I believe in the next few years we will see a similar development for game economy designer jobs: ‘analytical game designers’ who work with simulations and support lead designers in iterating on the key game systems.

Article written by Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King

The unique problems of freemium mobile game mechanics

Building successful freemium games includes a very special type of challenge: creating systems that engage players for years and that allow for very deep monetization. All the revenue of a freemium game comes from the slow trickle of small in-game purchases made by a small fraction of the playerbase. This makes it necessary for freemium games to retain players for a long time and avoid putting too low a cap on how much spenders can pay.

In order to achieve a long lifetime, freemium games are built so that players can set strong (short-, medium-, and long-term) goals for themselves. They are then tuned to gradually provide players with a sense of “progression” towards these goals for an experience that can last for years. This generally translates into a need for a lot of “content,” be it new levels, new items, or generally new “things” to get in the game. Now, since most spend in freemium games comes from players who want to accelerate their progression, and since as we said it is important to avoid putting a low cap on how much spenders can spend, this need for “content” is multiplied.

The solution to this type of problem often cannot just be “create more content.” Production of good quality “content” can be both expensive and time-consuming, and that has to be factored in the cost of maintaining a live game. In the case of mobile games, developers also need to keep in mind that there are device limitations in terms of loading times and even disk space in case they want to support old devices.

This pressure on “content” makes freemium system building one of the most difficult and interesting challenges in game development.

Review a game economy early

It is important to look at this “content” dynamic explicitly and in detail before launching a game. There have been a few examples of beautiful, innovative, IP-powered games that have burst into players’ attention (and into the Top Downloads and Top Grossing charts), only to then disappear just a few months later. Not having enough progression or spending depth impeded these titles from becoming new runaway successes.

Furthermore, work on those systems is also best done early in the development process. Mobile games have become big production efforts, with teams of dozens of people. Once a game team becomes that big, two things hinder fast or successful pivots:

• Lead designers become very busy with day-to-day work, which makes it hard for them to take a step back and focus on tasks as big as changing key game systems.
• Since changing key game systems means changing somewhat the “nature” of a game, it is hard to do that more than once or twice before losing the faith of the team or the key game stakeholders.

The problem with reviewing game systems

The issue with trying to review game systems early in the development process is that freemium game systems are both very complicated and abstract. Game system reviews typically happen via conversations and presentations, and sometimes with some high-level prototypes, but those tools are not fit to describe and analyze “content” problems in-depth. Different people are likely to interpret the same presentation or the same words in different ways, and without looking into this in detail, there is the risk of moving to production games lacking a solid plan.

Enter the economy designers

Game economy designers at King are “analytical game designers” who look at games as machines and partner with the lead designer on a game title to transform a vision and a desired player experience into mechanics and parameters. They build simulations of the game mechanics and find answers to questions like, “How long will players need to complete a game?” or “How deep can monetization be in this game?”

Having a game economy designer working in a game team early in the development process allows for the game team to iterate much faster on game systems, months before having these systems implemented in game. A game can then move in production with confidence that enough “content” will be available to allow for years of play and for enough monetization depth.

RPG example

For example, in order to accelerate our iterations on the development of a gear system in an RPG, one of our economy designers developed a small simulator in Python (our preferred language for economy design).

The tool encoded all the mechanics related to the gear system (item drops, gear progression, gacha system). A designer could interact with it and simulate the progression in the game without going through the core mechanics of the gameplay.

This allowed exploring the long-term state of players in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. The project could therefore quickly iterate on different variations on the design of the gear system and eliminate solutions that would have given a poor long-term player experience.

Casual game economies

Simulation is a valuable tool for casual games as well. In one of our latest casual games, players receive many of their rewards through (non-purchasable) mystery boxes. The inherent randomness in the boxes combined with variable progression speeds, skill levels, and play frequencies of players makes it hard to calculate how many rewards players get and when they get them.

In a game as big as a popular casual game, giving a bad experience to “a small percentage of players” could mean impacting millions, so having more control over the player experience becomes very valuable.

Using actual player data to simulate players’ journeys allows us to see how some game logic decisions impact player experience and content pacing, thus allowing for faster iterations before in-market tests.

Simulating players’ journeys allows us to see how game logic decisions impact player experience.

Game economy designers become increasingly important

The mobile gaming industry is still developing. The level of innovation to become a top title is as high as ever before, high quality is a minimum requirement and time to market is critical. To respond to these demands, gaming companies are trying to multiply their attempts at making successful games and are increasing the size of the teams once the games move to production. The more these trends will continue, the stronger the need will be to validate project investments early on, and the more there will be a need for game economy designers.

The discipline is young, with tools and practices still to be discovered, but the potential value to be created in this space is great, and I am convinced that we will have more and more A simulation specialists in this role.

If you’re interested in working with King on Economy design, take a look at their jobs board here.

By Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King
Originally posted on Gamasutra

The post The Rising Need for Game Economy Designers 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

Deconstructing Galaxy of Heroes

In Deconstructions

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

How to Design a Gacha System

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.

Related Read

3 Reasons Why Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle Reached #1 Top Grossing

In Monetization, Top Posts

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

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

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

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

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

Carpool Lane

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

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

Price range: Between $2.99 and $9.99

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

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

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

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

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

Toll road

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

Price range: $19.99 to $29.99

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

Google Maps

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

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

Price range: $29.99 to $99.99

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helicopter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t run out of road!

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

About the Author

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

The post Rules of the Road: How the best F2P games ensure their big spenders don’t get stuck in traffic appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Chad Kihm

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

On the surface, amassing a huge number of downloads within the modern mobile marketplace would appear to be a staggering task. Yet, when you look at successful games such as 1010!, Ballz, Agar.io, Dune, or Piano Tiles, the designs behind them are so simple plenty of developers are within rights to ask themselves, ‘just why didn’t I think of that?’.

The term ‘hypercasual’ has become a collective way to reference games of this nature. Such titles typically have a single mechanic and a single goal, yet reaching a high score can be fiendishly difficult. There are a number of publishers – Ketchapp, Voodoo, and Gram to name a few – that, within the last couple of years, have managed to gather a daily audience that could rival most large television networks. It’s naive to believe that each of these publishers have a ‘secret sauce’, yet how have they managed to get a game to 100 million downloads?

How do these studios choose the best prototypes? What does it take to design the perfect hypercasual experience? And, most importantly, just how do they make it to 100 million downloads?

Perfecting the mechanic

At their core, all of these hypercasual games are built around a single mechanic. Indeed, it would be fair to suggest the all-conquering Flappy Bird could be considered the beginning of the hypercasual genre on mobile.

