Guest Author: Niek Tuerlings / Writer at Ludocious.com.

Zynga is doing well, very well. Even more so since the first of January this year. This was the date that the Social Game giant had acquired Small Giant Studios, as was announced two weeks earlier. The main reason for this acquisition was the success of Small Giant’s hit game, Empires & Puzzles.

Only five months after being globally launched in March 2017, E&P entered the top 50 grossing games in its category (RPGs/Strategy) on the App Store. It has been there ever since. Especially the last twelve months the game has been thriving, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per day.

What makes this game so successful? What did Small Giant do differently from other developers like King and SEGA who have tried to successfully create a worldwide successor for Puzzles & Dragons, the first game in history to generate $1B in sales?

Guest Author: Niek Tuerlings / Writer at Ludocious.com.
Game Designer on June’s Journey at Wooga, Berlin.
Disclaimer: The article is the author’s own professional view on Empires & Puzzles. Wooga GmbH isn’t affiliated with this assessment in any way.

This deconstruction will cover:

• The game’s core loop
• Why having chosen a basic match-3 mechanic was a safe bet
• What other games have tried
• The game’s features and to which kinds of players it caters
• How time-limited offers and events are run successfully

The Loop

At first glance, the core loop of the game doesn’t look very complicated:

The player’s task is to create the best possible team of five heroes to battle with. Investing in these heroes is needed to level them up, which can be done by merging other unwanted heroes into chosen heroes. New heroes can be trained using recruits, which are collected by winning battles.

The hero roster (top row is the player’s team) and a hero’s detail page.

After carefully composing a balanced team of fighters, the player takes their party of stalwart heroes into battle, which in mobile games means the player is required to do the one and only obvious thing: matching three gems of the same color.

Matching gems in columns sends troops upwards to attack the enemies above.

The player’s team is positioned below the grid, the enemies are above it. Both enemies and the player’s heroes have one out of five elemental types (colors) which are effective to one another in a rock/paper/scissors-like manner. Matched gems turn into troops of the same color which then move straight upwards to attack the enemies above. This is why the position of specifically colored gems in the grid is important when considering which match to make. The designers wisely didn’t go with a 5-dimensional scheme but simply made the other two colors effective against each other to not make it too difficult to remember. Simplicity over Elegance.

Rock/paper/scissors (lizard/spock)

Matching a specific color of gem also fills up the corresponding character’s ability bar (if they are still alive). When full, the player can (without using a turn) trigger the character’s skill. Skills can be anything ranging from offensive to supportive with everything in between. When all enemies are beaten, the battle is won. The player loses when their entire party is killed.

Matchers gonna match

E&P’s core gameplay is carefully designed and balanced. Lots of additions like randomly spawning blockers, supergem combinations or stronger gems with timers could have been made but weren’t. This brings us to the game’s biggest weakness, at least if you’re a seasoned match-3 player.

The entertainment value of E&P’s core-game experience is disputable. It’s interesting enough to hook players and keep them engaged for a while but E&P’s level variation is clearly not what retains players in the long run. Every level in E&P is the same, making the matching gameplay feel tedious and slow. One battle is at least three or four waves of enemies which requires about 4 minutes when played tactically and half this time when grinding easier auto-battles. This means up to 20 minutes of the exact same gameplay, day in day out, multiple sessions per day. And this is only using the default kind of energy, world energy. E&P has two additional energy systems for the social and multiplayer parts of the game. Using these energies the player can battle world bosses or other players together, by doing what? Exactly the same match-3 levels again, but with a different enemy at the top of the screen. Mechanics like auto-win and auto-battle clearly indicate the need for players to shorten their session and “be done” with the matching component of E&P. The first three and most impactful feature suggestions on GameRefinery suggest adding core game variations like blockers and level goals.

The other edge of the sword is that trying to revolutionize match-3 gameplay is about the riskiest thing one can do when trying to make a hit game. Many others, like King’s Legend of Solgard have tried without success because they were too bold in trying to revolutionize the genre, scaring the huge segment of players who want classic match-3 mechanics.

Snowprint Studios’ Legend of Solgard and its refreshing core-game. Unfortunately without much success.

I do see why it’s difficult to scale and balance the matching gameplay with all kinds of level modifiers being present. E&P’s replay value depends on playing lots of levels over different features. Having to take into account which level modifiers the player has been subjected to spanning different lines of progression would be a lot of overhead. Apparently it’s sufficient to have no variation at all, as enough players simply want to match gems.

It is unclear to me why E&P has kept most battles lengthy and multi-wave, at least for features other than the main campaign. Omitting multiple waves of enemies would keep the grind at bay. It would even could keep monetizing off auto-win tickets a possibility, albeit slightly less desirable. The game becomes way too monotonous to say it’s impossible that no one is churning because of it.

Core-game variation

In terms of lifetime revenue, one of the other Puzzle RPGs that has seen moderate success is Marvel Puzzle Quest by Bandai Namco. This game was released in 2013 and is still generating good revenue until this day, although E&P has surpassed it by a couple of factors at this point.

Marvel Puzzle Quest, still alive and somewhat kicking.

E&P and MPQ are similar in terms of hero-focused gameplay & collection, but MPQ’s approach to match-3 is far more complex. Each Marvel character has three elements to benefit from when matched, including one corresponding skill per element. Damage done is linked to the matched color, not to the columns in which the gems are positioned. The game also requires the player to remove specific gems that have been turned into bombs before their countdown finishes, all adding to the dynamic of the matching gameplay.

MPQ’s core-game depth makes it much more varied & enjoyable than E&P but it takes too long to be fully taught and understood by everyone. Most mobile players don’t have the commitment to dig deeper to figure out how it works on their own. Making a puzzle game doesn’t mean you can make the mechanics themselves a puzzle.

E&P’s conservative stance on match-3 has allowed them to be applicable to a wider audience but at the cost of core-game depth. Its old-fashioned matching system doesn’t involve square or synchronous matches, nor does it feature supergem combinations, further removing player agency from the matching board. Disappointingly, E&P’s successor, Puzzle Combat is in technical soft launch in the Philippines right now and the matching gameplay is a direct reskin. I can understand Small Giant’s fear of killing the golden goose, but as a player I would have loved to be presented with a somewhat modernized experience. A little flair never killed anyone, or goose for that matter.

Tickle all the Fancies

What are players subjected to before the core game starts being repetitive? What gives Empires & Puzzles its long-term retention?

When designing any game, it’s essential to analyze its (planned) feature set to try and see in which ways it is designed to keep as many different types of players as engaged as possible. Almost every studios with top-grossing games tries doing this as well as possible. Good examples of this extreme feature-diversity are Kabam or FunPlus and their top games, MARVEL Contest of Champions and Guns of Glory respectively. E&P does the same, making it one of the most complete games in the Puzzle RPG genre.

Lots of research has been done to define possible player motivations. I won’t go in-depth here since many others have explored this psychological terrain in much more detail but I will use some existing taxonomies like the Gamer Motivation Model from Quantic Foundry to illustrate my point. Their model is suitable because it is based on extensive research on player psychology, all without specifying a distinct platform or genre.

Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Model, which one are you?

Strategizers

Any game that makes its players “feel smart” will successfully gratify strategizers and keep them engaged. Strategizers are the best catered-to group of players in E&P. Three main features of the game heavily depend on the player making the right choices. The first one is the essence of the meta-game; the player’s base.

A (very progressed) player’s base.

Base building

The base can consist out of 10 different kinds of buildings which can be placed on its 34 building plots. Mostly, the player will use these plots to create buildings that increase their food & iron production or storage. Iron is used to upgrade all buildings, including the ones that ultimately gate the player by limiting the amount of food they provide to upgrade their heroes. Filling up the entire base with fully upgraded buildings takes years of upgrades.

How many buildings of a kind to construct and in which order can be strategized on but not to a large extent. As more of the base’s plots get unlocked, the player gets more possibilities to either upgrade their buildings or build new ones. The game’s resource pool is split up between resources gained from winning battles and resources collected from buildings. The first part is gained by playing the core game (limited by the player’s engagement) and the other part is a steady and consistent flow, making sure also less engaged players are able to progress at a specific pace. The choice which buildings to build gives the player just enough feeling of agency over that latter part of resources. It’s a fenced playground where the player has space to feel smart about their choice and positioning of buildings.

Hero collection

The most influential feature of the game that gives the strategic players the most food for thought is the ability to compose a team of heroes they like. At the time of writing, the game contains 182 heroes spanning 5 rarity levels and 10 classes. Most heroes (especially the more rare ones) have specific skill sets, making them truly unique. Some heroes have skills that influence only adjacent heroes, making the placement order of heroes in the party a factor to take into account as well. The way E&P heroes function in the core game is most certainly one of its biggest differentiators.

