Idle Games: The Mechanics and Monetization of Self-Playing Games

[Music] okay so this is a talk titled idle games mechanics and monetization of self playing games so let's get right into it a quick introduction I am I've been at Kongregate for about six years on directing our browser-based virtual goods business also recently picked up production for a mobile game called venture capitalist which actually just launched about two weeks ago and we'll be talking about that quite a bit in this talk as it is also an idle game I also founded a studio called level up lab and we're probably best known for our game defenders quest and are currently working on a sequel kongregate we are if anyone is not familiar with us an open platform for browser-based games with a variety of technologies basically anything that runs in the browser we're happy to support we have around 16 million that might be a slightly old number but somewhere around 16 million monthly unique visitors worldwide our demographic tends to be more of a core gamer demographic than you usually think of with browser-based games heavily male our days about 22 years old popular genres or more mmo's RPGs flexible card games not really as much a casual and social games that you might see on other sites we have a platform level currency called Krebs that you can spend in our free to play games and we're acquired by gamestop in July of 2010 we work with a variety of partners that are both Western and Eastern big companies small companies as all published through us or disturb you through us on the web we also in the last year and a half or so have become a mobile publisher and these are some of our games we have quite a few more that are out now and regularly launching so that's that's kind of our core business so it's a good background of where a lot of data is coming from so I want to open with a question for the audience how many of you have played cookie clicker or some other idol game you pick out put up your hands alright I want you to leave all of them leave your hands up if you have played what you would describe an embarrassing amount of it alright a lot of hands stayed up for thank you so that gives us three interesting pieces of information one almost every hand went up for the first question these are very popular games they're well known a lot of people play them too a lot of people stayed up for pending and embarrassing amount which means that people play them a lot and keep playing them and three there is this sort of self shame around them people don't usually talk about playing games an embarrassing amount if it's like a really great game they're proud of but there's this weird thing about idle games so I want to kind of dig into all of that so this is a game called number it was a kind of a spoof parody game Tyler glial created you want to make your number go up it goes up a certain speed when you can afford more you make it go up faster it's boiled down to the most minimal level and yet this is actually kind of compelling it's I played this an embarrassing amount to be frank so why is that what what is it about this genre and why are we talking about this in the first place well for one it's a birth of a new genre we don't actually get to see that very often in the games industry probably the most recent one prior to this was maybe mobis to see like I'm the legit new genre coming and becoming very popular it's only about two years old in its modern form and it is very popular right now this is a screenshot of the top most played games on Kongregate in the last 30 days and three of those top five are idle games it's so popular you actually came watch twitch streams of self playing games like the guy's not even playing this he's just running it through his through browser but it's like six before actively watching this twenty five hundred people have favor did this channel of a self playing game without even a person there they have fabulous retention stats we'll look at some specific ones but these are some of the best retaining games on all of congregate comm and they actually generate really great revenue the the ARPU the lifetime values of these games are well above most single player games that we have and actually you're competing with a lot of our multiplayer games also for those taking pictures we'll post these slides on our website as well so you're welcome to take pictures but if you miss some please don't worry about it will they'll be available afterwards as well so I want to do a kind of a quick survey of sort of the history and evolution of Vital games to sort of understand how we've gotten to where we are probably the first one was progress quest by Eric Fredrickson in 2002 that's with a parody of mm o RP was basically a character sheet that just ran itself it's a zero player game you cannot interact with this even if you want to outside of the character creation which doesn't have any impact on the game it's you know so much so that the Wikipedia page kind of cheekily put quotes around the word game throughout it not really interactive in any way but it's still kind of people it was still popular I mean how many people have played progress quest right okay this is not a game you can play but that many people are aware of it and have played it so already we're seeing something interesting happening congregate in particular actually ended up being sort of an early breeding ground for idle games and I think the main reason is that we have a chat room that plays next to the games and you can only be in chat if you have a game running so there was this demand for games that people didn't actually want to play they just want to be in chat but he had it something up so we started seeing games the oldest one that has an idol tags game called car gay chat it was made just so you could chat and not really be playing a game not long after that I was 2007 in 2008 we started seeing some rudimentary RPGs appearing nowhere near the complexity of what we see in current Idol games but already this idea of a game that mostly plays itself with very little interaction is starting to occur 2009 probably our most popular early idol game is being called anti Idol and this game got crazy it was incredibly complicated it had active elements and idle elements it's actually really different from current oil games but it did a lot of pioneering work in that concept tons of content it's six years old and they are still adding new features literally yesterday he post pushed out a an update to it