Not too long ago, Nintendo vowed to never make mobile free to play games. Their own hardware is too important, the “Nintendo-factor” incompatible with free to play games. First, they yielded on hardware, with the release of Mario and then on free to play through collaborating with Niantic, creating the superhit Pokemon Go. A patchy success history followed, with some projects like Fire Emblem Heroes becoming hits, and others, like Pokemon Quest and Animal Crossing, opportunities to learn. Is Dragalia Lost proof that Nintendo can achieve continuous success on mobile or another missed opportunity?

Both Pokemon Go and Fire Emblem Heroes are seen as something of a surprise hit, vastly outperforming expectations. Dragalia Lost, in turn, is a much more predictable marriage, with free to play ancient Cygames (of Rage of Bahamut fame) adding tried and proven monetization design and expert systems knowledge to Nintendo’s famous world building and quality standards.

Written by  Florian Ziegler, who just recently  started up his consultancy Lava Lake; with additions by Adam Telfer.

How well is Dragalia Lost doing?

Dragalia Lost has had a weird launch approach. Rather than launch in minor market that behave similar to their major markets (ex. Canada, Australia), Nintendo launched Dragalia in Japan, Hong Kong, and the US first. A bold soft launch, but one where they will clearly see the success of the game.

Thus far, roughly 40 days from launch, the game initially peaked on the US Top Grossing charts, but has since fallen. Now it is still falling from the Top 250 Grossing.

So is the game performing poorly? Not necessarily. The japanese app store tells a different story:

While in the US the game is fading fast, this game looks to be a new staple on the Japanese Top Grossing charts.

Yet what sends signals that this game may be a contender is that these grossing ranks have sustained despite the game dropping off significantly in downloads. This is a soft launch, not a global launch, so it’s unlikely that Nintendo have put much effort into marketing the game yet. As of now, Sensor Tower estimates that the game has racked up over 2 million downloads in soft launch, but has already generated over $27 million.

Yet to put this in context historically, let’s compare the launch of Dragalia Lost in the US with Fire Emblem Heroes, Nintendo’s best performing free to play game to date:

Surprisingly, the game is actually hitting roughly the same per user numbers at this point is a strong indicator of success. So it’s likely that even though the game is fading from the top grossing charts in the US, the game is actually performing well on a per-user basis.

So the real question is — can Nintendo effectively grow this game to the same size as Fire Emblem Heroes? Can Nintendo repeat the success of Fire Emblem with a brand new IP?

Intro to Dragalia Lost

Dragalia Lost takes players into a familiar world of high fantasy, in which humans form special bonds with dragons to enhance their powers. Unlike previous Nintendo titles, Dragalia is an entirely new IP, relying entirely on the high-quality characters and beautifully crafted experience to draw players in.

Action Phase Gameplay

Dragalia’s action phase is a top-down 3D action RPG game. Players can use a single tap to attack, move their thumb to steer and trigger special abilities of their characters or their dragon form. The gameplay is very similar to pre-idle period mobile action RPGs like White Cat Project, with an optional “auto” button that essentially turns it into Nonstop Knight.

All of it is easily played with one hand and one finger in portrait mode, making it highly accessible. Auto gameplay is relatively efficient, and if you have the needed meta power you only have to trigger abilities when they are ready and otherwise watch the game play out.

Taking manual control is only useful to maximize the rewards from treasure boxes that are sometimes out of the way of the AI combat path, or for special bosses that require more thoughtful positioning and dodging than the control algorithms are capable of.

All in all, the combat is casual enough to be left alone, but has the potential for deep boss raid gameplay, which the game offers to engaged players.

Already completed grind battles can be skipped with skip tickets, which are not monetized.

Pre-Battle Phase

As the junction between action phase and metagame, the pre-battle phase is where players determine their team strategy and loadout. Key to winning is the elemental alignment of the characters (fire, water, wind, dark and light), and how it corresponds to the battle at hand. Another factor is the character’s class (attack, support, defense, and healing), and associated weapon (sword, axe, dagger, saber, lance, bow, staff and wand).

As the combat allows for this kind of depth, badly constructed teams (such as all support characters) tend to fail frequently, giving players another reason to maintain a large roster of characters.

With four characters, each with three potential slots (weapon, Wymprint and dragon form), making the right choice can be a complicated undertaking. Cygames has, however, simplified the process massively by giving you an optimization button that tailors the setup to whatever is the most effective elemental setup at hand. This means the amount of character and item management is massively reduced compared to other games of this type.

Systems Overview

Gacha RPGs essentially run on their system design, and from a systems standpoint, Dragalia is a massive game. To understand how it can generate the staggering $15 ARPI per player, the best way is to showcase the immense breadth and depth of its progression system.

As you can see, the game follows the classical trinity core loop of fight – get resources – upgrade. Where many games keep this pretty straightforward and potentially expand in the future, Dragalia comes with an an astonishing array of of sub-systems. In fact, they apply almost every commonly successful meta progression system on the planet. With those systems added in, a game map of Dragalia looks more like this:

That’s a lot of game! We will go through these systems one by one to explain how they work.

Adventurers

Players acquire adventurers from events and the gacha system, ranging from 3-5 stars in rarity. Adventurers have one of five elements (wind, fire, water, dark and light), and can each be equipped with a weapon, a Wyrmprint (essentially an upgradable ability) and a dragon form into which they can morph during battle.

Adventurers gain XP by battling, but can also be levelled with an XP currency called crystals. Duplicate adventurers are converted to Eldwater, which in turn allows 3 and 4 star adventurers to be “unbound” meaning they can become 4 and 5 stars respectively.

Additionally, each adventurer has a “mana circle” which is essentially a character’s skill tree. It unlocks stat bonuses and skills, and it, too can be “unbound” using special materials only found on certain recurring weekday events. The amount of mana circles (and hence power options) depends on rarity, and lower rarity characters need significant amounts of investment to break their limits to unlock them.

Dragons

Adventurer’s can turn into dragons for a limited time during combat, giving them strong power increases and new special abilities. Dragons can be levelled using a special dragonfruit currency to increase their power up to a certain level cap. Getting duplicates of a dragon allows the dragon to be “limit-broken”, meaning they can now have a higher level limit cap for further upgrading.

As an additional action, players can visit their dragon’s roost and give them gifts in the form of Rupies (Dragalia’s soft currency). In turn, the bond strengthens, which gives the player more time to use the dragon form. The dragon returns the gift by bestowing random item rewards onto the player.

Dragons have individual elemental alignments, and it is possible to give a fire adventurer a water dragon, in case a player cannot muster the right high-level elemental fighters for a specific challenge.

Wyrmprints

Wyrmprints are equippable trading cards that add or alter the adventurers ability. They, too, can be levelled using their own currency and limit broken with gacha duplicates. This means that to fully level up a 5 star top rarity Wyrmprint, you would need to acquire four duplicates (appearance rate of a specific 5 star Wyrmprint is 0.083% at the time of writing) and then acquire enough specific levelling materials or dud Wyrmcards to feed into them to level them up.

Some Wyrmcards are event specific (such as the anti-boss card shown above) and are needed to get the necessary horsepower to beat the bosses at highest levels, creating the need to go through the entire journey to max out an item that is not very useful outside the event. This is a powerful way to monetize whales that have all other standard game content already.

Like dragons, they can be equipped onto any character, but usually inherently are the right choice for certain classes (such as bestowing healing bonuses onto healers).

Weapons

Weapons can be found or crafted, and are not found in the main gacha. Crafting them requires rare materials that players have to grind, gacha or purchase. Just like dragons and Wyrmprints, they are levelled and limit broken with their own currencies.

Rare elemental versions of weapons can be created, which give 50% damage bonuses to characters of the same alignment. The 4 star and 5 star versions of the elemental weapons tend to be very hard to craft, with very rare materials involved, but crucial to late game success.

Being able to craft these high level weapon in the first place is dependent on the Smithy building in the Halidom.As a further connection between Halidom and the weapons system, after a substantial amount of time in the campaign, Dojos can be built to give buffs to your various weapons.

Dependence of the weapon system on the kingdom builder part of Dragalia forces players to have a steady predictable progression metaphor that is based on time, not random drops, until they can craft endgame items.

Halidom

The Halidom is a kingdom builder, and plays by the standard rules of builder conventions. Buildings costs soft currency, time and sometimes crafting materials to build, and there are a limited amount of builders. Building can be finished up quickly for hard currency. Buildings generate resources that can be collected when they are full, and unlock certain features in the game (such as weapon crafting).

Some of the buildings buff your weapons’ and adventurers’ combat power across the board, making progression in the Halidom a long term necessity. On top of that the economic gains the player requires towards higher levels make the return-to-collect mechanic a great retention driver.

Why have all these parallel systems?

As you can see, Dragalia Lost contains a character gacha game, a trading card system, a castle builder, a crafting system and dragon pets, each with their own upgrade paths. Each system is important to progression, none can be left behind to stay competitive. This abundance of systems is Dragalia Lost’s greatest asset, but also likely its greatest curse.

From the perspective of a developer, this is great. The monetization breadth and depth is incredible, and one of the reasons that players engaged in Dragalia Lost are spending so much money in the game for long periods of time. By leveraging almost every successful power progression mechanic known to man, Cysoft has created a large playground to tweak, leverage and incentivize the economy of the game and give players more reasons to spend, and for longer.

Mind that each of these sub-economies are in themselves closed, meaning that (for the most part) the resources required in each of these economies are only used there and nowhere else, making a system of this magnitude mangeable. Each one of them can be altered without affecting the others.

From a player perspective, this approach has its drawbacks, and that becomes evident when comparing the Japanese and US American market. The Japanese are used to highly complex systems and multi-faceted progression mechanics. This is the most likely reason for the big difference in ARPI. The western mid-core audience just doesn’t have the complexity appetite for this many parallel systems. Even Fire Emblem Heroes does not have so many granular avenues to power.

In my opinion, the main reason for the success difference is the progression complexity, in which the best path to power is not necessarily clear. Players that are more used to straightforward and easily accessible power progression will be turned off.

Economy

The plethora of progression systems is but one pillar of Dragalia Lost’s highly monetizing player profile. Cygames’ reliance on a randomized reward system is the other. There is rarely such a thing as a predictable reward in Dragalia.

The Summoning Gacha

Centrepiece of all character gacha games, Cygames’ main gacha cleverly extends the pool of gacha content by adding Wyrmprints and Dragons to the mix. There are 70 launch characters, a base upon which other games could build their entire game, plus 40 dragons and almost 80 Wyrmprints (190 droppable pieces in total). While some of these are currently event-only, the amount of content for the base gacha is staggering, particularly as Wyrmprints and Dragons require many duplicates to be useful in the long run, and can only be equipped on one character!

The large amount of content allows Cygames to be very generous in offering players spins on the gacha, and hence hooking them to the mechanic.

Adding to that, Cygames also applies a “pity mechanic” that increases the chances of pulling a 5 star item (character or otherwise) after a certain amount of summons without 5 star success. This prevents spender churn due to perceived lack of fairness.

While both of these methods sound generous, the chance of getting a rare Wyrmprint is still twice that of a character, and many players end up with these instead of their true desires.

Duplicates can be fed as XP boosters to their own kind, with the exception of characters, who are substituted by a currency called Eldwater, which is used to promote lower characters to a higher rarity and unlock high level skill boosts in mana circles. What is important to note is that at of yet, there’s no endless sink for Eldwater, meaning that at some point the currency becomes useless to high spenders – I will talk about this again in the live service segment.

A crafty way to turn more players into payers is the structure of the gacha summons: a single summon is 150 Wyrmite or Diamantium, the ten-fold summon at 1500 Wyrmite/Diamantium guarantees a 4 star item. The daily single summon ,however, only costs 30 diamantium, meaning that the paid-for premium currency is vastly superior when used in daily trickles, keeping spenders playing!

Item Gacha

Since players are in constant need of a variety of currencies and crafting materials, they get a free spin at the item gacha, which returns a small amount of them. Conveniently living in the shop, this daily habit makes sure players are exposed to any special deals they might want to make use of – or to buy the missing ingredients they hope the item gacha would return.

