“We’ve been chastised by other game studios and publishers for being a little too soft with our monetization.”
Morgan Long — CEO, co-founder, and art director at Sad Panda Studios, joined OGDA for our May Level Up Talk alongside her programmer and co-founder Programmer Panda to talk honestly about what a decade of free-to-play actually looks like. Not the theory. The specific decisions, missteps, and one very lucky guess. Her background is long. Seven-plus years at Disney Online Studios Canada as Senior Artist and Art Team Leader on Club Penguin, then Creative Lead and Art Director at Hyper Hippo Productions. At Sad Panda, the team has shipped Crush Crush, Blush Blush, Hush Hush, and Cabin Fever. All launched free.
The first version of Crush Crush didn’t have a store. It launched on Kongregate in February 2016 with five characters, idle mechanics, and no way to spend money. Within weeks, the forums filled up with the same question: where’s the store? Can we buy diamonds?
That wasn’t the plan. But it became the whole business.
The Store Players Built
Sad Panda didn’t design a monetization strategy in 2016. They shipped and listened. The Kongregate community told them what to build. When the balance made the game take years to finish, they adjusted it. Crush Crush sold cosmetics. Then time skips. Then premium outfits. Every time players asked for something to spend money on, Sad Panda built it. The model they landed on wasn’t designed — it was assembled from requests. The trust relationship that grew from that is still intact a decade later.
Who’s Actually Paying You
The numbers that surprised the room is that on mobile, only 1 to 2 percent of players spend money in-app. And they generate 60 percent of mobile revenue. The other 98 percent of the player base engages with ads and offer walls — and that accounts for the remaining 40 percent of revenue.
The Price Nobody Overthought
Programmer Panda ran proper A/B pricing experiments a couple of years ago. Multi-month. Randomly cohorted. Controlled correctly. He wanted to know whether the currency conversion they’d set in 2016 — 10 diamonds per dollar — was actually right.
“We found that the ideal conversion ratio was the one that we picked back in 2016. And if we changed it at all, either direction, the monetization got worse. And I was like, what the heck?”
They had guessed right. Completely randomly. Nine years earlier.
The lesson he draws: “Maybe ask the question earlier than I did, because I waited nine years.” The technology to run the test is not hard. What’s hard is remembering to ask it — and invest in a backend that lets you ask.
No Gacha. On Purpose.
Crush Crush has no gacha. No randomized pulls. No gambling loops. The team decided this deliberately and stuck with it through Blush Blush, Hush Hush, and Cabin Fever.
They know what it costs. The fans who’ve come from more predatory games notice the difference, and say so. The community that grew up around Crush Crush over ten years isn’t built on extraction. It’s built on trust accumulated over a thousand small decisions to not take the easy money.
“Probably leaving a lot of money on the table, but we’ve got our own scruples to follow.”
The Short List
Six things Sad Panda learned the hard way:
- Launch before you’re ready. The rough prototype is the product. Ship it, then build it with your community.
- Listen for where the store is. Players will tell you what they want to pay for, if you’re paying attention.
- Make speed boosts consumable. Permanent ones were a design mistake they can’t undo. If you’re starting now, start right.
- Test your pricing. Even when your gut was right — especially when your gut was right — run the experiment.
- Build your backend infrastructure when you can. PlayFab went from free to $6,000/month for Crush Crush alone. Sad Panda built their own with an $80k IRAP grant; it now runs all their games for under $1,000/month.
- Know what you won’t do. No forced ads, no gacha, no dark patterns. The list of nevers is a business strategy.
Why It Mattered
Fifteen people showed up on a Thursday night to hear this. Not a launch event, not a prize draw. Just a room of people who wanted to know how someone else made it work.
“Ideas are cheap and people can always pitch cool ideas, but making it happen and actually hitting the button to deploy the game is pretty rare.”
That line is for everyone who hasn’t shipped yet. Morgan and Programmer Panda have shipped. Four titles, ten years, and one dog who needed care by eight o’clock. The fact that they talked about the missteps as openly as the wins: the bad early UI, the permanently-priced speed boosts, the nine years before Programmer Panda finally ran the pricing test, is the kind of thing you don’t get from a polished panel.
If you missed it, materials are available to Associate members through the OGDA member portal.
What’s Next?
Our next Level Up Talk is on June 4, 2026. Where one of our very own EiRs — Barbara Dawson will talk about building the career you want from the job you have. Follow OGDA on Discord or watch ogda.ca for the next Level Up Talk session event announcement.