so it's an incredible game and it's been really popular for a very long time cow clicker is one of the ones that got a lot of media attention and vados was trying to really poke fun at farmville and other appointment's games and social games and so the idea was you got this cow you would click it then you have to wait six hours and then come back and click it again and by click 'add I mean one time you only get one click per 6 hours and that was about it you could invite some friends and if they clicked on their cow you got some money and and you know that was that was the entirety of the game and much to invoke a surprise it really caught on and he ended up adding some more features whoo and growing out a little bit but still try and champion this idea that you know social games and farming games are silly at least in his opinion a quick mention they're different but a darkroom and candy box are no idle games in many ways there was a lot of progress that would happen without active interaction but they actually are a bit different from most of what we're talking about now they are finite they can be beaten there lot more puzzle like an exploration base there they're great games I definitely recommend with you haven't played them but they are a little different from where this talk will be going so cookie clicker this is the one that really kicked it off it was actually a parody of candy box and got really popular and or Tila was quoted as saying you know at first I couldn't tell if people were just going along with the joke or if they were actually being serious it turns out they were being serious you know there was something even though it was funny and you kind of enjoyed it there was something extremely compelling about the system that he set up for it and I forget what the number was but like a ridiculous number of players who played this game and continued to play this game it was the first major mainstream hit of the genre arguably creating it so this is where I'm saying it's two years old as this is where it really came into its modern form and it really established a basis for the progression for the upgrading for all of these tropes that we see mimicked in most of the current idol games this was the game that really put the brothers into mainstream and kind of solidified them adventure capitalists was a kind of an experiment by coding vegans who worked at hyper hippo games and it turned out to be really popular in hyper hippo then put more people onto it but it's really a parody of capitalism and idle games if you notice I've been saying parody a lot this is sort of a genre it almost doesn't want to exist it's a joke really but it keeps despite itself being really successful and so you actually see a lot of humor in a lot of these games and less of a reason for it it was one of the first that I'm aware of to introduce offline progress so I'm on cookie clicker where you had to have it running your browser all the time this one would calculate the time between your last login and just give you credit for what everything you would have earned this was really freeing now you don't have to dedicate your CPU to you watching you know little pointers clicking a clicker or a cookie you could just close it down and come back the next day and I think that was actually a big advantage for it and it's now actually standard in most idol games and it was also just really fun to look at there was a lot the animation bars filling up everyone those bars filling up so it was it was really compelling clicker heroes 2014 this is one that was a lot more RPG like you hired heroes you level them up you gain skills and you know your your progress was measured or your power was measured in DPS and damage per second they add an addition of cooldown skills again this added some strategy and action elements to it and I had really great visuals and presentation and that's they didn't actually put all that into the idle game this was all repurposed assets from one of their MMORPGs but it made it one of the best-looking idle games of the time and then tap Titans is not by play stores but is kind of a closed derivative that you may have seen on mobile that is very similar to a clicker heroes but did a really great job kind of bringing that into mobile all right almost done with the history make it rain was probably the first big mobile success and a lot of that I think was just as hilarious concept you sit there and you flick your finger over it like you're making it rain with dollar bills it was very viral a lot of word-of-mouth people just wanted to show each other this great concept and I think that helped it really take off the idol elements were actually really limited you could only collect so much money and then you'd have to come back in two to get it and it would stop collecting once you got to a point so you had to really check in regularly I had a very aggressive ad strategy where as we're popping up all the time because you're doing this motion you'd actually click on them it was very clever but I think it actually probably wore down the players aterna I was kind of annoying to so I'm sure it was a great success for a while but I bet it hurt their longer-term retention I don't have the data to prove that though I may also have this pretty brutal like FBI monetization so the FBI would occasionally show up they would declare you guilty and you would lose not only a hunk of cash but actually a hunk of your cash per second which in an idol game is a really big deal and you'd have to bribe them with real-world money to not lose that and that's that's that was I think that's actually what kind of like stopped me from playing the game is once I hit that that was such a negative thing that it I just didn't want to go on so that's a very very aggressive monetization strategy may have worked well but again I think it heard the long term Bitcoin billionaire was another great mobile game Apple loved it it has really nice style tone and the topic was fun and Mary Curran presentation is really good just kind of general design is really nice on it and one of the best things about it is it's opt-in ads this was one a lot of times people cite discos ooh is great often ad this one I think also is really worth studying if you're ever gonna be working with opt-in ads on mobile look at how that the many many ways that they do it and we'll actually look at a few of them later on in the talk but that's it's something that Bitcoin did really nicely they similarly to make it rain had