Here are our Slides:

• The big question surrounding Idle: is it ready for larger developers to start moving into the space?
  • What has started off as a niche market, has gradually formed into a contender on the AppStore. Allowing smaller companies (East Side Games, Futureplay, Kolibri Games) to grow successful businesses in a very mature mobile marketplace.
  • Where the market was flatlining in 2015-2016, has had a resurgence from 2016 to 2018, increasing in overall downloads and revenue.
  • 3 Trends have driven that:
    • Movement to Hyper Casual games which use Idle as a retention mechanic (ex. Fishing Inc, Merge Planes)
    • Trailer Park Boys’ use of Gacha and Narrative
    • Kolibri games deeper, simulation focused Idle Miner Tycoon
  • But Idle is still a niche market when looking at the greater marketplace
  • Regardless, Kolibri games started in 2016 has created two strong idle games, and currently makes roughly $200,000 per day from them

So how did Idle Miner Tycoon do it?

• Scalability
  • There game aimed to fix the visual progression problem with Idle games: that after a few prestiges, the game starts to feel the same all the time.
    • They invested in making sure that the core gameplay scaled, and was always addictive to strategize over which upgrade will be best for progress (rather than a simple upgrade system)
    • They invested in new visual mines, giving you a reason to progress
    • They didn’t force you to fully prestige unless you absolutely wanted to — you can expand to many mines but always keep your original.
  • My Take: Idle games should take note of the visual changes necessary to drive a new style of engagement. Moving towards this simulation style game did a lot for driving more sustainable long lasting engagement. Going towards a 2D grid placement (isometric) almost feels inevitable now due to what it can do for creating compelling strategies that drive longer engagement.
• Marketability
  • Looking into the case of Idle Farming Empire (previously known as Farm Away) its clear that Kolibri stumbled on a visual style which resonated with the Idle game audience.
  • Their CPI managed to be significantly lower than competitors, despite going for the same audience, meaning they could grow their game significantly faster.
• Live Ops
  • There is a clear inflection point in their revenue as they integrated more with their events system. Offering limited-time mines for rewards.
  • My Take: This was a good implementation but limited in its impact. It was enough to drive the game’s success, but looking at the market it is clear that they have room to grow in terms of what the outputs are from events)

But overall, can Idle actually expand? Can Idle grow to larger players? Most likely not within 2019. My prediction is that it will remain with smaller developers, simply because of the caps on the audience that exist so far. However, there are 3 clear areas of growth that a small or mid-sized developer can take advantage of:

• Broadening Audience
  • Hyper Casual games have integrated idle style economies into vastly different core gameplay, opening up new audiences to Idle. If Idle can find a way to bridge the gap, they can drive a wider initial funnel into a strongly retaining core gameplay.
• Simulation Focus
  • Kolibri have proven that simulation style mechanics can work within Idle. Doubling down on this there is plenty of design space to move towards the SimCities and Civilization space. Use common themes, but scale as well as Idle Miner.
• Live Operations Maturity
  • Idle Miner is leaving plenty of money on the table by going with such light events. Developers that can find similar audiences have the opportunity to drive more overall engagement and revenue if they can create the game such that events are more core to the economy (ex. that Gacha components are actually rare and useful to overall progression)

The post GDC 2019: Deconstructing Idle Miner Tycoon appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

In this deconstruction we will cover:

• Disney heroes core gameplay and metagame
  
• The heroes in the game and why they are so important
• Daily quests, live ops and events
• Game modes and their dependancies on one another
• Campaign and game progression analysis
• And game monetization

Can Disney’s crossover live up to expectations?

From a gameplay perspective, the game is inspired by earlier casual hero brawlers like Heroes Charge (2014) and Soul Hunters (2015) and caters to a more casual to mid-core audience. The characters are the selling point of the game (which can be said for every Disney product) and it’s clear that was the intention.

The game makes the entire cast of heroes visible from the beginning, showing the player the carrots: their favorite characters. It even discloses the length of the stick by telling the player exactly what to do to collect every hero. Hero accessibility ranges from easily acquirable to practically premium, but even these can drop for very lucky players.

Guest Autor: Niek Tuerlings Game Designer on June’s Journey at Wooga, Berlin.Disclaimer: The article is the author’s own professional view on Disney Heroes. Wooga GmbH. isn’t affiliated with this assessment in any way.

Disney Heroes’ Core Gameplay

The player starts off with a handful of heroes and by engaging with the single player campaign, they quickly start collecting enough different heroes to be able to create a team of their five favorites.

The core gameplay consists of selecting a team, starting a level where this team fights against other teams of AI controlled opponents. After winning the fight, the player is rewarded with rewards, depending on the game mode.

During the fight, the only agency the player has is choosing when to activate each hero’s first and main skill when their energy bar is full. When getting stronger, heroes gain three more skills but these are activated automatically.

In the meta-game, the player is gated by two things, stamina and what the game calls team level. Stamina generates with time. Team level is generated by player engagement. All hero levels are limited by the team level, hence the name. New heroes can be collected by finding an initial amount of hero chips. After acquiring, heroes can be improved in four different ways:

• Rising their star level by collecting more chips
• Increasing their level by earning XP in battles
• Promoting them by equipping them with badges
• Improving their skill levels using gold

It’s interesting that improving hero skills is the only significant gold sink. Gold is also used to promote heroes after finding enough badges but the amount is substantially lower than the amount that is needed for the skills. The reason for this that Disney Heroes lets the player upgrade hero skills from the get go. Other games like for example Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes require time-limited event currencies for this. Assumingly a decision made for simplicity reasons and the different age groups for both games.

Motivational Pinches – The Heroes

Currently, Disney Heroes features 42 heroes, a decent but not copious amount for a game in this genre. Each hero has a different skill set and a team always consists of 5 heroes. This means players have more than enough potential team compositions to experiment with, although not every team is viable. Balanced teams usually have at least one and sometimes two heroes of each type (Support, Control, Tank & Damage). This is the core of the game’s fun, which is why strategic and competitive players are the main audience Disney Heroes caters to. Next to this, the ability to chat, cooperative or competitive combat and the ability to form guilds cater to player’s social desires. The storytelling isn’t the game’s strongest suit, but it can initially tickle the player’s explorative cravings.

Desire for Heroes

Each battle generates random drops of badges and hero chips. Together with potential hero drops from different kinds of loot boxes, these variable rewards create the desire to keep playing. The hero collection screen neatly exposes all available heroes to players, which is especially attractive to the ones with strong collecting ambitions.

The game has a Daily Quest system, and since this provides the bulk of the player’s team level experience, this should be the biggest reason to come back every day. It works for a while, but Disney Heroes keeps offering the same quests each day. It’s a list of quest that asks players to engage with practically every game mode, and always in the exact same way, day in day out. This sets the precedent for players to find the most effective routine, which then becomes boring and presumingly hurts the game’s long-term retention. A more varied quest system with a random selection of daily quests (as opposed to just showing all of them) should be able to reduce this monotonous daily ritual.

Game Progression

Disney Heroes offers an abundance of game modes which all use the same brawler mechanic. At first glance, it’s strange to call a game that has one single core mechanic ‘varied’, but when looking closer at the characteristics of each game mode, one can see that each mode has its own specific purpose. What the game does well is using its different currency rewards to make all game modes dependant on each other, ultimately feeding into the same goal; leveling up the ultimate team.

Loot boxes, competitive PvP with global leaderboard, tournaments, guilds, daily events, a collection system with upgradable powerups and a synchronous cooperative multiplayer mode, it’s all there.

Campaign Progression analysis

To understand the intricacies of the game’s engagement potential, a study of its progression is required, which can seem pretty complex at first glance. For clarity, an infographic is included at the end of this paragraph, outlying the main features, their interdependencies and the currencies they use and generate.

The campaign is the main storyline of the game. Beating new levels progresses the story and replaying beaten levels is the main source of badges. This feature also offers an elite campaign where next to the badges, new hero chips can be acquired. The friend campaign is a game mode where heroes are paired with another hero to beat levels that require a specific kind of stamina. Beating a hero’s friend campaign unlocks another (fifth) way to improve heroes; equipping them with Memory Disks. Episodes in the friend campaign are gated by the hero pair’s relationship, which can be improved by sending these heroes on missions together. Missions are nothing but a timer started by the player which rewards friend experience when it runs out. Heroes sent out on a mission can still be used in other game modes.

After the player has battled their way up through 2 campaign chapters the market opens up. The market is the place where earned currencies can be traded for hero chips and badges. During the day at specific times, players are incentivized to check back into the game and review the newly refreshed products in the market, next to claiming some free stamina.

Disney Heroes offers six game modes that unlock at different times during its progression which reward currencies to buy specific hero chips in the market. This means that if a player chooses a hero to be on their team, there is a big chance they need to engage with one of these features to be able to purchase the chips needed to upgrade this hero. The arena is the place where players can match their favorite team composition against other players in a single battle. The coliseum does a similar thing but requires three teams of heroes. Creep surge is a cooperative mode with the player’s guild members, happening during a fixed 4-hour window every day. Then there is the city watch, a single player mode where the player’s entire hero collection has to be used to win 15 battles without hero HP and energy being replenished. Then there is the heist, a real-time cooperative multiplayer mode where players can join 4 others to hunt down a thief that’s trying to steal the city’s treasure. Lastly, the recently released guild war makes guilds-versus-guild battles possible by asking other guild members to submit their best team compositions and letting them all fight in a battle every couple of days.
These six game modes cover all possible applications of the core gameplay and make sure to give the player a nice vertical slice of the game. The currencies that flow out tie back directly into the Market.

Disney Heroes also offers two game modes that are built to strengthen the daily retention cycle. These modes don’t require anything to be played but have a limited amount of tries each day. The first is trials where, depending on the day of the week, a subset of the player’s heroes perform battles five times a day. Trial battles guarantee a drop of useful rare badges that would otherwise take stamina and multiple tries to acquire in a campaign mode level. After a battle, the player has to wait 10 minutes to be able to start the next. This restriction makes the player feel smart by letting them sequence and organise their session by engaging with other modes during these 10-minute timers.
The port has the same timer but only two tries per day and doesn’t reward badges but experience boosters to level up heroes of the player’s choice.

The game also includes a social system with guilds, groups of players working together trying to beat the surge mode every day and battling each other in guild war every couple of days. A daily check-in is included as well, which simply requires everyone to tap a button once a day. The more guild members who do this, the higher everyone’s rewards. Simple and effective. Guildies can also post (copies of) their heroes to others to be used as mercenaries in the city watch and the surge. Now there’s something called guild influence, a currency that is earned next to team experience when completing daily quests.

This is a shared currency that the officers and president of the club can use to unlock perks for all guild members. What the game doesn’t do very well is expose these perks. It’s likely that many players who have been in guilds for a while and never look at the relatively hidden perks section don’t know all the extras they receive by being in that guild, since it’s not exposed within the features themselves.

Another notable feature is enhancements, which provides the player with a way to convert the huge amount of badges they don’t need into boosts for the badges they do need for their heroes. Lastly, two exclusive market categories with slightly better deals (available from team level 31 and 41) can be unlocked by random chance and only for a short period of time.

Game Mode Dependencies

As mentioned, one of the biggest strengths of Disney Heroes is how every feature is interwoven into the others. Ignoring one mode is detrimental to the player’s progress and oftentimes disqualifies the player from optimizing their team in some way.

For example, at team level 25, the player is introduced to the aforementioned friend campaigns. Because of the initially awkward gameplay where it’s for once not possible to influence the hero composition of the battles, this game mode is likely to be ignored by players who like to have agency here. However, after discovering the existence of Memory Disks (which boost one of a hero’s skills), these players might change their minds, but will then realize that completing a friend campaign requires hero friendship to progress. This is generated by sending these two heroes on specific missions repeatedly. This is a good example of how the game’s high amount of currencies and statistics give the game designers the possibility to increase feature engagement by creating interdependencies like these.

The only modes that are outside the loop are the heist, the challenges and the guild war, which is logical since they have been released only recently, months after the game’s global launch. While all three modes struggle to find a meaningful spot inside the game’s loop, challenges is having a particularly hard time since it offers only a cosmetic reward for a heavy hard currency price.

Less and less gameplay

One interesting thing about Disney Heroes is the more players engage with it, the more it steers their focus away from the core gameplay. Tapping the right skill at the right time is only fun for so long and the game averts the player from it after the meta-game has hooked them. At team level 30, fast forward is unlocked, which increases the speed of the battles to a higher (but still manageable) speed. Combine this with auto-mode (a premium feature) which automatically triggers the manual skill of the characters, and we now have a mostly self-playing game where the only tactical choice is starting the right battles.

By analyzing the infographic above one can discover a currency called Raid Tickets. These tickers make it possible to skip grinding through campaign- and trial battles by simply giving the rewards. It would be logical to assume that this currency is a rare good given its ability to save loads of time, which in free-to-play usually means you have to pay for it, but nothing is further from the truth. Paying players are drowning in them. The drop chance for raid tickets is pretty high during the the campaign missions and even after having bought the smallest currency package with real money only once, players get plenty of tickets every day. Generous, but also a missed opportunity to monetize further.

Monetization

Before diving in more detail about Disney Heroes’ monetization potential, it’s important to note that it has an elaborate VIP system. It offers 20 levels which unlock numerous options, some of which are a given in other games, like the ability to buy more stamina for diamonds or skip timers for diamonds. With every VIP level the player reaches, the premium properties increase gradually and sometimes even unlock quality of life features that reduce the need to engage with some of the single player modes.

Looking at the game’s currencies, all speedups and premium purchases require one hard currency; diamonds. Packages of diamonds can be bought instantly as usual, but subscription models are also on offer. Their top 3 most purchased products are the Pouch of Diamonds, the Fistful of Diamonds and the 30 day deal. Especially this last purchase offers a lot of bang for the player’s buck but it requires commitment to keep playing for 30 days. Not a bad way to increase retention, but only when players are able to keep intrinsic motivation to use these diamonds.

Although the game has a huge amount of diamond sinks, conservatively spending players can easily rack up a nice balance of these glinstering gems since quite a lot are given away as well, especially to people who sign in and engage with the competitive features every day. It does a good job making the player consider spending diamonds every day, and since the stamina bar takes ages to fill fully (6 hours at game start and up to 16 hours for high-level players) it’s very attractive and almost required to use the “Get More Stamina” function to exchange diamonds for stamina. After getting used to this, the step towards buying a steady influx of 120 diamonds per day is easily done. So it seems that having a slowly replenishing chrono-currency can create a shortage that is not going to increase the amount of sessions per day but can greatly increase buyer conversion if the game is centered around grinding to progress. A classic example of scarcity creates demand.

The fact that progression can be bought so easily defines the game as pay-to-win. Disney Heroes cleverly masks this by placing players in a vast amount of competitive tiers (leagues) that are easily progressed through at first because they are filled with many players who are not engaged or have churned already. The power gap between payers and non-payers only becomes visible in the highest leagues, which (when played at a regular, engaged pace) are reached after weeks if not months of play.

Something that can be questioned about the game’s monetization strategy is the lack of a feature that uses loss-aversion. Failing a campaign battle refunds all sunk stamina but 1, for some reason. Badges, Gold and other rewards earned during the battle are also lost, but this isn’t shown on the loss screen. This removes all excitement from trying to progress the campaign, although it probably also reduces churn. In the end it’s a matter of consideration what’s more valuable. Since Disney Heroes doesn’t have move-based gameplay either, it is more challenging to give the player a way to cheat in case of losing and still give them a possibility to win after paying some diamonds.

