The market for location-based gaming is heating up this summer. We’re finally starting to see some major developers come out with an answer to Niantic’s Pokemon Go, a game that is now nearly 2 years old and going stronger than ever. Pokemon Go is a staple in the Top Grossing Charts, and with user numbers reaching an all-time high this month, it’s likely to continue. As such, there are many attempting to repeat its success. Niantic plan another title this summer, “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite”. NEXT Games have soft launched their “Walking Dead: Our World”. Ludia + Universal just launched “Jurassic World Alive” in tandem with the new movie launch.

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But many in mobile questioned how repeatable the success of Pokemon Go is. Most would say it’s success is heavily based on the Pokemon brand. So what chance do other Location-based games have?

Location-Based Gaming: The New Frontier for Retention

Location-based gaming has been public for awhile. Since smartphones had GPS, game developers have used location in their games. Parallel Kingdom, a game by Per Blue back in 2008 was one of the pioneers of this genre. Niantic’s Ingress in 2012 is an obvious iteration upon this genre. None of these games did remarkably well. So if all those games failed, and Pokemon Go succeeded, was it just the license or was it something else? What changed in 2016?

Some have pointed to the rise of Augmented Reality as a reason for Pokemon Go’s success — but this isn’t really true. While Pokemon Go does have Augmented Reality components to it, its novelty wears off fast. Many players report turning off AR mode pretty quickly after playing. True AR (using visual recognition to superimpose virtual items onto the real world) isn’t a major component of Pokemon Go. It’s just allowing players to play the catching mode using their camera. AR-mode actually just makes the catching gameplay harder and more inconvenient. AR was used for marketing rather than as a retention mechanic. So what really drives Pokemon Go’s staggering retention curve? (Seen below)

My hypothesis is that the success of Pokemon Go was partly based on branding, partly based on virality, but mostly because of the retention differences when using location as a trigger for gameplay.

What I mean by trigger here comes from psychology. Taken from “Hooked” a book by Nir Eyal, we have a framework for what drives retention in apps and games.

To drive players to come back often:

• a player sees a visual trigger to enter the game (a player is bored, sees the icon on their phone)
• which has short, effective sessions (playing a quick match 3 level)
• with variable rewards (sometimes I win, sometimes I lose)
• that build long-term investment (reaching level 1000+ on a saga map)

All successful games use this loop to drive long-term retention. What changes in location-based gaming is the Trigger — the first step — pulling players into the game.

In typical mobile games, the trigger can be external (a push notification telling you your energy has refilled) or internal (I’m bored, let’s see if I can beat this level now). A location-based game has a new type of trigger — walking around in the world, being in a new place. Players that are stuck to games like Pokemon Go will tell you their trigger points — every time they’re getting a coffee, they check for Pokemon. Every time they are out at a restaurant, they check for pokemon. On their commute to work, they’re checking for pokemon.

If a game can attach itself to a commonly felt stimuli and use it as a trigger to play a game — this is an effective retention driver.

So location-based games, when they’re working, will build psychological triggers to play the game when you’re commuting, driving more repeat sessions and higher long-term retention. But do players have an appetite for multiples of these games?

Can a game with a lesser brand compete in this category? (sorry Jurassic Park, I love you but Pokemon is bigger)

Deconstructing Jurassic World Alive

Enter Ludia, a company that has proven over the last years to be confident in entering new genres and succeeding. Founded in 2007, they’ve focused on Facebook and mobile licensed games. They were acquired by Freemantle media in 2010, and have seen continued success since then. Associating with big brands, they’ve gone on to build consistent successes on mobile. Recently, they’ve built up the Jurassic Park games on mobile. Leveraging the brand and combining with the Dragonvale framework, they’ve carved out a success on mobile within a genre (Dragon Breeding) which has been out of the spotlight for years.

Their approach to taking the Jurassic Park brand and associating it with location-based gaming looks based upon Pokemon Go, but clearly trying to fix the aspects that were missing from the experience. Where Pokemon Go is a collector’s game, Jurassic Park is a competitive battle game.

The Core Loop

The core loop of Jurassic World Alive is simple yet effective. It builds upon the working framework of Pokemon Go, and adds a key element: battling.

1. Find dinosaurs on your map, and send a drone to collect DNA from it. Based on how well you play the mini-game, the more DNA you collect.
2. This DNA is converted into dinosaurs in a Clash Royale style system. The more DNA you collect, the faster you can unlock a dino and upgrade it.
3. Using your upgraded dinos, you can battle other players, which rewards players with chests. These chests contain everything you need to restart the loop: coins and darts.

The keys here are the currency sources & sinks:

• Finding dinos takes darts, which can only be collected from battling and a daily free chest. So you need to battle to collect and upgrade.
• Coins are needed to upgrade, unlock, and fuse dinosaurs. Coins start off plentiful but become tighter and more strategic as you reach the end game.
• XP is gained only from unlock & upgrading. So levelling up is relative to how big & high levelled your collection is. Collecting & upgrading any dinosaur is helpful.
• Upgrading your dinosaurs is needed to keep battling. As you battle, your elo rating is improving, forcing you to match against more and more difficult players. In order to keep up with the matchmaking, you need to be constantly upgrading your dinosaurs.

Let’s go into each step in more detail:

Collecting Dinosaurs

The game’s main screen is the map. It takes a perspective view of a typical google map and shows you the locations of dinosaurs currently wandering your city. If you’re close enough to a dinosaur, you can send a drone out to collect DNA from it. If you’re not, you’re going to have to move closer.

For this mechanic, Ludia creates an upsell mechanic. The radius of being able to capture a dinosaur is pretty small for free players, but if you pay into their VIP system, you get an increased radius for collecting. A compelling reason for beginning + lazy players (like myself) to commit to playing the game. Very smart!

Besides this, Jurassic World Alive conveniently places a few dinosaurs near you every session. So even as a lazy player that mostly checks their devices in similar to locations, you can still make good progress. A must for location-based games.

If you’re in radius, you can send a drone to pick up DNA from the dinosaur. This is a pretty compelling minigame of aiming with your drone and sending darts to collect DNA. A bit of timing, prediction and control wonkiness make it a pretty exciting minigame. Direct hits can get you large amounts of DNA, so being more accurate pays off big time.

DNA is a precious resource, it’s similar to cards in Clash Royale. The more DNA you collect, the faster you can unlock and evolve a monster. Giving a very compelling reason to play well in the mini-game. This makes their progression significantly more skill-based than most, makes it more difficult to balance for different play types, but makes the DNA collecting minigame much more compelling. As you progress and start wanting to collect rarer and rarer dinos, you only have limited chances to collect the DNA, adding further pressure to be on the lookout for the best dinosaurs.

Long Term Retention: Fusion System

One interesting addition Ludia have added to the Pokemon Go/Clash Royale style system is the addition of Fusion:

The fusion system allows players to create specific hybrids of dinosaurs. There are a number of pre-designed recipes which require you to combine two dinos (ex. Combining t-rex and raptor to create indominus, just like the movie). This typically requires both to be a high enough level as well as a modest fusion cost. This is how you can create legendary level dinosaurs.

It’s a smart tie in from the movie that adds significant depth to their chase for the best dinosaurs.

