Summarizing the Presentation, there are 3 key aspects that are key for making a Gacha system work: depth, width and desire.
#1 Depth
Gacha depth is about ensuring your gacha lasts as long as possible
The gacha will last a long time until players run out of content (or reasons to pull from the gacha)
The gacha will last a long time until it feels like a player isn’t making meaningful progress from it
Gacha depth is critical the more games rely heavily on gacha as its core retention and monetization (ex. all the games copying Clash Royale’s progression systems and gacha)
Build a model using Excel, Google Spreadsheets or code it
This model should take in key variables which impact the pacing and depth of your gacha:
How much content you have
What your duplicates are used for
Quantity of Rarities, and their drop rates
Pool Changes (as in adding and removing what content can drop from the gacha)
Using the model you can calculate a graph showing you effectively what your gacha will feel like.
This should show you clear dynamics of how to increase the # of drops your system can handle:
Adding Content adds depth, but it depends on what the rarity type is
Low Drop Rates for higher tier means flatter, more frustrating progress
Opening up the pool over time means that players can feel like the gacha is “refreshed” and interesting again
ex. Hearthstone releases new content packs every few months which instantly feel rewarding to open
ex. Clash Royale opens up the Gacha pool over time to give compelling reasons to spend each time you move up an Arena tier
ex. Dragonvale opens up new Gacha pool possibilities each time you unlock a new element in the game
Giving duplicates meaning to your progress (not just converting to dust) adds exponential depth to your gacha system.
Dust gives players a better baseline of progress, at the cost of progress speed (lowering your depth)
Duplicates that are required to progress (ex. Clash Royale’s duplicate system) mean that in order to upgrade cards you require sometimes hundreds of duplicates (depending on the rarity) adding significant depth AND making each drop feel rewarding
#2 Width
Gacha width is about ensuring that your systems put pressure on having a wide collection of content as much as possible.
Gacha width is about ensuring that players don’t feel terrible after bad drops.
To do this, make all content as relevant and helpful as possible.
4 example features that drive width:
Loadout Size
Asking the player to bring in a variety of items into the core battle
ex. in Call of Duty your Loadout includes a gun, pistol, weapon attachments, etc.
ex. in Hearthstone you bring in 30 cards, Clash Royale you bring in 8
ex. in Contest of Champions you bring 3 heroes to a campaign
you want just enough that collecting matters, but not so many that players can create a perfect team
Explicit Strengths and Weaknesses
Element systems are needed to ensure that there is no perfect team, and players need to constantly shift their team around to take advantage of the situation.
ex. Contest of Champions has 6 elements in their game, plus synergy bonuses
Implicit Counters
Fostering debate amongst your audience about what the optimal setup for a meta is will drive strong collection.
The more content the player has — the more they can experiment or be prepared for a shifting meta
Game Modes
Including game modes within your game which explicitly rewards players for having a large quantity of heroes.
ex. Gauntlet mode in Heroes Charge or Galactic War in Galaxy of Heroes: the more heroes you have, the longer you’ll survive, the higher you are rewarded
#3 Desire
Gacha desire is about ensuring that your game’s progress is effectively paced by the gacha content. Players NEED the gacha in order to progress in the game.
Look at your systems, how important is the content of the gacha to progress?
How important is Skill? can a player with high skill breeze through your game? will a player with low skill feel like the gacha isn’t helpful?
Are there mechanics within the game which water down the usefulness of the gacha?
ex. progression systems on the side of the gacha system which are more important than the content of the gacha
These 3 lenses can be used to look into your own Gacha to ensure it will be as powerful as you need it to be.
In the coming months, pocketgamer will post the video of the presentation. I’ll post it then.
Blizzard’s Hearthstone has defined collectable card games (CCGs) on mobile over the past year, and with the recent launch of the versions for smart phones on both iOS and Android the mobile revenues have rocketed roughly sevenfold.
Hearthstone is an interesting game to look at, because it breaks so many of the conventions of mobile F2P:
It has no energy system
It sells only permanent items
It is highly skill based
It is mainly synchronous PvP
As such it appeals to a lot of self designated “gamers” that find other mobile games somehow below them. This run down of the game will take apart the main features and discuss how they create and great game, and whether there are larger implications for the mobile F2P industry.
Core Loop
The core loop in Hearthstone is incredibly simple:
There are two main play modes: Ranked and Arena.
Ranked can be considered the basic game mode, where players play against each other synchronously to climb a monthly ladder. Players use decks that they have constructed from their permanent card collections. It is free to play, and players earn coins for winning matches and completing quests that appear daily.
Arena can be considered a secondary play mode, but is hugely important to and complements Ranked play. Here players also play synchronously with each other, but they must pay an entry fee – either coins or real money. Players make a deck as they enter the arena, choosing one of three cards at a time until they have a full deck. The rewards depend on a player’s performance, but can be generous compared to the entry cost.
The balance of the two modes is important, because it provides both payers and non payers, as well as players of different skills something to do. Earlier on, players may find Ranked play easier as they learn to put together decks that rely on specific combos. Later on they may find Arena more fun as there is the challenge of putting together a deck on the fly, and all players have the same chance of getting legendary cards.
Pacing
Quests act as the pacing system in Hearthstone, but it is so well framed that many players don’t see it for is. Rather than restricting the number of matches that players can play in a certain time, quests limit the amount of coins that a player can earn. Players get one new quest each day, and are limited to having three in total at any one time. Players can earn small amounts of coins for winning matches in Ranked play (10 coins every 3 wins), but this is small both compared to the time it would take to play these matches (perhaps 30 minutes or more on average), as well as the coins earned from quests (40-100 per quest).
As players earn most of their coins from quests, and not from playing matches, Hearthstone has no need to limit the amount of times a player can play. Players can (and do) sink hours into climbing the rankings without breaking the economy, as after the first few games their in game earnings are virtually nil. This is such a simple yet effective feature I am amazed that more F2P games have not copied it – energy systems are by far the most hated, yet standard F2P systems.
Single currency, single resource
I count coins as the single currency in Hearthstone and dust as the single resource. Hearthstone does not have a soft currency for everyone and a hard currency for payers. It follows therefore that it does not have items that can only be bought for hard currency. Purchasable things in the game can either be bought for either coins or real money. Dust is reserved exclusively for crafting specific cards.
The fact that as a non payer you can get anything in the game, and you can earn coins at a reasonable rate, helps create an environment that seems fair and inviting for both payers and non payers alike. Whilst the temptation to drop real money on a bunch of packs is constant, it never feels like someone has beaten you just because they’ve spent money on the game.
Permanent purchases
The nature of card rarity in Hearthstone also supports the feeling of fairness. Cards have one of four rarities: common, rare, epic and legendary. However, in contrast to many of the other mobile CCGs, cards cannot be upgraded or fused. This means that buying cards always results in a permanent addition to your collection, either directly or through the crafting system.
As with all CCGs there needs to be some method of dealing with duplicate cards, to maintain the randomness of pack opening. Hearthstone only allows players to have two of each card (one of legendaries) in their deck. Duplicates beyond this can be disenchanted for Hearthstone’s main resource: dust, which in turn can be used to craft any card in Hearthstone. The conversion rate is obviously not great – cards give only 25% of their cost to craft when they are disenchanted, and making progressively rarer cards gets ever more expensive. You need to disenchant 320 common cards to craft a single legendary. But the system does mean that even if players only get duplicates through randomly opening packs they can work towards specific cards that they want to create particular decks.
