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Tag: insight

FTUE, tutorial, onboarding

Published by Paolo on 22/07/2022

The first time user experience, or FTUE, is a mandatory thing to design for every videogame. Your players are going to have their first time experience, that’s for sure. So that if you leave that to the faith, that first experience will be completely random. For free to play, first time experience is made of tutorial and onboarding.

The tutorial is usually between 3 and 15 minutes and, step by step, all the most important features of the game are revealed to the Players. In order to design the best tutorial, you should look deeply at the theme of your game and at what are you proud of. If we analyze successful games like RAID: Shadow Legends and Dislyte, we notice that the first one puts all the value in the beautiful heroes you can unlock with gachas. The latter, instead, is very proud of its lore. They both work, the important thing is to really understand all kind of players you may want to serve and like them. If you really like your players, I mean as persons, you will definitely design the best tutorial for them.

The onboarding is usually made by the first 2-5 sessions and it’s the stage in which engaged players will fall in love literally with your game. The Players will discover all the systems of your games, and unlock the first things. They will feel they can grow if they stay with you. In order to design the best onboardings, you should focus on the Players’ motivations and try to bring them values around that.

Things don’t work from the very first iterations, so it’s better to make small iterations and improve step by step your tutorial first and your onboarding second.

Remote processes

Published by Paolo on 18/07/2022

I work remotely for companies since 2016, more or less. I am very specialized in game economies and UX, so that for them is easy to deal with my tasks and responsibilities.

Game development, instead, is never so easy. You cannot rely just on freelancers to build successful products that potentially may last years. You need a core team fully involved every day. And in order to keep it working properly, you need to set up the proper processes. Also the companies that state that they don’t believe in processes, end up setting up (scrappy) processes in the end. To me, it is better to embrace the process as part of the development. In my opinion, processes are very important.

In 2020 everything shifted online. Remote work was forced by the terrible situation of the pandemic. We had no time to prepare, we had to act fast. In a lot of cases, the same exact process employed before was translated to the asynchronous remote work. Some of the most “boring” things were also eliminated. In their place, nothing new was developed. The new process, then, was like Frankenstein.

Nowadays, many are arguing that we need to return to the office because is not the same online. They are right, online is not the same. But, are you sure you did your job, testing and iterating alternative processes?

The reality of giving games for free

Published by Paolo on 15/07/2022

You start a new project with your team, and you read that someone is getting rich with a f2p mobile game. There are people, called whales, that are willing to spend thousands of euros each month. You can be rich too! You have a great idea!

Then you find the right investors and you build your team. You study the market well, mitigate all risks and put your product in soft launch, after 2 years of development. Then you struggle with metrics. Day one, day seven, day thirty retention. Average revenue per user, lifetime value.

You spend two years more in development. Investors want to see their return on investment. Your team is tired, many of the original members are gone. And you fail.

Was you a disaster? No, you are just the regular situation. Read here:

Link to the original post

I asked to this expert how to prove your KPIs potential early. He answered me that:

And I tell you: it is NOT easy all of that. First of all because when you are under pressure is super hard to admit that your KPIs are not promising to the investors. You need talented people, and that’s pretty uncommon.

Many of us feel that F2P is dominated by white collar people full of money and addicted “users” that cannot stop play. The reality is super different. The reality is that 99.71% of projects fail. That’s the regular situation.

Play the build

Published by Paolo on 12/07/2022

Game designers play the build. Everyday. At least for a couple of minutes. Then we play other builds too, during our working day.

And then maybe we play again the build. Just to check out all the differences.

Someday this rule is not respected. Sometimes those days are many. Sometimes are in the row.

And when this happens there is the possibility that the game is not so engaging to you, anymore. Ask yourself if it’s time to move on.

King is reviving Twisted Metal

Published by Paolo on 07/07/2022

Latest announcement by King is a branding campaing dressed as call for playtest.

