This post is co-authored between Adam Telfer and Michail Katkoff of Deconstructor Of Fun.

Since Facebook fully embraced free-to-play, Crowdstar and others have strove to get to grips with what’s perhaps rather crudely been referred to as “female first” gaming – to make their name as a company that truly understands and delivers on an underserved demographic in the market.

In practice, what this translated to was – at least initially – a series of “cute” style games; taking care of sweet animals, managing a farm packed full of farm animals with massive eyes, or dressing up games with way too much glitter and pink everywhere. It ended up with studio creating games for a stereotype: a fictitious and overly simplistic view of what might interest  women, with very little understanding of the nuances the chosen demographic actually wanted.

Worst still, not all too many developers successfully went much deeper than that, believing that focusing a title on cute animals with big eyes was how you made a games ‘female friendly’.

Crowdstar challenged that assumption with the creation of the Covet Fashion and Design Home games, and it paid off. The game is one of the first of its kind to truly create a social network-game hybrid that recreates the feeling of being a professional in fashion design and interior decoration. It’s also one of the few games to really deliver on the actual professions of interior design or fashion without feeling cutesy.

Not only that, Crowdstar has managed to deliver a strong core loop built around equally strong principles of great F2P design – a core loop that, dare I say it, has never before been seen on the App Store. So, why was it so successful?

A Brief History of Glu & Crowdstar

Crowdstar was founded back in 2008, first focusing on free-to-play titles for Facebook Canvas before a shift to mobile in 2012. Crowdstar initially raised a $23 Million Series A in May 2011 on the back of the company’s success on Facebook success, raising an additional round of $11 Million in May 2012 to finance a pivot to mobile.

 

The company has always focused on female first games, beginning by focusing on animal care based games on Facebook – Happy Aquarium, Fish with Attitude – before eventually moving towards Fashion and now finally interior decorating.

Covet Fashion was launched in 2013 and has remained within the Top 200 grossing since launch, although it has been in a slow and steady decline since Fall 2016. Design Home launched during this period and has remained within the Top 100 grossing since launch, despite having a smaller feature set compared to Covet Fashion. Delivering on these games, Crowdstar cemented itself as a top developer, catching the eyes of the bigger players on the App Store.

 

As a result, Glu acquired controlling interest in Crowdstar just before the release of Design Home in 2016, mostly due to Glu’s decline in its licensed celebrity IP stardom style games – Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Katy Perry Pop games some of the most notable. Glu’s network of players from its stardom game network was a strong cross-promotion platform for the Crowdstar games, which made it a clear better-than-the-sum-of-its-parts acquisition. Crowdstar now has dominant control of the fashion and interior decorator network audience, alongside Glu’s strength in marketing, analytics, UA and live operations experience.

Core Loop

 

Design Home’s core loop is straightforward. Players participate in timed Challenges that ask them to design spaces with certain requisites.

1. Player Selects a Challenge from a List
2. Completes the Design Challenge by selecting furniture from their personal collection
3. Submit their Challenge and wait for other players to vote on it.  Rewards are based on how well their creation was rated by the community.
4. In order to start the next competition, the player needs to collect Keys. Keys are earned by voting on other player’s creations.

Let’s break down each step in a bit more detail:

Step 1: Selecting a Challenge

The core of the game is about selecting from a list of limited time events, which challenge the player to design for a specific style of home. For example, the “Tropical Heaven” event requires players to furnish a tropical living room so that it ‘feels like heaven’ at a resort in Fiji’s Yasawa Islands

Events can be from any location around the world, with vastly different requirements from one event to the next. Some events can be “key daily events”, while others can be included as part of wider, themed seasonal events. For example, the game has played host to an event for home improvement TV channel HGTV. As part of the tie up, players could enter “HGTV themed” competitions and have their respective scores tallied there.

When a player has selected an event they want to take part in, they pay the entry fee – in this case, keys – and then start designing.

Step 2: Designing

After a player has selected their Challenge, they are given a short fictional brief before entering a room devoid of furniture and decorations. All but the Daily Challenges come with unique requirements, such as furniture of certain style or color.

Each Challenge is a room filled with two kinds of ‘spots’: one spot where the player is required to fill with certain type of items, and a second spot ones where what they can place is optional. Player can’t change the colors of the wall or move the spots where items are placed, meaning play takes the form of a very simple placement puzzle that limits the creativity but also makes it easy for anyone to complete a Challenge.

