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Introduction to Loyalty Economies

The real magic (loyalty lift) of loyalty programs lies in getting the economy right. A well-laid economy will motivate players to keep going, help them "feel" the rewards and benefits they earn, nudge them along, and drive more engagement.

In this article, we'll introduce the basics of loyalty economies, including:

Rewards Programs: Introduction to rewards program economies, first principles, and basic components of a rewards economy system.
Status Programs: Introduction to status program economies, first principles, and basic components of a status economy system.

We'll close out with what it's like to work with playAWARDS.

Let's get started and be better together!

Introduction to Rewards Program Economies

Rewards programs create a win-win by driving tremendous value for the company while helping loyalty members feel rewarded for their loyalty. Examples of rewards programs include credit card cashback programs, airline miles that earn travelers free flights, or comped rooms in Vegas for customers gambling on their casino floor. Getting your rewards program right requires getting your economy right.

A rewards program economy is like any other. It has a demand side (loyalty point currency) and a supply side (rewards). What's different here compared to, say, the US economy is you control both sides. You're the US treasury, the mint, the banks, the manufacturer making the goods, and the stores selling them. You've got great power and responsibility to design a loyalty economy that strikes a balance between rewarding your members and creating value for yourself.

In this section, we'll cover the basics of rewards program economies, such as reinvestment rates, platform rules, and how playAWARDS is different. We'll go over the first principles of economy strategy, such as earning-speed, grant strategies, and accrual rates relative to rewards available. Finally, we'll cover the basic components needed to support a loyalty economy in a mobile game, such as earn methods, initial balances, and more.

Introduction to Rewards Program Economies

At their most basic, rewards program economies consist of a demand side and a supply side.

Demand Side: "Demand" is measured by the loyalty points awarded to your loyalty members. You want them to earn these points for behaviors that you wish to reward, you want them to earn enough to get rewards commensurate with their value to you, and of course, you want to design a program that incentivizes members to (a) engage more and (b) stick around and stay with your loyalty program (vs. your competitors') longer. Finally, when awarding loyalty in a mobile game, there are some platform rules provided by Google and Apple that you must adhere to. We'll cover each of these goals and topics in more detail below.

Supply Side: "Supply" is the rewards that you offer your loyalty members. These rewards can consist of your owned inventory or partner inventory. It should be reinvested into your players at the right rate and pace. When awarding partner inventory, you're able to think about reinvestment rates in a much different way. Finally, you should offer a complement of rewards that cater to each phase of a player's lifecycle, ensuring that they have something to reach for at every step of the way. We'll cover each of these goals and topics in more detail below.

Intro to Reinvestment Rates (Traditional "Owned & Operated" Rewards Programs)

The reinvestment rate is the rate at which rewards program reinvest back into its members. It's typically measured as the retail price of the reinvested reward divided by total member spend required to achieve that reward.

Like this:

Retail Price of Rewards Awarded

$10

Customer Spend Required to Achieve Reward

$100

Reinvestment Rate

10%

Of course, the true reinvestment for the business is different, because the cost of goods is different than the retail price. But regardless, this is the traditional way reinvestment is measured.

Reinvestment rates vary greatly based on several dimensions, including:

The typical reinvestment rates in your industry
The quality/value of the player and where they are in their lifecycle

In this table, you can see what are some typical reinvestment rates by industry. Of course, the margin that a business or industry has to play with (gross revenue - cost of sales - operating expenses) is a major contributor to what kind of reinvestment rate that industry typically entertains.

Why Have Points?

So why have loyalty points at all? Why not just tell your members how many dollars worth of rewards they have available?

Well, essentially, that's what points do. But in addition, loyalty points also...

...Allow you to be flexible. This has a ton of utility. What if you decide tomorrow you want to change your earn rate? What if you wish to accrue points faster for members who are in higher tiers? For all sorts of reasons, points give you the flexibility to make adjustments.
...Are an abstraction layer (that enhances value perception). Since you set both the earn rate and what points are worth, you can dole out far more of them than you could with dollars. It also helps international programs universalize all members under a currency, avoiding having to deal with global currencies and exchange rates in your loyalty operations, system, and marketing communications.
...Gamifies it. With points, you can award points out unevenly, granting more for behaviors you're more interested in driving. You can hold some back and give them back as "bonuses." With an abstraction layer, you have the flexibility to make point accrual more fun.
...Create a stronger sense of investment. Once members appreciate their loyalty currency, they'll value it just as they would the money in their bank account. Once they value it the same as any other currency, then they will perceive any balance they have as a sunk cost and any additional contributions into it as an investment.

Using the same example as before, here's how loyalty programs then take a reinvestment rate and add the loyalty point abstraction layer:

playAWARDS Partner-centered Approach

How is playAWARDS different from traditional programs? How is it that we're able to achieve a 100% reinvestment rate? It's because the playAWARDS program leverages a partner-centered approach. While we offer a combination of both in-game benefit ("owned") rewards and partner rewards, the reinvestment rate is driven by partner rewards, which we mostly obtain at no cost to playAWARDS.

Why would rewards partners volunteer their inventory? Because playAWARDS loyalty program-enabled games serve as a wonderful acquisition and reactivation program for brick-and-mortar businesses. Thanks to our mature system of rule governance, our vast player base, and our gamified way of doling out rewards, partners are able to leverage the program to find new customers cheaply and even profitably.

The result: playAWARDS is effectively a first-of-its-kind "freemium" loyalty program. Members can earn rewards without spending money at all, something that's virtually non-existant in traditional rewards programs. And if members DO spend money, playAWARDS as a strategy aims to reinvest 100% of their spend back to them in the form of loyalty points and ultimately rewards.

Platform Rules

As a mobile game, you're subject not just to the typical regulatory environment created by governments around the world, but also to the platform rules set by Apple, Google, and while not explicitly a platform, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). playAWARDS is steeped in the environments of platform regulation and can help ensure you steer clear of any violations.

Not all of the below rules apply to every app. Please work closely with the playAWARDS Economy Team to ensure you're in compliance with platform rules.

First Principles

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How do you construct a loyalty economy that drives value for your players and your app? Here are some of the first principles that lay the groundwork success. And of course, you let playAWARDS help.

Award Slowly

Players should earn loyalty points slowly. This is fundamental to rewards programs. First and foremost, rewards programs are about driving long-term retention. The way you achieve this is by letting players earn loyalty points slowly, work for it, feel invested, and every once in a while, "cashing in."

Over Multiple Methods is Better

Think of your earn rate as your zero-sum game. For a given player over a given period of time, you have a target of X loyalty points you wish to award. You could grant all X through one earn method, or you could divide it up among multiple methods. We recommend multiple earn methods because it lets you drive multiple behaviors.

Granting BIG Incentives to Drive Desired Behaviors

Along those lines, for any behavior that's really important to creating value for your app, reserve a good chunk of loyalty and dedicate it to these behaviors. Imagine being a player and seeing just 50 loyalty points here and 100 loyalty points there. When you offer them a chance to earn 1,000 loyalty points at once, they'll immediately see value and it will change their thinking and motivation about that behavior.

In other words:

Earn slow to drive long-term retention: This is the fundamental loyalty program model that 100% of loyalty programs adhere to. You award points slowly, then after N point-accruing interactions (and N is large), the loyalty member "cashes in."
Big moments to drive short-term engagement: That said, a portion of the anticipated earn rate should be reserved for "big moments." What's a big moment? It's an opportunity to grant the player a much larger amount of loyalty for a specific action. These should be behaviors that you really want to drive. Loyalty points can be a wonderful incentive for driving short-term engagement in those moments.

Slow Relative to What?

Of course, "slow" is all relative. But slow relative to what? Relative to the rewards they would like to buy.

The most achievable rewards (category A) within the first few days after install
Materially better rewards (category B) within the first few months after install
The most aspirational rewards (category C) after the first 1-2 years after install

Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Different player segments should have different earn rates based on how much they engage and monetize. Also, what percent of rewards you have in category A vs. category B should be a consideration as well. But it's a useful rule of thumb.

That Said, It May Differ Wildly By Player Segment

It goes without saying that higher-valued players should earn loyalty and qualify for better rewards faster than lower-valued players. How much more depends on many factors. playAWARDS will work closely with you to identify a structure that meets the needs of your business.

How Many Rewards Currencies Should You Have?