A player’s score is used as the primary metric for a users progress at perfecting that mechanic. This is very different from say a BBB (Base-Battle-Build), in which users strategically choose how to deploy the perfect army, or a Match-3 game that relies on a balance of skill and luck of where gems will fall. Great hypercasual games are easy to grasp, but rely on players having to perfect the mechanic through repetition, measured via a high score.

As a result, players quickly grasp that the more they play, the better they get. For example, with Flappy Bird your first run was unlikely to be too successful, but repeated play teaches the player how to control, time and avoid the simple obstacles. Perfecting the basic mechanics quickly feels fun. Nevertheless, the best hypercasual games still convey the idea that, even with consistent improvements, there is still a long way to go before the player reaches the top.  

Great games in this genre rely on mechanics that provide all the tools a player needs from the start of the game, either with a single life – such as Flappy Bird – or with multiple lives, like Ballz or a full base, like Stack.  In each case, winning is in the hands of the player and loosing is clear from the outset.

Perhaps most interestingly, to date, there have been three genres of game that have perfected the hypercasual model; arcade, puzzle and MMO games.

Arcade Hypercasual

Titles like Stack, Snake vs Blocks, Finger Racer are the most prominent successes of arcade hypercasual games. All typically rely on timing-based mechanics; tap at the right time, swipe at the right time. This is mostly due to the way timing mechanics work best with touch input.

For example, touch controls provide very accurate timing and directional responses, but are particularly poor at single point accuracy. Likewise, mobile session design is much shorter than other medium’s, and so the ability to pick up and play within 10 seconds is one reason people will turn to a hypercasual game over a simulation or RPG title.  The immediacy of the mechanic and the simplicity of the tools available make it a superior choice when time is at a premium.

Tapping and swiping both open up a lot of different gameplay ideas, but most top performing hypercasual games rely on timing and accuracy as the crucial skills to master. When thinking of the core mechanic the best ones usually are very hard to perfect, but the player will have a stat such as health, size or speed that provide them with a small cushion. In contrast, serving up too harsh of a mechanic will see players drop out far too quickly.  If you are testing ideas for a mechanic, try to formulate one that provides players with lots of room to fail in small chunks (Stack), or in 1 large chunk (Flappy Bird).  Think of it as either 1 – 0 , a clear and simple challenge. Or 100 – 0, where the more you have complicates the primary action of the mechanic.  You loose more earlier on and then the mechanic becomes more manageable.

Puzzle Hypercasual

Puzzle games usually remove dexterity and timing and replace them with strategy and planning. Great puzzle games require players to think in advance and formulate a strategy in order to win.  

The real difference with hypercasual puzzle, however, is that games don’t have a clear end.   This was the strategy adopted by 1010!, MergeTown or 2048, and in each case there are ways the player can lose but no real way they can win. This is different from the standard puzzle genre games such as Solitaire or Match-3 games where in each case the player usually completes a round and then is presented with another round. As such, in more traditional puzzle games, the ability to win is what drives players to retry. However, hypercasual puzzle games remove even that goal to maintain simplicity.

Removing obstacles is one of the key ways to make a product more casual. The easier it is for players to start a game, the easier it is for them to understand it – it’s lowest common denominator gaming.  Simplifying games is clearly what many teams try to do, the difficulty with a Puzzle game is that there is still enough strategic choice that a player can still make a bad move.

Puzzle games must tread a fine line between removing enough rules or restrictions from the player whilst maintaining a mechanic that has enough depth for players to perfect. Trial and error when it comes to the game’s development is typically the approach required to work out at what size and scale these mechanics breakdown – for instance, there are reasons 2048 has a 5×5 board or Match-3 is more popular than Match-4 or Match-5.  The balance of randomness within the constraints of the board are where teams should iterate the most.

MMO Hypercasual

Classic MMOs such as World of Warcraft or EVE have complex stories and huge number of mechanics. In the hypercasual realm, games like Agar.io or Paper.io create dynamic experiences often with single goals and simple controls. Players interact with each other to create emergent gameplay in real time, but their focus remains singular – be the biggest, be the longest.

The strategic choices the player has to make and concentration required as a result means play time will be longer than typical hypercasual rounds, but perfecting the mechanic will always require multiple attempts. Indeed, mastering the controls and timing is the only way players will learn. The actions of other players rather than computer generated scripts or increasing speed create the pressure and difficulty.  This always tends to feel more enjoyable as the difficulty develops with your play rather than being set in advance by a game designer.

Perfecting an MMO hypercasual game is not as clear cut as the other genres, but score is still used as the simplest measure of success. This leads players to naturally want to be first – an achievement only one person can ever attain, of course! The drive for perfection is challenging, but in this case perfection is attainable – at least until your device runs out of battery!

Scaling the mechanic

The three different hypercasual genres detailed above take different slants at providing challenge for players, yet all three rely on players learning a skill in order to achieve higher scores. For a successful hypercasual game to stick, that mechanic must scale.  

Scaling requires that the mechanic, environment or context to gradually increase in difficulty, whilst also increasing the score received. In some cases scale pushes the mechanic, making it harder to proceed. Conversely, in other cases the mechanic doesn’t grow harder but the board or level becomes more complex – i.e. players have to think harder, think deeper or plan further ahead in order to succeed. Scores are necessary so players can compete with themselves (as well as others), so developers have to make sure scores are front and center of the user experience.

Scaling usually makes the games harder with time in order to reduce the likelihood of a truly endless game. If a game were endless they usually are no longer fun because the threat of losing or progression from winning are lessened. If a game ends up heading down either of these tracks, the developer in question must meet it head on and develop features that end players sessions more quickly.

Timberman is one of the better examples of how a developer has learned to scale the mechanic through the use of a timer bar. The more the Timberman chops, the more the bar fills, but take too long and the bar will run out and the player will reach the end. The rate at which the bar drops also speeds up the more the player chops, meaning the best players get so good at the mechanic they don’t make any mistakes whatsoever but are still beaten by that damn bar! 

I’ve actually been present when some scores over 700 have been placed, which makes for some seriously intense thumb tapping. As such, it’s important games in this genre increase pressure overtime, but don’t punish great players just because they are doing well.  User Testing is invaluable here.

