On a weekly basis, I hear developers asking “What level of retention should I be aiming for?”, or “What day seven (D7) retention is needed for us to get a publishing deal?” However, the real question they should be asking is, should a single number decide the fate of your latest prototype?

When I think about retention, I like to think of the analogy of Miles per Gallon (MPG) in a car engine: the higher your retention, the higher your MPG, the more efficient your game’s engine. Revenues and marketing are the fuel that power this engine, so my advice is, be sure before you slam your foot on the accelerator.

The key lesson is, games with higher retention get further for less. However, just as there are cars built for many different purposes intended for different users, there are many games for many gamers – not all cars need high MPGs. A hot-rod, might be the fastest car on earth, but it requires a small oil well to keep it running. A family SUV serves multiple purposes at the cost of its efficiency, and a Tesla Model 3 does away with MPG’s entirely.

It is much the same with free to play games: different genres have different retention profiles, and different games monetise at different points in the funnel. Likewise, different business models rely on different audiences engaging for different periods of time.  

In each case, there’s not a single retention curve that is the correct model, merely a retention profile that gives signals to where your game is weakest.  So, rather than focusing on the numbers themselves, look for the days of the curve which have the biggest relative drop, as this can be the point where you lose people fastest. During a soft launch is the critical point where major decisions to carry on can be decided – it is often retention metrics that decide the fate of your game, but too little focus is given to the even fainter monetisation signals.

Source – GameAnalytics Mobile Gaming Benchmarks 2016-2017

Monetisation matters

For a free to play game to be a successful product it has to monetize. During the first few days of a new prototype’s launch you will have very few data points to make a call, but you must see some monetisation from some individuals. Focus on the conversion rate and the ARPPU you receive: it’s these two factors help to give a sense of what might happen if the game we’re to scale.  

Monetisation only occurs when your game’s system is appealing enough for someone to spend, and the amount they spend is the only real signal you have to how much value your product could create. Spend doesn’t need to equate directly to an IAP, but also how many unique players watched an ad or signed up to a subscription. In each case, the number itself isn’t as valuable as what it results in: Gross Revenue. I would argue that the more important metrics to consider when evaluating early prototypes are Conversion Rate (CR) and Revenue per paying user (ARPPU) as these small signals show that your engine is working.

Returning to the analogy of Miles per Gallon, increased MPGs are a result of a more efficient engine. Conversion Rate and ARPPU are like fueling the tank with gas – the more gas you get the less efficient you need to be.  However, it’s admittedly difficult to work out early on just when your engine is ready to take to the streets.

Each metric is only a signal: it gives you a rough overview of your games abilities. In order to build better games, you must focus on the components, not the metrics that show the signal. Only if each component is optimised to its specific goal will you start to see improvements in your metrics, the most general of which is retention.  Just like a car engine has pistons, turbos and exhausts that contribute to its overall efficiency, your game has FTUE, Clear UIs and Desirable characters to collect. A real jump in MPGs comes when as a game designer you appreciate the interplay between these features, and realise which of your designs is weakest.

Don’t get me wrong – retention is a fundamental driver of success on any app store, but this obsession with the number your game needs to hit is not how you build a better game. Indeed, improving retention is something we’ve written about it on multiple occasions.  

Life Time Value

LTV (Life Time Value) of a gamer is fundamentally what allows you to call a game a success or failure – a high enough LTV allows profitable marketing and growth of your game. However, by its very nature it is an estimation of future value – it can give horribly inaccurate signals early on during testing. There are also many different methods used to calculate it across large time periods.

The equation above focuses on 30D, simplified LTV – LTV is driven on the one hand by revenues (fuel) and on the other side retention (efficiency) with a time estimation for the future value of a player (discount rate). You can read more about methods for calculating LTV here.  Too much focus is given to the early retention metrics of the equation, because it’s easiest to gather with small amounts of data, but without any revenue signals being present there is no fuel to grow the LTV.  

CR and ARPPU are not accurate measures for generating robust models, but they do provide simple signals for game designers.

Conversion Rate is a clear indication of necessity and desire – it’s a signal showing just how many players want to invest in your product, understanding exactly when they bought and what they bought can help you optimise your design funnels to make purchasing clearer for future players.  

ARPPU is a strong indicator of pricing and value. You need to ensure that when someone does convert they are giving you the most that they would be willing to pay for content in your game, not converting for an overly generous bargain.  Quickly testing multiple price points for your game’s economy can greatly increase your gross revenue.

If you take a look at games with low retention but high CR and high ARPPU then you can still have a workable product on your hands because you’ve seen your gameplay converting players into payers.  There may be a huge host of other issues with your funnels and your onboarding, but the fundamental pinch within your system has led to a willing payer.  Observing these weak signals early on can give you faith in your early prototype

What retention metrics do tell you

Retention is a fundamental factor in LTV calculations – higher values are always better – but, as we’ve seen, exact figures vary greatly per genre. No matter what your retention curve looks like it won’t directly affect your monetization design.  What you ask a player to buy and whether they buy it is a personal decision for each and every gamer. Making that decision clear, simple, desirable and valuable will maximise your conversion.

So what can retention tell you?

Retention metrics are still incredibly useful as gauges for assessing where to focus your game design time.  Let’s take D1, D7 and D30 – the most common metrics:

• D1 retention shows me the desirability of your game – fun games are desirable, and people will happily play again tomorrow without the need of much investment or prompting.
• D7 retention shows me the core loop in your game – do they have a clear goal? Do they engage with your systems? Do they form strategies?
• D30 retention shows me whether your core loop scales – Do people have enough content?  Can they set long-term goals? Do they get stuck and still want to play more?

In each case, it’s not just the number that’s important, it’s the speed at which the retention drops – the steepness of the curve, if you will. Wherever the steepest drop descends, is where your game is currently weakest. The ideal scenarios is to reach a flat and stable base that is maintained for 60, 90, 180 or even 360 days into the future. When you predict revenues for the long term, even a significantly lower starting retention provides much higher gross revenue over the long term.

The early ‘wobbles’ in a retention curve point to gameplay issues. For example, your economy may have expanded too much, or the players might simply have reached the end of your content more quickly than you expected. In these cases, you can use these drop off points in the profile to go back and add in more depth to your designs.

Retention is one of the easiest and most reliable metrics to obtain during a soft launch, but don’t let it rule your development, creativity or decision-making abilities – use retention as a barometer to point to deeper issues in your game design. In essence, focus on understanding what is driving your players to spend money. Even the weakest signals can prove that you have a potential product on your hands, so stop focussing on the numbers directly and look for the broader trends – the patterns or fluctuations in the figures –  to aid your game design planning. The last thing you want to do is send a great game to the scrap yard.

The post Why Obsessing With Retention Metrics Risks Killing Your Game appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

As our audience’s tastes change, we as designers have to adapt our designs. We have to find new ways of making old systems feel new again.

Today I’d like to talk about pacing mechanics, and how we can adjust our current pacing mechanics to make them feel better for our maturing audience. Pacing mechanics usually take the form of Timers or Energy systems, and are always ingrained deeply into the core loop of any Free to Play game. Pacing is what prevents players from burning out on content or mechanics. Pacing is what drives habits. Getting pacing right is the key to driving strong long term retention. And long term retention is the key metric for a successful free to play game. But making these pacing mechanics not feel artificial is difficult.

So I’ve put together 3 tips that I like to use when “Re-dressing” pacing mechanics. These 3 pacing tactics can help you rethink how to build a pacing structure so that it feels new, different and more natural to the player.

#1: Add Natural Pacing: Days, Weeks, Months

Sometimes in a game design, you need to add longer timers which prevent players from engaging too much with a feature during a single day. Many free to play games aim for longer timers for this: 4 hours, 8 hours or even 12 hours. In my experience this can feel very restricting.