The fact that purchases result in permanent items that cannot be taken away from the player makes them all the more attractive. Players know that if they get a legendary card they will always have it, and its power will stay constant. Players can still spend huge amounts of money on the game, as there are so many cards to collect and the chance of getting a legendary is so low. Various Reddit posts put the cost of a Legendary at around $12-24, so with 67 legendary cards currently players could easily spend over $1,000 getting all of those alone. The cost of the epics and rare cards would be on top of that, and players can pay 4x for cards with a gold back – a purely cosmetic change.
The permanence of purchases together with the overall polish in the game creates an incredibly positive buying experience. You would expect nothing less from Blizzard of course, but the pack opening sequence is spectacular, especially when compared to the drab experience in many mobile F2P games to skip a timer or add more resources. Buying something feels great, a detail that is all too often overlooked.
Skilled play vs. Pay to Win
Most mobile F2P games steer clear of including too much skill. Skill makes games more difficult to balance, as players will have a varied experience of the same content. Furthermore, with highly skilled games it is difficult to give players a continuous sense of progression, as their skill level will typically plateau after an initial learning period. As most mobile F2P games are selling progress, they need to maintain the sense of progression that grind based games give, as ensure that players have broadly the same experience by leveling the playing field with luck.
In contrast, Hearthstone has a high degree of skill – the game has an impressive number of tournaments and events, and Blizzard host a World Championship at BlizzCon that had a prize pool of $250k last year. Youtube and Twitch are awash with Hearthstone matches and the top players are starting to make their fame and fortune from the game. This is clearly a far cry from games like Clash of Clans or Game of War, where success largely depends on the amount of time (and money) players can grind into the game.
That said, in Ranked play, working your way up gets more difficult the higher you go not only because you meet more skilled opponents. Any player will tell you that you need to both have the right cards to put together in a deck to create the right combos, as well as the ability to change your deck as you go. This flexibility is vital as the meta game changes as you move through the ranks. At a given time, rush decks might be unstoppable at ranks 20-15, but easy prey above rank 10.
Always having the right epic and legendary cards to finish off your deck becomes essential, but you rarely need very many of them to create a good deck. The pressure to spend is in having the necessary breadth of cards, rather than a deck construct solely of very rare cards. This creates a dynamic where players do need to spend to play at the highest levels, just as League of Legend players need to practice with all the different Heroes rather than just the ones that are freely available that week. At the same time each individual card is balanced for its mana cost and players who have spent a lot of money to acquire a lot of different cards might be beaten by a player who has spent very little, but happens to have the right cards for that particular battle. Players must spend to progress in general, but matches don’t feel pay to win.
Synchronous PvP
Hearthstone is one of the only successful mobile games to centre on its synchronous PvP experience. Vainglory and others have tried to take this challenge on, but no one else has succeeded except another game backed by a massive desktop IP: World of Tanks Blitz. Hearthstone was in beta on PC 9 months before coming to iPad, and had half a million downloads before it even hit the App Store. This period was essential to give them the critical mass needed to match players with each other at an appropriate level. Without it players would either be facing long wait times every match they played, or getting matched against players of very different skill – either case is a potentially game breaking experience.
Blizzard’s ability to drum up this level of interest in a new game is a testament to their expertise at launching new synchronous PvP games, but absolutely not a reference that other developers can hope to emulate. Without Blizzard’s existing World of Warcraft IP, installed fanbase, community management efforts and PR, the game would have faced a much harder prospect of building the community necessary for critical mass. I do not believe that we will see a synchronous PvP based game successful on mobile without a PC version any time soon.
Conclusion
The success of Hearthstone, combined with how different it is from many other mobile F2P games makes you expect it would have a huge impact on the prevailed design trends in the industry. The pacing system in particular seems superior to the energy systems that are still prevalent in many games. However, the fact that Hearthstone was launched PC first on the back of the huge World of Warcraft brand has allowed a number of other differences that the vast majority of mobile F2P developers cannot hope to emulate.
Big Fish, Small Pond: Surviving in a Maturing Market
Last week I attend Quo Vadis in Berlin and gave a talk on how to survive in a maturing mobile market. The slides are below.
My main take away was that companies need to set themselves smart constraints within which to be creative.
The four ideas I gave for setting yourself smart constraints were:
1. Know your strengths
Whatever your strengths are, be that an existing audience, particular technical expertise, or genre knowledge, you have to build on that. The market is tough enough without you giving yourself the best chance.
2. Find your pond
Incumbent games have too much market presence and content and too many systems and players to go head to head with. Define your market as a niche that is small enough for you to dominate (though big enough to pay the bills).
3. Manage the Risk
All game production is risk management – no one knows for sure if a game will be a success or not before it launches. Make sure that you manage the risk in production as well as possible. Do a risk assessment as you start out a project to get an objective feel for the number and scale of risks involved, and an idea of when they can be addressed (sooner is better!). This will also help you tackle the biggest risks first wherever possible.
4. Stick to the plan
It’s very easy half way through production, when things aren’t going well, to convince yourself that you just need a couple more months to fix things. Set yourself some fixed targets at the start of the project that trigger a full scale review of the project if they are missed. That way you will waste the least amount of time on projects that are doomed.
Harnessing the Psychology of Gifting
I feel like gifting has a bad name in games. Like the term “social” it has been ascribed to Facebook games that often implement interesting features in unexciting ways. Understand the psychology behind gifting in general – the phenomenon that is ubiquitous to all human culture and almost every human interaction – and I think things get a little more interesting, as well as suggest features that would work better than the average Facebook game.
Gifting and exchange are a component of almost every social interaction. This is even apparent in the way you greet your colleagues in the morning. If you see someone for the first time in the day that you work with then you are obliged say hello. They, in turn, are obliged to acknowledge your greeting and respond. If you barely know each other the exchange is short and perfunctory: “hey”, “hey”. If you know each other better, it might spawn a longer conversation or at the very least require more conviction.
Even this mundane situation exhibits what anthropologists know as the three obligations of gifting:
The obligation to give (to say hello in the first place)
The obligation to receive (to acknowledge that greeting)
The obligation to reciprocate (to say hello back)
In such a minor social interaction the exchange is fast and low value. But even so, to omit any of these steps would be rude. If a colleague continually ignored your greetings, then you would think less of them. Let’s examine the three obligations in a little more detail.
Giving
Giving gifts or initiating exchange is an action that is required in certain situations. In western culture we buy each other gifts at Christmas and on birthdays, and we take a bottle of wine or contribution to the meal for a dinner party. Failure to give at these times can be a serious faux pas depending on how well we know the other person.
Receiving
When someone offers you a gift you are obliged to accept it. To refuse a gift is to be unfriendly, if not rude. To turn down an invite to dinner for no good reason would be frowned upon, to refuse a Christmas present from a family member almost unheard of.
Reciprocating
There is an obligation to repay all gifts. In some cases this is more immediate and calculated than in others. If you give a friend a birthday present then you might expect one back from them, and Christmas gifts are often a minefield of social obligations to find gifts that correctly reflect the value previously received and current state of the relationship between two people. The tighter the relationship between two people the more that the value and timing of gifts becomes varied – both parties expect that everything will work out in the long run.