Examples of different hero skills

The third strategizer feature to highlight is one that speaks for itself but shouldn’t be forgotten. The game’s core-game provides the biggest chunk of challenge. Choosing which match to make where heavily influences a battle’s outcome.

Heroes: the way E&P scales content

Completionists

Completionists have a lot to do in E&P. There is the main campaign that takes care of the player’s long-term progression. It’s not much else than a saga map with chains of levels that increase in difficulty so the player has a measurement of how far and fast they are progressing.

The (saga) map. Overworld on the left, zoomed in province view on the right.

The game offers an elaborate quest system that has different branches of time-limited quests, providing more bite-size objectives to complete. Every quest line caters to different player needs within the feature. Players can grind for specific resources, recruits or class-specific power-ups.

Time-limited quests offering short-term progression.

Collectors

As mentioned, the game contains a lot of heroes to be collected. Heroes of the highest rarity are extremely difficult to acquire because of the game’s relatively wide gacha system. Any time a hero is either summoned or trained, the player gets a random drop. The cheapest, earliest summons and trainings only reward common and uncommon heroes. Later in the game, or during seasonal events, the player unlocks more chances to draw rare, epic and ultimately legendary gacha. Even though the majority of the heroes in the game are legendary (68) or epic (46), drawing gacha practically always rewards common and uncommon heroes. Even the most expensive summon (available only by paying hard currency) provides just ~25% chance of getting an epic hero while legendary heroes drop 2.5% of the time.

Hero rarity comparison; rare (3/5) on the left, legendary (5/5) on the right

The higher a hero’s rarity, the higher its potential. Less rare heroes can’t scale as much, have less interesting skills and have a lower base power. As mentioned, Small Giant scales E&P’s content by adding heroes (that all have to be balanced), which is the reason why acquiring the strongest heroes is such a rare event. Essential to creating an engaging gacha is desirability of its collectables. The need for specific heroes to compose the perfect team is a perfect and meaningful link to the core game.

Hero summoning and training (epic and elemental summons not pictured).

But what happens when the player has found their favorite team? What stops players from using the same team throughout the entire game? When starting specific quests and trials, the player can only use one class of hero, like Paladin for example. Every class has specific talents that can be configured when a player’s hero reaches max level. The player also benefits from having a more diverse roster of heroes in the competitive parts of the game, where specific heroes have the potential to counter others more or less efficiently. E&P only makes the player aware of hero classes much further in the game when their heroes are fully leveled up and ascended. By doing so the game opens up a whole new reason to collect different heroes when the player needs it.

Tactical breakdown of Trial of Serenity (fan made) and a character’s talent grid.

Socializers

E&P gives its players the possibility to form Alliances; groups of players able to chat, organize and work together on common goals. These common goals can include collectively attacking one very strong Titan on the map (PvE) or fighting a War with another alliance (PvP).

Player-versus-Environment & Player-versus-”Player”

In War battles, players can pick opponents with similar strength from the other alliance and attack their team. The battles are not real-time, the player is matched up against the other player’s AI-controlled team. Fighting wars or titans does not use the same energy as the other features, this is smart so that the player doesn’t have to choose between being social or grinding the single-player features of the game.

Competitors

As mentioned above, social players can work together to try and eliminate players of another alliance in the War feature, but there is also a single player combat feature called Raids. This is the main competitive feature of E&P. Players get matched with another player’s team to fight an AI-controlled battle against it. It would be much cooler to fight real-time against a human player, but for this to become reality, lots of technical and synchronicity issues will undoubtedly have to be tackled, not to mention it’s probably too big of a risk at this point.

The battle awards trophies to the winner and deducts some from the loser. Trophies are tallied into a global leaderboard for single players, as well as cumulative trophies of alliances.

The start screen before a raid battle and the screen that pops up when starting the game after being attacked.

When looking at the motivation model posed earlier, it’s clear that E&P caters heavily to the Social, Mastery, Achievement and Creativity categories. The other two (Action & Immersion) are generally not categories that thrive on mobile platforms anyways, which means E&P is practically the most complete game it can be.

Having handled all this, the game’s loop suddenly looks a bit more interesting:

A more thorough look at the game’s loop. (excludes social & compounds quests with battles)

Looking at E&P’s entire feature set, one can conclude the game provides features for everything and everyone. Strategizers, Completionists, Collectors, Socializers and Competitors alike are kept engaged at the time they have become (too) comfortable with the core-game. The coherent way in which all of these features are built to feed into the game’s thrifty hero gacha is the reason for E&P’s long-term success.

Merchandising

Having created such a complete game, the last thing to do is market and sell it for the right price:

Driving First Conversion

The ease of making purchases in a game can be directly compared to a person’s brain and the neural pathways that are created within. Doing something for the first time is by far the most difficult. Recurring events are much easier to perform and justify. For this reason, converting a player’s initial purchasing caution into necessity is pivotal to ‘unlock’ their potential Lifetime Value.

The way E&P converts players is ruthless and childishly simple. The player’s building construction timers ramp up with every upgrade until soon the player has to wait more than 10 hours to sometimes even days for a building to complete. But buildings need to be upgraded a lot. Every building has about 20 stages which means the player has to start these lengthy upgrades about 700 times to reach the end of content. This would all be not such a big deal if they would be able to upgrade multiple buildings at once. When trying to, the game throws the following pop-up:

That derpy pet dragon though.

When tapping the button to get a second builder, one is presented the VIP pass. For any player with a bit of sense how long it takes to complete just one build timer, this 30 day pass is a no-brainer. That second builder alone is what anyone would want since it effectively doubles construction efficiency. On top of that comes a good amount of gems and even more! VIP memberships are an amazing way to retain players since they pre-purchase rewards they won’t even get when failing to log back into the game. Linking it to something as desirable as that second builder to convert is a genius move.

In case the builder scenario didn’t work, the game continuously offers time-limited conversion deals to players. These deals all advertise something desirable for a low real-money-purchase in combination with gems. This way the player gets their desired product and additional freedom to spend currency the way they prefer.

A healthy reward space provides infinite possibilities to keep selling goods.

Retention through Live-ops

On top of the VIP membership lots of players will have felt inclined to buy, there are lots of reasons to check  back into the game. The daily free hero summon is probably the most tempting one. On top of that, everything else has a timer. Quests reset at different rates, huge amounts of building resources need to be collected every couple of hours, a titan spawns every day and guild wars need attending to. On top of all that the elemental summon provides a time-limited chance to draw an element-specific gacha every 30 hours, which is very tempting if your team’s 5th hero isn’t optimally synergizing and you have some gems saved up.

Everyday I’m summonin’

Since so much is happening and the game’s three different energies all replenish at different rates it’s very tempting to quickly check back into the game to see if one of these countdowns hasn’t reset in the meantime. When this game hooks you, it hooks you good.

Monetization

The game has enough to offer for players with deeper pockets as well; themed packs for rushy players (the fast lane pack), packages to buff specific heroes or elemental-themed sales are a common sight in the shop. Featured deals come and go and have a prominent placement in the shop.

Make it rain

There is one feature related to the game’s monetization that can easily be ignored: the incentivized ads. They seem tacked on later as they are entirely outside the core loop. The rewards are also slim pickings: 2 diamonds and a weapon of which I don’t see its immediate use don’t provide a high “wow” factor.

Adds, not ads

It would be more alluring to offer another gacha draw in the daily summon in exchange for watching an ad since it provides a reward that can immediately be used. Providing a reward that in most cases will just be used to ‘save up’ is less effective. On top of that, adding the chance of finding a rare hero to the equation should get more people excited.

Conclusion

Empires & Puzzles is an example to be studied when working on your next hit game. Wrapping your head around the intricate balancing of their systems and feature set might take some effort but it’s surely worth the trouble. Studying the quest, sales and event cadence makes it look so easy while in fact one shouldn’t forget a game with substantial economic depth is required to be able to replicate what E&P manages to offer.

In summary, these three things are what E&P makes it the success it is:

• An extremely rich feature set catering to all different types of players
• A highly scalable & desirable collection with ultra rare content that links back adamantly to its core gameplay
• Its irrefutable conversion offer linked to its rewarding VIP system

After having seen how this game has been performing and analyzing their core success factors, my big question is, who can do this better?

Disney Heroes: Battle Mode was announced in April this year and launched globally in May as an impressively feature-complete hero brawler, developed by PerBlue Entertainment. The game mainly caters to millennials who were raised watching Disney films and are familiar with the more modern IPs. The game features many characters from the Disney & Pixar Universe, all mashed into a single game.

In this deconstruction we will cover:

• Disney heroes core gameplay and metagame
  
• The heroes in the game and why they are so important
• Daily quests, live ops and events
• Game modes and their dependancies on one another
• Campaign and game progression analysis
• And game monetization

Can Disney’s crossover live up to expectations?

From a gameplay perspective, the game is inspired by earlier casual hero brawlers like Heroes Charge (2014) and Soul Hunters (2015) and caters to a more casual to mid-core audience. The characters are the selling point of the game (which can be said for every Disney product) and it’s clear that was the intention.

