We have shipped over 40 mobile titles in the last six years. Across all of them, the studios that struggled with monetisation shared the same handful of problems. None of them were about the core game being bad. They were structural: wrong timing, wrong pricing, wrong incentives. All fixable.
Here are the five we see most often, and exactly what to do about each one.
Mistake 1: Gating Too Early
The most common mistake by far. Studios put IAP prompts in front of players who have not yet felt the core gameplay loop. If a player hasn't experienced the moment that makes your game compelling, they have zero motivation to spend. You are asking them to invest money in something they don't value yet.
Mistake 2: Wrong IAP Pricing Tiers
Players fall into rough spending segments: non-payers, minnows (£1–5/month), dolphins (£10–30/month), and whales (£50+/month). If your IAP store only offers a £0.99 coin pack and a £49.99 starter bundle, you are missing everyone in between: which is the majority of your actual paying audience.
“The goal of IAP pricing is not to maximise the revenue per transaction, it is to maximise the number of players who cross the payment threshold for the first time.” Internal LiveOps review, Nine Pixels, 2024
Mistake 3: Ad Placement That Punishes Players
Showing a 30-second unskippable interstitial immediately after a player loses a level they have been trying to beat for ten minutes is a retention killer. It creates a Pavlovian association between frustration and your monetisation system. Players churn rather than spend.
Rewarded vs interstitial: the numbers
In our experience across titles, rewarded video ads placed at the loss moment convert between 18–34% of eligible players. Interstitials placed at the same moment convert 0%, and cost you 4–12% of that session's DAU through churn. The math is clear.
Mistake 4: No Soft Currency Sink
Free soft currency (coins, gems, stars) has no value unless players have meaningful things to spend it on. When players accumulate thousands of a currency and feel no pull to spend it, the currency stops feeling valuable: and so does the premium version of it that you are trying to sell.
Mistake 5: Treating Every Player the Same
Showing your highest-LTV players the same £0.99 starter offer you show a new install is a significant missed opportunity. Whales do not respond to small-value offers, they respond to exclusivity, convenience, and status. Minnows respond to perceived bargains. Optimising for one segment hurts the other.
The Common Thread
All five of these mistakes share the same root cause: building the monetisation system after the game is already done, rather than designing both together from the start. Monetisation is not a layer you add on top of a game. It is a design system that has to be woven into the core loop, the progression, and the social mechanics from day one.
If you are currently seeing ARPDAU below £0.04 on a casual title, or conversion rates below 2%, at least two of these mistakes are almost certainly in play. The good news is that all five are fixable without rebuilding the game: they are systems and placement decisions, not core mechanics.
If you want a second opinion on your current setup, we are happy to do a short live ops audit. Just get in touch.