Instead, ask yourself, can I pace this using a daily, weekly or monthly cycle instead?

So instead of a feature which is available “once per 8 hours”, opting for a pacing feature that is “once per day”. These will allow the player to be more flexible about how they structure the use of the feature, and it feels more natural because they are using their ingrained day/night cycle. It’s easier for a player to commit to coming back to the game once per day than it is to come back in exactly 8 hours. As a result you can pace the players stronger (once per day is longer than once every 8 hours) while it actually feeling better for the player.

Hearthstone (which we’ve covered many times before) is a great example of this. Their mission system employs daily pacing. Instead of using timers, they pace the missions so that there is 1 new mission per day, up to a maximum of 3.

So coming back at any time the next day, you know you will get an additional mission. This is the easiest source of free coins in the game, so it feels rewarding and is tied into the core loop of purchasing card packs. But the key here is the daily pacing. There’s no timers telling the player that in exactly x hours they need to return to the game, instead they have the flexibility of natural day cycles. Have I done my mission of the day?

Days aren’t the only cycle that you can use. Weeks and Months work great at pacing players for very long timers. Hearthstone paces players by month in seasonal competitions. Because each month has a unique card back, this makes it an easy choice for a player to come back to the game, especially near the end of the month, just to get their card back.

#2 Add Animations

Another clever way to add pacing is just to use visual animations rather than timers.

For example, Hay Day had a clever mechanic in which the trader characters delay taking new deals until they’ve left and returned to your farm. After completing a deal, the character would slowly walk/drive away happy, then return soon in the future ready for another trade. This made the pacing make sense, and didn’t need a timer in the player’s face.

Want the next deal? Wait until the trader walks back!

Games with a large world map which you have to send armies around commonly employ a pacing mechanic where the army must take x hours before they reach the location. Showing the scale of the world relative to the unit and actually animating the units along the map helps players buy in to the fact that it takes time for units to reach locations.

Is there any shorter timers within your game that can be visualized by an animation instead of by a timer? Is there any long timer which you can better visualize to the player through animations?

#3 Get Creative with the Cost

The best strategy for making pacing feel better is to get more creative with your economies & systems. Instead of demanding the player to wait for hours for a building to construct, increase the difficulty & cost of building it to begin with.

Most systems force pacing through timers that look like this:

Fallout Shelter is the best recent example of a game focused on adjusting pacing to feel different and stand out. They chose to do this by shifting the economy. Instead of the pacing of the game through timers for building construction, they’ve focused their pacing only through the initial cost of the building. As a result, Fallout Shelter feels different from most simulation games. It feels instantly gratifying and very rewarding for collecting the coins.

Due to this change, Fallout must increase the cost rapidly to compensate for the lost pacing with building construction and find other timers in the game for players to manage & drive sessions (in this case Wasteland Missions). In the end, this works out for Fallout Shelter, and feels like a very different simulation game from most free to play games.

But increasing the cost before the purchase can take many forms. Cost can come in the form of just collecting currency (ex. bottle caps in Fallout Shelter), or it can be a combination of luck and effort as seen in many gatcha games including Contest of Champions. To pace getting the getting the best heroes, players must grind through collecting hundreds of crystals.

When designing a new pacing mechanic, consider the following:

Instead of guaranteeing the player the reward at the end of a long game loop, try allowing them to engage in a shorter loop, but randomize the progress towards the goal. As psychology teaches us, this type of mechanic will pull players back longer than a strict cost:reward trade off.

There are many more ways to get creative with pacing. But I would always rethink just adding a timer or just adding a high cost to an action if there are ways to make pacing more engaging to the player.

The Bare Minimum : Timers should make sense

If all the above fail, then the bare minimum for having a timer is to make sure that it makes sense with the theme.

Why do all F2P games have building construction? because building timers is one of the few places where timers make sense.

This is mainly why so many games default to have a city building component, even if it’s a bit of a stretch for the concept. Take Walking Dead: Road to Survival, the F2P game from Scopely recently released. They clearly added the city building component for the ability to pace using construction timers. If they hadn’t had this component, they would have really struggled to find places that make sense to add long timers.

Agent Alice is a good example of a game that struggled with timer design.

Agent Alice is a recent Hidden Object game from Wooga. Agent Alice made a big risk by removing the city building component from Pearl’s Peril, it’s spiritual predecessor. Due to this design decision, the game struggled to find effective timer design.

Where Pearl’s Peril would use building timers to pace players, instead Agent Alice had to use more arbitrary timers. The timers became different actions that Agent Alice had to take to pace the story. In the example screenshot below, Alice must plan her next move which takes a long timer.

Agent Alice’s timers many times felt unexpected.

This timer is not expected by the player.

The goal of timers has to be to fit into the theme of the game. Each use of a timer leave the player feeling: “Right — that makes sense that it takes that long”.

In another hidden object example, Criminal Case, a game from Pretty Simple, uses a timer when the player has to send anything “to the lab”. This makes sense. In all the crime shows I’ve watched, this was expected by the detectives and the audience.

Sending evidence to the lab makes sense why it takes time.

Keep this in mind when designing your pacing structures. Timers have to make sense in the theme, they have to be expected by the player.

Summing Up

Pacing mechanics can be tough to get right. But slapping timers on every system isn’t the right direction, especially as our audience matures and becomes more sensitive to the mechanics. 3 ways which you can improve pacing mechanics to feel different are:

• Swapping Timers for Natural Pacing : Once per day, Once per week, Once per month. Use the natural cycles we’ve all been accustomed to.
• Use animations instead of a timer to make it feel natural & make sense
• Instead of directly using timers or an energy system, look to find ways to pace by increasing initial cost through currencies, gameplay and luck

And if none of the above is possible, do whatever you can to ensure the pacing actually makes logical sense in the game loop. Building takes time, sending heroes on a journey takes time. These can have timers. Don’t add timers to actions that don’t make narrative sense why they would take time.

Using these tips you can adjust your design to feel less restrictive, more natural, and ultimately serve this maturing audience.

The post 3 Tips for Better Pacing appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

1. Habituation
2. Content Pacing
3. Monetisation
4. Strategic Choices

I also noted that energy systems aren’t particularly elegant systems – they rarely blend well with the setting of the game, and this disconnect makes them disliked by players. Removing or eliminating energy systems from mobile games is no easy task. There are some directions that bear consideration and further investigation though.

Pacing through quests

Energy systems pace players by limiting the amount that they can play. This clearly prevents players progressing too fast through a game’s content. However, it is possible to limit the rate of progression directly, whilst leaving play unlimited. The way to do this is to decouple the main source of rewards in the game from play, so that rewards can be limited independently of play time.

The best case of this is Hearthstone. Here the quest system is the main pacing mechanic, as it is the main way that players can earn in-game currency. Players get one new quest each day and each quest requires perhaps three to ten matches to complete. Once the player has exhausted their missions, they can continue playing for rank or pleasure, but their ability to earn coins is negligible and so the game economy is protected.

For most mobile games this route is likely to be the easiest and most satisfactory route to removing energy and timers.

Session length and synchronous PvP

Another way of pacing players is to increase the amount of play time required to progress. The pace that players can progress is then limited by the number of hours they can sink into the game. The big caveat to this is that it is much easier to do this on console / PC than on mobiles.

Mobile games are designed to fill the gaps in people’s days – when they are waiting for the bus, queuing for their coffee or avoiding work on the toilet. A mobile game needs to have a satisfying session possible in 1-3 minutes to fill these gaps. For a mobile game it is very difficult to give players a satisfying session in just a few minutes without bombarding them with rewards if they decide to play for a few hours – perhaps 50-60 sessions all in one go.