In the case of Clash Royale, it can get frustrating with some of those early cards not being of use in the endgame. Also having no visual change to a character after unlocking it feels less powerful. With the fusion system, having a goal to level up a set of characters to unlock a more powerful character is a good long term retention system.

So overall, Jurassic World Alive has a nice mix between Clash Royale and Pokemon Go, with some interesting additions. Being able to influence how much DNA/Duplicates you collect is great for players (less so for balancers), and adding the fusion system creates a visible long term goal.

The Battle

Comparing Jurassic World Alive’s battle system to Pokemon Go’s, you can clearly see that Ludia took the weakest system from Niantic and improved on it substantially.

Pokemon Go opted for a system that is centered around their experience — location-based design. Instead of making battles central to their core loop, battles can only be done at certain locations (gyms), making battling tied to an overall social goal (take gyms for your team), and make it very asynchronous (the winner leaves a defending team for attackers to try to beat). The actual battle mechanic itself is really simplistic — bring 6 of your best pokemon in, and just tap madly on the screen to try to damage them as much as possible. There’s some skill in dodging and in selecting pokemon, but Pokemon Go’s battle system is very shallow that’s gotten plenty of criticism from their fanbase.

The Challenge of a 1v1 Battle

To be honest, Pokemon’s original battle mechanic wasn’t that great either. Since it was single player experience, the original Pokemon games were balanced very much in favour of the player. So they could get away with the game being pretty simplistic. When players started battling pokemon in PvP, there wasn’t alot of depth. The strategy usually was to keep swapping pokemon until you had the advantage on the field. Because it was a 1 on 1 turn-based battle, it didn’t leave a lot of room for countering and strategy. It’s why most turn-based PvP RPG games today typically have more fighters on the field (ex. 3v3 in Summoner’s War) or add a grid to move around units to create interesting countering tactics (ex. Fire Emblem Heroes).

Jurassic World Alive seems to have taken the original Pokemon style battling system and built it out so that it actually can function as a 1v1 PvP RPG battle with a healthy meta. Instead of dinosaurs having clear explicit strengths and weaknesses (ex. Water dinosaurs and weak against flying dinosaurs?) they’ve gone for a system where dinosaurs have much less obvious strengths and weaknesses. There’s no explicit rock-paper-scissors strategy, and it makes for a better game.

There are many types of dinosaurs, some with high health, some with quick attacks, some with high damage, some with status effects, and some as a hybrid. The strategy becomes trying to use your dinosaurs to the best of their abilities: having your high health dinos suck up damage, high attack dinos rip through without taking damage, and having your speedy dinos to do the final blow, preventing the opponent from attacking back. Overall, I counted 19 different attack types. This creates a nice base layer of strategy for a 1v1 game.

With status effects this also means that a dino’s strengths and weaknesses can change through a battle. Remember “Tail whip” from Pokemon? A useless move to increase damage taken by your opponent? — here in Jurassic World Alive it actually makes strategic sense. These moves have enough impact to make you second guess leaving your dinos in a weakened state.

The goal of the battle is to take down 3 opposing dinosaurs before your opponent does. You bring in 4 dinosaurs, and can switch as often as you’d like. Similar to pokemon however, swapping out your dino leaves them susceptible to a free attack by the opponent.

So typically what happens is there’s some mind reading of your opponent. You make assumptions when they will swap out their dinos and try to take advantage of them losing a move.

Overall this gives the PvP battles a good level strategy. You’re trying to counter the opponent’s, while preventing swapping at the wrong time. You’re trying to avoid your opponent from saving their speedier dinos, who can take down your weaker dinos without being hit back. The upgrades and matchmaking also keep battles intense — most battles feel like you lost because of skill.

However, some of the battle’s elements show that they can’t break away from the innate issues of a Pokemon style battle: a core strategy of the game is to try to guess what your opponent will switch to. Guess that your opponent will start with a heavy armor dino? Then start with an armor piercing one. Guess that your opponent will swap a weak dino before you can kill it? Then make them pay by using your special attack rather than your weaker one. This is fun to pull off, but call-your-bluff/mind-reading strategy isn’t going to last for the long term.

On top of this, your battle team is made up of 8 dinos, yet when you battle, it randomly selects 4 out of the 8. This feels like a tacked-on system to increase the pressure to upgrade more dinosaurs rather than increasing the strategy before the battle. As a player it means you have some arbitrary randomness about whether the strategy you wanted to use will pay off, and can mean that right from the onset of the battle you already feel like you’ve lost (you got a bad draw from move 1). While randomness can be good, this much pre-determined luck can make players feel helpless early in battle.

This points to an issue that the 1v1 gameplay has. It’s just too limiting. The in-game strategy hits a cap which turns into a mind-reading battle, and the out-of-game strategy is limited so they had to tack on a “random 4” system.

I wonder if the game’s battle system would have been better if they’d broken from the pokemon style design and instead gone with something like a 3v3 battle system. Increasing complexity, but increasing the depth substantially. There would be substantially more attack types, more in-game strategy. Makes swapping dinos a far more interesting choice, and makes directly countering a more nuanced strategy.

Regardless, the Jurassic World Alive battle system is far better than the tap fest that is Pokemon Go — I just wonder if it could have been even stronger with a 3v3 system.

Pacing & Progression

And just for good measure, to pace the battle system, Jurassic World Alive relies on the good ol’ chest system from Clash Royale. Instead of pacing you based on energy, players can only have 4 chests at a time, and each chest must be opened one at a time. Because of matchmaking and the importance of stats in the outcome of a battle, it prevents players from rushing too far ahead by winning too many battles. Eventually, you will need what’s in the chests in order to compete.

Arena tiers are another borrowed feature from Clash Royale. Players earn trophies for victories, which unlock higher and higher tiers which contain bigger prizes and better dino DNA each time you win. This gives a clear, compelling reason to keep playing.

Comparing to Pokemon Go, my goal in the game is far more explicit and I can make progress towards it immediately: reach the next arena.

3 Reasons why it’s Working

Regardless of your thoughts of Jurassic Park IP or Location-based gaming, Jurassic World Alive is within the Top 100 grossing, and has sustained there since launch. While I think many would dismiss this as a “lesser Pokemon Go” — it clearly has done something right.

I believe that there are 3 key reasons why Jurassic World Alive has seen success so far:

#1 – Smart Merchandising

Merchandising — the features of a game that are typically there to upsell players towards spending money — are top notch in Jurassic World Alive. Ludia consistently have launched games that have taken the best merchandising practices and executed on them well. In Jurassic World Alive this really is showcased in their VIP System:

Jurassic World Alive showcases throughout the game the value of their VIP system. From the onset, you are constantly shown that a dinosaur is just out of reach on your map — the cure? Join VIP! This is an excellent conversion leverage point. On top of this, getting an epic incubator and increased supply drops makes the progression far easier.

The VIP system is also a subscription. Utilizing the latest trends in F2P, which is now even a common tactic in Hyper Casual games. The power of committing players to an ongoing subscription seems to be driving a lot of revenue these days (hopefully not too much off the back of forgetful users…).

#2 – Clear Progression & Goals

As mentioned above, one aspect I think Jurassic World Alive does far better than Pokemon Go is the visibility and clarity of their progression system and goal systems.

For Pokemon Go, the goal is mostly focused on completing your Pokedex. This is alright for collectors, but it doesn’t hit all player types. Jurassic World includes the Battle loop + arenas, which give a clear focus for battling your dinosaurs. Now there’s a way to clearly show off my progress and a competition I can engage in that will give me clear progress & clear recognition.

