Hats, Monetisation and the Lobby

The basic idea behind this suggestion is to create a cosmetic that has a false value, encouraging people to spend both money and time obtaining it. Generally speaking it makes use of Dr Robert Cialdini’s principle of scarcity, which suggests that things are more valuable when their availability is lower. I’ll be using block hats to take advantage of this, but in theory it could be applied to a lot of other things too. So how do we artificially add value to something that has none?

You make it rare.

You see this principle in full force within CS:GO. People are willing to pay thousands of dollars for something with no gameplay value whatsoever, with price almost entirely dictated by rarity. And the more expensive something is, the more prestigious it is: even on Brawl, the Hacker tag has had a few sales despite the $49.99 price.

Rarity, price and desirability, therefore, go hand in hand. In the context of block hats (Minecraft blocks you wear on your head, for the unfamiliar), you can increase all three in a number of ways:

• Make them difficult to obtain
• Jack up the prices
• Limit the availability of certain hats

We’ll explore ways to obtain hats later. First I want to acknowledge the fact that at the end of the day, they’re just a cosmetic you can use in the lobby, and maybe Party or Build. Nobody’s going to see it, and therein lies the problem. Have a look at this formula:

Desirability = Visibility x (Rarity + Price)​

Desirability is, of course, what we’re trying to increase because that’s what’s making us money. You can increase price and rarity of cosmetics as much as you want, but they’ll never get off the ground if there’s nobody there to see them. So before we do anything, we want to increase visibility. Everyone wants to show off, right? There’s two ways to do this.


The first way is to make the hats visible on the forums. I’m a sucker for medals and I sunk 25 bucks into Brawl despite having lifetime Elite, partly because I want to support the server but partly because I wanted a shiny golden nugget under my name. So let’s transfer that over to block hats and have a counter for our profiles, visible on every post we make. Or failing that, a medal for certain milestones, similar to the donation medals – 5 hats, 10 hats, 25 hats and so on.

The second way is, I think, pretty beautiful. If hats are mainly going to be used in the lobby, the best thing to do is to make people spend more time there. This can be done pretty easily through minigames like spleef and parkour, and that’s certainly something we should be doing, but it’s not what I’m going to focus on. I want to talk about gadgets.

I might’ve mentioned it before, but there was an MCPVP hub we were working on that used gadgets pretty well. One part I specifically remember making was a maze with no floor, which you could only use a jetpack to navigate. It only flew for a limited time and made the maze fairly tough to complete. Essentially, though, all it did was allow players to access a restricted area. So let’s say we expand on that and create a bunch of gadgets that allow players to access more areas. Use the trampoline to access high places. Have a gadget that turns off lava damage so you can swim through a lava-fall without dying. Maybe have something that lets you phase through glass blocks. You get the idea. Money for access, it’s a strategy as old as time.

But that’s not all. Behind some of these restricted areas, it’s possible for a player to find a hat. And suddenly you’ve got another incentive to buy gadgets: you complete a puzzle, you get a rare reward. It’s way more satisfying than buying the hat outright because you’ve had to put some time and effort into earning it. Going back to our friend Dr Cialdini, he notes that the more difficult a fraternity’s hazing is, the stronger the sense of brotherhood. They’ve earned their place through hard work, so it’s more valuable to them. We use that same principle here.

So we’ve made the hats more visible, and now all that’s left to do is to figure out ways to hand them out. The beauty of this is that you can use these now-desirable cosmetics to draw attention to other parts of the network. You can easily use CTF and Party credits to unlock hats, and I imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to apply similar concepts to other gamemodes as well – you could even have a few forum rewards or use them to promote events. And, of course, you can buy them outright from the shop.

Summary/TLDR

Turn block hats into a collectible item. As well as selling them, they can be used to promote gamemodes and events, and to give players a reason to explore and spend time on Brawl.

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