In this article we will investigate how that market has grown and potentially where it will continue in 2020. If you want to read more about the Mechanics of HyperCasual or How Voodoo dominated the category in 2018.

HyperCasual is a business model, not a genre.

The greatest trick HyperCasual ever pulled was convincing the world it was a genre. It is in fact a business model. 

A hugely successful business model at that. I would define a HyperCasual game as: any game that relies on 95% of its revenue from ad monetization. Generating profits from any ad network, offer wall or affiliate scheme – anything not directly paid for by the gamer. HyperCasual games are truly free to play, you pay with your time and eyeballs when you watch an ad, but you’re never asked, forced or limited by gameplay by your inability to purchase a currency or speed up a timer.

The very best games blend the ad experience and mechanics together and create fast, simple games that appeal to the broadest audience of players. 

2015-2019 for HyperCasual Gaming

We worked with AppMagic who are an app store revenue and download estimator to assess the growth and proliferation of HyperCasual games.  They have been tracking the charts of 47 app stores around the world and manually analysing and classifying Top 100 games into genres. Over that time they have tagged 1300+ games and estimated their overall downloads worldwide. Although having precise numbers can only be achieved if you own the app yourself, estimations provide very reliable trend analysis and it will be these trends we look at.

The chart above shows the estimated monthly downloads for the biggest HyperCasual titles from 2015-2019. There are some games that fall into both Casual and HyperCasual as they may have been iterated on with deeper mechanics, but the trend is clear. Year on year there were more and more games that grew primarily via the ad-driven model.

The total quantity of hypercasual apps has been increasing at a fairly predictable rate and competition in the sector has grown. Overall the sector itself still supports 6 times as many titles as back in 2015, from 100million per month to 600 million downloads per month in 2019. The very best titles can rack up around 50 million installs in a single month, but most top titles do closer to 10 million. A large bundle of titles can see 1 million per month quite regularly. 

New Game Releases have peaked

The trend of new game releases that break into the Top 100 clearly articulates that rapid growth phase of 2018. However, we seem to have reached a peak. By the middle of 2019 almost 80 new releases featured in the Top 100 most downloaded around the world, but this is now in decline.  This points towards new games needing more development and more testing before scaling and becomes riskier for publishers. 

Competition is fierce in 2020

Although the market has grown steadily and big hits continue to maintain performance, the publishing model has become fierce. Where Voodoo once clearly dominated, they now share the space with 3 other key rivals: Lion Studios, Say Games and Crazy Labs, often trading top spot on certain weeks. The middle ground has also grown, with 42 publishers from around the world who each drove more than 10 million worldwide downloads in January 2020.

This shows overall sector health, but competition burns cash and this will be having significant effects on the bottom lines and sustainability of the model in general. Success is always in the eye of the beholder and although it’s become much tougher at the top there are more companies that have created sustainable, growing businesses in the HyperCasual sector.

2019 the year HyperCasual sustained

2018 was often talked about as the boom when HyperCasual appeared and dominated the charts, however, 2019 was the year that HyperCasual stuck. More games than ever were able to sustain and retain a top 10 position for at least 15 days in a month in the US. 

Although the number of titles that can sustain has flattened, it’s still a healthy 5-10 games in a single month that stick in the download charts. We can also be fairly sure that most of these games were new releases due to the lifecycle of a HyperCasual being very short. Across 2019 alone 87 new titles managed to break into and hold a place in the top 10 for half a month, a factor of 10x higher than any other genre. This gives confidence as creating new novel titles as a smaller dev studio or partnered with a publisher can be achieved. Rank and sustain of rank do come at a cost. The actual return on investment for these games is unknown, due to large marketing spends, but one would hope this was profitable for each game.

Expanding the view point to the TTop 100, we can see that 2019 continued to be a year of dominance for the HyperCasual space with almost 1 in 5 games in the charts attributing their business model to Ad View monetization. The sector continued to grow and hold apart from a large blip when Google removed many thousands of apps for breaking their terms of service, but publishers quickly fixed and resubmitted these games. 

Predictions for 2020

With all these upward trends why is it that HyperCasual falling out of favor? Many believe that the simplicity of these mechanics cannot sustain, that the need to grow LTV will lead to deeper meta-games and features. I don’t see that as the case. I feel that most of these predictions still see HyperCasual as a genre and not as a business model. To be successful in this field you must embrace that business model on a deeper level and understand what makes players interact with the ads and stick in your games:

#1 – The Top 100 charts will continue to contain 1 in 5 HyperCasual games each month

I don’t predict a drop in the number of titles in the Top 100, yet I also don’t believe there will be an increase. The interesting change will be whether the apps present in the top 100 will be new or will be older more established titles. Can companies create even longer sustain for their best games?

#2 – Niches and Mechanics will combine further

Predicting what will be the next hit will become even harder. Right now, one of the most popular games on the store is Woodturning by Voodoo which as both genre and idea is novel, unpredictable and niche. 2020 will see even more “is that even a game?” approaches. 

A broadening of mechanics to include more progression, goals, idle and social elements will combine with the HyperCasual business model. Any developer who is not focussing on ad views and simplicity will have expensive marketing and won’t be able to grow. Some games will do this very well, others will fail miserably. The costs in time and development skills will rise.

#3 – Ad Monetization must get smarter and more native

The biggest issue in the genre isn’t the games, it’s the ad units. Quite simply they suck, they don’t allow for smoothness, beautiful transitions, different sizes, timings or formats to fit into the game experience. Ad networks will get smarter but they need to work with game developers to build ad tech to support the genre. HyperCasual ads will feel more and more native. Playable ads do so well because they encourage the user to enjoy the time away from the main game. Any ad network that thinks about the player interactions and experience, specifically in terms of how HyperCasual ads are used, will create games that retain for longer while still seeing high clicks and conversions. 

The post Is the HyperCasual market still healthy and growing in 2020? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Genres and taxonomies are important distinctions for game designers. What works in one genre may not work in another. The audience – their tastes, their expectations, their desires vary dramatically. Within the app landscape, we are generally confined to the genres defined by the stores themselves. However, most of the time, they are too generic or audience trends react quickly and the standard groupings are not large enough. GameRefinery have recategorised and evaluated mobile games into 40 more relevant sub-genres. MFTP worked with their data to see how sub-genre landscape changed throughout 2018 and as a developer which genres might be overlooked or undervalued?

Top Grossing Charts in 2018

The top grossing represents the genres with the best mechanics that make people part with their cash and spend via IAPs. With all free to play the action of conversion (spending money in game) is a rare event. The vast majority of people never spend and those that do spend, spend infrequently. Therefore, games that do well in the grossing chart have game mechanics that increase the likelihood of a conversion event or the frequency of multiple conversion events.

We took the GameRefinery data set of the top 500 Grossing apps in each quarter of 2018, the games were categorised into a fixed set of 40 sub-genres according to their game mechanics. For each sub-genre, we determined:

1. The number of games in each sub-genre
2. The rank of each game
3. The Min rank, Max (mode) rank, Average rank, Median rank, Standard Deviation for each sub-genre.

Games which have a high number of titles in the the chart, could be considered as strong monetizing genres. Their mechanics encourage higher spends.  Games with the highest rank, i.e Position 1-5, earn the most money on a per app basis. High, Min or Max ranks signify that apps within the sub-genre perform very well.  Using calculated metrics we assess each of the sub-genre ability at driving high revenues on the app store.

We found some clusters of sub-genres that have more effective game mechanics at making money on the app store.  

• Rising Stars – Genres which have the highest chart rankings, but not necessarily a large number of games.
• Reliable Giants – Genres that have a large number of titles that span the full chart rankings, top to bottom
• Smash Hits – 1 or 2 titles that hit the top 20 grossing but the average game performs poorly.
• Fun but Free – Genres that support a small number of low performing titles consistently.

The Best Top Grossing Genres in 2018

The number of games in the charts over each of the quarters is a clear measure of a sub-genres ability to monetize.  These are the 4 reliable giants (Slots, Match3, Turnbased RPG, 4X Strategy) in the top grossing charts and we have covered these in the monetization section of the bible.  Each of these sub-genres support a large number (40-60) of games across all 4Q of 2018 that stay within the top 500 grossing. The rest of the genres tend to support around 5-20 games on average with Word/Trivia and Puzzle supporting the most.

Each quarter there is some movement in the number of games within a category. Categories which grew the count of games from Q1 -> Q4 in 2018 are showing stronger performance to monetize. The large dark green circle represents Q4 and the smallest pale green represents Q1. A consistent rise through 2018 would have the largest green circle at the top and the small green circle at the bottom, showing a rise in the number of chart positions being held. Slots, Battle Royale and MMORPG have all shown stead rise through 2018, whereas 4X Strategy, Tycoon/Crafting and Card Battlers have slowly dropped through 2018.  The best rising star categories outside of the Reliable Giants have been Word, Casual Sports and Casual Racing. Each of these have shown that they can grow their category in 2018. Comparing between this and the download charts, you can see that monetization is broader and less condensed although safety lies within the rising giants, which is why we see so many clones and copies of these game mechanics.