Hypercasual mechanic scale pressure in three main ways:

• Increasing the speed of the mechanic itself
• Changing the environment the mechanic is present
• Adding a competitive human element that adds variance to the play

A natural cadence of around one to two minutes of gameplay allows people to experience the mechanic in a safe space for 20-30 seconds before gradually increasing the pressure and forcing players to concentrate. The level of concentration can be immensely high and keeping a player fully engaged for as long as possible is the kind of rush every developer should be looking to master. Games that don’t find the balance, however, will be greeted with players who think gameplay is either too tough or, perhaps even more harshly, too boring. Getting on top of this progression, is the key to designing a game that hits 100 million downloads.

Monetising the mechanic

One very important fact to note: The only viable business model for hypercasual games so far is advertising. While there may also be opportunities to sell user data such as location or activity to various data companies, the simplicity of the mechanics make IAP irrelevant.

Here at Mobile Free To Play we’ve written articles aplenty on how video ads can be a viable business model to grow a company, but hypercasual games are where they excel. The sheer scale of downloads coupled with the short round times and repeatable gameplay mean that players can view multiple ads per session and multiple sessions per day.

Related Read

4 ways Futureplay use mobile video ads to increase monetization

In Design, Monetization

Tom Kinniburgh

Related Read

Understanding the value chain for Mobile Video Ads

In Monetization, Growth & Marketing, Top Posts

Tom Kinniburgh

Also of note, people often think that hypercasual games have very poor retention. Let me state right here and now, this is a complete myth.  Many hypercasual games can have extremely high 1-7 day retention – 60 percent or more is not unknown for day one (D1). It’s true that they do suffer from D30 onwards, but they can more than make up for this in the number of sessions and stickiness in the short term.  

The monetisation model relies on a smash and grab ad philosophy, which means that developers attempt to ensure all users see at least one ad a session, with more ads popping up after every game loop. In this way, every app start becomes a new opportunity to push players into more hypercasual games. This might lead to less engagement in a single app, but developers can see a much larger network growth when measured across all apps.  

The conclusion is, each hypercasual app becomes another opportunity to place another add, so the more successful hypercasual apps you have out there, the better. At the time of writing (January, 2018) the number of apps each publisher/developer had live on the Store.

• Ketchapp – 154 apps
• Voodoo – 15 apps
• Gram Games – 8 apps

Not all developers have the luxury of such a large network of apps or users, but it’s possible to use their tricks to maximise your ROI. One crafty trick of the hypercasual publishers is the on what I call the ‘app start ad’ – or the single advert that shows before the game even takes place. It may feel very aggressive, but it guarantees at least one ad view per session, which can add up on the bottom line. Players have come to expect that these casual expeiences are powered via ad revenue and so long as you provide an IAP to stop the advertising, I think it’s fair to subjegate players to a higher volume of ads.

Marketing Hypercasual Games

It’s important to note that mobile gaming is as much about marketing as it is game design. One of the main reasons for the rise of hypercasual is its incredibly low CPI costs and high CTR from ads.  

This is due to the sheer simplicity of the gameplay, enabling a 10-20 second ad to communicate the entire game to the player, means more people are convinced of enjoying the game by watching the ad.  This leads to a very high CTR (Click-thru-rate) and IR (Install Rate) as they know what they are getting.  The best ads show off the gameplay directly and don’t need fancy soundtracks or 3D models. Getting your Ads and game to market and testing the response rate is almost as important as developing the game.  The market decides which hypercasual games will succeed.  

The market has become overly saturated recently and thus a common art style has been established.  Clean and simple vector graphics – usually with strong and bold tones – stand out and help players make quick decisions on whether they will like the game. Sticking within this style can help people decide without even playing your game, what type of game it will be.  Again the clearer your game is for a consumer, the more likely they are to impulsively decide if they want to play your game. 

Loyalty hard to come by with HyperCasual gaming, with players quickly picking up and deleting titles every day.  Make sure that players can remember your game name and that this closely represents your core mechanic; Ballz, Dunk!, and Piano Tiles are great examples.  

By maintaining a simple theme, name and mechanic you provide the broadest audience appeal.  Hypercasual titles can drive upto 10x the number of downloads for similar budgets as RPG or Strategy Releases.  They may not command the same Lifetime Value (LTV), but they can still get into the charts. This in turn leads to a greater number of organic downloads lowering the eCPI even further, completing the virtuous game marketing circle. The sheer scale that can be achieved by modern marketing networks means that if done correctly and with budget spent in the right way, games can skyrockets, doing over a million download per day worldwide.

Conclusion

Designing hypercasual games can initially seem very simple, but creating success is as much an artform as developing a strong economy or deep narrative.  

Unlike other genres, success can rely much more on the market and whatever craze is sweeping the collective conscious that week.  Ensuring your game is as clear and easy to understnad for a user can make all the difference. When prototyping mechanics, decide which genre you fall into.  Focus on simplicity and timing but remember to use a high score to drive a competitive goal for all players. There is no perfect mechanic, nor perfect style, but the simplicity of the gameplay allows you to be fast and nimble in your development.  Set yourself strict timelines to releasing concepts and let the market decide

Making money from the genre requires a serious investment in a large variety of ad partners and understanding of the ad monetization model. The sheer scale of the games can make huge revenue via ads, but the fickle nature of the market mean unless you thought about your integrations early on, you might miss a lot of revenue. If you keep it simple, create an innovative twist on a simple mechanic and the market likes your brand – then who knows, you might reach the lofty heights of an eight-figure app store success!

The post 100 Million Downloads: How Hypercasual Mobile Games Are Rewriting the Game Design Rulebook appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Intro to Gram Games

Gram Games is an interesting company and one that deserves a lot of attention. In the past years, the mobile marketplace has matured to a point where most mobile companies can’t compete as premium nor free-to-play. Some companies have left the marketplace in search of new platforms like VR, some have doubled down on existing franchises in absence of a new hit. Making traditional free to play games on mobile has become increasingly difficult and creatively challenging. Productions now last years on high scoped free-to-play titles, and the success of these games are built upon designers finding ways to retain players for years. The risk of developing a traditional free to play title today has never been higher.

Gram Games takes a bit of a different approach. Gram creates games for “hyper casuals”. Players that aren’t looking for a deep long lasting game, but looking for something fun and interesting to try. Something that’s instantly gratifying and playful. Games like 1010!, Merged! and Merge Town really exemplifies this focus. Gram Games has had a history of launching quality hyper-casual games, growing them to the top of the free charts, and making plenty of revenue from advertisements in these games. They’ve found enough success out of this model to expand their studios from Turkey to London just this year, as well as start incorporating in-app purchases in their strategy with games like Merge Dragons.