The item gacha fulfills two important purposes: the first one is to get players to visit the in-game shop daily and come in contact with all potential purchasing offers.

The second is to ensure that players can’t miss out entirely on anything they might need in case they lose overview of the system, or have trouble grinding. Dispensing all types of the commonly needed progression resources, it ensures a minimum amount of power growth, even if a player isn’t fully efficient.

Randomized Battle Rewards

Each time a player fights a battle, they receive a few consistent resources: rupies and mana. On top of this, each level has a drop table of random rewards, that includes weapons and even low-level Wyrmprints. So to find the more tertiary resources only found in drop tables, players need to not only select the right level and fight difficulty, but also get lucky.

There is a small skill component to battle rewards in the form of treasure chests that can be found during battle for going out of one’s way, but their contribution to overall results is relatively minor.

If players need to desperately acquire a certain resource, they have the choice to either fight for randomized these rewards and potentially spend on stamina refills, or they have to buy these resources in shop packs and the item gacha.

Knowing what is the best way to acquire an item, and consequently where to spend most efficiently, is often not clear. This reduces the appeal for players who are used to easily understood power growth, and who are time poor.

At 40 Wyrmite for a stamina recovery, 50 (base) Wyrmite cost for an item summon, or around 30 USD for a pack that contains the item, Dragalia does not make acquiring an distinct item a straightforward purchase decision, either.

Dragon gifts

When gifting to Dragons (which costs Rupies or special purpose items), they offer a random set of goodies in return, along with their increase in dragon bond.

Since Dragon gifts are not very predictable or good return of investment, they are not a good way for the player to advance their progress. However, Talonstones, as pictured above, are given at certain bond levels, which makes leveling dragons relevant at specific points in the upgrade journey.

Event Gacha

If the recent events are anything to go by, Cygames are offering a special gacha type for their unique events. Unlike the other gachas, however, it is a finite gacha (also called box gacha), meaning that once an item is taken out of the pool, it cannot be rolled again. Players get full visibility on the current contents, and are even allowed to reset it, putting things back into the pool. This allows players some influence on whether they want the remaining items guaranteed or have another chance at getting the super rare drops, assuming they have already been removed from the pool.

Having this much of player progression be determined by randomized rewards systems allows for many more spending opportunities and make it easier to obfuscate balancing changes.

Live Service

There are two main ways in which Cygames currently keeps the game fresh and their players engaged: Gacha events and limited time special events.

Gacha Events

Gacha events are large-banner introductions of new characters and items to the common gacha pool. These characters have a highly increased chance of appearing (currently 0.5% instead of 0.05% for other 5 star characters) and are particularly suited to whatever the current special event challenges at hand are.

Oddly, Cygames makes no direct reference to enforce this connection, showcasing how the game accepts that players have to figure everything out by themselves, bleeding even into their monetization methods.

Limited Time Special Events

Dragalia’s current and so far only format of LTE has essentially three segments:

An engagement mode, where a new character is introduced that players are given to play with for free. This character only stays if players have won enough fights with them to increase their “friendship level” to maximum. Event fights give more points. This segment is achievable for all engaged players to complete.

Boss Battles can be completed on their own or in coop mode and hence allow players who do not want or are not able to participate in synchronous coop to earn event gacha currency, emblems (engagement rewards) and raid access tickets.

Raid Battles are coop raids only, with four players bringing in whole teams of four characters each! This is where players can earn the highest tier gold emblems and hence the best rewards.

Coop raids cost special stamina AND require the access currency from the Boss Battles, making them real stamina pinches, particularly since grinding high amounts of access currency will also cost stamina.

The true end rewards of the special event are multiple copies of the featured 5 star dragon, summoning vouchers for free gacha pulls, ultra-rare items needed for highest mana circles, “joker” items that can unbind any dragon or rare weapon ingredients.

Because all of these items are either event exclusive or barely obtainable by other means, events are a necessity for top players. Not performing well in events affects their core game performance, causing them to be heavily invested in these social coop raids.

Future Problems

The current systems design and live service model of Dragalia will likely lead to difficult endgame management.

First there is the fact that in absence of a mode that creates content on its own (such a PVP mode), players who have all or most of the standard content have nowhere to meaningfully play. There aren’t even leaderboards for the most event victories or any other measure of competitive success or dedication that keeps top players pushing.

The only motivation that keeps top players in the game is collection of future characters. This system means that future events either always need to yield the new most powerful character (power creep) or monetization will decline as players have no power-driven motivation to acquire them.

Secondly, duplicates including the substitute currency for characters, Eldwater, do not have an endless sink. This means that further spins on the gacha are a waste of money and literally return zero game state change. Top players will end up with large quantities of barren items und currency stocked up, making them precarious for use by the liveops team in the future.

Both the gameplay and the systems economy in Dragalia have distinct endpoints. Currently the solution seems to be to make the top resource acquisition incredibly grindy, which is another feature that will reduce long term appeal in the West.

Generous Rewards

One of the first things you will notice playing Dragalia Lost is how generous it is with dispensing its premium currency Wyrmite. You literally get it for everything from fighting battles, to completing dailies, to simply reading the stories of the various characters. Usually you can get enough to complete a multi-summon every day or two. There are three reasons Dragalia hands out its premium currency so freely compared to most western games.

Get you used to spending

In my opinion this is something that the Japanese developers, who first introduced this system to the mobile market, have always done better than their western counterparts: For a gacha game to truly work, gacha must be the habitual center of the game. Everything revolves around the gacha, and players must get used to it being the prime source of their progress first. To that end, sacrificing some early monetization to have people spend more in the long term is an acceptable trade-off.

Get you into the game

Mid-core games (Japanese-made in particular) tend to be complex affairs with many features, taps and sinks. Since most midcore games rely on good long term retention to make use of their feature depth, heavily incentivizing players to stick with the game until they have learned the ropes and are committed is beneficial.

Incentivize certain behaviours

The high granularity of Wyrmite (1500 for a multi-summon) allows the team to trickle small amounts everywhere to incentivize behaviours. Because the currency is so valuable players can easily be directed towards the features deemed most important. As an example, playing socially with new players in coop mode will yield a staggering 150 Wyrmite per fight.

Traditionally, most of these ultra generous reward streams will bleed dry as the players venture deeper into the game, and Dragalia Lost is no different – many of these rewards are for first time completion only. Add to that the fact that each gacha is diminishing returns as your power demands grow in the game, needing more and more more Wyrmite to make a power difference, and it becomes clear that this generosity is deceiving.

Social Systems

In a world where synchronous PVP and guild play are the buzzwords of the day, Dragalia Lost feels strangely oldschool. Relying on what is the gold standard of Japanese social features since Puzzle and Dragons, players can take the hero character of another randomly selected player into any battle to help them out.

Repeated use of the same player’s character “befriends” that player, but it has little consequence beyond allowing more frequent use of their special ability. While it appears as a social feature, it’s mostly a showcase for more powerful characters and a potential monetization driver.

Forceful Coop

Dragalia does not have a PVP system, and seemingly no plans to introduce one in the near future. Whether that was by design to take monetization pressure off to cater to the Nintendo feeling, or simply due to time and budget constraints, or because games like Dungeon Hunter had failed implementing it successfully before, one can only speculate. What is fact, however, is that Cygames have decided to double down on coop gaming.

Almost every battle, whether campaign or event, can be fought in synchronous coop mode with other players. Some modes only allow one hero (of four), others feature multi-team raids of 12 characters. Coop follows a classical lobby system, with all its drawback of waiting and dud players.

Dragalia really, really wants you to play coop, presumably because it lacks both PVP and other forms of social organisation. Not only is coop mode front and center in most battle screens, but each time you play with a new player, you get a maximum of 150 Wyrmite until you reach a (invisible) cap of several thousand.

This high incentivization means that coop is the most economically important part for players to engage with every day until they are deeply invested in the game.

On top of that, the best event rewards are only in coop raids, forcing even solitary players to play socially to advance their game state.

Considering that group raids are one of the most well-loved and most engaging elements of a whole slate of multiplayer RPGs (most famously World of Warcraft), it could well be a viable strategy to cut out the player finding and guild management and create a frictionless social raid PvE endgame.

Building a Brand

Another subtle but important aspect is that Dragalia Lost makes an active effort to create a lasting brand. Not many companies have managed to use the free to play mobile platform as a launchpad for new IP, but as a company known for beloved franchises, Nintendo does not miss the opportunity:

High quality comic strips playing out in the world of Dragalia are regularly added to the game. Players are awarded substantial amounts of premium currency to read through each character’s story, encouraging players to get deeply invested into the world of Dragalia Lost. This way Nintendo sets about creating the necessary super-fans to build a new brand from scratch that has lasting appeal.

Summary

Dragalia is probably one of the most polished mobile titles I have ever seen. Everything oozes the quality and polish you expect from a Nintendo game: from the fully voice-overed cast to the gorgeous card illustrations and expert J-Pop tunes, Dragalia Lost is a joy to behold and play.

But this polish isn’t constrained to its visuals. Cygames deploys the latest and greatest of Japanese mobile systems design, and provides one of the most accessible versions of JRPG style mobile meta designs to date. Yet so far financial differences in the US compared to the  Japanese market make clear that improving accessibility alone is not enough to wean western gamers to these highly complex systems en masse.

Its focus on coop play over guild and PVP systems is a bold choice, but one that will bite twice: firstly for leaving competitive player types stranded and secondly for putting the game firmly on a event-driven content treadmill. Because the game currently has no truly endless, self-content creating mode there’s a high chance it will run out of steam for high performing top spenders. After all, there’s only so many adventurers, Wyrmprints and weapons you can find and upgrade – after that, you are just waiting for the next event and the next character to collect.

Character collection is the endgame of Dragalia, and collection game players only make for a fraction of possible player types in the west.

Cygames is relying too much on Japanese design staples, using a highly refined version of what’s tried and proven features in free to play JRPGs for almost a decade. Clearly efforts were made to make the game more appealing to Western audiences, but it still relies too much on intrinsic player effort to understand and manage all of its complexities.

A clearer path to power and a monetization approach that responds to the player state, such as targeted offers, would substantially increase player investment in Western countries.

Without more understandable power growth, more accessible systems and a dynamic monetization design, Dragalia Lost will likely be “just” another Japanese hit. Yet, even that is a huge step forward for Nintendo on its way to be on mobile what it is for the world of console games.

Guest Post by Florian Ziegler, who just recently started up his consultancy Lava Lake; with additions by Adam Telfer.

Cross-Posted from Deconstructor of Fun. Co-wrote with Joseph Kim.

It’s hard to go a day without hearing about Fortnite anymore. In February, Fortnite passed PUBG in total revenue on PC and console ($126M versus $103M). While PUBG (Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds) started a movement, Fortnite created a phenomenon.

However, while the Battle Royale genre continues to heat up, I’d like to focus on a specific topic: the Battle Pass system as the monetization driver. Fortnite, for all of its smart decisions and flaws, made one key choice months after its launch: it wasn’t going to monetize based on loot boxes, instead, it was going to monetize off of its Battle Pass system.

It’s not as if Epic hadn’t thought of making it a loot box driven economy — Fortnite’s own “Save the World” mode is a loot box driven economy which you buy llama-themed pinatas that contain random gameplay-impacting items. Yet for their Battle Royale system, they chose to go against this.

Regardless of what you think of the choice — Fortnite’s revenue shows they’ve done something right. Fortnite has been steady as the top grossing game on mobile for weeks now, demolishing traditional mobile free-to-play titles, and outpacing all other battle royale style games on mobile in both downloads and revenue. The fact that the game was invite-only for the first weeks or so makes the feat even more impressive.

However, these results beg a question: is the revenue coming simply because of the user base size (DAU), or does the Battle Pass system actually drive higher revenue-per-user than a loot box system? In terms of KPIs, we’d be comparing ARPDAU or ideally, LTV.

While no one but Epic can peek behind the curtain and see what their metrics are, we will speculate today!

