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Tag: research

Gran Turismo Café

Published by Paolo on 22/08/2022

Saturday I got a PS5. I am so happy you cannot imagine. I was chasing the opportunity since a whole lot and I found mine. It came with Granturismo 7, Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring (which scares me because I am very bad at those games) and a second gamepad.

I wasn’t playing Granturismo since its second edition, so that I lost its tracks. Seeing it in its 25th anniversary makes me proud. I was there when the first edition launched. I was there struggling a lot with patents and so on.

With the power and the controllers of PS5 now I can feel way more the cars. The simulation improved a lot. The game converted to a service. You race and complete challenges to earn credits. You use those credits to purchase cars and parts. If you are not patient, you can also purchase extra credits. The game is a service, every day there are novelties. It has a lot of functionalities, mechanics, features and game modes so that a Player may feel lost.

Menu Books and Compass

Using the italian café metaphor, a character named Luca will guide the Players with his menu books. A set of missions designed to drive the Players.

A yellow compass guides the Players to the game mode and section they have to go in order to complete the challenge.

  • The compass is on the map and on the top bar.
  • The top bar completes the information with a sentence

The Player gets content/story on challenge completion

and with a roulette ticket (gacha) which permit to get credits, cars and car parts

Roulette ticket have stars and an expiration date, so that the Players cannot store them and get the last things after some month (thing that happens in a lot of free to play games). They have to invest them.

I am reading a lot of complaints regarding the missions given by Luca at Gran Turismo Café. Sometimes it forces you to purchase upgrades for a car that is not interesting. Still, I notice than the next challenge is always related with the previous ones. The game is thoughtfully designed.

I believe that when the Players have the opportunity to spend real money to skip time and satisfy their impatience, they can be led to believe that everything is designed to grab their money. You should grind a lot in order to get the best cars. Best cars are worth millions of credits and from a single race you get 2-5k. You have to play a lot to be able of purchasing them. The missions that require you to spend those credits that you are saving in order to progress can be a pain in the arse.

Still I am loving this game and this system is a very neat references for games with a lot of mechanics. Now I want to buy a G29 wheel and test the real drive!

Build the game thinking in system

Published by Paolo on 27/07/2022

Making video games is hard and it has a cost. That is why often we feel the need of building an universal system, capable of letting us creating more games in less time.

Players, instead, purchase and play video games for the experience that game has to offer. They usually do not think in systems, also if they are capable of understand what is similar to other games.

To me the best approach is to make a video game. The best is to focus on a concrete platform and a concrete experience having a great vision. Then if that system is designed to be custom, that is great for the production of next games, of course. But the priority is on the game itself, not on the system you are building.

If you think just in the system, I have to tell you, maybe you are not believing too much in your game. Which is completely normal, you should rely on data and results to believe in it from a business point of view. But from the creative point of view you should also notice that little spark waiting to become the next big IP.

Have a nice summer folks, this is the last post before of my vacations. See you soon!

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.

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!

The future of game design: Accessibility

Published by Paolo on 17/05/2022

All around the World, everyday hundreds of people publish their games on virtual stores. The efforts required to get the attention of the players are enormous. Apple’s new policies regarding player privacy only make this situation worse. The costs of acquisition campaigns are increasing dramatically and it is increasingly difficult to find people who like your type of game.

Look at that copy: nobody will accept to be “tracked”. It’s survivorship!

If we then consider that a substantial percentage of these people have hearing, vision and / or mobility problems, we risk wasting money by acquiring people who will never be able to play our game even if they want to.

There is one thing I have learned in recent years in industry: the development of a game compared to the marketing of the same is cheap. It is less risky to develop a good game, because then the benefits are seen in the announcement phase of the game.
I therefore believe that accessibility features will be increasingly needed in the games of the future, regardless of the platform.

Product lifecycle impacts marketing directly. Source: https://marketing-insider.eu/characteristics-of-the-product-life-cycle-stages/

Reasons

The first reason, as we have said, is the increase in the player base.

In order to improve your sales, make beautiful games that everyone can pick and play despite of physical and mental challenges.

The Last of Us 2 true innovation wasn’t about gameplay. It was about Accessibility.

The second reason is that accessibility allows for better games. Games with friendly interfaces, which perhaps allow you to customize the experience according to the type of player and his physical characteristics. Let’s face it: now a lot has been done in terms of creativity. There are games that metaphorize all kinds of experiences and contexts. There is still room for innovation, but few things are more important than accessibility.

Where to start

For me, a good design process always starts with a diagnosis.

A sincere diagnosis that asks questions and generates hypotheses on which the team can feel motivated to collaborate. Microsoft on its site dedicated to accessibility asks the following questions:

Can you complete the game using a single hand?

