Roblox Game Monetization Explained Like You're 5 transcript

Roblox game monetization explained like you're 5 years old, man. In this video, guys, I want to show you how we took our game from making around 175k in the past 72. Okay? It was at 1k CCU. This is the exact same game that you saw in my last video. It was on a run rate for around 6k USD per month. And recently, we've almost doubled CCU, more than doubled CCU, and revenue has gone up like 3x. And it's on a run rate to make close to 15k a month.

And I'm going to show you guys in this video how I think monetization, what our best-selling dev products are, why I set them up the way I did, how you can use basically the same mental model and thought process to apply to your own game. Let's dive straight into it. So, here is what we did. And I'm I'm a big proponent of this. You guys see me talk about this in a lot of my videos is number one, we looked at the data.

Okay? Simple, straightforward, dude, right? I go here. I go look at my top products. I look at which one is selling the best. Okay? I go sales in descending order. What's my best-selling product? Now, what was the best seller? In our game, there's a speed mechanic. You run. Okay? Best seller was plus 10 speed. I'll just put it like that. Okay? That was our best seller. Now, what's the simple logical thing to do? Oh, well, let's just add plus 30 speed as a dev product.

Let's add plus 100 speed for our whales. Okay? That might seem straightforward, but like, dude, when I tell you when I first started working on this game, we only had plus 10 speed as a dev product. Okay? So, we just added more options, made it more expensive. Simple, straightforward, and that became our new best seller, okay, for a hot minute. Now, what happened next? I was in the game observing player behavior. Okay?

Talked about this in last video. Talked about qualitative data. Simple, straightforward. Play your game and just see how people are playing it cuz your game won't always be played the way it was intended to be played. What I mean by that is our game is not really an AFK game. It's a very active game. You have to run in between the servers to collect data. But what I saw is a lot of players were playing AFK. Which kind of made no sense to me cuz I'm like, "Dude, you can't even collect data AFK." Some of you guys might think, "Oh, just add an auto collect game pass." Here's something I want to talk about.

You have to be careful with the products you sell cuz this obviously seems like simple solution, add auto collect. But what's that going to do? That could potentially wreck the entire economy of the game. Okay, bro? So, we didn't add auto collect. All right, spoiler. What I noticed though was these players that were AFK, they were getting wrecked by PvP. What do I mean by that? Basically, in our game you have bats, like Stealing Brains Right, you can smack other players, you can steal data from their servers, and these AFK players were having their data stolen like [ __ ] crazy, okay?

Also, if you played Oil Empire, this is also a mechanic in the game where you can steal gas from people's refineries. Okay. So, what do we do? I looked at different games in the genre and I saw One other thing I want to mention is that there were confirmed complaints in the feedback. So, again, if you go here, you go to audience feedback, okay? There were complaints in here about "I'm tired of being attacked and stolen from and targeted, okay?" Now, this isn't something that we just added in.

Like, the stealing mechanic was always part of the game, but we just noticed this was a friction point for players where their [ __ ] was getting stolen. A lot of them were AFK. It was frustrating for them. So, what we did first is we added a base lock feature. Okay? You guys have seen this in Stealing Brains Right's classic, right? Every 60 seconds or so, you can lock your base, no one can get in. Okay, we added that to our game.

Oil Empire doesn't have that by the way. I took this from a different game in the in the same genre, okay? And then what did we do next? Of course, we added a dev product where you can lock your base for 24 hours. Now, I'm a huge proponent of dev products versus game passes when it comes to consumables. What do I mean by consumables? Consumables basically means can be purchased again and again. If you think about e-commerce, some of the biggest brands in the world are CPG brands, consumer packaged goods.

These are your toothpaste, these are your supplements, these are anything that can be purchased again and again. This also works really well in Roblox, okay? So, 24-hour base lock, we added it in literally 2 days ago and it's already our top seller now. Like if I go here and I go to overview, okay, and I go to dev products, you'll see that's last 28 days. We'll get into this, 2x offline earnings. But you'll see last 7 days and we literally added this product yesterday, bro.