Fortnite’s Cosmetic-Driven Economy

Much like in MOBAs, Fortnite’s progression and monetization only come from cosmetics. Fornite is a “free-to-win” model: they do not sell anything that could impact the balance of the battle royale gameplay. All guns, armor, ammo is scavenged in the battle royale gameplay, but a player can choose what cosmetics they want to bring into a match.

Fortnite allows you to select a number of cosmetic options to bring into battle:

• A Skin/Outfit your character wears
• “Back Bling” — or a knapsack
• Harvesting tool — a Pickaxe is boring, why not a Scythe?
• Contrail — what Glider you use while falling (gotta look cool while falling)
• Loading Screen — what loading screen you see (only for yourself)
• Emotes to communicate with others. (you can bring in 6 emotes which you can trigger)

Since progress isn’t made through traditional stats and level up, the only way to show off your progress is through cosmetics. It’s not pay-to-progress, it’s pay-to-look-cool.

Until Fortnite, cosmetics-only based mobile games have not been able to achieve strong overall revenue, at least in Western markets. Although the large revenue growth certainly derives strongly from a massive number of installs, the amount of revenue and the #1 top grossing status cannot be explained without a level of monetization heretofore unseen by cosmetics in Western markets on mobile.

With the cosmetic driven economy, rather than dropping new cosmetic gear through gacha/loot boxes (like Overwatch, Destiny, etc.) cosmetics are either purchased with V-bucks (premium currency) or earned through the battle Pass. Interestingly, directly purchasing cosmetics through the shop has limited access. Each day there is a limited selection of items to purchase, so while loot boxes aren’t included in the economy, there is a limited set of items that are available at any time. Great for driving players to check the shop out daily, and giving additional pressure to purchase items while they are available.

The Battle Pass

Besides being able to purchase cosmetics with premium currency, players can also play and earn cosmetics and consumable boosts by completing their Battle Pass.

The Battle Pass is a set of rewards which can be unlocked by completing challenges. Completing challenges rewards the player with XP, which increases your tier, which unlocks subsequent rewards. The challenges themselves range in difficulty but give a baseline of progress for the Battle Royale style game.

When playing a Battle Royale game, especially if you’re not skilled, most games will end up with getting shot and losing all your progress. Also in many battle royale games there can be times when you’re waiting around for other players to arrive. These challenges give players additional goals to think about while playing, and can make even a losing round feel like progress.

The monetization comes in with the free vs premium tracks, much like the VIP system in Wargaming’s World of Tanks (read the full deconstruction of World of Tanks). Free players get far fewer rewards than the premium tier. Creating a very clear conversion effort. Look at all the stuff you “earned” but didn’t receive! The amount of content given out for the premium tier is compelling — its generous in terms of the payoff and pays back your effort quickly. This feels very similar to Annuities or “Subscription Diamonds” in mobile games. A small price that pays out far more than it costs – but only if you engage in the game.

The Battle Pass is limited to a season, which is what makes it so compelling. Each season has a matching Battle Pass, which comes with its own set of cosmetic content and rewards. If you don’t complete the battle pass in time — you don’t get the content. Some content may come in and out of the store on a daily basis — but then it’s usually for high costs of premium currency.

There’s a big “Fear of Missing Out” feeling with this system.

If being able to directly purchase progress was in any other game, most free-to-play designers would shoot this down. It’s usually a far better idea to monetize players on the gameplay itself and not allow players to directly pay to skip. It would feel very pay-to-win if you could directly pay to reach the top arena in Clash Royale, or pay to skip a set of levels in Candy Crush.

However, since Fortnite can’t really monetize on the core gameplay, and this is really just paying to reach cosmetic content (your battle pass tier isn’t really a metric player compare as a sign of skill) — player’s don’t seem to mind, and their revenue isn’t impacted. Player’s have a way to pay-for-progress to the cosmetic items they want.

Want a head start on the season so you can show off the cosmetic items before your friends get there? Pay to skip ahead!

A week’s challenges or season coming to a close and you don’t have time to get all the remaining challenges? Pay to skip ahead!

For this reason, the spend depth and potential of the battle pass system shouldn’t be seen as limited to just the monthly purchase price. When a player has locked into the battle pass, they are more likely to be highly engaged that season to unlock the content and to convert on skipping ahead to get all that content they unlocked.

User Experience of Battle Pass vs. Loot Boxes

Battle Pass can be best described as a system first and foremost for retention and player experience. Comparing Battle Pass to Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG), it gives players real goals, a direct sense of progress, and a clear path to the cosmetics that they want. PUBG instead uses a loot box system to gate all of their cosmetic content. Players play a match, get as many “Battle Points” (BP) as possible, to eventually open up a loot box.

These loot boxes can sometimes be locked with a key that needs to be bought with real money, which feels pretty much like a blatant rip-off. Like most gacha systems, as a player, this means the path to desired content is completely luck-driven. You can’t even save your BPs or a dust-like currency (example: Credits in Overwatch, or Dust in Hearthstone) to eventually get the item that you want. You just need to get lucky.

From a player’s perspective, Battle Pass simply feels fair compared to the competitors gacha systems.

So overall, from a player’s perspective, Fortnite’s Battle Pass system is a great match for battle royale:

• It gives secondary goals which give a strong baseline of progress and can keep the game interesting
• It gives players a clear marker of progress through a season and a goal of what to accomplish besides just killing every round
• It’s a compelling conversion item + retention driver. The amount of content for the price and the clear visual of seeing content that you “earned” but can’t access is a compelling driver to both monetize and engage in the game.
• It creates an endowment effect of purchasing an item but only being able to unlock the content if you engage highly in the game

But it’s not as if this Battle Pass system came from nowhere, it’s obviously inspired by the playbook of Valve’s DOTA2. Their compendium battle pass has been a staple of that game since 2013. Looking at Valve’s evolution of the compendium, you can see potentially how this system will evolve in Fortnite.

The Benchmark: DOTA2’s Battle Pass

Started in 2013 as an incentive for players to donate & get interested in the e-sports scene of DOTA2, the compendium was essentially an interactive guide to an upcoming tournament. Similar to a guidebook you’d get at a sporting event: it told you about the players, tracked the stats, and got you interested in the game itself. Valve doubled down on this by making it digital, interactive, and gave a portion of the money raised by the compendium as part of the prize pool. Players had a way of supporting the esports scene for their favorite game.

This has since evolved quite a bit. What started as just a compendium turned into a battle pass. They eventually added goals for players to accomplish in PvP that would increase their level for that season, and unlock cosmetic rewards (just like Fortnite’s today). However, DOTA2 has gone far deeper, with a number of recent additions that significantly increase the depth of the system.

• Multiple Paths give players choices as they progress in the battle pass, giving far more goals in parallel for advanced players. Also, give further reason to reach higher levels in the battle pass (some paths only unlock when you’ve reached a high enough level).
• Unlimited tiers with content unlocking slower and slower over time. Whereas Fortnite is capped at 100 tiers of content, DOTA2 has unlimited. This creates situations where players are even competing against each other to see who can progress farther in a season (when the competition itself is directly pay-to-progress)
• Treasures/Loot Boxes as rewards rather than direct cosmetics. This gives players a mix of direct rewards and a chase to get the random rewards that they want.

So while Fortnite’s Battle Pass system may just be in its “early access” phase right now with a basic feature set, it’s clear that Epic is taking inspiration from Valve’s similar Battle Pass system. This evolution shows that the current implementation is not just limited to 100 tiers of content, but could be a far longer lasting and complex chase which could drive even higher retention and monetization. This system clearly has been successful for DOTA2, since recently they’ve started to shift the system to a full-on subscription style service called “DOTA Plus”. Little details are known at this point, but it looks to be replacing the Battle Pass with an ongoing subscription that gives even further systems and progression.

But comparing the Battle Pass system to a pure-gacha system, is Fortnite (and potentially DOTA2) leaving money on the table? While it’s obvious that its a play for stronger retention and higher conversion, is the lower spend depth hurting them?

Is the tradeoff of giving away all this cosmetic content for higher conversion really the smartest business decision?

Revenue Analysis of Battle Pass

Just how impactful is Battle Pass to monetization? More specifically, we should ask this question on two levels of scope:

1. Battle Pass vs. Cosmetics: How does Battle Pass monetization compare to other forms of cosmetics based F2P, mobile monetization?
2. Battle Pass Overall: How does Battle Pass monetization compare to F2P, mobile monetization overall (including pay-to-progress models)?

We can get a rough sense for both of these questions by doing some high-level comparison. In particular, we can a) compare monetization of the various “fair-to-play”, cosmetics driven Battle Royale games and then b) compare monetization with “pay-to-progress” game monetization schemed games.

As an initial investigation let’s take a look at lifetime average revenue per install (ARPI) of each of these titles based on Sensor Tower data to comparative, key high-performing titles:

*Note: Rules of Survival does contain some weapons in its loot box, while they are balanced it is not strictly a cosmetics gacha

Source: ARPI based on Sensor Tower data

Battle Pass vs. Cosmetics

Let’s now address the first monetization question we posed above: How does Battle Pass monetization compare to other forms of cosmetics based F2P, mobile monetization?

At first glance, it would seem that Knives Out has the best per user monetization (ARPI) of the Fair to Play games. However, two issues are not fully captured by the chart above:

• ARPI growth over time and
• Audience distribution.

#1. ARPI Growth Over Time

Note the number of months in launch in the Lifetime ARPI chart above. Generally speaking, the longer a game sits in launch, the better the game’s ARPI becomes (eventually achieving it’s LTV):

Source: Based on SensorTower Data

Note the number of months since launch in the lifetime ARPI (avg. revenue per install) chart above. Generally speaking, the longer a game thrives in live operations, the better the game’s ARPI becomes (as the installs decrease and existing users spend more during their lifetime):

#2. Audience Distribution

The other key driver for monetization for Knives Out is it’s audience. Japan *generally* monetizes much more strongly than other countries, often 2x+ that of US. Hence, the large concentration of Japanese users in Knives Out primarily drives the monetization gap between Knives Out and Rules of Survival.

You can see the revenue split by top 5 countries for all three of the games below:

Source: SensorTower

So what happens to monetization if we were to exclude Japan?

Wow, what a difference a country makes! Without Japan, Knives Out actually becomes the worst performing game in term of monetization. Somehow Fortnite per user monetization actually does better without Japan.

Battle Pass vs. Mobile Free-to-Play

Let’s now address the second question we posed regarding Battle Pass monetization earlier: How does Battle Pass monetization compare to F2P, mobile monetization overall (including pay-to-progress models)?

From the Lifetime ARPI chart, it would seem to indicate that more traditional F2P monetization mechanics such as gacha or PVP speed-ups are much more effective on a per-user, unitary level than cosmetics based monetization.

However, we should also take two factors into consideration:

1. Months to LTV: How much further can a cosmetics driven monetization last over time?
2. Downloads vs. ARPI: Although ARPI for “free-to-win” games may not be as high as other, more traditional F2P monetization mechanics, these games should generate higher install volumes based on the friendlier monetization scheme.

Let’s discuss both of these points in turn.

#1. Months to LTV

So how long can gacha based games continue to increase ARPI until it hits LTV? Unfortunately, we only have 6 months of data on Rules of Survival and Knives Out and less than 2 full months for Fortnite.

One way to estimate the ARPI growth is to just do a logarithmic trendline and extend out the timeframe to say 20 months.

Another way we could guess the eventual LTV of these games is by taking a look at other game examples such as Clash Royale:

Source: Based on SensorTower data

Based on the above ARPI growth continued for at least 15-20 months. Hence, the 20 month timeframe for our logarithmic trendline earlier.

Traditional F2P designers would typically assume that cosmetics driven monetization should hit their LTV ceiling much sooner than a well-designed gacha game.

However, for the sake of simplicity, and just to get a rough feel let’s assume that the fair-to-play game monetization will follow a similar trajectory. In fact, let’s just eyeball all of this pretty roughly to estimate LTV.