Comparing this to Pokemon Go, having to go to Gyms, and choosing a team which is far too large to feel impactful within makes the competitive goals far too end-game heavy. In the beginning, the goal is just to collect — and this is only compelling for so long.

#3 – Less Reliant on Location-Based Gameplay

Lastly, I think it was a smart choice for Jurassic World Alive to make their systems less dependant on the location-based gameplay. In Jurassic World Alive you can have many sessions without ever really caring about the map or moving to different locations.

Within Jurassic World Alive, usually there are a number of dinosaurs directly near me that helps me progress. These “freebies” may not be the optimal path, but still help me progress faster and give a reason to check my phone even when I’ve been in the same location for awhile (which, if you’re like lazy me, is common).

On top of this, the battle system & chest system not being location specific means that throughout the day when I’m not walking around I can still complete a meaningful session. I can open up chests, start the opening of the remaining. I can win some battles and fill up my slots. I can open up my free incubator.

Comparing to Pokemon Go, it instead relies a lot on location-based design. Incubators require you to remember to walk around with them on (which is a pain). Gyms are at specific locations, making you need to remember to check your phone at that location to make meaningful progress. While this is great for getting some location-based retention, it can make “regular” mobile sessions a pain in Pokemon Go.

Jurassic World Alive, on the other hand, is stronger because it has location-based elements, but you can still play the game often without needing to worry about where you are.

But can it hold up?

Looking at the grossing charts now, it looks like it will stabilize within the Top 150 grossing. While the movie is still in theatres and advertisements are running daily, they should be able to sustain here.

By prediction however is that it will fall, and will be tough to retain within the Top 250. This bump from movie goers and IP is inevitable, but sustaining at this level will still be difficult. This is partially because of the brand — its not Marvel — there isn’t a new movie every 6 months. It’s not Harry Potter — the fanbase isn’t nearly as large. The simple nature of the IP will be resistance for Jurassic World Alive.

From the design side there are also some issues:

The battle is effective, yet still too simple. Building out a lasting meta should be priority. Driving players to collect and upgrade a wider range of dinosaurs is crucial, and the current system of randomly picking 4 out of 8 isn’t strong enough. They could drive this width from some PvE gameplay, shifting the meta more explicitly in events, or from shifting the PvP to 3v3. Either can be a way to drive players to collecting & upgrading a wider range of dinosaurs to compete.

The social component is lacking. Where pokemon go has built this up over time, Alive still has ways to g and launched with less features than Pokemon did at launch. No lures, no chat, no clans. For now this is fine, but to take advantage of the location-based gameplay and drive local players to work together like Pokemon Go does, adding some ways for players to communicate & strategize locally would be simple but great addition.

Ludia is an excellent company which has proven time and time again to break into new categories with confidence and deliver on the live operations side. This game should be no different. I have no doubt that Ludia will be able to take the strong base of this game, respond to player feedback, extend the battle gameplay to last longer, design events that drive players back, and develop social features which will build up over time.

I expect this to be a staple on the Top Grossing chart, just not one to beat Pokemon Go. However, I don’t think that’s necessary for success here — what we should all take from this is that location-based games may be more interesting than we all once thought.

Summer of 2016 was the summer of Clash Royale’s gacha.
2017 was the summer of Battle Royale gameplay.
2018 may be the summer of location-based gaming.

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

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

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!

For many developers, player retention is considered the most important metric for a free to play game.  Every game company obsesses about reaching higher and higher retention to ensure their user base grows and grows.

On a weekly basis, I hear developers asking “What level of retention should I be aiming for?”, or “What day seven (D7) retention is needed for us to get a publishing deal?” However, the real question they should be asking is, should a single number decide the fate of your latest prototype?

When I think about retention, I like to think of the analogy of Miles per Gallon (MPG) in a car engine: the higher your retention, the higher your MPG, the more efficient your game’s engine. Revenues and marketing are the fuel that power this engine, so my advice is, be sure before you slam your foot on the accelerator.

The key lesson is, games with higher retention get further for less. However, just as there are cars built for many different purposes intended for different users, there are many games for many gamers – not all cars need high MPGs. A hot-rod, might be the fastest car on earth, but it requires a small oil well to keep it running. A family SUV serves multiple purposes at the cost of its efficiency, and a Tesla Model 3 does away with MPG’s entirely.

It is much the same with free to play games: different genres have different retention profiles, and different games monetise at different points in the funnel. Likewise, different business models rely on different audiences engaging for different periods of time.  

In each case, there’s not a single retention curve that is the correct model, merely a retention profile that gives signals to where your game is weakest.  So, rather than focusing on the numbers themselves, look for the days of the curve which have the biggest relative drop, as this can be the point where you lose people fastest. During a soft launch is the critical point where major decisions to carry on can be decided – it is often retention metrics that decide the fate of your game, but too little focus is given to the even fainter monetisation signals.

Source – GameAnalytics Mobile Gaming Benchmarks 2016-2017

Monetisation matters

For a free to play game to be a successful product it has to monetize. During the first few days of a new prototype’s launch you will have very few data points to make a call, but you must see some monetisation from some individuals. Focus on the conversion rate and the ARPPU you receive: it’s these two factors help to give a sense of what might happen if the game we’re to scale.  

Monetisation only occurs when your game’s system is appealing enough for someone to spend, and the amount they spend is the only real signal you have to how much value your product could create. Spend doesn’t need to equate directly to an IAP, but also how many unique players watched an ad or signed up to a subscription. In each case, the number itself isn’t as valuable as what it results in: Gross Revenue. I would argue that the more important metrics to consider when evaluating early prototypes are Conversion Rate (CR) and Revenue per paying user (ARPPU) as these small signals show that your engine is working.

Returning to the analogy of Miles per Gallon, increased MPGs are a result of a more efficient engine. Conversion Rate and ARPPU are like fueling the tank with gas – the more gas you get the less efficient you need to be.  However, it’s admittedly difficult to work out early on just when your engine is ready to take to the streets.

Each metric is only a signal: it gives you a rough overview of your games abilities. In order to build better games, you must focus on the components, not the metrics that show the signal. Only if each component is optimised to its specific goal will you start to see improvements in your metrics, the most general of which is retention.  Just like a car engine has pistons, turbos and exhausts that contribute to its overall efficiency, your game has FTUE, Clear UIs and Desirable characters to collect. A real jump in MPGs comes when as a game designer you appreciate the interplay between these features, and realise which of your designs is weakest.

Don’t get me wrong – retention is a fundamental driver of success on any app store, but this obsession with the number your game needs to hit is not how you build a better game. Indeed, improving retention is something we’ve written about it on multiple occasions.  

Life Time Value

LTV (Life Time Value) of a gamer is fundamentally what allows you to call a game a success or failure – a high enough LTV allows profitable marketing and growth of your game. However, by its very nature it is an estimation of future value – it can give horribly inaccurate signals early on during testing. There are also many different methods used to calculate it across large time periods.

The equation above focuses on 30D, simplified LTV – LTV is driven on the one hand by revenues (fuel) and on the other side retention (efficiency) with a time estimation for the future value of a player (discount rate). You can read more about methods for calculating LTV here.  Too much focus is given to the early retention metrics of the equation, because it’s easiest to gather with small amounts of data, but without any revenue signals being present there is no fuel to grow the LTV.  

