Win or lose: Mastering the art of mobile game balance and monetisation

Guy Agiv is director of product design at Supersonic from Unity.

In the competitive world of mobile gaming, many companies fall into the trap of overloading their games with popups, special offers, and purchase prompts to encourage players to keep playing and spending.

While this may yield short-term gains, it’s ultimately the wrong approach, as cognitive overload and a sense of pay-to-win can result in alienating players and jeopardising long-term engagement.

Instead, game developers should reimagine the game’s win-lose dynamic - the ratio of how often a player wins or loses a level or challenge.

Finding the delicate balance between win and lose conditions is a critical aspect of game design, which helps create more organic, enjoyable, and sustainable monetisation opportunities.

Why aggressive monetisation fails

Monetisation in mobile games that rely heavily on special offers and purchase popups has several disadvantages:

• Player frustration and fatigue: If the challenge rate is too steep in order to force monetisation, players risk burning out before they've had time for their skills to improve and for them to progress in the game.

• Negative impact on user experience: Aggressive monetisation can make the game feel transactional, detracting from the immersive experience.

• Decreased long-term engagement: Players may drop out sooner if the game feels overly focused on extracting money from them or if it’s not challenging them sufficiently.

• Over-reliance on whales: Heavily targeting high-spending players increases revenue volatility and leaves casual players underserved.

• Payer burnout: Even paying players can grow weary of constant offers, eventually reducing or halting their spending.

• Risk of perceived pay-to-win: Players quickly sense when progression feels contingent on spending. This can sour the experience and harm the game’s reputation.

Does “How to play” = “How to win”?

When designing a game, developers commonly focus on the win condition - the set of actions that allow players to progress and feel successful. While this is vital, solely emphasising the win condition can leave a blind spot in the game’s core structure: the lose condition.

It’s a common refrain among developers: “Once we finish building the core gameplay, we’ll add monetisation.” However, this mindset misses a key opportunity. Monetisation and engagement can, and should, be organically integrated into the core loop via thoughtfully designed lose conditions.

The role of lose conditions in game design

Effective lose conditions introduce stress, stakes, and opportunities to keep players motivated and engaged. When properly designed, they not only increase tension and satisfaction but also create natural monetisation touchpoints. Here are some popular lose conditions:

• Limited lives or resources: Limiting the number of lives or resources available (e.g., energy, tools) requires careful play and creating moments where players seek extra lives or resources via in-app ads or purchases.

• Limited time: Introducing a timer can completely change the feel of a game, adding urgency and focus. Timer mechanics are particularly common in level-based games.

• Limited moves: Different from a timer, which creates a feeling of urgency, limiting moves frames the challenge differently and makes players think strategically.

• Limited space: Similar to the above, limiting where users can move objects, demands a strategic and deliberate approach 

• Objective-based failure: If the player fails to meet a set objective (e.g., collect all the required items), they lose - encouraging persistence without the external pressure of limited time or moves.

• Scoring-based challenges: A focus on achieving the highest score creates internal and social pressure. While not a “true” lose condition, it’s an effective motivator for certain games, especially with leaderboards.

• Incorrect Actions: Some games penalise incorrect answers or moves, creating a learning curve and an opportunity to integrate retry options with monetisation hooks. This is particularly popular in puzzle games.

• Survival mechanics: Survival mechanics introduce tension through limited opportunities for mistakes. Developers must decide how forgiving the game should be - for example, allowing players to resume progress by watching ads or spending in-game currency.

• Competition-based failure: PvP mechanics bring an extra layer of pressure. Losing to other players, especially with visible rankings, motivates players to improve - and sometimes invest money or time watching an ad - without feeling forced.

“Carrots” and the exit strategy

While lose conditions create tension, developers should also offer “carrots” to soften the blow and keep players engaged. Carrots are products or tools that are part of the in-level experience built directly into the gameplay to soften the game’s difficulty.

They help reduce frustration, providing a path to recovery without feeling punitive. For example, it could be a progress bar that shows clear, incremental progress to encourage persistence. Or milestone rewards where finding special items or reaching checkpoints activates helpful bonuses.

By combining lose conditions with well-placed carrots, developers can maintain tension without sacrificing fun, leading to sustainable engagement.

The balancing act: difficulty curves and revenue

A difficult curve illustrates the balance between skills and resources, and it represents the intensity of the lose conditions. Low difficulty is when a player’s skill exceeds the challenge of a game, and high difficulty is when the game’s challenge exceeds the skill of the player.

There is currently a correlation between hybridcasual mobile games in the top revenue charts and their difficulty curves. In many of these games, players lose more frequently than they win. They have nailed the balance of ensuring that the losses feel fair and the wins remain achievable. This balance is critical to keeping players in the “flow state.”

The flow state occurs when a game’s difficulty aligns perfectly with the player’s skill level. Too easy, and the game is boring; too hard, and it’s frustrating. An ideal difficulty curve starts slightly above the player’s current skill, rewarding initial challenges with a sense of accomplishment while ensuring the difficulty increases as their skill improves.

Crafting immersive, fun monetisation

Ultimately, creating perfect win-lose conditions requires more than just designing obstacles - it’s about rethinking the core mechanics, not only in terms of how the player progresses in the game but also with regards to the factors that hold them back. 

By carefully balancing progression and setbacks, developers can weave loss, difficulty, and monetisation into the fabric of the game itself. Keep the stakes high, the wins satisfying, and the experience unforgettable.

This holistic approach will help a game stand out, not only for its profitability but for the lasting loyalty and enjoyment it creates among players.