Hey, another podcast this week. I had the pleasure of joining Joseph Kim and Eric Kress on another edition of “TWIG” (This week in games”). This week we focused on Epic’s PC Store expansion with signing more exclusives (Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon) and acquiring some key studios (Psyonix). Also have a brief discussion on upcoming legislation and PSNow subscriptions.
If you want to have some fun with the podcast, refer to Georg Baumgarte’s bingo sheet while listening:
Had the privilege of joining “TWIG” (This Week in Games) – a podcast by
Miska Katkoff, Joseph Kim, and Eric Kress talking about the latest trends in Games. Check here for a listen:
Big thanks to Miska, Joseph and Eric for having me on!
Michail (Miska) Katkoff and I spoke at GDC this year, deconstructing two games we felt have shifted design in the mobile market since last GDC. Miska took on Brawl Stars, while I deconstructed a game called Idle Miner Tycoon.
Here are our Slides:
So how did Idle Miner Tycoon do it?
But overall, can Idle actually expand? Can Idle grow to larger players? Most likely not within 2019. My prediction is that it will remain with smaller developers, simply because of the caps on the audience that exist so far. However, there are 3 clear areas of growth that a small or mid-sized developer can take advantage of:
The idle game genre has been heating up quickly on mobile. What was once a small indie niche has been expanding rapidly over the last years. So how do you, as a developer, take advantage of this trend? How can you create the next idle game idea that will dominate the market?
This is a follow up to our Top 10 Game Mechanics for Hyper Casual Games article that you might also enjoy
Idle game mechanics are nothing new. Anthony Pecorella of Kongregate diving in deep into the trend back in GDC 2015, but moving into 2019 we’re seeing some advancements in the trend.
I remember playing Cookie Clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Tap Titans, and the mountains of clones of the simple idle game landed in 2014, but then the trend died out. Yet something changed. Starting in 2016, we’ve actually seen a big resurgence of the mobile idle game genre:
Aggregate downloads and revenue growth for mobile idle game genre from Q3 2016 to Q2 2018
Source: Sensor Tower Estimates
Looking at idle games from 2014 to 2018, we can see a growing trend for both downloads and revenue in this genre. This is not the case for most of the mature genres on mobile. Puzzle, Simulation, Casino, and Strategy all have stabilized or declined in downloads, and seen slow growth in revenue. These genres are locked up, but Idle remains a hotbed of innovation on the mobile market.
In the last years we’ve seen a lot of completely new styles of idle game mechanics hit the market and see success: Merge Town by Gram Games challenged the assumption that idle games were only for spreadsheet-savvy mathematicians, Trailer Park Boys by East Side Games shows a path where Idle games can actually host a compelling narrative, and Idle Miner by Kolibri (previously Fluffy Fairy) shows that idle games can create compelling traditional simulation-style game loops.
For this post, I’d like to showcase the variety of paths to success that an idle game can have. While this may be focusing solely on the past, the hope is that this can inspire you to create better idle game ideas for the future.
If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t understand what idle is, we’ve covered it a number of times: (we’re fans here at MFTP)
Idle games have risen on mobile because it is a genre that is perfect for modern mobile free-to-play design. The mechanics of idle games create perfect mobile sessions and drive strong long-term retention.
Idle games, sometimes called Clicker or Incremental games, are games which are all about management of income. Similar to simulation games, their main differentiator is the focus on revenue growth decisions. For some examples: Idle Games on Kongregate / Reddit’s Guide to Idle Games
The key to the genre: no matter what you choose, you will make progress. But optimizing your decision about what upgrades to purchase next is the core of the strategy and what drives long-term interest in the genre. Because the core of the game is focused on long-term purchasing decisions, retention is built in. Because progress is always felt, it always feels rewarding to come back.
Let’s now dive into the variety of mechanics within the idle genre.
The core of these games are usually insanely simple: tap as fast as you can to generate income. This starts off as fun, but gets pretty tiring and uninteresting quickly. So it quickly shifts into deciding over which upgrades to spend that cash on:
This decision-making structure has stuck with idle, but the core gameplay of tapping as fast as you can has not.
Over time, developers tried changes to the core gameplay to make it last a bit longer: Make it Rain! and Farm Away used swipe controls instead of tap to make it more mobile friendly. However, the core mechanic always quickly became a bore, and the appeal of just swiping or tapping as fast as you can to progress is only appealing to some.
Also, due to the nature of the game, prestige mechanics became a necessity. Pushing the player to reset their progress back to the beginning in order to make the growth more manageable and ensure the player still felt growth in the slower endgame. This was never all that appealing to players — so developers had to find clever ways to sidestep the issue and incentivize the full reset.
It’s important to note that this style of game has gone out of fashion. Besides Partymasters (pictured), there haven’t been many successful new titles that only use clicker gameplay or similar. The resurgence of the genre has actually been on taking the progression mechanics learned in this genre and applying it to whole new mechanics, whole new audiences.
So what do you do when clicking style gameplay is uninteresting? Take the same progression system mechanics you know work well, and graft it onto more compelling core gameplay. Enter Voodoo, who mastered this approach throughout 2017 and early 2018.
Instead of asking the player to tap to earn their coins, Voodoo asked them to play simple arcade games that have mass appeal. Games like “Idle Invaders” used classic shoot-em-up gameplay (ex. Space Invaders, 1942) to earn their income manually. Shoot down incoming invaders as fast as you can to earn your manual income, and then purchase and upgrade computer-controlled allied fighters to fight alongside you. This made for a compelling formula, that was easily replicated across multiple genres. “Idle Sweeper” took Pac-Man, “Idle Flipper” took flipping style gameplay.
Any simple arcade gameplay which had an opportunity for scaling health/damage and computer-controlled assists could create a compelling new idle game.
Planet Bomber was the first to expand on this formula, adding more depth to the game by adding more types of upgrades. Before, games would offer linear upgrades to damage dealt, or income generated. Planet Bomber now offers upgrades across a number of parallel vectors, all with a variety of importance to the core gameplay. This creates a far more compelling long term strategy, and is what future idle games will need to focus on. How do you find core gameplay that can offer a variety of upgrades that are equally visible and impactful to progress?
The merge mechanic was first pioneered by games like Triple Town, but turned commercially successful by Gram with Merge Dragons and Merge Town.
Merge style games take out the tiring clicker gameplay and swap it for merging items: drag and drop duplicate items on top of each other to increase their level. What’s a simple premise turns into an addicting experience, because the game always feels like there is something to do. Sessions are impressively long because it’s just so compelling to constantly build up your houses towards the next goal. The next goal is so clear (I want to upgrade my best house), and the path is clear (merge until I get a duplicate) — yet as soon as I complete a goal, I’m compelled to start the next path.
What Merge Town did more than just increase the session length was bring in an entirely different audience. No longer are idle games just about increasing numbers, but giving clear visual progress. This type of gameplay is for a much broader audience than most idle games, yet kept all the engagement mechanics intact.
Simulation has been on the decline on mobile for years, with Sim City Build It and Fallout Shelter (arguably) being the last big games in the space. Yet on Idle, in the last year we’ve seen a new face of simulation games: Idle Simulation. Wheras Sim City Build It, Farmville, Hay Day may appeal to a older, broader demographic, Kolibri’s “Idle Miner Tycoon” and “Idle Factory Tycoon” have shown a compelling business case for using classic simulation game loops.
Unlike the previous idle game mechanics, idle simulation games don’t innovate in the core gameplay. In fact, with Idle Miner and Idle Factory — they remove a core mechanic altogether. Tapping fast no longer helps you — the game stays compelling by asking you only to be managing your upgrades, and managing what boosters to start. This used to be an issue for idle games — since idle games typically had to start slow and progress quickly in order to give you a sense of progress, tapping gameplay was an easy out for designers to give a player something to do between upgrades. With simulation games, the upgrades are fast, but also far more strategic. As such, it doesn’t need tapping style gameplay as a crutch.
