Store
Benefits and Use Cases
Feature Overview
The Store module provides you with a multitude of ways to implement, test, and refine an optimal merchandising strategy for your game. You can list a selection of permanent store offers with single or multiple items, trigger special store offers by date and time, employ varied pricing strategies, and categorize and filter store offers using tags!
And of course, anything you can do with a regular virtual item being sold in your store can also be done with an NFT virtual item!
We also provide an additional safeguard to ensure the best experience for players while addressing the limited quantity nature of NFTs.
You may set the total quantity available for store purchase to match the number of NFTs you minted (note that this property is only available for NFT virtual items, not regular virtual items).
Once the entire supply of NFTs has been sold, the store purchase will be automatically hidden. You wouldn't want to merchandise an item to a player that they can't actually buy!
Key Benefits
Customizable Purchase Contents: Support for selling individual items or bundles of multiple items! You have the flexibility to configure the best array of purchases and item combinations for your specific store.
Pricing Flexibility: Multiple options for optimizing your pricing strategy are available. Set the price in a single currency or a combination of currencies! Support for displaying discounts is also included, perfect to use in conjunction with a limited-time store bundle.
Store Offer Scheduling: Easily plan a schedule of limited-time offers to increase monetization. Want to create a limited-time store offer with a discount to run during the holiday weekend? Have a refreshing daily deals section? No problem - the store module has you covered.
Categorize by Tags: Titles that monetize heavily on multiple categories of virtual items inevitably require filtering support for their stores. This functionality comes with our Store Module, simply add tags to your virtual items and then use those tags to allow players to filter the store in-game.
Modifiable: If you require additional functionality not included in the SDK you may attach your own data in JSON format to virtual items or store offers!
Interoperable: Our modules also support interoperability for developers who wish to enable this functionality. An example of interoperability would be purchasing an emote in the shop for Game A and then automatically having access to that emote in Game B (the player must also use the PLAY account in both Game A and B).
In-Game Implementation Examples
As covered above, there's a lot you can do with the Store Module. The implementation examples will focus on 3 different use cases that can provide extensive value for your monetization strategies regardless of genre.
Merchandising NFT Virtual Items
When merchandising NFTs in your game it is first and foremost important to integrate them into the game world and communicate their utility and/or rarity. We recommend theming the NFT items like any other player-facing feature or mechanic in your game. An NFT dog might be a "Rare Breed," and an NFT fashion item can be a "Limited Edition." This approach holds true even if you are a Web3 project, you'll still want to theme the NFT class of items to match the game.
However, it's also important to communicate that the items are in fact NFTs. We recommend integrating an information modal to explain NFTs to players and allow them to navigate to the PLAY player dashboard to learn more if they are so inclined. This approach in combination with theming the NFT items has been highly successful in a conversion rate of up to 42% and a 74% lift to ARPDAU.
The below image shows an example where NFT-backed virtual items are merchandised as "Limited Editions" and given a separate store entry placement from regular items.
The above image shows the tutorialization of NFTs in a social game with a casual audience.
The information modals would trigger when a player viewed the "Limited Editions" shop for the first time and could be manually triggered again by tapping a "?" button placement on that screen.
An alternative option is to simply use a manually triggered information modal - that approach may be a better fit for a less casual game and has been used in several other integrations.
Limited-Time Shop Offers
The above example illustrates an NFT virtual item being merchandised in a similar fashion to a limited-time IAP - with the modification of being a hard currency purchase.
This is just one example of possible configurations, limited-time offers could also be used to set up a daily deals section within your in-game shop.
Filtering Items in Your Shop
If you have a large library of virtual items that you merchandise to players in a store, you probably need filters. Even a medium amount of items could still benefit from filters, depending on your store's UI/UX.
It's important to make browsing your store simple, and even intuitive when possible, so players can just focus on picking up whatever purchases they are looking for. Any typical gamer probably has at least one example of a game they played where the shop or inventory experience had a painfully large amount of items and no easy way to categorize them (we won't name names though)!
Thankfully, you can organize your virtual items with tags and then surface those to players as categories or filters in your store. See the image below for an in-game example.
Performing inventory management can be a really fun, or a really terrible part of a game.
Make sure to carefully consider what types of categories for items would be most useful to players when they are browsing the store or viewing their inventory.
The more items you have, the more granular you might want to be.