Would an average person be able to pick the game up and play?

Can you effectively play the game on a small monitor or TV sitting at a distance?

Do you support more than one type of input device that can be used to play through the entire game?

Can you play the game with sound muted?

Can you play the game with your monitor set to black and white?

When you load your last saved game after a month, can you easily figure out where you are in the game and know what you need to do in order to progress?

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/gaming/accessibility-for-games

Here, this seems to me an excellent basis to start discussing this important feature that will significantly impact the future of games.

Study of Soda Supreme

Published by Paolo on 09/05/2022

Last week I saw a post from some LinkedIn influencer regarding a new liveops from King’s Candy Crush Soda Saga.

When I read the description, I decided to study this feature. In fact, as you can see from the announcement on the game’s official forum, the Soda Supreme feature proposal seems heavily based on monetization:

happy language to announce a disaster

Comments to the feature seem to go into one main direction. Obviously the volumes of people playing these games are huge. The majority is silent and we do not know if it has given good or bad results. As a game designer, I just try to understand the vision behind this, willing to learn from the masters of free-to-play.

That Bricorn may be right!

Then I downloaded the game again and tested the feature out:

I always record my gameplays on my channel (no commentary)

Goals and KPIs

When the Player runs the app, after a second a new screen will appear:

Sorry for the “Screen Recorder” thing on top

The pitch is quite clear: you get rewarded by spending gold bars. The fact that you are using the premium currency is reinforced by a new rewards layer.

Who is the real target of this feature? Payers: Players who use gold bars regurarly during their game sessions.

Probably, the team wants to improve the Gold Bars spending across the game. It will improve ARPDAU, average revenue per daily active user, since it is a time based feature.

Rewards are boosters, power-ups and lives:

the last tier is also the strongest one

There are 20 tiers of rewards. The higher the tier, the better the rewards. Rewards help you beat new games, so that if you spend gold bars you’ll probably beat more levels.

A secondary goal for the feature is probably to improve the engagement with the game. Engagement to me is: session length (minutes) and average sessions per day.

Feature Onboarding

The onboarding is heavily text based
  • The game matches you with a tier, according to your spending rate (I suppose).
  • The promise is to earn 1 special tile booster. I can make that simply by playing!
  • I have 42 hours total to pass to the next tier, otherwise my bar will reset. So that they are definitely looking for more sessions per day and more trials.

I am not sure that is the best way to explain the feature. First of all, I would introduce it starting from the first time the Player spends and/or needs gold bar. Second, the first reward is something I can create by matching 4 tiles in vertical. It would be better having more succulent rewards on lower tiers to foster the will to continue purchasing gold bars also for Players who doesn’t spend too much.

How will I improve this feature?

Candy Crush Soda Saga is an arcade version of the classic Candy Crush Saga. The levels are more blasty and also the challenge is designed for quick results (successes or failures). It’s fast, it’s for the younger cohorts of CCS Players and it has many game modes. The Player has always something to do.

Match-3 games monetize by removing pain points and by adding an interesting layer of strategy. A large part of the Players pay to be able to pass a level in which they are stuck.

  • Pain Point: You have run out of movements, but if you buy 5 more you can beat this!
  • Strategy: You may want to buy a booster to free up some areas on a complicated board.

In Candy Crush Soda Saga gold bars can be bought or won in certain situations. They are a soft currency, so that they are subject to inflation. Which is part of the reason why is very hard to scale those games.

The true potential of Soda Supreme

It would be great to adapt this feature to a ticket system for special levels. You spend gold bars and you earn tiers of special set of levels which give you extra rewards. That would be more meaningful and would probably create a better impact on the game’s community!

Anyway I found this feature really interesting, because it has the courage of taking the monetization directly! We should never forget, anyway, that rewards are great to reinforce successes. They works better as surprises and as the result of a concrete demonstration of skills from the Players. Spending gold bars can give access to new pieces of content, instead, and that would be way more meaningful in my humble opinion!

Last post on crypto games

Published by Paolo on 06/05/2022

After many months studying and deepening these technologies in detail, I have come to an important conclusion. The video game industry deserves to broaden the audience and encourage access to more people. We don’t have to shrink if we want to grow.

Crypto technology was developed with the sole objective of evading controls of banks and states on the circulation of value.

There is an attempt to force these technologies into video games, as video games have demonstrated their ability to attract people’s attention.

These technologies are not necessary in video games. The video games are necessary for these technologies!

All implementations are solutions designed for nonexistent problems. We don’t need this bullcrap in our industry.