The game makes the entire cast of heroes visible from the beginning, showing the player the carrots: their favorite characters. It even discloses the length of the stick by telling the player exactly what to do to collect every hero. Hero accessibility ranges from easily acquirable to practically premium, but even these can drop for very lucky players.

Guest Autor: Niek Tuerlings Game Designer on June’s Journey at Wooga, Berlin.Disclaimer: The article is the author’s own professional view on Disney Heroes. Wooga GmbH. isn’t affiliated with this assessment in any way.

Disney Heroes’ Core Gameplay

The player starts off with a handful of heroes and by engaging with the single player campaign, they quickly start collecting enough different heroes to be able to create a team of their five favorites.

The core gameplay consists of selecting a team, starting a level where this team fights against other teams of AI controlled opponents. After winning the fight, the player is rewarded with rewards, depending on the game mode.

During the fight, the only agency the player has is choosing when to activate each hero’s first and main skill when their energy bar is full. When getting stronger, heroes gain three more skills but these are activated automatically.

In the meta-game, the player is gated by two things, stamina and what the game calls team level. Stamina generates with time. Team level is generated by player engagement. All hero levels are limited by the team level, hence the name. New heroes can be collected by finding an initial amount of hero chips. After acquiring, heroes can be improved in four different ways:

• Rising their star level by collecting more chips
• Increasing their level by earning XP in battles
• Promoting them by equipping them with badges
• Improving their skill levels using gold

It’s interesting that improving hero skills is the only significant gold sink. Gold is also used to promote heroes after finding enough badges but the amount is substantially lower than the amount that is needed for the skills. The reason for this that Disney Heroes lets the player upgrade hero skills from the get go. Other games like for example Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes require time-limited event currencies for this. Assumingly a decision made for simplicity reasons and the different age groups for both games.

Motivational Pinches – The Heroes

Currently, Disney Heroes features 42 heroes, a decent but not copious amount for a game in this genre. Each hero has a different skill set and a team always consists of 5 heroes. This means players have more than enough potential team compositions to experiment with, although not every team is viable. Balanced teams usually have at least one and sometimes two heroes of each type (Support, Control, Tank & Damage). This is the core of the game’s fun, which is why strategic and competitive players are the main audience Disney Heroes caters to. Next to this, the ability to chat, cooperative or competitive combat and the ability to form guilds cater to player’s social desires. The storytelling isn’t the game’s strongest suit, but it can initially tickle the player’s explorative cravings.

Desire for Heroes

Each battle generates random drops of badges and hero chips. Together with potential hero drops from different kinds of loot boxes, these variable rewards create the desire to keep playing. The hero collection screen neatly exposes all available heroes to players, which is especially attractive to the ones with strong collecting ambitions.

The game has a Daily Quest system, and since this provides the bulk of the player’s team level experience, this should be the biggest reason to come back every day. It works for a while, but Disney Heroes keeps offering the same quests each day. It’s a list of quest that asks players to engage with practically every game mode, and always in the exact same way, day in day out. This sets the precedent for players to find the most effective routine, which then becomes boring and presumingly hurts the game’s long-term retention. A more varied quest system with a random selection of daily quests (as opposed to just showing all of them) should be able to reduce this monotonous daily ritual.

Game Progression

Disney Heroes offers an abundance of game modes which all use the same brawler mechanic. At first glance, it’s strange to call a game that has one single core mechanic ‘varied’, but when looking closer at the characteristics of each game mode, one can see that each mode has its own specific purpose. What the game does well is using its different currency rewards to make all game modes dependant on each other, ultimately feeding into the same goal; leveling up the ultimate team.

Loot boxes, competitive PvP with global leaderboard, tournaments, guilds, daily events, a collection system with upgradable powerups and a synchronous cooperative multiplayer mode, it’s all there.

Campaign Progression analysis

To understand the intricacies of the game’s engagement potential, a study of its progression is required, which can seem pretty complex at first glance. For clarity, an infographic is included at the end of this paragraph, outlying the main features, their interdependencies and the currencies they use and generate.

The campaign is the main storyline of the game. Beating new levels progresses the story and replaying beaten levels is the main source of badges. This feature also offers an elite campaign where next to the badges, new hero chips can be acquired. The friend campaign is a game mode where heroes are paired with another hero to beat levels that require a specific kind of stamina. Beating a hero’s friend campaign unlocks another (fifth) way to improve heroes; equipping them with Memory Disks. Episodes in the friend campaign are gated by the hero pair’s relationship, which can be improved by sending these heroes on missions together. Missions are nothing but a timer started by the player which rewards friend experience when it runs out. Heroes sent out on a mission can still be used in other game modes.

After the player has battled their way up through 2 campaign chapters the market opens up. The market is the place where earned currencies can be traded for hero chips and badges. During the day at specific times, players are incentivized to check back into the game and review the newly refreshed products in the market, next to claiming some free stamina.

Disney Heroes offers six game modes that unlock at different times during its progression which reward currencies to buy specific hero chips in the market. This means that if a player chooses a hero to be on their team, there is a big chance they need to engage with one of these features to be able to purchase the chips needed to upgrade this hero. The arena is the place where players can match their favorite team composition against other players in a single battle. The coliseum does a similar thing but requires three teams of heroes. Creep surge is a cooperative mode with the player’s guild members, happening during a fixed 4-hour window every day. Then there is the city watch, a single player mode where the player’s entire hero collection has to be used to win 15 battles without hero HP and energy being replenished. Then there is the heist, a real-time cooperative multiplayer mode where players can join 4 others to hunt down a thief that’s trying to steal the city’s treasure. Lastly, the recently released guild war makes guilds-versus-guild battles possible by asking other guild members to submit their best team compositions and letting them all fight in a battle every couple of days.
These six game modes cover all possible applications of the core gameplay and make sure to give the player a nice vertical slice of the game. The currencies that flow out tie back directly into the Market.

Disney Heroes also offers two game modes that are built to strengthen the daily retention cycle. These modes don’t require anything to be played but have a limited amount of tries each day. The first is trials where, depending on the day of the week, a subset of the player’s heroes perform battles five times a day. Trial battles guarantee a drop of useful rare badges that would otherwise take stamina and multiple tries to acquire in a campaign mode level. After a battle, the player has to wait 10 minutes to be able to start the next. This restriction makes the player feel smart by letting them sequence and organise their session by engaging with other modes during these 10-minute timers.
The port has the same timer but only two tries per day and doesn’t reward badges but experience boosters to level up heroes of the player’s choice.

The game also includes a social system with guilds, groups of players working together trying to beat the surge mode every day and battling each other in guild war every couple of days. A daily check-in is included as well, which simply requires everyone to tap a button once a day. The more guild members who do this, the higher everyone’s rewards. Simple and effective. Guildies can also post (copies of) their heroes to others to be used as mercenaries in the city watch and the surge. Now there’s something called guild influence, a currency that is earned next to team experience when completing daily quests.

This is a shared currency that the officers and president of the club can use to unlock perks for all guild members. What the game doesn’t do very well is expose these perks. It’s likely that many players who have been in guilds for a while and never look at the relatively hidden perks section don’t know all the extras they receive by being in that guild, since it’s not exposed within the features themselves.

Another notable feature is enhancements, which provides the player with a way to convert the huge amount of badges they don’t need into boosts for the badges they do need for their heroes. Lastly, two exclusive market categories with slightly better deals (available from team level 31 and 41) can be unlocked by random chance and only for a short period of time.

Game Mode Dependencies

As mentioned, one of the biggest strengths of Disney Heroes is how every feature is interwoven into the others. Ignoring one mode is detrimental to the player’s progress and oftentimes disqualifies the player from optimizing their team in some way.

For example, at team level 25, the player is introduced to the aforementioned friend campaigns. Because of the initially awkward gameplay where it’s for once not possible to influence the hero composition of the battles, this game mode is likely to be ignored by players who like to have agency here. However, after discovering the existence of Memory Disks (which boost one of a hero’s skills), these players might change their minds, but will then realize that completing a friend campaign requires hero friendship to progress. This is generated by sending these two heroes on specific missions repeatedly. This is a good example of how the game’s high amount of currencies and statistics give the game designers the possibility to increase feature engagement by creating interdependencies like these.

The only modes that are outside the loop are the heist, the challenges and the guild war, which is logical since they have been released only recently, months after the game’s global launch. While all three modes struggle to find a meaningful spot inside the game’s loop, challenges is having a particularly hard time since it offers only a cosmetic reward for a heavy hard currency price.

Less and less gameplay

One interesting thing about Disney Heroes is the more players engage with it, the more it steers their focus away from the core gameplay. Tapping the right skill at the right time is only fun for so long and the game averts the player from it after the meta-game has hooked them. At team level 30, fast forward is unlocked, which increases the speed of the battles to a higher (but still manageable) speed. Combine this with auto-mode (a premium feature) which automatically triggers the manual skill of the characters, and we now have a mostly self-playing game where the only tactical choice is starting the right battles.

By analyzing the infographic above one can discover a currency called Raid Tickets. These tickers make it possible to skip grinding through campaign- and trial battles by simply giving the rewards. It would be logical to assume that this currency is a rare good given its ability to save loads of time, which in free-to-play usually means you have to pay for it, but nothing is further from the truth. Paying players are drowning in them. The drop chance for raid tickets is pretty high during the the campaign missions and even after having bought the smallest currency package with real money only once, players get plenty of tickets every day. Generous, but also a missed opportunity to monetize further.

Monetization

Before diving in more detail about Disney Heroes’ monetization potential, it’s important to note that it has an elaborate VIP system. It offers 20 levels which unlock numerous options, some of which are a given in other games, like the ability to buy more stamina for diamonds or skip timers for diamonds. With every VIP level the player reaches, the premium properties increase gradually and sometimes even unlock quality of life features that reduce the need to engage with some of the single player modes.

Looking at the game’s currencies, all speedups and premium purchases require one hard currency; diamonds. Packages of diamonds can be bought instantly as usual, but subscription models are also on offer. Their top 3 most purchased products are the Pouch of Diamonds, the Fistful of Diamonds and the 30 day deal. Especially this last purchase offers a lot of bang for the player’s buck but it requires commitment to keep playing for 30 days. Not a bad way to increase retention, but only when players are able to keep intrinsic motivation to use these diamonds.

Although the game has a huge amount of diamond sinks, conservatively spending players can easily rack up a nice balance of these glinstering gems since quite a lot are given away as well, especially to people who sign in and engage with the competitive features every day. It does a good job making the player consider spending diamonds every day, and since the stamina bar takes ages to fill fully (6 hours at game start and up to 16 hours for high-level players) it’s very attractive and almost required to use the “Get More Stamina” function to exchange diamonds for stamina. After getting used to this, the step towards buying a steady influx of 120 diamonds per day is easily done. So it seems that having a slowly replenishing chrono-currency can create a shortage that is not going to increase the amount of sessions per day but can greatly increase buyer conversion if the game is centered around grinding to progress. A classic example of scarcity creates demand.

The fact that progression can be bought so easily defines the game as pay-to-win. Disney Heroes cleverly masks this by placing players in a vast amount of competitive tiers (leagues) that are easily progressed through at first because they are filled with many players who are not engaged or have churned already. The power gap between payers and non-payers only becomes visible in the highest leagues, which (when played at a regular, engaged pace) are reached after weeks if not months of play.

Something that can be questioned about the game’s monetization strategy is the lack of a feature that uses loss-aversion. Failing a campaign battle refunds all sunk stamina but 1, for some reason. Badges, Gold and other rewards earned during the battle are also lost, but this isn’t shown on the loss screen. This removes all excitement from trying to progress the campaign, although it probably also reduces churn. In the end it’s a matter of consideration what’s more valuable. Since Disney Heroes doesn’t have move-based gameplay either, it is more challenging to give the player a way to cheat in case of losing and still give them a possibility to win after paying some diamonds.

Read more about game monetization in our designing for free to play monetization section of our free to play bible 

Liveops and Events

Successful games feel fresh and well-maintained. Therefore it’s crucial to add events that change frequently and follow common trends like seasonal content and daily deals. Disney Heroes contains an elegant but relatively cookie-cutter event system with little surprises in its design. Sales can be ignored easily and aren’t shoved in the player’s face, although a more subtle encouragement to take a look is created by putting giveaways in between.

An example of a good Disney Heroes sale is one that is targeted to players at a specific time of their life cycle; the Badge Buster Bundle. For this example it’s important to note that badges become more and more tedious to grind nearing the end of the game’s content. One purple badge (like the Mickey Mouse Club one pictured below) requires 50 bits (parts) to be grinded in campaign levels. The drop chance is about 25%, which means at a cost of 12 stamina per gameplay, one badge costs about 2400 stamina. This takes players about 4 days if they spend about 300 diamonds per day on buying additional stamina (or about 2 weeks if they don’t).

Usually, every hero requires different badges to promote tiers, but in Purple 4 which is the highest tier at this point, out of the six badges they can have equipped, one they have all in common is the Mickey Mouse Club badge. Since every hero needs this badge it’s easy to sell and has amazing value to players since it offers them to skip the grind of spending about 10k stamina to collect the bits for these 4 badges manually. Of course they sell four badges per bundle, so players who want to supply their full team of five heroes with this badge have to buy the bundle twice.

Conclusion

Disney Heroes plays all the tricks in the book regarding player engagement and executes these with mixed results. All the ingredients of success are there; a strong IP, a great (although long) first-time-user experience, a great feature unlock pacing, a super-scalable asset pipeline making it very easy to add content (heroes) every couple of weeks, Disney’s deep pockets for increasing User Acquisition spend and on top of everything else, a healthy reward-space with enough resources and currencies to keep on selling.
Regardless off these factors, the game’s long-term retention is low compared to others in the same genre, which is most likely caused by putting too little focus on gameplay and too much on statistics and grinding in the late game. The more players engage (time-wise and especially money-wise) less use for the battle gameplay is needed. Facilitated by the monotonous quest system, all that is left is a dreary daily routine that revolves around finishing daily quests, without creating enough meaning for the rewards this provides. Depending on the player’s dedication to keep staying on the maximum team level, they might stick around for a while longer, but will eventually start feeling the lack of incentive to use what they have worked for.

It’s difficult to know the necessary User Acquisition investment, but the game’s asset pipeline is compact enough to not need the entire staff of PerBlue Entertainment to keep maintaining it. Looking at the revenue it’s making monthly and trusting that a sufficient amount of players stick around at least long enough to convert, Disney Heroes shouldn’t have too much trouble breaking even. But becoming top-grossing like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is most likely out of reach.

When freemium games started being successful in the late 2000s, the industry began to search for new job roles. Roles that are focussed on understanding data on in-game player behavior. New jobs like business performance manager, data scientist, data analyst and business intelligence manager were created. Initially, there were no tools and standards, but as the industry matured, so did the practices. Now there is a relatively standardized understanding of what it means to be a producer versus a business performance manager versus a data scientist, as well as what good use of in-game data looks like.

I believe in the next few years we will see a similar development for game economy designer jobs: ‘analytical game designers’ who work with simulations and support lead designers in iterating on the key game systems.

Article written by Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King

The unique problems of freemium mobile game mechanics

Building successful freemium games includes a very special type of challenge: creating systems that engage players for years and that allow for very deep monetization. All the revenue of a freemium game comes from the slow trickle of small in-game purchases made by a small fraction of the playerbase. This makes it necessary for freemium games to retain players for a long time and avoid putting too low a cap on how much spenders can pay.

In order to achieve a long lifetime, freemium games are built so that players can set strong (short-, medium-, and long-term) goals for themselves. They are then tuned to gradually provide players with a sense of “progression” towards these goals for an experience that can last for years. This generally translates into a need for a lot of “content,” be it new levels, new items, or generally new “things” to get in the game. Now, since most spend in freemium games comes from players who want to accelerate their progression, and since as we said it is important to avoid putting a low cap on how much spenders can spend, this need for “content” is multiplied.

The solution to this type of problem often cannot just be “create more content.” Production of good quality “content” can be both expensive and time-consuming, and that has to be factored in the cost of maintaining a live game. In the case of mobile games, developers also need to keep in mind that there are device limitations in terms of loading times and even disk space in case they want to support old devices.

This pressure on “content” makes freemium system building one of the most difficult and interesting challenges in game development.

Review a game economy early

It is important to look at this “content” dynamic explicitly and in detail before launching a game. There have been a few examples of beautiful, innovative, IP-powered games that have burst into players’ attention (and into the Top Downloads and Top Grossing charts), only to then disappear just a few months later. Not having enough progression or spending depth impeded these titles from becoming new runaway successes.

Furthermore, work on those systems is also best done early in the development process. Mobile games have become big production efforts, with teams of dozens of people. Once a game team becomes that big, two things hinder fast or successful pivots:

• Lead designers become very busy with day-to-day work, which makes it hard for them to take a step back and focus on tasks as big as changing key game systems.
• Since changing key game systems means changing somewhat the “nature” of a game, it is hard to do that more than once or twice before losing the faith of the team or the key game stakeholders.

The problem with reviewing game systems

The issue with trying to review game systems early in the development process is that freemium game systems are both very complicated and abstract. Game system reviews typically happen via conversations and presentations, and sometimes with some high-level prototypes, but those tools are not fit to describe and analyze “content” problems in-depth. Different people are likely to interpret the same presentation or the same words in different ways, and without looking into this in detail, there is the risk of moving to production games lacking a solid plan.