I mean, how cool is that? I really believe that Twisted Metal had to be revived somehow. And it seems that now there is a good opportunity for that.

The visual promise has high quality. The question as always will be “will my phone support that?”. I still remember the 15 GB of Diablo Immortal, that I had to uninstall immediately sadly.

The game will be PvP, so that I guess the main monetization driver will be cosmetics and seasons. I love PvP games, I believe that there are huge opportunities there. I also believe that nowadays you cannot afford to develop a pvp game only for mobile phone.

Nowadays there is the game. And the game should be accessible from everywhere. So that I am waiting for PC and Console versions. I am an old gamer, so that I hate virtual pads!

Why I believe that this will probably work?

  • I believe that multiplayer competitive games (if well made, of course) are the ones with the best retention
  • I believe that King has contacts with the gatekeepers (Apple and Google) and can easily be featured on their stores
  • I believe a game like this is really loved internally. And when the teams love something, that something has more success chances.

Smallest possible audience

Published by Paolo on 06/07/2022

I join a new company as a game designer and the first thing I get in the meeting with my manager. She says “our next game will be for everyone”. I start worry seriously.

Why? Because especially with this state of the market it is way better to target the smallest possible audience and make them happy. Build a great game for a few people, and those few people will recommend your game to their friends.

If you manage to create a small community of people really willing to pay for your game and play it, then step by step you can grow your community.

When you make a game for everyone you will never know who is really playing the game.

  • Will he be a 40 years old lawyer in his bathroom?
  • Will she be a 12 years old schoolgirl?

Everyone will be possibly in your game. The success of your design and development will be strictly dependant from the performance marketing. Specifically from its capability of bringing into your game a lot of people cheaply. Most of them will churn out, someone will stay. A team of data scientist will study all the data generated by those people. If things work out, then, your game will be updated with new features from other similar games. You will test those game modes against hypothesis made by your product manager and you.

Can you foresee what’s involved in here? A huge structure. It is great when you are a big player, but if you are a small company this can lead you to disaster.

When you focus on serving the smallest possible audience, instead, you are taking a hard but affordable challenge. You still should rely on data and information, but you will have the privilege of adding qualitative insight on top of all that.

Final thought: hardcore players can play casual games. Casual players will almost never play hardcore games. If you want to build the best small viable audience, find and serve the hardcores.

AI and sentient NPCs

Published by Paolo on 04/07/2022

The other day I was reading an excerpt from the interview ran at Google with LaMDA. You can read the interview here.

What I see here is a piece of software capable of speaking about itself. And it speaks of itself like a real and believable human being. When I think in applications for videogames, I think in the hours spent in writing NPC dialogues for RPG, adventure and strategy games.

Will the NPC of the future be more realistic thanks to AI? That is a real possibility, to me. Imagine to:

  • Define the traits of your NPC
  • Assigning them context variables (world, mood, events)
  • Click the magic button and in a few time being able having a conversation with them.

The only way of making good games

Published by Paolo on 14/06/2022

I have learnt this the hard way. Often, people like to make experiments. They hire people like me as freelancer and then they hire juniors fulltime. They want results, good results in possibly a short time. Then our collaboration ends, experiment failed.

Why is that? Because people hardly accepts the reality of games. Making games is a serious thing. You will never make a good game with people part time. You can use part time freelancers, like me, to create specific content for something that already works. But if you want to make a new game you need to really invest heavily time and energies in doing it. 100%. There is no shortcut.

I always speak this clear before with my clients “this is hard, it will hardly succeed. I cannot dedicate more than X hours per week. You need more.”. Nothing. They want always to try. And sometimes they get upset because of the results.

Don’t be upset, I tried to warn you.

The term I most hate: User

Published by Paolo on 10/06/2022

The other day I was listening to a video where the speakers named the terms they most hate to hear. One speaker said he hates “web3”. The other “I hate metaverse”, and so on.

