Ludo Club's Gold Pass already worked well on its own. The brief was to add a $15 tier above it that felt worth buying, without quietly making Gold feel like the cheap option.
We had a season pass in Ludo Club that already worked. Players could progress through a free reward track or buy a Gold Pass for $7 to unlock better rewards. They earned points by playing normally, eliminating pawns, rolling sixes, staying active in matches, and progressing through the season. The system was easy to understand, and that simplicity was one of its strengths.
Then came a new business goal. Add a third paid tier above Gold. The proposed Diamond Pass would cost $15, more than double the price of Gold, and target players who were already spending and likely willing to spend more. On paper, it sounded straightforward. In practice, it forced a harder question. How do you make a new premium tier feel worthwhile without changing how players perceive the tiers they already know?
We started with players, not rewards. Interviews helped us understand what made a season feel rewarding, which rewards justified spending, and where progression began to feel like work. But Ludo Club was played across 147 countries, and earlier research had already shown that value was interpreted differently across markets. A cosmetic that felt generous in one region could feel insignificant in another, and even the price itself carried different weight depending on local purchasing power.
So the interviews informed our understanding, but the decision came from behaviour. Before changing a single reward, I reviewed data from the previous twelve seasons. Who bought Gold, when they bought, how long they played, what they spent on afterwards, where engagement dropped, and which rewards consistently attracted attention. I was looking for the moments when players actually decided that spending more was worth it.
The central insight was that adding Diamond would do more than create another purchase option. With only two tracks, Gold was the destination. The moment Diamond existed, Gold became the middle option. That reframing mattered almost as much as the rewards themselves. Suddenly $15 was not an unfamiliar number. It was simply the next step above a purchase players already trusted.
The moment Diamond existed, Gold became the middle option.
To make that step feel worthwhile, we placed the most visible cosmetics in Diamond. Exclusive boards, dice, pawns, profile nameplates, and victory animations. In a multiplayer game, those items function as social signals because other players see them every match. The strongest driver, however, was not cosmetic at all. Diamond included discounted power-ups, giving our most engaged spenders a practical reason to upgrade. The cosmetics created desire. The discount created justification.
This is where the downgrade happened. To make the jump to Diamond feel meaningful, we shifted some value upward. Free progression became slightly slower, Gold progression became slightly slower, and several of the most desirable rewards moved into the new tier. No individual change was dramatic enough to feel unfair on its own, but together they made the premium path noticeably more attractive.
Gold did not become worse because we removed a feature. It became worse because the definition of complete moved one level higher. That change was intentional, and it is still the part of the project I think about most when I look back on the results.