🤔No Spend Cap
Your game is not worth ♾️ (infinite) money
Last updated
Your game is not worth ♾️ (infinite) money
Last updated
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Easily abused and hard to avoid given the limitations of MTX store tools.
No Spend Cap, means a player can in some way spend an infinite (or just ludicrous) amount of money on your game. Typically this happens when your game has a "cash shop" where some or all items are "commodity" that is they are non-unique and have no (or no reasonable) bound or limit on how many a user can buy.
Establishing a "max spend" is simply defining what the most amount of money any given player should be capable of spending in a defined period is. Knowing this value can help you make sound and reasoned monetization design decisions. Advertising the value can help establish trust in your player base ... assuming the max spend is a reasonable number.
Users don't care ... O yes they do, its a popular method to slander a game by calculating how much it would cost to "max out" rather that cost is time or money or both. This was done with Battlefront, Diablo Immortal and just about every other game with some form of time or cash grind. Stupidly high values here are also sited by agencies and politicians when lobbying for regulation ... this is part of our industries problem ... help keep it in check. Want to turn this to a positive ... make sure your "Max Spend" is a fair and reasonable amount and make it clearly known. Another negative on us as an industry is it often takes complex maths and deep research to figure out what the max spend would be .e.g. obscured pricing.
Many Free 2 Play games depend on MTX to monetize. Most of the tools we use to create such shops have little to no tooling that would enable us to establish a spend cap and thus we cannot define a true "Max Spend". How you deal with the limitation of your chosen tools will depend on those tools and the nature of your game. You can reduce the negative impact of this be avoiding the sale of consumables and other commodities that the user may want a large amount of. If you only sale "DLC" style items ... that is items that a user can own 1 of, then you can define the max spend. If you need to sale consumables or recurring you'll need to find some way to limit the max number that can be purchased in any given period ... this is effectively a subscription or season even if you guise it as a bundle of consumables.
