Casual Connect 2013: How to Monetize Emotions in Free-to-Play Games

by Julia Palatovska, Business Development Director, and Tatiana Timoshenko, Director of Licensing, G5 Entertainment

·         Summary: The core emotions to monetize are impatience, curiosity, comfort, and ambition. Don’t force players to pay, but make them want to pay.

·         Impatience – Players don’t want to wait. Allow them to pay to boost things up, expand their session time, or to skip grinding.

·         Curiosity – Announce new content ahead of time and have locked content that players can pay for.

·         Comfort – Pay to overcome restrictions, get tools for easier progression, and get protection from disasters.

·         Ambition – Pay to overtake friends on the leaderboards, have the best items, and own awesome things. Always compare players to their friends.

Casual Connect 2013: Keeping Your Development Team Motivated to Run the Free-to-Play Marathon

by Guy Bendov, CEO, Sidekick Games

·         Think about development in two phases, pre-launch and post-launch. In other words, it’s assumptions and realities.

·         The unknowns of moving into the free-to-play space are scary. Not everyone can handle it.

·         Advice – lose ridigness, locate the nimble and detail-oriented, create a small team with external help, focus on the core features and postpone the others, the team needs to support quick iterations

·         Gratifying for the team – short bursts, playable deliverables, everyone should get exposures to the numbers

·         Explore but don’t lose the end goal. Write a game brief with the main features, and then explore the game with everyone involved.

·         A free-to-play game is like running an online shop. You need marketing, sales, and in-store updates with item management, promotions, pricing, and placement.

·         Communicate with players often and have the entire team communicate with them. Players are the guiding angels and the numbers they generate are key. Print out all the numbers and expose it to the team by pasting it near the team area.

·         Tips – allow the team to change game parameters online without pushing content updates, leave time for third party service integration, be quick to respond to failures, don’t lose yourself

·         Making a free-to-play game is like what Ray Bradbury said about love and business. “First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down.”

Casual Connect 2013: Free-to-Play 2013 Year in Review

Abstract: This talk covers the 6 trends that came out of free-to-play games in 2013 including the solidification of social and mobile markets, rise of the mid-core, King’s dominance, casino games, endless runners, and that nobody knows anything.

·         Speakers include Dave Rohrl (VP of Game Production, Funsockets), Juan Gril (Studio Director, Joju Games), and Steve Meretzky (Former VP of Game Design, Playdom).

·         Trend #1 – Facebook and mobile leaderboards

o    Top developers on each platform mostly carry over between years. Zynga, King, and Wooga were top of the Facebook chain in the last two years.

o    Lessons – it’s very tough to break into Facebook and the platform solidified fast, mobile is more open but it’s getting harder

·         Trend #2 – Rise of the mid-core

o    Clash of Clans, Modern War, and Kingdom Age have proven that more men are playing mobile games. Supercell and Kabam have built businesses off this premise.

o    These games have lots of social aspects like guilds, collection aspects, and high production costs (ie. Injustice and Real Racing).

o    Lessons – men play casual games, combat and collection mechanics are successful, production values are rising very fast

·         Trend #3 – King

o    King started their saga series with Puzzle Saga and Bubble Saga. They became successful with Bubble Witch Saga andCandy Crush Saga, and has since followed with Mahjongg Saga, Pyramid Solitaire Saga, HoopDeLoop Saga, Pet Rescue Saga, Papa Bear Saga, and Farm Hero Saga.

o    When Candy Crush Saga came to mobile, it launched a true cultural phenomenon like other many hits in the past such asTetris, Pacman, Guitar Hero, Farmvile, Angry Birds, and Clash of Clans.

o    Lessons – strategy matters, persistence matters, quality matters

·         Trend #4 – Chipping in

o    Casino games remain dominant. Tables are social and offer multiplayer.

o    The pros of casino games are reduced design risk, reduced learning curves, and an understood monetization model. The cons are that it’s easy to replicate the mechanics, players resist game variants and innovation, and development requires premium math skills to maintain a stable economy. The market is also saturated with big name players like Big Fish, Zynga, and GSN.

o    Lessons – casino games offer great monetization, it’s a crowded field, legalized online gambling will expand the market

