You can't extract from people who aren't there

A month before we started building a product that turns cash into game currency, I spent a day taking Diablo Immortal's monetisation apart. That it's predatory isn't the finding, everybody knows that. The finding is that almost none of it works on a product nobody uses yet.

The levers

The Immoral Design of Diablo ImmortalJosh Strife Hayes, 2022. The source for every mechanic here.youtube.com

Twenty-two separate currencies, so nobody converts to real money in their head. Bundle sizes that leave you a few units short of what you came for. A free daily reward placed inside the paid shop, so collecting it means constantly walking past what you're missing out on. A five-minute gameplay step between paying and receiving, which is the only reason something isn't legally a loot box (a gamble).

Our users included minors, so there is no version of that list that is harmless pointed at them.

Every one of them also needs an audience already inside the product. You can't strand a remainder in an account nobody has opened, or build a daily habit for people who haven't arrived. Diablo Immortal had users while we still didn't have any.

So it was never really a refusal. Each of those levers makes the product worse to use, and a product without users has no margin for that. Taking more money from your users is a problem you have to earn.

None of the above

Margin came from buying inventory in bulk, not from anything the wallet did to a user's balance. One currency, because the denominations forced one, and built to be understood. Nothing randomised. Nothing running to bring anyone back tomorrow.

Why it won the work

We brought it to one of the first casual brainstorming meetings with the client, knowing most of it would never be used. He knew that too, but what he responded to wasn't the conclusions. It was that somebody had spent a day pulling apart a product in a similar business before anyone had drawn a screen. He liked that we'd worked through it, separating what we could use from what we wouldn't touch, and it was one of the reasons he wanted to work with us.