The Shrine

From Vox:



Should be pretty obvious to anyone here but good video nonetheless.

Essentially why I have no interest in these types of games especially on a mobile device. The time investment is absurd. Spending money on a mobile game is even more absurd. I can justify spending money on a PC F2P game because I spend money semi-constantly on that device to suck up time and have fun. But the main selling point of cell phone games (I'm not going to include actual handheld consoles in this) is to play them when you would otherwise be idle - waiting rooms, lines, public transportation. If you're in a place in your life where enough of your day-to-day is engaged by such activities, then yeah, mobile games could be for you even if they're freemium, but honestly you'd probably be better off getting a real handheld gaming device.

The idea of going outside to play a game with other people is appealing in a lot of ways for obvious reasons. But all the money and time being spent on it - how much is it all contingent on the game being popular in the first place? As the initial furor dies down it'll be interesting to see if Nintendo patches in the right kind of content to keep it going or if it just flounders as people leave to move onto the next shiny game. They definitely lucked out and released it in a bit of a gaming release drought. I can't imagine it'll die or anything but I just can't imagine the popularity holding until, say, September.

Mobile games are almost like a fad though if you end up shelling out $200 for some PC game with its whole mess of DLCs maybe it wasn't any worse to pay the same amount for some mobile game that at least other people play.

Yeah I guess it is comparable to a fad. Pokemon is kind of evergreen though. It has that nostalgia kick that the older crowd is into but it's also timeless and interests the young. It's definitely a rock solid IP, the limiting factor being that there's only so much to consume in any given game they create and PVP can only interest so many for so long. Makes me wonder how many people would stick with it if Nintendo does a good job of preventing people from running out of the things they want to do in it.

I don't mean a fad in the sense like it'll go away in 3 months or whatever because obviously games have managed to stay profitable in mobile for a long time. But like the whole premise of a lot of mobile game is literally you should play it because everyone else is playing. It's like lining up for a Black Friday sale even if you don't plan on actually getting any of the great deals, or playing a MMORPG the first day even though there's like a 99% chance of not actually getting to play anything. Given that PC based game cost a lot and generally comes with a whole mess of DLCs, if you're going to end up spending $200 on a game + DLCs, you could do it on a mobile and that at least makes you somewhat respected and you can be pretty sure that you'll get to beat up on a bunch of hapless victims for your $200 which is not the case buying some generic PC AAA game + DLCs. Now of course if the game was actually good that beats being able to dominate victims but game development has been kind of hit and miss anyway. If you're going to spend a lot in a game only to find out it sucks anyway, you might as well take something that at least lets you beat up on a whole mess of people because that's always quite fun too.

For example MA2 recently had an Eva collaboration. You can't just spend $10 or even $1000 to get a game that gets you an Asuka skin in her plugsuit playing cards with her face on it that totally owns everything else because she's Asuka Langley Sohryu. And even if somehow League of Legends or Counterstrike had a deal with Gainax you'll probably just end up with an overpriced skin for $15 that actually gives no in game advantage. The one thing mobile game has it right is that if you want people to shell out big bucks you got to give them the ability to totally faceroll someone. It could be the AI though even real players are fine. Why would you buy say the DLC for Dragonball Xenoverse when Super Saiyan God Goku/Vegeta is barely more powerful than whatever random character you have, if at all? It's a game with very little playerbase since PC gaming is very cutthroat even if power level was to scale you won't have much to show for your money, and of course it's clearly not. But if you play Dragonball Z Dokkan Battle, getting a SSJ Gogeta can pretty much faceroll anyone without. Granted, everyone probably has him by just rerolling until you get him, but then there are always the guys who don't take games that quite seriously, and failing that you can at least totally faceroll the NPCs that otherwise would wipe the floor with you. For all the accusation of P2W, mobile games do give you good return on your investment, since you're paying for power that usually lasts a pretty respectable amount of time that you otherwise won't have, and it's on a platform that thus far proved to have considerably better longevity than the PC. Now part of it is because mobile has a lower barrier of entry, though it's not exactly cheap to make a mobile game these days. I honestly think PCs makers are too stuck on the whole P2W thing. I'm not saying P2W is good, but if you expect me to shell out significant extra money for something that isn't going to help me winning you must be crazy.

The premium currency thing doesn't actually have to do with some sales tactic, it's FAR less sinister from the POV of the dev and publisher: it has to do with legalities and customer experience. Purchasing a consumable means the game manufacturer isn't permanently responsible for the content they then buy with the currency of something happens to the account data. It means A LOT less upkeep and legal cost on the publishing side. It's in no way a "let's trick the user" tactic. Besides, casual gamers are usually very good with numbers compared to regular gamers. It's mostly casual gamers who plug everything into excel sheets to find optimal strategies - I did it all the time in Utopia (an early casual browser game a few of us played), and helped lead a Kingdom to the top of the game during its peak years.

Also, the prices aren't 1:1 because of discounts for higher purchases. And $1.00 for 12 premium currency is fairly simple to understand, it just means that an 80 item costs 80/12, incidentally about 6.66 (6.67 with rounding)


Some of the actual strategies strategies:

Random numbers = effectively, take a bunch of items, weigh them out by percentage, and generate a number. Advertise the best items.

Up-sells = advertisement of purchases in the game. Some games are absolutely obnoxious with these, while others integrate it very well, only surfacing them when the content launches, unlocks, or surface notifications when the content has a functional benefit.

Conversion tactics = Builder in clash of clans, to get a few extra, it is cheap, so you make a value calculation "I am going to play this game more than just a bit, here's a few dollars in a one time payment to make it a lot easier, it would be silly not to do it!" But then that gives the player a taste for spending by giving a huge amount of positive reinforcement - typically Instop with the conversion tactic payments, they're almost always well worth it in my opinion.

Limited time offers = putting on sales or limited time availability to increase impulse buys.

Premium currency rewards = yes, this works. It gets players used to spending.

Of course, engagement strategies are key. Put something in to cut down session time, and increase the painlessness in regards to accessing the gameplay features. Pokemon Go does this CRAZY good with 2-30 second sessions, and the game shifts in and out of "sleep" mode with the gyroscopic sensor - when the device points down the game did a and disables processes, then you just flip your phone up and you're in game in less than a second. People will play 10 sessions in 10 minutes. Sometimes as simple as hitting a Pokestop, and putting the device down which immediately throws it into game sleep state.


But to comment on the "pain points" one: this is typically called pinching. The reason why games don't do this anymore, unless they are already established, is because it's a failing strategy - effectively, all of the pinch payers are invested in games and won't budge, they're paying to rule their games. These games usually have a lot of low or non payers, and a few VERY big payers. Games are mostly easing these up for the players now, because DAU is what's important.


What games are doing now is trying to encourage retention of daily active users, give them an experience, and give them different ways to spend money to invest in their experience. An invested player is much more likely to remain playing. Devs want to make a game that users want to pay for, by providing value to the purchase items, but not pinching the users to buy them.

And yes, I've been a shameless fan of casual games since Utopia back in the 90s. I like short play sessions with long term goals. But that doesn't mean I don't love my insanely long strategy or RPG game sessions either, I have different needs for different days of the month.

I don't really have anything against companies streamlining the experience from our side or their side. You just cannot expect a business entity to do anything but act in their own best interest and when it comes to F2P games that comes down to building incentives for you to spend money in their game. How you do that, though, is the difference between Path of Exile/Hearthstone and, say, a pay to win MMORPG. There are all kinds of philosophies that the internet can argue about all day when it comes to what's acceptable in MTX/cash shops in F2P games but at the end of the day it has to be what you're comfortable with. Just like any other kind of good that gets sold you really ought to find what suits you. I like to think of the whales in these games as well off 1%ers. Or failing that, people that enjoy the game so much they don't mind putting a chunk of (hopefully) disposable income into it. In this scenario, if they're having fun and it isn't hurting anyone... well consenting adults and all that.

I don't think spending $200 makes you a whale. While spending $200 to clownstomp some hapless stranger with your favorite character isn't necessarily the best value you can possibly get out of $200, there's a surprising amount of hit & miss even for well established AAA titles. A well made MMORPG probably costs you around $200 for a whole year of subscription + expansion + game during that time. If it was actually good that's likely a better value than the quick thrill of a mobile game, but then you could easily be holding out for a game that was abandoned by others and stuck on a sinking ship for an year and still spending that much. Compared to that, at least in mobile games it's pretty easy to tell what games are popular and it's certainly very easy to verify that your P2W methods are effective. Mobile games generally are quite honest with what you get for your instant gratification and you can be sure that gratification part is there, compared to AAA games where you might be wasting your time and money on the false hope that the next patch or DLC will make everything better. The flipside of being P2W is that mobile games are obviously very sensitive to the player's wants, and I've always seen people talk about random AAA games with comment like "I'll pay this much if it only offered this". Well, mobile games definitely answer that call, and it's because mobile games usually don't care too much about balance that you actually get stuff worth paying for. Unless you're SWTOR selling new lightsaber models that add no extra damage but can get away with it because lightsabers are the coolest thing ever, there really isn't this notion of 'cool cosmetic worth lots of $ but have no in game impact', because being cooler than the other guy isn't worth THAT much more money.