Our default position is one. But if you have a compelling case, a premium currency could:

Create an even SLOWER earn rate that's even MORE tied to monetization behavior
Unlock your ability to partition particularly valuable rewards for particularly valuable players

If you choose to take on a second currency, playAWARDS can help. Our system supports it and our Professional Services group can work with you to determine the appropriate earn methods, exchange rates, and more.

What's a Healthy Usage Rate?

Only a certain percentage of your players are actually engaging with your loyalty program and exchanging their loyalty points for rewards. Is that bad? Not necessarily. When you automatically enroll every player into the program, you'll inevitably experience a higher breakage on the consumption rates of your loyalty points. This is okay. You should instead measure this rate against the rate of overall customers who typically engage in loyalty programs in general. On average, 60-70% of customers enroll in a loyalty program, and only half of those will use their points for rewards. So if 35% of your MAU has ever used their points for rewards, you're doing pretty good.

And how many points will they use in a single consumption session? Don't expect them to use them all. That's okay. If they're using half or more, then you're in a good place.

Basic Components of a Rewards Economy System

We've discussed rewards programs, their reinvestment rates, the value of having points as an abstraction layer, the virtues of the playAWARDS partner-centered approach, and the platform rules you'll need to keep in mind when building a loyalty economy. We've discussed the first principles of rewards programs, like awarding slowly, spreading across multiple methods, holding some back for BIG moments, healthy usage rates, and more. What about the basic components that a loyalty system needs to have in order to support this complex system?

In this section, we'll discuss earn methods, initial balances, caps, account merging and sync thresholds.

Introduction to Status Program Economies

Done right, status programs can have a HUGE impact on a player retention and willingness to stick around and continue playing your game vs. your competitors, and can even drive higher short term engagement through time-sensitive incentives. To achieve success, your status program economy is just as important as merchandising or user experience.

In this section,

We'll discuss some of the first principles of designing a great status program, specifically for a mobile game.
We'll discuss what system features and functionality you need when implementing a status program.

But first, let's get a few definitions out of the way...

Tiers

Tiers, often referred to as "Status" as well, are the way in which loyalty members graduate up into ever greater benefits. Members start in tier 1 and graduate up to tier N based on their engagement with and spend through the loyalty program. Nearly all brick-and-mortar programs brand their tiers with names, but in the mobile space it's often a combination.

Elements of Status Program Economies

First Principles

Tier Points & Earn Methods

Tier Points are how members graduate to the next tier. They can go by many names as well, like status points, miles, or nights.

Earn methods are the method by which tier points are earned and granted. Some examples of earn methods in mobile games are logging in, purchasing an in-app bundle, or completing a challenge. Each earn method would be associated with a tier point earn amount.

Tier Expiration

Tier expiration is the length of time a member gets to enjoy a tier (without re-earning it or graduating to a higher tier) before they lose their tier. For example, once a player graduates to tier 2, they may have 7 days to either earn enough tier points to maintain it or graduate, but if they don't, they go back to tier 1. Tiers don't expire in every loyalty program, but they do in most. Some programs actually expire some tiers but not all. We discuss the merits and pros and cons of tier expiration in more detail in the article Introduction to Status Programs.

Additionally, the length of time to when a particular tier expires differs by loyalty program, and there are certainly prevailing trends by industry. It's even common for the tier expiration period to vary by tier within the same program. We'll discuss expiration periods in more detail below.

Benefits Structure

As loyalty members tier up, they gain access to ever greater benefits. This might mean unlocking more things (e.g. Get access to your own VIP host at tier 7), or unlocking richer benefits (e.g. 150% more chips at tier 5 and 200% more chips at tier 6.)

Below is a sample table of a benefits structure.

How Many Tiers Should You Have?

It's typical to see FAR more tiers in a mobile game program compared to a brick-and-mortar. In traditional programs typically have 4-6 tiers. Mobile games can have 5, 10, 50, or even hundreds. This is for a few reasons, but namely because the level of engagement in mobile games is simply far greater than that of brick-and-mortar loyalty programs. Where a member of a frequent flyer program might travel a few times a year at most, an active player of a mobile game logs in a few times a DAY.

You want enough tiers to where the player really feels and appreciates their status. If there are NOT ENOUGH tiers, each they would have too many engagements with your app between each tier graduation for them to see and feel regular tier movement. If there are TOO MANY tiers, then the graduation of the benefits structure will be too subtle and each tier graduation won't feel special.