Assumptions based on a rough eyeballing of Clash Royale ARPI growth:

• RoS/Knives Out will increase another 50%
• Fortnite to increase by 125%

On the face of it, Knives Out and Fortnite would have similar long-term LTV estimates based on our analysis above. However, when we factor in audience concentration, we can conclude that Fortnite has much stronger monetization design. This was clearly shown when we excluded Japan from our monetization data earlier.

#2. DL vs. ARPI

Although we’ve focused so far primarily on unitary economic measures like ARPI, at the end of the day, what matters most will be the amount of overall revenue (and profit) a game can generate. Hence, in addition to ARPI/LTV we must also look at product level economics by also looking at downloads and in turn overall revenue.

As you can see from the chart below, while free-to-win based monetization has not performed as well on a per player basis, but overall revenue can be quite healthy even compared to top pay-to-progress types of games.

Also note that we only have less than 2 months of data for Fortnite (so it’s not an apples-to apples-comparison), and it has been limited by a number of issues such as being iOS only and having high-end device requirements.

Further, Clash Royale, unlike the other titles, leveraged one of the strongest IPs in mobile gaming and utilized massive user acquisition to help drive stronger install volume for their game.

* Less than 2 months of data only and currently only on iOS
** Puzzle & Dragon started off in Japan only
Source: SensorTower

Battle Pass For the Win!

So, what is our conclusion on the original monetization questions we posed with respect to Battle Pass?

While pay-to-progress style economies will certainly drive higher per-player revenue, for games that monetize off cosmetics the battle pass is certainly showing impressive results. Battle Pass will likely become a dominant monetization system used with cosmetics based monetization in the future. Not only can it provide far better player experience, but by a rough calculation, it shows that it can drive higher LTV.

Just keep in mind these calculations are rough – these are using estimates of revenue and downloads, we’re using trendlines based on a small set of data, and we’re looking at a game that didn’t start from scratch when launched on mobile. The legion of fans that came over from PC/Console area already highly engaged and used to its systems. We’ll need to see how this goes in the coming months!

Yet by these rough calculations, we’re pretty excited. A player-friendly system that gives better goals and drives higher engagement shows the path to stronger revenues. All the while Valve’s DOTA2 shows that this is just the MVP of a battle pass system. Bringing in a hybrid of gacha design and a deeper battle pass will most likely be the future for cosmetic driven games.

Exciting times ahead!

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.

Imagine you’re in the middle of a long road trip with your family. The drive starts off at a fairly speedy pace of 75 mph. Everything is going great; you’re on time, you’re happy, and each member of your family is gripped to their respective phones.

A few hours in, you start noticing the traffic on the road is becoming dense. As a result, the pace of your car begins to slow. In reality, you know this isn’t a good sign: years of driving has taught you hours’ worth of queuing lies ahead with little chance of escape, even though you’re praying you’re wrong.

All of a sudden, someone cuts you off. You slam on the breaks just in time and, fortunately, you avoid a crash. You look up in the rearview mirror to make sure your kids are ok – which they are. However, they’re all now looking up from their phones at the density of cars on the road, and everyone in the car, like you, is dreading what’s to come.

Now, if you hadn’t already guessed, it’s my belief that such events accurately mirror the experience that every one of us at some points goes through with a mid-to-hardcore free-to-play game. At the beginning of such games, every player knows they’re going to get stuck in traffic – caught up in the lines of cars and happy to sit in the grind for free rather than pay the fee required to jump ahead.

It’s up to developers do decide just how they’re going to get the paying players out of there. Should they build in a carpool lane? A toll road? Install Google Maps with traffic updates? Throw in a helicopter?

Carpool Lane

Let’s start by looking at an example of building in a carpool lane. When it comes to free to play games, these are the equivalent of a monthly subscription offer – a model that’s become rather popular in the last two years.

In practice, they give the player a medium-sized lump sum of currency upon initial purchase, followed by a small (but nevertheless meaningful) amount each day for the next 30 days. Ultimately, the total amount over the 30 days is a lot more than one-time purchase for the same amount.

Price range: Between $2.99 and $9.99

In the example below, Lineage 2: Revolution offers some Adena (gold) subscriptions with five times as much currency on day one as a player receives every other day of the month.

If a player was to try and buy this much Adena at once, they’d have to pay three times as much, or maybe even more.

We took a brief survey of players from our Lineage 2 Community, and found that 17 out of 20 players who spent money on this game had bought these subscriptions.

In reality, however, the daily rewards are very small. With one side quest that lasts five minutes, a player can earn 21,000 gold. Only five side quests can be performed daily, but still, the daily rewards are small. It’s not hard to understand how this $9.99 subscription only provides slight relief from the traffic.

It’s important that your subscription offers can scale as a player progresses to late game. In the examples above with Lineage, those offers quickly become irrelevant when a player reaches level 100 of 180. However, Lineage could easily offer higher priced subscriptions that are relevant to later levels.

Toll road

In truth, a toll road that diverts them away from the mass of traffic isn’t all too different from a carpool lane. It’s essentially the next tier in the same approach – a monthly subscription.

Price range: $19.99 to $29.99

It’s not often that I’ll see subscriptions for more than $29.99, because the audience that buys them are most likely budget players. Subscriptions certainly provide mild relief from the traffic – even driving 10 mph faster than the rest of the cars on the road, any driver knows you’re party to a few solid endorphins. However, it’s once again key to make sure you consider how these subscriptions scale to the latter stages of the game.

Google Maps

Has Google Maps ever offered you a shortcut, but in reality it felt like it took just as long to get to your destination as if you’d stuck to your original path?

It’s a feeling that sucks and makes every future trip feel like something of a risk. However, as the likes of Google upgrade their software, so such events are becoming rarer and rarer. For every bad turn, shortcuts cuts actually end up paying off, offering you a smarter route that cuts your journey time. It’s at this point that using platforms like Google Maps builds trust with the consumer, and this to me is exactly how Gachas feel.

Price range: $29.99 to $99.99

If I pull my wallet out and take the leap of faith to try my luck on a gacha, and the rewards make me feel like I could’ve just played a few more days to get the same rewards, then I’m very discouraged to try my luck again. Maybe your VIPs will try their luck a few more times, but are unlikely to keep trying if they don’t see a solid result? On the contrary, if players get a favorable result the first time, their first impression of spending will be positive. It’s a feeling that can go a long way.

Personally, I like it when I see games that have limited offers of guaranteed results – preferably, even their most expensive gachas offer favorable results. For example, there’s a rival to the ridiculously successful Clash Royale that has unexpectedly held my attention for far longer than I expected. Star Wars: Force Arena comes complete with gachas that boast some guaranteed results. In this case, I’m more likely to make a purchase because the guaranteed results take any random elements out of the equation.

In the image below, I can buy a package with certain characters having a much higher, guaranteed chance to drop. I love this type of offer because I’m guaranteed to save a lot of time.

The legendary drop rates in this game for free packs that come from winning battles are so low that I’ve never received any legendary items in the two months I’ve been playing. Thus, I know for a fact that making this purchase will put me way ahead of many competitors.

On the other hand, Clash Royale’s special offers aren’t guaranteed to drop the character types that match my deck. This makes the risk a lot higher. Some days, I might be feeling rich and want to take my chances on a gacha, but my conservative nature makes me lean towards the packages in Star Wars: Force Arena with major appearance boosts.

A very engaged, passionate, wealthy audience might go for full risk gachas like in Clash Royale, but the more trust you take out of the equation, the higher conversion rate you’ll have. Consider the great feeling you get when Google Maps says, “Save 25 minutes by this recommended route,” and it actually happens. That’s exactly what a successful gacha feels like.

With gachas, like subscriptions, it’s also important to consider their relevance in late game. Early to mid game players are likely to have a high chance of a good first impression, because they don’t need legendary drops to make significant progress. However, late game players can only progress with legendary drops. As a result, you might have a different format of gacha for them, and it may only appear to those certain higher level players.  

Helicopter

Arguably, what every driver wants when ground to a halt in traffic is for someone to pick them up and fly them off at speed into the distance. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as moving a few inches a minute. Players want to fly.

Some developers, like Machine Zone (MZ), put the option to fly front and centre. MZ’s sales are exclusively in the form of bundles that offer an enormous amount of various currency items: speedups, resources, hero XP, VIP, alliance gifts, unique key upgrade items, etc. All of this is offered for a price – usually $99.99. These bundles offer so much, that they often give the player the experience of flying through the game.

In MZ’s monetization strategy, the only option is to fly, because traffic is at a dead stop. After only a few levels, each upgrade takes an enormous time. While level 10 of 25 buildings might only take a few hours, level 11s take half a day. With each new level unlocked, the wait time scales much higher and longer. Believe it or not, some timers even take a few years to complete.

Take a look at the length of speed ups offered in a package from the studio’s most recent game, Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire.

It’s an interesting approach, namely because it’s ‘all or nothing’. Players can’t make any progress using traditional free to play methods in Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire. Assuming equal skill level, it is impossible to compete with those who have spent a few hundred more dollars than you. Dipping back into our analogy, the price of flying ahead with a helicopter ride is high –  at a minimum, purchases will be between $49.99 and $99.99.

Most of the time, packs in MZ games give guaranteed results. The Valentine’s Day sale below offers instant upgrades to level 30 for all buildings.

Occasionally, MZ will have sales with hundreds or thousands of gacha chests. When this happens, a VIP player will typically buy a few and let the rest of the population know if the chests have good drop rates or not. So, once again, first impressions are a big deal.

However, I do want to warn you about changing the drop rates after the initial purchase. We’ve seen MZ try to do this in various ways. Players always find out eventually, and it leaves a bad taste in their mouth.   

Don’t run out of road!

We’ve covered all the different ways you can help players get out of traffic, but it’s also important to make sure you don’t run out of road, because then you’ll have no traffic left to monetize.

Different games take different approaches to this. For example, in Lineage 2, the first few expansions of the game offer limited additional content that can be quickly maxed with a few hundred dollars. Then, what’s left is a deep meta game of tediously limit breaking gear, rolling for the best stats you can, and experimenting with different builds for PVP – essentially, it’s a PVP-driven end game.

Counter to that is Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire, which never lets any player max the game. When a new feature is released, the first few levels will be attainable with a few hundred dollars; the next few levels can be acquired with a few thousand dollars, but the last few levels will be unattainable for even the largest VIPs.

When MZ is ready to release the next feature, it increases the currency in packs necessary to max the last few levels of the previous feature, at the same time as releasing the next feature.

Conclusion

In short, a developer’s job is to make sure players can dodge traffic however they see fit. If players want to spend money to get them out of the grind, the game should be able to offer them immediate satisfaction and sustained gratification. The trick is to make sure they feel like getting out of traffic is something they couldn’t have achieved in the same manner without spending money – their investment has to feel worthwhile, and there are three key ways to achieve this: –

• High conversion items should have tiers
• Gachas should guarantee drops over time (while scaling cost)
• Sales targeted at VIPs should go all out – make sure you give a large variety of content that allow VIPs to get where they want to go, without restriction

Follow the rules of the road as laid out above, and you can be sure your game will be populated with happy and contented motorists.

About the Author

Chad Kihm is the CEO of App Scrolls, a company that provides game design consulting, community development and management, as well as community marketing services. App Scrolls currently manages communities for Game of War, Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire, Summoner’s War, and Lineage 2: Revolution.

Due to the Star Wars Battlefront II controversy, the industry is taking a far closer look at what monetization practices are ethical, and whether the industry can police itself or needs further regulation to avoid misuse.

In the meantime, it’s likely loot boxes will still be featured heavily in the top charts as the revenue potential of gacha and loot boxes is hard to ignore. Using a random drop system has allowed many new genres and core loops to flourish.

However, designing for gachas isn’t a simple design process. Not all genres and not all types of gameplay can be ported to support a loot box design. We’ve already talked about some of the necessary ingredients:

• Part 1: Ensuring your gacha system has enough depth to sustain drops over time
• Part 2: Ensuring your gacha system has enough width to ensure that each drop is useful to a player

Now, it’s time for the third element: how to handle duplicates. It’s what we call an edge case, but it’s a process that will define how your game will feel over the long haul: Do players feel like duplicates are useful or useless?