Indeed to repay a gift too quickly or exactly and remove the implied social debt is as unfriendly as not returning it. If your friends help you move house you deliberately repay them with something where the value is hard to calculate, such as cooking them a meal, rather than paying them cash. Relationships typically start with small one-off gifts of time or effort and gradually extend into a continuing cycle of reciprocity. In extremis, almost all major religions advocate giving to charity for benefits in the afterlife or from the universe in general. We have an innate belief in karma of one kind or another that is hard to shake.
Now we’ve gone over the theory, let’s look at gifting in three games, in particular, to see how it’s applied:
1. Pearl’s Peril is a Facebook and mobile hidden object game with fairly typical energy and item gifting. (Disclosure: I’m currently game designer on this game)
2. Clash of Clans gives you the ability to donate troops to your clan members when they request them.
3. Animal Crossing has a sophisticated gifting system with both other players and NPCs.
Pearl’s Peril
As in many Facebook games Pearl’s Peril allows you to send energy, soft currency and low value collection items to your friends. In each case it doesn’t cost you anything to send the gift – the gift is created out of thin air during the gifting process, and the process itself is incredibly streamlined, allowing gifts to be sent from multiple points in the UI and delivered to the recipient’s inbox where they are accepted in a click that is barely noticed coming into the game.
The result is a social feature that is rather like greeting a colleague each morning. In interviews players describe it as a habit that they fall into – almost like a pleasantry of saying hello. It’s a valuable feature because they value the energy, but the gifting act itself is less so. Players do not feel obliged to log in just to send gifts to their friends and maintain the cycle of exchange.
Clash of Clans
In Clash of Clans you can donate troops to your clan members. You have to spend resources to train these troops yourself, and you could use them in your own attacks if you didn’t give them away. In many cases the only value that gifting affords you is allowing you to take a few extra troops into battle: those troops stored in your clan castle and donated to you. It does however give lower level players the opportunity to play with much more powerful troops given by other members of their clan, foreshadowing units they will have in the future if they stick with the game. It also requires some degree of coordination so that you get troops that support your style of play, which stimulates discussion in the chat.
The system is much more powerful than energy gifting in Pearl’s Peril. Clan members can see how many troops they have donated vs. received and compared to other clan members helping them keep track of a number of different relationships and making sure that gifting doesn’t get too imbalanced. Donating troops was really the only thing that clans allowed you to do originally, but the system has been further reinforced by clan wars, which provide an obvious occasion to donate troops.
Players that fail to keep up their side of the bargain – not giving as many troops as they receive, or not giving troops when they should – face being kicked from their clan to make room for more committed players. Higher ranking clans often state these obligations and enforce them rigorously. At GDC this year, Supercell stated that the 2 year retention for Clash of Clans is 10%, and I believe that the gifting economy that they have created in the game is a key component driving this.
Animal Crossing
Anyone that has played Animal Crossing will tell you it is a magical game that creates quite a unique atmosphere. Dropped off in a village of anthropomorphic animals you can gather fruit, fossils and flowers, catch butterflies and fish, design your own clothes and furniture and develop relationships with the NPCs and other players in your village. There is no real goal, but players typically spend their time collecting things and exploring the world, which changes season by season and through a day / night cycle.
It is perhaps the game that shows the best giving mechanics that I have observed. The calendar gives you a natural context to give things due to birthdays, other occasions or simply because you found something you know they want or don’t have space for yourself. NPCs also prompt you to gift on a regular basis, by asking you for things, letting it known they are looking for particular items, and occasionally sending you gifts themselves.
Most of the activities in the game drop items on a semi random basis, with some items rarer than others, but the selection constrained by the time and place that you are collecting. This makes gifts unique items, with each one requiring time and effort to find in the game world. In contrast to the commoditised resources that are given in Pearl’s Peril, you know each gift is special.
Indeed even sending the gift requires effort as you need to find the recipient in the game world or visit the post office to send it to them. Even if players do have multiple items that they want to give, each one needs to be given individually, rather than sent off as a bulk action. Similar to sending someone a hand written note over an email, it enhances the sense that the donor really cared about giving something to you.
The result is a powerful system with real emotional weight behind each gift. Gifting is one of the key systems that runs throughout the game and gives it such a unique and magical feel. The series consistently gets superb ratings from critics and is listed as one of the best selling games ever with c.27m copies sold across 4 titles. However the real demonstration of how effective this gifting system is comes from anecdotes like this one, about a mother with multiple sclerosis’s gifts to her son. It’s impossible to imagine either Clash of Clans or Pearl’s Peril creating this kind of story.
Conclusion
Gifting and exchange are ubiquitous human behaviours found in all cultures and a huge variety of situations. Gifting consists of three obligations:
To give in certain situations
To receive gifts offered
To reciprocate gifts received
Increasing the value of gifts increases the emotional engagement and social obligations that players experience. Increasing the power of gifting can be done by:
Making gifts unique rather than commoditized
Making gifts require more investment from the giver
Making the giving process itself require some effort
Prompting players to give in clear situations
Great gifting systems support strong long-term retention, player satisfaction and by extension commercial success.
Content Hunger: How to avoid the content mill in gaming
Games are content, and so the economics of games are largely the economics of content. Content is what players pay for, and content is what takes time and money to build, with both the quality and amount of content increasing production costs. I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age: Inquisition recently, and having a great time. I’ve already sunk just over 20 hours into it, and if friends and reviews are to be believed, I have at least another 30 to go before I finish the main storyline.
Dragon Age Inquisition has a huge amount of high quality content to explore
The world you can explore is vast, filled with scripted missions, side quests, wild beasts, roaming bandits and hidden secrets. Romping across the landscape from rocky deserts to dank marshes I am both awestruck at the variety and volume of content in the game, and slightly sickened by it. Sickened, because now I work in the industry I know how much time will have been invested into producing everything I see, and how countless days must have been put into dark corridors, rock formations and other mundane details that give the world authenticity, but will be largely forgotten and ignored by players.
Mobile is some way behind the production values of consoles. Partly the hardware isn’t as good yet, and so cannot support such high end graphics. Partly developers have not needed to deliver such high quality games to win customers. But mobile is rapidly catching up, and whilst the quality of content may not be as high, the amount of content needed is already probably larger. The F2P business model dominates mobile, and success here is highly dependent on retaining your players for months or even years. Having something for players to do a year after they start playing your game is no mean feat. Wooga’s hidden object game Pearl’s Peril has 90 weeks of content – something that few if any console games can match, and as a result of this the retention in the game is phenomenal.
Content is a key competitive angle
It’s clear on both console and mobile that the amount of content you can deliver, and its quality are key factors for success. It’s hard to imagine an RPG without the amount and quality of content that Skyrim or Dragon Age has being a success. For a competitive HOG you need to deliver a similar amount of content as in Pearl’s Peril – something that only one or two developers apart from Wooga can hope to do. One of the reasons that World of Warcraft has become so entrenched is the amount of content that it has built up over the past decade is now almost impossible for other MMOs to replicate.