PC and console games have it easier as they are designed to be played in stretches of 2-3 hours at a time. A Hearthstone match lasts 5-15 minutes, whilst a League of Legends match lasts 30-45 minutes, so a few hours play is a handful of matches. This means that the base rate of progress can be extremely slow. These games get away with such slow progression because they rely heavily on synchronous PvP battles. The excitement of facing off against other people in real time compensates for slow progression in the meta game.

Mobile games typically have problems with synchronous PvP because people want to pick up and drop mobile games at any time, and there is little commitment to stick with match, which combined makes for a poor user experience. That said, World of Tanks Blitz has managed to be successful in spite of these challenges. Although the battles are typically only 4-6 minutes, the game still manages pace progression slow enough to avoid an energy system.

The problem that World of Tanks Blitz has is that whilst it covers off content pacing just fine, it monetizes very poorly compared to most other successful mobile games. Indeed seems unlikely World of Tanks Blitz would be successful without a PC product to support its brand awareness. 8 Ball Pool has also managed to be successful here with even shorter play sessions, but faces the same issue with revenue. Being the dominant digital version of a hugely popular real world game seems to be a major factor in 8 Ball Pool’s success.

Limited progression and asynchronous PvP

Another small set of mobile games have managed to be successful without energy systems by limiting the amount of progression available to players. Games such as Words with Friends and Draw Something offer players an asynchronous PvP experience that is incredibly viral, and where the costs of creating content are minimal.

As content is generated by other players, there is no need to limit play time. However, in order to keep the playing field fair and prevent the games becoming play to win, these games have very little to offer in terms of progression and hence to sell to players. Both Draw Something and Words with Friends rely heavily on in-game advertising to generate revenue as they have so little to sell themselves to players.

Framing

If eliminating energy altogether is not possible then framing it correctly to players can greatly improve the player experience. World of Warcraft experimented with their pacing system, primarily to habituate players into certain play patterns. Their initial mechanism halved the XP that players could earn after a certain point, encouraging them to end their session.

Players universally hated it. Blizzard responded by reframing the system, turning “normal” XP into “bonus” XP that still halved at exactly the same point, but now instead of dropping down to a penalized level, it just dropped something they called “normal” XP. Suddenly players loved the system; although the numbers were exactly the same players felt rewarded instead of punished.

In the same way, timers usually feel better than energy points. If it takes me a certain amount of time to build a building, travel somewhere or train troops then that fits with the narrative of the game and feels better than it costing energy, which appears to be (and is) an arbitrary cap on the amount I can play.

Another way to make energy feel better to players is to give players some control over it. Basically, make a game out of spending energy. In Brave Frontier and Puzzle & Dragons the amount of energy that each levels costs differs. Players have to figure out how best to spend their energy, and not leave a small amount left over and wasted.

In Boom Beach players only need to train troops if their troops die in combat. Players can therefore attack lots of different opponents in the same session, as long as they pick them carefully. The game is obviously balanced to players playing in this way, but they feel a lot smarter because of the control they have over the timers presented to them.

Conclusion TL;DR

Eliminating energy is not an easy design challenge for mobile games. Pacing player rewards is one obvious route that more games should investigate. Some games may be able to rely on PvP play and user generated content to limit the rate of progression, though monetizing these games is generally a challenge. For many games the best they will be able to do is to frame their energy systems in ways that make them more palatable to players.

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

This isn’t a defence of energy systems – I’ll follow up with a post on ways of replacing them – but without something fulfilling these roles then it’s unlikely you’ll make a very good game. I’ll talk about energy and timers fairly interchangeably here as they are both pacing systems that function remarkably similarly.

The four main reasons that mobile designers use energy systems are:

1. Habituation
2. Content pacing
3. Monetization
4. Strategic choices

Habituation

The primary reason that designers use energy systems is to encourage players to play as long and as frequently as they would like. The amount of energy gives an easy way to fix the length of the play session, whilst the energy refill rate determines the play frequency. Energy systems do this by providing the player with closure – the feeling that they have done everything they need to in a game, and that when they return there will be new, fun stuff to do.

This is why crop and resource production timers work so well. Players coming back to the game harvest all the crops that have grown whilst they are away – a hugely positive experience. Then they can use the crops to complete deals, craft things and improve their farm. Finally they plant their crops so ready for their next session. As they leave the game there is nothing more for them to do in their farm, so it feels like a natural point to stop playing; but they also know that when they return they can get the satisfaction of harvesting their crops again.

Designers need to be able to control session length and frequency because it allows them to integrate their game into their players’ daily routine. Any activity that becomes part of your daily routine is likely to be something that you keep doing a lot longer than you otherwise might, and long term retention is highly correlated to lifetime value.

Think of the game as chocolate. If you had unlimited chocolate (and limited willpower) you might binge on it to the point you were sick of it. At this point you wouldn’t want to eat chocolate again for a while. Imagine if you got a small piece of chocolate every afternoon with your coffee break though. Now the chocolate enhances your coffee break, but at the same time, you never have enough in one go to get sick of it. Instead you look forward to the chocolate enhanced coffee break, and would miss it if it was taken away from you. As with chocolate, so goes gaming.

Content pacing

The second main reason that designers use energy systems is to pace their content, and to ensure that players consume content at roughly the same rate. Once players have run out of new content to experience, they usually have little interest in a game. It is vital therefore, to ensure that players are not consuming content faster than you can produce it.

Energy systems are crucial to minimising inequality in game economies; they ensure that players all consume content at roughly the same rate

PvP games often have an advantage here because their players effectively produce content for each other to consume. In Clash of Clans, each player’s layout of their base is unique and interesting for other players to attack. But Clash of Clans still needs to bring out new units, upgrade levels and features on a regular basis to keep their most engaged players.

Energy systems also help to reduce the “distribution of wealth” in games that exists between highly engaged and less engaged users. By capping the rate that the most engaged players can play, they cannot get too far ahead of the less engaged players. This is important for balancing, as a game should remain interesting for both types of players, and setting a progression rate that is interesting for the slowest players and yet doesn’t allow the fastest players to run out of content can otherwise be a challenge.

Monetization

Making money is the third reason that designers use energy systems. In casual games energy might typically represent a third of bookings. This is not insignificant, but there are better ways to make money out of games, and monetization alone is a poor reason to go with an energy system. Energy doesn’t typically make for a very exciting or satisfying purchase, as it gives players something that they could get if they waited a bit longer. Most mobile designers realise this and despite the perception of energy systems as a cynical way to extort players, it is rare to see them if they are not needed for habituation and content pacing as well.

Strategic choices

In some games energy systems also provide the player with a strategic choice that they need to make. This comes from having a limited number of energy points to spend each session, and a greater number of possible actions. Players must decide what to spend their energy on, and because of this they usually need to set themselves a longer term goal that they are working towards over several sessions.

For example, in Clash of Clans, because I can only upgrade 2 or 3 buildings at a time, and each one might take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, I need to work out what I prioritise. Do I upgrade my resource generating buildings first to facilitate further upgrades, my storage space allowing me to raid more, or my defensive buildings to protect what I’ve got? In prioritising my current session, I also create a mid term plan for my future sessions as well, which builds off this. In games where the energy system doesn’t allow the player any real choice in what they do, the system typically feels even more arbitrary and restrictive.

Conclusion

The reason that F2P designers use energy systems is not because they hate players, it’s because energy systems are efficient mechanics to encourage specific play patterns, pace content, monetize a game and provide a player with strategic choices. Designers should be wary of releasing any game without features that cover all these bases one way or another.

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

But why is this genre so popular? Why does this genre even exist? Why even discuss games that people don’t really play?