The Skew of Top Grossing Genres

Wicks

The chart above shows the spread of the revenue data. I took the average data across the 4 quarters to represent all of 2018. All the games have been ranked according to their highest average position throughout the year, the bottom left quadrant are the top performing genres. A wick (the thin blue line) is the min and max position for titles throughout 2018. A Candle the short, fat rectangle is the median and mean chart positions within 2018.  The shorter the wicks the tighter the range for the whole subgenre, meaning more concentrate chart positions. Concentrated high chart positions are favoured because the higher the rank the greater the ability to drive monetization. However, the number of games per category vary wildly and a larger number of games naturally increases the length of the wicks.

AR games such as Jurassic World Alive, Puzzle RPG and Card Battlers all have a number of titles that sit very high in the charts with a tight overall range. These sub-genres represent the rising stars of the grossing charts as they have a small number of top performing titles. It could also mean that gamers in these genres are more fickle, and favour 1 or 2 top titles with unique mechanics rather than playing a range of titles that each feature similar mechanics, like the reliable giants.  A lot of these sub genres also represent new and emerging niches in 2018 and when you observe the data across the 4Q you can often see more game entering and climbing the charts quickly.

Candles

If a genre has a dark blue central candle then it means the genre skewed positively, it’s Mean was higher than its median. A positive skew means that of all the games in the sub-genre more of them were of a higher rank than the average, meaning more games towards the top of the charts.  If the candle is white then the genre skewed negatively meaning more of the titles lay towards the lower end of the charts. The wider the bar the bigger the skew.

Games with long blue candles and very low wicks tend to show genres which have a number of top ranking games pulling up some low rank games. Battle Royale, Synchronous Battler and Interactive Story genres all show some stellar titles in the category, but also likely have fast following low performing titles bringing the average down.

Games with long with candles and short overall wicks represent genres that sit in the middle of the ranks, with a larger number of mid ground titles. Card Battler, Bingo and Breeding all feature stable but not stellar performances throughout 2018.

Bubble Chart of Top Grossing Genres

Top ranking games make the most money and we know that the store itself. Another visual representation of the same data shows the count highlighted by the size of bubble. AR and Puzzle rank highest overall throughout 2018 but have a small number of titles. 4X and Slots have the largest number of consistently performing game in the Top Grossing for 2018.

Competition on the App Store

Competitiveness is a huge factor in deciding which genre to try to attack when building your next game. The more games in a sub-genre, the harder it is to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd. A small number of titles with a low average rank however, means that the mechanics of the sub-genre itself might not support good monetization and is also a risky undertaking. It is therefore prudent to try to create a game in a genre with a lower number of titles, that each maintain a high average rank. We favour games which are rank 1-10 disproportionately as they take a lot more money than the lower ranks and we also prefer genres which have a positive skew as that’s showing that more of their titles are sitting higher in the charts than lower. We then combine this together to form the Genre Score (This is not a perfect mathematical score, something we came up with) and these game genres. Anything over 0 is good.  

Match 3, even with it’s competitiveness still stands out as a clear favourite for consistently monetizing an audience and maintaining high chart positions. This has been known about for some time with King and Playrix building entire studios and brands, appealing mainly towards the match3 audience. With enough uniqueness and enough marketing power there is still always room for another match3, but be prepared for the competition on the marketing side. AR and Battle Royale are still the stand out winners in terms of new entrants on the grossing chart. They have managed to support a few titles that all perform quite well while achieving high ranks.  

Conclusion

2018 has seen some real flux in the smaller genres through 2018. Although the top 4 grossing genres remained strong, rather than further consolidation there have been 2 strong entrants in the form of AR and Battle Royale that have supplied new gameplay and new monetization routes. The overall number of viable genre options available to free to play designers has increased and new monetization methods, such as subscriptions or vanity based IAPs are providing large sustainable revenues. Match3, AR and Battle Royale we’re the top genres to pick in 2018. Stay on the look out for more pure RPG, Synchronous Battlers and Turn Based RPGs which might have new twists in 2019 for more adventurous studios. For more established studios the top 4 still consistently perform but the competition from niche studios is increasing and piling on the pressure.

The post The Top Grossing Mobile Game Genres of 2018 appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Genres and taxonomies are important distinctions for game designers. What works in one genre may not work in another. The audience – their tastes, expectations and desires vary dramatically. Within the app landscape, developers and analysts generally confine themselves to the genres defined by the stores themselves. Most of the time these are too generic or broad to capture how a free to play mobile game is designed. GameRefinery have recategorised and evaluated the top 500 mobile games around the world into 40 more relevant sub-genres. We dug into the data to see if there were any genres that receive less coverage but have clear potential for new hits in 2019.

This is a 2 part piece. You can read the second part on the top grossing game genres of 2018 as well.

Top Free Charts in 2018

The top download charts represents games on the app store with either the widest appeal, most virality and/or highest marketing spends. The Download ranks have much greater fluidity than the grossing ranks because games tend to jump in and out based on marketing spend and the charts fluctuate much more across each region. For this data set we took US data only.

Driving downloads is as much about being on trend and having effective cheap marketing as is its game mechanics. However, just as we will see in the grossing charts, there are some game mechanics that dominate the download chart. The rise of Ad Revenue becoming a sustainable business model without IAP has allowed games to simplify and reduce development time to jump into the chart for brief periods of time. This has made it harder for most other genres to maintain chart positions, but there are some that can still keep top positions regularly.

The data we used was GameRefinery data set of the top 500 Downloaded apps from the US app store in each quarter of 2018. The games were manually categorised into a fixed set of 40 sub-genres according to their game mechanics. For each sub-genre, we determined:

1. The number of games in each sub-genre
2. The rank of each game
3. The Min rank, Max (Mode) rank, Average rank, Median rank, Standard Deviation for each sub-genre.

Genres which have a high number of titles in the the chart, could be considered as widely appealing genres. Their mechanics and positioning encourage more downloads. Genres with the highest max rank, i.e Position 1-5, have the most downloads which leads to the best opportunities for  advertising revenue. High, Min and average ranks signify that many apps within the sub-genre lie within the top 250 apps in the chart meaning they perform better as a whole. Using calculated metrics we assess each of the sub-genre ability at driving high revenues on the app store.

We then found some clusters of sub-genres that have more effective game mechanics at making money on the app store.  

• Rising Stars – Genres which have the highest chart rankings, but not necessarily a large number of games.
• Reliable Giants – Genres that have a large number of titles that span the full chart rankings, top to bottom
• Smash Hits – 1 or 2 titles that hit the top 20 but the average game performs poorly.
• Fun but Free – Genres that support a small number of low performing titles, they don’t climb high in the top grossing.

The Top Downloaded Game Genres

Simply observing the number of games in the charts over each of the quarters shows that there are some clear sub-genres that consistently perform well.  2018 was dominated by HyperCasual with there regularly being 120+ games in the top downloaded charts in every quarter making it the only reliable giant for the download charts. Hyper Casual is confusing as a genre as it’s really a collection of a large number of  hypercasual game mechanics, bunched together by a business model (Rewarded Video Ad Views). However you define it, it’s clearly been the overall winner of 2018 in the download charts.

Moving from Q1 to Q4 Hypercasual slowly dropped the overall amount of titles, yet it is still 3x larger than the next most competitive genre, Other Puzzle. There are also a large number of genres that perform exceptionally badly in downloads, such as MOBA, Music and Card Battlers. This could be in part due to the inability for the developers to market them to a broad enough audience. Reducing your audience by creating games targeting older or younger, male or female or niche/specialist fan bases greatly reduces your ability to achieve and maintain high ranks in the download charts.   

The large dark green circle represents Q4 and the smallest pale green represents Q1. A consistent rise through 2018 would have the largest green circle at the top and the small green circle at the bottom. Customization, Word, Arcade are the most secure genres for broad appeal and grew steadily through 2018. Puzzle, Sport and hypercasual all trended down across the year, but the effect was quite marginal.  The fact that the charts we’re so dominated by a single defined category shows a clear consumer trend, but who knows how long that will last in 2019?

The Spread of games in each genre

Wicks

The chart above shows the spread of the download rank data. We took the average data across the 4 quarters to represent all of 2018. All the games have been ranked according to their highest average position throughout the year, the bottom left quadrant are the top performing genres. A wick (the thin blue line) is the average  min and max position for titles throughout 2018. A Candle (the short, fat rectangle) is the median and mean chart positions within 2018. The shorter the wicks the tighter the range for the whole subgenre, meaning more concentrate chart positions. Concentrated high chart positions are favoured because the higher the rank the greater the ability for a genre to get downloads. However, the number of games per category vary wildly and a larger number of games naturally increases the length of the wicks.