Players can place items they own as well as pieces that they don’t own. If a player doesn’t have the necessary items, they can purchase or borrow them on-the-spot to fulfill requirements or make the room come together. After all of the required items have been placed, player submits the Challenge for other players to review. Submitting the Challenge rewards player immediately with Coins and XP.

It’s important to notice that once player has submitted their Challenge, they also lose the ability to use those items in other challenges until the submitted Challenge is over. This forces player to have bigger collections and multiples of the same item.

Step 3: Waiting for Results

After a player has completed their Challenge, they receive a Cash and XP reward. However, this is just the base reward. They need to wait for all other players to vote on their creation to get a final rating.

After the voting time is over, a player also receives a bonus reward based on how their design was perceived by the community. The verdict comes in form of a five star rating and if a player exceeds four stars, they will receive a piece of furniture as a reward.

Step 4: Vote to Earn Keys

Pacing in Design Home is handled partially through Keys – Keys that, quite literally, unlock events. Each time a player votes for a few other player’s designs, they are given keys, with five votes awarding three keys. In practice that means a player needs to vote on 45 different designs in order to enter a Challenge.

This forces players to not only be a part of the design creation, but also encourages them to constantly vote and legitimize the ratings they receive.

Besides keys, players are also paced by their collection of furniture. Each piece of furniture they purchase has a limit of one to three pieces, so players with smaller collections can’t enter in as many competitions. Also players are incentivized to have a wider collection of pieces, since using up all your best furniture in one event is not wise.

3 Keys to Design Home’s Success

#1: Events at the Core

The first key reason for Design Home’s success is the way that their core gameplay is wrapped around constantly changing events.

This is a design that’s now being replicated outside of Crowdstar’s lineup. Finnish giant Supercell used a similar design in Brawl Stars, while Seriously used a similar design in their upcoming game Best Fiends Rivals. Like Crowdstar, they’ve all realised it’s a great way to create a constantly changing core.

Why it’s so effective:

• The game almost simulates the social media ‘feeds’ of the likes of Facebook and Instagram, making the player feels like there’s always be something new, something interesting going on with the game. It’s a strategy that pulls the player back throughout the day to see what new modes, what new events are happening
• This gives the developer an easy way to change up the gameplay over time through live ops; introduce new modes, limited time events, to drive interesting changes to the game. This is the key to long term retention. Events are increasingly the most important feature within a game which can make all the difference when the game is live. As reported in the “Toon blast” article, competitive events which change up the core slightly and add variety are proven to drive engagement and revenue. It can turn a good game into a great game

#2: Monetizing On Emotion

Design Home doesn’t follow a lot of recent trends in monetization. It doesn’t have gacha, it doesn’t use a lot of timers, it doesn’t even allow players to skip the voting timers to get their rewards early. So, just how does it succeed?

Crowdstar monetizes from two key systems; slowly pushing players to care about their overall rating, and creating an emotional connection to what you’re creating. As a result, they monetize like no one else does.

The base of monetization in Design Home is the slowing of progress – specifically the overall score of the players’ accounts. After each event, your voting results impact what your account’s overall score is. In short, to increase your score, you need to get great results.

Design Home’s rating algorithm is set up in a way such that the voting results ratings typically fall between 3.0 and 5.0 rating. Getting lower than 3.5 rating seems to be a very rare occurrence. To begin with, your account’s overall score is 2.0. So, as a player first joins, each result from voting is guaranteed to make major progress to their review score.

When a player reaches a 3.5+ rating, this progress significantly slows down. In order to reach a 4+ rating they need to be consistently getting a voter rating of over 4. This requires a large collection of furniture alongside a sense of what will rate highest in a given event.
As a player hits this 4+ tipping point, their progress significantly slows once more and the easiest way to make progress is to buy the newest, best valued furniture & equipment.

In short, Crowdstar has created a system where players actively care about their overall score, and so only want to submit designs that will increase it. As a result, the second major monetization point comes from the just-in-time purchasing of items and emotional connection.

On this emotional score, each player lives out the fantasy of being a Interior Decorator in play. When decorating a room, the  motivation stems from creating the space they envision will win the competition. However, especially early in the game, they have very limited access to the most desirable furniture.

