Reward Types

Exploration of reward types to increase player retention in our non-exclusive customers domain.

situation

As a UX specialist i was asked to do a competitor analysis and design suggestion of a promotion type to introduce to players. I am a backoffice specialist and this is one of the rare occassion that i go to do on player-facing visual work. Although this is not my foray i did use it as an oppurtunity to learn.

The gaming platforms once dedicated to a single provider have now diversified their catalog, showcasing games from multiple providers. The is good news for players as they get a one stop shop at discovering interesting content and engage with the platform. The onus of being discovered and chosen now falls on to the game providers. Interesting rewards types attract players to a game provider. A player who opts-in for a reward, is likely to engage for a longer time and attribute to the revenue stream of that provider.

task

My role in this initiative was to research multiple types of rewards and produce a concept.

actions

I did internal and external research to understand how rewards work. This included talking to SMEs, looking at material on Confluence, and reading up online.

The rewards are a mechanism to incentivise the players to dedicate their time to a single game provider and thereby increase engagement.

I looked at several newer game providers that offer interesting rewards. A search for interesting gaming platforms that offer newer reward types led to the understanding that

• Attractive reward types increases player engagement

• Novel reward types improves players chances of being attracted to it.

• Players don’t prefer complicated reward systems

• Industry standard reward type offering includes free spins for player on one or more games of a provider

• Configuring rewards if not easy, reduces operators chance of creating rewards at all

I explored two kinds of rewards-  

Stand-alone reward type

A stand-alone reward type has an element of surprise as they are unpredictable in nature. I designed a bonus wheel that allows a player to spin and chance upon a reward among several of them. The reward types included in the bonus wheel were a combination of free-spins, free tournaments entry, bonus, multipliers, free entry into jackpots and double up. The operator can configure the bonus wheel to show daily login or trigger it on a specific player action.

GAMIFIED reward type

A systematic approach to offer rewards allows more control over shaping player’s journey but at the risk of being predictable. Here I explored the idea of rewarding players who have been longer with us and not necessarily throwing in more moolah.

• Based on duration of play over time, the player could achieve milestones.

• The milestones add to XP. One of the frustrations faced by users was that they could lose their loyalty points if they didn’t maintain game play so they mostly opted out of it. In my case you never lose XP. This allows players to remain in the league forever.

• The player’s journey could be influenced with rewards such as player for 5 consecutive days to get extra XP, play 5/5 games of in a fixed time span, find hidden gems in a set of games, and many more.

• Players could use XP to make purchases such as tournament entry, spend a day as a VIP, convert to bonus, have a happy hour, get physical goods and so on.

• The system could be set up in the player journey builder with triggers and rewards.

• It also allows to monitor and track player response to the reward system and amend accordingly.

For each of these reward types i created protoypes and presented to stake-holders. I got in touch with Senior Devs in-order to understand how these reward mechanisms work in the background. This was very interesting as we talked about using probability.

 actions

• The stand-alone reward type was successfully created and was well received by players. The gamified reward type was considered a project for future.