Pearl’s Peril has 90 weeks of content, each with 5 hidden object scenes and a point-and-click adventure scene
For many games the number of man-hours that have been put into content determines the production quality and amount, together with the efficiency that this time is converted into content, given the tools utilized. The older a genre is, the higher the production values are – by pushing the content bar ever higher, developers shut out competition and establish themselves in franchises for the long term. With each game developers up the stakes, both because they can due to improving tools and existing assets to start from, and because they must to continue attracting players.
Maximizing content
To be successful developers must therefore invest in their tools and production pipeline to match the incumbents in the genre they are going head-to-head with. Failure to do this sort of preparation can only result in failure. Indies and smaller developers that cannot match the content output of bigger companies must innovate on the gameplay mechanics more to succeed. By innovating they can produce a new experience that players will not directly compare with established games. No one compares Realm of the Mad God to World of Warcraft, or Faster than Light to Mass Effect. There are also a number of techniques that can be used to stretch content for as long as possible, and all developers, regardless of their content output are wise to use as many of these as possible.
Randomness: Games with randomness are far more playable than those without some element of randomness. In Candy Crush Saga, levels are different each time they are played due to the random way that gems drop into the board. Players replay levels effectively waiting for the right combination of gems to drop. Imagine the game without this randomness and each level has a solution that can be found by trial and error relatively quickly, and the levels become boring.
Alternative choices: Allowing players to customize their play experience in different ways allows them to go back and replay the same content to explore how their decisions influenced the game. Whilst this requires some additional content that not all players may see, it allows die hard fans to play through most of the same content several times with minor variations. A good example here is how Telltale games allow you to replay episodes making different decisions each time. These decisions allow you see how the other characters react and the story pans out. In Dishonored the skills you upgrade give you different ways to complete each level, and the amount of violence that you employ throughout the game affects the way the story pans out to give replayability significant appeal.
The way you play Dishonored affects how characters interact with you, the overall ending and even the weather in levels.
Events: Most successful mobile games run timed events of some form. Often the mechanics of the event are very similar, but the appearance of exclusive content that is only available for a limited period engages players extremely well. For the chance of getting a new unit, building or item players will happily grind through a lot of content that they have already seen before, and the most active players will often only be playing for the events schedule, having already exhausted the other content in the game.
Difficulty levels: In games where the difficulty of levels can be increased, then replaying the same content is fun because it requires players to master a higher skill threshold than before to complete. Changes in difficulty can often be made with config changes that are cheap to implement, and the players will still enjoy the content. Guitar Hero or Rock Band use this mechanic to allow you to replay the same tracks again and again at a level that is always challenging.
Rock Band lets you play through the same songs at several different difficulty levels
User Generated Content: In Clash of Clans, players spend most of their time attacking the bases of other players. As the layout of each base is set by the defending player then an incredible amount of variation is generated by the players. All Supercell needed to do was to give players the tools reason to vary their base layout and the players take care of the rest. Different bases require different tactics to attack and so even though additional buildings and units are released only very slowly, players stay engaged in the game.
Conclusion
In any genre, games compete on the amount of content offered and its quality, both of which drive up the cost of production. It is important to recognize the demands of producing this content before starting production and only choose genres where you can compete. Having chosen a genre it is vital that developers build the tools and pipeline to deliver the required content, as well stretch the playtime from their content however possible.
Free to Play: Coming to everything near you!
Since F2P became the dominant business model in mobile games, AAA publishers are anticipating changes throughout other platforms as well.
All the signs are pointing to the big traditional publishers to double down on digital games-as-a-service type models, especially free to play. EA’s recent earning calls show that their digital offerings are growing healthily, and that the CEO plans to continue to focus on delivering core experiences but with a free to try model. Activision’s headline for their earning call was Hearthstone and Destiny. They brought in $850M alone in new revenue. Now more than 46% of Activisions profits are coming from digital storefronts, not games sold in stores. Nintendo will clearly be focusing more on digital in the upcoming years. They are collaborating with GungHo on Pokemon Shuffle, and their recent financials shows their digital sales are a glimmer of hope in their rocky future.
The traditional big publishers are shifting to digital sales and free to play. We will see a bigger and bigger shift in game design of the mainstream commercial products because of this.
But shifting to digital services for many of these publishers is no easy task. The pay-to-play vs free-to-play model is drastically different when it comes to design. Thus far many attempts haven’t worked. Either the designs copy far too much from current free-to-play models and leave the current base alienated, such as “Age of Empires Castle Siege” by Microsoft. Or the designs are clearly a pay-to-play game at its core, and they fail to retain players long enough to generate revenue.
This is Age of Empires Castle Siege. A clear clone of Clash of Clans in an attempt to bring F2P to Windows 8/Mobile.
But publishers are starting to get this mixture between traditional game design and free to play game design right.
My prediction is that in the next few years we are going to see some excellent titles that really start to bridge the gap between free to play design and traditional game design.
This type of experience will soon be the norm for F2P.
Why can’t Call of Duty be F2P?
Traditional games, like Call of Duty, have been massive budget affairs. I remember working on Need for Speed in 2008 when we discussed the “D-Day” experience that is imperative for all console titles. The first experience a player gets within a console game has to be jaw dropping. This term came from the first Call of Duty game. The first mission had the player fight on the beaches of D-Day. The experience was a faithful recreation to the actual event in World War Two. This single mission cost a large portion of the budget for the game and it was worth it — the first experience players had with the game was incredible. This ecstasy created from this experience made them talk about the game, tell friends, and purchase subsequent titles. These experiences brings in millions of players. These graphics pushes player beyond the $60 entry price to get the game.
Free to Play games thus far haven’t really cared about this. Clash of Clans, Hay Day, etc. have nice art styles. But just by looking at the advertisements I already understand what I’m getting: a simple distraction. Not an experience.
There is a reason why most F2P games haven’t really focused on this experience. It comes down to what defines the game as successful. Pay to Play games like Call of Duty just need to get players past the entry fee of $60 and excited enough within the game to develop some word of mouth. If they beat the game after 14 hours and never play again, the publisher doesn’t care. F2P games are the opposite. Their focus is on driving long term retention. This comes with a price on the experience. The experience is slowed and blurred by timers, complex economies, and slow pacing.
Thus far pay to play experiences haven’t merged with free to play because no one has managed to build a strong experience while pacing the player properly.
I’m proud of the work Wooga is doing to push higher quality experiences in Free to Play games. Agent Alice and Pearl’s Peril are two games that are pushing the bounds of F2P on mobile. The games center around a strong serial narrative. The central narrative last for years within the game, because its given to the player only on a once-per-week basis (like TV shows). These games have found a sweet spot between giving a strong experience to players while pacing properly for long term retention.
How can Console move to F2P?
To merge strong experience design and long term retention is not easy. But we’ve already seen excellent examples of how game designers are subtly nudging their designs already down this route.
To see an example of strong retention design, play Dragon Age Inquisition. Dragon Age Inquisition was released late 2014 to critical success. The game is massive (it took me over 50 hours to complete) and the story line was captivating.What really marked the game as something different for me was managing your army in the war room.
War Room decisions were an interesting take in Inquisition. Players had to weigh between available operatives and their intended effect.
Dragon Age has an interesting meta-game or macro-decision making structure outside the usual grind of quests. The player has a war room which they have three operatives, a political mastermind, a spy master, and a general of an army. These three operatives can be sent out on various missions throughout the world. Each mission takes a specific amount of real-world time. So even when you’ve left the game or gone on long quests, these missions will continue. This type of design has been done in multiple ways, including Mafia Wars (the original Zynga hit) and even some Assassin’s Creed games. What adding this system does is give the game two levels of management for the player: a decision about what they should do with their time on the couch, and what actions should be done by the automated systems.