One key aspect that separates Gram Games culture from other gaming companies is the focus on innovation through game jams. Promoting that every Friday, teams have the opportunity to prototype new mechanics. This makes sense with their business model: it relies on accessible, innovative mechanics, and production times that are measured in weeks rather than months. There is a low risk and high interest in just trying interesting mobile mechanics out. Very different from traditional free to play.

Interviewing Gram Games

#1

How did you make the decision to start Merge Town? How long did it take to produce Merge Town?

Merge Town first was first developed by building on the merging mechanic we used in our first IAP-based title, Merge Dragons. We thought we could use the simple mechanic, and give the player the experience of clearing the board/progress.

Overall the development effort took a few months, including full development, soft launch, and other tests we ran to see where we could stretch the LTV/CPI figures. Because this was a hyper-casual game using a tried and tested mechanic, we were fairly confident in the mechanic itself, but we had to have a longer testing period (about 6-8 weeks) to test monetization/theme. We tested different options where we started out with one world only, added the second world and used a different number of levels where the players can discover for buildings. We also tested with variations in where the ads were used to arrive at where we are today.

Overall the development effort took a few months, including full development, soft launch, and other tests

#2

When you are doing your weekly game jams, is the video ad integration points already something important you are designing for?

Not in detail, but it is something that is always on the agenda. If the presenter of the idea has not included it in the main pitch, we still ask where rewarded videos will kick in, where interstitial videos may kick in – we need to have a preliminary idea of monetization.

#3

When thinking about Game Design and Session Design for Video Ad Driven games, what is more important — driving Session Length or driving Sessions per Day?

We aim for both! If you’d really have to pick one, it would depend on the type of ad units you’d like to utilize in the game. For example, an average user would see more banner ad impressions on a long session length game, but (depending on where you introduce the video ad interstitials) more sessions per day would mean more video ad interstitials. We generally see that session length tends to be constant over a user’s lifetime, whereas sessions per day go down as more time passes for an average player. You could, of course, introduce other videos (like rewarded) during gameplay to boost video ads through session length, as players watch more rewarded videos in longer sessions. These are different parameters you can play around with to optimize to the highest extent possible while still maintaining player satisfaction.

#4

Do you see Advertisement driven games as eventually overtaking (in terms of daily revenue) the Top Grossing games on mobile?

Not in the short-term, since most of the ads served are for other games that monetize mainly through in-app purchases, so ad-based games operate at the low end of the LTV/CPI curve. But in the long-term, with viewability and performance measurement enhancements, more and more brands will enter the ads business, giving ads-based games the ability to act as “new media”. Unfortunately there is not much public information on ad game revenue figures, but some of them would enter Top 50 grossing games, even today.

There is not much public information on ad game revenue… but some of them would enter Top 50 grossing games, even today.

#5

For advertisements, what integration points have the highest revenue impact? Those that have a higher adoption (% of DAU using it) or ones where users can watch unlimited ads for a small gain?

Adoption rates are generally constant for banners and video interstitials, but can vary greatly for rewarded videos (since they are user opt-in). Generally, there is a correlation between adoption rate and impression per DAU, since the first is a key determinant of the latter. Since adoption rates are closer to constant for banners and interstitials, we tackle more impressions per DAU and CPMs (for which you’d need to work with ad networks and focus on the right geos to optimize). For rewarded videos, we work to improve adoption rates through changes we implement within the game, such as making them part of the core gameplay, giving the player a chance to cast a new spell, ask for new lives/orders for progression and etc. By changing UI, and making it more accessible also helps boost adoption. Once game updates are done, adoption rates end up at a stable place, where you can work to optimize CPMs like other ad units.

#6

Why did you decide to integrate the forced Ad points into Merge Town? There is the obvious UX impact, but does the increased video ads watched outweigh this issue?

This is always a big discussion point before launching any new game. Whenever you introduce a forced ad in a game, you get a UX/retention hit, but a rise in ARPDAU. Optimal points differ from game to game as shorter lifetime does not necessarily mean lower LTV. Some games end up at the more aggressive advertisement end of the spectrum, others less.

#7

How do the metrics compare between Merge Town and Merge Dragons?

Merge Dragons is our only game that does not include ads, whereas Merge Town is the one where we use video and rewarded ads heavily. Merge Town is a much simpler game that uses the core mechanic of Merge Dragons, but there is less of a long-term story associated with it. So you get a higher short-term retention, but a lower long-term retention – that’s to be expected.

Because Merge Dragons monetizes mainly through IAP rather than through ads, monetization is harder to compare. UX is more significant in Merge Dragons, as we aim for higher long-term retention to form a community of committed players.

#8 

Idle as an economy has clear benefits for video ad integration. Do you see any other progression systems (ex. Saga, Simulation) that could also have strong ad integration?

For opt-in video ads, I’d say an Idle Game has an easier time finding integration points. This is less true for interstitial video ads, as there needs to be clear breaks in place to use them. This is actually harder to find on idle games, but easier in games with defined sessions or stages (like saga or high score games). As there is some impact on long-term retention, it is harder to use forced interstitials on games that monetize mainly through IAP.

#9 

One key aspect that makes Ad driven games work is the fact that they are so approachable, so marketable. During the creative process, how do you ensure what you are creating is going to be so attractive to the mobile audience? Have such a low CPI?

Similar to the way we are testing monetization and engagement, we also test how marketable a game is during the soft launch. Hyper casual games generally have low CPIs, but also lower LTVs than their IAP counterparts.

The key thing to remember when designing a hyper-casual game is the fact that your audience is different from a traditional “gamer” audience. Therefore the mechanics that work on traditional gamers may not work there. For example, certain themes (space, Fantasy/RPG) have very specific, committed segments of gamers that are lower in numbers for a hyper-casual game. That’s why we strive towards very simple, easy-to-associate-with themes in our games (e.g. blocks, buildings).

A hyper-casual game would not go for excessive items, skills, crafting and base building. Certain casual games can use one of these successfully (for example our casual title Merge Dragons!), and mid-core games could employ multiple of them successfully as seen in many successful IAP titles. But hyper casuals would have to go after millions of users, so they should not be focusing on a committed sub-segment, but rather strive to appeal to a mass audience. We constantly test, iterate, and have to “throw out” prototypes where we see this work/don’t work, and always see that mass appeal brings in higher short-term retention, and certain progressive elements (levels etc.) and simplicity can bring people back to play over the long-term (1010! is a successful example of this). What brings people back 2 years after installing a game would be different on a hyper-casual game compared to a mid-core game, thus a less “intimidating” game for a non-gamer could help there. Imagine a player who would have only 1-2 games on their phone, playing from time to time, and don’t play games on their PC. This is a very good target audience for an ad based hyper-casual game, also due to the fact that brands would have a higher appetite to target them.