really strong bit I'm sorry appointment mechanics very limited all fine progress and it was actually offline progress with one of their central monetization element I think this was actually a mistake on them and we'll talk about why a little bit later two quick notable entries that aren't really as well known but drip stat is really just a cookie clicker clone but it had amazing visualization you could really understand what was contributing to what it has a global live leaderboard so if you look in like the top left area here I can see my global ranking and every time I dripped more bytes into the machine I've actually seen my rank move up and there's actually even real-time contributions from other player so you can see this + 1 gigabyte from user you know whatever that is that's not me that's someone else that is just on that in real-time so even though it's a single player game you get this feeling that you're playing in a world with other people and that was something that I haven't seen done much in idle games and this one did really nicely the other one I want to mention swarm simulator has only been out for a couple of weeks so we some congregate I'm not sure where it started earlier than that it explores a new kind of funnel based economy so they're actually playing around with a different way of doing the idle game economy so that's really interesting even though it's only a couple weeks old it's proving to be extremely popular so in the last couple of weeks it's been played a million times on target alone so I think we actually probably will see this one catching on log it probably will hear about it if you haven't already I definitely recommend checking out it's really nice even though it's like a lot of these just sort of a glorified spreadsheet with some really neat mechanics in it so speaking of idle game core mechanics what makes these games so interesting what is unique about them compared to most other games progress without interaction this is sort of the most basic thing about idle games is where they get their name right and I should say I'm saying idle games you'll often hear incremental games use as well if you hop on reddit you can get into a very long argument about this I'm going to use them fairly interchangeably and not address that debate so products are interactions a low pressure experience you don't have to be constantly playing if you go away for a while and you come back that's ok you got some stuff you can keep going it's a it's a very kind of positive growth positive feedback everything is going up right there's no loose conditions you might not go as fast as other people but you constantly feel like you're making progress and quick check-ins can be very possible every time to check in and you buy a couple of things it shifts up your your curve so that you're gaining faster then you go away for a while and you've actually made a lot of progress even with a very short check-in and this is really good for social and especially mobile interactions when you're looking for that like I want to pull it out for a minute make a couple decisions put it away this type of system is great for that so what this actually does is it creates a celebratory moment every time you come back to the game so and a lot of you - I should call it explicitly so let's say like welcome back you just earned a ridiculous amount of money you should spend it and so it creates this positive feedback of oh man I just came back I get to spend all this stuff this is a lot of fun and beyond that the longer you're away the bigger the reason to return so if you've been gone for a week or so you don't feel like in some games you've fallen behind here you've actually gotten ahead alright and if you go back you can have even more money to spend and so here where I was gone five minutes five hours instead of a day I get a lot more being gone for a day so forced appointment mechanics I would actually say are unnecessary players naturally want to come back because of the way the system works and and that's that's a really kind of magical thing so you know even daily rewards I don't see using these games and you know maybe they could be but the fact is they don't really need it it's the retention is already off the charts so here is a chart of retention d-17 I think 14 and 30 or 30 and 90 sorry the actual numbers don't really matter but and you'll notice Rd ones look kind of low this is the the top 10 monetizing games of 2014 on Kongregate the new ones look low compared to what you see on mobile and that's because there's a lot less friction when you go to play a browser game you don't have to install it you just check out the page so what I'm doing this is to give kind of a sense of sort of a baseline of some of our best performing games and then now I'm going to pop on our three Idol games that have the amount purchases in them you'll notice they dwarf all of our other best performing games so the retention is amazing on these games there's something really special happening there and that's again without data rewards without saying you have to come back to check in without any kind of forced mechanics to bring players back another core mechanic is the rapid growth of cost and empower and rewards in the game so this leads to a sense of progress it's psychologically fun and satisfying like and that's what number was write your number is going up we like collecting things we like advancing you like improving ourselves and this these really really get into it and do it it's sort of a ridiculous level adventure capitalist actually writes out the words fully and you end up sort of speaking a new language as you play this game if you would learn what the next you know multiple of a thousand is called the duo Quadra gent alien you know that actually starts to make sense to you as you play the game other games will just flat-out you scientific notation because the numbers are just getting so outrageous but it's also just really fun to have that kind of growth and it's a sort of level growth you don't really expect experiencing game we actually couldn't even for a venture capitalist the game center leaderboards don't support numbers that big we had to take a log a logarithm just to record high scores so the core loop of these games is you log in you spend all your cash and then you log out and come back a few hours later and do it again now that sounds kind of familiar that's what we see in social games and in energy games right you get a certain out of energy it