, game economies, and spend depth. Like, uh

Speaker 1 favorite topic of mine and I guess a lot of people in the industry. It's kind of a little bit of a I would say a mirage that everybody keeps talking about but nobody actually you know shows how to do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So let's roll the presentation. So as said, the focus will be the economies and their spend depth.
So, what is spend depth

Speaker 1 by its sense?

Speaker 1 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 and so forth.

Speaker 1 So, this is what spend depth basically means: is that it's a money value representing the total amount of money a user can spend in a game until there's nothing else to buy.

Speaker 1 That's how you would define spend depth.

Speaker 1 This can be a little bit of

Speaker 1 clunky because you know games, especially free-to-play games, are content driven, so they're game as service, so they add more and more content. Therefore, this number keeps increasing.

Speaker 1 But for now, let's kind of stick with this one. The more important term is effective spend depth, because effective spend and means a specific set of resources needed to get to the end game.

Speaker 1 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 a practical example so yeah what is effective spend-up you can think of effective spend up as your pretty much fully upgraded deck on last league in clash real

Speaker 1 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 kind of were able to carry you to the end end game that's like because you didn't really need to upgrade everything like all the characters all the heroes 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

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 so let's continue uh and stick with clash real for now so what you do is you go to the anchor prices of the shop.

Speaker 1 Every game economy has this kind of a hard currency, if they have a hard currency or could be just of 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 bag has the worst price kind of hard currency per dollar and then it goes up all the way usually to something like

Speaker 1 50 discount on the highest one with 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 costs 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 of these things and count them up yada yada yada and we end up with something like this uh 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 it's enough doesn't matter so we have here for instance let's imagine this this was done at like

Speaker 1 at the point where clash royale is like this uh so we have all the common cards all the rare cards all the epic card on the legendaries all together 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

Speaker 1 and then we would need to have also the gold to upgrade those cards which would be something like 6,000.

Speaker 1 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 calculated it hopefully right, we have everything upgraded.

Speaker 1 But this is really everything. And I mean every single card in the game.
Do we really need that? We probably don't.

Speaker 1 So if we again look at the effective spend depth, because the deck has eight cards, so we again I just created created a random number deck here where there's like two legendaries three epics two rares one common again this is just my kind of randomness here

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Principles are what really we care about.

Speaker 1 So, what I'm just trying to demonstrate here is 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,

Speaker 1 everybody upgrading everything is nice, but it literally won't happen for like 90% of the players.

Speaker 1 Payers, no payers.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 as I said, this is very genre-specific.

Speaker 1 Some games, like

Speaker 1 again, Survivor I/O, they have pretty straightforward upgrade inventories based on HP damage scaling. So, that's, of course,

Speaker 1 normal

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 and so forth.

Speaker 1 So, this is a different spend-up. 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.

Speaker 1 Much harder to calculate, but it still has, of course, spend-up. And it's never ending because they keep adding like 40 levels every two weeks now at 15,000 or what.

Speaker 1 Then we have Coinmasters,

Speaker 1 or pretty much social casinos uh similar setup where there's like never-ending content where we're still upgrading that resetting city through soft currency and getting the energy and stuff like that again

Speaker 1 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 ref for like when you start the economy you assume there's just no other way like sorry

Speaker 1 um so let's continue with the rpg because it's again as i said very straightforward so we can you know dive deep into it uh one thing that i also want to mention uh is forex because Forex have infinite depth economies, meaning that Forex 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 hard and buy and like farm resources for, they can be actually killed permanently in those battles.

Speaker 1 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 for that, so they're dead.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Similarly also to something like ETH Online, where

Speaker 1 you read about these giant battles on the internet where all the starships and everything can go clash against each other.

Speaker 1 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 somehow similar.

Speaker 1 I don't think so that this mechanic has been

Speaker 1 like explored properly in other genres.

Speaker 1 Forex is I think the only one that's kind of 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.

Speaker 1 Moving on, so let's get to the basic example of something like Survivor.io.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 how we actually create the spend depth now, now that we know what effective spend up is, what spend depth, like how do we increase it so survivor io launched um

Speaker 1 august 2022 if i remember with six slots in their inventory and that was it weapons were giving you attack damage uh the armor belt and boots were giving you hp and that was it nothing else six slots just there uh immediately i guess the team very

Speaker 1 very

Speaker 1 swiftly recognized that like 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 debt 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 cards 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 so control v you add a little bit more flavor into it and suddenly you have double the spender because again you need to buy the first one already which is there and then the second one uh what happens afterwards like how do we go from here we create another layer again in this case it was pets

Speaker 1 which was added later where again because we're scanning 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 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

Speaker 1 uh later on they added outfits these are a little bit different as uh

Speaker 1 Yeah, those are like one-time thing, I guess. And you can really upgrade index straightforward.