CR and ARPPU are not accurate measures for generating robust models, but they do provide simple signals for game designers.

Conversion Rate is a clear indication of necessity and desire – it’s a signal showing just how many players want to invest in your product, understanding exactly when they bought and what they bought can help you optimise your design funnels to make purchasing clearer for future players.  

ARPPU is a strong indicator of pricing and value. You need to ensure that when someone does convert they are giving you the most that they would be willing to pay for content in your game, not converting for an overly generous bargain.  Quickly testing multiple price points for your game’s economy can greatly increase your gross revenue.

If you take a look at games with low retention but high CR and high ARPPU then you can still have a workable product on your hands because you’ve seen your gameplay converting players into payers.  There may be a huge host of other issues with your funnels and your onboarding, but the fundamental pinch within your system has led to a willing payer.  Observing these weak signals early on can give you faith in your early prototype

What retention metrics do tell you

Retention is a fundamental factor in LTV calculations – higher values are always better – but, as we’ve seen, exact figures vary greatly per genre. No matter what your retention curve looks like it won’t directly affect your monetization design.  What you ask a player to buy and whether they buy it is a personal decision for each and every gamer. Making that decision clear, simple, desirable and valuable will maximise your conversion.

So what can retention tell you?

Retention metrics are still incredibly useful as gauges for assessing where to focus your game design time.  Let’s take D1, D7 and D30 – the most common metrics:

• D1 retention shows me the desirability of your game – fun games are desirable, and people will happily play again tomorrow without the need of much investment or prompting.
• D7 retention shows me the core loop in your game – do they have a clear goal? Do they engage with your systems? Do they form strategies?
• D30 retention shows me whether your core loop scales – Do people have enough content?  Can they set long-term goals? Do they get stuck and still want to play more?

In each case, it’s not just the number that’s important, it’s the speed at which the retention drops – the steepness of the curve, if you will. Wherever the steepest drop descends, is where your game is currently weakest. The ideal scenarios is to reach a flat and stable base that is maintained for 60, 90, 180 or even 360 days into the future. When you predict revenues for the long term, even a significantly lower starting retention provides much higher gross revenue over the long term.

The early ‘wobbles’ in a retention curve point to gameplay issues. For example, your economy may have expanded too much, or the players might simply have reached the end of your content more quickly than you expected. In these cases, you can use these drop off points in the profile to go back and add in more depth to your designs.

Retention is one of the easiest and most reliable metrics to obtain during a soft launch, but don’t let it rule your development, creativity or decision-making abilities – use retention as a barometer to point to deeper issues in your game design. In essence, focus on understanding what is driving your players to spend money. Even the weakest signals can prove that you have a potential product on your hands, so stop focussing on the numbers directly and look for the broader trends – the patterns or fluctuations in the figures –  to aid your game design planning. The last thing you want to do is send a great game to the scrap yard.

In my previous post Understanding Energy I explained the reasons that designers include energy systems in their games:

1. Habituation
2. Content Pacing
3. Monetisation
4. Strategic Choices

I also noted that energy systems aren’t particularly elegant systems – they rarely blend well with the setting of the game, and this disconnect makes them disliked by players. Removing or eliminating energy systems from mobile games is no easy task. There are some directions that bear consideration and further investigation though.

Pacing through quests

Energy systems pace players by limiting the amount that they can play. This clearly prevents players progressing too fast through a game’s content. However, it is possible to limit the rate of progression directly, whilst leaving play unlimited. The way to do this is to decouple the main source of rewards in the game from play, so that rewards can be limited independently of play time.

The best case of this is Hearthstone. Here the quest system is the main pacing mechanic, as it is the main way that players can earn in-game currency. Players get one new quest each day and each quest requires perhaps three to ten matches to complete. Once the player has exhausted their missions, they can continue playing for rank or pleasure, but their ability to earn coins is negligible and so the game economy is protected.

For most mobile games this route is likely to be the easiest and most satisfactory route to removing energy and timers.

Session length and synchronous PvP

Another way of pacing players is to increase the amount of play time required to progress. The pace that players can progress is then limited by the number of hours they can sink into the game. The big caveat to this is that it is much easier to do this on console / PC than on mobiles.

Mobile games are designed to fill the gaps in people’s days – when they are waiting for the bus, queuing for their coffee or avoiding work on the toilet. A mobile game needs to have a satisfying session possible in 1-3 minutes to fill these gaps. For a mobile game it is very difficult to give players a satisfying session in just a few minutes without bombarding them with rewards if they decide to play for a few hours – perhaps 50-60 sessions all in one go.

PC and console games have it easier as they are designed to be played in stretches of 2-3 hours at a time. A Hearthstone match lasts 5-15 minutes, whilst a League of Legends match lasts 30-45 minutes, so a few hours play is a handful of matches. This means that the base rate of progress can be extremely slow. These games get away with such slow progression because they rely heavily on synchronous PvP battles. The excitement of facing off against other people in real time compensates for slow progression in the meta game.

Mobile games typically have problems with synchronous PvP because people want to pick up and drop mobile games at any time, and there is little commitment to stick with match, which combined makes for a poor user experience. That said, World of Tanks Blitz has managed to be successful in spite of these challenges. Although the battles are typically only 4-6 minutes, the game still manages pace progression slow enough to avoid an energy system.

The problem that World of Tanks Blitz has is that whilst it covers off content pacing just fine, it monetizes very poorly compared to most other successful mobile games. Indeed seems unlikely World of Tanks Blitz would be successful without a PC product to support its brand awareness. 8 Ball Pool has also managed to be successful here with even shorter play sessions, but faces the same issue with revenue. Being the dominant digital version of a hugely popular real world game seems to be a major factor in 8 Ball Pool’s success.

Limited progression and asynchronous PvP

Another small set of mobile games have managed to be successful without energy systems by limiting the amount of progression available to players. Games such as Words with Friends and Draw Something offer players an asynchronous PvP experience that is incredibly viral, and where the costs of creating content are minimal.

As content is generated by other players, there is no need to limit play time. However, in order to keep the playing field fair and prevent the games becoming play to win, these games have very little to offer in terms of progression and hence to sell to players. Both Draw Something and Words with Friends rely heavily on in-game advertising to generate revenue as they have so little to sell themselves to players.

Framing

If eliminating energy altogether is not possible then framing it correctly to players can greatly improve the player experience. World of Warcraft experimented with their pacing system, primarily to habituate players into certain play patterns. Their initial mechanism halved the XP that players could earn after a certain point, encouraging them to end their session.

Players universally hated it. Blizzard responded by reframing the system, turning “normal” XP into “bonus” XP that still halved at exactly the same point, but now instead of dropping down to a penalized level, it just dropped something they called “normal” XP. Suddenly players loved the system; although the numbers were exactly the same players felt rewarded instead of punished.

In the same way, timers usually feel better than energy points. If it takes me a certain amount of time to build a building, travel somewhere or train troops then that fits with the narrative of the game and feels better than it costing energy, which appears to be (and is) an arbitrary cap on the amount I can play.

Another way to make energy feel better to players is to give players some control over it. Basically, make a game out of spending energy. In Brave Frontier and Puzzle & Dragons the amount of energy that each levels costs differs. Players have to figure out how best to spend their energy, and not leave a small amount left over and wasted.

