I'm really surprised to see this from a company that makes, of all possible genres, clicker games.
Clicker games usually have almost no actual gameplay, and pretty much only interest people because they exploit many of the same type of psychological tricks that free-to-play games use to keep players hooked. They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression.
I honestly don't think that charging people up front will work, especially not at a $30 price point. Microtransactions work for this game style because you can take advantage of all the time people feel like they've "invested" into the game. Once they've spent hundreds of hours progressing, it's not difficult for some people to justify spending money here and there to make things a bit faster. I don't think many people will feel the same way when they're asked to pay $30 before they can even start getting addicted.
> They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression
First time I heard about clicker heroes game was 2 hours ago, reading your reply. Guess why it took me 2 house to reply? That’s right, I’ve been clicking and clicking. It’s crazy how something so pointless can be so addictive.
I have to agree with you. I would definitely not pay $30 up front to play it, but once you get hooked, I can see how easy is for people to start pouring money into it.
i'd rather pay upfront than be nickeled and dimed afterwards. Esp. if the production quality of the game is up to scratch (e.g., no unrecoverable bugs, good looking graphics/sound, and intuitive UI etc).
Sorry, I mean to say: there's no inherent evolution of plot or mechanics. It's a game that's literally defined by "numbers increasing on the side of the screen, and microtransactions to make those numbers go up quicker." What would that look like without the microtransactions?
It's a bit more complicated than that, and you can make decisions which can heavily penalize you. The person above who said that the optimal way to way would involve spreadsheets is correct, but this one isn't. Ultimately you have (when I tried it a couple of years ago) two main resources, and three meta resources.
Try to think of each of them as a graph of growth over time. Gold is roughly upstream of DPS, but There are additive, multiplicative, and even quadratic effects than may be applied to that relationship in the form of hero powers, items?, etc. However, since by design the relationship between hundreds of effects (mostly in the form of hero powers) isn't clear, some purchases are easily 100,000,000,000,000% better than others, which is to say one wastes your gold.
It's more of a long term time based math puzzle than a game, but there is definitely an evolution of mechanics, as you put it. Also despite the name, I'm pretty sure you pretty much never click in it past the first 10 minutes.
A huge chunk of gaming revolves around the mechanics of progression and getting new things. There will be an audience for the game, because they like this type of game.
MMOs have been wildly popular in the general community, precisely because there are no significantly complex mechanics. Yes, there can be, but a very small portion of the player-base are engaged at that level. You don't need amazing aim. You just press a sequence of buttons. The plot is often totally incoherent and a lot of people skip it. And plot can be supplied by the player's imagination, fitting in with existing fantasies they hold (writing fantasy dialogues for your virtual pet, or I'm the king of the realm, building it by clicking things).
Even FPSes are changing, in Blizzard's Overwatch, the most loved/despised hero Mercy[1] is "skill-less". You're not trying to get head shots or twitch aim or anything, you're keeping 5 bars full while moving around with very simple mechanics. And love it or hate it, you can't deny it's brought in a lot more diverse set of players to the game, I've never heard so many female voices in an FPS.
It make me think that games can be thought of as combinations of several elements, plot, progression, mechanics, difficulty, etc.. Some people like parts part of that. They hate other bits of it. The progression thing seems to be one that's very easy to "exploit" through gambling mechanisms, it seems to be some sort of built in congitive mechanism that probably benefited us when you needed to plan ahead to build a shelter, or go on a hunt, or go out and get X berries, or anything that required a multi-step process for future planning.
[1]Overwatch is a 6 v 6 first person shooter team game where there are lots of different characters to choose from that have very different weapons, skills, and roles, including healers. Mercy is a healer who can heal using a beam that requires extremely basic aim and can fly from player to player. This has allowed players without highly developed aim or positioning skills to enter the game and enjoy it, and then gradually develop those other skills to move to different heroes. The general consensus in the community is that this has allowed it to be much more accessible and fun for people who haven't been playing Halo/CoD/Battlefield from the age of 12.
Mercy is as skilless as Reinhardt or Winston though. Winston's gameplay is absurdly simple; find a healer or squishy, jump in, chase them around, and then jump out before you die. Reinhardt is just keeping a shield up, and knowing when it's safe to do your easily telegraphed rush.
The reason why they are easier is because you need effective tanks and healers in the game, and hard healers or tanks as the only option will make players just be DPS instead. This is why Ana always sucks and never solved the problem of adding more healers; if you like sniping, widowmaker or hanzo is better, and if you like healing, Ana is really hard to heal effectively with due to lack of defense and the need for precision much more than any other healer.
Yes, I just used her as an example of one of the low-aim heroes. I think Winston/Rein are bad starter heroes though as they require you to lead the push[1], which is a stressful job for a new player.
I think the Hanzo/Widow problem might be your personal view more than anything, there are lots of players who like winning games and did play Ana over them. The Hanzo/Widow "I want to DPS"[2] problem wasn't too bad until the disastrous Mercy re-balance caused a lot of problems including marginalising Ana players. Those sort of players don't like playing Mercy, so ended up as DPSers or, at best, Zenyattas.
Personally, I think the whole game would be simply better if they deleted Hanzo and Widow. I don't think snipers should be in a team-based, objective game.
[1] For the benefit of others, these characters are known as tanks (soak damage but don't deal as much) and usually initiate a full team fight, a match can be seen as a series of fights and knowing when to "push" is a key skill of Rein/Winston.
[2] A DPS is damage per second player, they do a lot of damage but are easier to kill. They can attract some players who aren't good at playing the objective and are just trying to get kills. A lot of people consider this role to be the most fun in Overwatch.
> there's no inherent evolution of plot or mechanics. It's a game that's literally defined by "numbers increasing on the side of the screen, and microtransactions to make those numbers go up quicker."
That's demonstrably not true. Universal Paperclips[1] had a progression, with new game elements becoming unlocked. Spaceplan[2] had a plot, and quite a bit of humor, and was absolutely worth paying for.