Speaker 1 But the important part, again, which is we're scaling 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.

Speaker 1 So, let's say, imagine that your overall player power is like 100%,

Speaker 1 and I don't know.

Speaker 1 20% is coming from base inventory, 20% from tech parts, 20% from pets, 20% from 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.

Speaker 1 So this is also like buyer beware, like you need to also do this properly. Otherwise, you will kind of make it irrelevant.

Speaker 1 So make sure that these things actually impact the player progression in terms of those statistics properly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so what happens afterwards, we end up with base inventory. Again, I'm making this up, but just to give an example.
10k span depth for the base inventory.

Speaker 1 Then you have tech parts, which is not a 10k span depth, so we effectively double that. Then we have pets, which isn't that robust, but it's still kind of robust, so 8k span depth.

Speaker 1 And then we have outfits, which is 6k spend depth. So suddenly we add something like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 34k,

Speaker 1 which started as a 10k kind of easy game.

Speaker 1 The other important thing to notice here that because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That just needs to be also

Speaker 1 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 so forth

Speaker 1 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 can just so easy to balance because you just increase these numbers of hp and damage and there you go again imagine something like a 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 and so forth.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, as I said, content bloat is real, so beware because at some point this hits diminishing returns and you can just add another stat-based layer and like, okay, this will work forever.

Speaker 1 It won't work forever. It will work to some degree and then it won't.

Speaker 1 Another advanced example here that we can go into is

Speaker 1 Oncastario from Mihoyo, where

Speaker 1 it's not only like inventories, it's also another like gacha-based vectors through the event banners because

Speaker 1 again the content width, let's say. So we have exclusive gachas there with characters that are rotated every three weeks.
And again, you can get them only through that time.

Speaker 1 Then they get maybe somewhere in like half a year later or something like like that. And you need to have those characters because those characters are part of the elemental system.

Speaker 1 And in order to tackle all of the challenges of the game,

Speaker 1 we need to have different teams and different elements of those characters.

Speaker 1 So again, another vector that we added into it instead of just a single inventory for a single character like in Survivor IO.

Speaker 1 And these characters have, again, many progression vectors because we have the base character with his level.

Speaker 1 We have his light cone, which is pretty much based on the same premise as the character itself.

Speaker 1 Again, another gacha, another specific token that you need to find for fully upgrade so on so forth then we have his skill tree then we have his inventory which is another game of itself because these pieces can roll stats that are you know like a 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 end up 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and as I said, each character represents a team role.

Speaker 1 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 required us in some parts to kind of bring more teams that are fully equipped.

Speaker 1 So it could not, it's not only four, it could be like 12 basically, fully upgraded characters. Suddenly we are talking years, years of kind of playing this game in order to get to this point.

Speaker 1 Of course, if we not smash our wallet on the game. So, yeah.

Speaker 1 This is again very important to understand because these characters, as they're added into the game, they're usually, as I said, like tackling the content of the game.

Speaker 1 But again, this is a little bit more advanced part where in Honkai style and like all these code-based RPGs, you're also going around synergies between these characters, which creates like multiplying effects.

Speaker 1 Therefore, it's much more

Speaker 1 harder and like

Speaker 1 deeper to kind of go there and to add more content,

Speaker 1 sorry, more span depth into the economy because, again, with each specific character, we can add a lot there.

Speaker 1 okay

Speaker 1 hopefully you learned something today

Speaker 1 yeah feel free to let us know in the comments and in or join our slack where there's always kind of we have dedicated channels to that like there's a game design one for instance or the general one when you can ask questions but tldr just for you know and kind of what i want you to kind of take from this one make sure you understand the difference between the spend depth and effective spend depth what these two numbers mean for your game and how you can increase them.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And, like, oh, Remo, how much spend depth should my game have? And, like, the answer is like, how much your competition

Speaker 1 or your competitors have in their economy spend them? Like, you can go and calculate, do it as a homework, basically.

Speaker 1 It's not that hard, but again, it takes time and practice, and it's a great exercise to kind of go.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, make sure that you understand this. And then, once you know this, make sure that you also understand the point here where

Speaker 1 these progression layers are added.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because if it's not that, then again, the game fails. Anyway,

Speaker 1 as I said, thank you very much, and see you on the one of the other solo episodes.

Speaker 1 Ciao.