Duplicates vs Bad Drops in a Gacha System

The first thing to master when it comes to a gacha system is how to think differently about two situations that can arise; duplicates and bad drops.

For example, let’s assume that we have a Gacha system similar to Overwatch – our boxes only drops cosmetic items. As a result, each item that we drop is permanent (the player keeps it forever and it can’t be “consumed”) and players are chase after the cosmetic items they want for the characters they play as.

In this system, a ‘bad drop’ could be a cosmetic item for a character that I don’t play as – maybe in the future I will, but for the time I’ve been playing I haven’t taken to the character in question. As such, this is most definitely a bad drop.

Ideally, I should be able to convert this item into something of value so that I can eventually get the items that I want. In games such as Overwatch and Hearthstone, this means converting any bad drop into a dust-currency, which allows you to purchase the items you want directly.

However, also inherent in this system are duplicates. In this situation, I receive the same cosmetic item for a character that I already have, which feels like a big loss. It’s doubly frustrating if the game drops a high rarity duplicate (i.e. a legendary skin) as this feels like a massive waste – I was lucky enough to receive a legendary item, but unlucky that it was an item that had dropped before.

As previously suggested, games like Overwatch and Hearthstone handle this by allowing players to convert these items to dust, essentially treating a duplicate the same way as a bad drop. However, the amount of dust dropped is a fraction of the cost of purchasing the skin you want directly, so players still feel terrible when they pick up a duplicate.

As a result, Overwatch eventually went public about adjusting the drop logic to avoid duplicates as much as possible, while Brawl Stars even removed duplicates outright. However, in my view it doesn’t need to be this way. Removing duplicates from your system reduces depth, and puts more pressure on your team to develop more content. Ideally duplicates would be celebrated by players, making this rare occurrence into something of value, rather than serving as a regretful outcome.

In light of this, let’s look at how to build out better gacha duplicate mechanics:

Six Mechanics for Handling Duplicates

#1 Duplicates Aren’t Duplicates

A different way to avoid the pain of duplicates is to make sure duplicates rarely happen.

One way to do it is to make each piece of content generate in many subtly different ways. For example, a weapon or character can drop, but certain sub-elements are randomized and generated.

Using this method, if a duplicate item drops, there are smaller comparisons that players can make between the drops. This is done when gear or drops are both procedurally and randomly generated and there are enough smaller detailed stats that players actively want to optimize.

For example, in the first Destiny you could get the same piece of gear dropping many times.

However, each drop had randomized stats and perks associated with it, causing players to head into a chase in the end game to find unusual builds of gear. The game included perks that offset the problem of some guns being overpowered in competitive modes like The Crucible. While this obviously went overboard causing severe balancing issues, this shows the power of procedurally generated gear – it deepens the chase and makes duplicates something players actively go after.

However, this system can result in players ending up with mountains of weapons and gear that they don’t want to use. As a result, designers need to find ways of converting all bad drops into something of use to players, such as:

• Gold to purchase more weapons
• Dust to re-roll the weapon perks of your choice
• Resources to upgrade the weapons that the player actually wants

While such solutions put the duplicate issue to bed, it also puts more pressure on the bad drop system.

#2 Repair

One system that hasn’t been used often is the repair system..

Fallout 3 used this effectively by asking players to collect duplicates to maintain their gear. Have an amazing piece of gear? It will eventually deteriorate and be less effective over time. To repair it, you can pay a large amount of currency or find duplicates of your gear to repair for free. If the deterioration is felt as fair to players, this can create a repeatable grind to find duplicates of your gear to maintain its highest possible gameplay effectiveness.

This system is likely avoided because of the consumable feel that drops from the gacha become: The feeling that an amazing item will drop, but one that’s only useful briefly. It’s a feeling that anyone who played Zelda: Breath of the Wild will definitely find familiar

#3 Fusion (Unlocking Potential)

[Source: Both Guns Blazing]

Fusion is the typical way that Japanese and Chinese games have made duplicates relevant. These games typically focus on selling stat improvements over cosmetics, and because of this they focus their duplicate mechanics more on unlocking higher stat growth.

Fusion mechanics are designed in a way that requires the player to receive a duplicate in order to increase the stat potential of a card. As such, while you can upgrade a card up to high level, unlocking the ability to upgrade it even further requires you to “evolve” or “awaken” the card with a duplicate of itself.

When looking at the stacking probability needed to get the highest star rating, it’s easy to see why they do this. You can drive a lot of depth in a gacha system by asking players to chase after duplicates without adding more content.

The problem with this comes in the randomness of the system. Getting a single duplicate becomes so important in this system that players can become very frustrated. Players have no grindable path to unlock the potential for their favourite characters. Hence, designers came up with a new system: Sharding.

#4 Sharding

As duplicate systems changed over time, there was a need to make them more flexible and granular.

To solve the issues of fusion, gacha games started to experiment with shards instead of duplicate fusion, best seen in Western Gacha games like Galaxy of Heroes. With shards, each character can’t be unlocked until you have collected a certain amount of shards. In the above example, Grand Moff Tarkin requires 80 shards to be unlocked.

However, that’s just to unlock the character. To upgrade the character to its maximum potential, the player would need to collect additional shards, so “duplicates” are simply just additional shards needed to progress to the maximum potential.

With characters now needing hundreds of shards instead of single drops to reach the maximum characters, games added mechanics which allowed players to grind for specific shards, so players that are looking to upgrade or unlock their favourite character could grind specifically for it. This wasn’t possible with the fusion system before, since giving a single card could mean massive progress for players. In short, sharding allows clear progress.

However, there remains one big problem: opening up a gacha pack you’ve paid for and receiving mere pieces of a character – nothing that you can use there and then. It’s a transaction the player almost always regrets and, as a result, Supercell came up with a workaround.

#5 Unlock & Upgrade

Clash Royale provided a completely new framework for how to handle duplicates. It took the best of the Shard framework, made the handling of duplicates restrictive, yet still has a gacha system that feels fair.

With Royale’s system, each card is unlocked after getting the first card. This feels far better than shards because getting a new card feels amazing – there’s no more paying for “parts of a character”.

After you unlock the card, the card becomes a duplicate sink. In order to upgrade the card, you need to collect a number of duplicates of that card. It removes any needed management of duplicates, while giving a clear path for players to upgrade their cards.

Due to the design, players will unlock cards fairly quickly (you only need one card), but the majority of the chase is after the (thousands) of duplicates necessary to upgrade your cards to a competitive level. This system has significant depth, allowing Supercell to be generous with the cards it gives out, and keep players collecting for years.

However, despite its perks, this design still has disadvantages. For one, Clash Royale has to work really hard to try to ensure that as many cards as useful to players as possible. Otherwise, getting a duplicate for a card you aren’t using is completely useless (the only way to get value from it is to trade it away to clan mates). This works very well for CCG style games, but many games can’t support this level of gacha width – where every item from the gacha is theoretically useful.

#6 Unlocking Better Cosmetics

All these mechanics thus far are primarily focused on handling situations where duplicates give out better stats – they “unlock the potential” of an item so they can be upgraded further. This works great for games that are RPG-based and are comfortable with players speeding up progression (ex. Clash Royale), but most competitive PvP games can’t do this, such as Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, and League of Legends. Competitive PvP games can really only sell cosmetics. So, how do you add value to duplicates for cosmetic economies?

This is considerably harder, which is why most cosmetic driven games end up allowing players to convert duplicates into dust (ex. Overwatch) or allow players to sell them on a secondary market (ex. Counter Strike: Global Offensive). League of Legends has even dabbled in at first not fully “unlocking” the cosmetic, but only allowing the player to “rent” the cosmetic. Getting duplicates eventually allows the player to convert their duplicates into a permanent item.

However, beyond this, the only thing you can do is make duplicates of cosmetic gear unlock cooler/better visuals of a cosmetic item. In Counter-Strike: Go (CS:GO), they use a “decay” system to do this.

In CS:GO, each item is dropped with a randomly assigned “decayed” attribute. This could mean that the item looks brand new, or is heavily worn down. Getting a duplicate allows players to find items which have far less wear, meaning that players aren’t just chasing that “item”, but also chasing the best looking version of it. The visual differences between “Factory New” and “Battle Scarred” are striking – making the value of having the highest valuable version of the item very important to players that are chasing after cosmetics.

As such, similar to stats, cosmetics can have a “unlocking potential” of their own – you just need to make sure your cosmetic items can have varying degrees of visual quality.

Summary: Duplicates aren’t Bad Drops

In any Gacha system, regardless if you’re just dropping cosmetic items or gameplay impacting items you, as a designer you are responsible for ensuring that there is as little remorse or regret from players – for making sure that each purchase of a loot box feels rewarding to players.

• Gacha depth helps ensure that you can sustain drops from a gacha.
• Gacha width ensures that each item is as useful as possible.
• However, Duplicates are inevitable, and how you handle them is important to achieve the balance between a system that feels fair to players and doesn’t cripple your studio by producing lots of content.

There are seven examples of mechanics you can use to handle duplicates and give them value:

• Dust: Allowing players a path to purchase items they want
• Duplicates aren’t Duplicates: Using procedural generation to have subtle differences between drops
• Repair: Duplicates can power up a previously owned item
• Fusion: Unlocking further potential
• Shards: Breaking fusion up into a more granular path
• Unlock & Upgrade: Unlocking higher stat levels with duplicates, no option for duplicates
• Unlocking Better Cosmetics: unlocking better looking versions of the same cosmetic

Each have their pros and cons, but hopefully can help you decide what is the best path for your game.

Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money is an unusual idle game.  The game features a very niche license and very unconventional gameplay.  It defies many of the genre’s conventions, adding elements like an episodic linear narrative, very rigid ascension requirements, and an extensive gacha system that is woven deep into the game’s core.  Yet the game has managed to be both a commercial and critical success, averaging at least a 4.5 star rating on every version and setting revenue records for the idle game genre.  This is an insider’s view of how this unconventional design was born, and how and why it works.

Origin Story for Trailer Park Boys

My name is Dave Rohrl, and I’ve been producing and design games for almost 25 years. I currently run a small game design consulting company that helps mobile game studios all over the world solve challenging design problems. I was approached by East Side Games in early 2016 about mentoring some of their development teams and helping out on their new products.  

The company was in development on a Trailer Park Boys-based idle game.  The game made a number of critical design errors.  The game had three main screens, each with a different activity, in honor of the franchise’s three main characters.  All three screens were of critical importance to play the game.  This made it difficult to articulate and focus on the creative center of the game.

The first module screen required constant tapping to prime the pump of the economy.  This is a common design mistake made by newcomers to the idle genre, who often assume that clicker games are about…well…clicking.  As ample research has shown, this is not at all their core.  Rather, players enjoy letting the game passively generate resources between sessions so they can spend those resources improving their economies.

Newcomers to the idle genre, who often assume that clicker games are about…well…clicking… this is not at all their core.

The second module was an odd one.  It again required tapping to convert the currency earned on the first screen into the game’s main soft currency – money.  The user then navigated to a third screen, which allowed the player to spend money to upgrade the operations on the other two screens – possibly with some element of automation.

East Side brought me in to evaluate the game.  And my feedback was quick, direct, and unequivocal.  The game’s core design was not working, and needed a significant streamlining or a full reboot.

The team decided to restart the game using familiar core mechanics from idle games like Adventure Capitalist or Doomsday Clicker with a few enhancements supporting the IP.  The player would build up businesses in the eponymous trailer park to earn money, to level up the businesses (which we referred to as acquiring customers), and occasionally fight the antagonist law enforcement officers that bedevil the boys.  The existing team struggled to take the design further than this, so East Side asked me to partner with the game’s producer to lead the game’s design.

Extra Requirements

In addition to the usual requirements that come with any mobile game project, like building a fun game with good retention and monetization, the game came with some unusual requirements that we needed to accommodate in the design.

The game was, of course, based on a license. Trailer Park Boys is a faux documentary series, originally broadcast in Canada and now distributed by Netflix.  It features the antics of petty felons who live in a trailer park in Nova Scotia, constantly trying to earn easy money through scams that the trailer park supervisors and local cops try to thwart.  The show is a cult hit, with a small but very passionate following.