For more information on Gram Games, Visit Here

The post Interview with Gram Games on Hyper Casual appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Here is the video of the presentation:

Here are my slides:

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

Summarizing the Presentation, there are 3 key aspects that are key for making a Gacha system work: depth, width and desire.

#1 Depth

• Gacha depth is about ensuring your gacha lasts as long as possible
  • The gacha will last a long time until players run out of content (or reasons to pull from the gacha)
  • The gacha will last a long time until it feels like a player isn’t making meaningful progress from it

• Gacha depth is critical the more games rely heavily on gacha as its core retention and monetization (ex. all the games copying Clash Royale’s progression systems and gacha)
  • The deeper your gacha, the higher your long term retention + max economy spend will be, which are critical for success in F2P

• To know what the depth of your gacha model is, you need to model your max drops. (read here if you don’t know what drops means)
  • Build a model using Excel, Google Spreadsheets or code it
  • This model should take in key variables which impact the pacing and depth of your gacha:
    • How much content you have
    • What your duplicates are used for
    • Quantity of Rarities, and their drop rates
    • Pool Changes (as in adding and removing what content can drop from the gacha)

Using the model you can calculate a graph showing you effectively what your gacha will feel like.

• This should show you clear dynamics of how to increase the # of drops your system can handle:
  • Adding Content adds depth, but it depends on what the rarity type is
  • Low Drop Rates for higher tier means flatter, more frustrating progress
  • Opening up the pool over time means that players can feel like the gacha is “refreshed” and interesting again
    • ex. Hearthstone releases new content packs every few months which instantly feel rewarding to open
    • ex. Clash Royale opens up the Gacha pool over time to give compelling reasons to spend each time you move up an Arena tier
    • ex. Dragonvale opens up new Gacha pool possibilities each time you unlock a new element in the game
  • Giving duplicates meaning to your progress (not just converting to dust) adds exponential depth to your gacha system.
    • Dust gives players a better baseline of progress, at the cost of progress speed (lowering your depth)
    • Duplicates that are required to progress (ex. Clash Royale’s duplicate system) mean that in order to upgrade cards you require sometimes hundreds of duplicates (depending on the rarity) adding significant depth AND making each drop feel rewarding

#2 Width

• Gacha width is about ensuring that your systems put pressure on having a wide collection of content as much as possible.
  • Gacha width is about ensuring that players don’t feel terrible after bad drops.
  • To do this, make all content as relevant and helpful as possible.
• 4 example features that drive width:
  • Loadout Size
    • Asking the player to bring in a variety of items into the core battle
      • ex. in Call of Duty your Loadout includes a gun, pistol, weapon attachments, etc.
      • ex. in Hearthstone you bring in 30 cards, Clash Royale you bring in 8
      • ex. in Contest of Champions you bring 3 heroes to a campaign
      • you want just enough that collecting matters, but not so many that players can create a perfect team
  • Explicit Strengths and Weaknesses
    • Element systems are needed to ensure that there is no perfect team, and players need to constantly shift their team around to take advantage of the situation.
      • ex. Contest of Champions has 6 elements in their game, plus synergy bonuses
  • Implicit Counters
    • Fostering debate amongst your audience about what the optimal setup for a meta is will drive strong collection.
    • The more content the player has — the more they can experiment or be prepared for a shifting meta
  • Game Modes
    • Including game modes within your game which explicitly rewards players for having a large quantity of heroes.
      • ex. Gauntlet mode in Heroes Charge or Galactic War in Galaxy of Heroes: the more heroes you have, the longer you’ll survive, the higher you are rewarded

#3 Desire

• Gacha desire is about ensuring that your game’s progress is effectively paced by the gacha content. Players NEED the gacha in order to progress in the game.
  • Look at your systems, how important is the content of the gacha to progress?
    • How important is Skill? can a player with high skill breeze through your game? will a player with low skill feel like the gacha isn’t helpful?
    • Are there mechanics within the game which water down the usefulness of the gacha?
      • ex. progression systems on the side of the gacha system which are more important than the content of the gacha

These 3 lenses can be used to look into your own Gacha to ensure it will be as powerful as you need it to be.

In the coming months, pocketgamer will post the video of the presentation. I’ll post it then.

Related Read

Brawl Stars vs Clash Royale : Designing a Strong Gacha

In Deconstructions, Monetization

Adam Telfer

Related Read

Creating a Strong Gacha: How the Pros Make Sure Duplicates Aren’t ‘Bad Drops’

In Monetization, Deconstructions

Adam Telfer

Related Read

Getting Back to the Roots of Gacha: 5 Things We Learned Developing Dragon’s Watch

In Deconstructions, Design

Guest Writer

Related Read

How to Design Loot Boxes and Gacha Systems

The post How to Design a Gacha System appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Source: SOOMLA Blog (an excellent source of info on Video Advertising!)

The rise of Video-Ad driven monetization has heralded in a new era within mobile game design. The casual segment has been dominated for years by the Match 3 Saga model with other casual categories struggling for meaningful revenue (ex. “with Friends” style games). Video Ads have opened up these categories because it monetizes on 100% of your user base. Instead of having to awkwardly cram in In-App Purchases into a casual title, developers can monetize off their active playerbase even if they don’t have a meaningful economy with anything to sell.

“The rise of hyper casual” it is called. Summarized here by Johannes Heinze of AppLovin:

“Players of hyper-casual games can be acquired at extremely low rates, so even though CPIs are increasing and gaining traction in the app stores is difficult, developers of hyper-casual games have a lot of opportunities. Hyper-casual games tend to be less costly to make, and users monetize almost immediately since ads are the primary revenue source, meaning that UA campaigns can be optimized early on. Hyper-casual games make the biggest share of revenue in the first couple of days, unlike IAP-heavy genres, where the most active users make the most money over time.” – Johannes Heinze, AppLovin

The rise of hyper casual category is exciting because it goes counter to what traditional free to play games have been moving towards: massive budget, multi-year long productions that are getting riskier and riskier. Hyper casual games are innovative, quick to make, and easy to market when done right.

Gram Games is one of many that successfully capitalized on the hyper-casual trend. Games like 1010! And Merged were quick to make, yet clearly generate more than enough revenue to support the mid-sized Turkey-based studio (now with an additional studio in London).