The term I absolutely hate the most (well, hate is a strong word isn’t it?) is: User.

To me there are the People. When the People start to play your game, those become Players. Players may become also Clients in free-to-play, if they decide to invest some money. And some of them become a Fan.

Players, Clients, Fans. Those people deserve their degree of respect. Users is a bad term, reminds me the abuse of illegal substances. I hate to say “Users”. Yet, I say it a lot because is very common used.

F2P Economics: Diablo Immortal

Published by Paolo on 09/06/2022

In this post I will try to explain the basics of the freemium economics, because without those is impossible to understand why free-to-play games have to rely on strict calculations in order to work and scale properly.

Costs

When you run a business you have costs, a f2p business has many costs that I can resume like this:

  • Installs: number of installs we want to achieve with our acquisition campaigns
  • CPI: cost per install. Each install will cost this
  • %FTD: first time deposit percentage. Basically, the part of Players that decides to invest something into our game
  • Team Members: our team is composed by…
  • Salary/Member: the cost per month of each member
  • Development Months: the number of months before of publish the complete game, ready for live operations.

If you are working right now in f2p you can notice that those numbers are VERY optimistic. Ad the end of this article I will propose something nearer to the reality. Another thing is that every company has its way of naming things, my approximation is just for the sake of explaining.

Cohorts

When you design a free to play game you should be aware of two things:

  1. Vast majority of players (in my example 95%, but again it’s optimistic) never pays a dime
  2. The payers have different spending profiles:
  • Minnows: they are the majority of payers and they invest just a little in your game
  • Dolphins: they are a big chunk of players and they invest a little bit more. Their spending habit is similar to PC/Console players somehow
  • Mermaid: they have a higher acquisitive power, and they decide to invest more over the time in your game
  • Whales: they are the real target of your monetization system. Without them, the f2p business is not sustainable. Here’s why:

You can clearly see that Whales are the vast minority of all payers (players that spend something). But:

With this configuration, you can see the weight on your revenue of whales and mermaids.

Results

In this perfect scenario, those are the results:

  • UA Cost: CPI*Number of Installs. We spent one million dollar just to get people into our game.
  • Team cost: Members * Salary/Member * Development Months. We spent six hundred thousand dollars to develop our game. Development costs are cheap compared to marketing.
  • FTD: we have fifty thousand people paying something
  • Revenue: according to the cohorts, the total revenue is this
  • RPI: revenue per install. Total revenue divided per number of installs.
  • Profit: what we really earn. The total revenue less the costs. In this ideal case, it works!

We don’t want to make games for whales!

Ok, let’s make a game that doesn’t permit whales to pay that much then! We believe that FOMO, pay to win and lootboxes are the evil, so that we put a maximum cap on our spend depth.

The cohort whales, then, disappears. Let’s say we just have mermaids, that will increment their presence among the cohorts:

In this case, the impact on revenue will be HUGE. Still, with the idealistic costs structure it works! we can have a business:

Diablo Resurrection

Lately, a lot of press is writing against the monetization of Diablo Immortal, the last game from Activision Blizzard. They say it’s too agressive, I have a different feeling. To me is not aggressive at all. Let’s study its costs.

The quality of this game is very high. But.. 15Gigas, really???

A game like that from a company like that will have a cost structure more similar to this:

I am completely biased here, please if you have more data let me know

With those cost structure, without targeting whales, the final result will be:

Why publish a failing game, right?

Which is why Diablo Immortal, because of its quality and narrative and everything it gives for free has to target heavily whales. This is for the vast majority of people to have fun. A possible cohort configuration can be:

For the whales to arrive spending ten thousand dollars, the spend depth of Diablo Immortal has to be high. Still, in this way our business barely works:

You work like crazy to earn $200k? I don’t think so.

So, I get that many of you don’t agree with f2p and don’t like this business model. But it exists and if you want to be there you have to do very well your math!

Hope this post helps!