Today I want to look into a business model that has shot up up in popularity over the last few years. The Battle Pass is a incredible tool to help successful titles to keep their customers invested in their game while generating significant revenue. We are going to dive into the Battle Pass concept and see why this model is so successful and the impacts in the design process that come as a result.
In case you are wondering my position on Battle Passes, I will straight up tell you here that they are genius and surprisingly insidious, a perfect combination for generating huge micro-transactions from customers.
A Battle Pass is an optional subscription model that players can choose to take part in to collect rewards in a limited time window. Battle Passes are normally divided into seasons, these can vary from game to game but a good window to consider standard is about 3 months. During this time players will be given missions or objectives to complete and they will earn points or tokens which will unlock increasingly cooler rewards. The industry standard for seasons seems to be 100 levels, with each level requiring the same amount of experience points to level up. The standard was set by Epic Games' hugely successful Fortnite. Each level the player gets a reward, which creates a positive feedback loop the keeps the player playing the game.
Battle Passes generally offer a free version with less rewards along side the Battle Pass. This means free-to-play players can get some of the rewards and will generally see the basic Battle pass as a cool free addition. If the player later in the season decides they want to join in on the Battle Pass, they can get all of the rewards they would have earned had they brought it at the start of the season.
Battle Passes are relatively cheap for what they offer in return, for a fee of around $10 USD the player can acquire rewards that would cost significantly more if the player just wanted to buy these items from the store. This line of thinking is what makes the Battle Pass so brilliant. When you market the Battle Pass, you get to use the weight of all 100 tiers of rewards as your hook for the customer. You can essentially say you get $200-$300 worth of value for your $10 purchase, as long as you keep playing throughout the season. If a player doesn't get the full value out of the pass, that is essentially on them for not staying active enough throughout the season. Customers hate losing value and leaving something on the table. You can see this by going into a supermarket where they have a sale on milk and watching how many people decide to buy 2 weeks worth of it because there is a good deal even if they don't really need it. This fear of losing value is a hard driver to push the player to engage with your game over the whole season. Battle Passes look very transparent to the customer, you can see all of the rewards at each level and know what you are going to get. This gives a sense of security to the customer that loot boxes do not. With some governments getting involved with loot boxes and the parallels to gambling, the season pass is a less controversial option to monetize a game.
The super low entry price with really high value is basically a Gym membership that you are committing to for 3 months. Just like a Gym membership, customers are very unlikely to buy 2 with different Gyms. Once a player commits to your Battle Pass, it is unlikely that they are purchasing multiple passes across different games because the player will only have limited time in a season to get all the rewards. The more battle passes a customer buys, the more value they will lose over all by not being able to finish them. This means that once your customer commits to a Battle Pass, your competitors are going to have a much harder time to steal your customers away because they already made a commitment to your game. This is a hidden cost in Battle Passes, more than the $10 they pay it's the time and commitment you are getting from the customer for the duration of the season. My girlfriend purchased a League of Legends event pass for the Arcade event, which had the grand prize of an exclusive skin upgrade of the main event skin that would really stand out in game. After she purchased the pass, I sat down and watched her calculate how many games she would need to play to unlock that skin to make the purchase worth it. She then proceeded to plan her next 2 months around getting that skin. During that time Riot had won against all of the following: -
Dota 2
Hearthstone
Pokemon Go
Netflix
Sports
Any other time consuming activity
In the modern age, if you ask a major games company that leading its field who its competitors are, don't be surprised if they don't even mention games but give an answer like our competitors are Pizza, the Pub, Cinemas and Netflix. A customers time is so valuable to monopolize, all of those activities are competition for time. In case you are wondering, she did successfully unlock the skin by the end of the event.
The Battle Passes are time limited for exclusive rewards. This is designed to press urgency and a call to action from the players to get them involved as quickly as possible. By keeping the seasons short, players have less time to over think their purchase. This would be a very effective method on its own, but it would have the problem that all of your sales would come in during the first week of a season, then all of the remaining players would see that they would lose value and decide to wait for the next Battle Pass or move over to a different game. This brings me to the next part of what makes Battle Passes insidiously brilliant. A player can buy the pass at any time in a season and get all of the rewards in one go that they would have unlocked if they brought it at the start of the season based on their current level. This solves the early season rush and gives reasons to all players throughout the whole season to invest in the Battle Pass. You may notice that many games show the free and Battle Pass rewards directly next to each other. In fact in some games, you have to visit the Battle Pass Page to collect rewards, even the free ones. This is very intentional. Every time a player looks at the reward track, they will see a grayed out list of rewards they could collect if they buy into the pass now. This is designed in such a way so that rather than the customer seeing the Battle Pass lose value as the season goes on and their chances of completing it go down, they actually see all the extra rewards they could collect that they have already unlocked. This flips the script in the customers brain to see the Battle Pass increase in value as the season progresses if they were playing your game anyway. This also creates a second surge of sales at the end of a season. During the last days, a Player may take a look and see that they made it to level 50 on a Battle Pass and see that they could get a significant chunk of rewards right away for their $10. The offer is no longer for their time commitment for a whole season but now offering an reward for what they already accomplished. All they have to do is buy the pass and get the rewards they have already earned.