you spend it all and then you leave them energy comes back and then you go do it again but the difference is energy games are this forced mechanic that's put on top of the core game while with with idle games it has a sort of natural energy system without the need for an energy currency and this ends up being a lot more palatable to get to the players and especially kind of like the core gamers who rebel against the social games in the Facebook games they we find that they really are perfectly happy with this kind of a set up and I think this is your reasons for that it has a real world analog it makes sense right like you're not dealing with lightning bolts that are just kind of like added on to it's like oh I'm out of cash I can't buy anything else that makes sense to me so I'm just going to come back later when I've got more cash additionally the player takes ownership over this decision the game is not saying you can't do anything else it's you could sit there you could wait and actively play it and probably buy something in five minutes or so but you as the player say yeah I could wait but my time is more with while in this I'm not gonna sit here and watch this I'm just gonna come back later and so it's overall is it sort of a better experience a cleaner experience and one that comes out of the natural mechanic rather than something artificially put on top of it it also counterbalances offline play so you get big reports but those rewards grow linearly and so time actually loses value without interaction so let's let's take a look at that what that means so here is a curve this is a an exponential growth where it's saying across the bottom we have like game sessions and basically in this case I'm roughly assuming game sessions kind of a once a day thing and everyday you get about 10x as powerful as the previous day and that's totally normal in inital games if not even a little slow it's also impossible to read like this so we're going to do a log scale instead so we make it a little more linear and understand it so now if you're playing once a day every day under this kind of rough approximation then your daily progress is going to be right in line with that right now if you were to play on the first day and then wait seven days and come back on that you know a week later instead of having the that's a little weird but on your second game session if you're playing every day you're going to have about 110 times what you had before here you have 700 you're gone for seven days you collected 100 for seven days what this means though is even though you were gone for seven days your actual that's showing up yoga your actual amount of cash only puts you at about where day 3 would be for someone who is playing every day so even though you were gone for a week it's not like you're a week ahead of people are playing actively you're actually only you know partway to where the next session would have been anyway and the thing is just keeps going if you're gone for a month so you're gone for 30 days yeah that gets you up to your 3000 but that's still only around somewhere around the day 3 of someone who's actively playing you can go away for a year come back three and sixty five days later and look you're sitting somewhere in the the fourth session so what this means is that you don't have to cap off where and spending our offer on earnings that's why I think these perforce appointment mechanics but beyond the fact that they're not Cerie from a retention standpoint they're not even necessary from the game standpoint the math makes it sorry I'm a math major so I think this is really cool the math makes it so that offline progress as linear progress becomes irrelevant because your growth is actually exponential so you can let the players keep earning lots and they're going to feel great come back seven days I have tons of cash compared to where I was but in terms of the progress of the game they're actually not getting that far and this gives you the freedom as a developer to not be forcing them to do things to let them kind of experience it on their own and to let the math control the progress something else you tend to see in a lot of games with tons of goals and achievements lots of unlocks adventure Catholics has 500 unlocks right now they're adding more all the time part of this is providing moments of joy throughout the game I mean the more the core game is you're making your number go up right and at some point that gets kind of boring but if you're getting move achievements a little burst of speed throughout that helps break it up a little bit it also gives you the ability to have moment-to-moment optimizations so you may be deciding in this example you know B you have one thing that you can get here to get to 2,000 use papers you'll get x 15 on your pizza deliveries or if you get to 2,200 you get x 3 on your car washes well you're making a decision now like which one should I try to go for which one's going to be the better optimization and so you actually do have some decisions that at least temporarily are meaningful they min/max a little bit long-term yeah you'll be able to afford it but you can be able to afford things faster if you play more optimally so it actually gives some strategy to the player rather than just number go up faster prestiging or a new kind of new game plus anyone know where the term new game+ comes from sorry anyone its Chrono Trigger I did not know that until I was researching this but apparently that was the first one to ever use the term sorry random trivia now you know so you get to choose to reset your game to kind of get a boost the next time through so this one's tap Titans and you it's not a force you can do it whenever you want but you kind of get the options like alright now I want to do a reset I'm going to get some bonus I'm going to completely start over but you're going to do it with more power and you're going to accelerate through the early part of the game and this is really really central to the search of the most successful idle games it provides a strategic decision to the player so a lot of the little min max decisions like you know those are nice they're fun and they're some opportunity there but when to reset is a really really important decision do I reset when I'm going to double my speed or do I do it at one and a half times and try to do that repeatedly at a faster rate and hope that it stacks on top more than the doubles go there are long discussions and forms about this there's a group of math