Time-Locked Upgrade (Purchasable Early by Whales Only): Continuous Glucose Monitor 

Most players complain about purchases designed to suspend boredom, but I’ll @#*$% pay anything to escape any of these crappy core loops.

Game Design Background: Some Additional Definitions

Time-locked upgrades: Upgrades that are only available to players who have reached a certain level of the game.

Whales: Players who spend an exorbitant amount of money in a game, often in excess of 10s or even 100s of thousands of dollars. These players often have highly addictive personalities. Recent studies have shown that a surprisingly large proportion of revenue earned by a game (sometimes over 50%) comes from these ‘whales’.

Suspension of Boredom: One of the major user complaints about many free-to-play monetization mechanics is that your purchases only pay for escaping the core loop as opposed to paying for things that actually improve gameplay.  This concept is referred to as “suspension of boredom”. Often games will force you to do a boring/monotonous activity over and over again, such as making you kill 1,000 boars to earn the sword - then they give you the option to buy the sword for $3 (essentially allowing the player to ‘escape the core loop’ and ‘suspend boredom’ by spending money).

With diabetes, the paid upgrades are all time-locked unless you pay a boatload of money. 

Endocrinologist: “Oh, you don’t want to poke your kid until she bleeds every 2 hours to test her glucose? There’s this thing called a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) where you only have to inject it once every 10 days.”

Me: “Are you serious?!?! Give me NOW!”

Endocrinologist: “Great. I’ll put in a request with your insurance. Don’t worry, it usually only takes 2-4 weeks for the insurance company to approve it.”

@#*$% time-locked upgrade.

Me: “Wait a minute - can’t I just go to a pharmacy and pay for it out of pocket?”

Endocrinologist: “I mean I guess you could, but….”

Me: “WRITE ME A PRESCRIPTION NOW!!!”

An hour later I’m downstairs at the hospital Walgreens.

Pharmacist: “You’re paying for this out of pocket, huh? Yeah, I see that from time to time.”

I’ve heard that tone-of-voice before. It’s the same tone our game’s live-operations team would use when they would discover another ‘whale’ in Dubai who just spent $70,000 USD a year on in-game coins. We used to see that “from time to time”.

Pharmacist: “That’ll be $750. Oh wait, I found a coupon. That’ll be $730.”

The CGM shifts the finger-prick-every-three-hours to a 10-day outer loop (or 7 days… Or 5 days... if your random Dexcom loot box gives you a bad sensor or one with a potentially fatal bug) because you need to reinject/reinsert the sensor that often. 

The second upgrade, the insulin pump, is time-locked to 6 months and skill-gated. They won’t let you have it until you’ve mastered the core loop- because that upgrade randomly fails too, and you need to have the skills to fallback to the core loop, which is @#*$%  needles. 

We’ll talk about that later…