·         Trend #5 – Endless runners

o    Endless runners have had successful iterations since its introduction with Canabalt. Jetpack Joyride added an alternative movement to simple jumping and missions, Temple Run added the third dimension along with tilting and sliding, Subway Surfers added customization features, Despicable Me: Minion Rush added stages and boss fights, and Running With Friends added asynchronous multiplayer. There’s still plenty of room to explore for the genre.

o    Lessons – simple and addictive, missions and alternative actions are key, production values are rising

·         Trend #6 – Nobody knows anything

o    A common myth was that “word games are dead,” but Words With Friends, Spelltower, and wurdle have become big hits.

o    “Dragons are for core gamers,” but Dragonvale and Puzzles & Dragons have disproved that myth.

o    “Zynga will always be #1,” but King has surpassed its dominance.

o    “Hidden object games don’t work on Facebook” but Gardens of Time changed the paradigm. The new mantra became “Hidden object games are the biggest thing on Facebook” and a wave of clones came out, all failing one after the other. The mantra went back to “hidden object games don’t work on Facebook” and now Criminal Case came out and proved that wrong yet again.

o    “Casual players want easy fun,” but Candy Crush Saga is an extremely difficult game.

o    Lessons – metrics only help you sand off the rough edges

Casual Connect 2013: The Merits of Multiplayer

by Rik Haandrikman, Director of Business Development, GamePoint

·         Rik defines a multiplayer game as any game in which your interactions with other players is a core part of the gameplay. Some examples of casual multiplayer games are Zynga Poker, Clash of Clans, and 8 Ball Pool, and core games are World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and League of Legends.

·         The pros of multiplayer are great retention (it may have poor day 1 retention, but incredibly high retention for anyone who sticks around afterwards), built-in discoverability through word of mouth, and endless content through users.

·         The cons of multiplayer are that users are content (one player’s bad actions can affect all players’ satisfaction), gaining critical mass is hard (especially with synchronous multiplayer), and multiplayer isn’t the norm (users need to be educated).

Casual Connect 2013: The Four Most Important Emotions for Free-to-Play Casual Games

by Nicole Lazzaro, Founder & President, XEODesign

·         Summary: The four key emotions are fiero, curiosity, amusement, and desire. You can tap into these emotions by making the store fun to explore, allowing for social play, making items feel special, and making purchasing a part of the play experience.

·         You can increase purchasing with emotions from play. Nicole has a degree in psychology from Stanford and deals with play experience consulting.

·         What’s working now is to have engagement loops that drive purchasing. Multiple loops increase the number of engagement points.

·         Emotions help us focus, remember, decide, perform, and learn. The four key emotions are fiero, curiosity, amusement, and desire. They map to the four main actions… compete, explore, socialize, and collect.

·         Curiosity (easy fun) – encourage exploration of the store, tell story with descriptions, make sure you get the player to click on the items to read the descriptions

·         Fiero (hard fun) – have goals and obstacles that require strategy to overcome, give opportunity to compete and win, give challenge and mystery, make players earn the right to buy something from the store, gamify the store so that you buy items to unlock other items for purchasing, have missions that require shopping to get people in the habit, Tiny Tower’s shop for currency exchange is a tiny game itself and players feel smart for understanding the conversion rate strategy

·         Amusement (people fun) – include communication, have cooperation or competition, encourage friendship and social bonds, employ silliness to build trust (ie. Tiny Tower’s costume shop), have social comparison with friends using leaderboards or map progression, have funny things because people will share amusing things

·         Desire (serious fun) – increase the perception of value, give tactile impressions of worth (by giving items good graphics and satisfying audio)

·         Takeaways – make the store fun using amusing stories, allow players to play to progress (as well as pay), allow customization, show players that you care by being generous, make purchasing part of the play experience.

My takeaways – Her breakdown of the four emotions map directly to Richard Bartle’s test of gamer psychology. There are killers (hard fun and fiero), achievers (serious fun and desire), explorers (easy fun and curiosity), and socializers (people fun and amusement). 

Casual Connect 2013: D180 is the Mark of Quality

by Aaron Loeb, VP, EA Mobile

·         Summary: The most important metric is day 180 retention, so build long-term engagement with your players. The Simpsons Tapped Out  achieved this by following the core values laid out by the Simpsons franchise, putting the player first and delivering high quality.

·         EA worked with Gracie Films to make The Simpsons Tapped Out. The four core values of the franchise are that creative leads business, treat everyone the same, make it great or don’t do it, and remain true to the show. Translations of these values to a game development team were worrying. Does it mean to give stuff away, not run A/B tests, and release “perfect” features without later iterations on them?

·         Creative leads business. Content for The Simpsons Tapped Out was planned 12 months in advance and the team worked on content 6 months ahead. All the content went through multiple passes with the show writers. There were very few sales and merchandising was muted. They followed a fun-driven design and ensured that the game lived up to Simpsons quality.

·         Long-term retention enables community. The game team took over the Facebook page and regularly engages with the players.

·         Non-paying users were not treated as freeloaders and the game never bugged them to purchase.

·         Lessons – build long-term engagement with players, listen and know what matters to customers, quantify services and be ready to respond, build a system that tracks and graphs out where people are complaining about, get the whole team involved, little mistakes can have big impacts (ie. a 6-second increase in load time caused hundreds of thousands of players to drop).

·         When the team knows the data, they will give you their brains.

·         It’s monstrously expensive to get into the top free charts, so make friends with Apple and get editorial placement.

Casual Connect 2013: The 5 Most Common Mistakes in Free-to-Play and How to Avoid Them

by Chris Williams, VP/GM, Big Fish

·         Abstract: This talk covers the 5 common mistakes made in terms of development, engagement, monetization, analytics, and notifications, as well as the best practices to avoid them.

·         Development mistake – Plan 2-3 weeks of live beta before launch, and update every 4-6 weeks.

o    Best practice – perform a 3 month live beta with server functionality for rapid pre-launch iteration.

o    Do rapid updates to logic, difficulty, economy (payouts, daily bonuses, starting balances), and tournaments. Do hundreds of server changes with minimal client updates.

o    Operate your game as a host of your users and their friends at an event. Communicate and moderate the game on a daily basis. It’s not a monthly cadence.

·         Engagement mistake – Design your game content for users who are playing 2-3 times per day.

o    Best practice – Be prepared for your most active users to play much more frequently.

o    Dedicated users will be playing between 20 to 30 times a day. Include enough content and evergreen mechanics that will survive content burn. Always have an evergreen loop, which does not have to be the primary loop.

·         Monetization mistake – Add virtual currency and virtual items and expect users to spend money.

o    Fairway Solitaire is the world’s leading F2P iOS solitaire game. It has virtual currency and sells customized cards, and made a total of $0.

o    Best practice – Clearly communicate the gameplay value of the virtual item to the player. Users need to find an emotional value in their in-app purchases.

o    From most practical to most emotion, the types of items you can sell are…

§  Return on investment

§  Time and convenience

§  Pride and status

§  Luck and probability

§  Rare and scarce

·         Analytics mistake – Focus on just a few standard high level metrics to measure game performance, such as average revenue per user and daily active users.

o    Best practice – establish custom metrics that accurately reflect the health of your game. Pay attention to things like number of boosts used per game.

·         Notifications mistake – Be cautious with how often you message your users to avoid irritating them.

o    Best practice – Message your users daily with exciting, relevant, and targeted information. If they turn off notifications, the next time they log in, remind them of the things they’ve missed while away so that they will want to turn back their notifications on.

Casual Connect 2013: Community Building in Free-to-Play Games: Beyond Whale Hunting

moderated by Mike Thompson, Creative Writer, 5^th Planet Games

·         Summary: Constantly talk to your users and give them a platform to talk to each other, run creative contests to engage fans who aren’t the hardcore gamers, and be careful about talking about future content.

·         Panelists include Robert Winkler (CEO, 5^th Planet Games), Mike Sego (Gaming Entrepeneur), Ken Seto (CEO & Founder, Massive Damage), Josh Nilson (COO & Co-founder, East Side Games), and Bryan Mashinter (Producer, Backflip Studios).

·         Build the community by incentivizing posting and engaging fans so that they feel like they’re building the game with you. Talk to your users and give them a platform to talk to each other, such as a forum or a live chat. Let the ragers and haters know there is someone else on the other side, and they’ll usually act more polite.

·         Allow them to play with the game when they’re not playing the game. Extend the content of the game outside the screen. Games should stand on their own and have a community outside of its platform. Give shout outs to fan sites.

·         It’s okay to A/B test even with live chats. People generally don’t chat about how much money they spend so they won’t expose the A/B testing. Even if they do, it’s okay. Be honest with your players and let them know what you’re doing.

·         Have volunteer moderators and allow the forums to be self-policing. Volunteers often become your first-line champions and evangelists.

·         If you have the money, have player councils and fly all these special players out to the office to have group meetings with the team.

·         Sometimes a community is passionate about a game, but it doesn’t mean it transfers to another title the company is making.

·         Don’t speak about upcoming features because people take it as a promise and will get upset if the feature is ever cut later. If you say something is “coming soon,” it should mean that it’s coming in the next 24 hours.

·         Have a thick skin against haters. Embrace your mistakes, apologize, and make up for it. Be creative and turn your failures and bugs into features.

·         There are currently two types of monetization methods – monetize those who want to decorate and monetize those who are impatient. In the future, we will monetize people who want to help other players. We will get smarter about the LTV of non-paying users who are generally great word-of-mouth.

·         Run silly contests like costume contests and singing competitions. This will convert people to your forums and will engage fans who aren’t into leaderboards.

·         Give people virtual currency or achievement for posting in the forums.

Casual Connect 2013: Balancing Fun vs. Monetization: Translating Traditional Game Philosophies into Effective Monetization Strategies

by Gary Gattis, CEO, Spacetime Studios

·         Summary: Don’t use pay walls, go cross-platform, find where purchasing points are and accelerate players to that point, and split your app into a small download and a big patch download on first play.

·         Spacetime Studios currently has 35 employees. Then spent 3 years building a space-themed MMO called Blackstar which was eventually cancelled, then some games for Disney which were also cancelled. The company moved into iOS games, making a lot of small unsuccessful games such as Dreadmill, Shotgun Granny, and Zombie Weatherman. They finally developed Pocket Legends, which was their first hit.

·         Don’t wall off the fun. Pocket Legends initially had pay walls, preventing players from progressing on the map until they purchased an unlock. It was a good source of revenue, but the player numbers dropped off dramatically. They removed the pay wall and the average playtime per player doubled, and revenue of items increased.

·         Expand your horizons. They later launched Star Legends, a reskin of Pocket Legends, and they went cross-platform. They let players play with anyone, anywhere, anytime. They cultivated partnerships with Apple, Google, Verizon, and Sony and were able to increase their acquisition.

·         Manage your funnel. They later launched Dark Legends and focused on retention. Find the money in the fun. People were making purchases on levels 7-13, so they decreased the XP curve to get all players to those levels faster.

·         People are more likely to sit through a patch than a download. Decrease the size of your app and do a first-time patch to complete the download when the players launch the game.

Casual Connect 2013: Adapting Mid-Core Gameplay to Casual Platforms

by Mike Goslin, General Manager, Rebel Entertainment

·         Summary: To make a successful mid-core game, your game needs to support evergreen content (user-generated content, PvP), challenge with stats (leaderboards, player matching), and social features (guilds, forum).

·         Mike started his career bringing casual games to hardcore platforms, but has since been working on the opposite.

·         The three tenets of mid-core gameplay to focus on are…

1.     Time – core gamers play more and faster than a casual gamer, so they’ll chew through game content really quickly. Trying to add new content to keep up will end in a perpetually losing race. Some solutions to this are to add an RPG treadmill (but this may be boring), include user-generated content, and add competitive PvP. In terms of operations, your infrastructure should support persistence, multiplayer, and moderation of user-created content and online multiplayer.

2.     Challenge – challenge is often split between your core and casual players. Core players want difficulty right away, while casual players need easy levels upfront to guide them into the game. The trick is to make your game easy to learn and difficult to master. Include leaderboards (both global and with friends), player matching, and real-time stats.

3.     Community – guilds will extend the lifetime of your game dramatically. You will need strong community management and moderation.

·         Theme matters. Your game has to look like it’s for the audience or they won’t even try it.

·         The major pitfall of core games on mobile is the lack of reach. However, core gamers will eventually move into the space and it’s worth making games for them since they have higher LTV.

·         Cross-platform real-time multiplayer for twitch-based games are tough. If you don’t have the infrastructure, you need to make your game turn-based or not cross-platform.

·         Don’t shove leaderboards into player’s faces because it will turn some casual players off.

Casual Connect 2013: Dissecting a Card Battle Game

by Christopher Ory, Playforge

·         Summary: Card battle games drive retention and monetization through enhance and fusion mechanics, events, carefully balanced drop rates, and loyalty programs.

·         A card battle game (like Rage of Bahamut, Marvel War of Heroes, Legend of the Cryptids, Puzzles & Dragons) is not a collectible card game (like Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, Cabals, Solforge). It is a separate genre that also uses cards as its metaphor.

·         Cards are a very effective tool for many reasons. First, your audience can intuitively read abstract mechanics of a card. Secondly, cards are cheap. With a card metaphor, the audience is willing to accept static art and even inconsistent art styles. This way, as a developer, you can out source the art to many studios and get a lot of art done quick and cheap.

·         The game mechanic of card battle games is just tapping. The strategy comes with the collection of cards and the deck composition. This model favors monetizing users who collected the most cards.

·         Rage of Bahamut has two core loops (the PvE loop and the PvP loop). They are both very similar, simple loops (PvE = go on quest -> collect loot -> unlock more quests, PvP = fight opponent -> collect loot -> find new opponents) with different resources. These core loops look exactly the same as World of Warcraft.

·         A very effective retention method is the Enhance and Fusion mechanics. Cards gain experience points and level up, and you can feed less desirable cards to power up other cards. This has two major positive side effects. First, it creates a system where everything (even bad cards) have value and the economy remains stable. Secondly, duplicates become desirable instead of a drag, because you can fuse several duplicates to create a more powerful version of that card.

·         Another retention method is the event system, which targets later-stage players. Have universal daily, weekly, and monthly events where players must coordinate together. This will create talk among players and naturally forge a community around your game.

·         Rage of Bahamut's drop rates are 38.5% normals, 60% rares, 15% high rares, 1% S rare, and 0.5% SS rare. The drop rate of rares are actually higher than normals because it's more desirable and rewarding to the player to get a 2 star card than a 1 star card.

·         Magic the Gathering's booster packs usually include 8 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare, and about 0.25% chance of a mythic rare. Magic's drop system is used for game balance (rares are actually more rare because they are also more powerful) and for secondary markets (retailers can make higher profits off rare cards). Rage of Bahamut's drop rates, however, are intended only to make money, so it's the model you should follow.

·         Kompu Gacha (translated as "complete gacha") is a monetization method where you must complete a set of random pulls. It's similar to prize vending machines at carnivals... you pay a small amount of money to receive an item at random, and you must complete an entire set of these random items to turn it in for a grand prize. Since the items are rewarded randomly, it's very difficult to complete a full set and players can easily spend a fortune getting a full set. This monetization method is so powerful, it was made illegal in Japan.

·         Loyalty programs are effective retention methods. Reward players for logging in or for making x number of purchases.

·         Puzzles & Dragons employs an arcade system where you can pay to continue a level after losing. In addition, it shows you everything you've gained up to that point in the level and you must pay an additional cost to keep those items, otherwise you lose them. This is their highest conversion to purchase.

·         Developers should be transparent about their retention and monetization systems. Don't trick players with dirty monetization methods. Players don't like to be lied to and they will always find ways around your tricks. They will only be more incentivized to "beat the system." Just let players know what they're getting into and it will build trust.

Casual Connect 2013: Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Prototyping Culture at Wooga

by Antti Hattara, Pocket Studio

·         Summary: Make a one-page pitch with a clear objective, make a prototype with scoring, and launch an internal company competition to drive people to playtest the game.

·         This talk is about how to evaluate and recognize prototypes with potential. Antti is the lead of a Wooga subbrand called Pocket Studio, which focuses on casual, mass-market games.

·         They show a case study, an idea called Lines. It's a match-3 game where you draw lines between same colored blocks. Yes, it is exactly like Puzzle Craft andBayou Blast...

·         Their prototyping process is a 3 phase framework.

1.     It starts with the idea being reduced into a one-page pitch. Using a lot of visuals helps a lot. The idea must have a clear objective and concept specification, so the prototyping team would know exactly what they have to build. It must also have some market potential for it to be considered. Lines was pitched as a line-drawing match-3 game with a move limit and a map. There was nothing in the market that was exactly like this, so they decided to go forward with it. This is how the one-page pitch looked like...

2.     The next step is to create a prototype with scoring. While building the prototype, there are two key elements to focus on. The first is that the game is intuitive. Do a lot of user testing to make sure the game is easy to understand and play. The second is that the game provides meaningful choices and replayability. You can achieve this by adding a meaningful scoring system in the game and testing to see if users are driven to improve their scores. Lines had scoring which was attached to a 3 star system. This was used to prove if the game had any retention and replayability.

3.     Finally, release the game internally and hold a competition to get your users into the game. Wooga has about 250 employees, but they found that you only need 50 users as a good sample size for this test. Hold a competition (over the course of 2-3 weeks) with actual physical incentives (prizes, t-shirts, toys). This will test the depth of the game, its extendability (how much the game requires on the content side), and its engagement factor. At Wooga, they create a private Facebook group to run the competition, which adds a social element and the benefit of wall posting. If there's a lot of talk and buzz about the game, you may have a winner on your hands.

·         Lines was a successful prototype and they greenlit the game, soon releasing as Jelly Splash. The idea was pitched in July 2012, the initial prototype was done in Sept 2012, and the competition was held in Dec 2012. Their process takes roughly 3 months of prototyping and 3 months of hardening with a team of 2 engineers.

·         They have about a 20% greenlight ratio. 4 out of 5 games are thrown away.

Casual Connect 2013: Inside the Saga Series

Inside the Saga Series (by Jong Woo, VP Business Development, King)

·         Summary: King’s hit games follow a three-step process (launch a short Flash game on the web portal, port to Facebook with social and monetization features, and build a mobile version with cross-platform synchronization). Deliver snackable, satisfying, social experiences where players are rewarded for winning.

·         King follows a 3 step process to find their hit games

1.     They have a small team of 3 developers who build about one new game a month and put it on King.com, their online portal. They track analytics and play times to see which of these small Flash games have the highest potential. This process allows them to fail faster and cheaply.

2.     The best games on their portal become candidates to be "saga-fied." This is when they add social, viral, monetization, and retention hooks into the games and put it up on Facebook. Facebook allows them to do heavy A/B testing and fine tune the game.

3.     The best performing Facebook games are brought over to mobile. Mobile versions are built natively (not ported over) and they focus heavily on cross-platform synchronization.

·         They have four pillars that guide their design decisions. Their motto is "the player is king" and they're all about optimizing the player experience.

1.     "Winning is the name of the game." King entered the social space pretty late and they intentionally strayed away from making resource management games that have no win conditions. They make sure their games always have clear and concrete goals, immediate feedback for winning or losing, and great rewards when you do win. They adopted the coin-op arcade framework, where you enter a quarter and play as long as you can survive. Their games have a lives system, in which you only stop playing if you lose. This is a "merit-based" system that rewards players positively for their skills.

2.     Rethinking the "social" in social games. Many social games treat your friends as resources, where you receive benefits for having more friends. King focuses on quality of friends, rather than quantity. When you see your friends on the map and leaderboards, this is an inherently social system that drives players to continue playing to stay competitive with their friends.

3.     Create snackable and satisfying experiences. The game should provide fun and meaningful interactions in a 3 minute session, as well as 3 hour sessions. It's unlike a slow sim, where you login for 3 minutes, and all you end up doing is buying something and placing it... then waiting 15 minutes to make another interaction. With Candy Crush, when you login for 3 minutes, you are delivered a complete satisfying game experience.

4.     Play where ever and whenever. King games provide a cross-platform experience with synchronized progress. The company invested heavily in the tech infrastructure that allows this and it was well worth it.