This was originally presented as a speech to the Social Games Meetup on February 24th

When it comes to making money on your games one thing that can easily gets forgotten is the user’s experience. It’s easy to forget about the individual perspective of you customer when you’re focused on the large scale metrics that define your ability to part a user from their money as a group.

It’s no one’s fault. It’s a natural outcome of the way internet transactions work. There’s no longer anyone left interacting with individual customers anymore, beyond the payment screen and the occasional irate phone call. And because the virtual experience is a faceless transaction we end up with cold euphemisms like “conversion” and “monetization”. After all the last thing we want our users to think is that we’re going to ask them to spend their actual money. The might figure out we’re actually trying to sell them something.

But guess what? They already know!

Buying things isn’t supposed to be bad. There’s actually a word we can use to describe a positive purchase experience. We call it shopping, as in “I wanna go shopping.” Sure, there are some people who never like buying stuff. There’s also some people who don’t like playing games, but none of those people are really a potential sale, so they can be ignored. Our customers are, by definition, people who are willing to buy things, and we’re okay with that, because it makes the economy go. And no matter how bad things gets there are still plenty of people who want to buy stuff. Especially if they understand that they’re getting something valuable.

But shopping is about more than just the simple act of purchasing things. It can be an emotional experience. In fact we even have a special phrase to describe the people go shopping entirely without ever spending a dime. We call that experience “Window Shopping”, and it doesn’t mean they’re buying windows. It’s a way to understand that there are good feelings that someone can get simply by basking in the idea of owning something. If you have something you’ve bought with great joy, only to have it end up unopened or unused on our shelves, you know firsthand that the visualization can often be more powerful than actually owning an object.

In order to sell virtual goods to people, to get them to buy something that doesn’t actually exist, what they need to be sold on is the idea of the value of an experience they haven’t had yet. Your product is the concept of what’s going to happen even before that something has actually happened.

And if the reality of their experience ends up matching or exceeding those expectations you’ll have them coming back for more. That’s the real value proposition: offer people a potential experience that’s so good they won’t want to refuse it. Bridging the gap between expectation and experience is a fundamental part of good gameplay. Make that same dynamic start to work in your marketing and you’re one step closer to integrating shopping directly into the gaming experience.

Want a good example of someone who’s already using this formula with great success? Take a look at Amazon. When you visit their store online and search through their goods, your experience is entirely virtual. There’s nothing real happening until that moment you click on the buy button and have them mail the item to you. It’s a transformative moment, but on some level every completed transaction is transformative. Something is yours now.

That’s why Amazon is willing to let their other users tell you much more than you think you want to know about the potential experience you’re going to have. Ultimately it’s what’s happening in your own imagination that gets you to buy it.

For better or worse, that’s what virtual goods and currency need to sell: the experience. You’re telling your user all about what they’re going to get from these virtual goods after they’ve bought them. It’s all good and well to show them that virtual guitar, gun, sword, hat, but you also need to let them know what it’s going to do in your application if you want a significant number of them to actually buy it. You don’t have to guarantee that experience, but to be successful you have to explain what you’re promising and then deliver on it most of the time.

The downloadable songs for Rock Band do this perfectly. The message is clear: “You’re going to get to rock out to this song”. You can imagine exactly what it’s going to be like to play the “No Doubt” song even before you strum a single note on your fake plastic guitar, partly because the music is already in your head, and partly because you’re already familiar with what the game does. But that particular song is a discrete unit of experience, and the price is right.

That’s also a reason why the X-Wars games have worked for selling virtual goods; The experience is so simple you can’t miss the value equation. Buying this clearly means you get to do more of that that. The fact that the user consumes those virtual goods is even better, but that’s a different topic.

Like great retail stores used to be, like Amazon is now, if you want people to buy virtual goods then you need to clearly communicate to them that this is a new form of “shopping”. Show them a valuable chunk of experience worth owning, and make it positive experience and you’ll fire the imagination of your customer. Do that, and they’ll be begging to give you their money.

Andrew Mayer is a Social Gaming and User Experience Consultant with over seventeen years of experience in the games industry.