
Ask HN: How to monetize a game and not make a pay to win? - Fr33maan
Dear HN, I&#x27;m making a game, a mmo based on fast paced fight. I&#x27;m looking for ideas to how to not make a pay 2 win but monetize the game in an interesting way. For now there is only fighting between knights.<p>Cheers
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spartan7500
Follow the strategy of games like Fortnite and League of Legends. They offer
extra cosmetics in exchange for money.

If you haven’t played these; things like “skins”, or armor packs, in game
dances, etc. Are offered for purchase. They are explicitly for cosmetic
enhancements and not game advantages (IE: changing your characters color won’t
make you have a higher attack damage)

If you go large scale you could also do what battlefield did and rent out
private servers, where people got to host private games with their customized
settings.

Lastly, this one I don’t agree with as much, but you could offer quicker lobby
times/higher priority in queue.

Ps: You can also do DLC’s with extra maps or something.

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Fr33maan
I really like the priority stuff and dislike the cosmetic, I explain why.

Cosmetics are expensive for mobile hardware as they create a tons of new
assets to show to players. GPU can only hold a 4096*4096 spritesheet which
correspond basically to 6 different characters with 5 animations each for a 2d
game. It's not a lot... Spritesheet swaping is expensive in CPU time as it
makes a new draw call. So the optimization part of displaying many different
assets is an important task I don't want to focus on right now. Additionally I
have to design the new assets. It seems to be a late solution when the game is
already profitable and monetized... Or when you have 10s of thousands in
investment.

Paying for beeing served in priority is quite fair. In our society, time is
money and you can pay for bypass queues. It not makes the game a pay to win
but a pay to play/not wait. It's fair for everyone.

I don't really like when games make players paying without offering them a
significative advantage.

Additionally, for games only based on gameplay it could work. But for game
with economy it doesn't click as if you don't have a white market, you will
see a black market appear.

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spartan7500
TIL.

Glad I was able to give you an idea, thanks for explaining. It’s cool to learn
a little crash course on this.

Good luck!

