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Free to play on mobile is changing quickly every day. The audience is maturing. Their tastes are changing, and now I feel is just the calm before the storm. The stasis that exists on the top of the AppStore can only hold for so long, the mobile audience’s tastes will change, it’s now up to designers to find out how.

As our audience’s tastes change, we as designers have to adapt our designs. We have to find new ways of making old systems feel new again.

Today I’d like to talk about pacing mechanics, and how we can adjust our current pacing mechanics to make them feel better for our maturing audience. Pacing mechanics usually take the form of Timers or Energy systems, and are always ingrained deeply into the core loop of any Free to Play game. Pacing is what prevents players from burning out on content or mechanics. Pacing is what drives habits. Getting pacing right is the key to driving strong long term retention. And long term retention is the key metric for a successful free to play game. But making these pacing mechanics not feel artificial is difficult.

So I’ve put together 3 tips that I like to use when “Re-dressing” pacing mechanics. These 3 tactics can help you rethink how to build a pacing structure so that it feels new, different and more natural to the player.

#1: Add Natural Pacing: Days, Weeks, Months

Sometimes in a game design, you need to add longer timers which prevent players from engaging too much with a feature during a single day. Many free to play games aim for longer timers for this: 4 hours, 8 hours or even 12 hours. In my experience this can feel very restricting.

Instead, ask yourself, can I pace this using a daily, weekly or monthly cycle instead?

So instead of a feature which is available “once per 8 hours”, opting for a feature that is “once per day”. These will allow the player to be more flexible about how they structure the use of the feature, and it feels more natural because they are using their ingrained day/night cycle. It’s easier for a player to commit to coming back to the game once per day than it is to come back in exactly 8 hours. As a result you can pace the players stronger (once per day is longer than once every 8 hours) while it actually feeling better for the player.

Hearthstone (which we’ve covered many times before) is a great example of this. Their mission system employs daily pacing. Instead of using timers, they pace the missions so that there is 1 new mission per day, up to a maximum of 3.

So coming back at any time the next day, you know you will get an additional mission. This is the easiest source of free coins in the game, so it feels rewarding and is tied into the core loop of purchasing card packs. But the key here is the daily pacing. There’s no timers telling the player that in exactly x hours they need to return to the game, instead they have the flexibility of natural day cycles. Have I done my mission of the day?

Days aren’t the only cycle that you can use. Weeks and Months work great at pacing players for very long timers. Hearthstone paces players by month in seasonal competitions. Because each month has a unique card back, this makes it an easy choice for a player to come back to the game, especially near the end of the month, just to get their card back.

#2 Add Animations

Another clever way to add pacing is just to use visual animations rather than timers.

For example, Hay Day had a clever mechanic in which the trader characters delay taking new deals until they’ve left and returned to your farm. After completing a deal, the character would slowly walk/drive away happy, then return soon in the future ready for another trade. This made the pacing make sense, and didn’t need a timer in the player’s face.

Games with a large world map which you have to send armies around commonly employ a pacing mechanic where the army must take x hours before they reach the location. Showing the scale of the world relative to the unit and actually animating the units along the map helps players buy in to the fact that it takes time for units to reach locations.

Is there any shorter timers within your game that can be visualized by an animation instead of by a timer? Is there any long timer which you can better visualize to the player through animations?

#3 Get Creative with the Cost

The best strategy for making pacing feel better is to get more creative with your economies & systems. Instead of demanding the player to wait for hours for a building to construct, increase the difficultly & cost of building it to begin with.

Most systems force pacing through timers that look like this:

Fallout Shelter is the best recent example of a game focused on adjusting pacing to feel different and stand out. They chose to do this by shifting the economy. Instead of the pacing of the game through timers for building construction, they’ve focused their pacing only through the initial cost of the building. As a result, Fallout Shelter feels different from most simulation games. It feels instantly gratifying and very rewarding for collecting the coins.

 

Due to this change, Fallout must increase the cost rapidly to compensate for the lost pacing with building construction and find other timers in the game for players to manage & drive sessions (in this case Wasteland Missions). In the end, this works out for Fallout Shelter, and feels like a very different simulation game from most free to play games.

But increasing the cost before the purchase can take many forms. Cost can come in the form of just collecting currency (ex. bottle caps in Fallout Shelter), or it can be a combination of luck and effort as seen in many gatcha games including Contest of Champions. To pace getting the getting the best heroes, players must grind through collecting hundreds of crystals.

When designing a new pacing mechanic, consider the following:

Instead of guaranteeing the player the reward at the end of a long game loop, try allowing them to engage in a shorter loop, but randomize the progress towards the goal. As psychology teaches us, this type of mechanic will pull players back longer than a strict cost:reward trade off.

 

There are many more ways to get creative with pacing. But I would always rethink just adding a timer or just adding a high cost to an action if there are ways to make pacing more engaging to the player.

The Bare Minimum : Timers should make sense

If all the above fail, then the bare minimum for having a timer is to make sure that it makes sense with the theme.

This is mainly why so many games default to have a city building component, even if it’s a bit of a stretch for the concept. Take Walking Dead: Road to Survival, the F2P game from Scopely recently released. They clearly added the city building component for the ability to pace using construction timers. If they hadn’t had this component, they would have really struggled to find places that make sense to add long timers.

Agent Alice is a good example of a game that struggled with timer design.

Agent Alice is a recent Hidden Object game from Wooga. Agent Alice made a big risk by removing the city building component from Pearl’s Peril, it’s spiritual predecessor. Due to this design decision, the game struggled to find effective timer design.

Where Pearl’s Peril would use building timers to pace players, instead Agent Alice had to use more arbitrary timers. The timers became different actions that Agent Alice had to take to pace the story. In the example screenshot below, Alice must plan her next move which takes a long timer.

This timer is not expected by the player.

The goal of timers has to be to fit into the theme of the game. Each use of a timer leave the player feeling: “Right — that makes sense that it takes that long”.

In another hidden object example, Criminal Case, a game from Pretty Simple, uses a timer when the player has to send anything “to the lab”. This makes sense. In all the crime shows I’ve watched, this was expected by the detectives and the audience.

Keep this in mind when designing your pacing structures. Timers have to make sense in the theme, they have to be expected by the player.

Summing Up

Pacing mechanics can be tough to get right. But slapping timers on every system isn’t the right direction, especially as our audience matures and becomes more sensitive to the mechanics. 3 ways which you can improve pacing mechanics to feel different are:

• Swapping Timers for Natural Pacing : Once per day, Once per week, Once per month. Use the natural cycles we’ve all been accustomed to.
• Use animations instead of a timer to make it feel natural & make sense
• Instead of directly using timers or an energy system, look to find ways to pace by increasing initial cost through currencies, gameplay and luck

And if none of the above is possible, do whatever you can to ensure the pacing actually makes logical sense in the game loop. Building takes time, sending heroes on a journey takes time. These can have timers. Don’t add timers to actions that don’t make narrative sense why they would take time.

Using these tips you can adjust your design to feel less restrictive, more natural, and ultimately serve this maturing audience.

What does Splatoon, a paid game for consoles have to do with mobile free to play?

Well you can find inspiration and clever design in any medium. Just so happens I’m a massive fanboy of Nintendo, and after playing their game for months it was inspiring to spot some really interesting design bits that can be applied to any free-to-play game.

Just to give you some background, Splatoon is a multiplayer 3rd person shooter for Wii U.

Splatoon of course isn’t just your run of the mill shooter however. Nintendo re-invented this genre from the ground up. The focus isn’t on kills, instead it is on covering the arena with as much of your team’s colour as possible. Kills can help slow down the opposition, but it is more about controlling territory than it is about camping for kills. As a result the game feels much more casual for players that aren’t interested in getting headshots, yet strategically deep for players that want to compete.

The core gameplay aside though, Nintendo did something I don’t think many designers expected. They built a masterful metagame outside the battle which drives strong long term retention. Instead of just taking the tried and true Call of Duty perk & leveling system, they’ve built something that feels great and keeps players coming back. This is something that all F2P games strive for.

Today I’d like to focus on 2 mechanics in Splatoon that can be applied to any F2P game:

#1 Clothing

 

The part that binds the entire metagame together for Splatoon is the clothes. Nintendo’s design of how players get clothes, unlock clothes and level up clothes makes this game work. It makes this game last.

Nintendo could have decided to go with the tried and true method that many shooters and skill based games go with. Call of Duty pioneered a system in 2007 which many online focused games have used since. Players gain levels by playing games and gaining XP. Levels unlock new guns, new perks and new gadgets to play with in the multiplayer game. As you progress up the levels you’re rewarded with more options to choose from. This system is simple and effective, which is why most multiplayer games have used this method over and over.

 

But this Call of Duty system also has its disadvantages. Each player unlocks equipment and upgrades in the exact same way. So while it allows players complete flexibility in choosing their loadout, there’s very little choice in the grind. Players just seek to optimize their XP growth.

Splatoon approached this in a completely different way. Splatoon instead ties perks and abilities to clothes. Instead of players being able to freely decide which perks they want, players need to choose clothes, upgrade them, and hope that they contain the perks and abilities that they want.

On the surface this isn’t a massive difference from most MMOs or Multiplayer games. Some games decide to tie aesthetics to special abilities in a game. The key difference that Nintendo makes is that the abilities of a new item are random. When you buy a new piece of clothing, only one perk is shown. The remaining perks are slowly discovered the more you play with the item.

The result is that this system feels like each piece of clothing is like a trading card booster pack — that you slowly open the more you play the game.

This means in theory buying multiple of the exact same pair of shoes can result in different perks awarded. This system results in players opting in to grinding for the gear that both looks good on their character and has the abilities which work well with their play style. This combination makes for a very powerful long term retention driver.

The 2 key reasons that make this system work:

There is no right answer

What’s important about this system is that the abilities are designed and balanced properly so that there is no set of abilities that dominate over all others. A must in any skill-based PvP game. Each ability benefits different play types equally.

Because there is no dominant play style, players are more likely to experiment. Players naturally will experiment with different perks, seek out cooler clothing, and as a result opt-in to playing with a ton of clothes that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Just in efforts to discover new abilities and experiment with different perks.

Just like Hearthstone, or any game with a strong meta-game balance, there should not be a dominant strategy. The more intrigue that goes into players debating over the optimal strategy, the more likely that players at the high level will be happy to experiment and try out new builds.

The clothes don’t give everything away from the start

Nintendo could have simply shown all abilities on the item from the point of purchase. Because they chose both to hide the abilities and force the player to play to discover them, they created a strong drive to keep playing.

F2P designers should seek to find similar systems in their own games. In any loot-based game or gacha-style system, do you need to give away all information about an item from the start? Can you ask the player to play before they discover any special abilities?

By asking the player to play instead of immediately get the benefit, you’ve asked them to invest in your item. Just as psychology teaches us, by making the player work for the benefits, they are more likely to find higher value in the outcome.

They will be more likely to “grind” (level up) multiple versions of the same item to get the benefits they want. They will be more likely to feel really smart when they’ve lucked out and found an item that randomly had a unique ability. This will build investment in the player and drive a long lasting metagame.

As a result Splatoon’s meta game is a longer lasting system than Call of Duty’s, despite having less perks, less guns and more casual gameplay.

#2 Special Order Queue

The second interesting system in Splatoon is the clothes ordering queue. Now that you know why clothes are important and why players happily grind for them, there’s an additional system which drives players back to the game.

Players in Splatoon can walk around the lobby area and see different avatars from around the world. You can walk up to anyone and see their clothes, which perks are on them, and how cool they look. This is a good system for driving desire (“I want that hat! With those abilities!”). Nintendo doesn’t stop there though — it also allows players to order clothes they see from other players. So if you really like that hat, order it!

But ordering is not immediate. Instead Spyke (a character which you order from) needs some time to get the item. To order you have to add it to your queue. An item from your queue is delivered once per day. When that day is over, if you haven’t purchased it, the item is gone. The next day you return the next item in your queue is available.

So this means:

• You as a player opt-in to coming back tomorrow to buy the item (or the days after depending on your queue)
• The rarer the item, the more likely you are to commit to returning
• When you arrive the following day, you’ve committed to purchasing this item within the time limit. You ordered it!
• If you can’t purchase the item by the end of the day, then only you are to blame. Pushing players to create a goal to play enough to purchase the item within the time frame (“I only have today to buy that cool hat! I have to get the coins!”)
• If you don’t come back to the game at all that day, the item is lost off the queue. Again, only you are to blame. You opted-in to this purchase window.

This system is interesting for free-to-play for 3 reasons:

Using the daily pacing feels natural: There’s no timer in my face, yet still paces the player. Daily cycles feel more natural to a player compared to a long timer (ex. “come back in 24 hours!”)

It builds commitment in the player: The player is now committed to come back to purchase the item, and to play the game enough to be able to purchase the item in the time it is available.

Punishment is fair: The player completely opted-in for this restriction, making the player more likely to accept the punishment if they fail. This also means that they are more likely to spend to avoid the punishment (“It’s my fault! but if I just pay $x I can avoid the punishment…”)

These 3 ingredients make for a very compelling F2P mechanic for both retention and monetization. This can be applied to any game that has a wide variety of items and gear to give away. Characters in Contest of Champions, Gear in Fallout Shelter, or maybe even cards in Hearthstone. Having an order queue which is filled on a daily basis can be a strong daily session driver. It drives strong commitment, feels natural, and feels fair.

In Summary

Splatoon is a very interesting game. If you have a chance to play it, I highly recommend it.

Besides the usual Nintendo charm, Splatoon managed to inspire me with a couple very interesting F2P systems:

• They drive me back to the game to find the best clothing and abilities
• I’m committed to come back to the game and play a few rounds each day to pick up my orders for clothes

These 2 key systems that can be applied to many F2P games to drive what’s most important: long term retention.