Idle games have risen on mobile because this is a genre that is perfect for modern mobile free-to-play design. The mechanics of idle games create perfect mobile sessions and drive strong long term retention.

What is an Idle Game?

Idle games, sometimes called Clicker or Incremental games, are games which are all about management of revenue streams. Similar to simulation games, their main differentiator is the focus on revenue growth decisions.

For some examples:

• Idle Games on Kongregate
• Reddit’s Guide to Idle Games

Cookie Clicker : http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

Cookie Clicker is the best example of an idle game. Each time you tap the cookie, you gain 1 cookie. You use cookies to purchase upgrades. Upgrades increase either the rate of tapping the cookie (now you get 2 cookies per click!) or increases the rate of cookies generated automatically (Grandmas will make 1 cookie per second). These automatic cookies are generated whether you are tapping or not. They are generated even if you’re away from the game.

On paper this sounds too simple to be fun. But try for yourself. The simple act of purchasing an upgrade always feels great. The growth curve is so fast it gets very addictive, very quickly.

Progress just for the sake of progress is fun. Even if it only means a virtual number increases faster.

Rate of resource generation is the core of the game. But an economy that inflates so quickly with a single currency has flaws. Very quickly, the game’s upgrade costs skyrocket. Starting off with nice low numbers the game quickly skyrockets into costs of trillions just a few sessions in. Most designers would cringe at this type of growth curve. What kind of player wants to worry about numbers in the trillions? In AdVenture Capitalist, your costs will eventually reach more than 1 Tretrigintillion (10 to the power of 102). Yet, players love this. Progress always feels good. Players playing for long enough to reach these ridiculous numbers feel like it is a real accomplishment.

As a result, Idle games have claimed 3 of the top 10 most played games on Kongregate (source: here). There are even Twitch channels dedicated to watching a computer play a game itself. Inexplicably, this genre has seen incredible growth.

Regardless of your stance of whether or not this is a “real” game genre, the mechanics in Idle games are perfectly realized for mobile. Idle games can teach mobile game designers a lot about creating a game that has strong session design. Idle games are so strong because:

1. It always feels good to come back.
2. Sessions naturally ease the player to leave
3. The mechanics ease the player from micro to macro gameplay

#1: It always feels good to come back

Many mobile games suffer gameplay mechanics that feel punishing on returning to the game after leaving for a few days.

In FarmVille: crops wither. If you do not come back to the game in time, your crops are worthless. In Clash of Clans: resources are stolen. The longer you are away from the game, the more likely a majority of your precious resources are stolen. Your rank on the leaderboard could be lowered. Your Clan becomes upset that you haven’t donated enough troops. These mechanics are all strong at driving reasons to come back, but also creates reasons for players to quit.

Idle games don’t suffer from this problem. Each time the player returns to the game, they are left with a massive stockpile of cash. It always feels like a bonus that they left the game. If a player leaves for a day, a week, or a month it only increases the amount of currency in their stockpile. In most economies this would be troublesome. Not in Idle games. Because the growth curves are exponential, leaving a game to infinitely generate a low income rate is absolutely fine.

Player A grows faster from Day 1. Player B waits until Day 7, but gains a massive stockpile.

For example, lets take 2 players. Player A comes back every day. Player B skips a week of play. Both players are generating 1 million cookies per day at this point in time. Player A, the active player, returns day 2 and receives 1 million cookies. Player B, who skipped the week, returns to have 7 million cookies. Player B can clearly purchase far more upgrades than Player A. Player B actually feels very rewarded for leaving for so long — they are rewarded with a very long session which they can purchase many things. However, comparing the growth curves Player A purchased many upgrades on that second day. So Player A by day 2 is already at a new growth rate of 10 million cookies a day. Player A is clearly growing far faster than Player B, but both players (because its a single player game) feel they made a smart choice. Player A is rewarded with faster progression. Player B is rewarded for waiting so long. It always feels good to return, but returning more often gives you faster progression.

Mobile games should strive to create this feeling. It should never feel like a punishment to come back to the game.

Players should be reminded that coming back often is a benefit, but coming back at all is always a bonus.

For this reason most farming games have shifted away from FarmVille’s model. Instead of withered crops, there’s low storage limits. In Clash of Clans, they incorporate shields and enforce looting limits to make sure players dont feel that not coming back feel too badly.

#2: Sessions ease the player away

Coming from my previous post on Flexible Sessions, the perfect mobile session finds a way to naturally push players out of the game. This is necessary for pacing and long term retention. Strong mobile games give strong reasons to come back (see above!) and strong reasons to leave the game. Idle games have mastered this natural prod of players out of the game.

Offering lots of purchasing options creates the session design. There is always something to purchase, but eventually the smart choice is the one where the player must wait.

As Idle games push players to invest in automatic revenue generators (ex. Grandmas in Cookie Clicker) over manual revenue generators (manually tapping on the cookie), players inevitably will reach a point in the game when they just have to wait. The player can purchase small upgrades fairly rapidly, but they know to make the next big leap of progression its smarter to purchase the more expensive upgrades. So, they leave the game feeling smart about their decision.

This is the exact point which the player, themselves, have opted-in to leaving the game. Naturally, the game has prodded the player to leave. Mobile games must strive for this. Create a situation which the player feels smart about leaving your game. Idle games have even managed to do this without timers, without social appointments or any other tacked on system as discussed in Player Commitments.

Create a situation which the player feels smart about leaving your game.

#3: It eases the player from core to meta gameplay

The first experience of a new player is very simple. In Clicker Heroes: A player just madly taps an enemy monster. In Make it rain: A player flicks heaps of money into the air. The first experience is addictive and immediately fun. Its obvious how to get better – tap or swipe faster. Players quickly master this mechanic and it feels natural. However, this mechanic’s interest quickly burns out. After the first few sessions, players are quickly tired of having to manually collect.

This is when the game offers a bait and switch. You came for the simplicty of tapping, but what you’ve been given is a game that is all about managing resources and upgrades. Players shift from tapping to managing which upgrade to purchase next. This clever switch means players that would have been burnt out from the simple mechanic are now thinking about long term decisions in the game. Which upgrade is the best value? How do I optimize my growth?

Mobile games must master this bait and switch. Players expecting to come into any mobile game will expect some core gameplay that mimics what they’ve played in the past. Playing bejeweled for Candy Crush, playing command and conquer for Clash of Clans, or platforming for King of Thieves. However, as a free-to-play designer your job isn’t to just hook these players with fun intial mechanics. You need to find ways to retain these players for years. The best way to do this is to switch the player from focusing on second-to-second core gameplay (tapping cookies) into longer term decisions (optimizing progression). Idle games clearly show a blueprint of how to accomplish this, regardless of the core gameplay.

Looking to the Future

Idle games are big and going to get bigger.

Anthony Pecorella gave an excellent talk at GDC 2015 on Idle Games summarized here. Clearly with the success of AdVenture Capitalist, Tap Titans and Make it Rain, more developers are taking notice.

The genre is ripe for innovation. Recently CivCrafter came out. A take on the idle genre with multiple resources and battles. Tap Titans has shown that the genre can apply to the auto-rpg genre. I believe that the progression systems in these games can really be applied to any genre. Replacing the core game play with a puzzle mechanic, an RPG battle mechanic, a Simulation theme, Arcade gameplay are all possible angles.

The key is to design the bait and switch: give the players the game play that is addictive and fun in the beginning, but eventually nudge them into purchasing the automatic resource generators. Players can then make the choice between grinding the core gameplay, or leaving and gaining the benefit just by waiting.

Get ready: the future will be all about games you don’t play.