Lock for 24 hours, okay? This is huge, guys, because there's a stat when it comes to your home wrecks. If you go to acquisition, you go home wrecks. There is this stat called 7-day spend days per user and it's exactly what it says here, the number of unique days individual users spend Robux in your experience over 7 days. This basically means if you have a user, how often did they spend Robux over a 7-day time period and consumables really pump this stat because they can buy the 24-hour lock today, they can buy it tomorrow, they can buy it the next day and the next day.

Same thing with 2x offline earnings, which I'm going to get into, okay? So, again, with this mental model that I have showed you guys in the last video where it's research, form hypothesis, launch update, check results, research, right? What I did is some competitor analysis. If you look at sell lemons, very common in other games as well. It's 2x offline earnings. And again, not a game pass, it's a consumable. Meaning, if they buy it today, they're not going to have it tomorrow.

They're going to have to buy it again tomorrow, okay? So, saw that a competitor was doing it, I wanted to test it. Our original game design was to have 2x offline earnings be a game pass. This is where a lot of people go wrong. They think, okay, this is super valuable 2x offline earnings or 2x cash, things like that. Let me make it into a game pass. But, you're hurting your stat here when it comes to 7-day spend days per user.

You want to experiment with consumables. This is just what I've experienced. This is what is it literally every time we add a new consumable that solves a big friction point in the game, it always becomes a new best seller, okay? I remember saying to David, like, bro, watch 24-hour lock become our new best seller. So, start thinking in the world of consumables. Sell lemons, this is I can almost guarantee their best selling dev product.

Okay? Turn it into a dev product, boom, 24-hour lock became our best seller, okay? Um it's actually our first best seller, so ignore that. Anyways, last thing I will say here, guys, is improve your purchase pathways, okay? What the [ __ ] does that mean? Okay. Let me give you an example. In our game, we had cash, okay? How can the player buy cash? This is the way it was previously. The player could only buy cash via opening the shop icon.

Okay? In the heads-up display, in the HUD, okay? You guys see this? It's literally in every single incremental tycoon, every single game has that shop icon where they open and they see cash packs, okay? This was previously the only way player could buy cash. What did we do? We added this little guy. This little plus icon, okay? Now, if you tap this plus icon, this is now a new way to access the cash shop. If they click this plus icon, it opens the cash shop, okay? now we have two purchase pathways.

What do we do next? We added a third purchase pathway, okay? Which basically, what would happen is if a player went to go buy something in the game where they don't have enough money, they would get this error, right? You don't have enough money. Now, I've talked about this with devs in the server and asked them, "Hey, if they don't have enough money, should you just directly open the cash shop?" The overall consensus is no, okay?

It can be very annoying. It can hurt your play time. And again, something you want to think about is when you're creating these products, what is the impact it's going to have on my other stats, okay? If I have a 2x offline earnings, I need to make sure that my economy long-term of progression compensates for that, okay? Cuz you don't want to wreck your in-game economy. Now, back to this. We had this pop up. Someone went to go buy something, they didn't have enough cash.

It says, "Error, you don't have enough money." Okay, what did we do? We simply had it where the second time after they see this error, it will show the cash shop. So, the first time it's just like, "Hey, error, you don't have enough cash." Second time it's like, "Hey, error, you don't have enough cash." The third time they go to do it, it's like, "All right, buddy. Do you need cash? Obviously, you need cash. Here's the cash shop." And we directly open the cash shop on the third time they go to purchase something and don't have enough cash, okay?

And this pop-up where it goes straight to the cash shop only happens, I think we have it three or five times per play session right now, so it's not super intrusive, but it's there for players that don't realize it. So, what do we have now? Now, we have three purchase pathways to this one dev product, okay? Now, purchase pathways, they can be UI, they can be physical parts in the world, which I'm going to get into. But, the more purchase pathways, the better.

Usually, not all the time. You're going to want to experiment, but just think about what is intuitive for the player. This plus little cash thing, I saw this in tons of different games, not in Oil Empire. You guys know our game's heavily inspired by Oil Empire. But, this is why it's important to study other games and see what mechanics they use and just form a hypothesis and think to yourself, will this work for our game?