Read more about game monetization in our designing for free to play monetization section of our free to play bible 

Liveops and Events

Successful games feel fresh and well-maintained. Therefore it’s crucial to add events that change frequently and follow common trends like seasonal content and daily deals. Disney Heroes contains an elegant but relatively cookie-cutter event system with little surprises in its design. Sales can be ignored easily and aren’t shoved in the player’s face, although a more subtle encouragement to take a look is created by putting giveaways in between.

An example of a good Disney Heroes sale is one that is targeted to players at a specific time of their life cycle; the Badge Buster Bundle. For this example it’s important to note that badges become more and more tedious to grind nearing the end of the game’s content. One purple badge (like the Mickey Mouse Club one pictured below) requires 50 bits (parts) to be grinded in campaign levels. The drop chance is about 25%, which means at a cost of 12 stamina per gameplay, one badge costs about 2400 stamina. This takes players about 4 days if they spend about 300 diamonds per day on buying additional stamina (or about 2 weeks if they don’t).

Usually, every hero requires different badges to promote tiers, but in Purple 4 which is the highest tier at this point, out of the six badges they can have equipped, one they have all in common is the Mickey Mouse Club badge. Since every hero needs this badge it’s easy to sell and has amazing value to players since it offers them to skip the grind of spending about 10k stamina to collect the bits for these 4 badges manually. Of course they sell four badges per bundle, so players who want to supply their full team of five heroes with this badge have to buy the bundle twice.

Conclusion

Disney Heroes plays all the tricks in the book regarding player engagement and executes these with mixed results. All the ingredients of success are there; a strong IP, a great (although long) first-time-user experience, a great feature unlock pacing, a super-scalable asset pipeline making it very easy to add content (heroes) every couple of weeks, Disney’s deep pockets for increasing User Acquisition spend and on top of everything else, a healthy reward-space with enough resources and currencies to keep on selling.
Regardless off these factors, the game’s long-term retention is low compared to others in the same genre, which is most likely caused by putting too little focus on gameplay and too much on statistics and grinding in the late game. The more players engage (time-wise and especially money-wise) less use for the battle gameplay is needed. Facilitated by the monotonous quest system, all that is left is a dreary daily routine that revolves around finishing daily quests, without creating enough meaning for the rewards this provides. Depending on the player’s dedication to keep staying on the maximum team level, they might stick around for a while longer, but will eventually start feeling the lack of incentive to use what they have worked for.

It’s difficult to know the necessary User Acquisition investment, but the game’s asset pipeline is compact enough to not need the entire staff of PerBlue Entertainment to keep maintaining it. Looking at the revenue it’s making monthly and trusting that a sufficient amount of players stick around at least long enough to convert, Disney Heroes shouldn’t have too much trouble breaking even. But becoming top-grossing like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is most likely out of reach.

The post Deconstructing Disney Heroes: Battle Mode appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

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

Related Read

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Adam Telfer

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

How well is Dragalia Lost doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intro to Dragalia Lost

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

Action Phase Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-Battle Phase

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

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

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

Systems Overview

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

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

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

Adventurers

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

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

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

Dragons

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

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

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

Wyrmprints

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

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

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

Weapons

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

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

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

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

Halidom

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

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

Why have all these parallel systems?

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

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

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

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

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

Economy

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

Related Read

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In Monetization

Adam Telfer

The Summoning Gacha

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

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

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

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

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

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

Item Gacha

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

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

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

Randomized Battle Rewards

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

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

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

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

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

Dragon gifts

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

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

Event Gacha

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

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

Live Service

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

Gacha Events

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

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Adam Telfer

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

Limited Time Special Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Problems

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

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

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

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

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

Generous Rewards

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

Get you used to spending

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

Get you into the game

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

Incentivize certain behaviours

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

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

Social Systems

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

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

Forceful Coop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a Brand

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Dragalia Lost: Has Nintendo figured out Free-to-Play? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Florian Ziegler

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

Check out our Free to Play Game Design Bible Here

Three Location-based games launch this summer, can any repeat the success of Pokemon Go?

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

Location-Based Gaming: The New Frontier for Retention

Location based gaming has been around since 2008. Games like Parallel Kingdoms by Per Blue

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

AR mode is more of a hinderance than a key gameplay element. Most players turn this off.

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

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

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

To drive players to come back often:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pokemon (Blue) vs Jurassic Park (Red) in Google Trends in the last 12 months. Even with the recent movie, Pokemon is a bigger brand.

Deconstructing Jurassic World Alive

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

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

The Core Loop

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

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

The keys here are the currency sources & sinks:

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

Let’s go into each step in more detail:

Collecting Dinosaurs

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

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

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

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

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

Long Term Retention: Fusion System

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

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

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

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

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

The Battle

JW:Alive significantly builds upon Pokemon Go’s simplistic battle system.

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

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

The Challenge of a 1v1 Battle

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

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

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

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

Take out 3 dinos before your opponent does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pacing & Progression

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

From Clash Royale: Chest Slots and Arena Tiers

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

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

3 Reasons why it’s Working

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

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

#1 – Smart Merchandising

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

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

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

#2 – Clear Progression & Goals

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

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

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

#3 – Less Reliant on Location-Based Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

But can it hold up?

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

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

From the design side there are also some issues:

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

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

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

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

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

The post Can Jurassic World Alive stand up to Pokemon Go? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Sims Mobile has big shoes to fill. Everyone knows The Sims. The sandbox life simulation has not only defined its own genre but counts among the top selling game series ever. After four major releases on PC/consoles and countless DLCs, EA and Maxis come with a second big attempt to succeed in the mobile sphere. Sims Mobile (Android, iOS) launched globally early March 2018. It’s hard to avoid comparison to the original PC game given it was made by the same developer and publisher, as well as visual style and gameplay elements.

What makes The Sims franchise stand out is by far the freedom of choice in playing out your personal story. Therefore it’s interesting to take a look what kind of changes are introduced in transition to a free-to-play model, and whether these changes are successful.

Guest Author: Eva Grillova
Senior Game Designer, with history at Disney Prague and Wooga.

Check out our Free to Play Game Design Bible Here

LOOKING BACK AT PC SIMS

The genius of the original Sims PC franchise lies in it’s approachability. It is easy to understand what is expected from the player and the Sim alike: The actions and choices are intuitive, learned from our own life experiences. The metrics of success do not have to be explained, because they are inherently ours: Make more money, get a promotion, get married. The game builds on our own fantasies how how we live our lives.

Matt Brown, current studio technical director of EA Maxis, spoke at this year’s GDC about emergent narrative in the original Sims, and how the game combines a natural human tendency to nurture for others with the Maslow hierarchy of needs.

Each character has needs. Social doesn’t matter if your bladder is full! (Sims 3)

These needs create the baseline structure of the game:

Sim is hungry →
Sim needs a fridge to make food →
Player needs to buy a fridge →
Player needs money →
Sim needs to get a job!

Furthermore, a Sim has some automated behaviour that tries to address pressing needs and loosely following on whatever actions they’ve been doing before. A Sim who wants to become a chef and has a career in a restaurant is more likely to start cooking on his own. If you have a house with multiple Sims, this is the developers helping you to keep the Sims on the path you’ve chosen for them without having to control every moment of their lives.

Example of choices when it comes to food and cooking

At the same time, the feedback to any action is visible and gives it meaning and progress:

Sim fishing and improving his fishing skill

Tracking actions rewards you for taking them while in real life these are not nearly as gratifying. For example:

Read a book → See the Sim’s “logic” skill go up
Talk to a person → Watch your relationship level with this person increase

This mechanic also builds an immediate next goal: Read books to level up your logic skill to get a better career. Talk to a person until their relationship reaches a high level, so you can get married and have kids.

