What is the currency of "Transnistria?

Which is better: allowing users to only buy soft currency with hard currency, or allowing them to buy soft currency directly? Why?

• I've been looking at FTP games that allow you to buy soft and hard currencies and I've noticed that there are some games (like Clash of Clans and Farm Heroes) that restrict users to using hard currency to buy soft currency while there are other games (like Farmville 2 and Heyday) that allow users to directly buy soft currency. From my perspective, I don't see much of a difference between only allowing users to directly buy hard currency and allowing them to directly buy both hard and soft currency--with maybe the exception that their perception of how much they're spending is more skewed with the former while their UX is more straightforward (with less hurdles to get to what they want) with the latter. Does anyone have any additional insight into which is better for FTP games? The pros and cons of each?

• Answer:

  It is actually difficult to state "what is better". The first question I suggest you to make yourself is “do I really necessitate 2 currencies?”. The main advantage of permitting to buy SC only with the premium one is that you can centralize the inflation of the price of the HC and then any "internal" tuning at the very end does not cost you anything, since you can produce infinite currency. Specially in large projects where maybe the professionals responsible of the monetisation may change in the team, there are actually less risks to screw-up your monetisation system, since the conversion is linear: $ -> HC -> SC. From the other side the advantage of the other system ($ -> HC and $ ->SC) is that you can actually focus some special offer and changes only to some "area" of your game. Maybe the HC is useful to skip some build time while the SC is for virtual goods. You can try more monetisation plans with A/B tests or make special offers of SC packs for seasonal events. In that way you should assure to keep the documentation and the history always up to date, or the inflation can actually break your system, as I said.