And [ __ ] test it, bro. For us, this drastically improved cash sales, okay? Cash is not our best-selling product. I think the one bill cash is, but we were basically selling no cash before we improved the purchase pathways, okay? Now, one more thing I want to mention that I've come to learn, that's been taught to me, is the placement of the actual dev products themselves is very, very important, okay? So, we added this lock feature, right?

When David first designed this, the way it was set up was, let me do like a bright yellow, okay? The way it was set up was this free lock was previously right where the dev product is here, okay? But, I basically told him to swap them, okay? Cuz this is where the player enters their base right here, right? So, this is where their foot traffic is going to be. This is where they're going to be walking a lot, okay? So, since we put the 24-hour lock right here, they're more likely to see this than if it were over here where the free version of it is, if that makes sense.

So, you want to put your products where the player is going to be walking the most, okay? And these are commonly referred to as POI, okay? Point of interest, okay? This is where you want to put your physical dev products and create that new purchase pathway. It's not just in the HUD, it's not just in the UI, all right? You want to make sure that your dev products, again, are really close to where majority of the foot traffic is going to be happening in your game, okay?

That's what we're talking about when it comes to placement. Now, one last thing I want to say to wrap up this video. This is what I noticed with our top-selling products, okay? Our best-selling products directly solved a problem {slash} pain. This is classic just consumer psychology. You see this in e-com. Products that rip are products that solve a pain point. So, let me show you guys what this looks like for ours our game.

So, I almost said our store. Uh plus 30 speed, what problem is that solving? The problem is I don't want to have to wait and grind and that's the pain of effort, okay? This product is relieving this pain. Okay? Very simple, straightforward, but just keep that in mind when you're creating your products. One bill money, okay? Same exact problem. It's the pain of effort. I don't want to have to grind and get all this cash.

I have the Robux, why can't I just buy it? Again, you want to be careful when you are having anything related to your economy because you can completely destroy your game's economy. Okay? You don't want to just make it like one bill money is like nine Robux. Like, that's going to cook you, bro. Trust. 24-hour base lock. What was the pain that this was solving? I don't want people to steal my stuff while I'm AFK. Right?

Very simple, straightforward. This is now our new best-selling consumable. 24-hour base lock solves a direct pain. Okay. Limiteds. This one is interesting because you might not think, okay, it's it's not it's not a pain, but technically could be related to a pain, right? What are limiteds? In our game, we have RGB antenna, RGB server. They are by far our best-selling antenna and servers. Why? Because there's limited stock, limited inventory.

We say, "Hey, there's only 100 of these for sale. There's only 150 antennas for sale." And the pain that it's solving is I don't want to look like a filthy casual when I'm playing. I want to flex on everyone. Okay? Interesting, right? 2x offline earnings. What pain is that solving? Well, this is the pain of missing out on huge gains, right? Think about sell lemons. You come in and like, "Dude, I've made 85 trillion, or I could double it?

Man, I don't want to miss out on that, right?" And again, it's the timing and placement of when these dev products actually show, because in our game, for the collecting offline earnings, when the player walks over this part to collect their offline earnings, okay, right here, that's when the prompt pops up and says, "Hey, do you want to 2x that?" 19 Robux. It's cheap. And you get twice as much data as you would have previously, okay?

Now, one last thing I'll say to wrap this up is products should feel like a must-have, not a nice-to-have, okay? Basically, what that means is they should be solving a pain. This can vary genre to genre. I'm not going to pretend like I'm an expert in every genre, I'm definitely not. I'm still [ __ ] learning, bro. I literally, you know, this is one of the first games that I've helped hit this amount of revenue, okay?

And I'm just sharing with you guys everything that me and David implement along the way, what became the best seller, the thought process behind it, and ultimately just comes back to this again, which is research, form a hypothesis, launch an update, check results. Did it work? Yes, keep it. If not, revert it, okay? Check results is not just did I make more Robux. You want to also see, did this dev product absolutely cook my playtime?

Did it absolutely destroy my D1? Did it hurt my D7? Okay, did it hurt my session time? Did it hurt the first-time user experience? All these things you want to keep an eye on, all right? Hope you guys got value from this video. This is everything that we've been learning as we are scaling this game, and uh if you have any questions, let me know. Also, Discord link will be in the bio, pinned comment, always. So, that's it.

Peace and love.