All in all, the game is a great combination of actions you can control and those you have to respond to (burglar in your house). Regardless of your story: freedom, feedback and intuitive goals are the trademark features of the brand and the design principles on which the narrative is built.

Does free-to-play versions achieve this?

THE SIMS GO FREE TO PLAY

As a shift to F2P, The Sims actually had two previous attempts:

1. The Sims FreePlay launched 2011 for mobile
2. The Sims Social launched 2011 on Facebook

The Sims Social (the Facebook game) ruled the top charts for a bit but then quickly fell off.

Sims FreePlay (mobile game) is still being updated and has been a staple of the top games on mobile since 2011. The mobile version used timers to break up the sessions and provide progress in times of player’s absence. These timers break the flow and make the game feel very different from the original, but it keeps its stable audience, presumably because the it stays quite true to the brand’s principles, keeping the narrative choices similar as in The Sims.

Use of timers in Sims: FreePlay. Each Sim’s action takes time.

The new Sims Mobile game was soft launched in May 2017 in Brazil, and launched globally this year in March. From very first moment you notice how different the game’s visuals are. It walked a long way from the quirky, robotic animations in Sims FreePlay into a very polished, full 3D experience with a wide range of animations and short loading times, resembling the Sims 4 PC game.

The Latest Sims Mobile: It Looks almost like the PC game!

So how did the latest Sims Mobile game do?

In the past weeks, the old game, Sims FreePlay, kept its position in the Top 100 grossing. The new Sims Mobile hasn’t maintained a rank in the top grossing, roughly flattening at $50K/day according to Sensor Tower across Android + iOS.

Such numbers are far from stellar for a game with such high visual polish that spent almost a year in soft launch and taps into the faithful audience of the franchise. So what happened? Why didn’t the Sims Mobile leapfrog Sims Freeplay?

Let’s first dive into the game, and then talk about the issues.

FOCUS ON FEWER SIMS: FAMILY AND HEIRLOOMS

Instead of controlling an unlimited amount of characters and houses like in The Sims and Sims FreePlay, here you can control only up to four characters that share one house.

Town in Sims FreePlay: Each house is controlled by the player

In Sims Mobile, you start with two Sims, two other slots can be purchased.

However to keep things interesting and let the player live different stories, at some point Sims can retire. This frees a slot for a new generation. If you choose to retire the Sim, they will hang out around the house, offering special actions rewarding Heirloom tokens (family currency), and eventually will be “moved out” (to a farm upstate) and permanently gone.

If you have a baby, similar process happens for it to grow up: From a toddler to a baby to a teenager to an adult.

Heirloom tokens allow you to purchase lucky charms that unlock and boost traits you can assign to your Sims.

Retirement and new Heirloom

The system works well: Player doesn’t get overwhelmed by controlling too many Sims, exploring differently flavoured stories comes naturally with new characters, and last but not least there is a tangible heritage from the previous generation, which is a great metaphor. It also serves as a retention mechanic for achievement-focused players.

Focusing player’s attention on a limited amount of characters and creating a heritage achievement system is definitely a good step for a mobile game.

SIM PROGRESSION THROUGH STORIES AND EVENTS

As a player, you can assign your Sims to events, which are basically quests with different duration. Events are part of Stories: Career, hobby and relationships. For hobbies and careers, only one can be active at a time for each Sim and switching costs Simoleons, but relationships can be explored in parallel, which keeps the game to one of the most cherished traits of the original. The only limited resource here is player’s time.

Each Sim can be assigned to one event at a time, and it will finish itself. This lets you progress without actively playing.

Stories serve as achievements; finishing one will require significant player dedication

Selecting an event: The longer, the bigger rewards

To give player a chance to act, each Sim also has energy that can be used to perform optional actions within the event to speed up the timer and finish earlier. Player chooses the actions through interaction points that are only available during the event.

The events feed both into the player progression and the Sim progression. It ties the two loops together: Completing an event means XP for the player, and a progression in the story for the Sim.

DECORATING YOUR HOME

Built on top is the decoration loop, which loosely connects to the overall progression loop described above. There are two progression tracks: Player level and Vanity level:

Player’s XP comes mainly from completing events. They unlock new parts of town and careers, furniture, building blocks and outfits. Decorating and buying clothes increases vanity level, which serves as a visible comparison between you and your in-game friends and unlocks more space in the house.

The whole loop then looks like this:

From this graph: the two loops (sim progress and player progress) feed into decorating. Therefore the player’s motivation should lie mainly there. The motivation to complete the loop is tied to the social driver of comparing houses and clothes with other players.

DECORATING YOUR SIM

Clothes and cosmetics for your Sims are different than decorations. These cost Simoleons (soft currency) or hard currency and add to your overall Vanity level… but do not have game effect.

To get clothes with an in-game effect you have to go to a special designer that will generate random — and very unique — clothes, giving you a boost for an activity and usually highlighted with particles.

Izzy’s fashion studio

These outfits tend to catch most attention from other players and feed into its own tiny loop of social encounters:

• Being seen by other players can earn you Stickers (that are basically likes)
• those are transferred into fashion tokens
• Fashion tokens can be traded in Izzy’s studios for different/better designs

To make your Sim visible to other players, you have to attend parties.

You can throw and visit thematic parties (wedding party when you get married, music party when you play guitar as a hobby etc.). These happen in parallel with other players. While the actions you perform are asynchronous (and act same as actions within an event), you do have some option to interact, such as a real time chat with all the participants.

SOCIAL SIMS: MEETING STRANGERS

No Sim game would be complete without all the wonderful strangers you can meet and Sims Mobile take some steps out of the single player by introducing an asynchronous system in which your neighbourhood is populated partly by NPCs and partly by other players’ Sims.

You are assigned to a group of players and for you, your neighbourhood is frequented by the same characters: allowing you to slowly build relationships with them.

This resembles well a live neighbourhood. Sims you befriend will stick around, being more likely to pass by your house. Sims you don’t care about you will stop seeing — and you won’t care. It would be interesting to know how these neighbourhoods are updated over time; whether new players are added when the old ones churn.

Map of the locations

It is here, at the end of the loop, where the real issues with Sims Mobile start to emerge:

The social loop doesn’t feed strongly back into the core loop and leaves the player feeling unrewarded
The social loop is way too far from the core to serve as motivation, and as I’ll show, it’s not sufficient to drive player through the game.

Let’s summarize the collected issues and go deeper into them.

THE 3 REASONS WHY SIMS MOBILE IS STRUGGLING

While the first part focused on visible systemic changes that were introduced to streamline the game for f2p and mobile, in this part I will talk more about design under the hood in order to get to the answer for our initial question: Why is the game not performing well.

I want to post a hypothesis: We’re seeing the game struggling because it lacks meaningful choices or goals, it mechanises motivations, and it doesn’t reward the player.

It becomes clear soon after few days of playing: The core design of the mobile game is at odds with what made the PC game so successful.

What do I mean by that?

1. The nurturing and narrative aspects are suppressed
2. The progression doesn’t validate player’s time and investment
3. The core loop is broken

These issues do not exist in vacuum, but they are the biggest part of the systemic oversight of player motivation. As I’ll show, the lack of meaningful, immediate actions diminishes ability to care for your Sims. Hard-to-read progression defies a will to grind for better objects. Funneling the core loop into social leaves the player out to dry without feeling rewarded.

Let’s look at these issues from the ground up; from the small things to the biggest one.

ISSUE #1: NURTURING AND NARRATIVE

When sims have needs… The nurturing aspect from the original Sims game was excellent. The needs system in The Sims have three main benefits:

They give players immediate call to actions
They build narrative
They create need for better items

These combine into the loop I described earlier:

Sim is hungry →
Sim needs a fridge to make food →
Player needs to buy a fridge →
Player needs money →
Sim needs to get a job

Through intrinsic motivation (Sim is hungry) comes care (I need to care) and attachment. Caring for the needs is the building block of the game, like swapping candies in CCS, you’ll repeat this action again and again, driven by curiosity what happens next.