As with any licensed game, we wanted to make sure that we used the license to strongly shape not only the presentation, but also the core gameplay.  We wanted the player to feel like they were running their own scams and getting their own a$$#s thrown in jail.   And because the game was based on a strong character franchise, we wanted to feature the characters prominently in gameplay and to tell their stories in the show’s cheeky, hilarious tone.

In addition, the game was looking expensive on its original course, and rebooting the design certainly didn’t make it any cheaper.  As a result, there was a lot of concern about the game monetizing well – particularly given that idle games are generally not high ARPDAU products.  The team and East Side’s management looked around for ways to monetize the game better, and – given the fact that we were all playing quite a bit of Clash Royale at the time – it’s not too surprising that we settled in on the notion of adding a card upgrade system backed by a gacha (random reward) system to the game, supported by a secondary, non-inflationary currency – Liquor.

Stories, Seasons, and Ascension

The original design for integrating stories into the game was to make short cutscenes and associate them with selected achievements, much like Adventure Capitalist associates its event rewards with reaching certain business levels.

Unfortunately, I saw a number of issues with this approach.  Players would enjoy lots of cutscenes early in the game, but as they became more established, cutscenes would inevitably drift further and further apart.  As these rewarding plot interludes became less and less frequent, players could grow bored with the game and churn out.  

We also couldn’t guarantee the sequence in which players would see cutscenes, so it would be impossible for us to tell real stories – just to offer one-off vignettes.  This was a deal-breaker, as the franchise is heavily focused on episodic comedy storytelling.

Instead, I proposed a different approach to dispensing the story.  We would break the game up into seasons, where each season would tell a single TPB story. Of course, the player moved from season to season by ascending.

We showed an intro scene at the beginning of each season, continuation scenes throughout based on the number of goals completed, and a finale scene just before the season’s final boss fight. This allowed us to implement a classic three act structure to build the kind of narrative arc that fans of the series love.  It kept players playing for the concrete reward of seeing the next cutscene.  Players got addicted to the end-of-season experience where they would experience a burst of fun activities – see a cutscene, play a boss fight, collect a bunch of rewards, and roll right into the next season’s intro cutscene and the fast early portion of the next season.

Goals

Of course, having decided to implement seasons, we needed a way to define for players to complete a season.  We looked at other idle games that had implemented ascension requirements, like the cash requirements in Doomsday Clicker or the progress requirements in Tap Titans, but we found them pretty uninteresting.  So we decided to lift a page from typical casual games and give the player a series of goals to complete.  Once the player had complete enough of the goals we set before them, they could end the season, fight a boss, and ascend.

As soon as we added this feature to the game, the gameplay started to feel much more interesting.  Rather than always buying the cheapest or highest yield business available to you, having player specific goals forces the player to focus on different aspects of the game at different times.  This made the game feel more structured and gave players more opportunities to feel smart and strategic.

Our original system gave the player only one goal at a time.  Although this was still fun, it led to real problems when the player was making slow progress toward their one and only goal. This was especially painful when the goal required some random rewards or other random elements.  Jason Bailey, East Side’s Chairman, came up with the idea of having 3 goals available at all times, similar to Halfbrick’s Jetpack Joyride.  After a bit of experimentation, we settled into the final structure, giving the player three tracks of goals – one linked to earning and spending soft currency, one linked to earning secondary currency and gacha items, and the third related to spending secondary currency and gacha.  This led to a robust system that allowed non-payers to progress at their own pace while giving payers an obvious way to accelerate.

Making Gacha Central

As I mentioned earlier, East Side Games’ management asked us to include a gacha system in the game to increase monetization.  Since we all wanted characters to be central to the game, it was an easy decision to use the gacha system as a way to upgrade characters.  And since we had businesses playing a central role in the game, it seemed to make sense to use the gacha system there as well. This gave us a critical mass of valuable items to create drops for.

Once we reached this decision, we needed to figure out how to integrate the gacha-leveled items into the game.  We quickly decided to associate two characters with each business, and to have the level of the business and associated characters make each business faster or more profitable.  

Unfortunately, this made the system completely optional.  The player could engage with it and gain marginal benefits or ignore it and progress almost as quickly.  A major turning point in the design came when we decided to require certain character levels to automate businesses.  Automation is a critical part of any idle game design, and forcing players to interact with the gacha system to use automation meant that every single player would be chasing cards and Liquor to be able to advance.  This had a huge impact on the game’s monetization, which is much higher than most other idle games.

The Trouble With Ascension

Ascension systems are core to idle game design.  After the player has played for a while, their progress slows down a crawl because of the structure of the underlying math.  The player then decides to restart the game (often called ascending, prestiging, restarting, or a variety of other names).  When they restart, they earn a special currency that tweaks the game math in some way, generally allowing them to progress faster.

This well-worn system has a number of issues.  Deciding when to ascend can be very awkward for casual players, as it requires a good understanding of the game’s math and ascension system.  And ascension currencies tend to be a bit abstract and weird.  And the story behind why the player is restarting the game from the beginning is thin or altogether missing.

In TPB, our season and gacha systems solved major problems with the ascension system.  Because the player cannot ascend until they complete enough goals, the game gives them a clear signal on when they should ascend.  Of course some of our more engaged players play on long after we let them move on to the next season, but at least our most casual players don’t have to sweat the decision.

Likewise, rather than having an ascension currency, we simply carry the player’s character and business levels forward.  Since the player has built up those bonuses during gameplay, it’s only natural that those levels should be maintained and carried forward.

And the story of ascension fits the license like a glove.  On the TV show, the boys are constantly getting thrown into jail for one reason or another, usually for their ridiculous scams and petty crimes.  In Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money, we used that trope from the show to explain our ascension mechanic.  When the player resets the game, it’s because the boys lost their fight with the police and got thrown in jail once again.  And with the boys gone, their business empire falls apart and needs to be rebuilt.  This perfect alignment of mechanic and narrative has been one of the most beloved features of the game.

Content Challenges

Although all these design elements helped make the game into a success, they all created significant challenges on the design and production side – each in their own special way.

The stories themselves are a central element of the design, and they were surprisingly hard to get right.  The TV show’s stories have a very particular flavor, and getting the humor, pacing, and character relationships in good shape required many iterations.  In addition to going through a number of contract writers looking for folks who really got the IP, the team put in many nights and weekends working to get the narrative on point.  But because we knew that the game’s core audience would be super-fans of the show, it was critical that we kept going until we got it right.

The use of goals and seasons made the gameplay sing, but that came at a price.  Instead of just needing to create a fun progression with inflection points for each business, we needed to carefully hand-craft a set of goals that could be completed at exactly the right cadence to keep the player engaged while dragging just enough to create real incentives for monetization.  This is an incredibly ticklish balance that requires significant playtesting and iteration for every single season, and we sometimes get it wrong.  We are constantly looking at player data and re-adjusting existing seasons.

The gacha system added great monetization, but also added a lot of randomness to the player’s state.  It would be very possible for two players who have progressed equally quickly to suddenly diverge over the course of a season because one had the right characters upgraded for that season while the other did not.  This meant that accurately forecasting how long players would take to complete seasons and goals was very tricky and our estimates were often off by a good bit.

We also did very well at engaging players with the character upgrade gacha system, but never found the right mechanic to generate similar levels of engagement with building upgrades.  We had a few ideas, but none of them have made their way into the game yet.

Final Outcomes

Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money release on April 20th (4/20 – get it?) and shot up the download and grossing charts.  It set records for daily gross revenues for a mobile idle game and drew rave reviews from critics and users (still over 4.5 stars on the Apple and Google app stores).   Now nearly six months old, the game continues to generate great revenue and goodwill as we continue to roll out linear content, new events, new features, and new platforms.  

There were a number of critical design decisions that contributed to this success, but in my view the three most critical were:

1. Gacha: Building a strong gacha system and baking it firmly into the game’s core loop helped the game monetize far better than competitors and opened up interesting new vectors of gameplay.
2. Celebrating the IP: Letting the Trailer Park Boys IP guide chunks of the gameplay, and not just the game’s presentation, led us to fun, novel places, and guaranteed the game would be a hit with the show’s fans.
3. Challenging genre conventions: We were not afraid to challenge some entrenched idle game design tropes, like leaving the ascension decision entirely to the player or avoiding linear content.  Our willingness to break these rules let us build something that was not just unique but also fun and fresh for players, and high performing for East Side Games.

About the Author

Dave Rohrl is the Owner of Mobile Game Doctor, a boutique game design consultancy that works with game developers worldwide to improve their games, teams, and processes.  Dave is an industry veteran with nearly 25 years of experience who has held senior roles at Pogo, PopCap, and Playdom, among others.  He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his two daughters and 600 board games.

I recently visited Pocket Gamer Connects in Helsinki and presented a talk on Gacha.

Here is the video of the presentation:

Here are my slides:

Pocket Gamer Helsinki 2017: Recipe for Strong Gacha (PDF)

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)
  • The deeper your gacha, the higher your long term retention + max economy spend will be, which are critical for success in F2P

• To know what the depth of your gacha model is, you need to model your max drops. (read here if you don’t know what drops means)
  • 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.

When Supercell launches a new game, it sends shock waves around our industry and players alike. On June 14th, Supercell released Brawl Stars — and in typical fashion, we all jumped on to give it a try.

But there was something special about when Supercell launched Brawl Stars. The game was Supercell’s first outside of the strategy genre. Brawl Stars is the first action-based multi-player game for Supercell, and notably, the most casual MOBA style game launched for mobile to date. Supercell also publicised the launch, beginning with an e-sport style tournament. This isn’t a typical soft launch; they are already building up a massive community and driving a strong streamer culture around this game. This was a bold move for Supercell. Supercell has been known to stop games such as Battle Buddies, Smash Land and Spooky Pop when they don’t look like they will become a top 10 game. Going into this soft launch with so much confidence is bold.

But weeks after the game has been launched, industry veterans began to weigh in and started noticing the cracks in the design. Many have already dismissed the game as an unlikely game to launch, despite having a massive following already from streamers and e-sport fans. Currently, the game is sustaining in the top 10 grossing in Canada and driving a massive community around it. Despite the concerns, this game could end up being a surprise hit due to the strong multiplayer gameplay.

But ultimately as a game designer, what I see from Brawl Stars is an amazing game that is weakened by a poorly designed gacha system. It fails to deliver on what a gacha system needs to do, and it will ultimately not last in its current incarnation. Comparing the system to Clash Royale, Brawl Stars system is considerably weaker and will result in lower revenue on a per player basis. Even if Supercell can drive downloads organically, this will hold it back from where it could be.

While I believe the game is incredibly fun to play and may just succeed based on its multiplayer component alone, ultimately the game will be weak on a revenue-per-player basis.

From this analysis, it begs the question:

What is it about the Brawl Star mechanics which weakens the Gacha? That comes down to Depth.

“Depth” of a Gacha System

Something to clarify is about how designers look at depth of a gacha system, and why this matters.

The depth of a gacha system ultimately defines how long it will last, roughly what the maximum spend a player could spend to reach the end of content, or how long a player would need to play before reaching the end of content. This is usually defined as the number of drops it takes to complete the gacha.

A “drop” in a gacha is defined as giving away a single item. For example, in Clash Royale a drop would be synonymous with a single card dropped from a chest. Some designers also call this a “pull” — but for this article, I will call them drops.

Keep in mind that a drop does not mean a chest. A Chest has multiple drops in the case of Clash Royale, but a chest in Brawl Stars only contains a single drop. Also, not all drops are alike — a drop from a legendary chest in Clash Royale is not the same as a drop in a wooden chest — since the legendary chest has different probabilities for selecting higher value items. But when roughly measuring the depth of a gacha — you can ignore (average out) the “quality” of a drop.

Drops are important because the ultimate goal in free to play games is to maximise long-term retention and maximise the cap of the economy. To drive strong long-term retention, players need to have a long lasting sustained desire to pull from the Gacha. The more drops this takes, the longer the system will last.