The other consideration is whether or not your game is able to support ongoing growth after continued engagement. For example, if you're an RPG game with 100's of complicated levels and new commodities and experiences that seem to keep going and going for players even after they've engaged for 1, 2, or 3 years, then you might consider a VERY large number of loyalty tiers (potentially hundreds). If the player lifecycle in your game does NOT continue to advance and evolve after the first 3-6 months, then it doesn't make sense to have more than 10-20 tiers.

That's why our recommendation is this:

Mobile games should have more than the typical 4-6 tiers that are commonly found in brick-and-mortar loyalty programs.
If mobile games with long-term lifecycles should entertain the idea of having dozens or hundreds of tiers.
Mobile games with shorter player evolutions should stick closer to home, perhaps 10-20.
If your mobile game has more than 20 tiers, they should be grouped. (e.g. Tiers 1-10 are "Gold," Tiers 11-20 are "Platinum," etc.)

How Many Earn Methods Should You Have?

The short answer is that tier points should be attached to whatever primary behaviors you'd like to drive. This might be in-app purchases, watching ads, or finishing a quest. There is no right number, but if you only have one or two, then you're missing an opportunity to leverage the tier point currency to drive player behavior.

How Many Tier Points Should You Award Per Method?

Tier points by themselves are an abstraction. The number itself doesn't matter. What matters is the combination of points earned + the number of points it takes to tier up. Players shouldn't be overly punished and have to work too hard to reach the next tier, but it also shouldn't be so easy to where players can fly through your tiers too quickly. And of course, reaching the second tier should be easier than reaching the third, fourth, etc.

So How Hard Should Your Players Have to Work to Tier Up?

So how do you arrive at the right effort-to-reward ratio? Start with Average Revenue Per Monthly Active User (ARPMAU) and back into it. Think about how much monthly spend you'd like to see at your HIGHEST tier and everything in between. We recommend doing this with data: Iterate by laying out some hypothetical criteria, then running it against real data. How many players would be in your hypothetical tier 1, tier 2, etc.? Of course, since there will be fewer players in each tier, and each tier is slightly harder to reach than the last, you should generally see a gradual, logarithmic decline, like this:

The bottom-most tier should have the plurality of your players, but perhaps not more than half. The top-most tier should have fewer than 1%, perhaps even as low as 0.01%, of your daily players. Why so low a number of players in the top tier? Why do all the work to support and advertise a tier that no one will be in? Because (a) tier programs should always be aspirational, no matter the tier, and (b) those top players will be worth 10-20% of your business and they deserve to know that you see that and you appreciate them. (These numbers are rules of thumb and may vary by app.)

It's okay for some volatility on your curve, or "stair step moments." Especially if you have more tiers, it can be motivating/rewarding to players to have tiers that are harder to reach.

Once you've determined a target monthly ARPMAU, you can move on. From there, you can translate value into a number of tier points required to tier up and tiers per earn method. First, come up with a total number of tier points to achieve each tier. For this, each tier then has an 'X.' Next, just as we discussed for loyalty points, divide those up among your various earn methods as a % allocation. The goal here is to determine what behaviors you want to drive the most, second-most, etc. You may end up with a table that looks like this:

From there, it's a quick translation to move from total tier points to tier up + % which comes from each method into a tier point amount for each method.

As a note, these methods should generally be associated with both free (such as logging in) and paid (such as buying an in-app bundle) behaviors. Of course, paid behaviors allow for you to know the player value of a tier and thus reinvest accordingly. But why free behaviors? Since mobile games are freemium in their nature, their loyalty program should be as well. Players who simply play for free and don't monetize should also be able to demonstrate tier graduation through the lower tiers through free engagements. (This will encourage long-term retention for them, and you never know when this may yield monetization.) Of course, as players monetize more and more, paid behaviors will play more and more of an outsized role in their tiering up.

The playAWARDS Economy Team will work closely with your economists to arrive at a tier-up effort model that best suits your app.

We started with some basic definitions of the elements of status program economies. We discussed the first principles of building a great status program economy. What components are required to handle all of the complexities of a great status program economy?

As for the user experience, player communication, and more, we cover this in another article, Introduction to Loyalty Status Programs. We'll focus here on what components support a status program economy.