Spaceplan is pretty great. Glad to see these mechanics maturing into something that can support an engaging story. (Kind of like the progression from Super Mario Bros to recent Mario titles, I suppose!)
These clicker games seem little more to me than an advanced "fidget spinner". There's really no skill or logic required and there doesn't seem to be much of a goal, other than to amass higher points/cookies/cows or whatever.
Doesn't this apply to pretty much everything though? You can partake in any activity without skill, you're just not going to get very far.
And I would argue that, since Clicker Heroes has exponential progression (outsiders) on top of exponential progression (ancients), that if you lack skill you're not going to get nearly as far as in any other activity, when measured in absolute terms. My max hero souls per primal boss kill is currently at e132. If you don't know how to optimize ascensions and transcensions properly you're not going to get very far at all, and will make very slow progression even at around e3. That's over one hundred orders of magnitude lower.
With due respect that's completely wrong. Clicker games have been a thing long before microtransactions were around and popular. I remember sinking an hour or two into cookie clicker: http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
how does tetris work then? You press button in response to what's on the screen. The clicker does have _some_ choices you have to make - it's just an easy choice most of the time.
But if you pay up front the whole concept of paying to make your clickies refresh faster (IE, the entire business model of clicker games) goes away. What's left after that?
I'm OK with people buying a skinner box - just as long as it's not possible to exploit their psychology with a coinslot to make money. Sell the whole box, and the user can do what they wish (including cheat their own way into more coins).
I was seriously surprised this has become a "real" game. I played Cookie Clicker for a couple weeks (and a bit of Clicker Heroes) and always thought they were a parody of the infinite treadmill modern gaming is turning into.
At least for me, they made the math behind the grind so blatantly obvious I've lost interest in any game that uses this mechanic for real.
I wasn't aware there were people so into these games they'd drop real money on them, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around gacha games being so profitable.
The entire genre started with Cow Clicker by Ian Bogost, which was a parody of Facebook games at the time and their lack of interactivity. The problem was though that the parody worked as an actual game for many people, and became the thing it criticized while spawning an entire genre of idle games like it.
Tv Tropes had an entry that is called something different now, but i knew it as "Truffault was right." It's point was that you can't make a movie about the evils of war without inadvertently throwing in enough cool stuff (handsome actors, big explosions, lots of drama) that you end up glorifying it by mistake. That's what happened to Bogost...for all his commentary he just strengthened the whole social game mechanic by distilling it to its ideal form.
Before Cow Clicker there was also Progress Quest [1], which was a similar attempt at deconstructed satire (of fetch quests that were not much more than progress bars), but just as much also paved the way for games/game systems that aren't satire using the same distilled mechanics. (Several MMOs come to mind that have "progress quest" systems to keep players checking in every few hours/days.)
According to Wikipedia, Cow Clicker was first released in July 2010[0]. That would mean that the SMBC Theater's sketch "MMO" precedes it by a few months[1].
Clicker heroes does take actual strategy to progress as you need to do cost benefit trade offs in how you spend resources. Gold, then hero souls, then log(hero souls sacrificed). Add to that when you reset the world, and how you reset it to gain hero souls or sacrificed hero souls.
That said, whenever optimal play is found using a spreadsheet it's not really interactive gameplay.
This is a really interesting attempt, and it might work because of how well-known the game is already.
I got this game (on iOS) about 2 years ago, and enjoyed the progression, and found myself continuing to work on it in 30 second chunks a few times a day. Weeks, months, now years later, I still keep the game on my first home screen and at least once a day continue the progress.
I decided to grab some rubies, mostly to support the developers, spent maybe $25 over 2 years, and felt like I got the best of the deal. Balance is tough, it's been a long time since I've had any desire to buy more rubies. I pre-ordered after reading this article, happy to support their hard work.
> They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression.
If anyone wants to try this type of "game" give cookie clicker a try.
One more with the niche of this forum, and one that doesn't take that much time (depending on your take on the task), is Paperclips http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
What is interesting about both Cookie Clicker and Paperclips is that their stories (yes, they have one, although perhaps it falls somewhere between "theme" and "story") are implicit critiques about clicker games themselves. Especially paperclips is on the nose, since the famous "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment fits the game mechanics so well[0].
Games have the ability to let you have a kind of "lived" experience of something. Sure, a good book makes you live the story through the eyes of the protagonist, but adding the act of making choices within a game framework on top of that changes this fundamentally. This more than anything else is what defines games as a medium.
Clicker games are in a way very interesting deconstructions of what it means to be a game. Cookie Clicker started out as a joke making fun of other game mechanics[1]. Which shouldn't be surprising, since some of the best jokes are deconstructions.
To close the circle, this was recently released as a paid game ($1.99 or $2.99 not sure) on mobile.
This game works so well (within its scope) because of its ability to surprise you with the crazy narrative and convoluted mechanisms it brings in as you progress.
Spaceplan (http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/) also ends after a while and was very entertaining for a clicker game. Apparently they have paid versions now too, which I haven't tried.
I haven't played in awhile, but I believe you can actually get stuck in this one - it's possible to run out of resources and be unable to progress further.
> If anyone wants to try this type of "game" give cookie clicker a try.
Cookie Clicker is fun and entertaining, but I'd recommend playing it (and all other "incremental"/"clicker" games) with the JavaScript console open. Enjoy the story, flavor, and twists, without the wasted time and idleness.
> Also, we like games with mods and we want mods. Real-money shops make little sense with mods, when you can just download a mod to quadruple the number of rubies you get. Also, it is simply too easy to cheat.
I think this touches on an important aspect of microtransactions that to my knowledge remains largely unexamined (but maybe I'm just not reading the right critics). Specifically, games are traditionally built as tools that players use to have fun. From house rules in tabletop games to Game Genie/Action Replay to Automatic Mario rom hacks to Minecraft texture packs, players changing games is something that's been part of gaming culture for a long time. When publishers turn a game into a marketing venue for microtransactions, however, they're essentially laying claim to that entire space, turning it into a dictated, manufactured product rather than a self-directed process in the player community.
