Why do players really open their wallets?
According to Ferdi Bakirezer, Lead Game Designer at Mage Games, we will have to understand a lot about player emotion for the answer.
So we decided to interview him to get into the details of these emotions behind game economies and the most common mistakes studios make.
Designing for Progression and Capitalizing on Enthusiasm
When asked what is the most important emotion to design for, Ferdi’s answer was simple: the feeling of moving forward.
“After every session, the player must feel like they moved forward,” he explains. “That is not just about numbers going up. It is about genuinely feeling like a better player.” Other common emotional triggers like frustration, FOMO, or excitement are merely tools used to make that feeling of progression feel real.
But there is a secondary emotion developers often overlook: Enthusiasm. “The moment a player installs your game is the peak of their enthusiasm. Everything is new, everything is exciting. Do not waste that moment.”
Aspiration Over Desperation
A common misconception in game design is that punishing players will force them to spend. However, as Ferdi points out, players almost never convert right after losing.
“A well-timed fail offer is the one exception, and it works not because it exploits frustration, but because it offers a way forward,” Ferdi notes. “Players convert before a new challenge, when they are excited about what is ahead, not angry about what just happened.”
Players don’t spend because an item makes them stronger; they spend because of how the item makes them feel. Because very few in-game purchases are purely rational, monetization should always be designed around aspiration, rather than desperation.
When evaluating your own monetization strategies, Ferdi suggests asking one simple question: “Does this offer feel like an opportunity or a punishment? If the player has to think twice, you’ve already lost the moment.”
The 4 Biggest Monetization Mistakes Studios Make
Despite the wealth of data available today, Ferdi sees studios making the same core mistakes when tying emotions to their game’s economy:
- Ignoring the emotional trigger: “Most studios never stop to ask one simple question: what emotion will this trigger? They design the game, add a shop, and wonder why revenue is low.”
- Designing for the “average” player: In most games, the top 5% of spenders drive more than half the revenue. “If your shop is built for everyone, it is really built for no one.”
- Lacking item variety: Ferdi points to the seven deadly sins as distinct spending triggers: pride (showing off), envy (wanting what others have), anger (rage spending), greed (fear of missing out), lust (attractive cosmetics), gluttony (hoarding resources), and sloth (skipping timers). “If your shop only has one type of item, you are only speaking to one emotion. You are leaving everyone else behind.”
- Pricing based on the item, not the player: An item’s effective value changes as the game progresses. A sword that feels incredibly powerful on Day 1 means nothing on Day 30. “Studios ignore this and price everything flat. Price based on effective value, not face value.”
Can Good Monetization Fix a Bad Game?
No.
“Don’t think about monetization first,” Ferdi advises. “Build a loop that feels satisfying to repeat for free. Remove all rewards, all currencies, all progression… If that is still fun, you have something.”
Monetization should be a natural extension of the emotions the core game already creates. If players are feeling pride, sell them something that amplifies it.
But who are you really selling to? “A fan is not a demographic. It is not an age group or a country. It is an emotional state.” You cannot create fans with monetization; you create fans with a great game, and monetization simply gives them a way to express how much they care.
The Future with AI in Emotional Design
With 17 years of experience, Ferdi’s primary guide is intuition, noting that “data just supports what I already sense.” But looking forward, he sees AI playing an important role in understanding human emotion better.
“AI will help us understand something we have never been able to measure clearly: which emotion actually triggered a purchase,” he says. “Right now, even if you watch a full session replay, you still cannot get inside the player’s head. You see the action, not the feeling behind it. AI could change that. Analyzing behavior patterns to tell you whether a purchase was driven by vanity, anger, envy, or excitement. That is a massive unlock for game designers.”
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