AR, Battle Royale and Synchronous battles games all have a small number of titles that sit very high in the charts with a tight overall range. These sub-genres represent the Rising Stars of the download charts as they have a small number of top performing titles. The genres are less cluttered but also are clear trendsetters in their game mechanics. Titles like Fortnite, Pokemon and Clash Royale maintain a constant presence in the DL charts.

These genres have more fickle gamers. They tend to favour 1 or 2 top titles with unique mechanics rather than playing a large range of titles that each feature similar mechanics, like Hypercasual gamers.  A lot of these sub genres also represent new and emerging niches in 2018 and when you observe the data across the 4Q you can often see more game entering and climbing the charts quickly. Depending on the background of your studio and the size of your budgets, attacking the rising star category requires more innovation and development investment but the competition is less and your game will stand out more. Larger studios tend to opt for safer bets so Puzzle, Word and Interactive Story have all maintained clear download chart positions.

Candles

If a genre has a dark blue central candle, the genre skewed positively, it’s mean was higher than its median. A positive skew means that of the games in the sub-genre more of them were of a higher than the average rank.  If the candle is white then the genre skewed negatively meaning more of the titles lay towards the lower end of the charts. The wider the bar the bigger the skew.

Games with long blue candles and very low wicks tend to show genres which have a low number of top ranking games pulling up some low rank games. Battle Royale, Synchronous Battler and Shoot em’ Up. The highest average rank is a good indication of trends, because more games can sit and stay high in the charts.  As Hypercasual is the category to beat in Downloads any genre that lies to the left of it I would consider it as trending as it’s beating Hypercasual over the year in terms of position.

Sandbox is one genre that’s got a large negative skew. There is really only one top performing game in this category (ROBLOX) and the rest is having a hard time maintaining rank.

Games with long with candles and short overall wicks represent genres that sit in the middle of the ranks, with a larger number of mid ground titles. Card Battler, Bingo and Breeding all feature stable but not stellar performances throughout 2018.

Bubble Chart to show number of games within a genre

The Bubble Chart representation doesn’t clearly show the size of the Hypercasual bubble, it should be around twice the size (I blame Google Sheets). The size of bubble represents the number of titles in the genre and the distribution of the mean vs median gives you a sense of what a good average game might perform. AR and Battle Royale highest average Mean and Median throughout 2018 but have a small number of titles, you would expect as the number of clones increases that these genres would move closer to the 200 rank. Sniper, Other Arcade and Word/Trivia games manage to outpace the hypercasual genre, but still the download charts are swamped with many more hypercasual successes that hit the top 10. Taking the ideas from hypercasual but applying it to some of the more obscure genres on the store is another way a studio could hit big in the download charts. The pace of development and release rate will only increase in 2019, so make sure you don’t put all your hope into a single title for the studio to see success.

Competition on the App Store

Competitiveness is a huge factor in deciding which genre to attack when building your next game. The more games in a sub-genre, the harder it is to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd. A small number of titles with a low average rank however, means that the mechanics of the sub-genre itself might not support good monetization and is also a risky undertaking. It is therefore prudent to try to create a game in a genre with a low number of titles and a high average rank, these games allow you to differentiate yourself and the mechanics support good monetization. Rank position is disproportionately important to revenue, so we heavily weight the top 10 ranks.  To represent this we created a Genre Score, where we weighted sub-genres for being competition free and still highly downloaded.  As we know Hypercasual is a highly competitive space and as we’re not measuring exactly which apps make up genre, then take these results with a pinch of salt. Compared with the Grossing Ranks, I have factored the max download as less important than the sheer quantity of entries in Downloads.

Even with the huge amounts of competition on the store, Hyper Casual truly dominated the charts and if you were in a position to build and promote these titles then there was a lot of downloads available to you. It’s hard to see hyper casual loose it’s crown but there may be a shift back towards deeper game mechanics in simple style formats as players demand more from their experiences but want the look and feel of hyper casual.  Battle Royale, Other Arcade and Word/Trivia games have all show that there are still a lot fewer competitors at the moment and that the genres are very desirable by the sheer number of downloads they drive. Combing that desire with new or interesting monetization is the way to make huge revenues on the store itself.

RPG, Card Battler and MOBA games rank poorly for different reasons. In some cases there are so few titles that there isn’t the demand for the titles and in others they have a large number of competitors but can’t achieve the top download ranks.  Interestingly as we will see next week, these genres can still make a lot of money and this is down to the game mechanics themselves, but from a popularity point of view they are poor and tough to rank in.

Conclusion

Download charts have been dominated by the hypercasual sub-genre in 2018. The genre has consistently maintained high chart positions while supporting a large number of titles every quarter. It prompts discussion that hypercasual as a sub-genre might need to be further split to understand which mechanics are performing best to aid further development.  For more niche genres, Battle Royale and AR have both had a small number of very high performing titles in 2018, these games are on trend and people want to play them. Although we’re not looking at actual download numbers for this analysis, Fortnite has been a consistent force in both ranking tables all year.

At the lower end of the download charts, Shooting, RPG and MOBA (all male targeted genres) have shown consistent low performance. It stands to reason that to really get top performing titles you need to clearly appeal to men and women to broaden the overall download rates and so no matter which genre you’re working within, keep that in mind.

The various Puzzle categories, of Match3, Action and Other have also all maintained large portfolios of games in the top 500 and can maintain consistent chart positions, making them safer bets than other genres.

Stay tuned for next week where we look at the Top Grossing charts.

The post The Top Free Mobile Game Genres of 2018 appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

This is a follow up to our Top 10 Game Mechanics for Hyper Casual Games article that you might also enjoy

Idle game mechanics are nothing new. Anthony Pecorella of Kongregate diving in deep into the trend back in GDC 2015, but moving into 2019 we’re seeing some advancements in the trend.

I remember playing Cookie Clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Tap Titans, and the mountains of clones of the simple idle game landed in 2014, but then the trend died out.  Yet something changed. Starting in 2016, we’ve actually seen a big resurgence of the mobile idle game genre:

Aggregate downloads and revenue growth for mobile idle game genre from Q3 2016 to Q2 2018
Source: Sensor Tower Estimates

Looking at  idle games from 2014 to 2018, we can see a growing trend for both downloads and revenue in this genre. This is not the case for most of the mature genres on mobile. Puzzle, Simulation, Casino, and Strategy all have stabilized or declined in downloads, and seen slow growth in revenue. These genres are locked up, but Idle remains a hotbed of innovation on the mobile market.

In the last years we’ve seen a lot of completely new styles of idle game mechanics hit the market and see success: Merge Town by Gram Games challenged the assumption that idle games were only for spreadsheet-savvy mathematicians, Trailer Park Boys by East Side Games shows a path where Idle games can actually host a compelling narrative, and Idle Miner by Kolibri (previously Fluffy Fairy) shows that idle games can create compelling traditional simulation-style game loops.

For this post, I’d like to showcase the variety of paths to success that an idle game can have. While this may be focusing solely on the past, the hope is that this can inspire you to create better idle game ideas for the future.

What is Idle? how does it work?

If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t understand what idle is, we’ve covered it a number of times: (we’re fans here at MFTP)

Related Read

Idle Games, Everything You Need to know!

Idle games have risen on mobile because it 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.

Related Read

Why you should care about Idle Games

In Retention, Design

Adam Telfer

Idle games, sometimes called Clicker or Incremental games, are games which are all about management of income. 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

The key to the genre: no matter what you choose, you will make progress. But optimizing your decision about what upgrades to purchase next is the core of the strategy and what drives long-term interest in the genre.  Because the core of the game is focused on long-term purchasing decisions, retention is built in. Because progress is always felt, it always feels rewarding to come back.

Let’s now dive into the variety of mechanics within the idle genre.

#1 Linear/Clicker Idle

The core of these games are usually insanely simple: tap as fast as you can to generate income. This starts off as fun, but gets pretty tiring and uninteresting quickly. So it quickly shifts into deciding over which upgrades to spend that cash on:

• Do you want to generate more money while you’re away?
• Do you want to generate more income from your own taps?
• Do you want to save up for the big purchase that will increase your income tenfold?
• Or continue to purchase cheap upgrades for small income gains?

This decision-making structure has stuck with idle, but the core gameplay of tapping as fast as you can has not.

Over time, developers tried changes to the core gameplay to make it last a bit longer: Make it Rain! and Farm Away used swipe controls instead of tap to make it more mobile friendly. However, the core mechanic always quickly became a bore, and the appeal of just swiping or tapping as fast as you can to progress is only appealing to some.

Also, due to the nature of the game, prestige mechanics became a necessity. Pushing the player to reset their progress back to the beginning in order to make the growth more manageable and ensure the player still felt growth in the slower endgame. This was never all that appealing to players — so developers had to find clever ways to sidestep the issue and incentivize the full reset.

It’s important to note that this style of game has gone out of fashion. Besides Partymasters (pictured), there haven’t been many successful new titles that only use clicker gameplay or similar. The resurgence of the genre has actually been on taking the progression mechanics learned in this genre and applying it to whole new mechanics, whole new audiences.

#2 Arcade Idle

So what do you do when clicking style gameplay is uninteresting? Take the same progression system mechanics you know work well, and graft it onto more compelling core gameplay. Enter Voodoo, who mastered this approach throughout 2017 and early 2018.

Related Read

Everything you want to know about Voodoo – An Interview with Voodoo Games

In Growth & Marketing, Industry & Market Trends

Tom Kinniburgh

Instead of asking the player to tap to earn their coins, Voodoo asked them to play simple arcade games that have mass appeal. Games like “Idle Invaders” used classic shoot-em-up gameplay (ex. Space Invaders, 1942) to earn their income manually. Shoot down incoming invaders as fast as you can to earn your manual income, and then purchase and upgrade computer-controlled allied fighters to fight alongside you. This made for a compelling formula, that was easily replicated across multiple genres. “Idle Sweeper” took Pac-Man, “Idle Flipper” took flipping style gameplay.

Any simple arcade gameplay which had an opportunity for scaling health/damage and computer-controlled assists could create a compelling new idle game.

Planet Bomber was the first to expand on this formula, adding more depth to the game by adding more types of upgrades. Before, games would offer linear upgrades to damage dealt, or income generated. Planet Bomber now offers upgrades across a number of parallel vectors, all with a variety of importance to the core gameplay. This creates a far more compelling long term strategy, and is what future idle games will need to focus on. How do you find core gameplay that can offer a variety of upgrades that are equally visible and impactful to progress?

#3 Merge Idle

The merge mechanic was first pioneered by games like Triple Town, but turned commercially successful by Gram with Merge Dragons and Merge Town.

Related Read

Deconstructing Merge Town: The Rise of Hyper Casual

In Deconstructions, Monetization

Adam Telfer

Merge style games take out the tiring clicker gameplay and swap it for merging items: drag and drop duplicate items on top of each other to increase their level. What’s a simple premise turns into an addicting experience, because the game always feels like there is something to do. Sessions are impressively long because it’s just so compelling to constantly build up your houses towards the next goal. The next goal is so clear (I want to upgrade my best house), and the path is clear (merge until I get a duplicate) — yet as soon as I complete a goal, I’m compelled to start the next path.

What Merge Town did more than just increase the session length was bring in an entirely different audience. No longer are idle games just about increasing numbers, but giving clear visual progress. This type of gameplay is for a much broader audience than most idle games, yet kept all the engagement mechanics intact.

#4 Idle Simulation

Simulation has been on the decline on mobile for years, with Sim City Build It and Fallout Shelter (arguably) being the last big games in the space. Yet on Idle, in the last year we’ve seen a new face of simulation games: Idle Simulation. Wheras Sim City Build It, Farmville, Hay Day may appeal to a older, broader demographic, Kolibri’s “Idle Miner Tycoon” and “Idle Factory Tycoon” have shown a compelling business case for using classic simulation game loops.

Unlike the previous idle game mechanics, idle simulation games don’t innovate in the core gameplay. In fact, with Idle Miner and Idle Factory — they remove a core mechanic altogether. Tapping fast no longer helps you — the game stays compelling by asking you only to be managing your upgrades, and managing what boosters to start. This used to be an issue for idle games — since idle games typically had to start slow and progress quickly in order to give you a sense of progress, tapping gameplay was an easy out for designers to give a player something to do between upgrades. With simulation games, the upgrades are fast, but also far more strategic. As such, it doesn’t need tapping style gameplay as a crutch.

These games rely on a traditional simulation game loop, similar to compulsion loops you felt in games like Sim City (the original) and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Purchasing one upgrade will strain another system. In Idle Miner, purchasing an upgrade for a mine will mean that mine generates more income per second. This puts a strain on your elevator — the elevator then needs to be upgraded in order to hold on to more resources. Upgrading that elevator will put a strain on your surface level extraction… This goes round and round straining each system giving you new goals with each step and avoiding upgrades feeling stale.

Idle Miner and Idle Factory aren’t the only games that have attempted this and succeeded. I’d recommend playing Crafting Idle Clicker, Reactor Idle, and Factory Idle on Kongregate. This genre has seen the biggest surge in downloads, and there is plenty of room for innovation to come. This is the category to watch for new developers.

#5 Idle Management

One mechanic that hasn’t been done often on mobile, but more often on Kongregate is more “Management” style sims. Check out a game called “Groundhog Life”: this is a life management simulator, with obvious idle characteristics.

The core gameplay is replaced with choosing which system to boost. In Groundhog Life, you can choose how you want to spend your 24 hours each day: spend 8 hours or 2 hours sleeping? Spend more time at work, or studying? While your character is always making progress, whether they are progressing in learning a new skill, earning money, or being happy is down to the decisions you make. Each time you die, you pass on your traits to your next life — giving you a boost depending on your choices in the previous life. While there haven’t been many mobile idle games that have used this mechanic, this is by far the most addictive idle game that I’ve ever played.

#6 Story-driven Idle

Going in a different direction, there’s also innovation happening in how idle games have made prestige (resetting your progress) less punishing and more relevant. Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money by East Side games is a masterclass in this. Many developers have attempted to graft licensed IP onto idle games, but none fit so well as Trailer Park Boys — in the last episode of every TV season, they end up in jail losing everything. East Side baked this into the game design: at the end of each season of generating a ton of cash from idle systems, the boys are caught by the cops and you lose all your money.

Related Read

Designer Diary – Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money

In Design, Deconstructions

Dave Rohrl

This creates a strong narrative arc in the game that makes sense in the idle game loop. Each prestige (which happens more often), the player gets a drip of story. This creates a more interesting long-term goal for the player besides just increasing their numbers.

The game has been a breakout success for East Side Games, and it’s why they’ve been slowly bringing on more licensed IP to work with. Their current game, “The Gang Goes Mobile” based on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is currently in soft launch.

#7 Idle RPG

Lastly, is most likely the biggest in-app purchase revenue generating idle category: RPG.

Clicker Heroes and Tap Titans were arguably the first games in the genre — showing that you can add battle mechanics with an idle progression, but both games actually fit more into category #1 based on their real mechanics. RPG can offer more than just a facade for progress.

Non-stop Knight was the first to break into this space, by adding automatic RPG gameplay as the core, while asking the player to choose when to use their boosters. Instead of linear upgrades, the character then started collecting loot from random drops (thank you Diablo), collecting pets and unlocking new boosts. Non-stop Knight was revolutionary in its time, but in retrospect leaned too heavily on idle progression to make a compelling long-term engagement loop.

The king of Idle RPG is without a doubt Idle Heroes. Instead of leaving too heavily on Idle Progression, they took many of the progression systems from Heroes’ Charge and Galaxy of Heroes. More focus is on a gacha-infused progression system: collect a team of heroes, outfit them with the best possible gear, and compete in limited time events for the currencies you desperately need.

This level of complexity is likely the next step for Idle RPG games. Keeping the compelling simple core gameplay, but creating more strategy in how you create and manage a team of heroes, and building upon an economy which events are necessary to be competitive.

In Summary

As you can see, idle game mechanics support a wide variety of game designs. Don’t just assume the tried-and-tested clicker gameplay is the only option when coming up with idle game ideas.

Idle, unlike most genres on mobile, has a lot of room for innovation. It’s created compelling business cases for many successful gaming companies on mobile, and as a genre has plenty of room for newcomers to enter into. As a designer in this space, I would take a look at what has been done and predict what will come into the future:

• Don’t stick with traditional core gameplay: find new core gameplays that will let you reach new audiences like Merge Town and Idle Invaders
• Add more strategy to the progression: create compelling game loops by using upgrade stats that actually lean on each other. Buying an upgrade in one area will drive you to upgrade in another.
• The market is maturing quickly: don’t underestimate the value of licensed IP or building out a events framework for your live operations.

If you keep this mind, my hope is that the idle market will continue to innovate for years to come!

The post Top 7 Idle Game Mechanics appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

But how do you know if you are picking the right trend? Is there a method to establishing a trend or is it pure luck? Is a trend just beginning, have I missed it, is there still time, is it still worth it?!

These are tough questions and there isn’t a single answer, but there certainly are telltale signs that a trend is developing. Most long term human endeavors create trends. The length of time or the number of events needed to establish a trend can vary wildly across industries. Mobile gaming on the app store is no exception — yet unlike other mediums, free to play apps that feature similar mechanics, themes or audiences can all still achieve financial success. While Candy Crush may be the #1 game in match 3, there have been hundreds of games operating outside of it that still provide sustainable financial success to their developers. You don’t need to be the trendsetter or the #1 game to build a successful business.

A particular mobile gaming trend that caught my eye recently is the hyper casual fishing genre. A genre that until 3 months ago didn’t feature in any charts. Then quickly 3 games all show up. Is this a clear trend — if so should we jump in?

What is a Trend?

Trends are used to describe a change over time “upward trends in stock markets” or “black leather is the hit style of the season”. These casual comments actually mask the fundamentals of a trend which is an observed statistical change in data over time.  People looking at datasets and making predictions on the future based on the performance in the past.

A trend is not a single remarkable data point.

For example, Banksy’s recent stunt of destroying his own art that had been sold in Sotheby’s received huge worldwide publicity, but it isn’t likely that we’re going to see art destruction as a trend.

Trends are all about data and the underlying data is tracking the actions of a population of people.  For a set of data to form a trend it needs to:

1. Be more than two points of data
2. You can’t pick convenient points, it should take all available data
3. The more data points the more reliable the trend, but margins of error always exist.
4. A trend is always historic and is not a guarantee of the future.

Pokemon Go hitting the top of the market in 2016 was a single data point. It would be bold to call that a trend looking at its own success. Now with Walking Dead, Jurassic World Alive, and soon Harry Potter being released — this starts to show as more of an underlying mobile gaming trend towards AR gaming.

A trend always needs multiple data points to confirm it is a trend and most people are only interested in strong trends in either direction.

For the purpose of this article, we will be taking the app store download chart as our data source and discuss whether there are any game genres or mechanics that are causing a splash!

A tale of three Fish

Fishing as a game genre has been popular all the way back from SEGA’s Mega Bass Fishing and this mirrors to some extent it’s popularity as a hobby. However, as a casual game, the original arcade fishing mechanic was first executed well in Ridiculous Fishing by Vlambeer released in 2015.

This game performed very well for the time and also won a number of development awards. Yet it wasn’t designed with the free to play business model, so as a paid app it does not get a large install volume anymore.

Similar to what happend with Threes!, within the last four months, 3 of the largest mobile publishers ( Lion Studios, Kwalee, Voodoo) have each brought their own version of ridiculous fishing to market (Hooked Inc, Go Fish! And The Fish Master).  

Each of these companies identified a gaming trend from years ago — a game that performed well within its market & business model (paid, mobile) that could be easily ported over to their model (hyper-casual). Finding trends doesn’t always have to be about what’s popular now, but also what has been popular, but can find new life today!

Fishing Game Design

Capitalising on a trend still requires differentiation to be successful. Both Go Fish and The Fish Master stay quite faithful to the original Ridiculous Fishing concept where you cast a line deep into the sea and then on the way up you must catch a variety of fish. The larger the fish you catch the more money you earn which allows you to buy upgrades that help you cast deeper, catch more fish or earn more offline currency via an idle mechanic.

This is a very simple, single currency positive feedback loop that doesn’t scale. But it provides ample opportunities to view an ad.  This likely makes it a good mechanic to increase the views per DAU which I wrote about earlier as the primary metric to improve for monetization in free to play.

Based on the game mechanics we’ve seen in hyper casual, fishing games use a very subtle rising mechanic + a small amount of dexterity in order to achieve the most optimal score.  Score is not as critical as other games and enjoyment is replaced by netting rare fish. This works well as it creates a simple random variable reward for players over the longer period as they never know which fish are swimming deep beneath their feet.

Idle Mechanics for retention

Hooked Inc, changes the mechanic and put’s the focus into a more fishing tycoon/management style approach where the focus is placed more on upgrading both your rod and your boat than the fishing itself.  Players have reduced importance on dexterity and more important on upgrade efficiency. tracing your finger across the screen. The aim with Hooked Inc, is to slowly increase the size and strength of your boat to lead yourself to the more lucrative waters. The core loop remains the same as above but there is a deeper idle mechanic and a larger number of upgrade choices.

In each case, the primary monetization is video ads, but Go Fish! And Hooked Inc contains more premium currency upgrades to increase the rate at which you can earn more soft currency.  If I had to rank them in terms of game design depth:

 The Fishmaster  < Go Fish! < Hooked Inc 

    (least depth) ———————- (most depth)

Beginning the Trend

What’s most interesting about this particular genre is that it has been dead since Ridiculous Fishing, a premium game that was barely doing 100 downloads a day. There has been no other top performing fishing titles since 2015. Then, in the space of 3 months, 3 casual games appeared and together they have amassed 10,000,000 downloads. The question is, why?

The mechanic itself lends itself to the hyper casual business model due to it’s short rounds, simple progression and one finger click and drag mechanics. This could have been the reason Voodoo attempted to grow The Fish Master originally. During that period the market itself was responding to the idea of a simple fishing game, but as we noted earlier one data point is not a trend.

Fast Follow

Due to the size of the 3 companies that each entered the market, it’s safe to assume that each of them is aware of one another. In the Hyper Casual space, this means keeping tabs, being fast to market, iterating on success or killing failures quickly. Fish Master (Kwalee) quickly built upon the game feel, improving the speed, transitions, casting feeling and the complexity of finding rare fish. However,  they didn’t stray too far out of bounds of the simple game mechanic – dropping a hook to catch some fish. Kwalee also made smart decisions, to focus on the hook drag, adding a small amount of skill and luck for the user so that they would reach their maximum load more quickly, but through skill you could catch bigger fish if you focus on where to drag.

This subtle change made the game feel more challenging. This seems to be just the right balance as quite quickly they rose faster and higher in the charts.  

Hooked Inc (Lion Studios) is a fundamentally different game as it’s idle compared to dexterity, but one that’s attacking the same audience.  Idle mechanics, which rely on upgrading large numbers of stats in order to earn more revenue quickly have less general appeal but still appeal to a gaming audience.  Based on the download figures it was harder to sustain and grow the installs, most likely due to CPI. You would hope that a higher LTV from the idle mechanics would allow for longer marketing growth, but again the charts points to a down trend. Exact LTVs for Hyper Casual are very hard to tell due to Ad Revenues being obscured from Sensor Tower Analysis.  

For the mobile gaming trend to be more significant and longer lasting, we would look for 3 major signs. Firstly the longer a single app can sustain larger install numbers. If a second data point then showed a higher but flatter drop in installs after it’s peak and then if the third data point could maintain a new and similar peak so that the install rate of all the apps together was much higher.

Sustaining the Trend

As fast as the trend appears the data shows it’s already reducing in volume. Fishing games have fallen out of the top 100 in general, and none of the 3 games covered has been a clear winner. Go Fish! By Kwalee was the most successful in terms of downloads, but the mechanic and depth of the gameplay has not led to sustained chart position.

There is also a large unknown in how much each of these companies was spending on marketing. Sustaining on the app store now requires large amounts of cash to push users into apps to get them up the store.  In each case, it looks like the profitability of the campaigns wasn’t high enough to maintain strong organic growth, leaving the apps to flounder. For a mobile gaming trend to really sustain it must usually lead to actions that are natural (no marketing), viral (increasing K-Factor) and adopted by the majority.

The most interesting trend at the moment is that of Fortnite which has truly captured the imagination of the youth and can often be seen where people are referencing things from the game in real life. Take for instance the real-life dance challenges that are also run digitally too.  A trend like this sustains itself with user-generated content, but Epic is doing a great job of sustaining momentum through their Season based approach and ever developing storyline and character plots.

When to jump on a trend and when not?

As we’ve seen in the Fishing trend, most of the pointers are already pointing down. Within 3 short months, a huge number of people had begun to play a fishing game, but the sustain wasn’t there. It would, therefore, be naive to believe that you can buck the global trend with a new fishing game.

However, the simplicity of the gameplay and the clear appetite for downloads initially means that with just enough of a twist or blend from Ridiculous, Hooked, Go Fish or Fish Master an audience awaits. Assessing how much revenue potential there is behind that audience is another blog post all. Happy Trendsetting!

The post Fishing for Trends on the App Store appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Happy New Year! In amongst all the disregarded party poppers, half drunk glasses of Prosecco, and trays loaded with fast drying out canapés, we can confidently report it is indeed 2018.

To start the new year off on the right foot, we’ve decided to come proffering gifts: namely, a new Free to Play Bible, building on its existing foundations to offer both upcoming and established mobile developers the resources they need to deliver an engaging and, most importantly, successful free to play game.

And we’re not done yet, either. Throughout 2018, we’ll be updating the links and adding new articles of our own on the main blog to flesh the Bible out even further. It’s going to be a busy year.

Related Read

The Free to Play Game Design Bible

Within the F2P bible we’ve pulled together a lot of content, linking to articles, opinion pieces, and videos by experts from across the web. We’ve separated the Bible into many different chapters, each taking a look at a different focus for game designers and product managers operating in the free to play space.

To begin with, we go into the basics; how to get started in game design, what it takes to be successful as free-to-play, and the high-level view of the free to play market.

Related Read

Getting Started in Mobile Game Design

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Creating a Successful Mobile Free to Play Game

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The Free to Play Gaming Market

Secondly, we dive into free to play design topics; how do you design and articulate a core loop, what gameplay works best in free to play, designing for touch controls on mobile, and how to approach session design.

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Crafting a Strong Core Loop

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Addictive Core Gameplay Design

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User Experience Design (UI/UX) & Onboarding

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Creating Habit-Forming Session Design

Thirdly, we go deep into the core systems of free to play games; improving retention and monetization, the design of gacha systems, alongside evaluating economies.

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Improving your Game’s Retention

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Designing for Free to Play Monetization

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Building a Lasting Free to Play Economy

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How to Design Loot Boxes and Gacha Systems

Lastly, we talk about the operations and growth side; how do you soft launch? How do you make money with ads? How do you grow a game?

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(Soft) Launching a Free to Play Mobile Game

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Making Money with Ads

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Mobile Game Marketing and Growth

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Mobile Live Operations Best Practices

Altogether, we hope the new refreshed free to play Bible should serve as the perfect starting point for developers old and new, motivating them for the year ahead.

The post New Year, New You, New Bible appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

This can’t have been easy. Top game developers know the importance of holiday long weekends. A time of year when many players find themselves with extra time to play games. Many games advertise big events to create higher engagement and maximise revenue. Most games show spikes in their revenue at this time of year when they push big events for holidays. Games like Pokemon Go even had major Apple featuring with their easter event:

So how did Dokkan Battle do it? How did they manage to push aside Supercell, Nintendo and Machine Zone’s holiday events and become the #1 top grossing game?

It came down to 3 reasons why

• Monetizing Core: A strong gacha-based system which drives monetization
• Driving Desire: tie-ins to the IP, community building, and rare desirable content
• Sales Design: well-timed sales surrounding the event driving players to convert multiple times

#1 Monetizing Core

If you haven’t played the game, it is a Gacha-based RPG Fighting game using the Dragon Ball Z license. Developed by BANDAI NAMCO, the game is actually 3 separate games: one released in Japan ( ドラゴンボールZ ドッカンバトル) one in China ( 龙珠激斗) and one Globally, for all other countries.

The game loops are designed similar to Summoner’s War, Fire Emblem Heroes, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, Heroes’ Charge and various other Gacha-based RPG Games on mobile. For more on how those games work, check out our deconstructions here.

Related Read

Deconstructing Galaxy of Heroes

In Deconstructions

Adam Telfer

Where Dragon Ball Z adjusts the formula is in the core gameplay. Instead of a standard turn-based RPG, they opted for something completely different. The game board pulls from puzzle RPG games by having a board you manipulate to deal damage (similar to Puzzles & Empires and Puzzle Quest).

In the core battle, your focus is on charging your character by collecting Ki (energy). If you collect enough Ki you will launch a super attack, a vastly more damaging and visually impressive assault with iconic moves. The board works with a path system: selecting an orb at the bottom connects with its own colour as it moves towards your opponent granting additional Ki. Additionally, matching your character’s type with orb colour yields double energy. In the example below, my hero type is red, so I want to select red balls.

While the core gameplay interaction is simple, the strategy in who you bring into the battle is where the depth comes in. The strategy comes into choosing heroes which synergize the best with each other. Each character has linking abilities, leader abilities and passive abilities. Each benefiting certain other characters. For example, LSSJ Broly has a leader skill which benefits all characters on the team which are a physical type (yellow). Broly grants all physical characters a boost to their energy, hit points, attack and defence.

The gameplay strategy overall feels light but puts significant pressure on trying to create a synergetic team of characters, which is exactly what you need when creating a Gacha-based monetization.

To collect heroes, players collect stones (premium currency) to eventually cash them in on a summon. In Dokkan Battle, each summon costs 5 stones, but the optimal strategy is to wait until you’ve collected 50 stones for a Multi-Summon, so you can summon 10 characters at a time with a guaranteed high ranking hero.

Ultimately the game is down to summoning hundreds (to thousands) of times to collect the heroes that work best together. But just getting a strong top team in the game doesn’t mean you’re finished. Then starts the long, gruelling road of awakening (evolving) your characters to their ultimate form.

Rarity	Name	Allows you to…
	Normal	Reach Max level of 20
	Rare	Max level of 40
	Super Rare	Max level of 60, can be awakened into a SSR
	Special Super Rare	Max level of 80, can be awakened into a UR
	Ultra Rare	Max level 100, can we awakened into a TUR *Does not drop in Gacha, must be awakened
	(Transcend) Ultra Rare	Max level 120, can be awakened into a LR using extremely rare event-driven currencies *Does not drop in the Gacha
	Legendary Rare	Max level 150 Can only be 1 of 3 characters + a lot of rare event currencies *Does not drop in the Gacha

If you’ve played fire emblem heroes, this will seem very familiar. Dokkan was actually first released back in February 2015 and saw many of the similar growing pains that Fire Emblem Heroes is going through now. In particular, Dokkan has added additional tiers (UR, TUR, LR) on top of their initially launched tiers to extend the amount of time it takes to reach the optimal build of a character.

Related Read

Deconstructing Fire Emblem Heroes

In Deconstructions

Adam Telfer

In Summary, Dokkan Battle is a well crafted Gacha-based game which focuses the player on building up a strong team of heroes. They’ve built a strong base which could be capitalised on using events.

#2 Driving Desire

So how did a game with a light RPG core play rocket up the top grossing charts? What was so special about this event?

The event was a summoning festival. For 77 hours, players have the ability to summon 5 new heroes. Included in this set is 2 heroes which are very desirable: Super Saiyan God SS Vegito and Goku Black Rose. If you’re not a fan of the show: the show is about the protagonist Goku, who fights, gets beat up, powers up to a new form, the bad guy does the same, Goku gets beat up again, rinse, repeat, until eventually Goku wins (this can take many episodes). For those knowledgeable about the show’s storyline, you will also know Vegito and Goku Black are different but we will avoid going deep into the lore of the show here.

Regardless, the Dragon Ball Z IP has been revitalised in the last year, broadcasting in a new major TV show and building up a strong following once more. In particular, in the last months, this Vegito and Goku Rose have been significant new characters to the plot line. The fans of the series know these characters and are extremely excited about adding them to their team within Dokkan Battle.

Besides watching the show, BANDAI NAMCO has been teasing these new characters joining the game for months. Teasing this content using the messaging within the game (seen above), social media, and their fan forums by showing silhouettes and teasing how valuable these characters will be.

Don’t underestimate the importance of proper community management and messaging with your live ops strategy. Building up anticipation & excitement is the key to driving high engagement in events.

Visually, these characters are just a recolouring of Goku and Vegito, but mechanically they shift the meta strategies of Dokkan Battle meaningfully. For one, these characters have a leader abilities which benefit a much wider array of characters (Vegito for SUPER type, Goku for EXTREME type) and these characters can deal insane amounts of damage (even having a chance to hit multiple times). For now, the fan base sees this as meta-shifting — not overpowered. It will be interesting to see how the audience reacts in the coming months to this meta-shift, and if BANDAI NAMCO can avoid the pay-to-win feeling in western markets. These characters were actually launched 6 months ago in the Japanese version of Dokkan Battle, which gave them some lead time to smoothen out the meta and avoid any negative meta changes in the process.

By combining these elements: a transparent time-limited window, clear tie-ins with the IP, and designing extremely desirable content, Dokkan Battle has created a recipe for their user base to be ravenous about collecting the event-driven content.

#3 Sales Design

But a strong gacha-based core and some desirable content aren’t going to drive you to the top grossing on its own. To drive top grossing games it is about properly capitalising on the demand for this content. Free to play games do this through the task of setting up and designing sales. In recent years this has become much more of an artform: finding the optimal messaging, timing, and cadence for sales so that it remains special to the audience, avoids cannibalization yet drives significant revenue.

Dokkan Battle clearly is being run by live op experts when they designed the Dokkan Festival Event.

A week before the event even started, when it was only being teased to players, Dokkan Battle started offering premium currency at a significant discount in limited time windows. Players were offered sales of 50%+ off of currency packs in limited quantities. Unlike most F2P game sales, Dokkan also adds a quantity limit per sale — allowing them to offer these crazy discounts without fear of players abusing the price window. But during these sales, players stocked up on their summoning currency for the upcoming frenzy that would happen during the Dokkan festival event.

When the festival started, Dokkan Battle offered big discounts for players that would summon multiple times in a row:

You can see here, that players would get initially 40-50% off the cost of a usual multi-summon, until reaching Step 4 which gave a free multi-summon. These were designed to get as many players deep into the sale as much as possible. Each Summoning type had their own step sales function — so you could get the 25/30/50 summon discounts first for Goku, and then again for Vegito. Players invested themselves in both sales to try to claim either top prize. After Step 4, players are given a free multi summon every 4th step, so any player in desperate pursuit of the unique content (and there was plenty) would attempt to take advantage of the “Buy 3 get 1 free” sale.

On top of this benefit, each purchased summon also came with 5 additional tickets which could be traded in for additional free summons (although these tickets did not have the unique content in their pool). Although this sales system is complex, it succeeded it pulling players into the pursuit of summoning as often as they could during the limited window for the content.

With these two systems, Bandai Namco capitalised on the limited time content. They utilised a strong premium currency sale surrounding the event to push players to convert early and take advantage of sales when they could, and they created an addictive savings system for continuing to summon. This drove players to continually spend and convert in pursuit of the rare content that was available at a bargain only this weekend.

Takeaway: Strong Core + Live Ops for the win

Dokkan Battle’s surge to the top grossing was actually many years in the making. Throughout the years of development, Bandai Namco built the base for what this event ultimately achieved.

• A strong monetizing core gameplay provided a basis for Dokkan Battle to build upon live events and extremely desirable content.
• Driving desire through leveraging the IP, effective messaging with players, and designing meta-shifting content.
• Sales design surrounding the event which pushed players to convert multiple times

In the coming weeks we will see if they can maintain their position. Was this event short-term focused, or can it propel Dokkan Battle into a staple in the top spots of the App Store? Regardless it is clear that Dokkan Battle is a finely tuned monetizing machine, that will be able to leverage their content and their audience many more times in the coming year.

Huge thanks to Matt Hood for this article! Without his knowledge of the deep systems in this game, I couldn’t have put this together.

The post 3 Reasons Why Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle Reached #1 Top Grossing appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation and do not work for any of the partners mentioned, this guide is meant as a reference to understand where value resides and what motivates the companies involved.

Making Money with Mobile Video Ads

Put simply, you use video ads to earn money and you earn money because advertisers pay to show videos to your players that drive installs of their app. As a rule of thumb the more videos you show the more money you will earn. With that in mind, your intention as a developer should be to increase the view count of videos shown to your users if you want to earn more money.

However, every view does not always equate to cash in the bank. The reason for this is that as an advertiser you want to pay for valuable actions. In the world of mobile, that ultimately means an install of an app. Developers only make money from the players who ultimately watch the full ad, click, then install the app. Every view should give you the best chance that a user will complete the video and are there more likely to install.

Your core KPI to maximising revenue is completed views per daily active user.

As you are unable to control a player’s behaviour after they have watched a video, you should focus on what you can control, the display and timing of the video. Within your games, your core KPI to maximising revenue is completed views per daily active user. Any number above 1 would be considered reasonable and over 4 would be considered very good! So set yourself the challenge of finding out what your current completed views per DAU is, then try to improve it.

Debunking the Myths of Mobile Video Ads

Most of the literature around video ads is unsurprisingly written by ad networks themselves. In each case, they have a mission to encourage the uptake of ads and are likely to involve selection bias to draw more positive conclusions.  On the flipside, game developers who believe that video ads break experiences, ruin gameplay and alienate users might want to change their opinion.

Myth 1 – Video Ads Decrease Retention

Yaniv Nizan gave an interesting report on match 3 games showed decreases in D1 retention of around 0.5% but increases in revenue of over 89% for android or 278% for iOS. In this case, the negligible loss in retention is worthwhile when compared to the revenue earned. In my experience I’ve not seen vast changes in retention due to video ads as fundamentally retention is driven by your ability to bring players back to the game and adverts don’t promote or dissuade players from starting up your app. When video ads are placed in areas where a user opts in to watch and a cooldown timer is used to limit viewing, the rewards and bonus associated with the video can even draw players to come back in order to watch more videos for the rewards!

Myth 2 – Video Ads Lower Engagement

Fuse Powered (a mediation company) analysed 6 million players to show that the 9% of users that watched a video ad were 6X more likely to make a purchase. Again this statistic may be misleading as the 9% of users who watched a video are very likely to be your most engaged users. Video views tend to aggregate at the top end of your player base as they value your in-game currency the highest. Rather than any video ad lowering engagement directly, the cohorts that watch on average remain more engaged in games in general. Don’t make the mistake that the ad itself, led to the engagement. Engagement is created by the desire for the valuable currency to spend in your game. Giving players an opportunity to progress with premium currency without buying an IAP is a strong incentive to engage and keep playing.

Don’t make the mistake that the ad itself, led to the engagement.

Myth 3 – Video Ads Decrease In-App Purchase Revenue

If you analyse the top grossing chart then many of the top grossing free games will not run rewarded video advertising. This might be considered a missed opportunity as video ads have been shown to improve ARPDAU, but in the case of a top grossing game losing highly valuable users to your competition is a bad long term strategy.

That said, there are many games that are top grossing and do have in-app-purchases and rewarded video. It’s a choice that you as a developer will need to gauge via your own data, typically you might look for:

• If your 90 day LTV of your players is under $1 then you should be looking to increase earnings via video ads.
• If you have a very large cohort (1 million+ MAU) of players that are actively engaged then you can increase earnings via video ads.
• If your overall conversion rate from Player → Payer is below 1% then video ads will allow you to leverage the 99% of non-payers.

If the opposite of these statements is true for your game then consider reading the monetisation articles on improving ARPU in the Free to Play Bible. If you have the ability to either A/B test or remote configs then a common technique is to stop showing video ads to your payers or to only switch on video ad monetisation after a period of non-paying days.

The Mobile Video Ads Value Chain

Advertisers (demand)

Within the industry, there are many different names for the clients on this side of the value chain: demand, publishers, brands, but I like to use “advertisers” as these are the people who pay for the adverts. Within the mobile video ad space, there are actually a relatively low number of advertisers that make up the majority of spend on the platforms. This is because running effective large campaigns can cost many $100,000+ per day. Overall the number of advertisers on mobile and their total spend continue to grow each year and show no sign of slowing.

It’s important to understand that an advertiser will only run a campaign (a video ad on an advertising network) if they are going to generate more value than the cost of the campaign. In simple terms, they usually need to equate an ad campaign to an LTV > CPI to be able to continue to run the ads.

One of the reasons rewarded video ads have become so popular is their ability to actually drive views. Every video watched is opt-in from the player who has chosen to spend the next 30 seconds to watch whatever is presented to them in order to receive a valuable reward. This works well for both gamers and advertisers as people want to watch the video at that point in time. This is why rewarded video has been one of the areas where advertisers have continued to spend big.

Nanigans

Video Ad Networks

Ad networks can get a bad rep… but they are good for one thing… they tend to throw lavish parties with lots of free drinks!

You may not like Ad guys, but they’re your best bet for driving revenue from high DAU – Low LTV games.

An ad network’s role is to talk to advertisers (i.e. Machine Zone) to run a campaign to promote apps across their network. Each campaign has different targeting (French/Dutch/German, Women, over 25) and objectives (Drive installs) and the network aims to optimise against achieving that objective. Every Ad Network has positives and negatives which can be hard to find out in advance. However, unlike the old days of print or tv advertising, a number of standard convention KPI’s that all networks provide. Comparing these numbers between networks is key to choosing which network is best for your game.

Ad networks can be private, where you receive content from a single source i.e Unity Ads or be a larger DSP (Demand Side Platforms) i.e Mobvista that aggregate lots of different ad campaigns from multiple sources.

Ad Networks tend to be very protective of their campaigns and run them exclusively on their own controlled SDKs. Demand side platforms usually allow the advertisers finer grain details of where they want to run their adverts, device, size, geo’s or even within specific apps (blacklist/whitelist). A reasonable list to check out for good ad networks from 2016 is on the Soomla site. If you’re just starting out and focussed on the US market then I would recommend Unity Ads, Applovin and AdColony as 3 networks to start with. Other smaller niche networks can work much better in other countries such as Yandex for the Russian Market. If your game starts to scale significantly, spend more time researching this field in particular.

How Do DSPs Work?

Demand Side Platforms (DSP’s) make it easier for an advertiser to buy across multiple, discrete inventory sources. The aggregate lots of different advertising channels into their single platform. DSP’s may strike a deal directly with a single large app developer for all of their views, or be working in partnership with an ad network to provide extra inventory at peak times. Due to their scale, often larger brands such as Nike or McDonlads would work with DSPs to reach the widest possible audience in the simplest way. With a single login and dashboard – running, reporting and optimising campaigns at large scales becomes much easier.

Facebook – The Biggest, Baddest Ad Network of Them All

The largest video ad network on mobile is Facebook. Unlike the other ad networks, Facebook handles all the infrastructure and tracking that is needed from the ad network to the store and even controls the display of the advertising in the apps themselves (Facebook / Instagram). This gives Facebook a huge advantage when attracting cash-rich advertisers to spend on their network as they know much more about the user and can present the user with a more relevant video. Facebook fiercely guards this data about their users and advertisers and platforms must abide by Facebook’s rules if they want to use the platform. This helps facebook maintain high-quality ads for its users.

The total mobile ad spend of 2016 is estimated to be around $40 billion and Facebook has around 1.15 billion mobile users in 2016. This huge user base is also very loyal with 66% of users logging in daily to Facebook; a metric similar to having a very high retaining game. Facebook has created its own consolidated value chain and has simplified the experience of using it from both an advertising and user perspective.

Facebook also has a lot of personal metadata about you that you willingly provide, your, age, sex and location are key pieces of data, but every like, interaction and comment can be used to guess what type of person you are. All this information allows facebook to show more relevant ads to you that you are more likely to click on and install. Inevitably this is why facebook can command higher prices for similar advertising space.

Mediation

Mediation companies (Fyber / Supersonic) and Supply Side platforms (SSP’s) we’re setup to help developers to optimise the delivery of advertising within their app. Their role is to switch seamlessly between ad networks in order to maximise your fill rate (the number of videos shown per request made for a video) and to show the highest paying network to your audience depending on their location or other pieces of data they have collected.

The real benefit to mediation is that as a developer you can remotely control and change your ad viewing, ad caps, network priorities and revenue reporting in one place. This benefit can save you many hours of laborious report checking and analysis to find out exactly which networks have been profitable for your game. There is no single best network or best setup: track, analyse and review on a weekly or monthly basis and adjust on what you see.

There is no single best network or best setup: track, analyse and review on a weekly or monthly basis

Mediation is usually free for developers. Although this noble endeavour of making a developer more money, most independent mediators have now been acquired or aggregated into ad networks themselves: Fyber by RNTS Media for $190 million and Supersonic by IronSource for an undisclosed fee. This allows a mediator to force a percentage of the views to their ad network of choice for which they might be reimbursed.

As a game developer adding a mediator requires a small amount of work, but it often provides you with a much more stable platform to track, analyse and review your ad networks. For that reason, I would always recommend either using a mediator or mediating SDKs yourself using a simple remote config to switch between ad network providers.

Game Developer (Supply)

You sit in the middle of the value chain. Creators of hit, fun experiences that encourage gamers to play and come back every day. Without a hit game, there would be very few people watching any of the videos.

A game developer’s primary goal is and should always be, make a fun experience that people want to come back and play again. Never lose sight of this when creating a game. Advertising slots around your experience and should not detract from it. Players are not against watching videos in order to earn valuable virtual currency. However, if there are intrusive or large un-skippable video at awkward periods within the app you are going to frustrate your user base. For videos to be effective and enjoyable you should always make them opt-in to view and allow a gamer to choose when and where to watch. This will increase engagement and video completes.

You have the audience, fundamentally that is where the value lies

You’re also the decision maker to which SDKs will be integrated. There is a lot of value to the ad companies if they can have their SDK in your game. If you have a very large audience (1 million+ DAU) then you may be able to negotiate better rates with partners. Put your business hat on and be shrewd! You have the audience, fundamentally that is where the value lies. The data of how your users play, who your users are and whether they have paid or not are all pieces of information that are highly lucrative to all parties across the value chain.

Attribution

Attribution sits after the video has been shown to the user. These companies are responsible for tracking the install and reporting back to the Networks who was responsible for driving this user to install the game. They act as a 3rd party intermediary on the whole video ad value chain. They are also one of the only parties in the value chain that are able to charge directly for their service. Usually, they make money by charging advertisers a cost per install tracked and so add a layer of cost to any ad campaign.

Fraud prevention is becoming more and more important as the rate of fraud is increasing with an estimation that almost 34% of all traffic is susceptible to fraud. Fraudulent traffic, such as fake installs or click-stuffing damages the whole ecosystem as it results in bad traffic. Advertisers see less value and so stop spending money on the network. Attribution attempts to pick up on these fraudulent users quickly and ban them from the ecosystem.

Third party intermediary ad networks rely on attribution to determine which ad network served the ad that led to the last click before install. This makes a big difference if you are a large publisher who is running tens if not hundreds of campaigns on multiple sources because you only want to pay once for the install. There are a large number of legal hoops that an attribution network jumps though to ensure trust for its clicks. As a smaller developer, you may not need to add in attribution if you are running a small ad campaign on a single source. Facebook and Google and many of the other video ad networks provide valid attribution for free if you advertise on their networks and you use their SDKs.

As mobile video spend grows, fraud becomes more lucrative and this part of the value chain will become more and more important for advertisers.

Stores (Apple and Google)

All installs occur via Apple and Google and so all clicks created by videos will end with a visit to their respective stores. As neither Apple nor Google gives much information about what users do on the stores it was the black box of the mobile world. Since 2015 both stores have started to give some data back to game developers in the form of store analytics, but they don’t provide this data to ad partners directly and so the post-click journey of a user is not visible and therefore hard to optimise for.

The stores add direct value to the whole chain as installs of games drive new users who may purchase in-app purchases or create brand loyalty and awareness by apps rising up the charts. The fact that there are only two major stores left in mobile, show the power they both wield and staying on the right side of both Apple and Google is a must for any mobile developer.

Conclusion – What should I do now?

With a clearer idea of the value chain in the mobile ad space, you should understand what value companies provide and who to talk to at different stages of development. Try to take some action in your current project to improve ad implementation:

Small Game (10k MAU) – If you are not using a mediation company, find one. Get 2-3 ad networks that you know and trust and add video ads to your shop for free gems. Focus on observing the number of views and as the game grows, get better at event tracking how your users interact with video. Use this to learn what a baseline is for video views in your game.

Mid Game (100k MAU) – Now it’s about increasing video views and increasing your revenue from each view. Work with your product team to think of more innovative placements to access the video, spend time making it fit within your theme, if you can A/B test ideas do this to increase completed views per DAU. In unison set out to talk to more varied ad networks who work in different Geos, Audiences or game types, you could start making more money in non-western countries etc. Try to get 4-5 networks in.

Large Game (1M MAU+) – You are likely to have a reasonable setup here and a person who is more dedicated on marketing or revenue generation. You may be working with 5-10 networks now, avoid SDK bloat. Can you work directly with a DSP? Can you cut a direct deal with an ad network? Can you approach an advertiser or a game company directly?

If video ads start to make over 50% of your revenue, can you create new features to increase views? Remember to continually compare networks revenue and tracking numbers. Work on a bi-weekly rotation to promote or demote networks within your app based on performance in particular GEOs.

In the future, I’ll be writing more article on video ads, in particular how to optimise in-game placement and get more completed views per DAU. Stay tuned!

The post Understanding the value chain for Mobile Video Ads appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

GDC 2017: Monetization

A Quick Summary:

• Define Your Core Monetization
  • Monetization’s root comes from a long lasting urge to progress.
  • The most successful monetization mechanics come from speeding up pacing to progress. So adding and tightening pacing systems is the key to improving monetization opportunities.
  • Pacing systems which can be monetized on usually come in 4 forms: Time, Stats, Currencies and Luck. Find where in your core loop you can add additional pacing systems which make natural sense.
• Ensure your game can scale for years
  • To be in the top grossing you need games which take years to progress, and can withstand tens of thousands of dollars of spending
  • Watch out for red flags in your prototype that it won’t scale:
    • Map out a vision of your progress over years. Do you think it will be enough?
    • Do the mechanics break? How large is your scope of stat upgrades?
    • Do the sessions break? In the mid and end game, are you asking too much of your players?
    • Does your Content scale? Can you effectively produce enough content to retain top players?
    • Does your Economy scale? Does your tight currencies remain valuable?
• Design & Tighten Triggers for spending
  • Record down for your game the various trigger points you see players spending. Can you add more? How can you tighten these reasons?
  • Triggers Usually come in the form of these 6 forms:
    • Loss Aversion: Protecting what players believe they’ve earned
    • Vanity: Showing off to other players in the game
    • Competitiveness: Wanting to dominate the game or other players
    • Impatience: Wanting to make progress quickly
    • Investment: Investing a small amount early which reaps greater rewards in the future
    • Social: Spending for the benefit of others
  • Which of these triggers does your game have? How do you tighten these?
• Prototype with Monetization & Pacing
  • Prototype with your pacing & monetization included to avoid misleading fun early in prototyping

Thanks for all that attended, and I hope this is useful for everyone!

The post Evaluating Monetization Early in Development (GDC 2017) appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

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.

The post Eliminating Energy appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Ed Biden