The Psychology of Pricing: Decoys and Anchors
- Dennis Wan
- Jun 20
- 2 min read
Why do game stores and shops always have three or more pricing tiers, even when some of the options are clearly a terrible deal? It's not a mistake. It's Decoy Pricing.
Decoy pricing involves offering one or more "decoy" options designed specifically to make another option look like a steal. If a store offers 500 gems for $5, 1000 gems for $10, and 1200 gems for $11, the $10 option is the decoy. It exists solely to make the $11 option look incredible (or at least the most value for money), pushing players to spend that extra dollar.
For Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a game I worked on previously, we implemented a decoy pricing slightly differently. Our IAP Diamond Packs (Premium Currency) was set up in denominations or $0.99, $4.99, $9.99, $24.99, $49.99 and $99.99. The $0.99 pack was the Anchor price, giving players a baseline idea of how much the Diamonds were worth.
From the data we had, we knew $25 - $50 was more or less the sweet spot, so instead of adding the most value to the $99.99 pack, we focused on the $24.99 and $49.99 packs (all other packs were effectively the Decoys). Buying 2 $49.99 packs got you MORE Diamonds than 1 single $99.99 pack. The strategy was to get players to think that we messed up our calculations, and that they were “getting the better of us”.
While this strategy worked just as I thought it would, what surprised me was that there were still more $99.99 purchases than I expected. Which was kind of a nice surprise, and also a revelation that there were players that felt that paying a little more for Diamonds made up for the minor inconvenience or making the in-app purchase twice.
Combine this with visual cues, limited-time countdown timers (FOMO), and clear "Best Value" tags, and you can massively increase your conversion rates. As the previous example with FFBE demonstrated, monetisation is pure sales psychology. Some games also practice price Obfuscation, to make it difficult for players to quickly do mental math on how much the purchases are valued compared against each other.
However, beware of treading into the territory of “Dark Patterns”, as this could land your company in all kinds of trouble. Maybe we’ll take a deep dive into these in another article!
If this has been useful to you, and you'd like to find out more, reach out to Dennis Wan at www.copiaventura.com !
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