I think Valve's model of pure cosmetics with an active workshop and ability to implement custom games shows you can still have microtransactions without turning away the notion of a player community. It just seems to me that the common monetization schemes implemented in other games is a bit of a blatant money grab made by forcing people to artificially grind.
On one hand I agree but on the other, Team Fortress 2, where the model originated has stagnated with only a handful of team members shipping actual content updates to the game with the majority of it just seemingly being community items made canon.
There is still a community but it doesn't feel like the same game since microtransactions were added. It's still a fascinating example of a player run economy though with (virtual) "Mac OSX Earbuds" being used as a primary currency at one point
I am a fan of the _idea_ of only charging for cosmetics customizations instead of hiding actual game content behind paywalls, but the way that Valve and others have implemented it in practice is highly predatory, because nearly everything desirable is hidden behind an opaque wall of RNG instead of just put up for direct purchase for a known price.
This is how you end up with gambling addicts blowing thousands of dollars for a virtual in-game skin, and it has enabled a vast network of grey-markets gambling operations to fuel those addictions [1].
It can be difficult for normal people (who mostly just enjoy the gameplay and maybe once in a while splurge on a few dozen bucks to make our virtual avatars look nicer) to emphasize with people who have real gambling problems, but that doesn't make it any more ethical to exploit them so blatantly.
Hiding these gambling platforms behind the veneer of innocent-looking games also exposes gambling to a younger audience that's much more susceptible to predatory tactics often used by gambling platforms to build up their addiction. There are pretty good reasons why gampling is a regulated industry, and online games that employ these kinds of systems are way overdue for some oversight.
I disagree with nothing you've said, but I do believe it's orthogonal to my main point: monetization via microtransactions doesn't need to inherently influence gameplay in any serious negative way, such as by introducing arbitrary grind or pay to win components. That said, I do wish the implementation was a bit better. It's an attempt at price discrimination which seems to work well, but the gambling aspect is definitely problematic and long in need of either a regulatory look or a pushback from the community. So far, the community seems to push back only when things become egregious.
I don't know if it holds for every scenario, but when it comes to microtransactions or DLC, I judge from the rule: Is this just bitflipping?
If they want me to pay for simply giving me a higher value of X resources, it's bad.
If they want me to pay for adding new content to the game, that's fine.
There is a grey area when it becomes apparent that they removed key content from the "full game" in order to charge extra for it. The new Battlefront 2 debacle shows that.
This should also cover the cases of user added mods since making your own content or hacking your copy of the game would be fine.
Jeremy Lin, the NBA player, talked about getting his teammates to play Clash Royale with him. He was shocked that everyone had better troops than him after two days. Apparently they all dropped thousands.
Clash Royale brands their philosophy as pay-to-advance. You can upgrade faster with real money, but that doesn't mean you will win matches. At some point at the top I assume everyone is spending a lot of money, and is matched up with similar level cards.
That is an interesting point, but I think most companies incentivise whales by putting them up against people who they can crush, whether it is deliberately (as in the case of activision's patent) or by having a matchmaking system that doesn't strictly separate people by their in-game power.
Imagine a game where players only interact if they are the same level. If you can pay to gain levels, that doesn't necessarily make the game unfair. If you can pay to gain an advantage at the same level, that is unfair.
Clash Royale is, much to my surprise, a game that heavily, heavily rewards skill over money bombs.
I've played against clear whale players - several levels higher than me, troops massively over leveled for the match making strata we were in - and they were uniformly terrible players who I beat easily.
Clash Royale is a really interesting game in many ways - it's Free-2-Play path is carefully calibrated to offer a perfect opportunity to pay them £10 on a "special offer" after you've been playing for 6 months to speed you over the grind hump at level 8 ish. That's the point where your in-game currency rewards can't quite match the amount of currency you have to spend upgrading your troops. Once you are over that hump though and get to the next arena level your in game currency rewards increase again relative to upgrade costs and you are back on another F2P coast.
Their non-special offer real-money shop though is absolutely appalling value for money. Anyone who ever buys gems from them at regular prices is crazy in the coconut.
There was an article recently about someone (perhaps EA) who was looking to implement a scheme to reward players for purchasing upgrades.
Right after purchasing a new gizmo, you (in PvP matches) would be matched against players who don't have that gizmo. So you get to enjoy yourself with the purchase for a while. After that, the matchmaking system would then send you against players who have some other more awesome gizmo which you don't have yet. So you get to lose more, and are they incentivized to but the new gizmo too.
So I did play such a free-to-play game where you could pay to level up, but you just battled the same level. I grinded my way up the level tree exploring the different systems that the game had and got my fun out of it. What was interesting was I realized you could craft a "team" that the system thought was a low level team, but what actually something no one would have at that level and was actually more powerful. Think Level 1 character, but somehow was equipped with a great fire sword of the deep and level 10 strength. This was a evening of fun building up such a wacky team that could defeat everyone the system put up against them. And then I realized I had beat the game and never played after that.
Been playing it for over a year, have all cards up to tournament standard and hovering at about 4k rating. Have spent probably close to 150 dollars on it that i do not regret. It is more fun than wow and less expensive, especially in the long run. Now that i have a solid base of cards i am really not incentivised to spend any more money and probably won't except for the rare 2$ 5x value offers which come up every month or so where as in a game like wow i would have to spend 60 bucks every year on an expansion and another 100 on subscriptions, have to constantly grind so need to invest loads of time.. Ugh
In tournament mode the levels are capped so it is an even playing field where spending money doesn't get you wins. I believe other developers have a lot to learn from their model
Oh but wow would've probably demanded 3x more time which would've not been spent in the same fun way. Grinding daily quests is a distraction it is not fun. Want to play PvP? Oh you have to grind battlegrounds 20 hours per week in perpetuity to be competitive in arena. I can play clash royale for 45 minutes a day in 15 minute sessions and be happy with it, it never felt like work.