This two-tier system I expect to see in many more games in the future. This two-tier structure allows games to have its cake and eat it too. The player makes decisions about whether they want to do the necessary grind to progress in the story, or hand over the grind to automated systems. The timers included in the automated systems make sense — that time would have been done by the player themselves.
Dragon Age Inquisition shows that AAA design can drive long term retention. It requires progression to be gated by an economy instead of simple linear progression.
In order to accomplish this two-tier progression system, there must be an interesting economy that the player in engaged in. This type of system can only work if there are more currencies utilized than a linear progression system. If players are just moving through levels as quickly as they wish with only skill to pace them, these games aren’t going to last very long. The content will run out quicker than you can produce.
In order for a player to start the “Find Wardens” story quest, the player must collect 8 power.
To pace players you will have to use economies and currencies. In Dragon Age Inquisition they use “Power”. This currency is gained by completing side quests, sending agents on missions, and collecting and crafting items that aid your armies. In order to progress in the story, players must collect enough power and purchase the ability to start the next mission. This makes sense in the narrative and paces players properly.
Borderlands proves that a loot drop system can work in other genres beyond RPGs. Progression can be slowed by pushing players to collect better items.
Other genres have already shown excellent designs on how economies can be injected and feel natural to the game. Borderlands shows that loot-drop systems can be used to make players need to collect and grind for items before they can progress in the game. Destiny shows that this model can be taken to work at a MMO level.
Warlords of Draenor, WoW Expansion, adds a fully featured village building component to the MMO.
World of Warcraft’s new expansion “Warlords of Draenor” shows that even village-building components make sense. For WoW, the first tier is engaging and grinding through raids and quests with friends. The second tier is managing your garrison, the auction house, and your followers.
This two-tier approach is the key for future AAA games to bridge the gap to F2P and games-as-a-service. When players are engaged in a properly managed economy, pacing can happen, and long term retention can occur in a strong console-like experience.
The Future is Cross-Platform
I expect that in the coming years many more console and PC titles that are aimed at the mainstream will move to games-as-a-service models and in its wake we will see designs shift to a more economy-focused design.
Players will have two-tiers of managing their game: Players can grind through open world environments to collect resources, guns, loot, or any other designed economies. Or players can engage in the second tier: sending their army, their followers, their pet robot, to collect and grind for them. This tier is managed through monitoring timers and making commitments to return.
This second tier can be managed on console/PC, but more likely these games will have companion games which allow their timer management to be done on their phone. In this way each platform delivers on its strengths: The Console/PC deliver amazing graphical experiences that last for hours, and Mobile delivers strong session design and long term commitment from players.
Expect that Console and PC games will slowly push players to engage in their economies outside the game. Using companion games on mobile, these games will keep players connected.
We can see this with games like FIFA 15 and Madden 15. Play the game on your console, but while you’re away you can bid on new players and trade players. The game never leaves you and this feels natural.
Each platform delivers on its strengths: console has great controls and gameplay that can’t be matched by phones or tablets. Mobile allows the player to be always connected and engaging with the economy.
Expect this type of interaction will become the norm for future EA games and digital games overall.
Wrap Up
The traditional gaming space is clearly showing signs that its moving towards a digital future.
To make this transition, game designs will need to change. In order to move to this model, commercial games will have to adjust their progression systems to focus on economies and currencies to gate and pace players.
When economies are injected, a two-tier progression model can take place. Players can make choices between grinding out progression themselves, or using automated or timer-based systems to grind out for them.
When a two-tier system is in place, you can create games that are always connected. Cross-platform services that have the players attention whether they are playing on the couch or are out and about.
This is how the industry is moving. A digital future that is focused on games-as-a-service, long term retention and always-connected play.
Will pay-to-play games die off? Most likely not. But they will not exist in the same mainstream context that they do now.
Will this transition to games as a service and long term retention water down the experience of our players?
That’s really up to designers like you. We as game designers must find ways to make economies engaging and complement the experience rather than detract from it. How that can be done is yet to be seen.
How to start a new game
Starting a new game is a daunting task. You operate in a design vacuum. The possibilities are nearly endless. The chance of failure incredibly high. Logic and reason of what games make it to the top is alchemy, and mostly just biased observations. Coming up with what the next hit game will be is a bit like throwing darts while blind.
From years of starting projects from square one, I’ve found a process that works for me. A process that helps me get off the ground quickly and moving on an idea that can work in the market. The process is mostly adapted from “The new business model canvas” as well as many Lean and Agile Product Vision processes.
Creating a new game is about firstly identifying a potential market, then building empathy for that target audience, using the empathy to design a concrete definition of your product, and then testing this vision as quickly as possible with real end customers. This vision will drive the development of your game.
To even begin, you have to start from some inspiration.
Step 1: Find your Blue Ocean
Natural Motion’s “My Horse”. A game that is targetted towards fans of horse fans of all ages. A blue ocean for the App Store.
My strategy is to find a blue ocean. Find a market, a niche, a genre, a player type that is currently under-serviced by the top grossing games.
Natural Motion has spoken multiple times about this approach to their games. My Horse, CSR Racing and Clumsy Ninja are all masterful games that were targeted at blue oceans. When My Horse was released, many of the games that were targeted towards horse fans on mobile were unpolished, 2D, and a terrible experience. Natural Motion came out with a product that really hit what this market wanted: realistic 3D horses. Players can pet them and watch the horse react realistically. They could care for them, and even pick up their shit. Exactly what fans of horses wanted!
When working out of XMG Studio in Toronto we were a very small, indie developer. We knew that we couldn’t fight for market share against the larger developers in crowded genres. Instead, we chose to focus on niches that we felt we could hold on to : Car fanatics and Fashion. We created Drag Racer which held the mobile racing market very well from 2009 – 2012 as well as Fashion Star Boutique which remains one of XMG’s top grossing hits. They were hits because we operated in spaces that many of the bigger developers wouldn’t. We could sit on these games and carve a large market share for the small niche with ease. Aiming for these blue oceans is a viable strategy, especially for indie developers.
Magazine racks are excellent spots to do research. What niches are here that current games aren’t targetting?
Blue Oceans can be found everywhere. Even in this crowded mobile space, looking down at the Top Grossing try to identify genres, themes and playing styles that are currently not serviced by these games. Can you create a mobile game that services this genre?
Step 2: Build Empathy
After you’ve selected a genre, It’s about getting into the mindset of the customer. Understand why certain games in the genre failed, and why others succeeded. Play a ton of games. Write everything down. Plot points of reference on a graph and truly understand what defines this genre. Define what base feature set customers need in order for the game to be successful. Research how some games have exceeded player expectation and some games that failed to meet it.
The Kano plot is excellent for plotting features and figuring out the minimum requirements for a genre. As well as brainstorming how you can exceed their expectations.
Most likely, this genre isn’t your personal first choice. Some independent or successful game designers can design games that are essentially for themselves. They use their own experience and knowledge of the genre to design the game. This isn’t possible for all developers. When the target audience is not yourself, you need to do effective market research to truly know how to design for them.
