Game Design for Housewives
Kirill Grabovsky at the GameNode Meetup
Do social games have a future? Who is playing on social networks nowadays? How should social games be approached in the age of a thriving mobile market? These were the central themes of a presentation by Kirill Grabovsky, Lead Game Designer at Crazy Panda’s Zaporozhye project.
Intro
When my fellow game designers found out that I would be giving a lecture on social games in 2019, they couldn’t help chuckling. It’s no wonder, because we have witnessed the dawn of the mobile era, where games for social networking sites are regarded as antiquarian. Nonetheless, I would try to demonstrate that this industry hasn’t yet exhausted its potential for outstanding and profitable projects.
Audience
Let’s start with the most essential element of any game: the audience. What is going on there, on social networks? Firstly, the average user is aging — those who joined at the inception of social networks have grown older. Secondly, social networks are popular with young people, but they prefer playing on mobile devices. This severely constrains the ability to deliver classic game design for social networks, since certainly not every game can be comfortably squeezed into a mobile device. In our case, this turned out to be a complex venture, on the brink of the impossible. As you can see, social gamers and users are two different crowds — although they intersect, they are nowhere near equivalent.
Types of Social Game Players
- Mobile Player
They are young, tend to play short sessions while on their way somewhere or in occasional leisure moments. They play casual games on their phones. These players favor free-to-play models and microtransactions.
- ‘Housewife’
A woman (or even a man) of an older age, who doesn’t work in the office and whose house work is interspersed with computer games. Such people tend to play on tablets or PC, just because they have this option. They are also monetized through the free-to-play model and are more susceptible to special offers, as compared with mobile players.
- Office Employee
People of either sex who are stuck in the office and are willing to play during involuntary or voluntary periods of idleness. Being in an office space, they are unlikely to use a mobile phone for this purpose, let alone a tablet, but there is a PC at hand! What about opening a social game for a minute or two? A very good choice indeed.
Appealing to the Female Audience
Why housewives? Firstly, women play more frequent and longer sessions — these are commonly known statistics. Secondly, up to 60% of players on social networks are females. The third and fourth reasons are the most noteworthy: there are 1.5 times as many paying users among women and their average spend is 44% higher. At our Zaporozhye project on Odnoklassniki (a social network service that is mostly used in Russia and the former Soviet Republics), females account for 70% of the audience and are responsible for 80% of payments and 85–88% of turnover!
Who is Our Ideal Player?
They play rather short sessions that last for 10–30 minutes. They have a large screen monitor and prefer casual or midcore gameplay. These folks pay through free-to-play models or special offers. They play at home or on their office computer in between their routines, to steal a moment of relaxation. Therefore, our ideal player is a procrastinator, and we need to occupy them in those moments of idleness, when they can’t grab their mobile device.
A Glimpse into Statistics
What Games Do They Play?
Extremely popular are gambling games, puzzles, farms and emulators. Some strategy games are also on this list — despite being wrapped as fantasy or sci-fi games, they can be treated as typical farms or emulators due to their gameplay. Social dating applications are also worth attention. And, finally, there are strategies and RPGs, which I won’t deal with much here as I am currently occupied with something different. This allows us to speak of social games as the ideological successors of solitaire.
When Do They Play?
As evidenced by our project, online peaks are registered at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., which is before and after work respectively. During the day, there is a short and fairly constant plateau occurring between these peaks which reflects less activity, with relatively short, evenly distributed sessions. These are exactly the niches, the short casual gameplay we are targeting.
How Much Do They Play?
Our project average is 3–6 sessions per day, with the average session lasting from 10–15 to 30 minutes. During these 10–30 minutes, the average player makes 300–500 clicks or touches, if playing on a tablet. However, top players significantly outstrip these numbers. Here, we are talking thousands of clicks and thousands of touches.
Gameplay
Three Pillars
Let’s talk about the gameplay of social games, which basically doesn’t depend heavily on the genre: it should be ultimately casual and it should rest on three pillars.
The first pillar is maintaining a simple gameplay approach. Having snatched 10–15 minutes to play on a social network, these guys won’t bother untangling complex rules — they just need to sit and click.
The second pillar requires the gameplay to be joyful. Not necessarily funny, but every touch, every click should bring joy. People play to break the routine, and your game must evoke positive feelings.
The third pillar is also focused on delivering positive feelings: it is essential that players feel continuous progress and are always praised for their achievements. Each step, even the simplest one, should be rewarded whenever possible. This slide shows that there can be nothing like too many drops in social games. This person hasn’t defeated a dragon — they are merely picking radishes. This vegetable takes an hour to grow, but look how lavishly the player has been rewarded for this! Actually, they have got precious little, but look at how nicely it is dressed up! Every click results in a firework of sparks, experience and coins. They have been levelled up for this effort. This was brilliant, what a cool fellow! It took them as little as 10 minutes to achieve this, while in the office they would have exerted themselves for months to progress.
A Passion for Collection
Players are fond of stockpiling resources and content. Here you can see a large farm owned by a level 30 player. They have spent about a month in the game — you can see dozens of objects on the site, everything is nice and neat.
Then they receive more content (as you remember, each step should be rewarded and it is), and in just half a year their farm looks like that. The left side of the slide is especially worth your attention: these are the rewards for completed quests. As the site area is limited, the player has to squeeze up a little, but there is room for more.
This is already level 100, with hundreds of objects on the site and those 300–500 clicks per session, and this is not yet the limit. There was once a case on Odnoklassniki when the game started crashing after being logged in to by a user who had exceeded the int embedded into the game’s experience counter. She had spent six years in the game, making thousands of clicks per day and having donated over 800,000 rubles. Such squirrels won’t give away any of their earned possessions.
Goals
Players will be satisfied with the game provided that they always have goals. Goals should be diverse to prevent players from getting bored. Goals should be obvious — players shouldn’t wonder what to do next. Goals should be achievable, or otherwise players might get upset and quit.
In our game, we categorize goals by the time it takes to achieve them, particularly when it comes to sessions:
- Instant goals. Once the player signs in to the game, they are immediately absorbed in an activity. How about feeding pigs, for instance?
- Short-term goals secure the next session and the said three to five sessions a day. An example of good practice is where the player would plant something and return in a few hours to reap the harvest.
- Mid-term goals are targeted at a longer retention. They keep the player engaged for a week and encourage them to visit the game time and again. For example, a calf can be grown in five days at 14-hour intervals.
- Global goals. For instance, a house may take a month to build because this requires materials to be collected. Unlike with shorter-term achievements, players might end up giving up on long-term goals — they are likely to get bored, but they will be nonetheless retained by the previous goals.
Viral Mechanics
Classic (Direct) Mechanics
From my experience, classic viral mechanics don’t work well on social networks today. Firstly, social networks themselves discourage spam. As a rule, game related information is confined within a small gaming space, where nobody would ever go. Secondly, social networks prohibit promotions that offer direct rewards for bringing people to games. Therefore, you won’t be allowed to utilize such powerful mechanics as ‘Bring three friends and get ten gems’. Thirdly, there is so much content all around that players have developed filtration skills. As a matter of fact, the highest virality is best achieved by word of mouth, when people invite their friends to the game in a private message. Let’s see how this can be attained.
In our game, all social mechanics can be split into three groups:
Passive Mechanics
The user is required to have playing friends, who are not expected to do anything in the game. The simplest mechanics would be performing actions on the friends’ sites: ‘Go to the neighbor’s, click on their turnip and get your reward’. Somewhat more complex mechanics would be a bring-more-friends lock. To unlock, users need to invite friends, who are only expected to install the game. There are also bonuses for visiting friends. These mechanics are instrumental in expanding the game’s audience and increasing the number of installs, however you won’t acquire active or paying users. In order to entice users to play, more sophisticated mechanics should be adopted.
Active Mechanics
Friends are required to act in the game — they need to sign in and press at least one button. They may be asked for help or to accept gifts, or they can be employed in handicrafts or as advisors to the king in an RPG. Furthermore, friends can be requested to supply you with desired resources. These methods ensure a much higher conversion to active players. On top of this, they help retain those who have quit for some reason. If a player stops showing up in the game, they are likely to be bombarded with messages from friends and may come back.
Cooperative Mechanics
The most future-proof mechanics would be clans and clan activities, especially clan vs. clan contests. When your clan is losing, dropping out would be a tough decision — you would be neither loved nor respected. These also include playing on common locations or shared gaming space, where a few players are involved in a joint activity or compete with each other. This is rather a narrow niche for social games, and we have established ourselves there. Our farm offers a multiplayer mode — there are common locations where players have fun gathering turnips and wheat together, chasing away monsters, etc. These mechanics excel in attracting new players, retaining old ones and stimulating payments. However, there is a drawback: they don’t embrace the whole audience. In any social game, there is always a group of antisocial folks who would never make friends with anybody.
Narrative
It’s not all that simple with the narrative on social networks. There is no doubt that players adore stories. A well-built storyline would grace any game. However, there are certain challenges. To begin with, players don’t like being forced to read. Another hidden rock is that players are not ready to pay for stories. If your game features a nice storyline, where the player is expected to move through a great many levels and ends up paying for defeating a dragon, this won’t work as the player is deprived of the feeling of achievement. Some users totally ignore quests. For example, we have 30%-40% of players who would never play our weekly quest events. We were puzzled for a long while and suffered a lot, until we conducted research to discover that these guys just play differently — squirrelling away their possessions — and quests are not their cup of tea. Apparently, a narrative can’t guarantee success. I would like to add that any narrative should be visualized. As in the case with social games, this word is not synonymous with ‘text’.
What Do Our Players Pay For?
In the remaining portion of my lecture, the word ‘payments’ will be used to denote transactions performed in the game’s hard currency, which can be purchased for the currency circulated on the respective social network.
Players can go hog-wild buying content. As seen from the stocked locations, they are passionate about content. Furthermore, almost any mechanics — whether competitive, gambling or other — ultimately result in a player receiving a nice building, a funny animal, a new unit or another piece of content. Therefore, players consume content at a reckless speed. Some curious numbers: in the six years that the Zaporozhye project has been up and running, game designers created, artists painted and players bought up 180 types of trees, 230 types of plants (the list is already exhausted, and we are digging through agricultural encyclopedias in an attempt to find something else in there), over 1,000 animal species and over 4,000 decorations. All of this has been swallowed by the players without wincing, and they crave for more. If you happen to run a game for social networking sites and release regular updates, while longing for larger profits than can be earned from the gameplay alone, then you should constantly feed your players with new content.
Players also pay for leadership. They can really pay a lot to take the highest places. They also pay for time and clicks, in other words, for purchasing lacking materials, for skipping quests, for speeding up handicrafts, etc.
And, finally, they pay for fervor. Slot machines are highly effective in engaging players and growing profits. In the case with Zaporozhye, they contribute about 30% of total project revenue.
Special Offers
As we deal with procrastinators, good old marketing techniques should work well here. These include market promotions, short-term discounts, cheap purchases that help engage newcomers, sale of unique content, complex offers with options, bonus-for-friends initiatives. And, the most compelling offers would be ‘Buy three and get one free’ and the like. Frequent and regular promotions can develop a payment reflex among players, and you should take advantage of this.
How to Retain Players?
A game should grow into a long-term habit, which is best developed through long-running game cycles. Players should never lose their resources, and come-backers should be incentivized with bonuses. Besides, working with the community is essential. We have official communities on each social network that we are present on, and several unofficial groups, wherefrom we derive the most valuable feedback.
By making social games, we sell people their dreams. They receive a sense of personal fulfillment and experience positive feelings. We do a noble job and earn our little reward in return.
The above text is based on Kirill Grabovsky’s presentation delivered at the GameNode meetup themed ‘Game Design’.