In Boom Beach players only need to train troops if their troops die in combat. Players can therefore attack lots of different opponents in the same session, as long as they pick them carefully. The game is obviously balanced to players playing in this way, but they feel a lot smarter because of the control they have over the timers presented to them.

Conclusion TL;DR

Eliminating energy is not an easy design challenge for mobile games. Pacing player rewards is one obvious route that more games should investigate. Some games may be able to rely on PvP play and user generated content to limit the rate of progression, though monetizing these games is generally a challenge. For many games the best they will be able to do is to frame their energy systems in ways that make them more palatable to players.

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.

 

Idle games are an exciting new genre that I expect to expand greatly in the coming years on mobile. Idle games, Clicker games, or “games that play themselves” is a baffling genre. Inexplicably these games are dominating many of the popular flash portals and shooting up the charts on mobile. Make it Rain by 337 Games, Tap Titans by Game Hive and now AdVenture Capitalist by Kongregate have all shown that this genre has a rightful place on the AppStore.

But why is this genre so popular? Why does this genre even exist? Why even discuss games that people don’t really play?

Idle games have risen on mobile because this is a genre that is perfect for modern mobile free-to-play design. The mechanics of idle games create perfect mobile sessions and drive strong long term retention.

What is an Idle Game?

Idle games, sometimes called Clicker or Incremental games, are games which are all about management of revenue streams. Similar to simulation games, their main differentiator is the focus on revenue growth decisions.

For some examples:

• Idle Games on Kongregate
• Reddit’s Guide to Idle Games

Cookie Clicker is the best example of an idle game. Each time you tap the cookie, you gain 1 cookie. You use cookies to purchase upgrades. Upgrades increase either the rate of tapping the cookie (now you get 2 cookies per click!) or increases the rate of cookies generated automatically (Grandmas will make 1 cookie per second). These automatic cookies are generated whether you are tapping or not. They are generated even if you’re away from the game.

On paper this sounds too simple to be fun. But try for yourself. The simple act of purchasing an upgrade always feels great. The growth curve is so fast it gets very addictive, very quickly.

Progress just for the sake of progress is fun. Even if it only means a virtual number increases faster.

Rate of resource generation is the core of the game. But an economy that inflates so quickly with a single currency has flaws. Very quickly, the game’s upgrade costs skyrocket. Starting off with nice low numbers the game quickly skyrockets into costs of trillions just a few sessions in. Most designers would cringe at this type of growth curve. What kind of player wants to worry about numbers in the trillions? In AdVenture Capitalist, your costs will eventually reach more than 1 Tretrigintillion (10 to the power of 102). Yet, players love this. Progress always feels good. Players playing for long enough to reach these ridiculous numbers feel like it is a real accomplishment.

As a result, Idle games have claimed 3 of the top 10 most played games on Kongregate (source: here). There are even Twitch channels dedicated to watching a computer play a game itself. Inexplicably, this genre has seen incredible growth.

Regardless of your stance of whether or not this is a “real” game genre, the mechanics in Idle games are perfectly realized for mobile. Idle games can teach mobile game designers a lot about creating a game that has strong session design. Idle games are so strong because:

1. It always feels good to come back.
2. Sessions naturally ease the player to leave
3. The mechanics ease the player from micro to macro gameplay

#1: It always feels good to come back

Many mobile games suffer gameplay mechanics that feel punishing on returning to the game after leaving for a few days.

In FarmVille: crops wither. If you do not come back to the game in time, your crops are worthless. In Clash of Clans: resources are stolen. The longer you are away from the game, the more likely a majority of your precious resources are stolen. Your rank on the leaderboard could be lowered. Your Clan becomes upset that you haven’t donated enough troops. These mechanics are all strong at driving reasons to come back, but also creates reasons for players to quit.

Idle games don’t suffer from this problem. Each time the player returns to the game, they are left with a massive stockpile of cash. It always feels like a bonus that they left the game. If a player leaves for a day, a week, or a month it only increases the amount of currency in their stockpile. In most economies this would be troublesome. Not in Idle games. Because the growth curves are exponential, leaving a game to infinitely generate a low income rate is absolutely fine.

For example, lets take 2 players. Player A comes back every day. Player B skips a week of play. Both players are generating 1 million cookies per day at this point in time. Player A, the active player, returns day 2 and receives 1 million cookies. Player B, who skipped the week, returns to have 7 million cookies. Player B can clearly purchase far more upgrades than Player A. Player B actually feels very rewarded for leaving for so long — they are rewarded with a very long session which they can purchase many things. However, comparing the growth curves Player A purchased many upgrades on that second day. So Player A by day 2 is already at a new growth rate of 10 million cookies a day. Player A is clearly growing far faster than Player B, but both players (because its a single player game) feel they made a smart choice. Player A is rewarded with faster progression. Player B is rewarded for waiting so long. It always feels good to return, but returning more often gives you faster progression.

Mobile games should strive to create this feeling. It should never feel like a punishment to come back to the game.

Players should be reminded that coming back often is a benefit, but coming back at all is always a bonus.

For this reason most farming games have shifted away from FarmVille’s model. Instead of withered crops, there’s low storage limits. In Clash of Clans, they incorporate shields and enforce looting limits to make sure players dont feel that not coming back feel too badly.

#2: Sessions ease the player away

Coming from my previous post on Flexible Sessions, the perfect mobile session finds a way to naturally push players out of the game. This is necessary for pacing and long term retention. Strong mobile games give strong reasons to come back (see above!) and strong reasons to leave the game. Idle games have mastered this natural prod of players out of the game.

As Idle games push players to invest in automatic revenue generators (ex. Grandmas in Cookie Clicker) over manual revenue generators (manually tapping on the cookie), players inevitably will reach a point in the game when they just have to wait. The player can purchase small upgrades fairly rapidly, but they know to make the next big leap of progression its smarter to purchase the more expensive upgrades. So, they leave the game feeling smart about their decision.

This is the exact point which the player, themselves, have opted-in to leaving the game. Naturally, the game has prodded the player to leave. Mobile games must strive for this. Create a situation which the player feels smart about leaving your game. Idle games have even managed to do this without timers, without social appointments or any other tacked on system as discussed in Player Commitments.

Create a situation which the player feels smart about leaving your game.

#3: It eases the player from core to meta gameplay

The first experience of a new player is very simple. In Clicker Heroes: A player just madly taps an enemy monster. In Make it rain: A player flicks heaps of money into the air. The first experience is addictive and immediately fun. Its obvious how to get better – tap or swipe faster. Players quickly master this mechanic and it feels natural. However, this mechanic’s interest quickly burns out. After the first few sessions, players are quickly tired of having to manually collect.

This is when the game offers a bait and switch. You came for the simplicty of tapping, but what you’ve been given is a game that is all about managing resources and upgrades. Players shift from tapping to managing which upgrade to purchase next. This clever switch means players that would have been burnt out from the simple mechanic are now thinking about long term decisions in the game. Which upgrade is the best value? How do I optimize my growth?

