Haha, yes — F2P is usually much more about the systems around the core game than it is the design of the core game. Those are what drive long term retention.

Agent Alice decided to go for Action-based pacing because they wanted to go mobile first. The team felt that having a full city that you needed to maintain was too much to be managing on the phone, and would prefer to move closer to the design of Criminal Case, which did a great job of pacing through actions like sending evidence to the lab. This allowed the game to focus more on the HO scenes and the UI to be much simpler and easier to manage, especially on mobile phones. Whether unexpectedness was a substantial setback is difficult to prove with numbers as you can’t really a/b test between build timers and action timers.

Out of curiosity, what prompted the change in timers from Pearl’s Peril to Agent Alice? Did the unexpectedness prove to be a substantial setback from the previous system?