I understand that there are a lot of investments. We are facing another fever for the novelty. But we are because people, especially those who move money, do not delve into the history of the video game. All significant revolutions have resulted in a broader audience and a significant improvement in accessibility.

These crypto-bullshits, on the other hand, unnecessarily complicate things to create pyramid schemes designed for people who get drawn into these traps!

Art explains tech trends today

Published by Paolo on 21/02/2022

Is video game art for you? For me it is. What is the result of human creative work and comes to attract the attention of other people can be defined as art.

If the video game is art, it is interesting to study the history of art to understand many of its facets. Part of the history of art is the time when living artists realized that they could have very large profits from a simple certificate of originality of an artistic work.

Which explains a lot of the NFT movement that has fully invested the video game in recent months.

This reporter explains it better than me. Enjoy it.

If a videogame is a piece of art, instead of creating multiple NFTs why not embed your whole masterpiece in a single NFT?

Vampire Survivors – Small game, well made

Published by Paolo on 11/02/2022

I am completely engaged to Vampire Survivors. Made by few people, it’s a game about power creep. I am totally engaged. Here my last gameplay:

The goal is to collect experience and level up, becoming stronger and unlocking new characters and scenarios.

Tower of Wants

  • I want to kill monsters to get experience
  • I want to get experience to unlock the next power
  • I want to unlock the next power so that I can survive more time
  • I want to survive more time to get more gold
  • I want to get more gold to unlock more characters
  • I want more characters to have new play styles
  • I want new play styles to unlock more achievements
  • I want to unlock more achievements to complete the game

It’s a simple idea, built around a retro theme (Castelvania). I admire people who build this kind of things. It is so smart and make me always thing: why didn’t I made this?

Clash of Clans notes on tutorial

Published by Paolo on 29/01/2022

Read the first part of the analysis here.

In this second part I want to write on what I experienced personally during the tutorial experience. It is very important to write down notes for a game designer.

If you have no time for that, you have no time to learn.

The game welcomes you with the main view of the Village. Here the Player can already decide “this is my kind of game” or quit. The welcome is given by the Villager, one of the two characters introduced in the tutorial. The girl has changed visually:

Her expressivity has become more exaggerated and her proportions are nearest to the beauty standards. I preferred the old one, since she reminded me more of a tough and rude viking. But I get why this one was selected: especially on a small screen you need to emphasize gestures and expressions.

The first mechanic is introduced. The tutorial makes you build a cannon to defend from a goblins’ raid. The sequence is pretty memorable. The goblin is fun and informal, but uses sophisticated words and spells correctly. The animation after the build, which is an idle mechanic with its rewards per se in the game. The defense mechanic is not completely introduced to the Players. Players will learn it alone later simply by playing and discovering they can tap on graves to earn some extra elixirs. Which is pretty smart!

Just after, the Player learns the attack feature and all of its mechanics. A group of 5 wizards join your village and you can use them to get revenge with the goblins. First of all, I believe that wizards are chosen because they are narratively meaningful. In fact the Villager has explained that your village is built on a Ley Line, so that your buildings will auto-repair. Magic is on the air. Second, wizards are pretty fast destroying buildings which is great to keep the tutorial shorter. Last, wizards are a kind of troops that a Player can unlock later in the game. So that the Players can get a hint of future unlocks and test two troops during the tutorial (later, they will use the barbarians).

Read the historic deconstruction made by Deconstructor of Fun here

The third part of the tutorial puts its focus on the importance of building and improving your village. I believe that the Developers, after giving an hint on the possible thrills and best moments, considered proper for the Players to really learn the core loop deeply. The Player builds 5 important resources, completing the core loop five times. It is more than enough to learn the basics of the game. 

The tone of the Villager is very formal, and that is when I want to work for personal exercise the next few days. I believe that this part hasn’t aged well and I would like to improve it as an exercise. Many clones of this fantastic game popped out and also many evolutions are at the door. The next successful game can be possibly based on this masterpiece. Especially for new players, I believe that the Villager is a character which should have a more relatable personality. Messy, complicated and interesting. Just like people in real life!

The 2022 tutorial ends with one of the newest features of the game: challenges and rewards. The overview is too fast and based on skipping dialogues, more than actually learning something meaningful like in the first part. Which makes the tutorial experience ending with many questions. This can be interesting for newbie Players, especially for the most hardcore part of the audience that can perceive suddenly that this game is not linear but deep.

When the Players return into the SHOP section, they will find the first offer which is the third builder. No pop-up, no constant prompts looking for no-brain conversions. The value is there. During the tutorial you entered the SHOP enough times and now you know that the SHOP is critical to the experience. You will find the offer and, if you want, you will convert. That is what I call: treating Players with respect.