{"id":133,"date":"2011-10-31T13:49:48","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T20:49:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robotinvader.com\/blog\/?p=133"},"modified":"2011-10-31T20:28:08","modified_gmt":"2011-11-01T03:28:08","slug":"pay-by-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robotinvader.com\/blog\/?p=133","title":{"rendered":"Pay by Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Why tear out my heart for all the world to see?
\nWhy not paint by numbers
\nCatchy melody
\nBurn it up the charts with sweet simplicity
\nThen do it again
\n— Self, <\/em>Paint by Numbers<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you ask experts in the field of mobile game monetization how to make a hit, they’ll give you consistent advice. \u00a0You should be “free to play” or “freemium,” which means you offer the game at no cost but then ask the user to pay for various things later. \u00a0 They will encourage you to schedule payment prompts at particular intervals, and to offer items that can be bought with cash. \u00a0It’s probably a good idea to have some sort of energy mechanic that forces players to take a break and wait for energy to “refill” every once in a while. \u00a0Of course, if they are impatient they can just pay for more energy and continue immediately. \u00a0You probably want to have some items that are cheap, and some other items that are super expensive, because a small percentage of users will go crazy over your game and end up buying these extremely expensive things. \u00a0In fact, these “whales,” the users that buy the $60 floppy hat and the $100 crested armor, will be your primary source of revenue. \u00a0Make sure most of your items are consumable, so the player will have to buy them over and over again. \u00a0You should give out free, randomized items every once and a while, just to keep the player interested. \u00a0And if they haven’t played for a few days, why not pop up a notification reminding them that they just earned free gold without even doing anything?<\/p>\n

This is what the experts will tell you, and they are clearly right: these types of systems allow you to give a game away for free and still make quite a profit on it. \u00a0The top grossing games on iOS and Android are, almost without exception, games that employ these schemes.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with any of these ideas. \u00a0Indeed, most of them predate the current boom of mobile phone games. \u00a0Once upon a time we called them DLC, or shareware, or subscription fees, or “insert credit to continue.” \u00a0MMOs have been operating on these systems for more than a decade. \u00a0You can find some of them in Animal Crossing<\/em>. \u00a0Some developers have jumped on these systems as intrinsically evil, designed only to exploit the player, and an assault on game design, but this argument has a big problem: it ignores players who genuinely love these games. \u00a0Look, Britney Spears might be a singer who’s career is entirely constructed by a corporation for the purposes of selling CDs, but it’s also true that some people genuinely enjoy the songs she sings. \u00a0You can’t argue that those people are “wrong” for liking Britney Spears, just as you can’t really argue that people who enjoy Farmville are “wrong.” \u00a0Though some implementations may seem more questionable than others, the schemes for monetizing free games are not intrinsically bad.<\/p>\n

In developing Wind-up Knight we spoke to a large number of well-meaining experts, all of which told us the same thing. \u00a0And we thought about their advice pretty hard. \u00a0Well, actually, we thought about it really hard. \u00a0We thought and debated and made plans and then threw them away for the entire course of development. \u00a0In the end, we ignored almost all of the advice we were given.<\/p>\n

It’s not that we think monetization systems are all evil. \u00a0The problem with the type of advice we were getting is that it assumes that your game design is inconsequential, the “touchy feely bits” between prompts for more free gold. \u00a0It doesn’t really matter what the player does<\/em>, just as long as they can do it within the monetization structure that seems to work. \u00a0Maybe that’s why so many of the top grossing games on iOS and Android feel so empty and soulless–there’s really nothing to do other than walk the monetization state machine in a loop.<\/p>\n

Wind-up Knight’s design isn’t something that we sat down and wrote up. \u00a0If anything, it’s a design that we unearthed, something that already existed and was just waiting to be discovered. \u00a0Something that we moulded and polished into a full game, but certainly not something that came from a big Word document describing a bunch of play mechanics. \u00a0It is the product of iteration, a lot of iteration: about 40% of our development period was spent testing ideas and tweaking the results. \u00a0The game we ended up making is almost nothing like our original concepts.<\/p>\n

The thing is, the game we discovered isn’t a game that works with an energy system. \u00a0Consumables don’t work well in the design. \u00a0There’s really no justification for an artificial delay in the game loop. \u00a0The items we have are not worth $60. \u00a0Almost all of the advice we received about “how to make a game that makes money” was at best inapplicable and at worst outright contrary to our core design.<\/p>\n

Wind-up Knight is a hard, skill-based game. \u00a0The design requires a level of rule transparency and respect for the player that some other games don’t need to concern themselves with. \u00a0When you die in our game, it must always be because you messed up in an obvious way; unfair deaths would change our rewarding challenge into a recipe for frustration. \u00a0This respect for the player must also extend to every other element of the game, and that includes item sales and monetization. \u00a0We felt that to compromise the core design to bolt on some sort of scheme would pretty much ruin the entire game. \u00a0It would cheapen the experience, and remove the value of a difficult achievement.<\/p>\n

We went around and around on our monetization plans. \u00a0Finding a middle ground that allowed us to make some money without damaging the game design or pulling a fast one on the user took a long, long time.<\/p>\n

Here’s the system we came up with in the end.<\/p>\n