The post Why you should care about Idle Games appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Gifting and exchange are a component of almost every social interaction. This is even apparent in the way you greet your colleagues in the morning. If you see someone for the first time in the day that you work with then you are obliged say hello. They, in turn, are obliged to acknowledge your greeting and respond. If you barely know each other the exchange is short and perfunctory: “hey”, “hey”. If you know each other better, it might spawn a longer conversation or at the very least require more conviction.

Even this mundane situation exhibits what anthropologists know as the three obligations of gifting:

• The obligation to give (to say hello in the first place)
• The obligation to receive (to acknowledge that greeting)
• The obligation to reciprocate (to say hello back)

In such a minor social interaction the exchange is fast and low value. But even so, to omit any of these steps would be rude. If a colleague continually ignored your greetings, then you would think less of them. Let’s examine the three obligations in a little more detail.

Giving

Giving gifts or initiating exchange is an action that is required in certain situations. In western culture we buy each other gifts at Christmas and on birthdays, and we take a bottle of wine or contribution to the meal for a dinner party. Failure to give at these times can be a serious faux pas depending on how well we know the other person.

Receiving

When someone offers you a gift you are obliged to accept it. To refuse a gift is to be unfriendly, if not rude. To turn down an invite to dinner for no good reason would be frowned upon, to refuse a Christmas present from a family member almost unheard of.

Reciprocating

There is an obligation to repay all gifts. In some cases this is more immediate and calculated than in others. If you give a friend a birthday present then you might expect one back from them, and Christmas gifts are often a minefield of social obligations to find gifts that correctly reflect the value previously received and current state of the relationship between two people. The tighter the relationship between two people the more that the value and timing of gifts becomes varied – both parties expect that everything will work out in the long run.

Indeed to repay a gift too quickly or exactly and remove the implied social debt is as unfriendly as not returning it. If your friends help you move house you deliberately repay them with something where the value is hard to calculate, such as cooking them a meal, rather than paying them cash. Relationships typically start with small one-off gifts of time or effort and gradually extend into a continuing cycle of reciprocity. In extremis, almost all major religions advocate giving to charity for benefits in the afterlife or from the universe in general. We have an innate belief in karma of one kind or another that is hard to shake.

Now we’ve gone over the theory, let’s look at gifting in three games, in particular, to see how it’s applied:
1. Pearl’s Peril is a Facebook and mobile hidden object game with fairly typical energy and item gifting. (Disclosure: I’m currently game designer on this game)
2. Clash of Clans gives you the ability to donate troops to your clan members when they request them.
3. Animal Crossing has a sophisticated gifting system with both other players and NPCs.

Pearl’s Peril

As in many Facebook games Pearl’s Peril allows you to send energy, soft currency and low value collection items to your friends. In each case it doesn’t cost you anything to send the gift – the gift is created out of thin air during the gifting process, and the process itself is incredibly streamlined, allowing gifts to be sent from multiple points in the UI and delivered to the recipient’s inbox where they are accepted in a click that is barely noticed coming into the game.

The result is a social feature that is rather like greeting a colleague each morning. In interviews players describe it as a habit that they fall into – almost like a pleasantry of saying hello. It’s a valuable feature because they value the energy, but the gifting act itself is less so. Players do not feel obliged to log in just to send gifts to their friends and maintain the cycle of exchange.

Clash of Clans

In Clash of Clans you can donate troops to your clan members. You have to spend resources to train these troops yourself, and you could use them in your own attacks if you didn’t give them away. In many cases the only value that gifting affords you is allowing you to take a few extra troops into battle: those troops stored in your clan castle and donated to you. It does however give lower level players the opportunity to play with much more powerful troops given by other members of their clan, foreshadowing units they will have in the future if they stick with the game. It also requires some degree of coordination so that you get troops that support your style of play, which stimulates discussion in the chat.

The system is much more powerful than energy gifting in Pearl’s Peril. Clan members can see how many troops they have donated vs. received and compared to other clan members helping them keep track of a number of different relationships and making sure that gifting doesn’t get too imbalanced. Donating troops was really the only thing that clans allowed you to do originally, but the system has been further reinforced by clan wars, which provide an obvious occasion to donate troops.

Players that fail to keep up their side of the bargain – not giving as many troops as they receive, or not giving troops when they should – face being kicked from their clan to make room for more committed players. Higher ranking clans often state these obligations and enforce them rigorously. At GDC this year, Supercell stated that the 2 year retention for Clash of Clans is 10%, and I believe that the gifting economy that they have created in the game is a key component driving this.

Animal Crossing

Anyone that has played Animal Crossing will tell you it is a magical game that creates quite a unique atmosphere. Dropped off in a village of anthropomorphic animals you can gather fruit, fossils and flowers, catch butterflies and fish, design your own clothes and furniture and develop relationships with the NPCs and other players in your village. There is no real goal, but players typically spend their time collecting things and exploring the world, which changes season by season and through a day / night cycle.

It is perhaps the game that shows the best giving mechanics that I have observed. The calendar gives you a natural context to give things due to birthdays, other occasions or simply because you found something you know they want or don’t have space for yourself. NPCs also prompt you to gift on a regular basis, by asking you for things, letting it known they are looking for particular items, and occasionally sending you gifts themselves.

Most of the activities in the game drop items on a semi random basis, with some items rarer than others, but the selection constrained by the time and place that you are collecting. This makes gifts unique items, with each one requiring time and effort to find in the game world. In contrast to the commoditised resources that are given in Pearl’s Peril, you know each gift is special.

Indeed even sending the gift requires effort as you need to find the recipient in the game world or visit the post office to send it to them. Even if players do have multiple items that they want to give, each one needs to be given individually, rather than sent off as a bulk action. Similar to sending someone a hand written note over an email, it enhances the sense that the donor really cared about giving something to you.

The result is a powerful system with real emotional weight behind each gift. Gifting is one of the key systems that runs throughout the game and gives it such a unique and magical feel. The series consistently gets superb ratings from critics and is listed as one of the best selling games ever with c.27m copies sold across 4 titles. However the real demonstration of how effective this gifting system is comes from anecdotes like this one, about a mother with multiple sclerosis’s gifts to her son. It’s impossible to imagine either Clash of Clans or Pearl’s Peril creating this kind of story.

Conclusion

Gifting and exchange are ubiquitous human behaviours found in all cultures and a huge variety of situations. Gifting consists of three obligations:

1. To give in certain situations
2. To receive gifts offered
3. To reciprocate gifts received

Increasing the value of gifts increases the emotional engagement and social obligations that players experience. Increasing the power of gifting can be done by:

• Making gifts unique rather than commoditized
• Making gifts require more investment from the giver
• Making the giving process itself require some effort
• Prompting players to give in clear situations

Great gifting systems support strong long-term retention, player satisfaction and by extension commercial success.

The post Harnessing the Psychology of Gifting appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Ed Biden

In fact, arcade games originally followed the distribution of pinball machines in bars where adults would socialize, before spreading to family friendly venues such as cinemas and malls. Reacting to a dire recession in the early 80s Nintendo decided to focus its marketing of consoles as toys for boys, rather than entertainment for all, and in doing so set the popular view of video games for the next 30 years.

Now, finally, the industry is beginning to come full circle, and it’s the social aspect that I want to focus on here. It was on Facebook that the term “social games” was coined. Of course, games were social before, whether you were playing Mario Kart with your friends or raiding with your guild in World of Warcraft. But now, even as Facebook is steadily replaced by mobile as the new platform for gaming, everyone is still talking about social.