By completing these steps more complex needs emerge for the Sim and the player alike: What about relationships or career? How do I afford a better house?

Because Sims need the player, the player cares for the Sims. This is where nurturing builds the narrative: Completing these steps naturally tells the story. Because of the combination of intuitive, human needs, the ability to fulfill them through game mechanics and a clear feedback, the game doesn’t need to take the player by the hand.

And when they don’t have needs…

Originally, setting up your house is finding an intersection of affordability, function and personal expression. Furniture caters the needs or improves skills (learning). Better furniture makes for faster progression, and granular improvements to your house also improve your Sims’ overall well-being; Sims want to live in nice houses.

In Sims Mobile, players can still interact with the furniture but since no needs are present, the interaction doesn’t provide any feedback, neither for the Sim or the player.

Player is therefore left with limited motivation to purchase furniture. The only game accepted push to decorate comes from the need to improve their vanity. Dropping stats and gameplay impact from furniture for the sake of a simplified experience cuts a major value of the experience.

Without feedback, doing these actions is unnecessary

Without this rewarding loop from furniture, a whole part of the game disappears that could have served as a compelling experience for a casual audience. Watching TV while playing Candy Crush is a good example, however games with metagame (building on ownership and personalisation) are even a better one: Interacting with your game with a slight sense of progress can be a great and rewarding activity. It further fosters the ownership of the space you’ve built. Having a reason to stick around meaningfully makes you retain better.

In Sims Mobile this leads to players coming in only for short, effective sessions. The intrinsic narrative of building up your sim and collecting furniture is replaced with the extrinsic motivation of just completing the the stories/quests for rewards and progress. Players that are coming in just for extrinsic motivation (rewards and coins) won’t stick around for long. They eventually need intrinsic motivation (social proof) to retain for the long haul.

THE STORIES ARE PRE-TOLD

Stories are the building blocks of Sims’ lives. Looking at an example of a relationship story: When you meet a new Sim, you choose one of three introductions: Friendly, romantic or confrontational. This determines your whole story with this particular Sim:

Choosing a story for two Sims

Each story is pre-scripted which lowers its replayability

Here The Sims Mobile misses out on what made the PC version of The Sims so successful: it’s accurate portrayal of relationships in real life. Relationships are ever changing and it’s unclear where things are going. Locking down a relationship into a pre-set story pushes you down a path with no option to take a side road apart from abandoning the progress in the story.

Through this, the motivation to progress becomes extrinsic since the choice of what happens next has been taken away. There is no surprise, no option to grab the steering wheel and have a fight in a romantic relationship. Pursuing achievements also takes away the option to play freely: Instead of playing what I want, I play what I want to complete, creating a detachment to my Sim.

The removal of the nurture aspect has huge impact both on the system and the player. It takes away natural onboarding and therefore complicates a relationship you could have built to your characters. It reduces the internal motivation by making the play aspect insignificant.

By attaching story progression to events only, the game builds a pre-set habit of collecting rewards, assigning events and leaving the session. A player never builds up a connection to their Sims which is not healthy for long term retention.

ISSUE #2: THE PUNISHING PROGRESSION

After playing the game for some time, you may start feeling like you’re not progressing. Only after looking closer at the event system it starts to be apparent why. The game includes clear progression, but they are not intuitive and make it hard for players to perceive their progression.

ENERGY: PROGRESSION WITHIN EVENTS

To recap: Events have varied durations that player can choose from. While in an event, they can use energy to perform actions and speed up the timer.

The event system is a main source of the player progression and coins

The energy is bound to the events: Using more energy means the player can finish more events and progress faster.

Each Sim has their own energy

Doing that sounds like a good idea: the player can engage with the game with visible progress in the event, and they overall get more done in the same time. But, it doesn’t feel good.

Here’s the first problematic part: You can select actions that are meaningful to you, but the result of a story event is the same regardless of the input. You will level up a relationship with your sweetheart whether you are cooking, watching TV, or talking about romantic plans. Or if you leave the game and come back later. Within each event the relationship between energy and time discount is the same. That further undermines player’s choice of actions (from event’s perspective they are all the same).

Next to actions with no game impact (outside of event) we now have mechanical actions. You’re bound to the result from the start. It’s like sitting at a math test, knowing that you can wait it out without writing anything, because in the end you will pass.

The result is: Energy doesn’t have story value. Or, to put it differently, energy is merely a means to grind.

Second problematic part is hidden in how relationship between energy and event XP.

For this action, player earns 20 event XP

While events in different career levels have same duration, using energy provides smaller discount on higher levels as the absolute amount of event XP grows. It’s an invisible cost to your progression.

At the same time, it’s not clear if your energy will be enough to get through an event as the absolute amount of event XP needed isn’t shown. In reality, the game value of energy is determined by the event type (typically family events go very fast), career level and quest duration. As a result, player has no idea what progress to expect in a session, which undermines their will to plan and set goals.

Even when this behaviour is not technically in a way of playing the game, it shows that energy is designed and implemented into other systems only for gating and pacing: It only really starts to matter if you push for event completion in a given time (in live operations for example).

LEVELLING UP EVENTS

In quest based games, reward is usually a function of game progression and duration of the quest.

Simple progression can expand rewards: With player’s level the reward grows. Or it can grow the quest timers: Players need to come back less often, which is a common practice in F2P games to lower session amount over time and not wear the retaining player out.

To visualise this:

The area of the rectangle defines the reward size

In reality it’s usually a mix of both and either of these gives player a good understanding of their progression, since there’s always a tangible gain.

In Sims Mobile, the progression works differently, and far less intuitively. Playing events unlocks pieces of furniture that discount the timer on quests. At the same time, regardless of your progression in the game (player level) and in the story (career level), your rewards stay similar:

Note the level difference in two different stories, yet the Simoleons earned are the same

To display it as above, the progression in Sims Mobile works like this:

The progression comes in a form of time discount. The result then looks like this:

As a result, player can do more quests and earn more rewards within the same time. This decision is interesting because this is not how we talk about getting a raise in real life. “I’m earning $200 per hour instead of $100 per hour”. In Sims Mobile it’s “I’m earning 200 simoleons in 1 hour instead of in 2 hours”.

We use time, the most stable, straightforward, linear measure as comparison. Relating to different time slots doesn’t feel as an intuitive progression. The different careers also don’t differ enough in earnings (which you would expect with being a barista versus being a top chef) and throughout them, players do not get significantly better off with coins either. This is particularly apparent later in the game when furniture and clothes become gradually more expensive and the player is less and less able to purchase them or complete sets.

From system perspective, the flattened progression is likely trying to balance leveled up Sims with new Sims at the beginning of their careers. This approach doesn’t disadvantage starting new stories, but at the same time also doesn’t validate progression. Comparing rewards of two Sims in the same household at different career stages can feel demotivating.

Would players keep their old Sims forever if the difference would be more significant? Do players value Simoleons higher than story progression?

The combination of predictability of the actions, the lack of story meaning and the fact you don’t need it to play makes energy redundant.

The design of events doesn’t communicate progression naturally. This seems to be a pattern in Sims Mobile: Instead of asking what player cares about, there’s an artificial measurement claiming player that should care… just because.

ISSUE #3: THE CORE LOOP IS BROKEN

When it comes to long term retention, it’s hard not to mention one more substantial shortcomings of Sims Mobile. From a systems perspective, most of the progression feeds into the party loop:

• Parties are where other players can see your home
• Leveling up in hobbies and careers rewards additional furniture that offers new opportunities at parties and allow the parties to reach higher level
• To be seen and rewarded for original clothes also requires to host / visit parties

Systemically you are rewarded through the parties, but it is anticlimactic. There is nothing substantial that you could gain in the party system that you can’t gain somewhere else (XP, Simoleons). Everything about a party is mechanical: The amount of parties you can visit per day, The amount of parties you can host, The amount of energy you have at a party. There is no status to earn, no best-party-host leaderboard. Nothing to push me to become the party master.

Providing social proof at the end of a loop to drive all motivations is good design. However, in this case it is executed poorly by not tying it to some kind of ladder or leaderboard.

The party system isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t justify the existence of all the other loops. Its progress is very far away from day to day activity, and participating in them is optional.

CHARGING INTO THE SOFT LAUNCH

When the game first came out, the gameplay was actually much more similar to Sims: FreePlay. This article is worth checking for an early review. From screenshots and App Store versions we can get an idea how the game looked when first released and what were the major changes.

Energy, hygiene, hunger and happiness were the needs in the early version

A Sim had a set of needs that gets refilled when performing actions. Timers, that lasted hours in the Sims: FreePlay are shortened, yet present. This leads me to assume that Sims Mobile didn’t start from scratch, but took mechanics from Sims: FreePlay for granted.

Looking at the how the versions evolved, we see several trends:

• Most of the design features I described were not present in the soft launch (Events, stories, retirement, Izzy’s store)
• Core loop kept being updated (Party system tied tighter into the core loop, vanity and player level were decoupled at some point)
• Further trickling of the changes (Daily to-do list instead of goals and wishes, adding new currencies)

My theory is that because EA used Sims: FreePlay as a basis, the design was already doomed. They attempted to patch what was there, rather than modernize the design.

FINAL WORD

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if Sims Mobile was instead a port of Sims 4. My designer brain drools with joy over such challenge: Would players enjoy the game? Would the brand be strong enough to rely on vanity only to monetize? Would it be possible to build a system that parallels passive and active gameplay meaningfully?

Instead, with Sims Mobile we end up with a hybrid that tries to achieve everything and nothing.

The Sims is a brand building on freedom of choice. As Matt Brown mentions in his GDC talk, a Sims’ actions and goals are built on improvisation theater’s “Yes and” principle: One thing always leads to next, there is no wrong move, there is no end goal to strive for, and things constantly change. Just like life.

Instead of that, EA Mobile’s latest take on Sims Mobile is constantly afraid to give players space to act on their free will. Intrinsic motivation is replaced with simple reward structures, likely out of fear of losing players without rewarding their every step. Goals are unclear and sessions unrewarding.

As a result, EA Mobile lost both the Sims fanbase and casual players alike.

Guest Author: Eva Grillova
Senior Game Designer, with history at Disney Prague and Wooga.

The post Deconstructing Sims Mobile appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

YouTube Views for multiple top PvP games

Clan Wars – What is it?

A clan war is split into two phases. The first is a 24h period called “collection” in which each clan member has the ability to play 2-3 different match types against a random selection of players.  These match types will be familiar to anyone who has been following Clash Royale for the past year or so in that they mirror the common challenges that are sometimes used for events. So far I’ve seen, double elixir, draft and 2v2 and in each case you can pick from your own cards or draft although they use Tournament level stats.  If you win your match you win a Clan Chest that opens into a central “clan deck” of cards that the clan can then level up and use to build a deck for Battle Day. The more players that compete in the collection phase the better the card selection and the higher levelled the cards.

The second day is called Battle Day and now players may only select from the cards they have won at the level that each card is currently levelled up to.  This creates a tactical discussion session where deck crafting from the cards that have dropped can be aided by the clan themselves. You only have one chance to succeed, with each clan member having a single battle.  If they win, they add a sword to their leaderboard and of the 5 competing clan, one clan will be the overall winner and gets a larger chest. Each clan war lasts around 2 days.

Clan Wars – Why do it?

Market share of downloads on the iOS app store US

Clash Royale is a mature product and with it there is a mature audience. Most of the players with over 3000 crowns or more will have been playing Clash Royale for 1 or more years. They will probably have somewhere between 80-100% of the cards unlocked and will be grinding the top levels of those cards. This can take months per card. At this point there is a large amount of player fatigue and moving people from new or different challenge keep people entertained. As I spoke about in my GDC talk a game team wants to establish a Lord of the Rings Metric (one KPI to rule them all). An update at this stage should focus on driving the most interaction with that metric as by improving this all other metrics will tend to trend upwards. For Clash Royale I would argue it is Battles per DAU which leads to more engagement in all their other systems, spenders will most likely have a high battle count.

As well as trying to improve your internal KPIs, the mobile marketing is a constantly changing battleground. External factors can have huge effects on your games bottom line and although unpredictable the one thing you do know is that changes will happen.  Just before this update released – Fornites launch has disrupted and captured 80-90% of the market share relative to the previously steady state.

Problems it could solve

Clash Royale is a fantastic mobile game. It creates subtle depth in it’s characters along complex strategic decisions which requiring a low number of active touch inputs but precise timing. This is what makes it so playable on mobile.  However when a game is designed to for many years there are often issues that long term players get stuck in that are not apparent in the short or mid term. Clans Wars has the potential to alleviate some of the more complex issues that most long term players of the game might be familiar with these are:

1. The Archetype Problem
2. The Yoyo Effect
3. Clan Engagement

1. The Archetype Problem

In all competitive games balance becomes one of the major discussion areas for players. Balance issues usually involve overpowers stats of a single gameplay element, a broken combination of 2 or more elements or a game-breaking unforseen bug when using the element.  In each case the collective of gamers dissect and discuss how to gain micro-competitive advantages with their setups – we call this the metagame (the game outside of the game).

An Archetype is usually a combination of cards that all work well together and therefore commonly get picked and combined together.  They are the most powerful implementation of cards and so by using them you are more likely to beat your opponent. Some decks that a Clash Royale player might recognise would be Lavaloon, Mortar-Hog, Bridgespam etc. When you’re a new player you strive to be able to make certain decks that contain legendary cards that you might not own and this drives you to engage more fully.  In each case the decks usually feature 6 core cards and then rotate 2 cards depending on the players taste. However from a long term players perspective, the issue is the boredom of playing the same archetype again and again.  

The challenge for the designer is to provide enough viable archetypes that during a play session of 10 or more rounds you are unlikely to meet the same deck. Currently in Clash Royale I would argue this is not the case, there are around 5-10 common archetypes and at the top end of the game, you see these decks almost every round. This is not an issue only for Clash Royale, but all online PvP games feature this to some extent.

Providing interesting tools to the community to enable quick counters and evolving strategies. This common archetype problem is exacerbated in Clash Royale because of the very short game sessions, meaning you encounter more decks in the same period of time. The Archetype problem isn’t a direct gameplay issue because it provides interesting content for players to talk about, this is one of the reasons why Clash Royale has been so popular on YouTube and Twitch. However, without enough variety in rulesets you can grind yourself out of enjoying the experience.

2. The YoYo Effect

Any person who plays competitive 1 on 1 games will know the YoYo effect. When placed in a competitive ladder where your opponents are matched by a ranking formula, such as ELO, the YoYo effect occurs. You yoyo between a high and low point on the ladder as you win one, lose one in a repeating sequence. In my case I can’t break the 4000 cap and I yoyo between 3600-4000.  This becomes immensely frustrating as no matter what I do I can’t maintain my progress. It also means that if I am at 4000 trophies I don’t want to play more as I fear a loss more than I want a win.

Levelling up a single card has no real difference to your position post 3000 trophies and so rank becomes a measure of skill. If this we’re the only mode in Clash Royale it is likely that I would have churned out a long time ago, but what kept me in was the events. Events applied new rules, new deck combinations and restrictions on the gameplay. This often levelled the playing field. The challenge was then to try to beat 12 individuals in a row with only 3 lives. This removes yoyoing entirely as now it’s simply a challenge to continue your winning streak. A new event happened every week and each week it would engage me to compete.  I personally drifted from the ladder climbing and focussed on perfecting the events with 2 or 3 that I got all 12 wins. Clan Wars could provide a more detailed structure for events, and pit not just player vs player, but clan vs clan in a clan winning streak.

3. Clan Engagement

I would estimate a very large proportion of players in clash royale are in a clan. The clan provides a group of people who share your passion and you can talk tactics and share replays. The most used feature within the clan would be the Clan requests where you can ask for cards from your clanmates. Within this interface currently there is a large stagnation of content. In my clan I would say there is a core of 8-10 people that actively chat or engage in conversations and discussion, with the majority of people including myself who simply make card request.

The more active and engaged a community the more likely they are to stick, spend and promote your game to their friends. From a long tail perspective providing engagement, challenge and motivation to these players is what sustains longer term revenues. However, without an evolving or changing metagame, a variety of weekly challenges or a global event the clan chat can become dull and boring. I feel that the clan structure within Clash Royale provides all the tools adequate to really helping people to share and strategise but I felt the strategy of the game had tailed off due to the archetype problem in recent months.

Clan Wars – The Update

Let’s think about each of the problems above and how the update attempted to solve them. Whether it was a success or how it could be improved.

1. Archetype Solution

Clan Wars made a valiant attempt to remove the archetype problem from the discussion. As the war is split into a collection day vs a battle day.  The collection day is an ability for players to find cards and then level them up for the clan. This is a beautiful solution as it tries to solve the Archetype problem in 3 ways

Firstly, it adds chance of which cards you find. You no longer have a reliable card collection, each Clan War forces you to look at the cards your clan has found and create a well rounded deck.

Secondly the cards you do find level up depending on the number of wins. This creates a wider range of stats with which to vary your deck playing abilities. The decision to take Goblin Barrel level 3 or Knight level 11 can affect your decks build.  

Finally your opponents are doing the same collection phase. This creates a more asymmetrical hidden information that means your deck cannot be built to easily counter.

Each of these 3 factors mean that wilder and less common card combinations are used and sometimes picking the most OP card in your collection (level 12 Barbarians) can truly beat opponents through sheer power. This plays out quite well as each clan war my clan has played a much wider range of decks.

Going Further

I think the solution doesn’t go far enough.  It should be tweaked to put even more pressure on the harvesting day and provide more depth in the War day for clans to strategise. Currently the number of cards dropped and number of level ups needed is the same as the main game. There is no reason to use these numbers apart from familiarity and in this particular game mode you never get enough cards to even see level 11. I would actually adjust the balance of the common and rare drops to provide even more “going for it” level ups, making the choice not just on strategy but stats as well.

Currently a player gets 2 attacks in order to earn cards and then their collecting abilities are capped. It would be more interesting if players had a number of lives in collection day, rather than a number of battles. This means that any player could earn exponentially more cards if their skills was high.  In order to limit players who are very skilled at the game the more wins you get the more levelled up an opponent’s King towers could becoming. In a way handicapping the victor.  This would then provide a range between 3-10 matches for each player depending on their skill.

The Clan War battle is also a single battle against a random opponent. In some cases you may have 2 battles, but this is only when the clan sizes are mismatched and you are on the lower tiered clan. You and your clan have no way to discuss or tweak your plays, based on learning from previous battles. It’s an all or nothing affair where winner takes all. What if the clan was given secret information or could earn the rights to see the opponents War Deck by winning challenges. By understanding the cards available for opponents you could again strategise more particularly on your clans deck crafting.

2. Yoyo Solution

Clan Wars does provide an alternative challenge to the ladder. It’s one more thing to do and I believe it would improve the total number of battles each user takes part in each week. However the ladder problem still exists in the single player game. For Clan Wars to be a truly successful update is should actually try to create a larger inter-clan ladder that all clans compete on worldwide ensuring that your personal ladder is of less important than your clans ladder position and you spend more time perfecting your skills for the Clan War.

At the moment this doesn’t feel the case as we’re still establishing clan win rates. However, I dont see a clear display of the Clan Wars leaderboard and no prestige is provided for those who are ontop. This means that overtime the wars fought will become less meaningful and apathy towards the wars might continue. Clan War leagues might be a better solution here, read the C.A.T.S review to understand the promotion and demotion for players and how it drives engagement.

3. Clan Engagement Solution

There is certainly more clan activity since the update. More communication, more replay sharing and an increased discussion about the game itself.  We’ve seen more clan leaders send messages to the group to get people involved and the social dynamics it creates are important. I also was personally congratulated for winning my particular fights in the war and that felt good. People within the group are responding and pushing each other to perform at their best and this is very healthy for the game in general.

Another suggestion here is that rather than creating multiple decks per clan for each war, the clans should craft a single war deck that all clan members would fight with. Clan members could each submit their own deck creations along with a name, and the top picks could be voted on for the war.  You could then imagine clan discussions recounting previous wars and how certain clan mates created crazy but powerful combinations that helped the clan succeed. You would also face the same deck with your opponents and therefore clan members could coach you through each war day.

War Day

For me the actual weakest aspect of Clan Wars is war day itself.  The collection mechanics and the strategic clan chats have geared you up for an epic battle against 5 other clans. However, what actually occurs is a single match against a random opponent.  Once you’ve played this round, the war is over.

The fact that the decks you spent so long collecting and crafting are only used in a single match. War Day feel more like a game of chance rather than skill. I felt this acutely on my first war when I won quickly because I was matched with a poor opponent.  It had built up, to a single battle that was a poor experience even though I had won and then I was left waiting for the next war.

The war could be expanded with a clan tournament.  Taking 8 clans and facing them in a 3 tier round robin tournament where if your clan wins you would obtain even more cards, dynamically shifting your war deck.  A clan would then spend 1 day collecting and 3 days battling to become the ultimate clan of the 8. Also rather than a single battle, each player should have 3 fights with opposing teams giving a bigger range for skill. The further a clan progressed the more involved in chat and strategy they would become. The Archetype issue would actually become a strategic point of discussion as you played more battles you could feedback to clan mates to let them know the opponent is like to drop a pekka. by giving the clan more and more to think about as results pour in.

Conclusion

Clan Wars is a well designed update aimed at solving some of the more complex design issues that occur in older free to play titles. It’s a great solution at solving the Archetype issue that is very apparent in the core game. We’ve also see that it provides some remedy to both the YoYo problem and clan engagement but these are likely to be short term fixes. My largest criticism is that the collecting mechanic and “Going for it” feeling are both underutilised and less important that simply turning up and having your battle with any deck. The clan as a whole feels united during collection day and disjointed in war day. I believe the team should go further to create memorable clan wars that are talked about for weeks or months after the event. Players who create the war deck that win wars will feel proud and acknowledged by the clan and could go down in clan history.  For me this is the weakness with the current Clan Wars update. It’s provided a new game mode that creates a dynamic and interesting deck building environment, but it doesn’t create memorable clan battle or stories. Each clan war fades quickly into the background and the next war takes its place. The more planning, strategy and interaction the clan takes in each war, the stronger the emotional connection will be towards the event and this is what will make players stick for the longer term.

The post Clash Royale Clan Wars – An update to re-engage its loyal fans? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

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

Fortnite is by far the most viewed and streamed game on YouTube.  source: Matchmade.tv 

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

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

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

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

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

Fortnite’s Cosmetic-Driven Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battle Pass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Experience of Battle Pass vs. Loot Boxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Benchmark: DOTA2’s Battle Pass

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revenue Analysis of Battle Pass

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

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

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

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

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

Source: ARPI based on Sensor Tower data

Battle Pass vs. Cosmetics

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

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

• ARPI growth over time and
• Audience distribution.

#1. ARPI Growth Over Time

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

Source: Based on SensorTower Data

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

#2. Audience Distribution

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

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

Source: SensorTower

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

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

Battle Pass vs. Mobile Free-to-Play

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

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

However, we should also take two factors into consideration:

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

Let’s discuss both of these points in turn.

#1. Months to LTV

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

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

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

Source: Based on SensorTower data

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

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

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

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

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

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

#2. DL vs. ARPI

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

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

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

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

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

Battle Pass For the Win!

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

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

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

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

Exciting times ahead!

The post Deconstructing Fortnite: A Deeper Look at the Battle Pass appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Watch it on GDC Vault

For Golf Clash, the main takeaways were:

• Golf Clash was the most successful follow up to Clash Royale because it focused on a fundamentally different audience
  • Most rivals focused on gameplay, IP or theme, but golf clash went for a completely different audience
  • A blue ocean strategy that paid off. At that point there were no other golf games on the market that could retain and monetize as well as the Clash Royale system.
  • Golf Clash got this Hybrid to work because:
    • Key #1: Balance between Luck and Skill
      • Clash Royale works because the core gameplay is actually very skill driven, yet the stats that you can upgrade are still very visible and desirable
      • Golf Clash was a great fit for this because of the nature of golf — having multiple clubs for different situations gives plenty of reasons to keep all clubs upgraded
      • Ultimately Golf Clash is a skill-driven game by feeling. You’re commonly leaving a match you lost feeling like you could’ve played better, not that your stats weren’t strong enough
    • Key #2: Strong implementation of the Gacha system
      • Golf Clash’s lower number of clubs meant that they needed to adjust the balance to ensure enough duplicates were happening for progression
      • They also needed to ensure that all clubs were useful, otherwise players would end up with a bunch of drops that were useless
      • They did this with level design — over time the holes become more horizontal movement over vertical movement, putting more pressure on Spin & Curl over power. (ex. While most clubs only increase by 10% in the power stat, they will double or triple their curl & spin stats)
    • Key #3: Overcoming the lack of Shifting Meta
      • Golf Clash isn’t a PvP game which can support a shifting meta. Both players race for the cup, but can’t influence each other. My opponents choices do not impact my own.
      • As such, Golf Clash had no shifting meta, which is a key component of what makes CCGs work
      • To overcome this they added in the buy-in system (from Miniclip’s 8ball pool), and put more focus on events and tournaments. This drives their revenue over the shifting meta.

Golf Clash shows us that the best way to attack the market is still to find blue oceans, and they still exist, even in this state of maturity. Translating mechanics from one audience to another is not trivial, but is clearly worth it!

The post GDC 2018 – Deconstructing Golf Clash and Rules of Survival appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

In most markets, the concept of ‘pay to win’ is not acceptable, and players need to feel they can compete or progress whether they choose to spend nothing, something, or a lot. At the same time, those players who do choose to pay need to feel that they’re getting value for money – there’s nothing more dangerous to your game than paying players feeling short-changed.

We’ve recently beta launched Dragon’s Watch – a tactical battle RPG for mobile. It uses the collection/gacha/fusion system seen in many Asian and, increasingly, western games. Players spend either soft or hard currency to summon new heroes, which can be fused and evolved before taking them into battles.

The roots of the gacha system can be traced back to collectible trading cards – I remember, as a child, collecting Panini football stickers, despite having zero interest in sport. Why? The excitement of collecting, trading, completing sets, getting hold of a rare, metallic team badge made the hobby worthwhile to me, despite having no interest in the subject matter. In the digital realm, we can go further to make sure players always feel they’re getting good value.

We’re still at the beginning of our journey with our game, learning each week what players do and don’t like. We know there’s a huge amount more we can do, but below are some of the key pillars we’ve built our game on and lessons we’ve learned so far.

1. A prize every time

We put a huge amount of time, effort and love into creating beautifully animated characters, with their own backstories, stats, and skills. Each one is unique, both in appearance and gameplay and, hopefully, collecting one gives value to players over and above their use in the game. We love to see our players proudly curating and displaying their hero collections (just like in the video below, where one of our loyal players does a gacha and is rewarded with a really rare event hero first time – which he totally wasn’t expecting), as much for the artwork as for the gameplay value.  

2. Completion is a reward

Football stickers work well as a collectible because players are naturally organised into teams. Completing a team is a much more achievable goal than completing an entire sticker album – if the only goal is completing a near-unachievable set, then players are bound to get bored quickly. We split our heroes into themed sets – some small, some big, so players can frequently get the buzz of completing one.

3. Exclusivity, rarity, and power

It’s important to distinguish between rarity – how likely a player is to summon a certain hero – from power – how strong that hero is in play. If the rarest characters are also the most powerful, you run the risk of making players who don’t get them feel their gameplay experience has been compromised as a result.

Similarly, we periodically run live events where a new hero is introduced, that can only be summoned during that event. Again, if that hero is overpowered, players without it will be at a major disadvantage – which is neither fun nor fair. If you’re making a hero extraordinary in one way, that needs to be balanced with some corresponding weakness. In this way, those players who choose to pay, and so to collect a broader set of heroes don’t end up with a more powerful squad, rather a more flexible set of heroes to build with, giving them more tactical and strategic choices in play.

4. Waste not, want not

It’s inevitable that, in a random system, players won’t always get the item they were hoping for – the excitement of summoning a rare hero relies on that rarity being real. Collecting football stickers would be no fun if you just bought whatever player you wanted, and filled up your album accordingly. The ‘game’ is all about chance. Try playing Monopoly or Cluedo without a dice and you’ll soon realise that the random element is what makes many games fun.

While a duplicate football sticker can be traded with friends, the nature of variable rarity always means players all end up with the same second division players, and nobody to trade them with. Digital goods can be traded with others worldwide, or somehow used in game to give players good value even when they’ve received something they weren’t hoping for.

The fusion system allows players to fuse unwanted heroes into preferred ones, leveling them up to be more powerful in battle and, eventually, ready to evolve into a new type of hero. Recognising that players would be particularly disappointed if they receive a hero they already own, we make that leveling up extra generous if you fuse two heroes of the same type together. In that way, even the most disappointing summon (getting something you already have) gives you an additional benefit, giving each cloud a silver lining.

5. Be upfront, respect your players

Apple recently updated their terms to require developers to make clear the odds of receiving randomised items. We publish these, both in game and on our wiki and Discord channel. The nature of completely random drops is that some players will get what they want immediately while others might keep summoning and never get there.

Inevitably, despite publishing the odds and trying to make every purchase feel worthwhile, the occasional player will conclude the game is fixed against them and complain – what we’re seeing from our early players is that enough people do win the heroes they’re looking for to rise to our defence anytime someone feels the tables are stacked. All you can do here is be upfront and honest about how the game systems work.

We’ve been surprised by just how clued in players are about these things – they know more about the drop rates in our, and competitors’ games than we do, and are quick to point out not only where they think we are being too aggressive, but also where we should be charging more/giving less in order to keep the balance between happy players and a viable game economy.

This is just a glimpse into some of the most potent points that are top of mind following the beta launch of Dragon’s Watch – a list we can expect to swell further in the coming months. You never stop learning, which is why any resource like Mobile Free to Play that adds to your library of knowledge is worth its weight in gold.

Harry Holmwood is the co-founder of London-based mobile studio The Secret Police and European GM of Japanese animation, music, video games, television series specialist Marvelous Entertainment.

The post Getting Back to the Roots of Gacha: 5 Things We Learned Developing Dragon’s Watch appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

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

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

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

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

Duplicates vs Bad Drops in a Gacha System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six Mechanics for Handling Duplicates

#1 Duplicates Aren’t Duplicates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#2 Repair

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

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

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

#3 Fusion (Unlocking Potential)

[Source: Both Guns Blazing]

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

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

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

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

#4 Sharding

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

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

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

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

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

#5 Unlock & Upgrade

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

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

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

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

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

#6 Unlocking Better Cosmetics

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

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

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

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

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

Summary: Duplicates aren’t Bad Drops

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

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

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

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

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

The post Creating a Strong Gacha: How the Pros Make Sure Duplicates Aren’t ‘Bad Drops’ appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer