Is Your Player Entertained?

Do you still follow the idea of “you need to break the player’s session so he doesn’t play too much an get bored of your game”? It got a bit old.

In fact, if the player can get bored of your game in one session and never return, don’t you think there is a problem with your game?

The player will keep playing and returning if these two minimal conditions are met:

1. He is emotionally invested in the game

2. He has something to do in it

The first point is incredibly difficult and deserves its own article, or a series of articles, or maybe a book even. Actually, that is something that allows our games to be called games still. I think it’s almost impossible to simulate or cheese through; at the same time, sadly, f2p developers often don’t even think about dealing with it consciously, trying to wade through it intuitively instead.

The second item on the list is more interesting for me as f2p developer in that it implies the possibility of somewhat mechanistic approach to solving it.

So for me one of the most interesting and effective ways to “hack” retention is adding mini-games.

Now let’s briefly digress and talk about developers’ psychology. I think it’s no secret that for most f2p devs the way into the industry looks something like this:

1. They loved video games since childhood and always wanted to make them

2. Of course, they want to make games they like playing themselves, which is usually AAA

3. There are no AAA studios in their country at all, or the amount of people who want to work there is much higher than needed

4. They could go indie but that doesn’t pay the bills for some time, if ever

5. They go to f2p companies in hope of getting some experience and use it as a path to AAA (which rarely works)

6. In f2p they have to make games other people like to play, not games they like to play, so they do it quite poorly.

The worst match-3 developers are usually the guys who hate match-3, don’t understand why people play match-3 and don’t want to understand it. They often treat their players with contempt, which leads to underwhelming games loved by nobody.

So it is no wonder that when people like this get to make something like f2p FPS or RPG they feel somewhat relieved and try as hard as they can to sublimate their own hardcore ideas into the game, fighting for “genre integrity” and narrowing the target audience.

Let’s talk about game as a business model now. Omitting details, it’s as in almost any other business: your UA brings you clients which costs some amount of money per client — that would be your CPI. Then a fraction of those clients churn and another fraction stays, and a fraction of that fraction pays you money — that would be your LTV. So for the whole affair to make business sense you need your LTV to be higher than your CPI.

But what do those acronyms actually mean? In fact, your UA could buy any amount of traffic with any CPI, but that could be “not your target audience” which will never stay and pay, or “your” target audience may be so narrow (blonde men 33 years of age with one child, married to a woman named Sarah who played Call of Duty no less than 3 and no more than 5 hours) that their number will be so low and finding them would be so expensive that no LTV would ever pay that off.

So for your game to continue exist as a business you’d have to choose one of the following strategies:

1. Make a game for some niche audience — for example, guys who love giant battle mechs and want to play FPS. Those people will be limited in number by definition, so you’ll have to make a game that caters to interests of as many of them as possible while retaining them practically forever

2. Make a game for the broadest audience possible. A lot of contemporary match-3 games are already not targeted solely at women 35+ and a lot of contemporary RPGs are already not targeted solely at men 20+.

Both of those strategies are quite viable, but in my opinion the first one is good if you have a not very big game company with limited resources or some advantage in acquiring the specific niche audience. One way or another, this strategy has an innate growth limit equal to the size of the niche.

On the other hand, if you have a lot of resources for user acquisition, the second strategy’s potential gets much higher.

Why did I make that long digression? So that you would remember it when in reply to your suggestion of adding a mini-game to your RPG, RTS or whatever your game designers will start to talk about genre integrity, about your “core audience” getting baffled and alienated by those dirty casual mechanics and leaving or something like that.

It is good to remember that niche products’ early retention is not quite stellar precisely because there may be not a lot of said “core audience” and it may be quite expensive to narrow down ad targeting, so you will be getting a lot of people who are not your TA anyway. Those people will churn and you will just shrug because it’s the norm; and it really is, but does it have to be?

Why lose a big part of incoming traffic if you could not lose it?

I like to view a game like some sort of an amusement park. Your UA brings buses of visitors; some of them see rides tailored specifically to their taste, stay and pay money; others glance at your park, realize that none of the “Super intestine-through-the-mouth-squeezer-outer-9000” interests them, turn around and leave (having already cost you money to bring them in).

At the same time, had you had at least a few simpler rides, they may have stayed and sooner or later risked riding a “Super intestine-etc-etc”.

So if your “midcore” RPG had a few small casual mechanics, some fraction of casual players may have stayed long enough to get involved in midcore.

For now, this approach is more common for casual games. For example, in Klondike Adventures the player encounters a simple version of 2048 pretty early. They can play it once a day to obtain a small amount of energy needed for the core loop.

Now bear in mind that since I’ve never worked at Vizor I don’t have data. What I have though is personal anecdote and love of speculation. To me that mini-game worked so well that it kept me returning to the game even when I started to grow tired of the core loop. At some pointed I logged in just to play a quick round of 2048; then I amassed such an amount of energy that I wanted to get rid of it, and that’s how I started playing Klondike again after essentially churning.

And I think all that is applicable to midcore and hardcore games. Why try to invent what coins or what heroes to give out to the player every day so that he keeps returning if you can think about what games to let him play every day? Why not add a tower defense mini-game into your RTS? Why not add a runner into your RPG? Why not add a little clay shooting range to your hardcore PVP FPS?

There are countless ways to add some amount of mini-games into any “big” game without the need of drawing gigabytes of new content or writing the amount of code similar to the rest of your game. What stops you from trying it right now?