And that's yearly cost for wow, if you leave the game and come back in a year you have to pay another 60 upfront. I can leave the game and come back to play for free, I won't have any of the new cards but those are hardly essential and you can certainly make a competitive deck with the cards you have if your account is as farmed as mine.
But the "progression" doesn't really buy you anything other than "cooler" cards. You'll still win and lose at similar proportions, because you get matched against more skilled players or players with even better cards.
It means that yes, if getting to the top matters to you, you'll likely spend a lot of money, but spending money on it doesn't really alter whether or not the matches themselves are fun.
I hope (though I'm not truly that optimistic) in a decade that the trend of F2P will have passed. I find them extremely parasitic, exploiting human behavior.
I also hate the term free-to-play, because it purposefully hides the fact that for many games, you either need to grind a lot to acquire content/in-game currency or have to spend a lot.
Just yesterday I was looking for a simcity-like game for my iPad to play that didn’t use microtransactions. It’s simply not there. Not a single city simulator that you can actually play without paying for some stupid credit system.
I was easily willing to spend $10 for such a game, because of the scarcity. I would expect some indy dev to jump into this space, but I guess microtransactions are just too lucrative?
> I was easily willing to spend $10 for such a game, because of the scarcity.
Your willingness to pay $10 for a SimCity-style game probably explains the scarcity. If you and enough others were willing to pay $40-60, you'd find that game.
$10 for a mobile game is perceived as expensive. Many people say "I don't pay $15 for a mobile game", even if they are ready to pay $30 for the exact same game on a game console or PC. And if you look at Steam and the Android Play Store, you will often notice that the the mobile version of a game is often much cheaper, even though they are not significantly different.
Upfront payment simply doesn't work on mobile. Looking at the "most profitable" apps on the Play Store, the first non-free app is ranked 78th.
but if you want the sim city experience, you want a AAA game. It's just not profitable to make that kind of game for $10. So you're never going to get it.
If you only want to pay $10 for a mobile game tops, you will get what that $10 is worth; a 4-5 hour experience with little replayability, but has great graphics and is fun. Someone is not going to recreate a AAA title that had millions of dollars put into it in their bedroom for maybe 23k people to pay $10 for it, or even less.
I don’t expect game mechanics as refined as SimCity, or graphics like that. All I want is a sim game that doesn’t land me into a brick wall after a day because they want me to pay to expand my territory beyond 100 square foot.
And if it was worth it to do that for ten bucks, someone probably would have already. But mobile app consumers are incredibly price sensitive, and so you see the market dominated by crap and F2P, and sometimes even F2P crap.
So you think this is an actual requirement, rather than game studios just trying to maximize ROI by going after the whales using F2P?
I simply find it hard to believe game development suddenly became so much more expensive in the last few years of F2P rise. Isn’t this just about a whole industry discovering an opportunity, and accordingly a new standard of expectations of money to be made ?
When was $10 for a SimCity-like game ever viable? Even if you say that you can live with reduced graphics fidelity and functionality, that's still a lot of work involved. I don't even think the original SimCity was $10 in 1980s dollars.
I guess the canonical example of "you can deliver a premium gaming experience on phones for under $10" is Minecraft, but unless you can sell the volume Minecraft is, you need to make more per user than they do.
There are lots of amazing mobile game experiences available that cost under $10 for a one-time purchase. I don't understand why you think they must all necessarily have AAA budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. One person or a small team of people can easily make an amazing game.
Probably won't quite scratch the same itch, but check out the Suburbia Board Game iOS app. It was a board game inspired by city building games that's fairly popular, that has since been converted to an iOS game. It won't make pretty cities, but it will give you some interesting choices, at least, and has multiple scenarios and levels you can play. It's only $3. No microtransactions, and if it has any DLC it's only going to be the expansions that came out for the physical board game.
Try Cities: Skylines. They offer a lot of (in my opinion) overpriced DLCs, but it's already a great game without them.
You can get it in a Humble Bundle for about 10(?) bucks right now.
I think that there is a big gap between predatory mobile style F2P and other F2P games. I like the F2P games.
In the past, you had to spend money to have something to play and the game would last you for a short while. Nowadays, if you are into competitive gameplay, you can just install League of Legends, DOTA2, TF2, Paladins, Starcraft 2 and lots of MMOs and play for years without paying anything. In most of these games, you only pay for cosmetic stuff, or for early unlocks, but they aren't really necessary to progress.
That's the good side of F2P. But then you have the nasty "you run out of energy, pay $5 to recover" games, which milk you each step of the way and aren't fun at all without paying. These should be frowned upon.
I think one of the main reasons F2Ps have become so prominent is that players want something for nothing - sure, you get all these games for free (but then, most players could easily afford $40 for a game they'll spend hours on) but then your weighted cost of development will get offloaded onto either some rich person with too much time on their hands (ethically fine) or someone with chronic gaming addiction or depression who spends all their money on microtransactions (ethically not fine). I'd much rather live in a world where people were just more happy to pay for things they consume - we'd have a lot less exploitative business practices if this were the case.
"I'd much rather live in a world where people were just more happy to pay for things they consume"
As an "old" and grumpy gamer, I agree, but I think we are past that point. Nowadays I think new gamers are losing track of the fact that they are supposed to play to have fun, and see getting rewards as the only end-goal.
Recently Hearthstone (collectible card game) announced a free roguelike single-player mode, and the only thing many people in the community can think of is that the only reward for completing it is a minor cosmetic item, and that is not sufficient, that they should be better compensated for the time "invested" in it.
Mind, it is an attitude that is a consequence of the culture of microtransations and lootboxes that also Blizzard helped to establish, so it's hard to take the company's side.
> Recently Hearthstone (collectible card game) announced a free roguelike single-player mode, and the only thing many people in the community can think of is that the only reward for completing it is a minor cosmetic item, and that is not sufficient, that they should be better compensated for the time "invested" in it.
To be fair to Hearthstone players, the reason why they have this mentality is because the game is expensive and the amount of in-game currency one earns by playing every day is pretty small. So spending a few hours of entertainment time on Dungeon Run's is essentially giving up potentially earning gold for a pack. I don't think this would be as much of an issue had they not removed Adventures, which had a traditional purchase model (pay $20 to get complete content).
yeah I think both sides of the equation feed into each other to create some kind of Skinner box with mutually-dependent researcher and subject. It's not a pleasant formula and it's started to leak into paid AAA games too (for example, Battlefront II's loot-box controversy and Deus Ex's single player microtransactions).
Well, our language is a very blunt instrument and often gets in the way of clear and nuanced communication.
Almost all the products advertised as free ask for some other form of payment.
Not all of them are harmful, far from it, but we fail at discussing it if we can't even name these different variations.
There is the game platform that will give you games for free because it wants you to register so there is less friction later on when you want to buy something there. Also, this way you have registered your mail in order to send you ads.
Many services on the web are free but this time they mine your personal information in order to target ads
Free to play games want to hook you like an addict using manipulation techniques.
Etc
They are all very different, and not necessarily all bad, but we don't even differentiate them that well in my opinion.
I'm active in the clicker/idle game scene so I can give a bit of background:
It isn't rare lately for people to come to https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/ and discuss possible ways to monetise games. How to best implement microtransactions, opt-in ads, or even some talk lately about cripto mining.
Then yesterday someone wrote a post about the 'unannoying way to monetise', which is to make the game paid.
It wasn't massively well received. If you look at the top comments, they still prefer F2P and microtransactions. And then CH2 dropped this bomb today.
From my personal experience, I am quite skeptic about a paid model for this particular genre of games. Also, 30$ for this kind of game seems a little bit too step.
Nevertheless I wish them best. Hopefully if they are successful they will show the way for others and we will move away from these kind of predatory techniques.
$30 isn't really steep given the thousands of hours of... ahem... gameplay. It's easily justifiable for a niche hobby purchase. I've been idling Clicker Heroes for thousands of hours and it has a very soothing mathematical zen rhythm to it. I highly recommend it to anyone who's enjoyed Cookie Clicker or other idle-type games. What makes Clicker Heroes extra special is the high-quality design and the lovely math that's gone into making sure progress is smooth and eternal. I have high hopes for CH2 and will pre-order it as a vote of confidence.
I'm at the end of cookie clicker and I honestly don't see any interesting progressions forward. I just got 350 chancemakers so now I'm just creating spreadsheets to try to time the "get xxx777777 levels on ascension".
But actually this is a feature and not a bug since I actually appreciate the sense of "I'm done for now" that lets me pause gameplay for a couple of months and wait for a new tier building or something else. I think a more polished clicker game sounds rather scary given my player profile since I could easily see myself get totally absorbed. So CH2 being $30 is good news for me personally since that guarantees I wont get caught. =)
Heh, I just used JS to get that achievement in Cookie Clicker.
I would say that Clicker Heroes is far less demanding of your time than Cookie Clicker. It's difficult to play Cookie Clicker and be mostly idle. Clicker Heroes only asks a few minutes a week to make meaningful progress. It's a different beast than most clicker games, because your game makes significant progress when you're not playing.
IMO, a game price shouldn't be about how many hours of gameplay it provides...
$30 for a mobile clicker game just seems too much to me. I don't think it holds so much value.
NES games were a lot harder to and took more time to produce (we're talking writing the game in assembly for a lot of them) and had less effective tools at producing content than we have today.
You also had to assembly the cartridge and transport it to the retails. Hardware was not as cheap as today (nor was transport I believe).
Compare that to your 2017 mobile game which can be distributed via internet (very cheap), produced at a high level language, and you can make in less than 2 weeks with less than 4 people.
Don't you think that a game providing hundreds of hours of gameplay does hold a lot of value for the user? Getting hours (or even days) of entertainment for $30 certainly looks like a good deal. Especially if you compare it to $8.50 for a ticket to a 2-hour movie.
It also follows the sentiment often found on HN, where freelancers and consultants are advised to price their services based on the value they provide to their clients.
Pricing is more nuanced than just calculating the expenses.
As someone who's playing the game - why do I care whether it took you and three friends two weeks, or a team of seventy people three years? That's all completely opaque to me.
Please tell me crypto mining isn't gaining any traction. The last thing we need is apps and websites trying to hijack our devices to mine behind the scenes.
A great piece, an ethical decision, and I hope the start of something bigger. I agree that free to play is often horribly exploitative, not to mention horrible game design.
But that price point. That makes me worried. Browse around
Steam to see the company they are trying to keep at
$30. In the reddit thread the dev said they've chosen this price point based on $2m production budget. Fair enough they've done their homework and run the models. I'm sure they've done a competitive analysis. But it feels too expensive to me.
I really really hope I am proved wrong. As spectacularly as possible.
I suspect it's all about whether your game is mainstream or niche. The latter probably will earn more with a slightly higher price point. It won't achieve mainstream success anyway, and you also do not have to worry about scaring the dedicated core audience away.
Cogmind is a good example of this[0]. Traditional roguelikes are typically in the "completely free" category. But that core audience that loves the genre is a lot more likely to pay twenty dollars for such an extremely polished and well-crafted game in this genre.
EDIT: Of course, whether or not clicker games are niche games with a hard core audience is highly questionable. If anything they are surprise addictions for casual players browsing the web.
The problem isn't the price point, but what you get for that price. From the video, it looks just the same as the original, and I definitely wouldn't pay $30 for that.
