F2P Design Elements – Data
Driven Advice For Success
Anthony Pecorella
Director of Production
Kongregate.com

Who am I?
• At Kongregate for 5 years, directing our browserbased virtual goods business
• Also an indie game designer, cofounder of Level Up
Labs, created Defender’s Quest and CellCraft

What is Kongregate?
• Open platform for browser-based games
– Flash, Unity, HTML5, Java, etc.
– 93%+ of users already have Unity installed
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15M monthly unique visitors worldwide
Core gamers – 85% male, average age of 21
Core genres: MMOs, RPGs, CCGs, TD, shooters, etc.
Platform level virtual currency, “kreds”
Acquired by GameStop July 2010

What is Kongregate?
• Mobile publisher of Free To Play games for
core gamers.
Synapse Games
LingPlay

Select Developer Partners

How To Succeed On Kongregate
• We have collected data from hundreds of games
over the past few years.
• We provide advice and analysis on a per-game
basis for games we work with, but here we will look
at more general patterns and trends.
• This talk will go through highlights of lessons
learned and advice we’ve developed.
• This advice is of course not unique to the
Kongregate platform and applies more generally to
free to play games, especially in the core genres.

Terminology
• All stats are lifetime
• User / Player: a Kongregate registered user who
loaded the game page at least once
• ARPU: average revenue per user
• ARPPU: average revenue per paying user
• Play: a game session, measured by page loads
• “Eastern European” is broadly used to include
Russia, Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine
– There are of course lots of other countries in Eastern
Europe, but we don’t have any games from them.
Come see me after the talk if you’re interested in
putting your game on Kongregate!

Overview of Kongregate Games
• X axis is the User Rating (a score from 1 – 5)
• Y axis is the ARPU. Top game is actually $10.
• Bubble size is lifetime relative revenue

Overview of Kongregate Games
• X axis is the User Rating (a score from 1 – 5)
• Y axis is the ARPU. Top game is actually $10.
• Bubble size is lifetime relative revenue

Overview of Kongregate Games
• X axis is the User Rating (a score from 1 – 5)
• Y axis is the ARPU. Top game is actually $10.
• Bubble size is lifetime relative revenue

Progress is Essential
• The foundations of a F2P game are strong RPG elements
and a sense of progress over time
• Building your account, leveling up, adding/improving
skills and stats, etc
• Surprisingly it’s more important than multiplayer
• Deep RPG mechanics and multiplayer matter:
– 25x ARPU for Multiplayer RPG vs Single Player non-RPG!

Long Term Retention is Critical
• Nearly all revenue comes from people who play a
game at least 100 times.
• Focusing on long term retention is probably the best
thing you can do for your game’s revenue.

Spending Happens Over Time
• For top performing games, paying users continue to spend
for months, if not years

Keep Players Busy
• The more they are able to do, the more time they’ll
spend with the game.
• Wartune has live PvP, co-op PvE, team battles, single
player, asynchronous battles, world raid bosses...
Wartune, R2 Games

Help Create A Daily Experience
• Give players clear goals in a daily gameplay loop.
• Wartune provides something to do every day, and
rewards exploring the various parts of the game.
Wartune, R2 Games

Create New Content Regularly
• We surveyed lapsed big spenders and 64%
reported the reason they left the game was a lack
of new content
• Good news: 70% said they’d come back if new
content were added!
• Try to give players something new to do every 6 –
8 weeks if possible.
– Don’t aim for huge semi-annual or annual updates.
Better to spread out in smaller chunks.

Do Seasonal/Holiday Events
• Have special content tied to what is fun and relevant in
player’s real world lives.
• Bush Whacker 2 has incredible retention because of all of
the special events and features they have in the game.
Bush Whacker 2, DJ Arts

Guilds, Guilds, Guilds!
• 100% of top games on
Kongregate have guilds!
• Guilds are incredibly powerful
late-game tools.
– Create strong personal bonds
with other players
– Encourage high-level, deep
competition between guilds
– Motivate spending to help
perform at a high level, not just personally but for the guild’s
sake
– Players who join guilds are 10 to 20 times more valuable
– Check out my guild talk at developers.kongregate.com

Percentage Of Big Spenders
• What percent of paying users spend >$1000 USD?

Big Spender Revenue
• On Kongregate, revenue driven by quality over quantity.
• Make sure players can spend $1000+ meaningfully.

Avoid Fine-Grained Pricing
• In a few Eastern European
games, we see currency
conversion that gives the
player precise control over
how much to spend.
• Unfortunately, this limits
your ability as a
salesperson to “up sell”
bigger packages of currency, or better deals.
• The buyer will only purchase exactly as much as he needs,
so he will never have a balance of extra currency or decide
to buy a bit extra because it’s a better deal.

Instead, Up-sell and Incentivize
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Break currency sales into a few packages.
Provide a special deal for first-time buyers.
Add bonus currency for bigger purchases.
Throw in a bunch of great stuff if the player spends big!
Cloudstone, Nexon
Dragons of Atlantis, Kabam

Gamify Continued Spending
• Provide incentives for bigger spenders on successive
purchases, like a loyalty program (frequent flyer).
– VIP Program that comes with extra convenience and power.
– Increased VIP
levels for even
bigger spending.
– Reward your most
valuable players,
make them feel
good about
purchases.
Pockie Pirates, NGames Ltd.

Key Takeaways
• Long term retention and engagement is crucial.
• Keep players coming back with new content and
events.
• Provide incentives to purchase larger packages of
currency and keep purchasing.
• Make sure players have the ability to spend $1000+
in your game in a meaningful, fun way.

Thank you!
• For a copy of the presentation or questions, email
anthony@kongregate.com
• For more talks & data visit developers.kongregate.com
• For web games contact us at apps@kongregate.com
• If you’re interested in mobile publishing, email
mobile@kongregate.com
• Follow us on Twitter: @EmilyG & @KongregateDevs