Mobile Free to Play: What about Player Skill?

¿Por qué en las listas de mayores ingresos en dispositivos móviles no hay juegos con una gran cantidad de habilidad del jugador?

¿Dónde están los Mario? ¿Los juegos que pusieron a prueba tus habilidades hasta el último jefe?
¿Dónde están los Call of Duty? ¿Juegos que te permiten jugar competitivamente en línea durante cientos de horas?
¿Dónde están los luchadores callejeros? Juegos con tanta emergencia y profundidad que hay libros sobre cómo dominar los controles del juego...

Las versiones móviles de estos géneros pueden haber encontrado una manera de obtener una cantidad decente de descargas, pero ninguna de ellas ha encontrado un lugar sostenido en la lista de mayores ingresos.

¿Por qué?

Para tener éxito en el juego gratuito, debes controlar el ritmo de progresión del jugador para que pueda jugar tu juego durante meses.
Para que un juego imponga una progresión lenta para todos los tipos de jugadores, debes poder equilibrar con alta precisión.

Cuanto más afecte la habilidad del jugador al resultado de tu juego, más difícil será equilibrarlo para lograr una monetización óptima.

Cómo Candy Crush maneja la habilidad

Si Candy Crush estuviera equilibrado para tener menos suerte y más habilidad, el juego no sería tan exitoso.

Por un lado, no tendría un gran atractivo. Los jugadores sin los niveles de habilidad necesarios se quedarían atrás y se irían debido a la dificultad, mientras que los jugadores con mucha habilidad destrozarían el contenido sin gastar un centavo.

Pero la razón principal por la que Candy Crush Saga tiene éxito es la forma en que el juego desarrolla su contenido. Candy Crush tiene muchos niveles, pero con más de 300 niveles, todavía te lleva meses de juego intenso incluso hacer mella en el mapa. Esta velocidad de progresión estancada es exactamente lo que se requiere para tener éxito en Mobile Free to Play. Un juego que dura meses (mejor aún, años) con un ritmo saludable de contenido para mantener a los jugadores interesados. Esto genera una fuerte retención a largo plazo: un gran porcentaje de jugadores regresan al juego después de cientos de días. Este KPI es la medida más importante a la hora de evaluar el éxito de un juego, lo hemos visto una y otra vez en Wooga.

So how does King do it? How do they pace the content so well so that players only reach the 100th level after playing for a month? They do this by varying up the difficulty. The difficulty of levels is not a steady linear increase like in most classic games. Level 55 is not necessarily easier than level 56, level 100 is not necessarily easier than level 200. In Candy Crush (and all of the games that copied the formula thereafter) there are levels that are meant to be easy, and levels that are meant to be hard. A set of levels are designedas easyto make sure that you have moments when you are loving the game and feeling smart/powerful. However, there are also levels that happen more sporadically which ramp up the difficulty exponentially.These levels are “blocking” levels — they are there to be extremely difficult. These levels are required to convert players to payers (give them reasons to use all those boosts), reinforce that the game is not a cakewalk, and that level progression should be celebrated, (see twitter…) but mostly so that there are levels which have to be played over and over and over and over again before you progress – pacing the content.

Florian Steinhoff did a wonderful GDC presentation about this exact balance when he discussed Jelly Splash. I’d really recommend watchingit if you have vault access.

The problem facing game designers looking to create new genres in Free to Play comes back to Player Skill. How do you build these blocking levels that are so important to yourretention monetization? If a player has a huge influence on the result of the round (whether they progress or not) then balancing for a skilledplayer versus an unskilled gamer would be impossible. I can beat the new Super Mario Bros. in a few hours, it takes others with less experience years to do the same. How Candy Crush builds these levels is by making the chance of winning, regardless of your skill, low. Like 5 to 10% (sometimes I’ve heard numbers even lower). But isn’t this frustrating? No! Since the game hasso little skill (in comparison to other genres), they can balance these levels to make sure that players consistently come close to reaching the goal. Those near misses everyone talks about. These keepthe player feeling like they can beat the level,they just need to play a few more times or convert. With higher player skill, this becomes much more difficult to achieve.

Super MarioSaga

So let’s go with a little bit of an experiment. Let’s take a game that has high amounts of skill and try to pace it without resorting to “dumbing down” the mechanics.

Super Mario is a game everyone loves – lets assume (for this experiment) that you could actually get the same level of control and ease of use out of a mobile version of Mario.

To play the game, the player progresses along a map, working between worlds which have unique content in each world. It takes months of time for artists, designers and developers to build each world. We need to try to make this amount of content last for months in the hands of players as well.

First off – we ramp up the difficulty on some levels like Candy Crush did. This will prevent players from progressing too quickly and force them to master the game. However, then we’d have a retention issue. The game only appeals to a small niche, and most players are dropping out because the game is too punishing and unrewardingto play.

So let’s add an upgrade system! You collect coins from playing, and then you can use those to improve the runners abilities to pass those levels. For unskilled players – they can grind on previous levels if they need the boost, but now they can progress!Games like CSR and Deer Hunter do this very well.Players can upgrade their weapons or car to improve their chances of winning. Blocking levels are directly tied to your upgrade level, and grinding is a core part of the game loop. However, in our Mario game we start to get some issues. Compared to CSR and Deer Hunter, there is substantially more skill in our game. So a player beating a level has a lot more to do with their current skill level than over how much they’ve upgraded. Those blocking levels are not forcing you to upgrade at all, it’s just demanding more skill. So in the end we have no control over the pace of skilled players, and unskilled players areforced to grind. No fun.

Here in the bottom right you can see the recommended gear for completing a level. In order to actually ensure a player NEEDS this upgrade — you need to make sure their skill isn’t overpowered and they can beat the level regardless.

What else can we do?

Games like Hearthstone and Diamond Dash are games of high skill and have performed very well in the Top Grossing charts. These games use Multiplayer PvP to control the player skill.

Tying PvP (Multiplayer) to your progression is one way that high skill games can pace their content. Ranked Mode in Hearthstone is an excellent example of how to do this. You may be a highly skilled player, but matching you against an equally skilled player and tying the result of this match to your progression allows High Skill games to balance out.

Games like Brave Frontier put most of their Skill into the decisions made in the metagame/elder game. The skill fromBrave Frontier is not in the battle. Players are asked to mindlessly tap to fight against opponents. In later stages they even have an automated mode when you bore from mindlessly tapping. The skill in Brave Frontier comes from the choices you make as a player about which monsters/fighters you want to upgrade and which ones you take away. These types of mechanics certainly take much longer for players to appreciate and master, but in the end these are the mechanics that drive players to play these games for months rather than put the game down because they’ve bored of the core mechanic.

Takeaways

So what’s your take away? You can say two things –

1. I’m going to be that crazy game designer that cracks this nut. I’m going to go out and design a game with high skill that will dominate the marketplace that has strong retentionand amazingmonetization to shoot up the top grossing.

2. Or I will sit back with most free to play designers and continue to find ways to subtly water down skill based mechanics so that we can keep players in the game long enough to monetize and turn them into dedicated players.

I strongly believe that the mobile marketplace is maturing. The current marketplace is slowly demanding more skill from their games. Playersarebecoming fed upwith re-hashed mechanics from a couple years ago. Players can see through Candy Crush’s mechanics and are not sticking to these types of games like they used to.

Encontrar formas de agregar habilidades a los juegos de manera inteligente será la clave para abrir nuevos géneros en dispositivos móviles.