Mobile games must master this bait and switch. Players expecting to come into any mobile game will expect some core gameplay that mimics what they’ve played in the past. Playing bejeweled for Candy Crush, playing command and conquer for Clash of Clans, or platforming for King of Thieves. However, as a free-to-play designer your job isn’t to just hook these players with fun intial mechanics. You need to find ways to retain these players for years. The best way to do this is to switch the player from focusing on second-to-second core gameplay (tapping cookies) into longer term decisions (optimizing progression). Idle games clearly show a blueprint of how to accomplish this, regardless of the core gameplay.

Looking to the Future

Idle games are big and going to get bigger.

Anthony Pecorella gave an excellent talk at GDC 2015 on Idle Games summarized here. Clearly with the success of AdVenture Capitalist, Tap Titans and Make it Rain, more developers are taking notice.

The genre is ripe for innovation. Recently CivCrafter came out. A take on the idle genre with multiple resources and battles. Tap Titans has shown that the genre can apply to the auto-rpg genre. I believe that the progression systems in these games can really be applied to any genre. Replacing the core game play with a puzzle mechanic, an RPG battle mechanic, a Simulation theme, Arcade gameplay are all possible angles.

The key is to design the bait and switch: give the players the game play that is addictive and fun in the beginning, but eventually nudge them into purchasing the automatic resource generators. Players can then make the choice between grinding the core gameplay, or leaving and gaining the benefit just by waiting.

Get ready: the future will be all about games you don’t play.

Recently I spoke at GDC 2015 in San Francisco with my colleague Sebastian Nußbaum. We conducted a talk called “In it for the long haul: How Wooga boosts long term retention”. We were both amazed by the response. The GDC feedback was extremely positive: we ranked #1 of all F2P talks in the GDC Summits.

To view the video of the presentation, you will need GDC Vault Access. You can view it here. The slides of the presentation can be visible here.

We discussed the importance and difficulty of delivering strong long term retention. My half of the presentation focused on creating long term retention during prototyping/pre-production, while Sebastian discussed how they delivered long term retention through Narrative design in Pearl’s Peril.

Just as a summary of my main points:

• Long Term Retention is the biggest differentiator of the Top games to the rest of the F2P market
  
• Long Term Retention is more important than monetization or broad audience appeal

To create long term retention:

• Create a long term goal or aspiration
• Create mechanics that encourage players to invest in the long term of the game
• Create session design that both pulls players in 6+ times per day, as well as paces players naturally in the progression
• Create social mechanics that require players to rely on others to play at their best
• Understand the cost of content production by your team vs content consumption by your consumers. This must be a healthy ratio.

To test long term retention of new concepts, during prototyping focus on creating a game that lasts for 1 month of fun.

Stop any game that doesn’t show it can scale to one month of fun. Games that struggle at this point have a dangerously low chance of figuring out long term retention during production.

Since F2P became the dominant business model in mobile games, AAA publishers are anticipating changes throughout other platforms as well.

All the signs are pointing to the big traditional publishers to double down on digital games-as-a-service type models, especially free to play. EA’s recent earning calls show that their digital offerings are growing healthily, and that the CEO plans to continue to focus on delivering core experiences but with a free to try model. Activision’s headline for their earning call was Hearthstone and Destiny. They brought in $850M alone in new revenue. Now more than 46% of Activisions profits are coming from digital storefronts, not games sold in stores. Nintendo will clearly be focusing more on digital in the upcoming years. They are collaborating with GungHo on Pokemon Shuffle, and their recent financials shows their digital sales are a glimmer of hope in their rocky future.

The traditional big publishers are shifting to digital sales and free to play. We will see a bigger and bigger shift in game design of the mainstream commercial products because of this.

But shifting to digital services for many of these publishers is no easy task. The pay-to-play vs free-to-play model is drastically different when it comes to design. Thus far many attempts haven’t worked. Either the designs copy far too much from current free-to-play models and leave the current base alienated, such as “Age of Empires Castle Siege” by Microsoft. Or the designs are clearly a pay-to-play game at its core, and they fail to retain players long enough to generate revenue.

But publishers are starting to get this mixture between traditional game design and free to play game design right.

My prediction is that in the next few years we are going to see some excellent titles that really start to bridge the gap between free to play design and traditional game design.

Why can’t Call of Duty be F2P?

Traditional games, like Call of Duty, have been massive budget affairs. I remember working on Need for Speed in 2008 when we discussed the “D-Day” experience that is imperative for all console titles. The first experience a player gets within a console game has to be jaw dropping. This term came from the first Call of Duty game. The first mission had the player fight on the beaches of D-Day. The experience was a faithful recreation to the actual event in World War Two. This single mission cost a large portion of the budget for the game and it was worth it — the first experience players had with the game was incredible. This ecstasy created from this experience made them talk about the game, tell friends, and purchase subsequent titles. These experiences brings in millions of players. These graphics pushes player beyond the $60 entry price to get the game.

Free to Play games thus far haven’t really cared about this. Clash of Clans, Hay Day, etc. have nice art styles. But just by looking at the advertisements I already understand what I’m getting: a simple distraction. Not an experience.

There is a reason why most F2P games haven’t really focused on this experience. It comes down to what defines the game as successful. Pay to Play games like Call of Duty just need to get players past the entry fee of $60 and excited enough within the game to develop some word of mouth. If they beat the game after 14 hours and never play again, the publisher doesn’t care. F2P games are the opposite. Their focus is on driving long term retention. This comes with a price on the experience. The experience is slowed and blurred by timers, complex economies, and slow pacing.

Thus far pay to play experiences haven’t merged with free to play because no one has managed to build a strong experience while pacing the player properly.

I’m proud of the work Wooga is doing to push higher quality experiences in Free to Play games. Agent Alice and Pearl’s Peril are two games that are pushing the bounds of F2P on mobile. The games center around a strong serial narrative. The central narrative last for years within the game, because its given to the player only on a once-per-week basis (like TV shows). These games have found a sweet spot between giving a strong experience to players while pacing properly for long term retention.

How can Console move to F2P?

To merge strong experience design and long term retention is not easy. But we’ve already seen excellent examples of how game designers are subtly nudging their designs already down this route.

To see an example of strong retention design, play Dragon Age Inquisition. Dragon Age Inquisition was released late 2014 to critical success. The game is massive (it took me over 50 hours to complete) and the story line was captivating.What really marked the game as something different for me was managing your army in the war room.

Dragon Age has an interesting meta-game or macro-decision making structure outside the usual grind of quests. The player has a war room which they have three operatives, a political mastermind, a spy master, and a general of an army. These three operatives can be sent out on various missions throughout the world. Each mission takes a specific amount of real-world time. So even when you’ve left the game or gone on long quests, these missions will continue. This type of design has been done in multiple ways, including Mafia Wars (the original Zynga hit) and even some Assassin’s Creed games. What adding this system does is give the game two levels of management for the player: a decision about what they should do with their time on the couch, and what actions should be done by the automated systems.

This two-tier system I expect to see in many more games in the future. This two-tier structure allows games to have its cake and eat it too. The player makes decisions about whether they want to do the necessary grind to progress in the story, or hand over the grind to automated systems. The timers included in the automated systems make sense — that time would have been done by the player themselves.

Dragon Age Inquisition shows that AAA design can drive long term retention. It requires progression to be gated by an economy instead of simple linear progression. 