One of the problems with game development is that consumers aren't always very good at judging what they're getting (in terms of quantity, I'm not suggesting consumers can't be trusted to decide whether they like something).
A game with one repeating background, versus a game with a whole range of varied backgrounds, can be order of magnitude cheaper to make. But typically this will be reviewed as "crappy graphics" or "boring art", and the more expensive version will be panned for being too expensive. Sometimes crappy graphics won't matter, sometimes it will.
From the video, there is no comparison in terms of development resource. There is much much more art, many more frames of animation, much less smoke and mirrors in the engine. I can understand why the development budget is $2m.
But I have a horrible feeling that most consumers will be like you, and not see that, and not think that all that effort is worth it, or that they've put much effort into the new game at all. And a good chunk of them (not you) will be very entitled about it, about not getting it for free. The reality of game development, unfortunately.
I only looked at the gameplay. The graphics would only have entered into my decision if they were horrible. I'm a long-time incremental game fan and I've played a ton of them. Most of them have pretty bad graphics, and that's okay. The incremental portion, especially the choices you make (what to upgrade, when, etc) are the interesting parts.
So yeah, I expect a lot of incremental gamers will view it the same way.
And gamers that aren't fans of incrementals are going to be even harsher on the gameplay.
I love this essay. Thinking about people who've damaged their lives on addictive gaming.... those people behind the four-figure numbers on the spreadsheet of Whales. That's sad as hell.
But... it's a clicker game. A hilarious-looking clicker game... but a clicker game. Would anybody spend $30 on a clicker game?
> A hilarious-looking clicker game... but a clicker game. Would anybody spend $30 on a clicker game?
Well that's the thing, isn't it: A lot of people spent a lot more than $30 on Clicker Heroes 1. So yes, obviously people will spend $30 on a clicker game. The question is whether they'll do so via an ethical business model.
Aren't clicker games notorious for hidden difficulty curves, which are sometimes exponential?
The whole p2w model is based off of getting players invested with their time before making it too difficult to progress without investing cash. I'd bet the people who spend $30+ on the p2w version won't be willing to pay $30 up front to start investing time into a brand new game.
It should be noted that ClickerHeroes didn't have p2w for months, maybe years.
I did quit after the addition of Rubies. But the game was legitimately good at balancing the heroes. A good amount of my effort in Clicker Heroes was spent on optimizing builds through linear algebra and other optimization problems.
Clicker Heroes 1 was very good before they went with Rubies.
I threw some money in the form of Rubies into the game, when it became pay-to-win (to some degree). But really, I was way better than my clicker-guild-mates because I personally had optimized a better strategy than them. So even when others spent Rubies, I personally was able to keep up with them through simply better tactics.
Still, it left a bad taste in my mouth to pay for some in-game benefit. And I knew that if I dumped $100+ more dollars in, my superior tactics + money injection would lead me to higher clicks.
At that point, I just became disgusted with the F2P model and quit Clicker Heroes.
It was a very well programmed game, and I think getting rid of the F2P format will help this game a LOT.
This announcement has gotten my hopes up about it. My thinking is, there must be enough to it that it's not just a clicker game (which is why I stopped playing the first one; I got bored of it).
That question was asked on reddit. Most commenters seemed to think it was too high. The devs said they spent $2 million to make a clicker game, and therefore needed to price it high to recoup their costs.
Personally, I feel they should have managed their costs to a more reasonable price point, but I didn't feel like engaging in debate on reddit over the point.
Awesome, good on them! Another studio who dipped their toe in the F2P model then ran away screaming (in their case, to great success) is Butterscotch Shenanigans--three brothers in Saint Louis who released the game Crashlands for mobile and Steam which I've probably sunk 300 hours into (but I'm weird like that). I really hope this works well for the Clicker Heroes 2 developers. I've enjoyed Clicker Heroes and I'm really looking forward to everything they've layed out for CH2.
Of course dropping $30 for what had been a free game is a bit of a shock on first hearing the price (price anchoring can be a major hurdle), but after reading this (and reflecting for a moment: most games that I spend any real time playing are easily worth $100 or more to me even if it's rare that I end up having to spend that much on them) I'll definitely be pre-ordering.
It seems the app economy has really skewed our sense of value when it comes to mobile games. If we can get over the mental hurdle of $1 to $5 apps we might be able to dig ourselves out of this F2P hole.
I wonder if you could still have free to play, but just had a limit to how many different things to buy. Say, you could buy everything for $60. That way, you don’t have to worry about someone spending thousands because they wouldn’t get any more than if they spent $60.
Most free to play games have completely different mechanics to traditional games. Typically you get to a certain level, after which you are hooked, then you are faced with a choice: Pay or keep grinding. There's no real end, so even if you choose to pay now, you will face the same decision again. I assume a lot of users will abandon the game at this point, because most games purposely don't make the grinding fun to encourage you to pay.
Compare this to a traditional game like Cities: Skylines. You pay once for the base game, then there are various DLC expansions that work as you suggest. You don't need them to complete the game, they just add new features and can only be purchased once.
Edit: 'Pay to win' is a better description for most games in this category (and Clicker Heroes 1 looks to follow that), although there are some free to play games like Dota 2, which have DLC that just provides cosmetic changes and isn't needed to win.
There are games like EU4 or other paradox games that kind of straddle the barrier. You don't need the DLC, but your game is updated and the AI and all other players you play with has it so your game will get worse over time unless you pony up.
Not quite though; every DLC comes with a patch that everyone gets, with general improvements to the game but you don't get the additional DLC features unless you buy it.
You could but the profitability of free2play games are whales. I don't remember where I read it, but the vast majority of people playing free2play mobile or Facebook games never spend a single dollar.
This means that if you set a limit on it, you'd be limiting your profit by an extreme amount.
I'm all for it by the way, I think games that sell game affecting content for thousands of dollars are targeted scams portraying as games to get away with it.
Especially because games like league of legends and path of exile had shown how you can do free2play while only selling cosmetic items, if you make a good game.
