Pubg's Genius Strategy: How to Design Addictive Products to make 2.8 Billion Dollars?
Hi everybody in the past two years we've been hearing horrific stories of people who have been adversely affected because of over engaging with pubg while some people often think it to be as some digital chinese invasion strategy what most people miss out on is the fact that pubg is a work of a genius and pubg has got some critical business strategy lessons that these schools often don't teach us because you see in
Spite of the release of thousands of games designed by the most talented game studios in the world rarely do you see a game like pubg that takes the world by a storm within just 5 years of its launch this game today has 40 million daily active users has more than 400 million monthly active users and has a mind-boggling download count of 1 billion downloads as a result it has been able to make 2.8 billion dollars in revenue and like we
Saw with many people around us these players are so engaged in playing the game that they literally have to be pulled out of it so the underlying question over here is what is so unique and powerful about pubg's product design that it is able to achieve such an extraordinary level of engagement how does this model work out and most importantly as entrepreneurs and business strategists of the future how can you cultivate the skill of building
A super engaging product like pubg and apply that to your business this video is brought to you by walt but more on this at the end of the video the answer to this lies in this incredible book called hooked written by d yal and in this book nirial explains a model called the hook model this model consists of four behavioral elements and if these elements are applied to your product your product by default becomes an addictive product
These four elements are trigger action investment and variable reward the first and the most simplest element of all is trigger and this is an element that actually motivates you to start using the product these triggers are of two types internal trigger and external trigger internal triggers are those triggers that tempt you to use the product without any external force like an advertisement or a notification classic examples boldum is the trigger
For instagram hunger is the trigger for zomato and the need to go out is the trigger for ola or uber whereas for external triggers we've got apps like bloomberg and gmail that get you to the app through a push notification about a news or an email and just like that for pubg the internal trigger is boredom and the external trigger could be your friends calling you to get online or a notification that tempts you to start playing pubg
And if your friends do not call you pubg will send you a daily bonus as a reward just to tempt you to enter the game so that you have the motivation to start playing this is followed by the second element which is action in this case action is nothing but a simple act that you do in anticipation of the reward in case of pubg it's as simple as you starting to play the game in anticipation of getting an adrenaline rush
And this is where the third element comes in which is by far the most powerful element that is capable of causing addiction and this is the variable reward system to understand this let me take you back to a very famous experiment that was conducted by an american psychologist named dr b.f skinner in the 1950s in this experiment dr skinner created a small box this box had a small button which can be pegged by a pigeon and
Along with that there was a small opening right below that button where the pigeon gets the reward with food so basically dr skinner was trying to find out if he could create a habit in the pigeons by using the reward of food so in the first set of experiments he rewarded the pigeon every time it pegged and he noticed that the pigeon actually started asking for food when it got hungry so after some time he decided to tweak
This experiment slightly and this time he started rewarding the pigeon randomly both in terms of quantity of the food and the frequency in which they were rewarded so instead of the regular rhythm of one pack and immediate food this time he used to give them food after two packs sometimes after three packs sometimes after five packs and then used to give it after 12 packs and so on and so forth so this way the food was given to the pigeons in a random
Pattern and to his surprise he noticed something absolutely unbelievable as it turns out unlike the pigeons that received the same food at regular intervals the pigeons that received variable rewards went crazy these pigeons started continuously pecking at the button compulsively even after getting more food than needed in fact one of these pigeons hit the button 2.5 times every single second for
The next 16 hours and another one packed the button 87 000 times in the next 14 hours and the pigeons did that in spite of getting the reward less than one percent of the time and as it turns out this exact same behavior was also shown by rats when they were put in a similar condition this is when dr skinner realized that when a creature is rewarded for its action in a random unpredictable pattern that creature will get addicted to carry
Of that action again and again this is what you call as the variable reward system and guess what the exact same system is very cleverly used in pubg to keep the gamers hooked every time you play the game you have no idea who you're playing with you have no idea what formation is going to be which weapons you will get and the box that drops down i don't know what you call it but then you have no idea when it's going to land or where
It's going to land on top of that if you're going on a winning streak the algorithm will deliberately curate your player's lobby such that you will end up playing with players of higher caliber such that your possibility of losing increases similarly if you're on a losing streak you are put in a lobby of players of lesser caliber making you more likely to win therefore the reward of winning is deliberately made variable and this is the reason why it is so