Fallout Shelter shocked many people when it reached the top grossing charts. Many (including myself) have been preaching about the unchanging stasis that exists at the top of the AppStore, and Bethesda came in and changed that completely.

As the smoke cleared, and I watch Fallout Shelter slowly fade from the top charts, I’m left with: “so what did we learn?”

I don’t think anyone can doubt that the brand of Fallout was huge for this launch. It attracted loyal gamers and drove massive organic growth on the AppStore. Every game studio since the launch of Kim Kardashian by Glu has known this. To make marketing on the AppStore affordable, brand recognition is becoming more and more important.

But the marketing aside, what shocked me was the response from players to this game. Here is a game that was developed by a traditional developer, taken a brand many gamers love (as a premium title), and then changed it completely to be free to play. We have seen this many times before ending poorly (see Dungeon Keeper, Sonic the Hedgehog). So what was so different about this launch?

How did Fallout Shelter become a beacon of acceptable free-to-play design for core gamers?

#1 No Arbitrary Session Caps

Fallout Shelter never forces its players to leave. There’s always something positive to do with your vault. There’s no blocker such as energy which says “you must leave now”. But as we’ve seen in previous posts (here and here), having a limit on sessions and progression is absolutely necessary to drive long term retention.

Fallout Shelter employs what I like to call “Flexible Sessions”. The player enters the game, feels rewarded, but the game slowly increases the pressure to leave. Instead of having an abrupt end to the session with energy, Fallout Shelter slowly tweaks the gameplay so you as a player feel smart for leaving.

Each time the player enters the game there are a ton of things to reward them. Production timers are short, so coming back every 5-10 minutes rewards the player with lots of resources and some occasional level ups of their dwellers. However, the longer the player remains in the session, the less rewarding the game is. This is built intentionally so that players eventually opt-in to leaving the game.

You want to build session design so that the player feels smart about leaving. Not told to leave.

A good example of the game increasing pressure over a session is the “rush” feature. Rushing takes the place of a “skip for premium currency” button which free to play games have. For fallout, the rush feature is no longer a monetization feature, it is a session design feature. In the beginning, the player is trained to continually rush production of rooms. This rewards with faster resource production and bottle caps (a key currency for progression). However, the more you rush a single room, the higher the incident chance will go up. So the more you rush rooms, the more likely a fire or radroach attack happens. The longer you are in the session, the more rooms you rush, the higher risk you have of bad effects. It is strategic to leave and come back later.

Overall the game never really forces the player to leave. Just tries to slowly decrease the value of sticking around. So for core gamers, they never feel like they are being pushed out of the game for no apparent reason, rather they are making strategic choices about when to stay and when to leave.

#2 Disguised Pacing Structures

We can all read from the reviews, forums, and rants that gamers hate timers, pay-to-skip and energy systems. But pacing is the key to long term retention. Without long term retention, a free to play game can’t succeed (more on this here).

So how do we effectively pace traditional gamers?

Disguise the pacing systems to feel different from traditional free to play systems.

Best example of a disguised free to play mechanic is the wasteland mission system. This system is a version of FarmVille’s “plant and wither” mechanic which drove very strong commitment for players to return. Each time a player would plant a crop, the crop would have a limit of how long it was harvestable. If the player didn’t come back before this time, the plant was withered. The player would not get any value from it.

Plant and wither hasn’t been around for awhile because most designers see that player’s really hate it when their first experience coming back to the game is to be punished for not returning. Punishing players at the level of FarmVille these days results in a high churn rate (a high percentage of players leaving the game). But Clash of Clans, Boom Beach and other “Build & Battler” style games have slowly added this punishment back into the toolkit for free to play design. The longer the player is away, the more likely they are to be attacked. When they’re attacked, their precious resources are being stolen.

This fear of losing out on owned items, or “loss aversion”, is a very strong session driver.

Fallout Shelter employs loss aversion with their wasteland feature. Unless the player comes back to the game before the dweller dies in the wasteland, that settler is dead. All those bottle caps and rare equipment the dweller collected? That’s gone too. Of course the player can revive the dweller, but this comes at a cost, which rises over time. “Smart” gamers are going to feel good about scheduling their day around avoiding deaths of their dwellers.

For addressing the core audience, designers will have to reverse engineer common pacing systems and rebuild them to feel something very different. The wasteland feature is an excellent example of how to do this.

#3: Gacha

Lastly, targeting their Fallout player audience, Bathesda knew they needed a fair monetization scheme. The only way to do this is with a Gacha/Card system (more on Gacha here). Fallout Shelter offers no direct purchase of resources. This is the usual method for simulation games. Drive desire for the player to spend when they’ve run out of a specific resource they need.

