Price ladder gaps and the pack your catalog is missing

Currency pack catalogs tend to be built once, early, and then left alone. A studio picks five price points that look reasonable, ships them, and revisits the contents occasionally but almost never the ladder itself. The result across a lot of games is a catalog with a real gap in it — a stretch of price where a player who is willing to spend has nothing sensible to buy.

The gap is easy to miss because it does not show up as a problem. It shows up as an absence, and absences do not appear on dashboards.

Where the gap usually sits

The common shape is a small entry pack, then a jump to something several times its price, then the large packs above that. A player who has decided they want to spend something but not much finds the entry pack too small to solve their problem and the next one up more than they wanted to commit.

What that player does next is the part worth understanding. Some of them buy the larger pack anyway, which looks like a win and often is. Some of them buy the small pack twice, which is fine. And some of them do neither — they close the store and go back to playing, and the intent that brought them there dissipates.

That third group is invisible. There is no event for "considered a purchase and found nothing suitable". The store visit looks like every other store visit that did not convert, and browsing without buying is normal enough that nobody investigates it.

The gap is usually widest in the middle of the ladder, between the impulse tier and the committed tier. That is exactly where players sit when they have started to take the game seriously but have not yet decided how much it is worth to them — which is the transition every studio wants to support.

Why the ladder gets built with a hole in it

The gap is rarely a decision. It is usually an artefact of how the catalog was designed.

Most ladders are built by picking a bottom price and a top price and filling in between with round numbers and a value curve that improves as you go up. That method produces a ladder that is mathematically tidy and says nothing about where players actually want to stop. The spacing reflects arithmetic, not demand.

The other common origin is copying a competitor's ladder. This transfers their gap along with their structure, and their ladder was built for their economy — where the meaningful purchases sit at different prices than yours do.

The correction in both cases is to work backward from the game rather than forward from a price. What does the next thing a player wants actually cost? If the meaningful upgrades in your game cluster around a particular currency amount, the ladder should have a pack that reaches that amount cleanly, not one that overshoots it by three times or falls short by a quarter.

The tell that a gap exists

You cannot see the players who left, but you can see the shape they leave behind.

The clearest signal is repeat purchases of the same small pack in a short window. A player buying the entry pack three times in one session is telling you that the amount they want sits well above the entry pack and that nothing in your catalog reaches it at a price they accept. Each repeat is a workaround for a rung that is not there.

The second signal is a conversion rate on the tier above the gap that is unusually low relative to the tiers around it. If the small pack converts, the large packs convert, and the one in between underperforms both, the price of that middle pack is likely misplaced rather than the pack itself being unwanted.

The third is the one worth instrumenting deliberately: how often a player opens the store, looks at the currency packs, and leaves without buying. That number in isolation is meaningless — plenty of browsing is idle. What matters is whether it is concentrated among players at a particular progression point, which points at a specific unmet price.

See how we surface offer and pricing gaps →

Filling it without cannibalising what works

The reasonable fear is that adding a rung between two existing packs simply moves buyers down from the higher one. Sometimes it does, and whether that is a loss depends on what the new rung does to the population overall.

If the new rung is priced so that its value per unit is worse than the pack above it, players who were going to buy the larger pack mostly still do — the ladder rewards them for it. Players who were not going to buy anything now have something to buy. That is a net gain even with some downward movement, because the alternative for that group was zero.

If the new rung is priced so its value is comparable to or better than the pack above, it becomes the obvious choice and the larger pack stops selling. That is a genuine cannibalisation, and it is a pricing error rather than a structural one.

The other thing worth doing when a rung is added is checking whether the ladder still reads clearly. A five-rung ladder where each step is an obvious improvement is easy to navigate. A seven-rung ladder with inconsistent spacing makes the player do arithmetic, and players who are made to do arithmetic in a store frequently decide to think about it later.

The underlying idea is simple enough. A price ladder is not a list of prices — it is a set of answers to the question "how much do you want to spend right now". If a common answer has no corresponding rung, the players giving that answer are not converting, and nothing in your reporting will tell you they were ever there.

Talk to us about your pricing structure →