This is where the “just-in-time” purchasing is impactful. Players can preview how amazing a new piece of furniture would look in their design, and purchasing with Cash or Diamonds is just a quick tap away.

As the player progresses, inevitably they will need to grind for major resources. Cash and Diamonds will become strapped as they progress due to how expensive the furniture is and how low each competition pays out. So over time, players will have to decide if they grind events by putting any possible furniture into it – wait a long time for their furniture to return to their collection – or spend.

Crowdstar really preys on the player’s internal drive to create only great things. No one wants to feel like they are submitting a design to a social competition that is sub par, especially when your Facebook profile associated with it.

The key learning here is, players are willing to spend both to maximize their chance of a high rating and because no one likes submitting something that they aren’t proud of.

By combining these two systems, Crowdstar has created the perfect storm – it’s whipped up a great way to monetize off players purchasing decorations directly, which is a system that no other developer in the top grossing uses to this degree.

#3: Professional Visuals & Real-Life Brands

Lastly, what key aspect I believe that drove the success of Covet Fashion and Design Home is that these games aren’t designed to look like a usual cutesy free to play game – they are styled like a professionally designed app.

If you look at many of the Fashion Styling and Interior Decorating games created before it, they all resembled over the top pink, cartoony, and pretty gaudy color selection. Design Home’s look and feel is closer to a furniture magazine or professional software for interior decorating compared to a game. This both reinforces the fantasy and I believe strikes a chord with the audience – it’s a game for mature designers, not for kids.

Of course what really ties this all together is the use of brands within the game  it’s a win-win situation for both Crowdstar and the brands involved. Design Home is seen as a professional designing game by the game’s audience – a game where players get to place real furniture that they could feasibly buy in real life, and can even within the app.

On top of this, brands get exposure within the app to their target audience: people that love designer furniture. Brands like HGTV sponsor events, furniture brands can pay Crowdstar to increase the sorting rank of the furniture they put in game. Brands can even pay Crowdstar to have “brand exclusive” events — ex. one where only “Blink Home” furniture is allowed.

Conclusions

Design Home and Covet Fashion before it are key games for Glu + Crowdstar. The company has created a successful hybrid of a social network and a game, and delivered a competitive PvP environment for a traditionally competition-lite market – fashion and interior decorating. It creates strong long term retention and plenty of outlets for Crowdstar + Glu to build upon for the years to come.

My keys for their success:

• Event-driven core loop which gives enough variety that player’s collections are constantly challenged and giving Crowdstar an outlet to build limited time events and interesting new competitions to drive long term play
• The core loop monetizes strongly on player’s key emotions: that they want to reach the top of the leaderboard by creating the best possible designs + that they never want to publish anything that they don’t believe is quality
• That the game is designed as a professional design app rather than a cutesy game. This is a game that fully understands its market

We don’t tend to typically think about games as emotional experiences, and perhaps because of this, the most interesting talks I saw at GDC 2013 were about games that had made people cry. Crying is not something that we expect from games, yet if a book, film or play made us cry we would think that a great achievement. Instead, we expect games to be fun, which whilst pleasant, is not a deep emotional experience. However, the games that do go beyond fun to deliver real drama are some of the most interesting, memorable and successful games out there.

Here are some four techniques that games can use to deliver hugely engaging, dramatic experiences.

Jeopardy

One of those talks at GDC 2013 was on DayZ (the other was about Journey). Dean Hall, the lead designer talked about creating a consistent world where things had value. The game is an FPS in a zombie apocalypse setting – so far, so generic. But the game is also permadeath, has scant supplies, and as well as zombies, has other players who may or may not be friendly. As well as avoiding zombies and bullets, you have to keep your character fed, watered and warm.

The zombie apocalypse does not itself generate tension and danger, it just provides the backdrop for this. The game boasts incredible levels of tension from the unpredictable way that other humans will act in a world without strict rules, and where killing you for ammo is just as likely as agreeing to team up. Staying alive is a painstaking process of amassing equipment from match boxes up, and all of which can be snuffed out in a moment from a sniper you never saw.

Players have been quick to share their stories on the forums. Many are the early triumphs of new players surviving more than a few minutes to gather some food and set up camp. Others are more heroic, inflicting revenge or justice on rogue players. Most make some reference to the feelings and ethical dilemmas that players experience – how a miscommunication can lead to unintended bloodbaths, or the acceptability of sniping noobs.

As with so many other Rogue-like games, it’s the danger of loss, the jeopardy, that makes the experience so rewarding. When things in the game are hard to come by and easy to lose, players place a huge amount of value on them. It’s the same reason that players love FTL or Dark Souls, where every encounter is a story and a chance to be a hero, because the risk of failure is so real and tangible. (Here is another great review on DayZ).

Empathy

A sense of loss is also prevalent in X-Com, though to a lesser degree. Here your inevitable squad casualties from taking on alien invaders can be replaced for the next mission. However, a number of details make you feel each death of a soldier under your command more keenly. Some of this is down to the mechanics – troops gain experience and become more powerful as they survive longer, gaining unique special abilities that are crucial to your long term success. But beyond that each solider has a name, a nationality, and their own physical appearance.

These cosmetic details build on their varying stats to give a surprising amount of individuality that you empathise with, even in the absence of scripted dialogue. Pierre from France might be a craven sure to break at the first sign of danger, whilst Brad from the US is your favored sniper with a history of saving you from impossible situations. As a player you start to fill in the gaps and elaborate on their characters and backstories. If your troops survived long enough they also earn a nickname that further endears them to you, and if they die, their names are remembered in the in game memorial.

These details mean that when a soldier dies, it is not only a setback in your progression to build up an experienced team. It is a much more personal testament to your personal failure to protect your squad mates, who trusted you to command their every move. X-Com is a great example not because it is the best game at showcasing empathy for digital entities, but because it manages to achieve so much with so little.

Context : Half Life

When you start Half Life, you don’t get a gun, and you don’t kill anyone. It’s an incredibly mundane start to an FPS, as you walk around a research facility going through the daily routine of the protagonist Gordon Freeman. But few games are as feted as much as Half Life for their quality of narrative. The slow start has a couple of beneficial effects on the rest of the game.

Firstly, you know that at some point, very shortly, Bad Things will happen. Just as Tarantino cranks up the tension with long, drawn out conversations that you know will eventually end in a blood bath, anticipating the upcoming excitement is every bit as good as actually experiencing it.

Secondly, once the facility is infested with aliens trying to chew your face off, there is an added gravity to the drama that you are going through. The dead bodies aren’t just decorative as in so many other games. Here they are fellow scientists you were exchanging pleasantries with a short while ago. You haven’t been born into carnage a hero, but thrust into the role of a reluctant hero as a survivor of an attack on the world you knew.

Agency : Game of Thrones

Telltale have been making games giving player big choices for 10 years. Their games are dialogue heavy, with players deciding how to respond to other characters from a range of predefined options. Their latest offering, Game of Thrones, has some exquisite moments, such as when you are interviewed by Queen Cersei. Squirming through her questioning was on a par with any similar scene from the TV series where some piteous underling is pulled apart, and I found new sympathy for the impossible situations that minor characters often find themselves in.

This scene works so well for the same reasons that many game choices of this nature fail. As an avid fan of the franchise I knew the political landscape and dangers I was traversing, and also had strong views on the type of character I wanted to play. Without this background knowledge and the sense that the choices offered would actually make a difference, my choices would have felt hollow.

In the same game there are breaks in conversation where as the player you are given the choice to say the same thing in three different ways. This adds nothing to the experience apart from slowing it down, and in reminding you that you should be identifying with one of the characters, that in actual fact you’re not.

I recently came across the other problem, of insufficient knowledge to inform a decision, in the otherwise excellent Dragon Age Inquisition. Here I had to choose between allying with one faction or another, but could explicitly not choose both. Although both factions were well known to me I felt I was still getting to grips with the world lore, and could not fully grasp the potential implications of the choice I was being given. Frustrated I resorted to the internet to understand what I was getting myself into in each case. Again, instead of deepening my immersion in the experience, poor agency had broken it.

Giving players choice to direct the story in a game is one of the defining attributes of the medium, and can be extremely powerful. However, it needs to be both a genuine choice and the player must understand the choice they are being given, or it can risk backfiring.

Conclusion

Games are often thought of solely in terms of fun. But engagement and memorability often peak when there is more than just fun, and they deliver real drama. Increasing the drama in games can be achieved by making things have value, getting players to empathise with the characters, giving the story context and allowing the player agency.