Gram Games’ most recent launch is “Merge Towns”, a mashup of a puzzle and idle game. The game has peaked at #3 top free downloads in the UK, and is within the top 20 downloads in the US. This game clearly shows the latest innovation in the video-ad driven monetization space and is an excellent guide for newcomers to space. Not only does it have strong proven video ad integration, it also supports an innovative core gameplay. Let’s take a closer look.

Core Gameplay

Merge Towns at the purest concept level is a Matching game core combined with an Idle game economy.

The core gameplay mimics that of Threes! and Triple Town in that you attempt to combine multiple of the same block to upgrade the square.

You can see above how the core is built. You can drag and drop any piece on top of another piece of its kind. There are no restrictions like Triple Town or Threes. Placing the same tier of a piece (a small house) on top of the same tier will upgrade the house to the next tier (a piece with 2 houses). This carries forward and forward throughout the game, creating more and more intricate pieces.

Whereas the goal in Threes And Triple Town was simply to survive for the longest time possible, Merge Towns is more akin to an Idle game. There are no failure states, there is just optimization of progress. Your goal is to generate pieces — so you can combine them — to make better buildings — which generate more revenue — to purchase better pieces. The core gameplay moves like this:

1. The first step is about generating pieces. Players can do this by rapidly tapping on a button, or by waiting.

2. With the generated pieces, players combine them to upgrade them and make space for more land and new pieces to fall.

3. With the upgraded buildings, these generate faster soft currency.

4. With the soft currency, players can purchase better pieces directly

Overall the gameplay feels significantly more approachable and casual than Threes or Triple Town. For Triple Town, the restrictions on movement and the loss condition make for a far more difficult puzzling experience. Merge Towns feels much more like a new take on an idle game mechanic (ex. Farm Away and Build Away’s core gameplay which is deconstructed here). Instead of simply asking players to tap-tap-tap their way to progress, they’ve added a thinly more involved matching mechanic which feels satisfying to complete.

Players don’t even have to pay that much attention to the numbers, the core gameplay of simply matching the highest tiered object possible works well on its own. It’s not so much a puzzle as it is just a pleasurable action.

What this says to me is that the key part that works for the Idle genre is the metagame and the economy. Clicking over and over again is just a relic of the Cow Clicker days — to innovate in this genre it will be about combining the economy of and idle with interesting core mechanics which have significantly more interest than tapping over and over. Merge Towns executes on this.  Merge Towns appeals to a wide casual market while having the lasting economy of an idle.

Integrating the Idle Economy

To integrate the Idle economy with a new gameplay took some workarounds by the design team. If players can upgrade buildings on their own, what is the value of the currency generated?

Gram Games answered this by making soft currency the time skip currency. Players can purchase upgraded buildings directly with their soft currency, allowing them to make progress significantly faster as the economy naturally slows down with the exponential nature of the design.

Players thus enter the store as part of the core loop, constantly aching to spend their soft currency to speed up their progression and purchase the highest upgraded buildings possible. It feels like an Idle economy, where I’m constantly making purchases to upgrade the rate at which I’m generating soft currency, but this feels very different. Something that all designers must strive for.

As time goes on, Merge Towns eventually opens up more tiles in which you can place pieces giving a small sense of Visual Progress. Your town can now get bigger and bigger. However, eventually, things do get boring as a usual idle economy does. Eventually the next major upgrade gets farther and farther away.

To keep players engaged when progress slows down most idle games use a prestige mechanic, forcing players to reset their progress in the current area. To make this appealing, games usually offer a permanent progress boost to the player, making their subsequent resets of progress allow them to get farther and farther in the progression. Merge Towns breaks this formula, and instead opts for a more heavy-handed design.

Eventually, new tabs open up on the right which introduces the player to new areas of the game. This offers up an entirely separate town to build up. Their soft currency is completely different, so progress in the first zone does not help at all to progress in the second zone. This is a far break from their idle game roots.

This design decision has some pros and cons.

On the one side, it feels casual because I don’t actually lose any progress — my initial town is still running and I can still keep upgrading it. All the visual progress that I’ve made upgrading my buildings is still felt. It removes the punishing feeling that most idle games can have.

However, it also means that my sessions will get longer and longer. While this game’s design already rewards players quite heavily for being active. As you progress the sessions continually get longer and longer to manage the multiple zones, making sessions more and more exhausting.

But in essence longer session length is what Gram games want. The longer their sessions — the more players stay within their game — the higher their Video Ads watched per DAU. Restricting session length too much actually isn’t in Gram Games favour. So Gram Games made the right design decision, as long as it doesn’t translate into exhausted players.

Advertising Strategy

Advertising strategy always revolves around getting the highest possible adoption and driving as many completed video ads viewed per DAU. More on this in our previous article.

For Merge Town, because their economy is so based on the Idle economy, they didn’t have to reinvent too much. Merge Town mostly takes cues from the dominant idle games like Farm Away and Build Away. However, they do make adjustments to make them work with the core merging interaction.

There are 4 key integrations of Video Ads:

#1 Welcome Back Bonus

Each time a player returns to the game they are greeted with a choice. Watch a video ad to double the soft currency generated while they are away, or lose out on this deal. Just as we’ve written about before, this is a no-brainer.

This integration is great for driving a high adoption. Right from the outset there’s a high adoption integration. Some scarcity + a clear benefit make this easy for a high percentage of your DAU to accept. However because it’s limited, it’s not great at driving a high quantity of views.

#2 Upgrade Rewarded Building

Throughout the game, there are also smaller rewarded video ad integrations which allow the player to upgrade a given reward for the cost of watching a video ad.

These integrations are great at driving quantity of views, since players can utilize them throughout a session without restriction. In most games offering video ad rewards like this without restriction isn’t possible, it floods the economy or gives too much progress away. However in Merge Town, because the economy scales exponentially, a small boost like this actually doesn’t really dent the overall economy.

#3 Double Production for 2 Hours

Similar to Build Away and Bit City (deconstructed here), Merge Towns gives the player the opportunity to double their overall coin production for an extended period of time for a video ad watch. This drives adoption (it’s an incredible deal) but is weak on quantity of video ad views due to its limited nature. This is also more likely for session design over monetization — giving players a compelling reason to come back to the game every 2 hours.

#4 Forced Ads in Flow

Lastly, Gram Games also has Ads forced upon the player when doing certain actions. When entering the shop (which happens multiple times per session) and sometimes when moving between zones (as you progress this happens more and more) you can be presented with a skippable full screen ad. They definitely are annoying, especially since they seem to appear randomly (most likely due to fill rates from advertisers).

Why would Gram Games opt for such a strategy? Isn’t rewarded video ads always better than forced?