Number of Tiers: The system needs to support a particular number of tiers.
TPs Required to Maintain, Tier Up: The system needs to support a certain number of tier points to maintain a tier and to tier up, and should support DIFFERENT numbers per tier.
TP Earn Methods: The system should support N number of tier point earn methods, both for paid and free engagements.
Tier Expiration Period: The system should support tier expiration windows by tier.
Tier Benefits Matrix: The system should support a benefits matrix and all of the metadata that accompanies it.
Configurable/Easy to Change: The system should be easily configurable.
A/B Testable: Ideally the system would let you A/B test everything above.

Wrapping Up

Basic Components of a Status Program

In this article, we talked about Rewards Programs, including an introduction to rewards program economies, first principles, and basic components of a rewards economy system. We discussed status programs, including an introduction to status program economies, basic terms, first principles, and basic components of a status economy system.

playAWARDS is here to help! Our platform supports everything you need to operate and optimize a healthy loyalty program economy. When you partner with us, you get access to not only our platform, but our Professional Services team that has decades of experience building and running loyalty programs for mobile games. We start with a diligence session to determine your needs, get to know your player base and your goals, and orient you further to loyalty programs. Our Economy Team then works closely with you and your game economists to design an economy that works best for you and your app.

Back to Module 3 Home

Earn Methods

First and foremost, your loyalty economy needs earn methods. An earn method is a behavior which merits a loyalty grant. When the player performs the behavior, the system must test that behavior for whether or not the behavior merits a grant (and how much the player qualifies for).

The earn methods and amount of loyalty currency that they award should all depend on the player's segment. For example, the player's game level or VIP tier. For each behavior, the system should be set up to test the player against a number of prioritized rule sets, each associated to the player segment, determine which one the player qualifies for, then award loyalty based on the qualified rule.

Initial Balance

We believe players shouldn't start at zero loyalty points. Players should instead start with some amount of loyalty to make them feel immediately invested. This too should be segmented.

Daily & Lifetime Caps

Daily and lifetime caps protect against fraud, but daily caps also serve another purpose: It allows for you to reward players (with higher caps) who are more valuable to you, such as because they're in a higher tier. So daily and lifetime caps should also be player-segmented. Reaching a daily cap should be celebrated as an achievement in the day rather than perceived as a lock or blocker.

Account Merging

If you're granting loyalty to anonymous users, then at some point, when they authenticate, you may find that their credentials are already associated to an existing account. In this case, you'll need to merge the balances of the two accounts. For example, if they are merging an anonymous account that has 5,000 loyalty points into an existing authenticated account that has a balance of 10,000 loyalty points, then the new balance for this player would be 15,000 loyalty points.

To prevent fraud and bad actors, we recommend capping players to a certain number of lifetime merges. Players would SUM the anonymous and authenticated balances up to the cap, then reject new anonymous loyalty balances in merges after that. For example, if they are merging an anonymous account that has 5,000 loyalty points into an existing authenticated account that has a balance of 10,000 loyalty points, but they've reached the lifetime cap, then the new balance for this player would be 10,000 loyalty points (keeping only the balance from the existing authenticated account.

Sync Thresholds

Finally, your system will need the ability to set loyalty balance sync thresholds. Since certain events might result in very small loyalty point balance increases, you'll want to cache them to avoid making excessive calls to the database. Your system should achieve this by establishing a sync threshold, below which the engine caches balances changes until it reaches the threshold, then speaks to the database only when an earn behavior triggers the cached balance to be larger than the threshold.

Working with playAWARDS

The playAWARDS platform supports all of the above:

Our Loyalty Engine, a piece of partitioned software dedicated to your instance, handles all of the logic. To learn more about the Loyalty Engine, click here.
Our playAWARDS database owns and maintains all player balances and speaks perfectly to the engine to handle new account creation, merging, balance updates, caps, and more.
Your loyalty economy can be fully managed via the playAWARDS Game Console. To learn more about the playAWARDS Game Console, click here.

What Should You Get When You Get There?

What about your benefits matrix? How should you think about and construct a benefits matrix that's appropriately rewarding to players who reach those higher tiers, and motivating enough for them to want to reach that next higher tier?

Again, there isn't one answer to this question either. Start by asking your game economist, "What would be motivating for a tier 3 player to want to reach tier 4 and 5? What would be motivating for a tier 4 player to want to reach tier 5 and 6?"