Another offering some Battle Passes give the customer, is the option to buy levels. This is super popular in DOTA 2 with their Battle Pass. If a player doesn't want to play out the whole season but still wants the rewards, many games allow the player to just buy levels. This generates the highest volume of sales at the end of a season when players are looking at the reward track and are seeing how close they are to the next major reward. Something to be careful of in the design process is not making the Battle Pass impossible to complete unless a customer buys levels at the end of the season, that's a sure fire way to upset all the customers that invested time and energy into your game. Expect a twitter firestorm if you do decide to do this.
The last thing that makes Battle Passes super appealing for a company is that they are easy to repeat each season. Just change the rewards and run the same strategy again. If a player had fun and earned more than their $10 in rewards, they will likely invest in the next season pass you put out.
With all of these pros you may be wondering "what's the downside?" and "how does this impact game design?". The first thing to bring up here is that a fully fledged out Battle Pass is a lot of work. With so many rewards on the ladder, you will have the development team putting all of their time into creating assets and planning the reward structures. Any time you add an emote or a new skin, numerous teams have to plan and create that asset and make sure that it gets into the game functioning correctly. 3 month development life cycles are not very long when you consider you want 100 rewards to give out to players. On top of creating all of these assets, they need to be tested, reworked where necessary and also included in marketing materials. Lots of the big games will create a season trailer and website to show off the new Battle Pass. The creation of these in-game videos take time and also require for the most part that everything is working correctly. As such this puts even more pressure on teams to make a lot happen with short deadlines. This is a recipe for hard crunching (known as pushing your staff beyond their limits for a period of time to complete the project). Sadly crunching your team does not give them all Peter Andre 6 pack abs and you an awesome game . Too much of this and you will burn out the team and many of them will produce lower quality work or will just leave the company, you will likely end up getting a bad reputation in the industry as well which may make it harder to attract high level talent.
By implementing a Battle Pass you will likely have all of your human resources (your programmers, artists, animators and designers) making that season which can let other aspects of the game fall behind, such as bug testing, needed balance updates or new features. This can be offset by having a larger team, but its worth noting that over expanding the team can also have negative consequences on your game. The Battle Pass is a huge amount of investment for a team to make sure they offer great value to the player so keep this in mind when deciding if a Battle Pass is the right decision for your game.
In addition to burning out the staff, something to keep in mind is that you are monopolizing a players time and pressing them with a sense of urgency to keep playing your game through the season. This means your game can become really grindy (the process in which players find the game repetitive but feel compelled to keep going for the rewards even though they stopped enjoying it). This is something you as a designer need to be aware of and make sure there is enough variety in the game so that your Battle Pass doesn't burn out your players. A great example of extra things you can do is Brawl or the Arena in Hearthstone which gives users a break from normal game play and gives them something fun to do on the side (this is even better if you can still get Battle Pass experience points by taking part to break up the grind). When you look at the Dota 2 Battle Pass there is actually a lot of ways to get Battle Pass levels without just playing hundreds of games. When you get this right the player doesn't feel like they are wasting precious time on not leveling the Battle Pass, but also get enough little breaks that they don't get burnt out and take a huge break from your game at the end of a season. You can also push players to play your game differently to help mix up their experience to prevent burn out. Using Dota 2 as the example, for their 2019 Battle Pass they introduced the Jungle Expedition as one of the many features they offered for buying into this years Battle Pass. The Jungle Expedition is map with lots of nodes, many of them have rewards and there are super rewards such as skins hidden in the map. When a player starts, they will not be able to see the whole map, they have to explore it by winning games with the characters shown on the nodes to open up pathways. As the player explores they will get rewards and will eventually find the super rewards. There are many ways to get Battle Pass levels hidden in the map, so if a player is focusing on the Jungle Expedition, they are also crossing off objectives and advancing their Battle Pass helping them feel like they are not losing out on value by playing through this cool feature. Each character node tells the player they need to win a game with that character, this is a brilliant way to diversify the players in-game experience to keep the player feeling fresh.
Dota 2 also uses 25% of the money raised from Battle Passes for their yearly international tournament called the International. As a company, by sacrificing 25% of the money raised from the Battle Pass, Valve are able to push their overall marketing return on investment up by offering some of the biggest cash prizes in all of Esports. The amount of additional coverage they get from media when they announce their prize pools is worth its weight in gold for getting players interested in Dota 2 which over all increases how much they will make on future Battle Passes. It's a self-feeding loop that generates huge amounts of profit while also pushing the perceived value of the game to the player up.
To wrap this all up, the Battle Pass is an amazing concept that is much deeper on a business level than the $10 charge would imply. They are also a huge amount of work to implement correctly and need to be planned out thoroughly before you decide to commit to one for your game.
- Matt