These games rely on a traditional simulation game loop, similar to compulsion loops you felt in games like Sim City (the original) and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Purchasing one upgrade will strain another system. In Idle Miner, purchasing an upgrade for a mine will mean that mine generates more income per second. This puts a strain on your elevator — the elevator then needs to be upgraded in order to hold on to more resources. Upgrading that elevator will put a strain on your surface level extraction… This goes round and round straining each system giving you new goals with each step and avoiding upgrades feeling stale.
Idle Miner and Idle Factory aren’t the only games that have attempted this and succeeded. I’d recommend playing Crafting Idle Clicker, Reactor Idle, and Factory Idle on Kongregate. This genre has seen the biggest surge in downloads, and there is plenty of room for innovation to come. This is the category to watch for new developers.
One mechanic that hasn’t been done often on mobile, but more often on Kongregate is more “Management” style sims. Check out a game called “Groundhog Life”: this is a life management simulator, with obvious idle characteristics.
The core gameplay is replaced with choosing which system to boost. In Groundhog Life, you can choose how you want to spend your 24 hours each day: spend 8 hours or 2 hours sleeping? Spend more time at work, or studying? While your character is always making progress, whether they are progressing in learning a new skill, earning money, or being happy is down to the decisions you make. Each time you die, you pass on your traits to your next life — giving you a boost depending on your choices in the previous life. While there haven’t been many mobile idle games that have used this mechanic, this is by far the most addictive idle game that I’ve ever played.
Going in a different direction, there’s also innovation happening in how idle games have made prestige (resetting your progress) less punishing and more relevant. Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money by East Side games is a masterclass in this. Many developers have attempted to graft licensed IP onto idle games, but none fit so well as Trailer Park Boys — in the last episode of every TV season, they end up in jail losing everything. East Side baked this into the game design: at the end of each season of generating a ton of cash from idle systems, the boys are caught by the cops and you lose all your money.
This creates a strong narrative arc in the game that makes sense in the idle game loop. Each prestige (which happens more often), the player gets a drip of story. This creates a more interesting long-term goal for the player besides just increasing their numbers.
The game has been a breakout success for East Side Games, and it’s why they’ve been slowly bringing on more licensed IP to work with. Their current game, “The Gang Goes Mobile” based on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is currently in soft launch.
Lastly, is most likely the biggest in-app purchase revenue generating idle category: RPG.
Clicker Heroes and Tap Titans were arguably the first games in the genre — showing that you can add battle mechanics with an idle progression, but both games actually fit more into category #1 based on their real mechanics. RPG can offer more than just a facade for progress.
Non-stop Knight was the first to break into this space, by adding automatic RPG gameplay as the core, while asking the player to choose when to use their boosters. Instead of linear upgrades, the character then started collecting loot from random drops (thank you Diablo), collecting pets and unlocking new boosts. Non-stop Knight was revolutionary in its time, but in retrospect leaned too heavily on idle progression to make a compelling long-term engagement loop.
The king of Idle RPG is without a doubt Idle Heroes. Instead of leaving too heavily on Idle Progression, they took many of the progression systems from Heroes’ Charge and Galaxy of Heroes. More focus is on a gacha-infused progression system: collect a team of heroes, outfit them with the best possible gear, and compete in limited time events for the currencies you desperately need.
This level of complexity is likely the next step for Idle RPG games. Keeping the compelling simple core gameplay, but creating more strategy in how you create and manage a team of heroes, and building upon an economy which events are necessary to be competitive.
As you can see, idle game mechanics support a wide variety of game designs. Don’t just assume the tried-and-tested clicker gameplay is the only option when coming up with idle game ideas.
Idle, unlike most genres on mobile, has a lot of room for innovation. It’s created compelling business cases for many successful gaming companies on mobile, and as a genre has plenty of room for newcomers to enter into. As a designer in this space, I would take a look at what has been done and predict what will come into the future:
If you keep this mind, my hope is that the idle market will continue to innovate for years to come!
The market for location-based gaming is heating up this summer. We’re finally starting to see some major developers come out with an answer to Niantic’s Pokemon Go, a game that is now nearly 2 years old and going stronger than ever. Pokemon Go is a staple in the Top Grossing Charts, and with user numbers reaching an all-time high this month, it’s likely to continue. As such, there are many attempting to repeat its success. Niantic plan another title this summer, “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite”. NEXT Games have soft launched their “Walking Dead: Our World”. Ludia + Universal just launched “Jurassic World Alive” in tandem with the new movie launch.
Check out our Free to Play Game Design Bible Here
Three Location-based games launch this summer, can any repeat the success of Pokemon Go?
But many in mobile questioned how repeatable the success of Pokemon Go is. Most would say it’s success is heavily based on the Pokemon brand. So what chance do other Location-based games have?
Location based gaming has been around since 2008. Games like Parallel Kingdoms by Per Blue
Location-based gaming has been public for awhile. Since smartphones had GPS, game developers have used location in their games. Parallel Kingdom, a game by Per Blue back in 2008 was one of the pioneers of this genre. Niantic’s Ingress in 2012 is an obvious iteration upon this genre. None of these games did remarkably well. So if all those games failed, and Pokemon Go succeeded, was it just the license or was it something else? What changed in 2016?
AR mode is more of a hinderance than a key gameplay element. Most players turn this off.
Some have pointed to the rise of Augmented Reality as a reason for Pokemon Go’s success — but this isn’t really true. While Pokemon Go does have Augmented Reality components to it, its novelty wears off fast. Many players report turning off AR mode pretty quickly after playing. True AR (using visual recognition to superimpose virtual items onto the real world) isn’t a major component of Pokemon Go. It’s just allowing players to play the catching mode using their camera. AR-mode actually just makes the catching gameplay harder and more inconvenient. AR was used for marketing rather than as a retention mechanic. So what really drives Pokemon Go’s staggering retention curve? (Seen below)
My hypothesis is that the success of Pokemon Go was partly based on branding, partly based on virality, but mostly because of the retention differences when using location as a trigger for gameplay.
What I mean by trigger here comes from psychology. Taken from “Hooked” a book by Nir Eyal, we have a framework for what drives retention in apps and games.
To drive players to come back often:
All successful games use this loop to drive long-term retention. What changes in location-based gaming is the Trigger — the first step — pulling players into the game.
In typical mobile games, the trigger can be external (a push notification telling you your energy has refilled) or internal (I’m bored, let’s see if I can beat this level now). A location-based game has a new type of trigger — walking around in the world, being in a new place. Players that are stuck to games like Pokemon Go will tell you their trigger points — every time they’re getting a coffee, they check for Pokemon. Every time they are out at a restaurant, they check for pokemon. On their commute to work, they’re checking for pokemon.
If a game can attach itself to a commonly felt stimuli and use it as a trigger to play a game — this is an effective retention driver.
So location-based games, when they’re working, will build psychological triggers to play the game when you’re commuting, driving more repeat sessions and higher long-term retention. But do players have an appetite for multiples of these games?
Can a game with a lesser brand compete in this category? (sorry Jurassic Park, I love you but Pokemon is bigger)
Pokemon (Blue) vs Jurassic Park (Red) in Google Trends in the last 12 months. Even with the recent movie, Pokemon is a bigger brand.