Enter the economy designers

Game economy designers at King are “analytical game designers” who look at games as machines and partner with the lead designer on a game title to transform a vision and a desired player experience into mechanics and parameters. They build simulations of the game mechanics and find answers to questions like, “How long will players need to complete a game?” or “How deep can monetization be in this game?”

Having a game economy designer working in a game team early in the development process allows for the game team to iterate much faster on game systems, months before having these systems implemented in game. A game can then move in production with confidence that enough “content” will be available to allow for years of play and for enough monetization depth.

RPG example

For example, in order to accelerate our iterations on the development of a gear system in an RPG, one of our economy designers developed a small simulator in Python (our preferred language for economy design).

The tool encoded all the mechanics related to the gear system (item drops, gear progression, gacha system). A designer could interact with it and simulate the progression in the game without going through the core mechanics of the gameplay.

This allowed exploring the long-term state of players in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. The project could therefore quickly iterate on different variations on the design of the gear system and eliminate solutions that would have given a poor long-term player experience.

Casual game economies

Simulation is a valuable tool for casual games as well. In one of our latest casual games, players receive many of their rewards through (non-purchasable) mystery boxes. The inherent randomness in the boxes combined with variable progression speeds, skill levels, and play frequencies of players makes it hard to calculate how many rewards players get and when they get them.

In a game as big as a popular casual game, giving a bad experience to “a small percentage of players” could mean impacting millions, so having more control over the player experience becomes very valuable.

Using actual player data to simulate players’ journeys allows us to see how some game logic decisions impact player experience and content pacing, thus allowing for faster iterations before in-market tests.

Simulating players’ journeys allows us to see how game logic decisions impact player experience.

Game economy designers become increasingly important

The mobile gaming industry is still developing. The level of innovation to become a top title is as high as ever before, high quality is a minimum requirement and time to market is critical. To respond to these demands, gaming companies are trying to multiply their attempts at making successful games and are increasing the size of the teams once the games move to production. The more these trends will continue, the stronger the need will be to validate project investments early on, and the more there will be a need for game economy designers.

The discipline is young, with tools and practices still to be discovered, but the potential value to be created in this space is great, and I am convinced that we will have more and more A simulation specialists in this role.

If you’re interested in working with King on Economy design, take a look at their jobs board here.

By Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King
Originally posted on Gamasutra

Sims Mobile has big shoes to fill. Everyone knows The Sims. The sandbox life simulation has not only defined its own genre but counts among the top selling game series ever. After four major releases on PC/consoles and countless DLCs, EA and Maxis come with a second big attempt to succeed in the mobile sphere. Sims Mobile (Android, iOS) launched globally early March 2018. It’s hard to avoid comparison to the original PC game given it was made by the same developer and publisher, as well as visual style and gameplay elements.

What makes The Sims franchise stand out is by far the freedom of choice in playing out your personal story. Therefore it’s interesting to take a look what kind of changes are introduced in transition to a free-to-play model, and whether these changes are successful.

Guest Author: Eva Grillova
Senior Game Designer, with history at Disney Prague and Wooga.

Check out our Free to Play Game Design Bible Here

LOOKING BACK AT PC SIMS

The genius of the original Sims PC franchise lies in it’s approachability. It is easy to understand what is expected from the player and the Sim alike: The actions and choices are intuitive, learned from our own life experiences. The metrics of success do not have to be explained, because they are inherently ours: Make more money, get a promotion, get married. The game builds on our own fantasies how how we live our lives.

Matt Brown, current studio technical director of EA Maxis, spoke at this year’s GDC about emergent narrative in the original Sims, and how the game combines a natural human tendency to nurture for others with the Maslow hierarchy of needs.

These needs create the baseline structure of the game:

Sim is hungry →
Sim needs a fridge to make food →
Player needs to buy a fridge →
Player needs money →
Sim needs to get a job!

Furthermore, a Sim has some automated behaviour that tries to address pressing needs and loosely following on whatever actions they’ve been doing before. A Sim who wants to become a chef and has a career in a restaurant is more likely to start cooking on his own. If you have a house with multiple Sims, this is the developers helping you to keep the Sims on the path you’ve chosen for them without having to control every moment of their lives.

At the same time, the feedback to any action is visible and gives it meaning and progress:

Tracking actions rewards you for taking them while in real life these are not nearly as gratifying. For example:

Read a book → See the Sim’s “logic” skill go up
Talk to a person → Watch your relationship level with this person increase

This mechanic also builds an immediate next goal: Read books to level up your logic skill to get a better career. Talk to a person until their relationship reaches a high level, so you can get married and have kids.

All in all, the game is a great combination of actions you can control and those you have to respond to (burglar in your house). Regardless of your story: freedom, feedback and intuitive goals are the trademark features of the brand and the design principles on which the narrative is built.

Does free-to-play versions achieve this?

THE SIMS GO FREE TO PLAY

As a shift to F2P, The Sims actually had two previous attempts:

1. The Sims FreePlay launched 2011 for mobile
2. The Sims Social launched 2011 on Facebook

The Sims Social (the Facebook game) ruled the top charts for a bit but then quickly fell off.

Sims FreePlay (mobile game) is still being updated and has been a staple of the top games on mobile since 2011. The mobile version used timers to break up the sessions and provide progress in times of player’s absence. These timers break the flow and make the game feel very different from the original, but it keeps its stable audience, presumably because the it stays quite true to the brand’s principles, keeping the narrative choices similar as in The Sims.

The new Sims Mobile game was soft launched in May 2017 in Brazil, and launched globally this year in March. From very first moment you notice how different the game’s visuals are. It walked a long way from the quirky, robotic animations in Sims FreePlay into a very polished, full 3D experience with a wide range of animations and short loading times, resembling the Sims 4 PC game.

So how did the latest Sims Mobile game do?

In the past weeks, the old game, Sims FreePlay, kept its position in the Top 100 grossing. The new Sims Mobile hasn’t maintained a rank in the top grossing, roughly flattening at $50K/day according to Sensor Tower across Android + iOS.

Such numbers are far from stellar for a game with such high visual polish that spent almost a year in soft launch and taps into the faithful audience of the franchise. So what happened? Why didn’t the Sims Mobile leapfrog Sims Freeplay?

Let’s first dive into the game, and then talk about the issues.

FOCUS ON FEWER SIMS: FAMILY AND HEIRLOOMS

Instead of controlling an unlimited amount of characters and houses like in The Sims and Sims FreePlay, here you can control only up to four characters that share one house.

However to keep things interesting and let the player live different stories, at some point Sims can retire. This frees a slot for a new generation. If you choose to retire the Sim, they will hang out around the house, offering special actions rewarding Heirloom tokens (family currency), and eventually will be “moved out” (to a farm upstate) and permanently gone.

If you have a baby, similar process happens for it to grow up: From a toddler to a baby to a teenager to an adult.

Heirloom tokens allow you to purchase lucky charms that unlock and boost traits you can assign to your Sims.

The system works well: Player doesn’t get overwhelmed by controlling too many Sims, exploring differently flavoured stories comes naturally with new characters, and last but not least there is a tangible heritage from the previous generation, which is a great metaphor. It also serves as a retention mechanic for achievement-focused players.

Focusing player’s attention on a limited amount of characters and creating a heritage achievement system is definitely a good step for a mobile game.

SIM PROGRESSION THROUGH STORIES AND EVENTS

As a player, you can assign your Sims to events, which are basically quests with different duration. Events are part of Stories: Career, hobby and relationships. For hobbies and careers, only one can be active at a time for each Sim and switching costs Simoleons, but relationships can be explored in parallel, which keeps the game to one of the most cherished traits of the original. The only limited resource here is player’s time.

Each Sim can be assigned to one event at a time, and it will finish itself. This lets you progress without actively playing.

To give player a chance to act, each Sim also has energy that can be used to perform optional actions within the event to speed up the timer and finish earlier. Player chooses the actions through interaction points that are only available during the event.

The events feed both into the player progression and the Sim progression. It ties the two loops together: Completing an event means XP for the player, and a progression in the story for the Sim.

DECORATING YOUR HOME

Built on top is the decoration loop, which loosely connects to the overall progression loop described above. There are two progression tracks: Player level and Vanity level:

Player’s XP comes mainly from completing events. They unlock new parts of town and careers, furniture, building blocks and outfits. Decorating and buying clothes increases vanity level, which serves as a visible comparison between you and your in-game friends and unlocks more space in the house.

The whole loop then looks like this:

From this graph: the two loops (sim progress and player progress) feed into decorating. Therefore the player’s motivation should lie mainly there. The motivation to complete the loop is tied to the social driver of comparing houses and clothes with other players.

DECORATING YOUR SIM

Clothes and cosmetics for your Sims are different than decorations. These cost Simoleons (soft currency) or hard currency and add to your overall Vanity level… but do not have game effect.

To get clothes with an in-game effect you have to go to a special designer that will generate random — and very unique — clothes, giving you a boost for an activity and usually highlighted with particles.

These outfits tend to catch most attention from other players and feed into its own tiny loop of social encounters:

• Being seen by other players can earn you Stickers (that are basically likes)
• those are transferred into fashion tokens
• Fashion tokens can be traded in Izzy’s studios for different/better designs

To make your Sim visible to other players, you have to attend parties.

You can throw and visit thematic parties (wedding party when you get married, music party when you play guitar as a hobby etc.). These happen in parallel with other players. While the actions you perform are asynchronous (and act same as actions within an event), you do have some option to interact, such as a real time chat with all the participants.

SOCIAL SIMS: MEETING STRANGERS

No Sim game would be complete without all the wonderful strangers you can meet and Sims Mobile take some steps out of the single player by introducing an asynchronous system in which your neighbourhood is populated partly by NPCs and partly by other players’ Sims.

You are assigned to a group of players and for you, your neighbourhood is frequented by the same characters: allowing you to slowly build relationships with them.

This resembles well a live neighbourhood. Sims you befriend will stick around, being more likely to pass by your house. Sims you don’t care about you will stop seeing — and you won’t care. It would be interesting to know how these neighbourhoods are updated over time; whether new players are added when the old ones churn.

It is here, at the end of the loop, where the real issues with Sims Mobile start to emerge:

The social loop doesn’t feed strongly back into the core loop and leaves the player feeling unrewarded
The social loop is way too far from the core to serve as motivation, and as I’ll show, it’s not sufficient to drive player through the game.

Let’s summarize the collected issues and go deeper into them.

THE 3 REASONS WHY SIMS MOBILE IS STRUGGLING

While the first part focused on visible systemic changes that were introduced to streamline the game for f2p and mobile, in this part I will talk more about design under the hood in order to get to the answer for our initial question: Why is the game not performing well.

I want to post a hypothesis: We’re seeing the game struggling because it lacks meaningful choices or goals, it mechanises motivations, and it doesn’t reward the player.

It becomes clear soon after few days of playing: The core design of the mobile game is at odds with what made the PC game so successful.

What do I mean by that?

1. The nurturing and narrative aspects are suppressed
2. The progression doesn’t validate player’s time and investment
3. The core loop is broken

These issues do not exist in vacuum, but they are the biggest part of the systemic oversight of player motivation. As I’ll show, the lack of meaningful, immediate actions diminishes ability to care for your Sims. Hard-to-read progression defies a will to grind for better objects. Funneling the core loop into social leaves the player out to dry without feeling rewarded.

Let’s look at these issues from the ground up; from the small things to the biggest one.

ISSUE #1: NURTURING AND NARRATIVE

When sims have needs… The nurturing aspect from the original Sims game was excellent. The needs system in The Sims have three main benefits:

They give players immediate call to actions
They build narrative
They create need for better items

These combine into the loop I described earlier:

Sim is hungry →
Sim needs a fridge to make food →
Player needs to buy a fridge →
Player needs money →
Sim needs to get a job

Through intrinsic motivation (Sim is hungry) comes care (I need to care) and attachment. Caring for the needs is the building block of the game, like swapping candies in CCS, you’ll repeat this action again and again, driven by curiosity what happens next.

By completing these steps more complex needs emerge for the Sim and the player alike: What about relationships or career? How do I afford a better house?

Because Sims need the player, the player cares for the Sims. This is where nurturing builds the narrative: Completing these steps naturally tells the story. Because of the combination of intuitive, human needs, the ability to fulfill them through game mechanics and a clear feedback, the game doesn’t need to take the player by the hand.

And when they don’t have needs…

Originally, setting up your house is finding an intersection of affordability, function and personal expression. Furniture caters the needs or improves skills (learning). Better furniture makes for faster progression, and granular improvements to your house also improve your Sims’ overall well-being; Sims want to live in nice houses.

In Sims Mobile, players can still interact with the furniture but since no needs are present, the interaction doesn’t provide any feedback, neither for the Sim or the player.

Player is therefore left with limited motivation to purchase furniture. The only game accepted push to decorate comes from the need to improve their vanity. Dropping stats and gameplay impact from furniture for the sake of a simplified experience cuts a major value of the experience.

Without this rewarding loop from furniture, a whole part of the game disappears that could have served as a compelling experience for a casual audience. Watching TV while playing Candy Crush is a good example, however games with metagame (building on ownership and personalisation) are even a better one: Interacting with your game with a slight sense of progress can be a great and rewarding activity. It further fosters the ownership of the space you’ve built. Having a reason to stick around meaningfully makes you retain better.

In Sims Mobile this leads to players coming in only for short, effective sessions. The intrinsic narrative of building up your sim and collecting furniture is replaced with the extrinsic motivation of just completing the the stories/quests for rewards and progress. Players that are coming in just for extrinsic motivation (rewards and coins) won’t stick around for long. They eventually need intrinsic motivation (social proof) to retain for the long haul.

THE STORIES ARE PRE-TOLD

Stories are the building blocks of Sims’ lives. Looking at an example of a relationship story: When you meet a new Sim, you choose one of three introductions: Friendly, romantic or confrontational. This determines your whole story with this particular Sim:

Each story is pre-scripted which lowers its replayability

Here The Sims Mobile misses out on what made the PC version of The Sims so successful: it’s accurate portrayal of relationships in real life. Relationships are ever changing and it’s unclear where things are going. Locking down a relationship into a pre-set story pushes you down a path with no option to take a side road apart from abandoning the progress in the story.

Through this, the motivation to progress becomes extrinsic since the choice of what happens next has been taken away. There is no surprise, no option to grab the steering wheel and have a fight in a romantic relationship. Pursuing achievements also takes away the option to play freely: Instead of playing what I want, I play what I want to complete, creating a detachment to my Sim.

The removal of the nurture aspect has huge impact both on the system and the player. It takes away natural onboarding and therefore complicates a relationship you could have built to your characters. It reduces the internal motivation by making the play aspect insignificant.

By attaching story progression to events only, the game builds a pre-set habit of collecting rewards, assigning events and leaving the session. A player never builds up a connection to their Sims which is not healthy for long term retention.

ISSUE #2: THE PUNISHING PROGRESSION

After playing the game for some time, you may start feeling like you’re not progressing. Only after looking closer at the event system it starts to be apparent why. The game includes clear progression, but they are not intuitive and make it hard for players to perceive their progression.

ENERGY: PROGRESSION WITHIN EVENTS

To recap: Events have varied durations that player can choose from. While in an event, they can use energy to perform actions and speed up the timer.

The energy is bound to the events: Using more energy means the player can finish more events and progress faster.

Doing that sounds like a good idea: the player can engage with the game with visible progress in the event, and they overall get more done in the same time. But, it doesn’t feel good.

Here’s the first problematic part: You can select actions that are meaningful to you, but the result of a story event is the same regardless of the input. You will level up a relationship with your sweetheart whether you are cooking, watching TV, or talking about romantic plans. Or if you leave the game and come back later. Within each event the relationship between energy and time discount is the same. That further undermines player’s choice of actions (from event’s perspective they are all the same).

Next to actions with no game impact (outside of event) we now have mechanical actions. You’re bound to the result from the start. It’s like sitting at a math test, knowing that you can wait it out without writing anything, because in the end you will pass.

The result is: Energy doesn’t have story value. Or, to put it differently, energy is merely a means to grind.

Second problematic part is hidden in how relationship between energy and event XP.

While events in different career levels have same duration, using energy provides smaller discount on higher levels as the absolute amount of event XP grows. It’s an invisible cost to your progression.

At the same time, it’s not clear if your energy will be enough to get through an event as the absolute amount of event XP needed isn’t shown. In reality, the game value of energy is determined by the event type (typically family events go very fast), career level and quest duration. As a result, player has no idea what progress to expect in a session, which undermines their will to plan and set goals.

Even when this behaviour is not technically in a way of playing the game, it shows that energy is designed and implemented into other systems only for gating and pacing: It only really starts to matter if you push for event completion in a given time (in live operations for example).

LEVELLING UP EVENTS

In quest based games, reward is usually a function of game progression and duration of the quest.

Simple progression can expand rewards: With player’s level the reward grows. Or it can grow the quest timers: Players need to come back less often, which is a common practice in F2P games to lower session amount over time and not wear the retaining player out.

To visualise this:

In reality it’s usually a mix of both and either of these gives player a good understanding of their progression, since there’s always a tangible gain.

In Sims Mobile, the progression works differently, and far less intuitively. Playing events unlocks pieces of furniture that discount the timer on quests. At the same time, regardless of your progression in the game (player level) and in the story (career level), your rewards stay similar:

To display it as above, the progression in Sims Mobile works like this:

The progression comes in a form of time discount. The result then looks like this:

As a result, player can do more quests and earn more rewards within the same time. This decision is interesting because this is not how we talk about getting a raise in real life. “I’m earning $200 per hour instead of $100 per hour”. In Sims Mobile it’s “I’m earning 200 simoleons in 1 hour instead of in 2 hours”.

We use time, the most stable, straightforward, linear measure as comparison. Relating to different time slots doesn’t feel as an intuitive progression. The different careers also don’t differ enough in earnings (which you would expect with being a barista versus being a top chef) and throughout them, players do not get significantly better off with coins either. This is particularly apparent later in the game when furniture and clothes become gradually more expensive and the player is less and less able to purchase them or complete sets.

From system perspective, the flattened progression is likely trying to balance leveled up Sims with new Sims at the beginning of their careers. This approach doesn’t disadvantage starting new stories, but at the same time also doesn’t validate progression. Comparing rewards of two Sims in the same household at different career stages can feel demotivating.

Would players keep their old Sims forever if the difference would be more significant? Do players value Simoleons higher than story progression?

The combination of predictability of the actions, the lack of story meaning and the fact you don’t need it to play makes energy redundant.

The design of events doesn’t communicate progression naturally. This seems to be a pattern in Sims Mobile: Instead of asking what player cares about, there’s an artificial measurement claiming player that should care… just because.

ISSUE #3: THE CORE LOOP IS BROKEN

When it comes to long term retention, it’s hard not to mention one more substantial shortcomings of Sims Mobile. From a systems perspective, most of the progression feeds into the party loop:

• Parties are where other players can see your home
• Leveling up in hobbies and careers rewards additional furniture that offers new opportunities at parties and allow the parties to reach higher level
• To be seen and rewarded for original clothes also requires to host / visit parties

Systemically you are rewarded through the parties, but it is anticlimactic. There is nothing substantial that you could gain in the party system that you can’t gain somewhere else (XP, Simoleons). Everything about a party is mechanical: The amount of parties you can visit per day, The amount of parties you can host, The amount of energy you have at a party. There is no status to earn, no best-party-host leaderboard. Nothing to push me to become the party master.

Providing social proof at the end of a loop to drive all motivations is good design. However, in this case it is executed poorly by not tying it to some kind of ladder or leaderboard.

The party system isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t justify the existence of all the other loops. Its progress is very far away from day to day activity, and participating in them is optional.

CHARGING INTO THE SOFT LAUNCH

When the game first came out, the gameplay was actually much more similar to Sims: FreePlay. This article is worth checking for an early review. From screenshots and App Store versions we can get an idea how the game looked when first released and what were the major changes.

A Sim had a set of needs that gets refilled when performing actions. Timers, that lasted hours in the Sims: FreePlay are shortened, yet present. This leads me to assume that Sims Mobile didn’t start from scratch, but took mechanics from Sims: FreePlay for granted.

Looking at the how the versions evolved, we see several trends:

• Most of the design features I described were not present in the soft launch (Events, stories, retirement, Izzy’s store)
• Core loop kept being updated (Party system tied tighter into the core loop, vanity and player level were decoupled at some point)
• Further trickling of the changes (Daily to-do list instead of goals and wishes, adding new currencies)

My theory is that because EA used Sims: FreePlay as a basis, the design was already doomed. They attempted to patch what was there, rather than modernize the design.

FINAL WORD

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if Sims Mobile was instead a port of Sims 4. My designer brain drools with joy over such challenge: Would players enjoy the game? Would the brand be strong enough to rely on vanity only to monetize? Would it be possible to build a system that parallels passive and active gameplay meaningfully?

Instead, with Sims Mobile we end up with a hybrid that tries to achieve everything and nothing.

The Sims is a brand building on freedom of choice. As Matt Brown mentions in his GDC talk, a Sims’ actions and goals are built on improvisation theater’s “Yes and” principle: One thing always leads to next, there is no wrong move, there is no end goal to strive for, and things constantly change. Just like life.

Instead of that, EA Mobile’s latest take on Sims Mobile is constantly afraid to give players space to act on their free will. Intrinsic motivation is replaced with simple reward structures, likely out of fear of losing players without rewarding their every step. Goals are unclear and sessions unrewarding.

As a result, EA Mobile lost both the Sims fanbase and casual players alike.

Guest Author: Eva Grillova
Senior Game Designer, with history at Disney Prague and Wooga.

This is a Guest Post written by Will Wilson

I have $100 worth of Goflam. I’m going to give it to you for just $2! That’s an amazing price, right? Well, no, because you – I would hope – have attached no worth to whatever a Goflam is. It doesn’t matter how much I cut the price of one – you’re not going to buy something that means nothing, because if it means nothing, it’s worth nothing. Everything that exists in your game, from the beautifully animated assets to the clever stat balancing you spent months putting together, holds literally zero value to a player when they first start the app.

To create that value you’ll have to ensure your economy loops and design, not to mention the UX and UI, help to accentuate and create the value in the player’s heads as quickly and painlessly as possible.

There are four main components to help that along:

• Utility
• Exclusivity
• Familiarity
• Uniqueness.

Ensuring that all items satisfy at least one (preferably more) of these core components is the solid foundation that underpins great economy and systems design.

#1 Utility

The most basic way of creating value is Utility. This doesn’t just mean that an item is useful because it does x, but also creating the understanding of what, how and why the item is used. How to establish that cause/effect baseline to items and currencies, then, should be the number one question for designers as early as when the first economic flows. Merely showing a number going up as a consequence of an action can work with certain groups of players (there is a reason why Clicker games have a fanbase), but it’s far more effective to show a state change – an undesirable outcome is now a desirable outcome.

A great example of this is deployed by CSR Racing (1 and 2)’s FTUE, which deliberately forces the player to lose a race prior to introducing the concept of upgrades to them. This is not accidental – by teaching the player that this action (upgrading) results in an alternative conclusion (a loss is now a win), they instinctively link the benefits of upgrading to overcoming difficulty in the game.

CSR Racing takes a massive risk in failing the player as part of the FTUE. But it also effectively teaches the value of upgrades well beyond a simple textbox

But that’s a simple core loop demonstration – what about something more complex like an RPG with a rune or gear system? Again, it’s about ensuring that communication of why and how you can create a strong character or item is as clearly demonstrated as possible. This doesn’t mean putting tutorials and question marks everywhere for the player to tap, though. In fact, some of the best examples of helping players to see the value in items use the player-base itself to promote them. Summoner’s War, for instance uses a player-run forum for every character that let’s people quickly see who or what they need, as well as – most importantly – what runes and other latter systems they should aim to get for the character to make them even better. Contextualising the value of potentially complicated games systems for other players.

Summoners War has a full tutorial for its systems, but also has a one-button access to user-created builds and strategies for every monster you find. Because these are from ‘real’ people (aka. not the developers), they come across as much more genuine (because, well, they are!)

There is one last consideration when it comes to establishing utility – does usage of the item change over time? Ensuring that something can be always used and help the player, no matter how far they may be in the game, is vital for creating a well-rounded economy. Take FIFA Ultimate Team’s Squad Builder mode – what good is a Bronze tier player after the initial few hours of gameplay, when the player has a full squad or three filled to the brim with Gold (and even rarer) players?

Instead of letting these cards clog up the inventory, the player is given the opportunity to ‘trash’ sets of cards (for example, a Bronze League 2 team) for either limited edition or higher-tier players, thus ensuring that even when they have a core team, there is still a desire to collect more from all rarities in order to advance their squad.

 

By ensuring the weaker cards are always able to be used in a way that furthers the goal of the player, FIFA’s Ultimate team creates demand on what otherwise would be ‘undesirable’ players. It also manages to create a clever and compelling puzzle game in the process.

The more traditional way of ensuring commons and ‘poor’ cards or items are still useful is the classic ‘feeder’ mechanic employed by classics like Puzzles & Dragons, but while it does make sense on paper, the exponential nature of XP requirements devalues these items over time and eventually results in them losing their value.

Hearthstone takes a more basic approach to useless cards, allowing players to ‘dust’ them to gain a universal currency for creating any other card in the game

#2 Exclusivity

So you’ve established how useful that item is and the player has a good grasp on why they should care about obtaining it. Now to establish its relative worth in the game, and the key lever for that is Exclusivity.

This exclusivity is established via the taps and sinks in the economy – if the former is greater than the latter the item is of low value, and visa versa when you want to create something of high value. Ultimately the more of said item that ends up sitting the player’s inventory, the harder it is to convince them that they need more. This is a particular problem with Hard Currency, and the reason why a number of games, like Marvel: Strike Force, seem to have almost limitless ways to spend it.

Almost every screen in Marvel: Strike Force has at least one, usually more, ways of spending Hard Currency, reducing the risk of ‘hoarding’ and devaluing the currency in the process.