In the early days of Zynga, it was customary that new hires would work in the customer care area of the company. For their first weeks, they would be answering phone calls from disgruntled customers. Whether intentional or not, this gave many designers a stronger backbone in designing games for this audience. Listening and hearing the wants and desires of their players allowed them to build empathy and step into the mindset of the players they would be designing for.
That is why it is important to have conversations with your target players. Understand why they play the way they play. Understand what they enjoy about the genre, but more importantly — discover why they don’t play. Why do they churn from games. What would it take for these players to leave the top grossing games? Even the most popular ones — whats the reasons why players leave this game? Identifying the chinks the armour — the areas which players hate about that game is your first order.
In the beginnings of Style Studio and Fashion Star Boutique, two games in the Fashion Design genre, it was important that we went out and talk to actual players/fans. In the case of Fashion Star Boutique, we even hired a full time Fashion Designer to help with designing the gameplay, designing the UI, and picking out all the items that players could customize. In the end the product really showed its authenticity.
Step 3: Define Your Pillars
After many, many conversations with players of your game you’ll start to notice patterns. Players of the genre will be demanding certain things about their next game. They will have annoyances, certain aspects that they don’t like, or just general fatigue in the way things have always been done.
To start creating pillars, take some of this feedback and focus on a few points you feel the audience would really be excited about. What if Clash of Clans had more depth in the battle? What if Candy Crush had alternate methods so you could get past those levels when you were stuck?
Endless Runner genre is full of design decisions that player’s don’t like.
For example, after interviewing a ton of fans of the Endless Runner genre (Temple Run, Subway Surfers), we started to see patterns about why many players dropped out. Many players complained because the beginning of the round always felt slow and the same. Advanced players would have to wait until the game got fast enough before they were challenged. Other players complained of seeing the same level over and over again. Players that left the genre complained that the game was too punishing: hitting one obstacle and getting knocked out was exciting, but felt like they got knocked out before they could understand the game.
Taking these 3 points of feedback, and playing a lot of OutRun 2, we decided that maybe we could take a different approach to the Endless Runner market. We transformed the game into an endless racer instead of a endless platformer. We focused on speed, not on avoidance. The game became about optimizing your speed to get to the next checkpoint (like OutRun 2) instead of just staying alive for as long as you can. We added mechanics like a close call system, which gave advanced users reasons to push their luck throughout the whole round. The beginnings were no longer boring, players no longer felt as punished, and we cycled new backgrounds in as the player upgraded to show progress and ensure players felt like the game was always new.
Our racer game came from focusing on addressing 3 key pain points players had from Endless Runners.
These innovations were created as pillars right from the beginning. We developed the game specifically to hit this points of feedback. This drove us through production and kept everyone on the same alignment.
Hearthstone is the great example of excellent pillar creation. In this GDC Vault talk by Eric Dodds, he articulates the importance of Pillars in Hearthstone’s creation. Specifically, he mentions certain pillars that you can really see came across in the design :
“Immediate fun for the new player”
“Allow non-competitive players to thrive”
“Simple Cards, Complex Interactions”
Hearthstone created pillars that focused on players that left the TCG genre. Aiming for simple cards with deep interactions pushed Hearthstone & TCGs to a whole new audience.
Hearthstone serviced a need of Trading Card Game (TCG) fans. They focused on “fringe” card game players that love playing TCG, but could never handle the complexity of Magic. With this focus, they managed to captivate a crowd that has always been turned away by games like Magic. These pillars defined what exactly the final game must feel like in order to be successful. They succeeded, and according to Eric, it had a lot to do with sticking with these guiding pillars throughout production.
Step 4: Fake it ’til you make it
When you have pillars, you have a strong vision for the game. Now you need to create a working prototype as quickly as possible.
You can start on developing a prototype, but this takes too long. Instead, focus on creating simple sketch mockups of key screens in your game as quickly as possible. Do whatever you can to articulate the exact vision you have for hitting those pillars.
How will the game look on device?
Can you articulate the unique aspects of the game in just a few screens?
Are the changes you are making exciting enough to your target audience?
If People aren’t excited when they’ve seen your sketches and discussed the product, they never will be. So iterate on the sketches, brainstorm about more innovations and get more feedback. Many times this will take weeks before an idea really fleshes out, and more often then not, your first idea sucks. That’s fine!
In Summary
The key to building a hit game is very similar to building an app or a business. It comes down to identifying a market need and servicing that need with a new game design. Even in games players have needs (or maybe wants) about what a new game they would be willing to play would be. Identifying large or small blue oceans is the first step. Making sure that there’s a market gap wide enough that by the time you get the game finished — the competition won’t be already swallowing up all of the market share. From here its about truly empathizing with this audience — recognizing what needs this audience currently does not have serviced. I
s it that the current genre options are polished or aesthetically pleasing like CSR or My Horse’s path to success?
Is it that the game design is just too complex for mobile gamers to get into like Hearthstone’s path?
Or maybe its as simple as the current offering just doesn’t have systems that draw players in for the long run, like Endless Runners.
Recognizing these needs, then solidifying them into pillars is the best way to start a new project.
Social Gaming: Facebook, Guilds and Beyond
Facebook has had a big impact on games. Before Facebook, video games were seen as an antisocial activity for spotty boys hiding in their bedrooms. Together with the ubiquitous usage of smart phones and Nintendo’s family marketing of the Wii, the perception of both the gender bias and social nature of video games is gradually shifting.
In fact, arcade games originally followed the distribution of pinball machines in bars where adults would socialize, before spreading to family friendly venues such as cinemas and malls. Reacting to a dire recession in the early 80s Nintendo decided to focus its marketing of consoles as toys for boys, rather than entertainment for all, and in doing so set the popular view of video games for the next 30 years.
Now, finally, the industry is beginning to come full circle, and it’s the social aspect that I want to focus on here. It was on Facebook that the term “social games” was coined. Of course, games were social before, whether you were playing Mario Kart with your friends or raiding with your guild in World of Warcraft. But now, even as Facebook is steadily replaced by mobile as the new platform for gaming, everyone is still talking about social.
It’s not hard to understand why. Kongregate spoke convincingly at GDC 2013 on the importance of social features, and particularly guilds. Their talk highlighted the dramatic ways that guilds can improve retention, engagement and monetization. A few facts summarized from their presentation:
Every one of their top 10 games has some form of guild structure
Dawn of the Dragons (5th Planet Games): conversion rate for non guild members: 3.2% vs. guild members: 23%
Tyrant Unleashed (Synapse Games): ARPU for non guild members: $36.59, vs. guild members: $91.60
But guilds are only one part of “social”, just as Facebook and your real life friends are. Humans are social beings, but their social interaction can take many different forms depending on the context. There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to social in games, and each game must work out what is appropriate for its own audience and mechanics (and the same is true if you are building an app). I believe that the nature of social interactions depends on whether your game is really about your Friends, the Mechanics, or the Content.
Friends
When you play a game with your real life or Facebook friends, things work best when the experience is about your friends, and not about the game. Playing with people is a great way of strengthening your relationships with them. Games are appropriate for the majority of family gatherings, whether it’s Risk or Charades.
For the experience to work out well for everyone, then the game needs to be right. The game should facilitate building relationships, and act as a backdrop to this, rather than be the main event. Games of low skill typically work best as they allow participants of all ages and abilities.
This is why games like Draw Something and QuizUp work so well, and more complicated simulation games have quickly fallen out of favour on Facebook. In the former, the experience is more about your friends, and in the latter it is more about the game. Real life friends and family are not the way to drive distribution or underpin retention unless your game is about the people you are interacting with. As we all know from the complaints about people’s newsfeeds being spammed, it isn’t that common for our friends to share our taste in games.
Draw Something.Chibi Pikachu by HoangArtist
Mechanics
In this category I would put everything from people who like playing otherwise family games to a competitive level, to immersive experiences such as World of Warcraft or Clash of Clans. If you are REALLY into bridge then you don’t invite your real friends over and grind them into the floor. You are going to have an unsatisfying time both in terms of the quality of gameplay, and social experience. Instead you either play a friendly match where everyone can enjoy the social aspect, or you join a bridge club and enjoy the gameplay.
This latter case is still a social experience of course, but it’s unlikely to be one with your immediate friends and family. It’s more appropriate to share it with other people that share your love of bridge. This is exactly what Netflix and Spotify have realized as they’ve shifted their recommendations engines from showing you what your friends like, to what other people like you like. Generally we do not really care what our friends have been watching. But if we enjoyed The Godfather and The Departed, then we are interested in what other people who also liked those films would recommend.
For games that rely on their mechanics, adding in a social layer can have some powerful effects. Initially, players can even be taught how the game works by more experienced players and this knowledge flow continues as players exchange thoughts on more advanced strategies. A social aspect can enrich the gameplay by requiring the coordination of several different players such as in raids in World of Warcraft or Destiny. Finally, as these interactions build new relationships between players, they develop a sense of duty to each other, which leads them to keep coming back even if they tire of the gameplay itself.
For the social layer to add value to players, and by extension developers, it doesn’t need to involve people who are real life friends. It’s much better to group people together by the intensity that they play the game, so that they can engage at the same level as the others in their group. This is exactly what happens in Clash of Clans and many other clan based games, where the top clans demand a certain level of engagement as a requirement for membership. Not that the developers need to worry about this, as given the right tools the players organize themselves.
Content
There is however a third, much rarer way of organizing people. In games where there is a strong narrative and the experience is largely single player and driven by consuming content in a linear manner, it makes more sense to group players by their progress through this content.
This is what happens when people live-tweet TV shows. Using Twitter, viewers can feel part of a larger experience and share in the unfolding drama, regardless of whether they are actually sitting with other people watching the same show. I believe there is an innate human desire to calibrate your social responses, and this fills the same role. It helps people comprehend their own reactions, see if they are appropriate and ensure they understand the situation in full.
This is the equivalent of catching a stranger’s eye and enjoying a moment of shared understanding – we know it in a diverse set of situations from sharing the frustration of waiting in line to sharing the elation of hearing the opening beats of a favorite song at a gig. The same sort of social experience could enhance games like BioShock and Mass Effect, maximizing the impact of the most dramatic moments. However, most games that would fall into this category do not have any form of social layer, because of two problems.
Firstly, how do we bring together people who are all experiencing the content at different rates and different times? The solution here might lie in something akin to the comments sections on newspaper and magazine articles. Here the comments don’t need to be by people you know, or written whilst you read the article. But they are still relevant to you, because the person commented after they experienced the same content as you just did, and they enrich your experience of the article by providing additional information and opinions.
Secondly, how do we allow people to be social without breaking the immersion of deeply engaging games? The last thing people want after deciding who lives and who dies in The Walking Dead is for the drama of the moment to be shattered by being prompted to see what everyone else did. Luckily TellTale have the good sense to wait until the end of the episode, a natural break point before allowing you to review what everyone else did and connect you to the forums. In free to play games this might in fact be even easier, as the breaks between sessions and timers are natural point to allow people to engage with each other, both savoring recently enjoyed drama and anticipating exciting things to come.
A few games do manage to solve these problems and pull people together in this way, however. Dark Souls 2 allows other players to leave messages as you work your way through the world and narrative. These can either be helpful tips or troll postings luring you to an untimely death. You can also summon other players into your world to help out with particularly hard bosses. These interactions with other players enrich the single player experience by adding a new, social layer to it. In both cases the associations with players work because they fit into the context of your game, not because of the relationship that you have with the other players. Other players appear as phantoms and in doing so stay consistent with the Dark Souls narrative, and do not break immersion.
Wrap Up
Social rightly continues to be a buzzword in the games industry. However, there is not a single solution for what social should look like. Different types of social interactions are suited to different game experiences. When designing a game there is almost certainly some way that it can be enhanced with a social aspect, but this needs to be designed according to the type of experience that you are building for your players, rather than the design fads of the day.
There are 3 ways to win on the Mobile App Store (Part 2)
In order to be successful on the App Store a lot has to go right. Since 2012, the App Store has hit a point of maturity. The top grossing charts are in stasis with very little change from month to month. The winners of the App Store have been decided, and now the remaining developers are trying desperately to hold on to their existing market niches. Just recently (January 2014) in a report by Gartner they estimate by 2018 that less than 0.01% of all consumer mobile apps will be deemed a commercial success.
It’s not all so bleak though.
Looking back at the success stories since 2012, you can see some clear patterns of how developers built successes from this difficult market. Some clever developers have managed to launch games that turn a profit despite the trends. From comparing these success stories, I can see 3 clear paths that small developers can take to have a shot at being profitable on the AppStore.
If you don’t have the brand equity of Blizzard, Rovio, or EA, or if you don’t have the marketing budgets of King, Supercell or Zynga, then these 3 paths are really your only option to succeed:
Feature or Bust: do everything you can to get a feature.
Free to Pay your way to the top: optimize for CPI and LTV. Play the performance marketing game.
Viral Sensation: get lucky and build a game that just blows up on its own.
The first option I discussed in my last post. Create an amazing mobile experience and do everything in your power to ensure a featured spot from Apple or Google.
This is the best path for small, creative indie developers. For any developer that can’t fork over $400,000+ for a marketing budget should consider the first option.
But this option comes with limitations. The number of developers fighting for featuring grows by the day. There are limited slots each week that can be used for featuring, and only the top spots will drive the discoverability needed to sustainably bring in a profit. The bar for how much you need to invest into polishing your game is growing week by week. There is also a low revenue ceiling for these types of games. In order to get over $1 million in revenue, you need to have an editor’s choice featuring. This type of feature is not easy to get.
When you fight for featuring, it all comes down to getting the Editor’s choice.
As a developer looking to grow beyond just a 10-20 member studio, they must look beyond such a risky path to generating hit games. In order to hit bigger margins on games, you have to move to Free to Play. It is obvious just from glancing at the Top Grossing charts for the last few years that free to play is dominant and is here to stay. Clash of Clans clears over $1M/day according to AppAnnie. The only paid game that has consistently been in the top grossing since 2012 has been Minecraft.
The 2nd Path: Free to Pay your Way to the Top
So if you need to go bigger, how do you find success in the free to play market?
You need:
A game with incredibly strong long term retention
A game with equally strong monetization
Deep pockets to spend on marketing (user acquisition)
A good product is not enough. You need to be able to build a better product than the competitors, that keeps players playing for months longer than the competition, and then outspend them on marketing. If you can’t do these three things, your game will sink like a stone.
Free to Play Games must last for years, not days
Free to Play games are drastically different from traditional console games or paid games on the AppStore. As I discussed last week, if you choose the 1st option to succeed on the AppStore (“Feature or Bust”), your focus is on creating an amazing first experience. Creating just a few days worth of content is entirely okay. Players are fine with a quick, polished experience for their $2.99. You don’t need to sweat out creating months of content for players to consume. However, Free to Play is drastically different: the success of your game hinges on your ability to keep players playing for months, if not years.
In the early days of free to play on mobile, developers focused on creating revenue within the first week of a player playing the game. Players would start a free to play game and be accosted by deals and tricks to get them to spend as quickly as possible. Nowadays this has completely changed. The common approach now is that players that enjoy a game for months are more willing to spend, and will spend much more.
Tracking and optimizing retention is imperative. Ensuring that a substantial (5+%) of players come back 30, 60, 90+ days after opening is crucial to free to play success.
So unlike creating games to be featured (the 1st path), this second path is the exact opposite. Your success hinges on your ability to create a game that lasts for months. Focus should be on mechanics over aesthetics. Mechanics that drive players to return each day for months on end, and ultimately create systems that encourage players to eventually pay.
On top of this, developers will need to make a commitment to this game for many months after the launch. In order to drive the long term retention to where it needs to be, developers must invest heavily in consistent content updates. Updating your game every 2-3 weeks is imperative. As a small developer, this commitment to a single game may be deadly. Free to Play only works for larger developers.
If you don’t think you can create a game that will last for months on first launch, then rethink your path to be successful in this market.
LTV > CPI is all that matters
The second step to creating a successful free to play game is to make the magic formula work : Your game’s LTV must be greater than CPI.
LTV : Lifetime Value. This is the amount of money an average player will spend throughout their entire time playing your game. This is a reflection of your retention curve (how long players will remain in your game) multiplied by your game’s ability to monetize over that curve. To increase: retain players for longer and monetize on that game better.
CPI : Cost per Install. This is the average cost marketing must spend in order to push a customer all the way until the point of installing and opening up the game. This number is heavily dependant on marketing as well as the theme and art style of your game. How costly is it to acquire a player that likes your game enough to install it? Word of mouth, brand recognition, reddit posts all come into this. If you have a large user base that you can get to download your game for free, even better.
Optimizing these two numbers is the only way to success with Free to Play games.
As a small developer, how can you make this equation work?
First off, you need an amazing game. That’s not an easy accomplishment, but must be the base for making the LTV vs CPI equation work. Assuming you’ve got a healthy LTV (over $2) then it makes sense to start looking into smart ways of acquiring users.
As a small developer, you don’t need to be in the Top 10 grossing charts to bring in a profit on a free to play game. CPI scales with volume. So purchasing 2,000 new players a day can have a much smaller cost per install than purchasing the 20,000 new players required for a massive blockbuster. As a small developer you can be smart about purchasing enough volume of users to pay the bills and avoiding the big spenders.
Otherwise, as a small developer you’ll need to find a publisher or an investor to fork over the necessary cash to drive serious marketing out of the game. Dimitar Draganov mentioned in “Freemium Mobile Games : Design & Monetization” that a marketing budget must be minimum $400K. That was back in 2013. This baseline has only increased since then. According to AppAnnie and Flurry this trend will most likely continue to climb as long as the biggest developers have strong LTVs and can afford the CPIs.
The 3rd Path : Viral Sensation
This is the most elusive and undocumented of the paths. I myself have had no experience creating games like this, but have only watched as some games have become successful using this route.
Games like Words with Friends, Draw Something, Flappy Bird, Fun Run, Canabalt, and QuizUp are all games that drove a massive audience to their game by virality and word of mouth alone. They didn’t need featuring from Apple, many didn’t spend a dime on marketing.
Fun Run Multiplayer was built by a bunch of students for a school project. They polished and launched it on the AppStore themselves. It became a massive hit with a younger crowd (13-18 year olds) which resulted in the game reaching a dominant Top Free ranking position. They even managed to creep into the Top Grossing charts for a limited time. How they did this? I can only speculate. Focusing on a younger demographic that is more likely to spread games via word of mouth at school when all their friends have iPod touches or iPhones improves your chances of being viral. Ultimately they did not need to be featured or pay for marketing.
Flappy Bird was a massive news headline in early 2014. It left the mobile development world speechless why a game so simple could traverse the charts so easily. Tech Crunch did an excellent write up on the Flappy Bird phenomenon: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/why-fads-fade-the-inevitable-death-of-flappy-bird/ . The game was incredibly addictive: it gave players always a reason to try once more. The player’s reason for failing was always blatantly obvious: tap better next time! This game again was for a younger audience — but captured an even wider one than Fun Run. This was a game that was so frustrating that players couldn’t help but tell their friends about it. It shot up on discussion boards everywhere. People naturally wanted to share their scores and their stories from playing this game.
Games like QuizUp, Draw Something and Words with Friends did something different. They built games that word of mouth and virality was at its core. You can’t play these games unless you get your friends to play it. Friends themselves are constantly prodding you to play one more turn. This drove massive growth for these games. Everyone was playing — to the point that Zynga purchased Newtoy (Words with Friends developer) and OMGPOP (Draw Something developer). These games were quick to rise and fall, but it was long enough for the developers.
Most of these games are very broad audience games. They appeal to a wide range of player types and demographics; this supports the game’s viral ability. You can’t create games that are niche that depend on word of mouth.
However, these games are risky. Words with friends didn’t even show signs of life until more than 6 months after their first launch. Most companies would have put the game to rest long before the game got the attention of the public. But when the game took off, it took off like a rocket.
Yet with all of these games, what goes up must come down. These games float in the top charts for awhile, but then sink incredibly quickly. Unpredictably, these fads are over almost as quickly as they came. So developers must seek to make money while they can. This success is fleeting.
Going for a viral hit is by far the most elusive path to choose. Its always difficult to see what games will become a viral sensation. But regardless, each year, one developer always wins the lottery. There will always be stories of developers arguing that you don’t need to sink years in to making beautiful games (the 1st path) or spend a dime on marketing (the 2nd path) to succeed. If we all could be so lucky.
In Summary
This market is incredibly tough, but in summary there are 3 distinct routes that a developer can take today that can lead to success :
Feature or Bust Focus on featuring from Apple and Google.
Go paid, not free.
Focus on experience, not on monetization.
Build games with an incredibly strong aesthetic experience.
Don’t fuss with a massive amount of content.
Focus on an experience that is a polished and fun few hours.
Free to Pay to the Top Build a game that will retain players for months, even years.
Find ways to optimize your LTV with retention and monetization.
Find a way to get $400K+ for a marketing budget to push the game to the top.
Hope that LTV > CPI, and that the game can sustain in the Top Grossing Ranks.
Viral Sensation Incredibly risky, and not much is known how to accomplish.
Aim for a broad audience game that enforces word of mouth marketing.
Pray that it eventually takes off.
Each of the big successes since 2012 have gone down one of these 3 paths. Each of these successes have spoken at length how they’ve won the lottery that is the AppStore. The mobile industry in 2015 will surely bring some surprises. For the rest of us that can’t count on surprises, looking for an equation for how to build a hit game, this is as close as you can get.