Enter Ludia, a company that has proven over the last years to be confident in entering new genres and succeeding. Founded in 2007, they’ve focused on Facebook and mobile licensed games. They were acquired by Freemantle media in 2010, and have seen continued success since then. Associating with big brands, they’ve gone on to build consistent successes on mobile. Recently, they’ve built up the Jurassic Park games on mobile. Leveraging the brand and combining with the Dragonvale framework, they’ve carved out a success on mobile within a genre (Dragon Breeding) which has been out of the spotlight for years.
Their approach to taking the Jurassic Park brand and associating it with location-based gaming looks based upon Pokemon Go, but clearly trying to fix the aspects that were missing from the experience. Where Pokemon Go is a collector’s game, Jurassic Park is a competitive battle game.
The core loop of Jurassic World Alive is simple yet effective. It builds upon the working framework of Pokemon Go, and adds a key element: battling.
The keys here are the currency sources & sinks:
Let’s go into each step in more detail:
The game’s main screen is the map. It takes a perspective view of a typical google map and shows you the locations of dinosaurs currently wandering your city. If you’re close enough to a dinosaur, you can send a drone out to collect DNA from it. If you’re not, you’re going to have to move closer.
For this mechanic, Ludia creates an upsell mechanic. The radius of being able to capture a dinosaur is pretty small for free players, but if you pay into their VIP system, you get an increased radius for collecting. A compelling reason for beginning + lazy players (like myself) to commit to playing the game. Very smart!
Besides this, Jurassic World Alive conveniently places a few dinosaurs near you every session. So even as a lazy player that mostly checks their devices in similar to locations, you can still make good progress. A must for location-based games.
If you’re in radius, you can send a drone to pick up DNA from the dinosaur. This is a pretty compelling minigame of aiming with your drone and sending darts to collect DNA. A bit of timing, prediction and control wonkiness make it a pretty exciting minigame. Direct hits can get you large amounts of DNA, so being more accurate pays off big time.
DNA is a precious resource, it’s similar to cards in Clash Royale. The more DNA you collect, the faster you can unlock and evolve a monster. Giving a very compelling reason to play well in the mini-game. This makes their progression significantly more skill-based than most, makes it more difficult to balance for different play types, but makes the DNA collecting minigame much more compelling. As you progress and start wanting to collect rarer and rarer dinos, you only have limited chances to collect the DNA, adding further pressure to be on the lookout for the best dinosaurs.
One interesting addition Ludia have added to the Pokemon Go/Clash Royale style system is the addition of Fusion:
The fusion system allows players to create specific hybrids of dinosaurs. There are a number of pre-designed recipes which require you to combine two dinos (ex. Combining t-rex and raptor to create indominus, just like the movie). This typically requires both to be a high enough level as well as a modest fusion cost. This is how you can create legendary level dinosaurs.
It’s a smart tie in from the movie that adds significant depth to their chase for the best dinosaurs.
In the case of Clash Royale, it can get frustrating with some of those early cards not being of use in the endgame. Also having no visual change to a character after unlocking it feels less powerful. With the fusion system, having a goal to level up a set of characters to unlock a more powerful character is a good long term retention system.
So overall, Jurassic World Alive has a nice mix between Clash Royale and Pokemon Go, with some interesting additions. Being able to influence how much DNA/Duplicates you collect is great for players (less so for balancers), and adding the fusion system creates a visible long term goal.
JW:Alive significantly builds upon Pokemon Go’s simplistic battle system.
Comparing Jurassic World Alive’s battle system to Pokemon Go’s, you can clearly see that Ludia took the weakest system from Niantic and improved on it substantially.
Pokemon Go opted for a system that is centered around their experience — location-based design. Instead of making battles central to their core loop, battles can only be done at certain locations (gyms), making battling tied to an overall social goal (take gyms for your team), and make it very asynchronous (the winner leaves a defending team for attackers to try to beat). The actual battle mechanic itself is really simplistic — bring 6 of your best pokemon in, and just tap madly on the screen to try to damage them as much as possible. There’s some skill in dodging and in selecting pokemon, but Pokemon Go’s battle system is very shallow that’s gotten plenty of criticism from their fanbase.
To be honest, Pokemon’s original battle mechanic wasn’t that great either. Since it was single player experience, the original Pokemon games were balanced very much in favour of the player. So they could get away with the game being pretty simplistic. When players started battling pokemon in PvP, there wasn’t alot of depth. The strategy usually was to keep swapping pokemon until you had the advantage on the field. Because it was a 1 on 1 turn-based battle, it didn’t leave a lot of room for countering and strategy. It’s why most turn-based PvP RPG games today typically have more fighters on the field (ex. 3v3 in Summoner’s War) or add a grid to move around units to create interesting countering tactics (ex. Fire Emblem Heroes).
Jurassic World Alive seems to have taken the original Pokemon style battling system and built it out so that it actually can function as a 1v1 PvP RPG battle with a healthy meta. Instead of dinosaurs having clear explicit strengths and weaknesses (ex. Water dinosaurs and weak against flying dinosaurs?) they’ve gone for a system where dinosaurs have much less obvious strengths and weaknesses. There’s no explicit rock-paper-scissors strategy, and it makes for a better game.
There are many types of dinosaurs, some with high health, some with quick attacks, some with high damage, some with status effects, and some as a hybrid. The strategy becomes trying to use your dinosaurs to the best of their abilities: having your high health dinos suck up damage, high attack dinos rip through without taking damage, and having your speedy dinos to do the final blow, preventing the opponent from attacking back. Overall, I counted 19 different attack types. This creates a nice base layer of strategy for a 1v1 game.
With status effects this also means that a dino’s strengths and weaknesses can change through a battle. Remember “Tail whip” from Pokemon? A useless move to increase damage taken by your opponent? — here in Jurassic World Alive it actually makes strategic sense. These moves have enough impact to make you second guess leaving your dinos in a weakened state.
Take out 3 dinos before your opponent does
The goal of the battle is to take down 3 opposing dinosaurs before your opponent does. You bring in 4 dinosaurs, and can switch as often as you’d like. Similar to pokemon however, swapping out your dino leaves them susceptible to a free attack by the opponent.
So typically what happens is there’s some mind reading of your opponent. You make assumptions when they will swap out their dinos and try to take advantage of them losing a move.
Overall this gives the PvP battles a good level strategy. You’re trying to counter the opponent’s, while preventing swapping at the wrong time. You’re trying to avoid your opponent from saving their speedier dinos, who can take down your weaker dinos without being hit back. The upgrades and matchmaking also keep battles intense — most battles feel like you lost because of skill.
However, some of the battle’s elements show that they can’t break away from the innate issues of a Pokemon style battle: a core strategy of the game is to try to guess what your opponent will switch to. Guess that your opponent will start with a heavy armor dino? Then start with an armor piercing one. Guess that your opponent will swap a weak dino before you can kill it? Then make them pay by using your special attack rather than your weaker one. This is fun to pull off, but call-your-bluff/mind-reading strategy isn’t going to last for the long term.
On top of this, your battle team is made up of 8 dinos, yet when you battle, it randomly selects 4 out of the 8. This feels like a tacked-on system to increase the pressure to upgrade more dinosaurs rather than increasing the strategy before the battle. As a player it means you have some arbitrary randomness about whether the strategy you wanted to use will pay off, and can mean that right from the onset of the battle you already feel like you’ve lost (you got a bad draw from move 1). While randomness can be good, this much pre-determined luck can make players feel helpless early in battle.
This points to an issue that the 1v1 gameplay has. It’s just too limiting. The in-game strategy hits a cap which turns into a mind-reading battle, and the out-of-game strategy is limited so they had to tack on a “random 4” system.