This is most likely a strategy to drive the strongest revenue from players that won’t last forever. Merge Towns is a fun game, but it certainly won’t have the same staying power as traditional free to play games like Gardenscapes, Galaxy of Heroes or Clash Royale. But Merge Town doesn’t need to be like this. Not every game needs to be a 3 year epic hobby with clans and guilds. Which is why many of these video ad driven games are refreshing and are easy to market. They have instantly gratifying mechanics that most traditional free to play games wouldn’t utilize. Their design is simple making it easy to pick up and play compared to most free to play games.

On top of this, it allows Merge Town to monetize off the “No-Ad” version. Purchasing a In-App Purchase will remove the annoying ads, making their offers even more enticing for the power players.

So Gram Games’ embraces their shorter retention curve by their aggressive ad strategy. While it does no favours for their retention, they made a calculated trade-off between retention and revenue. If you know players aren’t going to be here a long while, retention isn’t king… revenue is.

In Summary

By having innovative, instantly gratifying core mechanics, Merge Town has made a game that feels immediately new and different. This game must be easy to market.

By connecting it to an idle game economy they’ve built a game that can last, and drive meaningful integrations of video ads for sustainable revenue.

For game designers in the market, Gram Games have shown that Video Ads and Hyper-Casual games have opened up new possibilities in the market.  Now it’s time for us as game designers to adapt and embrace it.

The post Deconstructing Merge Town: The Rise of Hyper Casual appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

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

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

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

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

From this analysis, it begs the question:

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

“Depth” of a Gacha System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem #1: Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem #2: Duplicates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem #3: Pacing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Path Forward

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

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

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

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

The post Brawl Stars vs Clash Royale : Designing a Strong Gacha appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Creating successful Video Ad integrations is more difficult than simply rewarding a video ad watch with in-game currency. In order to generate enough video views, games need to be designed with video ads in mind. For video ads to perform well we’ve established four core principles of video ad monetization:

• All video ad views are opt-in
• Game design that pushes the maximum number of views per DAU
• Ads give valuable rewards in a positive way for the player
• Ads complement in-app purchase, they don’t replace IAPs

Futureplay is one company that have followed these four principles and built two games (Farm Away and Build Away) that use view-to-play to full effect.  Founded in 2015 in Helsinki, Finland their focus is on shipping games based on the idle / clicker genre. If you haven’t played this style of game, I recommend reading our overview of Clicker/Idle genre:

Related Read

Why you should care about Idle Games

In Retention, Design

Adam Telfer

Great interaction design and slick presentation make these games a joy to play. Let’s dive into how they integrated video ads into the core loop:

Farm Away! and Build Away! Gameplay

An Idle game’s core loop revolves around producing as many coins as quickly as possible. In order to do this, a player must purchase exponentially costly upgrades that increase their coin production rate.  It’s a positive feedback loop.

The objective for a player becomes maximising the efficiency of earning currency. The skill in these games is choosing which upgrades are the most efficient. Rather than digging too deep, remember that for players, increasing the rate of earning feels powerful — and upgrades that provide 2X or 4X increases to your coin production for short periods of time feel very rewarding as progress is noticeably sped up during your session.

Increasing the rate of earning feels powerful

“Farm Away!” wraps the idle mechanic to planting and harvesting crops so that you can upgrade your crops and increase your rate of earning by buying more plots.

“Build Away!” uses a very similar system but you buy various building types and place them in blocks within a city.  

Both games allow you to sacrifice all of your crops or blocks in order to get seeds in “Farm Away!” or keys in “Build Away!”.  Investing into seeds or keys provide global growth bonus’ to help your future farms or cities.

Video Ads:  Opt-in + Attractive Rewards

Nobody wants to watch a video ad. So if you’re going drive a full video ad view you need to make sure it doesn’t feel forced (it’s opt-in) and players feel they are getting a benefit from it.

If you think of watching a video ad as a transaction of time (30 seconds) it will help you to design systems that respect the player’s choice.  Just as buying an in-app purchase is asking people to sacrifice money to gain progress, here you are asking players to sacrifice their time to watch an advert. Asking players to do this not always possible or preferable, you might be sat on a busy train or having a romantic catch up with your girlfriend. Playing mobile games while having a romantic catch-up with your girlfriend is not advisable or you may find your romantic catch-ups become few and far between!

Therefore, allowing users to opt-in to view your video enables them to choose a time and place to sacrifice their time.  People will very quickly learn which features of your game are powered by video ads. The clarity of the trade enables people to opt-in when they will get the most value for themselves. Clearly labelling the reward at the point where you choose to watch helps here. Enabling scheduling and power-ups that each work for different amounts of time enables a player to chose the most efficient trade for them at that moment in time.  Having a breadth of options that caters for these needs leads to many more opportunities to view a video.  More opportunities give a higher chance that any one of these might convert to a video view.

Making a video ad watch opt-in allows for scheduling, but making the reward feel positive and special will lead to higher conversions. Well designed rewards are those than enhance a player’s experience. For example, a boost to currencies the player would normally receive, increased speed to reward or a dramatic / exciting feature that isn’t normally available.  As with in-app purchases, a strong sense of value makes watching the video feel worth it.

Rewards from video ads don’t only need to come from giving away currency or increasing the rate of currency gained.  People appreciate novel experiences, limited offers or a chance at a grand prize.

FuturePlay uses 4 different strategies that each create a positive experience for their users.  Remember as we discussed in the mobile video ads value chain increasing the number of views per DAU will lead to greater payouts in the end. So from a game design perspective building systems that can support 2-8 views in a single session rather than the classic 1 or 2 can have huge increases in monetisation.

1. Scarcity and Growing Value (Daily Double!)

The strongest and most efficient video ad mechanic is the daily double. It offers to double the income you earned whilst away.  Although very relevant to Clicker games as currency generation forms the core loop, a similar offer could be used in simulation games (currency doubling) or arcade (energy doubling) to give a highly valuable rewarding upgrade for the upcoming session. This has some very strong drivers:

• Obvious value that grows with time
• Presenting on appStart means everyone sees it and has the opportunity to opt-in
• Time limited availability which creates urge to take the deal now

The daily double effectively monetizes because it is high value (2x) and that starting value grows with time (seconds away from the game). Therefore, however long it has been, this bonus doubles it! 2X feels very rewarding for clickers and as a retention mechanic you get a larger boost no matter when you last logged, making your start feeling great!

Presenting a forced pop-up on appStart before the game begins, increases the % of your DAU which is likely to opt-in.  People can only convert (earn you money) to an offer if they see it.  People won’t feel bad if the opportunity is opt-in and valuable. As with all free to play designs you know your players are fickle, most players won’t even come back after a single day.  Therefore forcing a high value, time-limited opportunity to kick start their game when they come back has the highest chance of conversion.  For the view-to-play model to be successful you need to bump your average views per dau to 2-4.  The way to do this is to be quite forceful. appStart provides the highest number of opportunities because it’s the first thing people will see.

The daily double is only presented once per session. By creating a scarcity in availability, people perceive the offer at a higher value even if the actual reward might be smaller.  Putting people on the spot leads to more conversions. There are a number of psychology articles that talk about the effects of scarcity and it’s been used in marketing since the early 1970’s.

Any offer which is time or availability limited can create higher conversions due to a sense of urgency for players.  To be effective the offer system should be presented to users multiple times across multiple sessions teaching people of its scarce nature.  The more someone recognises a scarce item, the more likely they will be to convert when they see it. A good cadence for offers like this depends on the value of the reward. Once per session (Daily Double) has high cadence, low monetary value. A starter pack or time limited purchase (new players only) has high value, time limited. A special offer tied to an event or big update has high value and is availability limited can help to convert non-spenders into spenders.  Video ad’s work best at the higher cadence lower value trades, whereas IAP works better at high value limited offers such as starter packs.

By creating a scarcity in availability, people perceive the offer at a higher value

2. Value over time (Session Doubler)

Clicker games benefit by being able to vary the rate of earning easily as their core loop supports a huge amount of depth.

Related Read

Deconstructing Nimblebit Bit City

In Deconstructions

Tom Kinniburgh

By creating a large (2X or 4X) growth for an extended point of time the sessions themselves feel faster and progress feels quicker.  This is quite like a feeling of increasing the flow of time (simulation) or even slowing down game-time in an arcade runner where a player’s game is made more comfortable. This form of trade adds value to your session, rather than short and sharp currency bonus’ that are quickly used up.

In other genres, it can be hard to create a similarly powerful video view because you need to keep a tighter grip over currency inflation.  You should therefore consider speeding up an aspect of your core loop that encourages more play or more comfortable play of the core loop.  For instance in a Base, Battle and Build (BBB) game, such as Clash of Clans, you might opt to increase the training speed of units by 2x by watching a video ad.  This encourages more gameplay but doesn’t break your economy, it increases the number of battles played which positively reinforces the core loop.

If you have an RPG or adventure game then you might improve drop rates for 4h after watching a video ad encouraging people to continue to play longer sessions in order to maximise the benefit of the ad.  Using video ads to strengthen the number of times a core loop is performed helps reinforce the positive moments and maximise the efficiency of a player’s time, creating a win-win scenario.

3. Short and Sharp Powerup (Instant Gratitude)

People run into situations where they need a little bit of help to achieve a gameplay goal.  Creating a novel and fun power up that provides a short but sharp economic boost to help them reach a goal in that session.  Futureplay turns this relatively simple power-up into a moment of joy for the player by encouraging them to interact intensely with the core action of harvesting in FarmAway! or collecting income from buildings in BuildAway! 20 seconds feels natural and a user can further increase the value by swiping as quick as possible to get an even bigger bonus.

Positive actions encourage a player to engage

Power-ups like this work by creating large environment changes such as increased animations, novel buildings or rare characters. The aim should always be to leave the user with a positive feeling.  Some users may even watch a video ad in order to play the 20s mini-game.  Think of a feature that fits your theme and allows people to play intensely for a short period of time, this might be doubling attack speed of a unit or increasing the power/size of in-game power ups in a match3. Think about ways you can trigger an exciting and special moment in your game that is unique but powerful to users.

4. Content Unlock or 1 More Life – (Unique Ability)

Certain features within your game might be critical to a player’s progress or score. In clicker games sacrificing your progress for global power ups is core to reusing the loop. Futureplay created a great and simple 24h blocker to prevent instant sacrifice. Players can skip this wait by watching yet another video ad. Patience is a virtue, but enabling players to gratify themselves instantly increases your views per DAU. Endless runners and frustration games use this very effectively to help people continue their progress in an attempt to get the highest score for a single run.

Unique abilities or instant gratification work so long as they are opt-in and don’t break your core game loop. Every game is different but by creating options and presenting them at different points allows people to choose when to feel clever.

Stack and Extend Video Views

The 4 different methods of watching a video are all unique but tied to positive actions that help a player to progress in their game. By providing 4 different features to watch a video, Futureplay has maximised the opportunities for players to watch a single video. In order to really boost their views per DAU, they have made more positive and valuable reasons to watch more than once.

• Every video views bonus stacks.  So if the Session Doubler and Instant Gratitude feature are used together and effect 2×4 = 8x growth for a short period of time.
• Extending the period of certain bonus’ can occur by watching more than one video, this helps players to schedule their time in the game.

Effectively providing players with more opportunities to engage with video content around a feature will increase your views per DAU.  Stacking of video views works well as long as you have a robust economy, be very careful that too many trades for currency or in-game growth don’t break late game systems in the game.  When in doubt block players from too much stacking or extends. 2 or 3 stacks is enough for any single session.  In this way, you can be sure that players need to keep coming back day after day and engaging with your game over a longer period of time.

At Slush in 2015 Futureplay revealed the Launch DAU and ARPU for FarmAway! Launch numbers and a staggering $0.09 ARPU during the launch window. Although they might not have maintained their high ARPU, it still shows what is possible for games that use the view-to-play model.

Watch the full video of View to Play by Futureplay at Slush 2015 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE6mF6VCxHA

Conclusion

View-to-play monetisation is now large enough to support gameplay mechanics that don’t work well with an IAP model.  The biggest mistake companies make when trying to integrate the model is not providing enough opportunities for players to watch.  Each of these opportunities should provide a positive experience either through value or interaction with the mechanics.  High-value trades lead to a greater conversion of videos, but be careful that your economy is robust enough to handle this.  When looking at your analytics make sure to track the video views per DAU in order to create features that lead to higher views.  As the name itself makes clear View-to-Play requires views to generate revenue, use this to guide your development. View-to-Play is not applicable for all genres, but for some, it will be more lucrative than in-app purchases.  Be sure to stick to the four guiding principles of view to play and track your video views in your analytics accurately.  View-to-Play is here to stay and gives you more options to create financially successful games outside of the standard Match3, BBB or RPG mechanics.

The post 4 ways Futureplay use mobile video ads to increase monetization appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh