Announcing: A New Prizes Model

Hi friends 👋 It’s Diego here, the CEO of Playbite!

I just wanted to write this quick announcement to let you know that as of today, the way prizes work on Playbite is changing – for the better!

Go update your app or refresh the website to see it!

Here’s the tl;dr if you don’t wanna read the whole thing:

-New “Prize Drop” model is entry-based

-Spend tickets on entries to prizes, get drawn to win the full prize or unlock a portion of the prize

-Prize Drops can be prize specific (for example, $10 Roblox Gift Card), or a grouping of prizes (for example, Gamer Piñata with many gamer-focused prizes)

-Puzzle Pieces are going away. Instead we’re letting users unlock prizes by percentages. These percentages can range from 1% to 99% reaching 100% equals unlocking the prize and having it sent to you!

-Your puzzle pieces have already been converted to a % unlocked for each of those prizes

-The app has new tabs:

• Prizes for Prizes
• Shop for in-game items such as Collectibles
• My Stuff to see progress of prizes, collections of in-game items, etc.

-You don’t have to jump online at the exact second or miss a prize any more. You won’t have to get into a bidding war to win prizes any more.

-This system will make the app much simpler, fairer, and healthier

-Make sure you have the latest version of your app to see it!

Wanna learn more and see pics? Great, keep going! 👇

Change #1: What you spend tickets on

The first big change to understand is that we are changing from the complicated system we’ve had to a singular way to win a prize: the new “Prize Drop” system.

Here’s how it works:

• Step 1: a specific prize (for example, $10 Roblox Gift Card) or a specific grouping of prizes (for example, a “Gamer Piñata” with several prizes for gamers) will “drop”
  
• Step 2: Users will spend their tickets on entries into the drop
  
• Step 3: The drop will end, and all entrants will receive a push notification so you can come back and see what you’ve won!

Now, this model works really well because of change #2, explained below!

Change #2: Puzzle Pieces are being replaced with “Percentage Unlocked”

Before today, players could only earn progress towards a prize by getting puzzle pieces (typically 1/4).

That is now being replaced by “% unlocked” that can range between 1% to 100%!

Now, hundreds if not thousands of people will get to experience making progress towards prizes constantly!

Puzzle pieces helped us prove that it was very powerful for players to experience winning a portion of the prize and building their way up to a full unlock.

The problem it still faced was the amount of people who could experience that was way too little.

Now, we’ll be able to get many more people unlocking progress, which we believe will help us keep them around for much longer.

The more players, the more money Playbite makes, the more we can drop in prizes, which gets even more players, which gets even more money for Playbite, and so on…

What will happen to my puzzle pieces?

Great question! By the time you read this, your puzzle pieces will have been converted to a % unlocked for each of those prizes.

The dev team did some sophisticated math 🤓 to determine what that % unlock would be.

It’s worth mentioning that each puzzle didn’t just translate to +25% each time – that would’ve simply been unsustainable!

We hope you are happy with the results, we spent a lot of time working through how to make the one-time switch happen! 🥰

How the app will look

It’s also important to understand how the app will look from now on.

We are separating Collectibles (and soon to be other in-game items) from Prizes.

From now on, there will be a tab called “Prizes” for prizes, and a tab called “Shop” for in-game items such as collectibles.

On top of that, we’re creating a new tab called “My Stuff” where you can see and manage your Prizes and In-Game Items separately.

(This was a heavily requested feature fyi… the ability to “see what progress I have in unlocking prizes”)

What isn’t changing

What isn’t changing is the proposition Playbite offers you, our amazing players and community: the more/better you play, the more you’ll win.

The more/better you play, the more tickets you have. The more tickets you have, the more you can enter Prize Drops. The more you can enter Prize Drops, the more you’ll unlock on prizes.

We’re simply changing the mechanics, eliminating the need to stay up late or leave in the middle of dinner to rush to press a button faster than 100 other people, or causing you stress and anxiety with bidding wars.

With 1% to 100% progress unlocks, we’re also going to be able to give many more people the joy of making progress towards prizes, which we believe is important to build loyalty and fun for everyone!

As you probably already know, our mission is to build the most entertaining and rewarding app on the Internet.

We believe this new prizes model will be a much healthier system for all parties involved. It’s much simpler to understand, it’s the fairest it’s ever been, and it’s the healthiest presentation to the user… so go play the games you like, spend your tickets on what you want, and rest easy knowing the drawing will happen even if you’re not online!

We’ll surely have to keep making tweaks

I’d also be foolish not to mention that we are still very much in the beginning of our app’s journey, so I expect changes to continue to happen as we get feedback and data from our users and partners.

What I can promise you will never change is our mission: building the most entertaining and rewarding app on the Internet.

Have any questions? Come chat with us!

If you haven’t already, consider joining our Discord – I’d be happy to answer your questions!

We’ll also be hosting a Town Hall at 2pm ET this Sunday, January 29th. You’ll be able to join that from our Discord as well, but it will be streamed on Twitch and later published on YouTube.

THANK YOU in advance for your continued patience and support as we keep tweaking the app to improve upon it!

Love you all! 💜