Of course, 100x the benefit would be really, really motivating. So player motivation is balanced against economy thresholds. Your game economist should then ask themselves, "What level of benefits can we stomach awarding to the HIGHEST tier?" (Then back into every tier in between from there.) "What incremental bonuses can we give before we begin having a negative impact on our economy or business?" Again, this can be answered with your game data, either through "natural studies" (simply looking at existing player behavior) or by running A/B tests ("What happens when we grant 10%/20%/30% more to this caliber of player?")

The more tiers you have, the more you should lean into "stair step moments" for your benefits matrix as well, where a tier-up brings a jump in the benefit structure. For example,

If you have 10 tiers, perhaps there is a modest stair step at tier 3 and 7.
If you have 100 tiers, perhaps there are stair steps every 10 levels.

Stair step increases in benefits should coincide with stair step harder levels of difficulty in your tier structure.

The playAWARDS Economy Team will work closely with your economists to arrive at a benefit matrix that best suits your app.

Thoughts on Tier Expiration

We've already discussed tier expiration above, and we spend time on the merits of tier expiration in the article Introduction to Status Programs. The only thing left is how you should construct tier expiration by tier.

Tier expiration should be different per tier. In other words, the length of time a player gets to keep tier 5 should be LONGER than the length of time players get to keep tier 4, etc. This is of course an idea that's unique to mobile games. Since the windows of engagement in brick-and-mortar loyalty programs are so much further apart, their expiry windows also tend to be much longer, such as 1 year or more, and thus tend to be the same for all tiers.

Why graduate the expiry windows? Two reasons:

For one, because it's harder for players to go from tier 4 to tier 5 than it is for them to go from tier 3 to tier 4. Commensurately, your "maintain" amount will fall somewhere shy of the tier-up amount. And thus, your maintain amount will also grow as you go up in tiers. Since players need to put in more effort to tier up and/or maintain, they should get more time.
Secondly, to reward them. As players earn their way up into the upper tiers of the program, they shouldn't feel as "punished" with tighter windows of time between earn and expiry. This in itself becomes a benefit of higher tiers in the program.

Your expiry graduation design – the rate at which the expiry window graduates as players tier up – will be dictated by the play frequency rate of your game, the length of time to reach higher tiers, and more factors. The playAWARDS Economy Team will work closely with your economists to arrive at a solution that best suits your app.

IAP Economy vs. Ad-based Economy

Finally, status economies will be different for in-app purchase games vs. ones that monetize through ads. This is mainly due to the total potential value players can bring the app:

Players of admon games have a soft cap in their potential daily value, and ARPDAUs tend to be in the < $0.20 range.
Players of IAP games can often spend infinite amounts per day, and ARPDAUs can be as high as $1 or $2.

Another way to look at this distinction is that admon games tend to concentrate value at the lower end (i.e., a low value per player, but LOTS of players), whereas IAP games tend to concentrate at the top (i.e., many $0 players at the low end, but a few high-$ players at the top end. This leads to a couple of interesting results:

In Admon games, the players in the lower status tiers are worth more $s to the app than the bottom tier players in an IAP game.
The players in Admon games have no chance of reaching the mid-to-high status tiers without also logging in and playing an IAP game that's connected to the same loyalty program.

This dynamic creates a VERY different economy, and resulting loyalty status economy, for these two game monetization types. (By the way, the same is true within monetization types, to a degree.) Even with this being the case, you can still devise a status program that graduates up in difficulty and benefits as players engage more. It just won't be as dramatic a scale or as exciting of an improvement in benefits.

If you have multiple apps in your portfolio/loyalty program network, and they vary wildly by monetization type or ARPDAU, then we typically recommend:

Remain consistent in terms of player value-to-tier achievement. In other words, a player worth $10/month in App A should be the same tier as a player worth $10/month in App B, no matter what. Breaking parity, allowing lower-valued players in a lower-monetizing app to achieve the same tier as higher-valued players in a higher-monetizing app only invites loyalty status program arbitrage and abuse, and likely shifts player time-share to lower ARPDAU games, not the other way around.
In lower-monetizing apps, silence any tiers that players simply can't or won't achieve. For example, if your program has 10 tiers, but in a particular game, it's unreasonable to expect any player to reach higher than tier 5, then only show tiers 1-5 in that app.