Fallout Shelter does it differently. Instead of the much-hated resource store, they have a lunchbox gacha system. Each lunchbox contains a random set of cards. Cards can be resources, soft currency, gear, or even rare dwellers. So instead of knowing exactly how much currency you’re going to get, you have the rare chance that you’ll get a rare dweller or rare gear on top of the resources you need. Thus paying for items feels very rewarding versus paying for currencies in other games. You don’t feel like you’re cheating the game (as much) instead you feel like you’re playing the lottery and being rewarded with new toys to play with.

The key that makes this core-gamer friendly is that it is fair because it is luck based. Any player has a chance at the big rare prizes.

It is fair because all players can get lunch boxes from regular play. Playing the game smartly can get you lunchboxes quicker. It also feels fair because the players that pay aren’t really impacting any other player’s experience with the game. Fallout Shelter is not operating in a PvP multiplayer environment. If they were, there would be a lot of pay-to-win criticisms. Because the game is single player, Bethesda had some wiggle room with these pay-to-progress mechanics.

Hearthstone and Contest of Champions has shown that these gacha systems can give lucrative monetization potential. However, the revenue per download of Fallout Shelter over the last few months is much lower than most top grossing games. But when you consider the downloads the game got simply because it took a lighter approach to monetization, this was probably the best choice.

Monetization methods have far more to do with what your audience expects, rather than what would be the best way to make a buck.

The Fall

Despite the all that I’ve praised here, the game ultimately did not sustain in the top grossing. While it initially had the support of the brand, ultimately the game didn’t stick to the top charts because of the lack of content, not pacing players enough and no social gameplay which led to low long term retention.

From discussing with high level players, the game really only lasts for maximum 2 weeks. After this, there is no new rooms, no desire for more dwellers, no new content. No goal to achieve other than optimizing your vault’s layout. For free to play to truly work, your game must last for months (if not years).

So why should you start even considering emulating what fallout shelter built?
Why should we care what core gamers think of our game?

It comes down to your audience, and knowing what they expect and what they tolerate in free to play mechanics. Games for players of mass market match 3 games require different techniques than games for players of fallout.

What fallout shelter has shown is that the core gaming audience can be a big game changer for free to play games. This audience can grow a game overnight that can take over the top grossing charts. This audience is very likely to be the ones playing your game for months, competing at the highest level. Research is showing that the big spenders on mobile aren’t new game players, these are players that have experience playing and paying for games.

Gamers have money and are willing to spend it on games that they feel treat them fairly. So as a developer, if you’re going for a more mid-core or core audience, you have to ask yourself: What did Fallout Shelter teach you?

When it comes to free-to-play, ensuring your game has strong multiplayer gameplay is essential to driving long term success. Multiplayer drives strong long term retention for obvious reasons:

1. Multiplayer gameplay always has the uncertainty of what the other player will do. Each time you play in a multiplayer game, there is an element that you can’t predict, making the game always interesting. Because multiplayer games have this degree of uncertainty, players don’t need a massive amount of content in the game to enjoy it. Compared to a single-player game which a developer has to hand-craft months of content for the player to enjoy, in a multiplayer game, the a developer only needs a fraction of that content. Multiplayer games are far more efficient at pacing.
2. On top of pacing content, multiplayer focused games always have strong long term retention because you have this feeling of being in a living, breathing community. These games create real social interactions between players. Players build social norming bonds. Playing with real people makes it socially acceptable.

But creating truly social multiplayer gameplay is not trivial on mobile. Creating a well balanced multiplayer is a massive task on designers, add on top the constraints that the mobile platform creates: smaller screen, shorter session lengths and intermittent connections. Because of these constraints, fully synchronous multiplayer has not really seen massive success on mobile except for a few key games: Hearthstone, 8-ball Pool and World of Tanks. Even with Hearthstone, arguably the best at “lean-back” synchronous multiplayer, I know that each time I play I must be completely focused and I can’t quit within that time. The game is not great for handling distractions or allowing players to leave at will. I’ve gotten in trouble enough times for getting stuck in a Hearthstone match when real life needed my attention.

While I’m convinced that games will slowly move towards fully synchronous multiplayer, in the meantime, smart developers will be trying to find ways to create the same benefits of synchronous multiplayer (social gameplay, repeatable content) with systems that are more adapted to the mobile constraints.

Today I’ve put together 3 key ways that developers build multiplayer on mobile currently:

Faked Synchronous

Many free to play games create the feeling of synchronous multiplayer without actually delivering on it. When players are matched up to other opponents, a bot plays in the place of the actual player. Game designers rely on players not being able to feel the difference between a live player and a bot player. Which is difficult, but not impossible.

Contest of Champions by Kabam relies on this. Even though it feels like multiplayer, each multiplayer fight is actually against a bot. By doing this, they cut out problems that come with matchmaking and handling a fully synchronous fighting game with intermittent internet connections.

CSR Racing also does something similar. When you race against another player online, they either use stored ghost of the player or a bot to race the player’s car. Because of CSR Racing’s gameplay, player’s can’t affect the other player’s race. So playing against a bot or a live player is really no different.

But of course, this is the bare minimum of synchronous multiplayer. Just racing against something you can’t effect doesn’t really feel engaging. Real Racing 3 tried to fix this. Taking a recording of another player’s race, they allow you to race against their ghost. During the race, you can bump into their car and send them off course, but their ghost will magically re-adjust to where the original player was racing. Its about as close to synchronous as you can make it.

Overall this approach allows you to have the easiest matchmaking, handles connection stability and players can engage in quick sessions. However, true interactions and the feeling of playing against a live player is lacking.

Simultaneous Multiplayer

Simultaneous multiplayer is something that not many mobile games have used. It originates mainly in browser based games and Fantasy Sports games in the late 90s and early 2000s (see Travian, see Hat-Trick).

Simultaneous multiplayer is done by asking players to prepare their strategy in advance, then both strategies are played out at the same time. With this method, players can come to the game any time before the scheduled turn and make their choices. Players don’t have to be online at the exact same time to interact and compete with each other.

Top Eleven by Nordeus is one of the few games that have implemented a simultaneous multiplayer system. Each match is scheduled at a set time. Each player sets up their team’s tactics, formations, strategies beforehand, then waits for the scheduled match to commence. Regardless if the players are active or not, the game is run.

What’s really nice about this approach is that it provides natural pacing of the gameplay:

• Player’s feel like the pacing is fair: everyone in the world can only the same amount of actions per day.
• Session design revolves around scheduled times, building habits and keeping a rhythm

However, this system also leads to a lot of design problems for free to play:
it is extremely difficult to offer monetization in this system without making it feel pay-to-win. Each day each player has the same amount of actions. If payers get more actions than non-payers, or are offered anything that would give them a leg up in the gameplay, it will be felt quickly by other opponents. Matchmaking becomes very important.

Session design feels pretty limiting. After you’ve set up your strategy, there’s not a lot to do before the next scheduled turn. So it becomes a difficult decision for a designer to choose between very rapid turns (anxiety inducing) or a long time between turns (boredom inducing). This system suffers from being too scheduled and not giving players much flexibility if they miss out on a round or want to engage more in the system.

Asymmetrical & Asynchronous

The most popular way to create multiplayer on mobile is focusing on asynchronous multiplayer.

Games like Words with Friends or Draw Something have full asynchronous multiplayer. Each player takes a turn, then waits for their friend to finish their turn. While this is engaging initially, the most games that go for this style of asynchronous have failed on the mobile marketplace. Mostly due to matchmaking, session design and monetization limitations with the game design (see our post on eliminating energy and building social mechanics). But async doesn’t have to be designed this way. They can also be designed as asymmetrical asynchronous.

Asymmetrical Asynchronous games focus on two types of gameplay, usually active and passive, and making each as engaging as possible. When players are active, they engage in one facet of gameplay (mostly the attacking gameplay), when players are inactive, they passively engage in the other facet (defending gameplay). Of course this is shown in the Clash of Clans, Rage of Bahamut or King of Thieves style games.

The key with this style of multiplayer is how to make both gameplays engaging and balanced. Ensure that players must engage in both systems in order to progress. Usually this comes in the form of loss aversion: players need to engage in the defending game to ensure their resources are protected from other players. Players also need to engage in the attacking game to retrieve these resources quickly enough to build and progress.

So far in the mobile world, asymmetrical games have all been constrained thematically to Clash of Clans style “Attacking” vs “Defending”. There’s been some attempts to change up this formula with games like Zombination, where the player can decide to focus more on attacking (zombies) or defending (humans). However for the most part these games fall under the “clash of clones” style game, yet this system clearly has room to grow for new games.

Looking into new ways to apply this formula (Passive vs Active gameplay) to new genres and new gameplay is the key to opening up new opportunities on mobile. King of thieves is the best example I’ve seen to date.

Conclusion

There are other types of multiplayer that can work on mobile.

You can go full synchronous like World of Tanks and Hearthstone, but these have session length problems and critical mass problems.

You can go fully asynchronous like Words with Friends, but this creates critical mass, player inactivity, and further session issues.

You can just stick with leaderboards or other “tacked on” multiplayer competitions, but if you want the real benefits of social multiplayer, you need to tie this into your core gameplay.

Thus far mobile has existed in the middle ground — trying to get the advantages of synchronous multiplayer, but without the constraints that are felt on mobile.

To build multiplayer on mobile there are 3 options :

• Faked Synchronous
• Simultaneous Multiplayer
• Asymmetrical Asynchronous

Each can create strong session design, work with the constraints of mobile, and still feel like living vibrant community. Each have their own problems and their own opportunities.

It’s happened. F2P Mobile is now officially triple A. The major publishers have all put more focus on mobile than on console. (see Bethesda, Nintendo and Konami)

Now we are also starting to see high budget games climb on the top grossing charts.

If you still believe that the AppStore can still have indie success on the Top Grossing, the stakes are rising. Games from now on will need significant investments in their visuals on top of having a strong economy design to succeed.

The proof of triple-A F2P is “Marvel Contest of Champions” by Kabam. Showing their recent commitment to working closely with Hollywood, they’ve brought both AAA visual standards and a strong license to mobile. As a result the game has been downloaded by over 30 million people and taken a dominant spot in the Top 25 grossing:

But is this game just all glam, but no substance? Can Marvel sustain in the Top Grossing?

The Pitch

Kabam’s approach for Contest of Champions was clear: Take “Injustice: Gods Among Us” and, apply it to a new license. On top of having the license, take learnings from Kabam’s other games and improve the economy design, multiplayer, and ensure that events are strongly tied to its core.

Its a simple premise, but Kabam’s secret formula of events, multiplayer gameplay and monetization is a powerful force. They’ve proven this before with the Hobbit’s mobile game and the Fast and the Furioius mobile game.

Injustice: Gods Among Us was a game released in March 2013 by DC Comics and Warner Brothers. Its essentially a very simple fighting game at its core with a collectible card game as its meta.

Both Injustice and Contest of Champions are similar to Idle games where it really gives players a “bait and switch”. Based on the screen shots you’d think this was the next Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. But after the first battle you quickly get introduced to the true intention of the game : collecting the characters and upgrading them. You came for the 3D fighting mechanic, but are quickly hooked in the long haul to collecting the characters.

The Core : Back to Basics

Comparing Injustice to Marvel Contest, Marvel has simpler controls, easier strategy, and much shorter battles. Injustice focuses on building up a combo enough to do a quick-time-event (“Swipe to knock down opponent”) whereas Marvel is more about building up a sustained combo of attacks of choosing whether to jab (which can be defended) or go for a heavy attack which can break defenses.

Fights are much shorter because they’ve cut out the 3v3 battle. Its 1 on 1 like original fighting games with victory based on the first KO.

Overall I believe the changes make the game better for mobile. Its easier to play and the fights are quicker. This allows players to complete sessions in less time and spend more time in the metagame. However, moving from 3v3 sacrifices some of the strategy in the battle. As a result battles quickly grow pretty tedious, which puts more pressure on the metagame to keep the strategy.

So how did Marvel fill the gap in the Meta?

Unlike Gods Among Us, Kabam also chose to focus on elemental types. This adds more strategy to choosing which hero you bring to different fights. Also to make sure that the simple 1v1 fights don’t push players to collect and invest in only 1 hero, they added elemental types which push players to collect heroes of each element.

Each element has a strength and a weakness. So each time the player enters a match, they run the risk of facing up against an enemy which is their weakness. This adds strategy to choosing who you bring along and making sure you have a spread of different strong heroes for each type.

Bringing this all together, Kabam really pushes players to be strategic outside the battle. So when you’re playing a online match, players are invited to strategize about which fighter they want to play against an opponent:

Note here that the Scarlet Witch shouldn’t be paired up against Hulk. The player  should try to find a better matchup.

The Meta : Gacha for the West

This is really where Contest of Champions gets interesting. At the metagame layer, the game delivers on the licensee’s strengths. There are a ton of different Marvel heroes to collect, each of which has their own, stylized 3D model.

Each character feels unique. Each character looks beautiful. As a fan of Marvel, you’re really driven to collect your favorite heroes. However, this is where the monetization and retention come in. To get your favorite hero, you need to get lucky in the Gacha system.

This Gacha system is embodied in the Crystal Vault :

Crystals are a currency that is used to give a random reward. Crystals are earned through timers (daily, every few hours), through play (multiplayer or single player) or from purchase. Each time the player completes one of those actions, they are pulled into the Crystal Storage screen. From here, they can open up a random reward within: A resource or sometimes a new character. Here is an example of a player opening up a crystal:

These Crystals are the most important design decision that Kabam made.

There are 3 reasons for this:

#1: Each time the player earns a crystal, they are brought back to the Crystal Vault

Each time they complete the actions needed for the crystal, they are brought back to the storage area. Each time they are reminded of all the other options they can purchase, and all the other means to progress. Players know that in order to get heroes, they need to earn crystals. In order to earn crystals, they need to pay or play.

#2: Each Crystal is a Lottery

Each crystal gives a chance of what you want. No crystal ever gives defined rewards. Want that cyclops? Well that’s the top prize in this crystal, so buying the crystal will not guarantee you earning Cyclops. This is gacha done perfectly.

Gacha works because in the beginning players can purchase these gacha packs (crystals) and get great content. Each time they open a crystal they get a brand new hero they’ve never seen before. As time goes on, as a designer you introduce mechanics and promote content that drive players to want rarer and rarer star players. So a player wanting a 4 star rare Cyclops is going to have to purchase many, many gacha packs before they get exactly what they want.

This should be taken with some fairness though. You want to make sure that player’s don’t feel cheated when they spend money. So similar to Hearthstone (each card pack includes 1 rare), Contest also guarantees a certain star tier with each crystal that is paid.

Unlike Injustice: Gods Among Us and Mortal Kombat X (a recent release by Warner Brothers) Kabam chose to offer no direct purchasing of heroes. In Injustice, players can look at the store of all the heroes in the game and directly purchase the hero they want. In Marvel, players have to use Crystals to collect all the heroes they want. This design is more similar to Japanese games like Puzzles and Dragons, and has been a lucrative business for them. By cutting out the direct purchase and going for a more pure-Gacha system like Japanese games, they’ve maximized their revenues.

#3: They offer no direct purchase

Never allow player’s direct purchase of the content that they want in a Gacha system

Allowing players a direct purchase of the hero they want is a hit to your retention and monetization. You’ve given them the end game content for a single quick purchase.

You can see this also when you compare Mortal Kombat X to Contest of Champions. Mortal Kombat X was recently released by Warner Brothers. Arguably each game is well designed and looks beautiful, but on a Total Revenue to Total Download ratio, Marvel comes out well on top. Kabam is simply far better at monetizing, and offering no direct purchase improves this metric.

Gotta Collect ‘Em All

But the strength of Gacha lies only when you’ve added an additional layer: Rarities. In order for Gacha to work, you need to drive desire to get the absolute rarest items. In the beginning as a player it is alright to get a 1 or 2 star spider man. It feels good to get these heroes. But as you play, you quickly realise that this spider man isn’t going to cut it — you need to play your chances at getting the rarest heroes.

 

To do this, Kabam added Star Tiers to their heroes. Each hero can be found in 1 star to 5 star forms. The higher the star rating, the rarer the hero. Having a higher star hero increases their base stats, exponentially increases their potential highest level, and adds passive and active special abilities during the battle. All 3 of these are important to monetization and retention.

Having strong base stats makes the hero feel powerful immediately versus opponents. Making sure that Rare monsters immediately feel good to purchase and easy to dominate opponents with is crucial to drive first time purchases.

Exponentially increasing the maximum potential also increases the amount the player must invest their time and energy to reach the hero’s maximum potential. The higher the star rarity, the more time the player must spend to upgrade the hero to their maximum potential.

For players to upgrade their heroes, they must use in different strands of ISOs. ISOs come from actively playing (mostly) so in order to fully upgrade your amazing 3 star champion, you have to collect ISO.

This is essential for Long term retention. This mechanic nudges players commit to training their heroes to receive their full benefit. Without this exponential growth, players would pay for the best hero then forget about actively playing in the game.

 

Lastly, Adding Passive and Active special abilities in the battle gives visual feedback to the player that what they are doing (collecting rare heroes) is worth it.

Heroes that are 3 stars or more have an extended special ability bar (as shown above in the bottom left). When the player fills up this meter, the hero shows a unique animation and does a lot of damage. You can only trigger this ability if you’ve got the 3 star or higher version of this hero. This is very important to ensure that players feel rewarded and powerful for getting the highest heroes.

Just increasing a virtual number is not rewarding enough for players. Eventually you’re going to have to give players real visible rewards for getting the rare content.

In Summary

Kabam’s Contest of Champions decided to focus their innovation on outside the battle, in the Meta. The Meta for all games is what drives long term retention and strong monetization. This paid off for Kabam.

They focused on creating a pure Gacha system, stripping out elements from Warner Brother’s Injustice: Gods Among Us that was conflicting with what they know to drive strong free to play design:

• Simpler, shorter battles for better sessions
• No direct purchase of heroes
• Engrained crystals into the core game loop
• Deeper Star Tier system to create more reasons to purchase
• Elemental system to promote collection of heroes

As a result, Kabam have a top performing game.

To be Continued…

Marvel Contest of Champions innovations and design insights don’t just stop at the Gacha system. Rather than overwhelm you, I’ll put this one on pause for now. Next up I’ll focus on Multiplayer and Session Design.

Stay Tuned!