Designing FOREVER games

Shared attributes of successful evergreen games we love

As their name suggests it, forever (or evergreen) games are games that don’t have a finale or culmination, as in “The End”. These games have a very high replayability factor (meaning we enjoy playing them over and over again). There are no stories that end or terminal levels or stages. Essentially these games don’t run out of content. More importantly, these are games we don’t get easily tired of.

Forever games are also timeless. We can pick up these games anytime , be it the day they were released, or a few years later, and play them for months or years. We can even stop playing for a while, pick them up again years later, and they’d still be fun and relevant.

Some examples of forever games are: Poker, Risk, Minecraft, Settlers of Catan, and several PvP, Sports & Racing Games, as well as procedurally generated puzzle games like Tetris.

As players, we love forever games. However, for game designers, developers and publishers forever games represent the holy grail of game design, especially in the free to play space, because long term player retention and engagement are paramount to monetize audiences through recurring advertising, subscription and/or micro-transaction revenues (vs. one time purchase or upfront payment). In addition, these games do not require design and development teams to keep cranking new content every week or month (or as we used to call it at Zynga: the “content treadmill” trap) to keep them alive or fun, thus lowering operation costs.

So what makes a game a forever game? Most importantly it needs to be fun, which is easier said than done. It needs to be exciting, to some degree unpredictable, with moments of delight. It should also comply with other core design principles like Bushnell’s Law (or Nolan’s Law) which states that “All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.” Lastly, players need to feel that they can influence the outcome of the game.

However, throughout my years in the gaming industry, and as a player, I have identified 5 key attributes that I believe to be present in some of the most successful forever games

Note, not all of the great games out there hit all of these attributes. However, they hit a combination of the list below, and in some cases offset the lack of one of these attributes by masterfully executing on the others.

• Elements of Reset: In forever games every level or play session affords players a new chance to start again and win. That is, your chances of winning are rarely correlated to the outcomes of the previous sessions or levels you played. In competitive games, this principle evens the playing field and creates a chance for a new outcome every time you play (thus increasing replayability). For example, every time you start a new game of Risk the board is reset and players get new country cards. There are some pseudo-forever games that feature game state persistence from one session to the next (or level progression), like Candy Crush Saga, but even in this case, each new level can be started and completed somewhat independently from the ones before.
• Elements of Chance: Luck or chance is another great way to level the playing field and create replayability. As an example in Poker, every hand brings another opportunity to win with the chance to get better cards than your opponents. Other games use “slot machine”, “random” or “dice” functions to determine the loot, board, or player’s starting position. Ultimately, these elements of chance make PvP games more interesting as better players may get handicapped (or players may get rubber banded together) to increase the chance of a different outcome each play session. On single player games, elements of chance bring surprise and delight and keep players guessing on what’s next. However, using chance as the sole driver of session outcome could lead to a sense of helplessness or lack of control that turn most players off (unless you’re into slots), which brings us to the next point.
• Elements of Skill: Players want to become better and feel that they are progressing and mastering the game. They want a sense of control and predictability, knowing that if they play well, or make the right moves, they will have a greater probability to win. A game that is just about luck can become frustrating very quickly. For example in Poker, even though there’s luck in the cards you draw, players with not so great hands could outplay players with better hands. Ultimately, players like to quantify their progress, face new and more challenging tasks (or opponents) and know that they are getting better at the game. Therefore, elements of skill make the game more engaging and long lasting.
• Multiplayer: There are many ways to create multiplayer experiences in a game. The best ones are those in which moves or actions from other players impact your gameplay and results. This design makes every play session different based on the skills, type of play, or behavior of other players who share the session with you. For example, in games like Halo or Call of Duty players can quickly finish the single player campaign (or storyline) which would lead to a shorter useful life or replayability factor for the games. However, when these games added multiplayer experiences like “survival mode” or “capture the flag” they were able to extend the useful life of their games. In these cases people (i.e. other players) become the content that makes the game enjoyable and different every time you play.
• User Generated Content (UGC): Games that provide the means and tools for user generated content can become evergreen by unleashing the creativity of players and reducing the content cadence pressure for art, design and game development teams. Minecraft is a $2.5B example that combines best of breed UGC tools and multiplayer to create an ever expanding game world in which players can become designers. If you’re designing a content heavy game and wish to become evergreen, adding elements of UGC can be your best bet. However, in the absence of UGC design, creating the tools that procedurally generate new content and levels or allow your development teams to easily (at near zero cost) add new content can increase the useful life of your game.

So there you have it. These are my favorite design attributes of forever games, which ones are yours?

If you enjoyed this article be sure to read Engagement the leading indicator of product-market fit