Difficult to win 10 games in a row all of these attributes when deployed together they make pubg the product a complex version of many skinner boxes that keep you so hooked to the game that you completely lose track of time and just like the pigeons in the skinner box the players end up compulsively playing the game for a very very long duration if this is very very clear to you let's move on to the next powerful element and
That is something called the infinite loop phenomenon people has it ever happened to you that you started scrolling through youtube shots and the next thing you know it's already been one hour the same thing must have also happened with you when you started scrolling through instagram reels and if you've been using tik tok you must have felt this very early similarly even while playing pop g people just decide to play one game but
They end up playing for hours without even realizing it so the question over here is how is this happening and what is the secret recipe of this design the answer to this comes from an american professor named brian one sings most famous experiment called the bottomless bowl experiment in this experiment the participants were made to sit in groups of four and they were given a bowl of tomato soup they were given 20 minutes and they were asked to eat as much as
They wanted and the catch over here was that while two of these participants were given a normal soup bowl secretly the other two bowls had a small pipe at the bottom that kept filling the soup as these participants were drinking it and the most astonishing thing that this professor found was that a typical person drinking soup from the bottomless bowl ended up consuming 73 more soup as compared to the people with the normal bull
And guess what when these participants were asked if they were full they said how can i be full i still have half a bowl of soup left and this is how ladies and gentlemen this experiment drew an important conclusion about human behavior that if there isn't a visual cue to indicate the quantity of consumption and if the experience is left unhindered then by default it will lead to excessive
Consumption and most importantly in spite of the excessive consumption the subject will still be unsatisfied leading to more consumption this is the reason why when you start watching youtube shots because it is a continuous unending loop leading to an unhindered experience you end up consuming it excessively and cherry on the cake is that you are still left unfulfilled by the way this is also the reason why when you take a shower you have no idea
How much water you're consuming you lose track of time and you're always left with a slight urge to shower more this is also the reason why netflix plays the next episode before you get the time to think what to do next and in case of pubg if you watch closely the game in spite of being so complex with millions of players playing every single day it somehow gets the players into the next game as quick as possible to keep
The experience unhindered this is done so that they do not get satisfied and do not get the time to quantify how many games or how much time they've spent and lastly we have the fourth element which is an investment into the game that increases the perceived value of the game so if you've reached a certain level in pubg if you have a certain number of coins if you have a particular set of weapons that you bought and if
You made in-app purchases it by default increases the value of the game for non-gamers many of us do not use facebook and yet if i ask you to delete your facebook account today you will still be a little hesitant why because your account has 500 friends whom you might get in touch with in your entire lifetime which is quite unlikely and yet you are hesitant because the perceived value of facebook is increased because of the network that you've
Formed this is also the same reason why google photos gives you 15 gb of free backup so that when you backup your photos the value of your gmail account increases by a large extent this is how using the super powerful hooked model pubg as a product has been able to achieve extraordinary levels of user engagement and when this got combined with the elimination of the entry barrier through pubg mobile this game took the world by
A storm becoming one of the most successful products in gaming history and many many games today have already adopted these kind of models to keep the players hooked to the game these were some of the most important attributes that turned pubg into an insane product now the question over here is pubg is a great product that is fine but how can you learn about the intricacies of product design and what are the sources that you have to refer to in order to
Apply these principles to your product before we move on i want to thank our partners walt for supporting our content people did you know that gaming companies like g2a have been constantly experimenting with crypto payment acceptance and giants like at t have already started accepting crypto payments since 2019 itself and if you're someone who wants to invest in cryptocurrencies you should do it through vault
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Very carefully if this is very very clear to you let's move on to the study materials to help you become a genius in product design the first reference is obviously this book called hooked written by this legend called real i'll also attach the workbook that he gives out in his website and this workbook has got specific questions that will help you apply the techniques that you start in this book so don't just read the book
Also try to solve the workbook discuss it with your team if you really want to build insane products the second book is this book written by bj4 called persuasive technology it is slightly expensive so only buy this book if you're damn serious or you are a professional product designer and lastly if you find this book too expensive please read this book called tiny habits written by bj fogg himself that's all from my side today guys if you learned
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