Minor nitpick: League of legends requires you to purchase heroes as they come out, and this gives the player incentive to spend ~5$ every month or so. DOTA would be a better example as you are not required to purchase heroes.
It's possible to never pay a dollar in League, and wind up owning all champions. The problem is how long it takes to unlock them all with the free in-game currency (previously IP, now Blue Essence). It takes 3-4 years of near-daily play. Once you own all to-date champions, there is no monthly real-money requirement - you earn enough free currency to instantly buy new champion releases.
Some people, like me, spent a ton of real money to unlock all champions faster. According to Riot, it's not "necessary" to have all champions unlocked. However if you don't own a champion, you cannot pick that champion early in the team drafting phase for someone else to play (swap/trade) - even in ranked. It is a disadvantage, though admittedly minor - a 5 man team that owns all champions has more flexibility in drafting than an enemy team that has holes in what they own.
Not true. You also get points for playing a game. With enough points you can buy any heroes.
With enough play times, you'll have more than enough to buy all the heroes without paying real money and then there's nothing else you can use it for.
Real money is only required if you want to buy skins.
Also, with hundreds of available champion to play you are not really required to play the most recently released champion. Just play from pools of all existing champions until you get enough point to buy new champion.
You’re absolutely right, I forgot because I haven’t played it for a lot of years. Back when I played unlocking the heroes was relatively easy, but I can imagine how it isn’t like that anymore considering how many heroes they must have added by now.
This is something that comes up often as an example, usually mentioned by someone who doesn't actually play the game.
Simulators are different. You do not gain competitive advantage by buying DLC. You get some more content, and usually they're high quality, historically accurate and come with nice documentation (checklists, etc).
No-one would have the time to play with all the DLC in train simulator. There is hours worth of playing in each. Heck, it took me an hour just to figure out how to get a steam locomotive out of the rail yard.
Flight simulators and racing sims (iRacing) are similar. You can expect to spend hours of time with a new aircraft or race car. In racing, you race against others with the same or similar car, so you gain no advantage.
I can warmly recommend trying out Train Simulator or Trainz. It's fun and relaxing gameplay.
The sad thing is that Pay2Win is coming to triple A games like Need for Speed Payday, Forza 7, Star Wars B2. These completely wrong trend deserves all the outcry that happens right now. If EA and MS try to destroy video games, it's just stupid, their greed will scare the real players away.
Exactly. I have no real problem with a company charging for cosmetic stuff (unless it's limited-time-only, which hurts addicts) but pay2win makes the games pointless.
One issue with that is that it cheapens the other route you can take.
If you need 100 hours to unlock all the characters (playing through lots of times was common for fighting games I recall) but you advertise you can buy them for $60, it puts a price on your time and takes the achievement of spending those hours getting better and puts it as "worth $60".
App stores could easily enforce a rule like this. The maximum price could also appear next to the download link for the app so you know what you're getting into.
I go back and forth on this, because there seems to be material disagreement on whether whales are, in fact, a) folks with problems or b) folks with hobbies which are, relative to a single video game, expensive.
I share your moral intuitions about exploiting whales if whales are, in fact, little old ladies suffering from social isolation or teenagers with undiagnosed depression. But the F2P companies say that they've done the research and come to the conclusion that most of their whales are gainfully employed professionals.
That sounds... not intrinsically implausible to me? I enjoy video games, quite a bit. Games, books, and hating on Bitcoin are my hobbies, and hating on Bitcoin is cheap. I have probably sustained $100 a month on video games for ten years now, and that would frequently be concentrated on a single game for an extended while (e.g. LoL for 2 years), likely resulting in me easily hitting their whale lists.
I feel like if I'm a central example of a whale that it isn't unethical to sell me things that I like? It's not a material amount of money given my financial situation. It compares very favorably to the time commitment for my main hobby, which causes _much_ more friction than the money does. (The primary reason I don't play LoL anymore is an unpauseable 40 minute game doesn't play well with having young children.) Most external observers would categorize me under Either A Responsible Adult Or At Least Fakes It Decently Most Of The Time. Similarly well-adjusted people in my social class spend similar amounts of money on things which are not morally different than Evelynn skins, for example Hamilton tickets.
Right, but I don’t think 100/mo is quite what is considered a whale.
Just as in casino gambling, where I believe the term came from, a whale is someone who throws a few hundred to several thousand into a game in a month, possibly in a large number of smaller transactions so they don’t even realize their running total. It’s the people for whom the “10’000 rubies for 49.99” in-app currency chests are meant for.
Side story, I shortly worked for a big game company that dived into mobile games, and learnt from the market team that the most bought packages where the cheapest and the most expensive ones. The intermediary ones were nearing 0 sales.
So they kept adding new packages at higher prices until it reached about 120$ IIRC. All intermediary packages are just there to make the "best value" (read highest price) package more enticing.
I agree that a $100/month is probably on the low end for the whale category. But, I think his broader point is that there’s at least some evidence that the whales in question are, in fact, people with disposable income (i.e. middle class or better; often professionals) for whom pay-to-play games are a substitute for other equally expensive IRL hobbies that are not uncommon among people in that social strata (like, say, golf, tennis, or skiing).
I think a good benchmark is how you feel about the spending afterwards. There are many stories about people having regrets after spending a lot on addictive Candy Crush type games and swearing off them, but still relapsing to spend again and again.
I think the poster girl from the slides of 40-year old californian MMO player is artificially nice, because $7.5k for a typical Californian isn't much and the social aspect makes you think there's a human connection involved. But this is just the good-for-pr end of the whale spectrum.
(Of course the most artificial part is that she's getting paid by the industry)
It concerns me that Apple and Google are happy to take 30% of all the gambling exploitation on the markets. And looking at AppAnnie, they appear to be the largest grossing segments of their app store profits, or "increeased services growth", as Tim Cook might put it during a quarterly call.
