How do you construct a successful store in the mobile racing game genre? CSR2’s store is an excellent example: it feels fun and engaging and shows the CSR2 team’s clear understanding of their audience’s needs.
Zynga’s CSR2 has dominated the mobile racing genre for some time now, yielding over $5M revenue in August 2022 alone, and generating over $270m between 2018-2021 (according to Deconstructor of Fun).
CSR2 delivers a drag racing experience to mobile, with the world’s top car manufacturers in beautiful 3D graphics. Its primary sources of monetisation are through car purchases and upgrades. Cars can be obtained through soft currency, hard currency, loot crates and direct IAPs.
So, what’s in store?
Starter Offers
Starter offers are a staple first conversion tool in games. These are often the user’s first offer impressions and are some of the best bangs for their buck they’re gonna get.
CSR2 has two starter offer placements: the first is located at the front of the store, and the second is located on the ‘Buy Car’s screen. You visit both screens a lot, so are highly familiar with the offer.
The offer is priced at $1.99, giving 1.2k gold (hard currency), 19k cash (soft currency) and 350 Bronze Keys (Gacha system currency).
CSR2 does a fantastic job at making the value proposition clear to new users through easy value comparison and familiarity with the currencies offered.
- The offer contents and value are very easy to understand, as you are introduced to all three currencies during your first session.
- A red banner with ‘SAVE 85%’ is strapped across the bottom. This is the highest in the shop by a wide margin.
- The original price of ~$12.50 (£11.93) is displayed with strikethrough formatting. This is the only offer that has this strikethrough effect.
- A quick scroll to the currency section shows it costs $3 for 370 gold normally, so 123 gold per USD. Ignoring the cash and bronze keys, the starter offer provides 1200 gold for $1.99, so 600 gold per USD!
- There are Currency Saver Packs directly next to the $1.99 offer. All these saver packs offer gold, cash and bronze keys in varying quantities and at different price points, but for considerably worse value
Unlike other titles, the starter offer doesn’t have an expiry time. Time limitations are frequently used to add time pressure, and in theory, lead to higher conversion percentages. The CSR2 team instead use this offer as the ‘no-brainer’ purchase/first-conversion tool for users at all points of the game. Notice that CSR2 never brands this offer as a starter offer.
Higher Priced Starter Offers
The game has a few offers that are actually labelled ‘Starter Pack’. These are priced between $10-30, featuring at minimum one car and some hard currency, but also bundled with some extra currencies, cars and in-game items depending on the bundle selected. CSR2 offers you exactly what you want as a new user, which is more cool cars. These have time limitations of around 5 days.
These offers are likely used to help optimise performance marketing by providing higher price points for a user’s first conversion, as well as improve LTV by catering for more users.
Offer Features
Time-Limited
The majority of car offers in the store use time limitations to add time pressure and sync with the LiveOps events schedule. Offers related to LiveOps events are in tabs named after their corresponding event, e.g., ‘Showdown’ in the image below.
Animations
Offers flash into the screen as you scroll, again, making for an exciting browsing experience.
Value Indicators
Offers use a consistent value indicator formula: a red banner with ‘SAVE X%’ text. This is effective as reduces the mental work users in trying to understand whether a particular offer is worth their money!
Varying Price Points
CSR2 regularly presents multiple IAP bundles for cars, with varying contents at different price points. This can be a useful means of upselling but could lead to paralysis by choice. Fortunately, the most cost-effective option is displayed clearly!
Hard/Soft Currency IAP Packs
The Currency IAPs have an ‘X Free’ banner, making it really clear to the user how much extra cash/gold they are getting. This is far more effective than a percentage here, as the lower-cost bundles only provide 2-14% extra.
All gold IAPs and one bronze key bundle have a ‘Twice’ feature. I’m not really too sure what they mean but suspect it may be a BOGOF style up-sell on your first purchase. This is a clever idea, likely increasing conversion at all price points.
One Long Scroller
Again, a classic feature. One single-paged, continuous scroller is very common in these top-grossing F2P games. Endlessly scrolling is so easy and pleasurable! Also, it has the benefit of no confusing menu navigation AND is great in low-offer periods as the store will always feel full and alive.
The system is supplemented by quick-travel tabs between key shop segments.
How to get to the shop & the ‘Buy Cars’ Shop
Navigation to the shop wasn’t particularly obvious to me! The main shop with all the offers is only accessible through the yellow ‘+’ icon at the top right-hand corner by your currency balances, however, there is a secondary shop that can be accessed through the ‘BUY CARS’ button in the garage.
When I first started playing, I thought this was the shop! You are taught to navigate to the ‘BUY CARS’ section early in the FTUE as you purchase your first car. This secondary shop is the focus for new users.
I don’t think this is a bad thing! CSR2 understands its audience – they are car enthusiasts that want to browse the collection of cars or look for a specific car! In addition, cars are the things a user wants most when playing the game – this makes the action of buying a particular car as intuitive and frictionless as possible.
CSR2 capitalises on the higher impressions of the ‘BUY CARS’ screen with the ‘Piccadilly Circus’-Esque animated offer panels for the starter offer and car bundles.
Closing Notes
If you enjoyed this content, check out my other store analyses here: