How to Deconstruct Games Better
I have always tried to watch the competitors. While working on the moderately successful, not-too-notable products, I got used to looking up to them. What’s that update the huge game released? They removed game mechanic A and added game mechanic B? Well, it just looks so obvious now! They did it because this, this and that, and now we urgently need to do the same.
Then as the products I worked on started to get more and more successful, the “overtake the leader” goal started to look more and more feasible, and another goal started to form — “don’t let others overtake you”. That lead me to finally start looking in the opposite direction of top-grossing, at the projects breathing down our neck.
I remember studying yet another city-builder while working at Game Insight. It was a pretty well-made game, but something was constantly nagging me. At last, I realized that a good part of strange, uncomfortable and unpleasant decisions were obviously taken… right from our project!
There was no other explanation. We discussed them at large with the team and came to the consensus that those were bad decisions that we could not really change at that moment since they were intertwined with the rest of the game.
When I worked as a game designer, I tried to resist ideas like “let’s take game mechanic X from the successful game Y because it’s a successful game” time and time again, but only at that moment I truly realized why.
That got me thinking about game deconstructions and their value.
Do your research
When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
When you work in marketing, you think that all of the product’s failings and successes are caused by user acquisition.
When you work in the product team, you connect all of the product’s failings and successes to its mechanics and how it is built.
The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between: if the product’s UA strategy is not good enough, it can’t reliably buy good traffic with low enough CPI for it to pay off. The same is true for the case where the product itself is not good enough.
More often than not, in a deconstruction, you don’t have too many reasons to establish how exactly the game in question is making money.
The problem is, you don’t even try to study it. If you make assumptions about why the game itself is good, why don’t you try to assume how it can buy traffic?
- Look for the ads. Do you see them often? Can you find them on Facebook and see their view count? Is it high? How far from the look of the actual game do they stride?
- Look at AppAnnie. What’s the average revenue per install? Is it higher or lower than the CPI you could suspect? Are there any interesting changes in gross correlated to updates and not to the number of installs?
- What seems to be their sticky factor? Are they gaining or losing the audience based on all that?
Make a clear distinction between facts, impressions, and assumptions
Assumptions are often the only thing we have.
That is perfectly fine, but deconstruction articles often tend to lack borders between facts and assumptions. For example, “the global ranking in a successful game X provides long-term retention” is a dangerous mix of facts and assumptions:
- if you haven’t worked on the said game X you have no reason to establish that their long-term retention has anything to do with global ranking
- even if you have worked on that game, you most probably know that your game mechanics often work in the ways you never intended
- you also have no reason to establish that game X even has good long term retention or if it is successful because of it
Make extensive screenshots of every window and every pop-up. Better yet, record your first sessions as you play.
Write your initial deconstruction mechanic by mechanic, window by window. Divide each section into three subsections:
- Facts — screenshots and objective facts go here.
- Impressions — what you personally feel about how the mechanic works. Also, what other people you asked think.
- Assumptions — what you think the mechanic does. This is the place to finally write something like “I think the global ranking feature should raise long-term retention”.
This way, even if your assumptions are wrong, your article is only 1/3 wrong.
Only after you’ve done all that, you can go back and write an abstract for how the game works as a whole in your opinion.
Example
Let’s try to tear down Clash Royale’s chests very quickly.
How it usually looks:
The timed chests are a key mechanic for Clash Royale. Due to the chests having timers and the amount of chest slots being limited, the player has to break her session when the developer wants it and return to the game when the developer wants it to be effective.
This is how Clash Royale’s high early retention rate is achieved.
Also, the chests’ nature is effectively nudging the player to spend her hard currency, so the chests are also the base of Clash Royale’s monetization.
It is THE mechanic that is THE reason for Clash Royale’s success.
A better way:
Facts
- the player earns one chest after winning a battle.
- the chest may contain gold and character cards of different rarity based on the chest rarity itself and arena it was earned on in.
- the chest is not opened automatically, it is put into a slot.
- the player has four chest slots.
- to start opening the chest the player has to initiate that process manually.
- the chest then starts its timer countdown (the rarer the chest, the higher the timer)
- only one chest can be opened at a time
- after the chest has started to open its timer can be skipped by spending hard currency (the more time left, the more hard currency needed)
- if the player is to earn a chest when all four of the slots are taken, the chest is lost
Personal impressions
These chests mostly frustrate me. In general, after speaking with some players around me, I failed to find anyone who said that he loves the slot system. However, those who like the game are ready to tolerate it.
Some players I talked to feel satisfied after obtaining the fourth chest. The feeling is kind of like “ok, I fulfilled my quota”. However, they said that after they return to the game to only one chest being opened — and so only one free chest slot — they felt irritated to only be able to play one game “with reward”.
Others said that they don’t really care about “lost” chests and they were ready to keep playing with four full chest slots just to earn PVP rating.
Assumptions:
The limited number of slots, timers on chests and the “only one chest can be opened at a time” may create an appointment mechanic where the timer is supposed to remind the player to return for reward. This can raise the player retention if she cares enough for the chest’s contents.
All that can also lead the players who want to play longer and more often without “losing” chests to spend hard currency.
Apart from being a better way to write deconstructions, this is actually a better way to read them. So next time you read one, if there are no clear borders between facts, impressions, and assumptions — set them yourself. You might be surprised by the result.