I wonder if the game’s battle system would have been better if they’d broken from the pokemon style design and instead gone with something like a 3v3 battle system. Increasing complexity, but increasing the depth substantially. There would be substantially more attack types, more in-game strategy. Makes swapping dinos a far more interesting choice, and makes directly countering a more nuanced strategy.
Regardless, the Jurassic World Alive battle system is far better than the tap fest that is Pokemon Go — I just wonder if it could have been even stronger with a 3v3 system.
And just for good measure, to pace the battle system, Jurassic World Alive relies on the good ol’ chest system from Clash Royale. Instead of pacing you based on energy, players can only have 4 chests at a time, and each chest must be opened one at a time. Because of matchmaking and the importance of stats in the outcome of a battle, it prevents players from rushing too far ahead by winning too many battles. Eventually, you will need what’s in the chests in order to compete.
From Clash Royale: Chest Slots and Arena Tiers
Arena tiers are another borrowed feature from Clash Royale. Players earn trophies for victories, which unlock higher and higher tiers which contain bigger prizes and better dino DNA each time you win. This gives a clear, compelling reason to keep playing.
Comparing to Pokemon Go, my goal in the game is far more explicit and I can make progress towards it immediately: reach the next arena.
Regardless of your thoughts of Jurassic Park IP or Location-based gaming, Jurassic World Alive is within the Top 100 grossing, and has sustained there since launch. While I think many would dismiss this as a “lesser Pokemon Go” — it clearly has done something right.
I believe that there are 3 key reasons why Jurassic World Alive has seen success so far:
Merchandising — the features of a game that are typically there to upsell players towards spending money — are top notch in Jurassic World Alive. Ludia consistently have launched games that have taken the best merchandising practices and executed on them well. In Jurassic World Alive this really is showcased in their VIP System:
Jurassic World Alive showcases throughout the game the value of their VIP system. From the onset, you are constantly shown that a dinosaur is just out of reach on your map — the cure? Join VIP! This is an excellent conversion leverage point. On top of this, getting an epic incubator and increased supply drops makes the progression far easier.
The VIP system is also a subscription. Utilizing the latest trends in F2P, which is now even a common tactic in Hyper Casual games. The power of committing players to an ongoing subscription seems to be driving a lot of revenue these days (hopefully not too much off the back of forgetful users…).
As mentioned above, one aspect I think Jurassic World Alive does far better than Pokemon Go is the visibility and clarity of their progression system and goal systems.
For Pokemon Go, the goal is mostly focused on completing your Pokedex. This is alright for collectors, but it doesn’t hit all player types. Jurassic World includes the Battle loop + arenas, which give a clear focus for battling your dinosaurs. Now there’s a way to clearly show off my progress and a competition I can engage in that will give me clear progress & clear recognition.
Comparing this to Pokemon Go, having to go to Gyms, and choosing a team which is far too large to feel impactful within makes the competitive goals far too end-game heavy. In the beginning, the goal is just to collect — and this is only compelling for so long.
Lastly, I think it was a smart choice for Jurassic World Alive to make their systems less dependant on the location-based gameplay. In Jurassic World Alive you can have many sessions without ever really caring about the map or moving to different locations.
Within Jurassic World Alive, usually there are a number of dinosaurs directly near me that helps me progress. These “freebies” may not be the optimal path, but still help me progress faster and give a reason to check my phone even when I’ve been in the same location for awhile (which, if you’re like lazy me, is common).
On top of this, the battle system & chest system not being location specific means that throughout the day when I’m not walking around I can still complete a meaningful session. I can open up chests, start the opening of the remaining. I can win some battles and fill up my slots. I can open up my free incubator.
Comparing to Pokemon Go, it instead relies a lot on location-based design. Incubators require you to remember to walk around with them on (which is a pain). Gyms are at specific locations, making you need to remember to check your phone at that location to make meaningful progress. While this is great for getting some location-based retention, it can make “regular” mobile sessions a pain in Pokemon Go.
Jurassic World Alive, on the other hand, is stronger because it has location-based elements, but you can still play the game often without needing to worry about where you are.
Looking at the grossing charts now, it looks like it will stabilize within the Top 150 grossing. While the movie is still in theatres and advertisements are running daily, they should be able to sustain here.
By prediction however is that it will fall, and will be tough to retain within the Top 250. This bump from movie goers and IP is inevitable, but sustaining at this level will still be difficult. This is partially because of the brand — its not Marvel — there isn’t a new movie every 6 months. It’s not Harry Potter — the fanbase isn’t nearly as large. The simple nature of the IP will be resistance for Jurassic World Alive.
From the design side there are also some issues:
The battle is effective, yet still too simple. Building out a lasting meta should be priority. Driving players to collect and upgrade a wider range of dinosaurs is crucial, and the current system of randomly picking 4 out of 8 isn’t strong enough. They could drive this width from some PvE gameplay, shifting the meta more explicitly in events, or from shifting the PvP to 3v3. Either can be a way to drive players to collecting & upgrading a wider range of dinosaurs to compete.
The social component is lacking. Where pokemon go has built this up over time, Alive still has ways to g and launched with less features than Pokemon did at launch. No lures, no chat, no clans. For now this is fine, but to take advantage of the location-based gameplay and drive local players to work together like Pokemon Go does, adding some ways for players to communicate & strategize locally would be simple but great addition.
Ludia is an excellent company which has proven time and time again to break into new categories with confidence and deliver on the live operations side. This game should be no different. I have no doubt that Ludia will be able to take the strong base of this game, respond to player feedback, extend the battle gameplay to last longer, design events that drive players back, and develop social features which will build up over time.
I expect this to be a staple on the Top Grossing chart, just not one to beat Pokemon Go. However, I don’t think that’s necessary for success here — what we should all take from this is that location-based games may be more interesting than we all once thought.
Summer of 2016 was the summer of Clash Royale’s gacha.
2017 was the summer of Battle Royale gameplay.
2018 may be the summer of location-based gaming.
Cross-Posted from Deconstructor of Fun. Co-wrote with Joseph Kim.
It’s hard to go a day without hearing about Fortnite anymore. In February, Fortnite passed PUBG in total revenue on PC and console ($126M versus $103M). While PUBG (Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds) started a movement, Fortnite created a phenomenon.
Fortnite is by far the most viewed and streamed game on YouTube. source: Matchmade.tv
However, while the Battle Royale genre continues to heat up, I’d like to focus on a specific topic: the Battle Pass system as the monetization driver. Fortnite, for all of its smart decisions and flaws, made one key choice months after its launch: it wasn’t going to monetize based on loot boxes, instead, it was going to monetize off of its Battle Pass system.
It’s not as if Epic hadn’t thought of making it a loot box driven economy — Fortnite’s own “Save the World” mode is a loot box driven economy which you buy llama-themed pinatas that contain random gameplay-impacting items. Yet for their Battle Royale system, they chose to go against this.
Regardless of what you think of the choice — Fortnite’s revenue shows they’ve done something right. Fortnite has been steady as the top grossing game on mobile for weeks now, demolishing traditional mobile free-to-play titles, and outpacing all other battle royale style games on mobile in both downloads and revenue. The fact that the game was invite-only for the first weeks or so makes the feat even more impressive.
However, these results beg a question: is the revenue coming simply because of the user base size (DAU), or does the Battle Pass system actually drive higher revenue-per-user than a loot box system? In terms of KPIs, we’d be comparing ARPDAU or ideally, LTV.
While no one but Epic can peek behind the curtain and see what their metrics are, we will speculate today!
Much like in MOBAs, Fortnite’s progression and monetization only come from cosmetics. Fornite is a “free-to-win” model: they do not sell anything that could impact the balance of the battle royale gameplay. All guns, armor, ammo is scavenged in the battle royale gameplay, but a player can choose what cosmetics they want to bring into a match.
Fortnite allows you to select a number of cosmetic options to bring into battle:
Since progress isn’t made through traditional stats and level up, the only way to show off your progress is through cosmetics. It’s not pay-to-progress, it’s pay-to-look-cool.
Until Fortnite, cosmetics-only based mobile games have not been able to achieve strong overall revenue, at least in Western markets. Although the large revenue growth certainly derives strongly from a massive number of installs, the amount of revenue and the #1 top grossing status cannot be explained without a level of monetization heretofore unseen by cosmetics in Western markets on mobile.
With the cosmetic driven economy, rather than dropping new cosmetic gear through gacha/loot boxes (like Overwatch, Destiny, etc.) cosmetics are either purchased with V-bucks (premium currency) or earned through the battle Pass. Interestingly, directly purchasing cosmetics through the shop has limited access. Each day there is a limited selection of items to purchase, so while loot boxes aren’t included in the economy, there is a limited set of items that are available at any time. Great for driving players to check the shop out daily, and giving additional pressure to purchase items while they are available.
Besides being able to purchase cosmetics with premium currency, players can also play and earn cosmetics and consumable boosts by completing their Battle Pass.
The Battle Pass is a set of rewards which can be unlocked by completing challenges. Completing challenges rewards the player with XP, which increases your tier, which unlocks subsequent rewards. The challenges themselves range in difficulty but give a baseline of progress for the Battle Royale style game.
When playing a Battle Royale game, especially if you’re not skilled, most games will end up with getting shot and losing all your progress. Also in many battle royale games there can be times when you’re waiting around for other players to arrive. These challenges give players additional goals to think about while playing, and can make even a losing round feel like progress.
The monetization comes in with the free vs premium tracks, much like the VIP system in Wargaming’s World of Tanks (read the full deconstruction of World of Tanks). Free players get far fewer rewards than the premium tier. Creating a very clear conversion effort. Look at all the stuff you “earned” but didn’t receive! The amount of content given out for the premium tier is compelling — its generous in terms of the payoff and pays back your effort quickly. This feels very similar to Annuities or “Subscription Diamonds” in mobile games. A small price that pays out far more than it costs – but only if you engage in the game.
The Battle Pass is limited to a season, which is what makes it so compelling. Each season has a matching Battle Pass, which comes with its own set of cosmetic content and rewards. If you don’t complete the battle pass in time — you don’t get the content. Some content may come in and out of the store on a daily basis — but then it’s usually for high costs of premium currency.
There’s a big “Fear of Missing Out” feeling with this system.
If being able to directly purchase progress was in any other game, most free-to-play designers would shoot this down. It’s usually a far better idea to monetize players on the gameplay itself and not allow players to directly pay to skip. It would feel very pay-to-win if you could directly pay to reach the top arena in Clash Royale, or pay to skip a set of levels in Candy Crush.
However, since Fortnite can’t really monetize on the core gameplay, and this is really just paying to reach cosmetic content (your battle pass tier isn’t really a metric player compare as a sign of skill) — player’s don’t seem to mind, and their revenue isn’t impacted. Player’s have a way to pay-for-progress to the cosmetic items they want.
Want a head start on the season so you can show off the cosmetic items before your friends get there? Pay to skip ahead!
A week’s challenges or season coming to a close and you don’t have time to get all the remaining challenges? Pay to skip ahead!
For this reason, the spend depth and potential of the battle pass system shouldn’t be seen as limited to just the monthly purchase price. When a player has locked into the battle pass, they are more likely to be highly engaged that season to unlock the content and to convert on skipping ahead to get all that content they unlocked.
Battle Pass can be best described as a system first and foremost for retention and player experience. Comparing Battle Pass to Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG), it gives players real goals, a direct sense of progress, and a clear path to the cosmetics that they want. PUBG instead uses a loot box system to gate all of their cosmetic content. Players play a match, get as many “Battle Points” (BP) as possible, to eventually open up a loot box.
These loot boxes can sometimes be locked with a key that needs to be bought with real money, which feels pretty much like a blatant rip-off. Like most gacha systems, as a player, this means the path to desired content is completely luck-driven. You can’t even save your BPs or a dust-like currency (example: Credits in Overwatch, or Dust in Hearthstone) to eventually get the item that you want. You just need to get lucky.
From a player’s perspective, Battle Pass simply feels fair compared to the competitors gacha systems.
So overall, from a player’s perspective, Fortnite’s Battle Pass system is a great match for battle royale:
But it’s not as if this Battle Pass system came from nowhere, it’s obviously inspired by the playbook of Valve’s DOTA2. Their compendium battle pass has been a staple of that game since 2013. Looking at Valve’s evolution of the compendium, you can see potentially how this system will evolve in Fortnite.
Started in 2013 as an incentive for players to donate & get interested in the e-sports scene of DOTA2, the compendium was essentially an interactive guide to an upcoming tournament. Similar to a guidebook you’d get at a sporting event: it told you about the players, tracked the stats, and got you interested in the game itself. Valve doubled down on this by making it digital, interactive, and gave a portion of the money raised by the compendium as part of the prize pool. Players had a way of supporting the esports scene for their favorite game.
This has since evolved quite a bit. What started as just a compendium turned into a battle pass. They eventually added goals for players to accomplish in PvP that would increase their level for that season, and unlock cosmetic rewards (just like Fortnite’s today). However, DOTA2 has gone far deeper, with a number of recent additions that significantly increase the depth of the system.
So while Fortnite’s Battle Pass system may just be in its “early access” phase right now with a basic feature set, it’s clear that Epic is taking inspiration from Valve’s similar Battle Pass system. This evolution shows that the current implementation is not just limited to 100 tiers of content, but could be a far longer lasting and complex chase which could drive even higher retention and monetization. This system clearly has been successful for DOTA2, since recently they’ve started to shift the system to a full-on subscription style service called “DOTA Plus”. Little details are known at this point, but it looks to be replacing the Battle Pass with an ongoing subscription that gives even further systems and progression.
But comparing the Battle Pass system to a pure-gacha system, is Fortnite (and potentially DOTA2) leaving money on the table? While it’s obvious that its a play for stronger retention and higher conversion, is the lower spend depth hurting them?
Is the tradeoff of giving away all this cosmetic content for higher conversion really the smartest business decision?
Just how impactful is Battle Pass to monetization? More specifically, we should ask this question on two levels of scope:
We can get a rough sense for both of these questions by doing some high-level comparison. In particular, we can a) compare monetization of the various “fair-to-play”, cosmetics driven Battle Royale games and then b) compare monetization with “pay-to-progress” game monetization schemed games.
As an initial investigation let’s take a look at lifetime average revenue per install (ARPI) of each of these titles based on Sensor Tower data to comparative, key high-performing titles:
*Note: Rules of Survival does contain some weapons in its loot box, while they are balanced it is not strictly a cosmetics gacha
Source: ARPI based on Sensor Tower data
Let’s now address the first monetization question we posed above: How does Battle Pass monetization compare to other forms of cosmetics based F2P, mobile monetization?
At first glance, it would seem that Knives Out has the best per user monetization (ARPI) of the Fair to Play games. However, two issues are not fully captured by the chart above:
Note the number of months in launch in the Lifetime ARPI chart above. Generally speaking, the longer a game sits in launch, the better the game’s ARPI becomes (eventually achieving it’s LTV):
Source: Based on SensorTower Data
Note the number of months since launch in the lifetime ARPI (avg. revenue per install) chart above. Generally speaking, the longer a game thrives in live operations, the better the game’s ARPI becomes (as the installs decrease and existing users spend more during their lifetime):
The other key driver for monetization for Knives Out is it’s audience. Japan *generally* monetizes much more strongly than other countries, often 2x+ that of US. Hence, the large concentration of Japanese users in Knives Out primarily drives the monetization gap between Knives Out and Rules of Survival.
You can see the revenue split by top 5 countries for all three of the games below:
Source: SensorTower
So what happens to monetization if we were to exclude Japan?
Wow, what a difference a country makes! Without Japan, Knives Out actually becomes the worst performing game in term of monetization. Somehow Fortnite per user monetization actually does better without Japan.
Let’s now address the second question we posed regarding Battle Pass monetization earlier: How does Battle Pass monetization compare to F2P, mobile monetization overall (including pay-to-progress models)?
From the Lifetime ARPI chart, it would seem to indicate that more traditional F2P monetization mechanics such as gacha or PVP speed-ups are much more effective on a per-user, unitary level than cosmetics based monetization.
However, we should also take two factors into consideration:
Let’s discuss both of these points in turn.
So how long can gacha based games continue to increase ARPI until it hits LTV? Unfortunately, we only have 6 months of data on Rules of Survival and Knives Out and less than 2 full months for Fortnite.
One way to estimate the ARPI growth is to just do a logarithmic trendline and extend out the timeframe to say 20 months.
Another way we could guess the eventual LTV of these games is by taking a look at other game examples such as Clash Royale:
Source: Based on SensorTower data
Based on the above ARPI growth continued for at least 15-20 months. Hence, the 20 month timeframe for our logarithmic trendline earlier.
Traditional F2P designers would typically assume that cosmetics driven monetization should hit their LTV ceiling much sooner than a well-designed gacha game.
However, for the sake of simplicity, and just to get a rough feel let’s assume that the fair-to-play game monetization will follow a similar trajectory. In fact, let’s just eyeball all of this pretty roughly to estimate LTV.
Assumptions based on a rough eyeballing of Clash Royale ARPI growth:
On the face of it, Knives Out and Fortnite would have similar long-term LTV estimates based on our analysis above. However, when we factor in audience concentration, we can conclude that Fortnite has much stronger monetization design. This was clearly shown when we excluded Japan from our monetization data earlier.
Although we’ve focused so far primarily on unitary economic measures like ARPI, at the end of the day, what matters most will be the amount of overall revenue (and profit) a game can generate. Hence, in addition to ARPI/LTV we must also look at product level economics by also looking at downloads and in turn overall revenue.
As you can see from the chart below, while free-to-win based monetization has not performed as well on a per player basis, but overall revenue can be quite healthy even compared to top pay-to-progress types of games.
Also note that we only have less than 2 months of data for Fortnite (so it’s not an apples-to apples-comparison), and it has been limited by a number of issues such as being iOS only and having high-end device requirements.
Further, Clash Royale, unlike the other titles, leveraged one of the strongest IPs in mobile gaming and utilized massive user acquisition to help drive stronger install volume for their game.
* Less than 2 months of data only and currently only on iOS
** Puzzle & Dragon started off in Japan only
Source: SensorTower
So, what is our conclusion on the original monetization questions we posed with respect to Battle Pass?
While pay-to-progress style economies will certainly drive higher per-player revenue, for games that monetize off cosmetics the battle pass is certainly showing impressive results. Battle Pass will likely become a dominant monetization system used with cosmetics based monetization in the future. Not only can it provide far better player experience, but by a rough calculation, it shows that it can drive higher LTV.
Just keep in mind these calculations are rough – these are using estimates of revenue and downloads, we’re using trendlines based on a small set of data, and we’re looking at a game that didn’t start from scratch when launched on mobile. The legion of fans that came over from PC/Console area already highly engaged and used to its systems. We’ll need to see how this goes in the coming months!
Yet by these rough calculations, we’re pretty excited. A player-friendly system that gives better goals and drives higher engagement shows the path to stronger revenues. All the while Valve’s DOTA2 shows that this is just the MVP of a battle pass system. Bringing in a hybrid of gacha design and a deeper battle pass will most likely be the future for cosmetic driven games.
Exciting times ahead!
At GDC 2018, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a Deconstructor of Fun talk, which Anil Das-Gupta and I deconstructed two top mobile games. I broke down Golf Clash, and Anil broke down Rules of Survival.
For Golf Clash, the main takeaways were:
Golf Clash shows us that the best way to attack the market is still to find blue oceans, and they still exist, even in this state of maturity. Translating mechanics from one audience to another is not trivial, but is clearly worth it!
Whenever a new platform emerges, it’s always interesting to see how developers jump onto the opportunity.
Instant Games – Facebook’s new developer platform for games on messenger and News Feed – isn’t like most new platform transitions, so for most, this meant a more cautious approach. For one, messenger games are built on HTML5. HTML5 as a technology doesn’t have the best track record for creating great games. Messenger also isn’t necessarily a new platform either – more like a platform within a platform. The platform comes with challenges that come with working within Apple and Google’s ecosystems.
Roll a year on, however, and the platform is showing signs of strength. Games are getting massive growth, developers have competitive eCPMs for advertising, and there is promise of in-app purchases coming in the future. Facebook Messenger continues to grow in user base numbers, reaching more than 1.3 billion monthly users in late 2017. Looking at public user base data that is surfaced on the splash screen for games that load in messenger, the top 10 games have between 3 million and 10 million players. Growth has been unprecedented. A game “Snake Mania” grew by 2.2 million players in seven days during February 2018. Messenger is fast becoming a viable platform.
Player base delta from Feb 19 to Feb 26, 2018
Source: Data as displayed via Instant Games loading screens
However, approaching the messenger platform isn’t the same as mobile design or social web games. Many mobile devs are trying direct ports of their mobile games over to messenger. Some have succeeded with this method (Cut the Rope and Adventure Capitalist) but most have failed. It seems that this isn’t a straight-technical platform change, design needs to change as well.
I believe that moving to Instant Games will be a product and design shift similar to what mobile was in 2010-2011. While many of the same gameplay interactions and UX learnings can be applied to Instant Games on messenger (it still is a mobile platform with touch controls), to drive retention on the platform is not a simple port. Re-thinking core loops, progression, interactions from the ground up is necessary to reach the full potential of the platform.
This is something that we’ve learned at Chatterbox Games over the last year of developing games for Facebook Instant Games and iMessage – that many of the best practices of mobile don’t apply to messenger games, and to overcome the initial challenges you really have to think about the opportunities that only exist in the messenger context.
Thinking messenger is a marketing channel is commonly how many mobile game developers will approach the platform. I don’t blame them – mobile is a highly competitive battlefield and developers are desperate for any leg up they can for getting installs. However, developers who think messenger games are a free place to get new players are mistaken.
While messenger games can gain insane levels of growth, they are all limited to playing within messenger itself. Facebook has worked aggressively to build Instant Games on messenger as a platform on its own. One of Facebook goals is most likely to drive increased engagement within messenger, not drive players into your games, so attempting to use the platform to pull players away from the platform won’t work – nor will you need to. Games can work and be profitable as its own business unit, so why fight against it?
That being said, Instant Games can be used for branding. Nordeus and ZeptoLab have done a great job at this; Golden Boot by Nordeus has Top Eleven branding all over the game, but does not directly link to the game or push players outside the platform, while ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope Instant re-creates the same feeling of playing a native mobile version. This can drive organic installs to their mobile game, but regardless both of these games have a substantial user base on Instant Games and can build a business case on its own. Branding has its benefits, but revenue generating games are always better.
If messenger is not an acquisition channel, then the games built for it have to stand on its own in terms of retention and monetization. It’s possible, but only if you think critically of how retention can be sustained within a chat app.
As we’ve mentioned before, retention on messenger platforms is lower than native mobile – indeed it’s more similar to Facebook canvas than it is to native mobile. This is intuitive: Most users are going into messenger to chat with their friends, not to play games. Messenger games don’t install to your phone – there’s no icon on the home screen, no push notifications, no red dots to let you know when to come back. Messenger games have to drive retention in other ways.
Having no install is great for discoverability, but not great for retention
Retention instead has to come from what’s unique about the platform: social interactions. Retention is driven by friends pulling you back to play against them, or working together.
On native mobile, Facebook adoption has become tougher. Most developers would rather push players to play in guilds with other active players than real friends, yet knowing from launching countless mobile games in the past, players that connect to Facebook and actively play with friends retain far better. With messenger, this social connection is no longer an option – Facebook connection is a natural part of the user experience. Right from the start you have access to friends that are playing the game, displaying them in a leaderboard, challenging them, gifting them.
Messenger’s first priority is still to be a chat app, so real estate for games isn’t limitless. In order to have a path to your game and retain players, you have to fight to stay relevant in a player’s chat application. Facebook has the games tab along the bottom for finding new games to play, but to retain players you’re going to have to go farther than that.
This is done through creating social contexts and by maintaining a bot channel:
Social contexts are chats with friends or groups which your game is relevant to the conversation. You can see from the image above, in both a group chat and a one-on-one conversation, a player has posted to this chat and now there’s a clear call to action to start the game.
Your Bot channel is the other method – think of this as your home screen icon within the Messenger app. However, it functions more like a chat with a friend. This allows you to communicate via messages to your players, giving out rewards and notifying them when things are happening within your game:
However, bot channels can quickly become spammy, and Facebook is very restrictive over how often games can send messages. If players don’t engage with your bot, it will quickly drop off their messenger home page. If players don’t want to be bugged by your game, muting the channel is a quick button press away. Facebook has learned from their early gaming days to prevent game developers from ruining the user experience of their platform.
As a result, this is the real design challenge for a messenger game:
These aren’t normal design problems for a native mobile game.
The best games on the platform will attempt to create the strongest social interactions. This will both be great for the game’s virality and their retention, so let’s just push players to spam their friends in order to play, right?
This has led to many of the initial interactions on the platform to be straight from the playbook of old Facebook social games:
However, this isn’t really leveraging the platform for what it does best, and isn’t sustainable.
What has stood out as new to messenger games are group chat dynamics: a game pushes players to engage with their group chats: working together to solve a problem or competing against each other.
The strongest implementation of social interactions are “group raids” – the idea that you can start a challenging level that can be only completed if you work together with others in a group chat. The more powerful the members are, the more difficult the challenge you can complete, and the bigger the rewards.
Games: Quest Friends by Mojiworks and Everwing by Game Closure
This system allows players of all progress levels to work together, prod each other to play more, and feel rewarding to play with friends. However, this is limited to games that can give a similar depth of rewards as an RPG game, not all games can work with a system like this.
Other games attempt to use turn-based gameplay. That after each turn a player would send you their move. We’ve attempted a couple times last year to focus on turn-based interactions with your friends in messenger games, but we found it isn’t the best for retention. The key reason: if players can’t keep playing because they’re waiting for friends, they will leave the game. In the same way that “Words with Friends” or “Draw Something” from native mobile were interesting only while your friends played the game, as soon as your friends stopped responding, you had no reason to come back. Some games have gotten this to work (8 Ball Pool by Miniclip and Words with Friends), but these were launched very early on the platform and have sustained a large critical mass of players. New developers to messenger will have a harder time to reach that critical mass.
For some games, to solve this means adding more modes where you can play against strangers as well. When looking at Golden Boot from Nordeus, this most likely drove a lot of its success. You can match with strangers when friends aren’t active. In the case of Snake Mania, the top growing game mentioned above, focuses solely on playing with strangers.
However, I believe this starts to water down what separates messenger games from native mobile games. While this is currently working – by mimicking what is already retaining well on native mobile – the future for messenger games will do a better job of integrating social interactions with friends. Making playing with your friends the optimal way to progress.
As discoverability becomes an issue on the platform, developers will need to rely more heavily on social contexts to drive retention and installs. Games that are able to integrate social interactions smartly will be the winners.
Instant Games are still in their infancy, but the marketplace is maturing very quickly. Within a year, there already has been big shifts in what games work on the platform. Many games that were big on the platform a year ago are no longer (Galaga, Space Invaders, PAC-Man), and plenty of new hits have moved up the charts within the last months (Snake Mania, Cookie Crush).
Instant Games games will be the “Wild West” for some time. As more developers join the fray and discoverability becomes an issue, the games’ design will need move towards making social-focused games on the platform. My recommendations for anyone looking to join the messenger gaming market:
I’m really looking forward to the year ahead for messaging games – it’s going to be a wild one. I can assure you one thing for those who are building messenger games: It won’t be boring.
Due to the Star Wars Battlefront II controversy, the industry is taking a far closer look at what monetization practices are ethical, and whether the industry can police itself or needs further regulation to avoid misuse.
In the meantime, it’s likely loot boxes will still be featured heavily in the top charts as the revenue potential of gacha and loot boxes is hard to ignore. Using a random drop system has allowed many new genres and core loops to flourish.
However, designing for gachas isn’t a simple design process. Not all genres and not all types of gameplay can be ported to support a loot box design. We’ve already talked about some of the necessary ingredients:
Now, it’s time for the third element: how to handle duplicates. It’s what we call an edge case, but it’s a process that will define how your game will feel over the long haul: Do players feel like duplicates are useful or useless?
The first thing to master when it comes to a gacha system is how to think differently about two situations that can arise; duplicates and bad drops.
For example, let’s assume that we have a Gacha system similar to Overwatch – our boxes only drops cosmetic items. As a result, each item that we drop is permanent (the player keeps it forever and it can’t be “consumed”) and players are chase after the cosmetic items they want for the characters they play as.
In this system, a ‘bad drop’ could be a cosmetic item for a character that I don’t play as – maybe in the future I will, but for the time I’ve been playing I haven’t taken to the character in question. As such, this is most definitely a bad drop.
Ideally, I should be able to convert this item into something of value so that I can eventually get the items that I want. In games such as Overwatch and Hearthstone, this means converting any bad drop into a dust-currency, which allows you to purchase the items you want directly.
However, also inherent in this system are duplicates. In this situation, I receive the same cosmetic item for a character that I already have, which feels like a big loss. It’s doubly frustrating if the game drops a high rarity duplicate (i.e. a legendary skin) as this feels like a massive waste – I was lucky enough to receive a legendary item, but unlucky that it was an item that had dropped before.
As previously suggested, games like Overwatch and Hearthstone handle this by allowing players to convert these items to dust, essentially treating a duplicate the same way as a bad drop. However, the amount of dust dropped is a fraction of the cost of purchasing the skin you want directly, so players still feel terrible when they pick up a duplicate.
As a result, Overwatch eventually went public about adjusting the drop logic to avoid duplicates as much as possible, while Brawl Stars even removed duplicates outright. However, in my view it doesn’t need to be this way. Removing duplicates from your system reduces depth, and puts more pressure on your team to develop more content. Ideally duplicates would be celebrated by players, making this rare occurrence into something of value, rather than serving as a regretful outcome.
In light of this, let’s look at how to build out better gacha duplicate mechanics:
A different way to avoid the pain of duplicates is to make sure duplicates rarely happen.
One way to do it is to make each piece of content generate in many subtly different ways. For example, a weapon or character can drop, but certain sub-elements are randomized and generated.
Using this method, if a duplicate item drops, there are smaller comparisons that players can make between the drops. This is done when gear or drops are both procedurally and randomly generated and there are enough smaller detailed stats that players actively want to optimize.