In order to accomplish this two-tier progression system, there must be an interesting economy that the player in engaged in. This type of system can only work if there are more currencies utilized than a linear progression system. If players are just moving through levels as quickly as they wish with only skill to pace them, these games aren’t going to last very long. The content will run out quicker than you can produce.

To pace players you will have to use economies and currencies. In Dragon Age Inquisition they use “Power”. This currency is gained by completing side quests, sending agents on missions, and collecting and crafting items that aid your armies. In order to progress in the story, players must collect enough power and purchase the ability to start the next mission. This makes sense in the narrative and paces players properly.

Other genres have already shown excellent designs on how economies can be injected and feel natural to the game. Borderlands shows that loot-drop systems can be used to make players need to collect and grind for items before they can progress in the game. Destiny shows that this model can be taken to work at a MMO level.

World of Warcraft’s new expansion “Warlords of Draenor” shows that even village-building components make sense. For WoW, the first tier is engaging and grinding through raids and quests with friends. The second tier is managing your garrison, the auction house, and your followers.

This two-tier approach is the key for future AAA games to bridge the gap to F2P and games-as-a-service. When players are engaged in a properly managed economy, pacing can happen, and long term retention can occur in a strong console-like experience.

The Future is Cross-Platform

I expect that in the coming years many more console and PC titles that are aimed at the mainstream will move to games-as-a-service models and in its wake we will see designs shift to a more economy-focused design.

Players will have two-tiers of managing their game: Players can grind through open world environments to collect resources, guns, loot, or any other designed economies. Or players can engage in the second tier: sending their army, their followers, their pet robot, to collect and grind for them. This tier is managed through monitoring timers and making commitments to return.

This second tier can be managed on console/PC, but more likely these games will have companion games which allow their timer management to be done on their phone. In this way each platform delivers on its strengths: The Console/PC deliver amazing graphical experiences that last for hours, and Mobile delivers strong session design and long term commitment from players.

We can see this with games like FIFA 15 and Madden 15. Play the game on your console, but while you’re away you can bid on new players and trade players. The game never leaves you and this feels natural.

Each platform delivers on its strengths: console has great controls and gameplay that can’t be matched by phones or tablets. Mobile allows the player to be always connected and engaging with the economy.

Expect this type of interaction will become the norm for future EA games and digital games overall.

Wrap Up

The traditional gaming space is clearly showing signs that its moving towards a digital future.

To make this transition, game designs will need to change. In order to move to this model, commercial games will have to adjust their progression systems to focus on economies and currencies to gate and pace players.

When economies are injected, a two-tier progression model can take place. Players can make choices between grinding out progression themselves, or using automated or timer-based systems to grind out for them.

When a two-tier system is in place, you can create games that are always connected. Cross-platform services that have the players attention whether they are playing on the couch or are out and about.

This is how the industry is moving. A digital future that is focused on games-as-a-service, long term retention and always-connected play.

Will pay-to-play games die off? Most likely not. But they will not exist in the same mainstream context that they do now.

Will this transition to games as a service and long term retention water down the experience of our players?
That’s really up to designers like you. We as game designers must find ways to make economies engaging and complement the experience rather than detract from it. How that can be done is yet to be seen.

Mobile Session Design defines a game’s ability to pace its content and create strong long term retention. It’s one of the biggest indicators for a game’s long term success. I’ve spoken about a number of considerations you need to have when designing sessions:

Firstly, you need to ensure your initial user flow into the game allows players “Easy In”. They quickly understand what they need to do, and how to accomplish it.

Secondly, sessions need an “Easy Out”. Players need to slowly and subtly be prodded to leave the game to ensure they don’t burn through your content or burn out in interest too quickly.

Thirdly, you need to ensure during a player’s session they are making commitments to come back. Driving strong re-engagement and creating habits to return.

Lastly, I spoke about allowing players to return to the game naturally in search of surprising content or offers. Ensuring your game has cycling content throughout the day to pull players back like the masters of session design: Facebook and Twitter.

With these components you can build strong sessions that will last for months, even years.

To bring it all together, now it is about making these components feel natural and unrestrictive to the player.

The Problem with Energy

When it comes to session design in free to play, the natural tendency is to add an energy mechanic. Energy is a cheap and simple way to pace players. They come into the game, have full energy and can only spend a specific amount of it before its time for the player to leave. Later on in the day, they receive a push notification telling them that their energy has refilled, they can play again! When completely depleted, energy can be purchased to play a few extra sessions, although energy is no longer is really an effective monetization mechanic.

Energy has always been a tacked on mechanic in many games. It’s an aging industry standard that players are pushing back against. Players now demand that games don’t feel nearly as restrictive towards when and how they play.

So what is the real issue with Energy?

Issue #1: Energy gives an abrupt end of the session with no commitment

Energy was necessary to create the “Easy Out”: giving a players a reason to leave, and giving a strong reason to come back. However, this is not a player commitment — this is just them running out of a pacing currency and now having to wait for it to return. Players don’t make a an opt-in commitment to return to the game when their energy runs out, instead they just feel they are being prevented from playing for no reason. Energy thus has a strong stigma, and I’ve seen large drops in user funnels when players realise their sessions are being controlled by such an arbitrary economy.

Issue #2: Energy has communication issues

Energy sometimes just doesn’t make sense in a game’s theme. It costing energy to do every action feels weird. In previous social gaming environments this was the standard, but in today’s mature mobile market energy being tacked on doesn’t translate well.

Lives are taking some precedence in match 3 games or skill based mobile games. This makes some sense and translates well. If you fail, you lose a life. It’s been a staple of the Arcade. It has meaning and players feel like they have an impact on how long their sessions will last.

I am convinced Lives remained a staple in even modern Nintendo’s design because it created this “Easy Out”. Giving a players a reason to walk away from a game when they were getting too frustrated by it. This made sure they would return another day to try again.

Issue #3: Energy doesn’t pace engaged players

Energy works because it allows for many play sessions per day. With short refill timers for lives, player can keep coming back throughout the day with full lives and try again. However, since simulation games push players into much longer timers for benefits, simulation can pace their content a lot better. In the long run, a city building system is much better at pacing its content than an energy structure.

Pacing content with energy is difficult because highly engaged players can come back 20 times per day and have full benefit. The optimal would be that their benefit for returning would slowly taper off instead of grow in a linear way. So a hyper engaged player wouldn’t blow ahead in the content compared to an average player.

What ends up happening in a game like Candy Crush is that you have to balance your games to ensure that regardless of engagement level, a player gets new content in a controlled, steady flow. But with energy and allowing players to come back with full benefit throughout the day, designers can end up pacing content for way too long for the average player. Conversely, they could just not care about these hyper engaged players ripping through their content and allow them to progress quickly. Yet these are your super fans — these are the players that would gladly pay you if given the opportunity!

What Flexible Session Design looks like

The optimal Session design will seek to pace Benefit vs Sessions per Day and Session Length in this manner :

A graph which the growth rate slows over time. The benefit for playing 10 sessions per day is higher than 1, but it grows at a much slower rate. Also for session length: Playing for 2 minutes has great benefit. Playing for 6 minutes has more, but grows at a slower rate. This is optimal for keeping players growth controlled, while still encouraging strong re-engagement.

Boom Beach’s Sessions

Boom Beach have one of the best mobile sessions around.

Boom Beach follows the rule that the first session of the day is the strongest: your longer timers (buildings) have completed and you collect a majority of your resources.

Some players can come back a second time that day and get a similar benefit. Yet as the game grows these timers get longer which makes the second session less beneficial.

The benefit of coming back beyond this is mostly just to battle. This is the funnest part of the game. This can give some big currency rewards and random rare drops. However, the more you raid other player’s bases, the more likely it is that you will be raided. This makes the benefit taper off as the day continues.

Clash of Clans even has a mechanic if you are active in the game, no one can attack you. This strongly recommends re-engagement for players that are paranoid about their resources, but because the game is still paced, they aren’t progressing fast when they come back for these “defensive” sessions.

So this works for Clash of Clans and Boom Beach, but how do I apply it to other genres? Especially other genres that don’t have a town building or simulation component?

Idea #1: The longer you play, the harder it gets

Smash Cops Wanted Level is a good example of a flexible energy mechanic. Each time the player plays a round, their wanted level increases (similar to GTA). This means each subsequent time they play the game will get more and more difficult. 1) This makes complete sense given the nature of the game. 2) It allows the illusion of allowing the player to play forever :

Idea #2: Separate playing and progressing

Hearthstone does this beautifully where they really allow players to come and play as much as they want, but the currency is only tied to completed missions. Missions regenerate the next day.

Of course this only works if you are confident core mechanic can last this long. This is a feat only very few designs have pulled off. I’ve only really seen it in Trading Card Games and MOBAs (ex. DOTA or League of Legends). If you believe even the most engaged players won’t bore of your core after playing it constantly for months, then you can consider opening it up without restriction. Especially if you’re going after a more core or traditional gamer audience which is outspokenly negative towards obvious timers or energy mechanics.

Idea #3: Take a bet on your skill

A combination of lives and a randomly generated level list is a good way for players to manage their own sessions and prevent session burnout.

As I spoke about before, a game can allow for a list of missions to be randomly generated. Each has a different tradeoff between risk and reward given the player’s current level in the game. This list is regenerated on a quick timer, so players can always come back to the game to search for “deals” on which level to pick on this list. Which level do I think I can beat, that will give me the best reward?

They make the call whether they go for broke on a difficult level or go for grinding missions with significantly less reward. You can subtly control the drop rate of these types of levels to ensure that players aren’t going to get too many grinding levels and exploiting the session design this way.

With the life mechanic, players are adequately punished for losing a level. Adding urgency and making this a really interesting decision. Plus, with the “Shopping for levels” mechanic, the player has reason to come back throughout the day but is still restricted from always getting what they need.

Keeping your sessions flexible will make the game feel much less restrictive. This in turn will really make players feel that your game is something that will adapt to when and how they want to play. This attitude will turn into strong play sessions per day and much stronger longer term retention.

Continuing from my last post, I’d like to dive deeper into driving re-engagement on mobile.

Driving long term retention continues to be the focus for mobile free to play developers. As marketing costs for launching titles continues to hit new highs, it becomes more and more important to retain players over the long haul.

The first strategy for driving players to come back for a long time is about designing your game’s features so that players are committed to returning. Players activate timers to trigger a notification in a few hours. Players could also push another friend to play a round, then receive a notification when its their turn to play again. These evoke a very “explicit” session design. There are push notifications always notifying you when you need to come back to the game. Very obvious reasons to return to the game.

But this is exhausting and can lead to very structured session designs that don’t bend around a players life. It also gets really tiring, very fast. Players getting notifications in the middle of the night, feeling like in order to play optimally they need to return.

As a result, explicit push notifications are fine for triggering 1-3 sessions per day. However, any more than this and the game just turns into an annoying Tamagotchi and players will break away from your game.

But 1-3 sessions per day frankly isn’t enough for free to play games. Looking into some industry data from Digi-Capital, we can see the importance of Sessions per day and its correlation with hitting the top grossing :

Hitting a strong session per day count is a very good indicator for a top grossing game. So how do we design a game that pulls the player back very often?

Learn from the Masters: Facebook & Twitter

Facebook and Twitter are the clear winners on mobile for sessions per day.

But Why?  What is driving us back?

There are direct messages and notifications — people post about us or message us. This provides the “explicit” notifications. Players return because they are committed socially to reply to these messages and look at their notifications.

But why do we open up facebook every time we’re in line at the grocery story? Even when there are no notifications on the phone? Why do we pick up twitter every time we have a boring break in a conversation?

Because of the news feed. Because there is always something to check, always a hope that something new is going on.

Throughout the day the content on both of these networks is changing rapidly. A user can come back once a day, five times a day or a hundred times a day and still get enjoyment. This is what mobile free to play needs to strive for.

Going Deal Hunting

Alright, so game design can’t provide the same amount of new content and surprises that a social network can. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t hit the same level.

A first great example of creating this session design feeling is cycling content in shops.

For shops, you don’t have all the items available at all times. Some of the best moments using the store in Borderlands or Diablo was when the store had the exact item that I wanted on sale or for a deal. If your design supports a huge possible library of items to sell, then a cycling shop is a must. Highly engaged players feel great finding deals on items that were previously too high. Players always have hope coming into the game that there might be the solution to their problems available in the shop for a deal. In short: the shop provides a feeling of something new and interesting that could change their fortunes. If the cycle is short enough, and the deals good enough, this can really push players to come back throughout the day. It also adds urgency to purchasing behaviour — each deal feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Of course we’ve seen this behaviour in other forms as well. Ebay, Craigslist, and Steam Sales are great inspiration for creating a store that really pushes players to come back constantly to go deal shopping.

Also, this cycling can create some other interesting monetization mechanics. You don’t want to come back throughout the day? You really want to find that item quickly? Then pay some currency to refresh the store. You can see this in the recent Backflip game, “SpellFall”.

Shopping for Level Design

Of course this constant cycling isn’t limited to just in-game shops. This same mentality can be applied to your progression system or matchmaking system.

Let’s take for example a game like Boom Beach. What would happen if you only have 10 opponents you could play per hour. Every hour, the full list is refreshed. Players then would shop the deals on this board. This hour, which of these opponents are the easiest to beat and provide the best reward? Then each hour they return and search for the “deals” on this board which will help them progress. This could be a great replacement for the current system where players feel like they are matched with extremely difficult opponents and can only progress by grinding the PvE computer levels, greatly reducing the importance of PvP in the game.

Having levels that cycle and change throughout the day is a way to add interesting choices a PvE or level based game. Puzzle and Dragons have Event dungeons for very limited time. Making these more central to the daily grind and progression is a great way to add more interesting choices and pull the player back more often.

For trading and resource based games, having customers that have random requirements and give random rewards cycling throughout the day is an easy way to add excitement.

Hay Day most likely didn’t add this because it makes setting long term goals very difficult for players. Players can’t predict if making bread for the next hour or milk is the right choice. So of course this has to be balanced with ensuring the player always has a clear deal they are going for, but can find interesting deals along the way to speed up their progress.

Your goal as a designer at the end of the day is to get players to come back for multiple sessions per day. Allow players to feel smart about taking advantage of one-time offer deals that progress them faster. This will make your game feel much more alive — it’s constantly changing, and a player can’t predict what the optimal path to completing the game will be. Progression will not be linear and boring. How often you need to grind, how many rounds you need to complete before you can beat the next boss isn’t laid out in front of you.

Most importantly — you will always have a reason to come back to the game.