The more drops a gacha can sustain, the more generous a game can be, the higher revenue per player, and the higher the long term retention would likely be.

On this metric, Clash Royale’s system dominates Brawl Stars, comparing their soft launch states. Designers usually have 3 key variables to maximise Depth: Content, Duplicate mechanics and Pacing. In all 3 of these cases, Clash Royale’s systems outperform Brawl Stars.

Problem #1: Content

Content is usually the easiest problem to point to with a shallow gacha system. Brawl Stars has 15 characters (for now) whereas Clash Royale had 42 at their soft launch.

What this gave Clash Royale was a longer period of time in which players were likely to get new content, as well as the ability to control the pacing of the introduction of this content. With 42 cards at launch, Clash Royale was able to pace the pool over time using Arena tiers. So players knew they needed to play for awhile before they could even gain access to some of the upper tier cards.

On top of this, because they were able to launch with this much content, each interaction with the gacha system felt novel and interesting, especially between arena tiers. So playing through arena 1, each time you opened up a gacha chest you typically got new cards. Each time you levelled up to a new tier, you were introduced to a whole new set of cards, all of a sudden the gacha got way more exciting to open (even inciting purchases like the limited offer for each tier!).

For Brawl Stars, with 15 characters, all available in the gacha from the beginning, with only a few as legendary, this leaves Supercell in an inflexible position. They need to keep all 15 in the pool from the beginning, otherwise, players will get duplicates too fast from the gacha. By only having a few legendaries, the path to complete the gacha feels fast. As a paying player of Brawl Stars, I’ve dropped a small amount of money, but already feel like I’ve unlocked a majority of the content that the game has to offer.

With more content, Brawl Stars would have considerably better control over the player experience and make it last far longer.

For Supercell to correct this problem it may not come in the form of new characters. Brawl Stars gameplay is not the same as Clash Royale. Clash Royale’s core gameplay supports and pushes players to have a collection of cards, especially since each battle requires 8 cards chosen. Brawl Stars only asks the player to choose 1 character. If they add too many characters, this may lead to players losing the desire to collect them all. Having too many characters can lead to players just choosing one they like and ignoring the rest. Brawl Stars will need to find new ways of dropping desirable content, and it may not be in the form of characters. Content can come in the form of special abilities, perks, equipable weapons, customizations, which each could add considerable depth to the progression system, and drive players to upgrade more than just their favourite character.

Problem #2: Duplicates

Content typically isn’t a terminal problem on its own. Content is simply the base in which the gacha total drops has to work with. If content were the only thing that was important, Hearthstone’s 1,000+ card collection would dominate over Clash Royale, but this isn’t the case. The fact is that Clash Royale got away with significantly less content than Hearthstone at its launch because of its duplicate system.

Even with a smaller set of content, a strong mechanic for handling duplicates can make a gacha mechanic last.

The most terminal problem that was introduced with Brawl Stars was the mechanic for handling duplicates.

In Brawl Stars, getting a duplicate character in the gacha meant that you were instead rewarded with a single blue chip. This mechanic is similar to Hearthstone, where you can exchange duplicate cards for a small amount of dust. Players can exchange the blue chips in for unlocking characters, although the number of blue chips necessary to unlock many of the rare characters is insane.

As a result, each time I have purchased gacha packs from Brawl Stars I’ve felt completely regretful. After I unlocked a majority of the characters, each chest has a high probability of dropping a single blue chip over unlocking a new character or gaining some elixir (the currency necessary to upgrade your characters). Having a string of gacha packs that just give out blue chips, especially if you’ve unlocked all the content, would surely cause many players to churn.

Clash Royale doesn’t have this problem because it drives significant value from its duplicates. Duplicate cards are necessary to upgrade the card. Getting a single card unlocks the card for use, but to have the fully upgraded version of the card, you need duplicates of it.

This is what makes Clash Royale’s Gacha system last. Thinking in terms of the number of drops, even with a base amount of content of 42 cards, requiring each card duplicate to be found hundreds of times (depending on rarity) exponentially increases the number of drops necessary to reach the end of the economy.

Even thinking about maximising a single legendary card can show you that it takes a lot of drops. It’s reported that Supercell drops 1 legendary card 0.43% of the time in their gold level chests. If we use this as a base, and a pool of 6 legendary cards, that leaves the % of dropping your chosen legendary to be 0.0716%. In order to upgrade this card fully, you need 37 drops of this card. So, on average, a player will need over 50,000 drops before their single legendary card is fully upgraded. That’s a system that LASTS.

So for Brawl Stars to utilise its minimal content better, it needs to think about duplicate mechanics similar to Clash Royale. Potentially duplicates increase the max upgrade level of a character. Potentially duplicates unlock new special abilities. Without it, players will simply lose interest in the gacha, or feel as though the high price tag to purchase chests are just not worth it.

Problem #3: Pacing

With gacha systems, designers have one final variable to control how long their gacha lasts: pacing.

Not all gacha systems support a huge amount of drops, but to counteract this, increase the time it takes for a player to get another drop from the gacha. For pacing, game designers typically have a couple methods to use:

• Pace how often the players can open the gacha
• Pace how many drops the gacha gives

Clash Royale gives a lot of drops daily. With free chests, crown chests, clan chests, and regular chests, each day players can get plenty of free drops to feel progress. This is mostly because Clash Royale’s duplicate system multiplied by their high amount of content supports such a high amount of drops.

With Brawl Stars, because of the low level of content and the fact that duplicates aren’t necessary, this left Supercell designers in a bind. They had to pace their gacha significantly slower. They did this by tying chests to coins, and by making chests only give 1 drop each. Comparing this to the experience of opening a chest in Clash Royale, Brawl Star’s gacha boxes are far less rewarding. The reward pops up, you get a single currency of something, and then you’re left feeling — “That’s it?”. This problem is magnified when each drop can be amazing or terrible feeling. If I get a new character or some elixir — this feels good. If I get a blue chip… I feel like all the time I put into collecting coins for that box was worthless.

Clash Royale’s chests on the other end can guarantee rare or legendary cards, and even if I get a duplicate, it still feels beneficial. So even as I reach the mid-game and end-game where I have a majority of the content, every time I open a gacha I feel like I’m making progress, and I have a chance for big gains.

Supercell had pace Brawl Stars chests this harshly because their economy only supports a certain amount of drops. If they increase the number of drops a chest will give, this will mean they either need to increase the pacing (increase the cost in coins to purchase a chest) or they will be allowing players to speed through content significantly faster — something they can’t afford with the low amount of content they have so far.

The Path Forward

Supercell’s Brawl Stars is an amazingly fun game to play. As the community has shown, there is a huge desire to play an action-based MOBA on mobile, and clearly, Supercell has capitalised on this with Brawl Stars. This game has a strong chance of succeeding simply based on its rabid community building around its multiplayer core gameplay.

But as we know in free to play, a strong core gameplay is only the first step towards success. For Brawl Stars to become a Supercell-sized success, it’s about how long their systems last.

Improvements could come with more content, it could come from better pacing of the gacha, but driving more sustainable drops likely will need to come from a better mechanic for duplicates to avoid a content treadmill. Taking a page from Clash Royale’s system and finding a way to make duplicates a key part of reaching the end of content for its gacha mechanics. Doing so will exponentially increase the lifetime of their gacha systems, plus drive stronger retention and monetization from their user base.

Brawl Stars has the DNA of the next Supercell hit. They may just need to make some last minute adjustments to make it the next billion dollar game. I’ll be cheering for them.

It’s happened. F2P Mobile is now officially triple A. The major publishers have all put more focus on mobile than on console. (see Bethesda, Nintendo and Konami)

Now we are also starting to see high budget games climb on the top grossing charts.

If you still believe that the AppStore can still have indie success on the Top Grossing, the stakes are rising. Games from now on will need significant investments in their visuals on top of having a strong economy design to succeed.

The proof of triple-A F2P is “Marvel Contest of Champions” by Kabam. Showing their recent commitment to working closely with Hollywood, they’ve brought both AAA visual standards and a strong license to mobile. As a result the game has been downloaded by over 30 million people and taken a dominant spot in the Top 25 grossing:

But is this game just all glam, but no substance? Can Marvel sustain in the Top Grossing?

The Pitch

Kabam’s approach for Contest of Champions was clear: Take “Injustice: Gods Among Us” and, apply it to a new license. On top of having the license, take learnings from Kabam’s other games and improve the economy design, multiplayer, and ensure that events are strongly tied to its core.

Its a simple premise, but Kabam’s secret formula of events, multiplayer gameplay and monetization is a powerful force. They’ve proven this before with the Hobbit’s mobile game and the Fast and the Furioius mobile game.

Injustice: Gods Among Us was a game released in March 2013 by DC Comics and Warner Brothers. Its essentially a very simple fighting game at its core with a collectible card game as its meta.

Both Injustice and Contest of Champions are similar to Idle games where it really gives players a “bait and switch”. Based on the screen shots you’d think this was the next Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. But after the first battle you quickly get introduced to the true intention of the game : collecting the characters and upgrading them. You came for the 3D fighting mechanic, but are quickly hooked in the long haul to collecting the characters.

The Core : Back to Basics

Comparing Injustice to Marvel Contest, Marvel has simpler controls, easier strategy, and much shorter battles. Injustice focuses on building up a combo enough to do a quick-time-event (“Swipe to knock down opponent”) whereas Marvel is more about building up a sustained combo of attacks of choosing whether to jab (which can be defended) or go for a heavy attack which can break defenses.

Fights are much shorter because they’ve cut out the 3v3 battle. Its 1 on 1 like original fighting games with victory based on the first KO.

Overall I believe the changes make the game better for mobile. Its easier to play and the fights are quicker. This allows players to complete sessions in less time and spend more time in the metagame. However, moving from 3v3 sacrifices some of the strategy in the battle. As a result battles quickly grow pretty tedious, which puts more pressure on the metagame to keep the strategy.

So how did Marvel fill the gap in the Meta?

Unlike Gods Among Us, Kabam also chose to focus on elemental types. This adds more strategy to choosing which hero you bring to different fights. Also to make sure that the simple 1v1 fights don’t push players to collect and invest in only 1 hero, they added elemental types which push players to collect heroes of each element.

Each element has a strength and a weakness. So each time the player enters a match, they run the risk of facing up against an enemy which is their weakness. This adds strategy to choosing who you bring along and making sure you have a spread of different strong heroes for each type.

Bringing this all together, Kabam really pushes players to be strategic outside the battle. So when you’re playing a online match, players are invited to strategize about which fighter they want to play against an opponent:

Note here that the Scarlet Witch shouldn’t be paired up against Hulk. The player  should try to find a better matchup.

The Meta : Gacha for the West

This is really where Contest of Champions gets interesting. At the metagame layer, the game delivers on the licensee’s strengths. There are a ton of different Marvel heroes to collect, each of which has their own, stylized 3D model.

Each character feels unique. Each character looks beautiful. As a fan of Marvel, you’re really driven to collect your favorite heroes. However, this is where the monetization and retention come in. To get your favorite hero, you need to get lucky in the Gacha system.

This Gacha system is embodied in the Crystal Vault :

Crystals are a currency that is used to give a random reward. Crystals are earned through timers (daily, every few hours), through play (multiplayer or single player) or from purchase. Each time the player completes one of those actions, they are pulled into the Crystal Storage screen. From here, they can open up a random reward within: A resource or sometimes a new character. Here is an example of a player opening up a crystal:

These Crystals are the most important design decision that Kabam made.

There are 3 reasons for this:

#1: Each time the player earns a crystal, they are brought back to the Crystal Vault

Each time they complete the actions needed for the crystal, they are brought back to the storage area. Each time they are reminded of all the other options they can purchase, and all the other means to progress. Players know that in order to get heroes, they need to earn crystals. In order to earn crystals, they need to pay or play.

#2: Each Crystal is a Lottery

Each crystal gives a chance of what you want. No crystal ever gives defined rewards. Want that cyclops? Well that’s the top prize in this crystal, so buying the crystal will not guarantee you earning Cyclops. This is gacha done perfectly.