Exclusivity can be established in other ways, too. A limited time-frame or limited run of an item or character creates an artificial demand that can be completely disconnected from the utility of said item, although in these instances the item must have something else about it to generate value (a time-limited opportunity to earn an item that can be earned normally via gameplay is not going to suddenly make it more valuable).

It’s also worth considering the effort the player must make to activating either the taps or sinks of that item in the first place. Hearthstone‘s Dust, for instance, is earned at a painfully slow rate, which in turn helps reinforce the value of the Legendary cards by allowing the player to put an estimate of how much time it would take to obtain them, even if – on a paper loop – these cards can simply be obtained through gameplay.

#3 Familiarity

One benefit licensed games have is that their items often come with value attached to them – the characters, locations, and other elements are things fans of the franchises are already familiar with. A great example of this is Daryl in The Walking Dead: No-Man’s Land or Darth Vader in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Both are used as powerful retention devices, earned via gameplay (in the case of Vader, this is the only way he can be earned).

Daryl in Walking Dead: No Man’s Land is used as a compelling D7 retention device for fans of the show. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, you have to have him…

…meanwhile, Galaxy of Heroes uses the iconic Darth Vader as their long-term achievement reward. If you’re an original trilogy Star Wars fan, you have to have him.

Even when it comes to non-licensed titles, though, do not underestimate the power of pre-existing biases when it comes to how players see value. In Best Fiends Forever we switched from collecting and spending ‘mites’ (the original game’s currency) to coins prior to launch, simply because getting coins ‘felt’ better internally, and testers had an immediate understanding of why they want more of the item. In another unrelated title we switched out from the fictionally more relevant ‘plasma’ as our hard currency, purely because testers were left utterly confused as to what it was. Despite Diamonds not making any sense in that game’s world, it solved the problem immediately.

Coins and other items with real-world value connotations are instantly more compelling to collect. Don’t pass up on opportunities to leverage existing biases when it comes to creating a sense of value.

#4 Uniqueness

In multiplayer or social-focused games, standing out from the crowd is one of the most compelling motivators for obtaining an item. But even when contact with other players is primarily limited to 30 seconds in a lobby (as with current chart-topper Fortnite), the main goal for players beyond winning is obtaining unique and cool cosmetic items to show off, whether as part of a retention-focused soft subscription or as one-off purchases in-store.

While cosmetic rewards may not influence the mechanics of gameplay, they most certainly do have an effect on how someone feels when playing the game and how they’re seen by others. A unique skin can make you feel special, while a generic skin everyone is walking around in feels terrible.

The amount of time you actually see others’ skins may be all of 30 seconds in the lobby and a split second in-game, but that’s plenty of time to show off my limited-time purchase-only Raven skin (complete with Electro-shuffle emote) to this non-paying player.

In fact, Fornite goes one step beyond most other games with a cosmetic economy by stopping the player from having control over how they look entirely until they have at least one unlocked or purchased skin. This lack of choice coupled with the lack of uniqueness or exclusivity is a powerful driver to persuade them to purchase V-Bucks for the in-game store, and gives the cosmetics even more value than other similar titles.

Fortnite goes one step further than other cosmetic-based economies by not allowing the player to select their character unless they own a skin, thereby depriving them both of choice and style if they don’t pay

In Summary

So when drawing out the taps/sinks economy flow, be sure to sit down and write up the thought process of the player when it comes to valuing the parts of the loop.

Utility: Why is said item or currency now important to the player and how can that value be clearly shown and demonstrated?

Exclusivity: Are the taps and sinks of this currency balanced? Do players have an abundance or a shortage of this currency most of the time?

Familiarity: Are the currencies and items using established mental models for players? Or are you fighting against what might be familiar to players?

Uniqueness: Are there items which are more exclusive to players? Are players able to show off this exclusivity?

By answering these questions when designing the game economy, you can more easily identify what players will want to purchase when it comes to your monetisation design and what goals players are likely to set for themselves outside of tutorials and challenges.

Recent weeks have seen much debate and controversy around the subject of Loot Boxes – randomized rewards are given to players in exchange for hard currency. Particularly in premium games, players feel ripped off if they have to pay to progress or to be competitive in P2P – especially when they don’t even know whether the box they’re paying contains something worthwhile.

In most markets, the concept of ‘pay to win’ is not acceptable, and players need to feel they can compete or progress whether they choose to spend nothing, something, or a lot. At the same time, those players who do choose to pay need to feel that they’re getting value for money – there’s nothing more dangerous to your game than paying players feeling short-changed.

We’ve recently beta launched Dragon’s Watch – a tactical battle RPG for mobile. It uses the collection/gacha/fusion system seen in many Asian and, increasingly, western games. Players spend either soft or hard currency to summon new heroes, which can be fused and evolved before taking them into battles.

The roots of the gacha system can be traced back to collectible trading cards – I remember, as a child, collecting Panini football stickers, despite having zero interest in sport. Why? The excitement of collecting, trading, completing sets, getting hold of a rare, metallic team badge made the hobby worthwhile to me, despite having no interest in the subject matter. In the digital realm, we can go further to make sure players always feel they’re getting good value.

We’re still at the beginning of our journey with our game, learning each week what players do and don’t like. We know there’s a huge amount more we can do, but below are some of the key pillars we’ve built our game on and lessons we’ve learned so far.

1. A prize every time

We put a huge amount of time, effort and love into creating beautifully animated characters, with their own backstories, stats, and skills. Each one is unique, both in appearance and gameplay and, hopefully, collecting one gives value to players over and above their use in the game. We love to see our players proudly curating and displaying their hero collections (just like in the video below, where one of our loyal players does a gacha and is rewarded with a really rare event hero first time – which he totally wasn’t expecting), as much for the artwork as for the gameplay value.  

2. Completion is a reward

Football stickers work well as a collectible because players are naturally organised into teams. Completing a team is a much more achievable goal than completing an entire sticker album – if the only goal is completing a near-unachievable set, then players are bound to get bored quickly. We split our heroes into themed sets – some small, some big, so players can frequently get the buzz of completing one.

3. Exclusivity, rarity, and power

It’s important to distinguish between rarity – how likely a player is to summon a certain hero – from power – how strong that hero is in play. If the rarest characters are also the most powerful, you run the risk of making players who don’t get them feel their gameplay experience has been compromised as a result.

Similarly, we periodically run live events where a new hero is introduced, that can only be summoned during that event. Again, if that hero is overpowered, players without it will be at a major disadvantage – which is neither fun nor fair. If you’re making a hero extraordinary in one way, that needs to be balanced with some corresponding weakness. In this way, those players who choose to pay, and so to collect a broader set of heroes don’t end up with a more powerful squad, rather a more flexible set of heroes to build with, giving them more tactical and strategic choices in play.

4. Waste not, want not

It’s inevitable that, in a random system, players won’t always get the item they were hoping for – the excitement of summoning a rare hero relies on that rarity being real. Collecting football stickers would be no fun if you just bought whatever player you wanted, and filled up your album accordingly. The ‘game’ is all about chance. Try playing Monopoly or Cluedo without a dice and you’ll soon realise that the random element is what makes many games fun.

While a duplicate football sticker can be traded with friends, the nature of variable rarity always means players all end up with the same second division players, and nobody to trade them with. Digital goods can be traded with others worldwide, or somehow used in game to give players good value even when they’ve received something they weren’t hoping for.

The fusion system allows players to fuse unwanted heroes into preferred ones, leveling them up to be more powerful in battle and, eventually, ready to evolve into a new type of hero. Recognising that players would be particularly disappointed if they receive a hero they already own, we make that leveling up extra generous if you fuse two heroes of the same type together. In that way, even the most disappointing summon (getting something you already have) gives you an additional benefit, giving each cloud a silver lining.

5. Be upfront, respect your players

Apple recently updated their terms to require developers to make clear the odds of receiving randomised items. We publish these, both in game and on our wiki and Discord channel. The nature of completely random drops is that some players will get what they want immediately while others might keep summoning and never get there.

Inevitably, despite publishing the odds and trying to make every purchase feel worthwhile, the occasional player will conclude the game is fixed against them and complain – what we’re seeing from our early players is that enough people do win the heroes they’re looking for to rise to our defence anytime someone feels the tables are stacked. All you can do here is be upfront and honest about how the game systems work.

We’ve been surprised by just how clued in players are about these things – they know more about the drop rates in our, and competitors’ games than we do, and are quick to point out not only where they think we are being too aggressive, but also where we should be charging more/giving less in order to keep the balance between happy players and a viable game economy.

This is just a glimpse into some of the most potent points that are top of mind following the beta launch of Dragon’s Watch – a list we can expect to swell further in the coming months. You never stop learning, which is why any resource like Mobile Free to Play that adds to your library of knowledge is worth its weight in gold.

Harry Holmwood is the co-founder of London-based mobile studio The Secret Police and European GM of Japanese animation, music, video games, television series specialist Marvelous Entertainment.