For example, in the first Destiny you could get the same piece of gear dropping many times.
However, each drop had randomized stats and perks associated with it, causing players to head into a chase in the end game to find unusual builds of gear. The game included perks that offset the problem of some guns being overpowered in competitive modes like The Crucible. While this obviously went overboard causing severe balancing issues, this shows the power of procedurally generated gear – it deepens the chase and makes duplicates something players actively go after.
However, this system can result in players ending up with mountains of weapons and gear that they don’t want to use. As a result, designers need to find ways of converting all bad drops into something of use to players, such as:
While such solutions put the duplicate issue to bed, it also puts more pressure on the bad drop system.
One system that hasn’t been used often is the repair system..
Fallout 3 used this effectively by asking players to collect duplicates to maintain their gear. Have an amazing piece of gear? It will eventually deteriorate and be less effective over time. To repair it, you can pay a large amount of currency or find duplicates of your gear to repair for free. If the deterioration is felt as fair to players, this can create a repeatable grind to find duplicates of your gear to maintain its highest possible gameplay effectiveness.
This system is likely avoided because of the consumable feel that drops from the gacha become: The feeling that an amazing item will drop, but one that’s only useful briefly. It’s a feeling that anyone who played Zelda: Breath of the Wild will definitely find familiar
[Source: Both Guns Blazing]
Fusion is the typical way that Japanese and Chinese games have made duplicates relevant. These games typically focus on selling stat improvements over cosmetics, and because of this they focus their duplicate mechanics more on unlocking higher stat growth.
Fusion mechanics are designed in a way that requires the player to receive a duplicate in order to increase the stat potential of a card. As such, while you can upgrade a card up to high level, unlocking the ability to upgrade it even further requires you to “evolve” or “awaken” the card with a duplicate of itself.
When looking at the stacking probability needed to get the highest star rating, it’s easy to see why they do this. You can drive a lot of depth in a gacha system by asking players to chase after duplicates without adding more content.
The problem with this comes in the randomness of the system. Getting a single duplicate becomes so important in this system that players can become very frustrated. Players have no grindable path to unlock the potential for their favourite characters. Hence, designers came up with a new system: Sharding.
As duplicate systems changed over time, there was a need to make them more flexible and granular.
To solve the issues of fusion, gacha games started to experiment with shards instead of duplicate fusion, best seen in Western Gacha games like Galaxy of Heroes. With shards, each character can’t be unlocked until you have collected a certain amount of shards. In the above example, Grand Moff Tarkin requires 80 shards to be unlocked.
However, that’s just to unlock the character. To upgrade the character to its maximum potential, the player would need to collect additional shards, so “duplicates” are simply just additional shards needed to progress to the maximum potential.
With characters now needing hundreds of shards instead of single drops to reach the maximum characters, games added mechanics which allowed players to grind for specific shards, so players that are looking to upgrade or unlock their favourite character could grind specifically for it. This wasn’t possible with the fusion system before, since giving a single card could mean massive progress for players. In short, sharding allows clear progress.
However, there remains one big problem: opening up a gacha pack you’ve paid for and receiving mere pieces of a character – nothing that you can use there and then. It’s a transaction the player almost always regrets and, as a result, Supercell came up with a workaround.
Clash Royale provided a completely new framework for how to handle duplicates. It took the best of the Shard framework, made the handling of duplicates restrictive, yet still has a gacha system that feels fair.
With Royale’s system, each card is unlocked after getting the first card. This feels far better than shards because getting a new card feels amazing – there’s no more paying for “parts of a character”.
After you unlock the card, the card becomes a duplicate sink. In order to upgrade the card, you need to collect a number of duplicates of that card. It removes any needed management of duplicates, while giving a clear path for players to upgrade their cards.
Due to the design, players will unlock cards fairly quickly (you only need one card), but the majority of the chase is after the (thousands) of duplicates necessary to upgrade your cards to a competitive level. This system has significant depth, allowing Supercell to be generous with the cards it gives out, and keep players collecting for years.
However, despite its perks, this design still has disadvantages. For one, Clash Royale has to work really hard to try to ensure that as many cards as useful to players as possible. Otherwise, getting a duplicate for a card you aren’t using is completely useless (the only way to get value from it is to trade it away to clan mates). This works very well for CCG style games, but many games can’t support this level of gacha width – where every item from the gacha is theoretically useful.
All these mechanics thus far are primarily focused on handling situations where duplicates give out better stats – they “unlock the potential” of an item so they can be upgraded further. This works great for games that are RPG-based and are comfortable with players speeding up progression (ex. Clash Royale), but most competitive PvP games can’t do this, such as Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, and League of Legends. Competitive PvP games can really only sell cosmetics. So, how do you add value to duplicates for cosmetic economies?
This is considerably harder, which is why most cosmetic driven games end up allowing players to convert duplicates into dust (ex. Overwatch) or allow players to sell them on a secondary market (ex. Counter Strike: Global Offensive). League of Legends has even dabbled in at first not fully “unlocking” the cosmetic, but only allowing the player to “rent” the cosmetic. Getting duplicates eventually allows the player to convert their duplicates into a permanent item.
However, beyond this, the only thing you can do is make duplicates of cosmetic gear unlock cooler/better visuals of a cosmetic item. In Counter-Strike: Go (CS:GO), they use a “decay” system to do this.
In CS:GO, each item is dropped with a randomly assigned “decayed” attribute. This could mean that the item looks brand new, or is heavily worn down. Getting a duplicate allows players to find items which have far less wear, meaning that players aren’t just chasing that “item”, but also chasing the best looking version of it. The visual differences between “Factory New” and “Battle Scarred” are striking – making the value of having the highest valuable version of the item very important to players that are chasing after cosmetics.
As such, similar to stats, cosmetics can have a “unlocking potential” of their own – you just need to make sure your cosmetic items can have varying degrees of visual quality.
In any Gacha system, regardless if you’re just dropping cosmetic items or gameplay impacting items you, as a designer you are responsible for ensuring that there is as little remorse or regret from players – for making sure that each purchase of a loot box feels rewarding to players.
There are seven examples of mechanics you can use to handle duplicates and give them value:
Each have their pros and cons, but hopefully can help you decide what is the best path for your game.
Happy New Year! In amongst all the disregarded party poppers, half drunk glasses of Prosecco, and trays loaded with fast drying out canapés, we can confidently report it is indeed 2018.
To start the new year off on the right foot, we’ve decided to come proffering gifts: namely, a new Free to Play Bible, building on its existing foundations to offer both upcoming and established mobile developers the resources they need to deliver an engaging and, most importantly, successful free to play game.
And we’re not done yet, either. Throughout 2018, we’ll be updating the links and adding new articles of our own on the main blog to flesh the Bible out even further. It’s going to be a busy year.
Within the F2P bible we’ve pulled together a lot of content, linking to articles, opinion pieces, and videos by experts from across the web. We’ve separated the Bible into many different chapters, each taking a look at a different focus for game designers and product managers operating in the free to play space.
To begin with, we go into the basics; how to get started in game design, what it takes to be successful as free-to-play, and the high-level view of the free to play market.
Secondly, we dive into free to play design topics; how do you design and articulate a core loop, what gameplay works best in free to play, designing for touch controls on mobile, and how to approach session design.
Thirdly, we go deep into the core systems of free to play games; improving retention and monetization, the design of gacha systems, alongside evaluating economies.
Lastly, we talk about the operations and growth side; how do you soft launch? How do you make money with ads? How do you grow a game?
Altogether, we hope the new refreshed free to play Bible should serve as the perfect starting point for developers old and new, motivating them for the year ahead.