Gacha works because in the beginning players can purchase these gacha packs (crystals) and get great content. Each time they open a crystal they get a brand new hero they’ve never seen before. As time goes on, as a designer you introduce mechanics and promote content that drive players to want rarer and rarer star players. So a player wanting a 4 star rare Cyclops is going to have to purchase many, many gacha packs before they get exactly what they want.

This should be taken with some fairness though. You want to make sure that player’s don’t feel cheated when they spend money. So similar to Hearthstone (each card pack includes 1 rare), Contest also guarantees a certain star tier with each crystal that is paid.

Unlike Injustice: Gods Among Us and Mortal Kombat X (a recent release by Warner Brothers) Kabam chose to offer no direct purchasing of heroes. In Injustice, players can look at the store of all the heroes in the game and directly purchase the hero they want. In Marvel, players have to use Crystals to collect all the heroes they want. This design is more similar to Japanese games like Puzzles and Dragons, and has been a lucrative business for them. By cutting out the direct purchase and going for a more pure-Gacha system like Japanese games, they’ve maximized their revenues.

#3: They offer no direct purchase

Never allow player’s direct purchase of the content that they want in a Gacha system

Allowing players a direct purchase of the hero they want is a hit to your retention and monetization. You’ve given them the end game content for a single quick purchase.

You can see this also when you compare Mortal Kombat X to Contest of Champions. Mortal Kombat X was recently released by Warner Brothers. Arguably each game is well designed and looks beautiful, but on a Total Revenue to Total Download ratio, Marvel comes out well on top. Kabam is simply far better at monetizing, and offering no direct purchase improves this metric.

Gotta Collect ‘Em All

But the strength of Gacha lies only when you’ve added an additional layer: Rarities. In order for Gacha to work, you need to drive desire to get the absolute rarest items. In the beginning as a player it is alright to get a 1 or 2 star spider man. It feels good to get these heroes. But as you play, you quickly realise that this spider man isn’t going to cut it — you need to play your chances at getting the rarest heroes.

To do this, Kabam added Star Tiers to their heroes. Each hero can be found in 1 star to 5 star forms. The higher the star rating, the rarer the hero. Having a higher star hero increases their base stats, exponentially increases their potential highest level, and adds passive and active special abilities during the battle. All 3 of these are important to monetization and retention.

Having strong base stats makes the hero feel powerful immediately versus opponents. Making sure that Rare monsters immediately feel good to purchase and easy to dominate opponents with is crucial to drive first time purchases.

Exponentially increasing the maximum potential also increases the amount the player must invest their time and energy to reach the hero’s maximum potential. The higher the star rarity, the more time the player must spend to upgrade the hero to their maximum potential.

For players to upgrade their heroes, they must use in different strands of ISOs. ISOs come from actively playing (mostly) so in order to fully upgrade your amazing 3 star champion, you have to collect ISO.

This is essential for Long term retention. This mechanic nudges players commit to training their heroes to receive their full benefit. Without this exponential growth, players would pay for the best hero then forget about actively playing in the game.

 

Lastly, Adding Passive and Active special abilities in the battle gives visual feedback to the player that what they are doing (collecting rare heroes) is worth it.

Heroes that are 3 stars or more have an extended special ability bar (as shown above in the bottom left). When the player fills up this meter, the hero shows a unique animation and does a lot of damage. You can only trigger this ability if you’ve got the 3 star or higher version of this hero. This is very important to ensure that players feel rewarded and powerful for getting the highest heroes.

Just increasing a virtual number is not rewarding enough for players. Eventually you’re going to have to give players real visible rewards for getting the rare content.

In Summary

Kabam’s Contest of Champions decided to focus their innovation on outside the battle, in the Meta. The Meta for all games is what drives long term retention and strong monetization. This paid off for Kabam.

They focused on creating a pure Gacha system, stripping out elements from Warner Brother’s Injustice: Gods Among Us that was conflicting with what they know to drive strong free to play design:

• Simpler, shorter battles for better sessions
• No direct purchase of heroes
• Engrained crystals into the core game loop
• Deeper Star Tier system to create more reasons to purchase
• Elemental system to promote collection of heroes

As a result, Kabam have a top performing game.

To be Continued…

Marvel Contest of Champions innovations and design insights don’t just stop at the Gacha system. Rather than overwhelm you, I’ll put this one on pause for now. Next up I’ll focus on Multiplayer and Session Design.

Stay Tuned!

Supercell’s most recent soft launch is called Smash Land. It’s been in soft launch phase in Canada and Australia since March 31st 2015 (About 2 months from this post). There is no doubt that Supercell’s soft launches are huge news for the mobile free to play industry. Supercell is notoriously picky about what games that make it to soft launch. Each new game goes through rigorous internal feedback, and only the best games survive. The games that hit soft launch are games that Supercell genuinely believes have a shot at the Top Grossing charts.

Smash Land is based on “Monster Strike”, a massive mobile free to play game in Japan. In December 2014 it took over Puzzles and Dragons’ top spot in the Japanese charts. Similar to how Supercell started Clash of Clans with looking at Backyard Monsters, Supercell now looks to simplify the design of Monster Strike so that it could work in the Western markets. But in Supercell’s simplification of a game that performs so well in Japan, has the game stayed intact?

Has what remains kept what is required to be a successful game?

Smash Land’s Core Battle

Supercell decided to keep core battle game the same as Monster Strike. The core battle mechanic is a Physics-based RPG battle. Almost like a game of pool, the game is mostly about predicting how balls on a flat surface will bump and move to create a preferred outcome. In Smash Land, the game is about lining up one of your characters so that it bounces between walls, enemy characters and your own characters as many times as possible. The player then collects up to 10 different heroes, each with their own special ability. For an overview of the mechanic, watch this video:

Overall the core battle feels smoother, cleaner and is much easier to understand than Monster Strike. Each character feels unique because of their special abilities which feels great.

The gameplay is very strong for a mobile F2P game. Its easy to pick up and understand for any player. The feeling of skill is strong — I can predict a few bumps and feel smart about setting up strong combos. On top of this, because of the nature of physics, Luck comes into play. Like Peggle, physics is usually pretty easy to predict after the first shot, but after the first few collisions it becomes almost impossible to predict the outcome. As a result each move can result in some “Post-Action Luck” which is critical for casual games.  Players feel smart and each shot is unpredictable.

Overall they’ve taken the best bits of Monster Strike and applied it to a more focused experience. It’s a great battle system that is easy to get addicted to.

Heroes

Outside of the battle, players can also engage in upgrading their heroes stats. This is really where Smash Land departs from Monster Strike.

Monster Strike contains far more variety of stats for each character:

Just comparing these two screens you can see the dramatic comparison between the games. Its much easier to understand Smash Land compared to Monster Strike.

However, at what cost is this simplicity? In Smash Land the major differences between the characters are special abilities and their health to damage ratio. In Monster Strike, the team you bring into battle requires far more strategy as you progress in the game.

You need a balance of elemental types on top of ensuring you’ve got strong special abilities that are complementary. My guess is that while Supercell’s game clearly scores points for understandability, it will seriously limit the long term replayability of the game compared to Monster Strike. Players just won’t have nearly as much to strategize about in the long run.

Smash Land also departs from Monster Strike in how upgrades are handled.

Heroes are upgraded with gold and time. So the player collects gold from playing matches or collecting them from treasure hunts, and turns this gold into upgrades to their heroes. The cost of each upgrade escalates very quickly. As a result, the game really starts to require many, many battles before you can afford a single upgrade.

Smash Land’s system is far simpler than Monster Strike. Monster Strike takes cues from Japanese Gatcha games like Puzzles and Dragons. To upgrade your heroes you must collect hundreds of characters and consume them to give experience points to your heroes. For a great overview of Gacha, read here.

Leaving the Gatcha system out for Smash Land is a big risk, what remains is a far too simple economy that quickly becomes a grind.

Monster Strike’s system with consuming & collecting monsters has a massive advantage in the long run compared to Smash Land. Instead of just 10 heroes, Monster Strike has almost 1000 collectable monsters in the game (source). With this massive set of monsters, they have created a system where players have much more excitement for the long run.

As I’ve spoken about before, to alleviate the feeling of grinding it’s all about creating random spikes of progression. Similar to games like Diablo you need to find ways to add luck to your progression. Ensure that each battle can result in a lucky outcome which could dramatically increase their pace of progression. In Diablo this could be finding a legendary weapon on the ground which makes it a breeze to beat the enemies following.

In Monster Strike, instead of powerful rare swords, players can randomly get awarded rare monsters from the gatcha system. The player now feels lucky, like the game gave them something for free that should have cost them real money or a lot of time. Because the player got this rare monster, they can rush through previously hard levels and feel great.

Overall the rate of progression may be slow, but because there are these moments where progression randomly spikes, players are far more likely to engage for a long time.

This variable progression is missing in Smash Land. To progress, you must upgrade your  heroes in a linear path. Each victory gives you a calculated amount of rewards. The cost of upgrading a hero grows each time.

Overall, with only 10 heroes and very limiting upgrades, the metagame is just too simple. I have the same heroes as everyone else, the same upgrades as everyone else, so there is no moment where I feel like I’ve got a really unique set of heroes that are more amazing than my opponents. Without this unique feeling, it is hard to get attached to my characters or get attached in the long run.

Desirable Stats

Smash Land removed plenty from Monster Strike when they simplified the heroes/monster collection structure. But regardless of how many collectable characters you have in your game, if you want players to engage in an upgrade system you need to ensure that those upgrades are desirable.

In Smash Land my drive to upgrade is very weak. The battle overall feels very Skill & Luck driven (as I described above). The outcome of battles has more to do with getting repeated bounces over how much each player’s heroes had levelled up. In many cases I won with far fewer levels than my opponent, or I lost at the hands of an opponent that had far fewer hero levels than me. This translates in less player demand for upgrading their heroes. Instead of having a strong desire to have the strongest possible team, players will blame victories on their skill or luck and will more likely be content with their team as is. This is a difficult balance to get right in any game. For more on Stats vs Luck vs Skill, read on here.

But for this game, where its whole monetization plan is dependant on players upgrading their characters, Stats must take more precedence in the outcome of a battle.

If the player has a decreased desire to upgrade their heroes, then this will break how the game monetizes. Hero upgrades are at the core of how this game makes money. Players grind for coins (or spend money), on top of have long timers (8 hours or more) to upgrade their characters. After spending money in the game, speeding up the upgrades all of my characters substantially, I really didn’t feel any more powerful in the game. I lost subsequent multiplayer battles, and was now facing an even higher upgrade cost for my heroes. In the end spending money in the game really just didn’t feel worthwhile.

Overall Thoughts

If this wasn’t launched by Supercell, this game would never have gone under so much scrutiny. The game on its own is polished, fun to play, and ticks all the boxes for being a successful free to play game:

• Strong Pacing of content
• Multiplayer gameplay to provide long tail retention
• Guilds to bring players together without requiring Facebook
• A simple game mechanic that’s easy to pick up and play, hard to master

But when you put them all together in this game, the metagame is too simple:

• There is not enough variety or strategy in choosing heroes
• Upgrading quickly becomes tedious and a long grind
• There is not enough desire to upgrade your team to compete at the highest level

So how will this do on the market?

So far it seems Supercell is keeping this game in a quiet soft launch. Comparing this soft launch to Boom Beach, by 2 months Boom Beach was higher in both the download charts and grossing charts within Canada (source:AppAnnie). That points to Supercell keeping the marketing costs & number of new users down for the time being while they improve the game. Supercell is very rigorous with their soft launch games. Just last year they released “Spooky Pop” which failed to hit their targets. As a result they decided to cancel the game.

Can Supercell turn this game around during the soft launch? I think it will be difficult. They cut so much away from what made Monster Strike work, its hard to see if small feature additions will be able to rebuild what’s necessary. It will only happen if they completely rebuild their Hero progression systems.

I think Smash Land should be an example for all future mobile game designers. Simplicity can open up to wider markets, but the focus on Free to Play must be on long term retention, not the widest audience. Game designers must strive to create enough longterm depth in their metagames, or else they will fail.