The reason logging in is rewarded before doing anything
The app pays you for opening it, before you play or produce anything. Presence is cheaper to reinforce than effort, and it is what they need.
Filed by The Archivist 2 min read
Intuition test — answer before you read on
Why do apps reward the act of logging in, before the user has done anything productive?
Correct answer: A
Option B treats a persistent daily mechanic as onboarding. Option C is a non-explanation. A reward strengthens the specific act it depends on, and attendance is cheaper and more controllable than achievement, so rewarding the login purchases the return itself — the behaviour the platform most needs.
You open the app and, before you have done a single thing, a reward drops: coins for showing up, a daily gift, a chime and a number. You have created nothing, learned nothing, played nothing — and you have been paid. The reward is not for what you did. It is for the one behaviour the app most needs, which is that you arrived.
What everyone sees
Rewarding a login looks like generosity or a warm welcome — a small thank-you for returning. It is a precise choice about what to reinforce. Effortful achievements are expensive to reward and hard to guarantee, but mere attendance is cheap, frequent and entirely within the user’s power, so paying for presence rather than performance reinforces the single behaviour the business depends on: the return itself.
What is actually happening
A behaviour that is reinforced is one that recurs, and the meta-analysis by Deci, Koestner and Ryan on extrinsic rewards clarifies which behaviour a reward actually strengthens — the one it is contingent on, not the one the designer might wish to encourage. Reward the login and you strengthen logging in. Hamari, Koivisto and Sarsa’s review of gamification studies found that engagement mechanics reliably increase the targeted behaviour while their effect on deeper outcomes is inconsistent, which fits a system that pays for attendance: attendance rises dependably because that is what is being reinforced, whatever else does or does not follow.
Why it stays hidden
The choice hides because a login reward is framed as a benefit to the user rather than as a selection of which behaviour to buy. The player experiences a gift and does not register that the gift is contingent on the one action that serves the platform. Because showing up feels like a precondition for enjoying the app rather than a behaviour in its own right, the fact that it is being directly purchased goes unnoticed.
You get paid for arriving because arriving is what they are buying. A reward strengthens the act it is tied to — and this one is tied to your return.
You get paid for arriving because arriving is what they are buying. A reward strengthens the act it is tied to — and this one is tied to your return.
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You get paid for arriving because arriving is what they are buying. A reward strengthens the act it is tied to — and this one is tied to your return.
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Sources & further reading 2
- Deci, Koestner & Ryan — a meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation
- Hamari, Koivisto & Sarsa — does gamification work? a literature review of empirical studies on gamification
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