All this while being incredibly censorious of their stores otherwise, to the point of bragging about their store curation. Political commentary is out. But gambling mechanisms aimed at children is OK. Hell, outright name your app "Big Fish Casino" or "Slotomania".
I wouldn't be surprised if some of those devs as well as other gamers just think that it's buyers fault for improperly spending money, and that it makes perfect sense as corporations exist for the maximization of profit.
It's true some responsibility does lie in the person with the wallet. But it just strikes me as odd that none of these companies are really held accountable for exploiting human behavior, specifically by gaming communities.
It's a sad fact of human nature that it's really easy for us to compromise our morals when the only person hurt by doing so is an anonymous stranger on the other side of the Internet.
I'm not super interested in clicker games, but I pre-ordered anyhow, because I have to believe the future of gaming isn't just a never-ending series of venal cash grabs.
Clicker Heroes one is a lot of fun. I "played" it for about six months... which means I left the browser window open at work and bought upgrades every few hours.
(bought with in-game currency; I never spent real money)
In-app purchases have such an absurdly high probability of being scams that I literally shop only by filtering them out. It’s why I can’t be bothered to tap into each and every game to see if it’s “only” using purchases to unlock the full game; I just assume it’s probably gem bags.
They really need a built-into-store way of saying “Buy If Not Deleted In 24 Hours”, and then I would try so much more.
I have a habit of playing a F2P game to understand how easy it is to advance. They really do understand how to get you hooked, and then put you up against players/AI where you either have to grind for the next 10 weeks or handover money, and even then I suspect you'd hit another wall every 10 or so levels. I usually end up uninstalling very quickly at this point.
This would see me willing to pay a lot more to many f2p games, but would curb their income considerably from their whales.
Also, it'd ruin most games, because of the way they're designed.
For instance, gacha games like Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, Record Keeper, and Mobius. If you could cap out at (for example) $300 and then pull for free from then on, you'd end up with everything you ever wanted, all the time. There'd be nothing to stop you from just pulling until you got everything.
The entire game would need a redesign to deal with that situation.
Premium currency in most F2P games is the same way.
I'm not arguing with you, just exposing the reason that nobody except Nintendo has done your suggestion so far.
And to my knowledge, they've only done it twice. Pokemon Picross and another Pokemon spinoff game.
In free to play games, significant money may be spent in user acquisition. The business model for many games is:
effective cost per new unique user <= life time value of the user
That gives you a profitability margin. Then, you need to acquire a lot of users, put them in the game and, move them from 1 to 3:
1. New user
2. Recurring user
3. Paying user
Additionally, if users invite other users, that lowers your effective cost per new user, increasing your profitability.
The process of getting paying users is very lossy, with only a small minority becoming paying users. That's why paying users have to pay so much.
For a while it was generally accepted that freemium games monetize more than premium games. But with the recent proliferation of games I am unaware if that is the case anymore.
We made a lot of money from these players who spent thousands. They are known to the industry as "Whales".
I haven't seen this addressed yet, but what if the whales we are seeing are not poor addicted victims nor rich people but simple fraudsters?
It really makes sense if you are a person with access to "unlimited" credit that you can't spend in a way that can be traced back to you.
There is so much credit card fraud going on, and it's surely possible to decouple that from the actual in-game transactions by buying cash cards. The credit companies can't trace back the money, and the in-game transactions never get challenged.
I've heard multiple stories (firsthand) of kids accidentally ordering virtual stuff on mobile for thousand(s). It happens only once, but there is no way to recover the money.
Might depend on your location but I've heard several stories of successfully getting a refund from kids purchases in games and app stores. It's still a lot of trouble to file for a refund, not worth doing for a few bucks.
But this might be because in my legislation there are strong consumer protection laws. Ymmv.
But is it really worth commiting fraud to beat somebody in Clicker Heroes? Doesn't every transaction you make with a stolen credit card increase the chance of getting caught/no longer being able to use the card because it gets blocked?
credit card fraud is very pro consumer. If the rightful owner issues a chargeback they will likely be returned their funds at the merchants expanse. Given the nature of ftp games, I suspect few would bother disputing these when they come up.
Good for them. I don’t have the numbers or business plan but I have faith they did their homework.
There seems to be a counter trend in the current micro transaction game market which will catch some of the people who long for pure premium games.
My guess is they intend to use the first game as a platform to bring people into the second. The drawback of premium is that 1 in 50 people who see a game buy it. The drawback of F2P is that 2% of players will spend money in it. This is a move to cause a conversion higher than that by effectively selling the F2P players, a premium game.
A bit off topic, but I would be extremely interested in a post mortem of the disaster that befell Micro Machines on mobile. My guess is people have completely abandoned the game due to it not working in iOS 11 for nigh on 6 weeks, and now there just aren't enough players to get regularly matched into a game. This must have decimated their revenue stream.
Would like to see this resonate with IP holders in the creative industries too. I don't think the people who created a franchise like Bob's Burgers as used in AnimationThrowdown are ok with causing some collateral damage to kids or other addicition sensitive audiences and will put some restrictions into their licensing contracts.
> New updates can change the game to be incompatible with old saves (which will be rare, maybe once or twice a year), and there will be plenty of advance warning when it happens. Players then have the option to continue playing on the old version, or start fresh on the new version.
And without knowing anything about the game, they've guaranteed that I'll never buy it. Corrupted or incompatible saved games is a great way to kill interest in your game.
Clicker games usually have almost no actual gameplay, and pretty much only interest people because they exploit many of the same type of psychological tricks that free-to-play games use to keep players hooked. They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression.
I honestly don't think that charging people up front will work, especially not at a $30 price point. Microtransactions work for this game style because you can take advantage of all the time people feel like they've "invested" into the game. Once they've spent hundreds of hours progressing, it's not difficult for some people to justify spending money here and there to make things a bit faster. I don't think many people will feel the same way when they're asked to pay $30 before they can even start getting addicted.