Localised offer content versus localised price points

Regional pricing is standard practice. Studios adjust price points by market, account for purchasing power, and treat that as the localisation of monetisation.

What is in the offer is generally identical everywhere. The same bundles, the same contents, the same structure, translated. That is where the larger unexploited difference usually sits.

Why contents differ by market more than price does

Players in different markets play differently, and the differences are frequently structural rather than cultural.

Session patterns vary with commute length, device quality, and connectivity. A market where most play happens in short bursts on mid-range devices produces different needs from one where sessions are long and uninterrupted. An offer built around a long play session is a poor fit for the first.

Progression speed varies with those session patterns, which means players in different markets arrive at the same content at different points in their tenure — and therefore want different things at the same nominal stage.

Payment friction varies enormously. In markets where the common payment method has a minimum transaction size or a per-transaction cost, small purchases are impractical regardless of what the price says. An offer structure built around frequent small purchases does not work there, and no amount of price adjustment fixes a structural obstacle.

And what players value differs. Time-saving is worth more where time is scarce and less where it is not. Cosmetic differentiation is worth more in markets with strong social play. These are real preference differences and they change what should be in a bundle rather than what it should cost.

The pattern of adjusting the wrong lever

The typical response to a market underperforming is to lower prices there. Sometimes that is correct — if the price is genuinely out of line with local purchasing power, it is the whole problem.

Frequently it is not, and lowering the price of an offer nobody wants produces a cheaper offer nobody wants. The conversion barely moves, revenue per buyer falls, and the conclusion drawn is that the market monetises poorly.

The check that separates the two is whether players in that market engage with offers before declining. If they open offers, look, and decline, price is a plausible explanation. If they do not open offers at all, the problem is relevance and price is irrelevant.

What is worth varying

The contents are the first thing. Bundle composition can differ by market without changing the price — more of what that market's players actually use, less of what they do not. This costs nothing in revenue terms and can move conversion substantially.

The structure is the second. Where payment friction favours fewer, larger transactions, a market benefits from bundles that cover a longer period. Where small frequent payments are easy, the opposite. This is a structural adaptation to how money moves, not a preference guess.

Timing is the third and it is the cheapest. Events and offers scheduled for one market's evening land at another's working hours. Studios running a global calendar on one clock are consistently reaching a large share of their players at the wrong time of day, which suppresses everything regardless of contents or price.

Payment method availability is the fourth, and it is less a design choice than a prerequisite. An offer a player cannot pay for converts at zero, and that shows up as poor market performance rather than as a missing payment option.

See how we vary offers by market →

Doing it without a per-market team

The objection is that this implies bespoke work per market, which nobody has capacity for.

It does not have to. Most of the value comes from a small number of groupings rather than from per-country treatment. Markets cluster by the structural properties that matter — session patterns, payment characteristics, device mix — and three or four groups capture most of the variation.

The other simplification is to vary composition rather than create entirely different catalogs. The same offer slots, filled differently, is much less work than a separate catalog and captures most of the benefit.

And the timing adjustment requires no content work at all — it is a scheduling change, and it is usually the single highest-return item on this list for a game running one global calendar.

The reason this is worth attention is that price is the lever everyone pulls, which means it is also the one with the least remaining advantage in it. Contents, structure, and timing are barely touched by most studios, which is exactly what makes them worth touching.

The measurement that makes this tractable is to look at each market's numbers relative to its own baseline rather than against the global average. A market that converts below the global figure may be performing normally for its structure, and a market that converts near the average may be underperforming badly relative to what it could do. Absolute comparisons across markets mostly measure purchasing power and payment infrastructure, which you cannot change. The within-market trend is the part that responds to design decisions, and it is the one worth watching.

Talk to us about market-aware offer design →