It’s not hard to understand why. Kongregate spoke convincingly at GDC 2013 on the importance of social features, and particularly guilds. Their talk highlighted the dramatic ways that guilds can improve retention, engagement and monetization. A few facts summarized from their presentation:

• Every one of their top 10 games has some form of guild structure
• Dawn of the Dragons (5^th Planet Games): conversion rate for non guild members: 3.2% vs. guild members: 23%
• Tyrant Unleashed (Synapse Games): ARPU for non guild members: $36.59, vs. guild members: $91.60

But guilds are only one part of “social”, just as Facebook and your real life friends are. Humans are social beings, but their social interaction can take many different forms depending on the context. There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to social in games, and each game must work out what is appropriate for its own audience and mechanics (and the same is true if you are building an app). I believe that the nature of social interactions depends on whether your game is really about your Friends, the Mechanics, or the Content.

Friends

When you play a game with your real life or Facebook friends, things work best when the experience is about your friends, and not about the game. Playing with people is a great way of strengthening your relationships with them. Games are appropriate for the majority of family gatherings, whether it’s Risk or Charades.

For the experience to work out well for everyone, then the game needs to be right. The game should facilitate building relationships, and act as a backdrop to this, rather than be the main event. Games of low skill typically work best as they allow participants of all ages and abilities.

This is why games like Draw Something and QuizUp work so well, and more complicated simulation games have quickly fallen out of favour on Facebook. In the former, the experience is more about your friends, and in the latter it is more about the game. Real life friends and family are not the way to drive distribution or underpin retention unless your game is about the people you are interacting with. As we all know from the complaints about people’s newsfeeds being spammed, it isn’t that common for our friends to share our taste in games.

Draw Something.Chibi Pikachu by HoangArtist

Mechanics

In this category I would put everything from people who like playing otherwise family games to a competitive level, to immersive experiences such as World of Warcraft or Clash of Clans. If you are REALLY into bridge then you don’t invite your real friends over and grind them into the floor. You are going to have an unsatisfying time both in terms of the quality of gameplay, and social experience. Instead you either play a friendly match where everyone can enjoy the social aspect, or you join a bridge club and enjoy the gameplay.

This latter case is still a social experience of course, but it’s unlikely to be one with your immediate friends and family. It’s more appropriate to share it with other people that share your love of bridge. This is exactly what Netflix and Spotify have realized as they’ve shifted their recommendations engines from showing you what your friends like, to what other people like you like. Generally we do not really care what our friends have been watching. But if we enjoyed The Godfather and The Departed, then we are interested in what other people who also liked those films would recommend.

For games that rely on their mechanics, adding in a social layer can have some powerful effects. Initially, players can even be taught how the game works by more experienced players and this knowledge flow continues as players exchange thoughts on more advanced strategies. A social aspect can enrich the gameplay by requiring the coordination of several different players such as in raids in World of Warcraft or Destiny. Finally, as these interactions build new relationships between players, they develop a sense of duty to each other, which leads them to keep coming back even if they tire of the gameplay itself.

For the social layer to add value to players, and by extension developers, it doesn’t need to involve people who are real life friends. It’s much better to group people together by the intensity that they play the game, so that they can engage at the same level as the others in their group. This is exactly what happens in Clash of Clans and many other clan based games, where the top clans demand a certain level of engagement as a requirement for membership. Not that the developers need to worry about this, as given the right tools the players organize themselves.

Content

There is however a third, much rarer way of organizing people. In games where there is a strong narrative and the experience is largely single player and driven by consuming content in a linear manner, it makes more sense to group players by their progress through this content.

This is what happens when people live-tweet TV shows. Using Twitter, viewers can feel part of a larger experience and share in the unfolding drama, regardless of whether they are actually sitting with other people watching the same show. I believe there is an innate human desire to calibrate your social responses, and this fills the same role. It helps people comprehend their own reactions, see if they are appropriate and ensure they understand the situation in full.

This is the equivalent of catching a stranger’s eye and enjoying a moment of shared understanding – we know it in a diverse set of situations from sharing the frustration of waiting in line to sharing the elation of hearing the opening beats of a favorite song at a gig. The same sort of social experience could enhance games like BioShock and Mass Effect, maximizing the impact of the most dramatic moments. However, most games that would fall into this category do not have any form of social layer, because of two problems.

Firstly, how do we bring together people who are all experiencing the content at different rates and different times? The solution here might lie in something akin to the comments sections on newspaper and magazine articles. Here the comments don’t need to be by people you know, or written whilst you read the article. But they are still relevant to you, because the person commented after they experienced the same content as you just did, and they enrich your experience of the article by providing additional information and opinions.

Secondly, how do we allow people to be social without breaking the immersion of deeply engaging games? The last thing people want after deciding who lives and who dies in The Walking Dead is for the drama of the moment to be shattered by being prompted to see what everyone else did. Luckily TellTale have the good sense to wait until the end of the episode, a natural break point before allowing you to review what everyone else did and connect you to the forums. In free to play games this might in fact be even easier, as the breaks between sessions and timers are natural point to allow people to engage with each other, both savoring recently enjoyed drama and anticipating exciting things to come.

A few games do manage to solve these problems and pull people together in this way, however. Dark Souls 2 allows other players to leave messages as you work your way through the world and narrative. These can either be helpful tips or troll postings luring you to an untimely death. You can also summon other players into your world to help out with particularly hard bosses. These interactions with other players enrich the single player experience by adding a new, social layer to it. In both cases the associations with players work because they fit into the context of your game, not because of the relationship that you have with the other players. Other players appear as phantoms and in doing so stay consistent with the Dark Souls narrative, and do not break immersion.

Wrap Up

Social rightly continues to be a buzzword in the games industry. However, there is not a single solution for what social should look like. Different types of social interactions are suited to different game experiences. When designing a game there is almost certainly some way that it can be enhanced with a social aspect, but this needs to be designed according to the type of experience that you are building for your players, rather than the design fads of the day.

This post was written by Ed Biden, who also writes at Just for the Fun of it.

The post Social Gaming: Facebook, Guilds and Beyond appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Ed Biden

Players can simply open up the app, start a round, flip a switch, then put their phone down. The AI will make all their decisions. The AI will have all the fun while the player waits for the virtual reward at the end of the round.

At first glance, this is worrying. This turns the game into a Skinner box. Tap the button, wait, get a reward. Where is the fun in that?
Instead of making the core battle so boring that auto-mode is necessary, shouldn’t designers seek to add more depth to the battle?

No.

Focusing design on in-depth core game mechanics is a losing battle.
Focusing on making long-term decisions more interesting is a much better strategy for free to play games.

Battles are the Hook

In the RPG Genre, having an interesting battle mechanic provides the hook for the game. This is what draws players in and immerses them in the world. If I have no option of control, then this isn’t really a game.

When a player starts a battle, they expect to make choices and see their impact. Having novel mechanics in the battle provides early players with a new experience that they have never had before. As seen above, in Summoner’s War, in the beginning, you have choices for each of your players of where they need to attack. This is engaging at first, but quickly goes stale. This isn’t the focus of the game.

Secondly, it really showcases the artwork. Your artwork sets the expectations right from the beginning. A player is only willing to invest in games that feel polished, exciting and professional. Making sure that players experience as much exciting battles in the beginning is important.

However, as they play many battles, inevitably the mechanic will get boring. Inevitably the artwork will get repetitive. There are few games in the history of game design that have ever managed to keep a core game mechanic interesting thousands of times repeatedly (ex. Tetris, Chess, Collectable Card Games). Especially in a non-multiplayer context, in a casual game, and even more in a mobile context where the interaction complexity possible is limited. In theory this could be done, but it would be incredibly difficult.

So how do you keep the gameplay interesting for the long haul while still allowing for a great initial experience?

Bitcoin Billionaire

Bitcoin Billionaire is in a weird genre. I’m not really sure how to label it… It’s part simulation, but mostly an “Endless Progression” style game. Your goal is to try to collect as many Bitcoins as possible by tapping the screen.

Initially there is the appeal of just madly tapping on the screen. Each tap gets you 1 Bitcoin. You strum your fingers across your ipad watching your money go up. You’re so good at this!

But after about 30 seconds this starts to become a bore (also your fingers are getting tired!). So now the game starts to push you into making investments: earn Bitcoins while you’re not tapping.

What this does is ease the player away from a newly-boring core mechanic into something much more interesting: managing investments and optimizing the rate of progression. Bitcoin Billionaire has done an excellent bait and switch: you came for the tapping, but now you are addicted to buying income sources. Cookie Clicker, Make it Rain, Clicker Heroes and Bitcoin Billionaire are four excellent examples of games that have managed to ease a player from a boring core mechanic into something that is much more interesting in the long haul.

This transition is exactly what all games need to deliver for successful long term retention. So how do we add this to other genres?
Auto-battle is how its been added to the RPG genre. Eventually the game recognizes that making choices in the battle is no longer interesting. The bait and switch becomes making the choices outside the battle more interesting than the battle itself.

But Auto-Battle isn’t a trivial system to add. Like all design decisions it comes with benefits and consequences.
There are 2 questions to ask if an Auto-battle system will work with your game:

Session Design: Auto-Battle or Job system?

Auto-Battle as a system essentially means that a player will make a choice about which “dungeon” to enter, then leave their phone on and come back to it after a few minutes.

Is this valuable to your session design? Players just opening your app for long periods of time? It will effect your KPIs — your session length will go up. But is that really what you want in the design? Successful games push players to return to the game often throughout the day and focus on meaningful choices. So why demand that they keep the app open during the battle?

Job Systems in games have been around for quite awhile. They reached a peak with games like MafiaWars in the early days of Facebook. A player would send their units on Jobs. Tap a button, and the unit would be disabled for a limited time. When the time was up, the rewards for the action were given. This was a nice appointment mechanic that allowed players to opt-in to coming back to the game. If the game was only job systems however, the game grew stale. But what if a Job System replaced the need for auto-battle?

What may be more interesting is asking the player to make a choice: Do I send my fighters out without my control for 5 minutes, then return with the loot? Or do I think the AI will mess up this battle, so I should do it manually for the next 10 minutes? This way players can make a choice whether to end their session and come back later, or improve their chances of winning by playing the actual battles manually.

Is there enough depth outside of the battle?

If the game is really distilled down to a few taps each day this can get boring quickly.
Grinding for rewards and items is only fun when there is significant complexity and depth to collecting items.
By adding auto-battle in the game, this will put much more stress on your long-term meta mechanics. Do your players have enough interesting decisions outside the battle that will last for months?

Summoner’s War has Relics to provide interesting decisions in how you upgrade your players. Brave Frontier has the boosting and fusing mechanic which provides years of collection and interesting long-term trade-offs. Many games have a very in-depth loot system which makes for interesting decisions choosing which gear to keep.

However, even with a strong loot system with collection, players need an indicator of progress. They need to be immersed in your setting, story and game. Having an auto-mode is great, as long as eventually players will be pushed to an epic boss battle. A battle that surprises them, challenges them, and maybe even progresses the story. This will be necessary wrapper around the grinding that makes it all worth it. These auto-battles end up building anticipation to something new and exciting for the player.

In the end auto-battle lets players focus on the choices and decisions that matter to them, no matter what stage of the game they are in.

The post Mobile Free to Play: Games that don’t want you to play them appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Firstly, you need to ensure your initial user flow into the game allows players “Easy In”. They quickly understand what they need to do, and how to accomplish it.

Secondly, sessions need an “Easy Out”. Players need to slowly and subtly be prodded to leave the game to ensure they don’t burn through your content or burn out in interest too quickly.

Thirdly, you need to ensure during a player’s session they are making commitments to come back. Driving strong re-engagement and creating habits to return.

Lastly, I spoke about allowing players to return to the game naturally in search of surprising content or offers. Ensuring your game has cycling content throughout the day to pull players back like the masters of session design: Facebook and Twitter.

With these components you can build strong sessions that will last for months, even years.

To bring it all together, now it is about making these components feel natural and unrestrictive to the player.

The Problem with Energy

When it comes to session design in free to play, the natural tendency is to add an energy mechanic. Energy is a cheap and simple way to pace players. They come into the game, have full energy and can only spend a specific amount of it before its time for the player to leave. Later on in the day, they receive a push notification telling them that their energy has refilled, they can play again! When completely depleted, energy can be purchased to play a few extra sessions, although energy is no longer is really an effective monetization mechanic.

Energy has always been a tacked on mechanic in many games. It’s an aging industry standard that players are pushing back against. Players now demand that games don’t feel nearly as restrictive towards when and how they play.

So what is the real issue with Energy?

Issue #1: Energy gives an abrupt end of the session with no commitment

Energy was necessary to create the “Easy Out”: giving a players a reason to leave, and giving a strong reason to come back. However, this is not a player commitment — this is just them running out of a pacing currency and now having to wait for it to return. Players don’t make a an opt-in commitment to return to the game when their energy runs out, instead they just feel they are being prevented from playing for no reason. Energy thus has a strong stigma, and I’ve seen large drops in user funnels when players realise their sessions are being controlled by such an arbitrary economy.

Issue #2: Energy has communication issues

Energy sometimes just doesn’t make sense in a game’s theme. It costing energy to do every action feels weird. In previous social gaming environments this was the standard, but in today’s mature mobile market energy being tacked on doesn’t translate well.

Lives are taking some precedence in match 3 games or skill based mobile games. This makes some sense and translates well. If you fail, you lose a life. It’s been a staple of the Arcade. It has meaning and players feel like they have an impact on how long their sessions will last.

I am convinced Lives remained a staple in even modern Nintendo’s design because it created this “Easy Out”. Giving a players a reason to walk away from a game when they were getting too frustrated by it. This made sure they would return another day to try again.

Issue #3: Energy doesn’t pace engaged players

Energy works because it allows for many play sessions per day. With short refill timers for lives, player can keep coming back throughout the day with full lives and try again. However, since simulation games push players into much longer timers for benefits, simulation can pace their content a lot better. In the long run, a city building system is much better at pacing its content than an energy structure.

Pacing content with energy is difficult because highly engaged players can come back 20 times per day and have full benefit. The optimal would be that their benefit for returning would slowly taper off instead of grow in a linear way. So a hyper engaged player wouldn’t blow ahead in the content compared to an average player.

What ends up happening in a game like Candy Crush is that you have to balance your games to ensure that regardless of engagement level, a player gets new content in a controlled, steady flow. But with energy and allowing players to come back with full benefit throughout the day, designers can end up pacing content for way too long for the average player. Conversely, they could just not care about these hyper engaged players ripping through their content and allow them to progress quickly. Yet these are your super fans — these are the players that would gladly pay you if given the opportunity!

What Flexible Session Design looks like

The optimal Session design will seek to pace Benefit vs Sessions per Day and Session Length in this manner :

A graph which the growth rate slows over time. The benefit for playing 10 sessions per day is higher than 1, but it grows at a much slower rate. Also for session length: Playing for 2 minutes has great benefit. Playing for 6 minutes has more, but grows at a slower rate. This is optimal for keeping players growth controlled, while still encouraging strong re-engagement.

Boom Beach’s Sessions

Boom Beach have one of the best mobile sessions around.

Boom Beach follows the rule that the first session of the day is the strongest: your longer timers (buildings) have completed and you collect a majority of your resources.

Some players can come back a second time that day and get a similar benefit. Yet as the game grows these timers get longer which makes the second session less beneficial.

The benefit of coming back beyond this is mostly just to battle. This is the funnest part of the game. This can give some big currency rewards and random rare drops. However, the more you raid other player’s bases, the more likely it is that you will be raided. This makes the benefit taper off as the day continues.

Clash of Clans even has a mechanic if you are active in the game, no one can attack you. This strongly recommends re-engagement for players that are paranoid about their resources, but because the game is still paced, they aren’t progressing fast when they come back for these “defensive” sessions.

So this works for Clash of Clans and Boom Beach, but how do I apply it to other genres? Especially other genres that don’t have a town building or simulation component?

Idea #1: The longer you play, the harder it gets

Smash Cops Wanted Level is a good example of a flexible energy mechanic. Each time the player plays a round, their wanted level increases (similar to GTA). This means each subsequent time they play the game will get more and more difficult. 1) This makes complete sense given the nature of the game. 2) It allows the illusion of allowing the player to play forever :

http://toucharcade.com/2013/10/17/smash-bandits-update-removes-play-stopping-timer-and-adds-other-cool-goodies/

Idea #2: Separate playing and progressing

Hearthstone does this beautifully where they really allow players to come and play as much as they want, but the currency is only tied to completed missions. Missions regenerate the next day.

Of course this only works if you are confident core mechanic can last this long. This is a feat only very few designs have pulled off. I’ve only really seen it in Trading Card Games and MOBAs (ex. DOTA or League of Legends). If you believe even the most engaged players won’t bore of your core after playing it constantly for months, then you can consider opening it up without restriction. Especially if you’re going after a more core or traditional gamer audience which is outspokenly negative towards obvious timers or energy mechanics.

Idea #3: Take a bet on your skill

A combination of lives and a randomly generated level list is a good way for players to manage their own sessions and prevent session burnout.

As I spoke about before, a game can allow for a list of missions to be randomly generated. Each has a different tradeoff between risk and reward given the player’s current level in the game. This list is regenerated on a quick timer, so players can always come back to the game to search for “deals” on which level to pick on this list. Which level do I think I can beat, that will give me the best reward?

They make the call whether they go for broke on a difficult level or go for grinding missions with significantly less reward. You can subtly control the drop rate of these types of levels to ensure that players aren’t going to get too many grinding levels and exploiting the session design this way.

With the life mechanic, players are adequately punished for losing a level. Adding urgency and making this a really interesting decision. Plus, with the “Shopping for levels” mechanic, the player has reason to come back throughout the day but is still restricted from always getting what they need.

Keeping your sessions flexible will make the game feel much less restrictive. This in turn will really make players feel that your game is something that will adapt to when and how they want to play. This attitude will turn into strong play sessions per day and much stronger longer term retention.

The post Mobile Session Design: Flexible Sessions appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Driving long term retention continues to be the focus for mobile free to play developers. As marketing costs for launching titles continues to hit new highs, it becomes more and more important to retain players over the long haul.

The first strategy for driving players to come back for a long time is about designing your game’s features so that players are committed to returning. Players activate timers to trigger a notification in a few hours. Players could also push another friend to play a round, then receive a notification when its their turn to play again. These evoke a very “explicit” session design. There are push notifications always notifying you when you need to come back to the game. Very obvious reasons to return to the game.

But this is exhausting and can lead to very structured session designs that don’t bend around a players life. It also gets really tiring, very fast. Players getting notifications in the middle of the night, feeling like in order to play optimally they need to return.

South Park described this behaviour perfectly in the recent episode mocking free to play games. Waking up in the middle of the night to tend crops gets old really fast.

As a result, explicit push notifications are fine for triggering 1-3 sessions per day. However, any more than this and the game just turns into an annoying Tamagotchi and players will break away from your game.

But 1-3 sessions per day frankly isn’t enough for free to play games. Looking into some industry data from Digi-Capital, we can see the importance of Sessions per day and its correlation with hitting the top grossing :

http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/27/5-drivers-of-700-billion-in-mobile-internet-revenue/

Hitting a strong session per day count is a very good indicator for a top grossing game. So how do we design a game that pulls the player back very often?

Learn from the Masters: Facebook & Twitter

Facebook and Twitter are the clear winners on mobile for sessions per day.

But Why?  What is driving us back?

There are direct messages and notifications — people post about us or message us. This provides the “explicit” notifications. Players return because they are committed socially to reply to these messages and look at their notifications.

But why do we open up facebook every time we’re in line at the grocery story? Even when there are no notifications on the phone? Why do we pick up twitter every time we have a boring break in a conversation?

Because of the news feed. Because there is always something to check, always a hope that something new is going on.

Why do you open up Twitter every 15 minutes? Because there’s always something new on the feed. There’s always an anticipation that you could find out something new if you just checked in quickly…

Throughout the day the content on both of these networks is changing rapidly. A user can come back once a day, five times a day or a hundred times a day and still get enjoyment. This is what mobile free to play needs to strive for.

Going Deal Hunting

Alright, so game design can’t provide the same amount of new content and surprises that a social network can. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t hit the same level.

I came back to the shops often in borderlands to see what the deal was.

A first great example of creating this session design feeling is cycling content in shops.

For shops, you don’t have all the items available at all times. Some of the best moments using the store in Borderlands or Diablo was when the store had the exact item that I wanted on sale or for a deal. If your design supports a huge possible library of items to sell, then a cycling shop is a must. Highly engaged players feel great finding deals on items that were previously too high. Players always have hope coming into the game that there might be the solution to their problems available in the shop for a deal. In short: the shop provides a feeling of something new and interesting that could change their fortunes. If the cycle is short enough, and the deals good enough, this can really push players to come back throughout the day. It also adds urgency to purchasing behaviour — each deal feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Of course we’ve seen this behaviour in other forms as well. Ebay, Craigslist, and Steam Sales are great inspiration for creating a store that really pushes players to come back constantly to go deal shopping.

Also, this cycling can create some other interesting monetization mechanics. You don’t want to come back throughout the day? You really want to find that item quickly? Then pay some currency to refresh the store. You can see this in the recent Backflip game, “SpellFall”.

Shopping for Level Design

Of course this constant cycling isn’t limited to just in-game shops. This same mentality can be applied to your progression system or matchmaking system.

Let’s take for example a game like Boom Beach. What would happen if you only have 10 opponents you could play per hour. Every hour, the full list is refreshed. Players then would shop the deals on this board. This hour, which of these opponents are the easiest to beat and provide the best reward? Then each hour they return and search for the “deals” on this board which will help them progress. This could be a great replacement for the current system where players feel like they are matched with extremely difficult opponents and can only progress by grinding the PvE computer levels, greatly reducing the importance of PvP in the game.

Everyone on the map is too difficult to face. There never are any deals here.

Having levels that cycle and change throughout the day is a way to add interesting choices a PvE or level based game. Puzzle and Dragons have Event dungeons for very limited time. Making these more central to the daily grind and progression is a great way to add more interesting choices and pull the player back more often.

For trading and resource based games, having customers that have random requirements and give random rewards cycling throughout the day is an easy way to add excitement.

What would happen if these customers were all time-based?

Hay Day most likely didn’t add this because it makes setting long term goals very difficult for players. Players can’t predict if making bread for the next hour or milk is the right choice. So of course this has to be balanced with ensuring the player always has a clear deal they are going for, but can find interesting deals along the way to speed up their progress.

Your goal as a designer at the end of the day is to get players to come back for multiple sessions per day. Allow players to feel smart about taking advantage of one-time offer deals that progress them faster. This will make your game feel much more alive — it’s constantly changing, and a player can’t predict what the optimal path to completing the game will be. Progression will not be linear and boring. How often you need to grind, how many rounds you need to complete before you can beat the next boss isn’t laid out in front of you.

Most importantly — you will always have a reason to come back to the game.

The post Mobile Session Design: Deal Hunting appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer