From the first time I played Brawl Stars, I was in love.

The game loop is so simple to grasp, but you can actually feel the learning curve and you understand soon enough that, not only you'll spend a lot of time in the game, but also a pretty decent amount of 💸💸💸.

Today, I won't share my thoughts on why the game is so good, I'll let you give it a try and you'll get it.

What I'd like to do instead is to show some aspects of the strategy they're leveraging to improve their game's monetization.

Keep in mind that I'm sharing my thoughts, it may not be accurate and Brawl Stars team may be experiencing in more aspects of the game that I'm aware of.

In Brawl Stars you have 4 different "currency"

• Coins: With coins, you can buy energy to level up your "brawlers" (game characters)
• Gems: With gems, you can buy brawlers, packs of energy (to quickly level up a specific character), double tokens, brawlers skins (=costumes) and coins
• Tokens: Not really a currency as you can't store it, it's just "points" you win by doing specific activity in the game. With Tokens, you unlock chests and other rewards.
• Star points: With star points, you can buy special brawlers skins and chest at the end of each season (a season = 2–3 weeks).

The ones you can store are Gems, coins and star points.

The shop is always structured as follows:

• Special offer section: Between 1 to 3 items that are available for a specific amount of time
• Daily deals: 6 items, usually 5 paid and one free. They change every day
• Skins: 5–7 different items, rolling cycle is around 1–2 days
• Star shop: 2 skins (all the time) + 2 chests (only available at the end of the season)
• Token Doubler: 100 tokens
• Boxes: big box and mega box
• Gem packs: ranging from 2.29EUR to 109.99EUR
• Coin packs: ranging from 150 to 2,600 coins
• Alright, let's dive in!
• Making the shop part of the user experience

In Brawl Stars, if you want to level up your brawlers, you need to go to the shop and use your free currency (coins) to buy upgrades.

This means that every time you want to "progress" you'll need to go to the shop.

This is great, for a couple of reasons:

Education: No need to educate users on purchasing items if they are already doing it on a daily basis

More touch point: As I was talking about in my previous article, the more touch points you have, the easier it's going to be to drive the user towards a purchase.

Additionally, every day you visit the shop, you'll get a free item ( random).

This item is progress related, making it important for the player to get it every day, making shop visit a habit.

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