majors that I'm working with a university they're trying to model this out and to pick out the best strategies for other bands like it's actually an interesting question and a really good strategic opportunity it's often tied to a separate currency so in this previous shot you can see like you earn these uh.sorry relics based on your progress and you're only earning like five or ten relics despite the fact that you have some Lingam octillion damage per second that you're doing there and so this actually lets you transform exponential but growth back to linear so now you're getting back into an actual gameplay progression you're sort of you know taking a log of your progress and so the players are seeing all these giant numbers that you had the game developer gets to turn it back into something that's a bit more linear and more controlled and this also leads to a new gameplay loop you start getting faster and like your core loop of buying all your upgrades and getting through it then gets you know wrapped around or wrapped within this idea of prestiging and sometimes your prestiging like once a day for some of these games and that becomes a second almost core loop as fast as it goes and players get into a rhythm and it's really fun so let's go back to our exponential growth curve we take our log of it now in the last one we said that your progress was basically right in line with the power there but when you start doing a prestige loop your costs are going up that way but your earnings are going to be a little bit low that right so early on you're going to be earning above the cost but then it's going to trail off and you're going to be unable to progress this is not a hard wall the game is not saying you have to progress but it's going to start feeling slower and slower and the player is going to be getting a little bit bored and so they get the option to do a prestige now when you do a prestige you're multiplying ethnic by three and in this case you're going to multiply your earnings so boom now you're taking the exact same earnings line like nothing has changed in the balance but you shifted it up and what this means is that the early part of the game is going to accelerate you're going to fly through that early stuff and you're going to get farther than you did before but then you're going to start you know trailing off again you're going to hit a different soft wall and at some point you're going to side okay it's time for siege again and you can keep doing this and you're going to keep progressing through the content of the game but you do it in this kind of repeat way and it creates this interesting loop that's really fun for players it's a ladder climbing idea each time you're going a rung higher even though you're starting over and it gives this amazing sense of progress it's one of the like the greatest rushes of an idol game as many of you know if you got into a cookie clicker you do your you're prestige and and also you get to buy everything and it's incredibly fun it's a really good player experience and it's a core part of the the game progression regular updates this seems like a weird thing to I call a mechanic I guess it's more of a quality that we've identified but because I think in large part because the games are fairly simple there's not a lot of assets it's all just kind of like spreadsheets and balance and ui/ux you actually can iterate on it fairly quickly and what we've seen so this is the swarm simulator release log that's like everyday all of the you know he's putting out a release with you know not just like a minor fix like that you know fair amount and what we've actually seen is it I think I can actually say every single highly successful Idol game on Kongregate has had a rapid release cycle of like every couple days they'll do something new it's you know I don't know that it's necessary but it is a very clear observation that we've seen the players react well to it with math this weird like trying to get the balance right is really hard so being able to iterate on that it's actually kind of important it's just something that we've seen over and over again is a quality that has been six that has been a part of success for Ionia make it bumpy so this was kind of interesting this was a story from Cody Vig who is the adventure capitalist designer risen Winky did a very smooth progression curve and it turns out that was really boring you know what's coming there's no surprise and delight associated with it so you have your cost curve and your and your earnings curve and it's totally flat you know exactly what you're going to do and so we ended up intentionally screwing up the curve and that made a lot more interesting you make it bumpy and you're going to have areas of rapid acceleration when things going real well they going to have kind of slow parts and this provides variety it keeps it interesting you don't know exactly what's going to come next and that's actually fun to discover and then when you start prestiging the interact the the intersection points you know also change and so again you're going to have different points where things are going to be happening things are going to go in really fast and they're fun and other parts where they slow down a little bit maybe you ease off come back a day later and then you can get back into it it just makes the whole process a lot more interesting so we have we actually see a lot of these elements in other games well you know many of them are not unique to Idol games so like in real time social and strategy games you do often see progress well gone so often with hard caps so in you know heyday you you're seeing your farm is growing but only the stuff that you planted and if you go away for weeks it's no better than going away for however long the longest timer is mafia war is kind of like the energy based games same type set up and even game for I'm sorry a game of war the you have all your earnings but there's also a max storage that you can have so there is still this idea of earning while you're gone and that's still fun for players but they all cap it out in a way that I think misses out a little bit on an opportunity there that go putting some ass into the exponential growth could could fix so it would be a little bit weird in these two Chinese MMORPG so there's a current trend of becoming very heavily autoplay players and especially Chinese players are really really savvy at MMORPGs they want to get through the early part very quickly and get to the endgame where it gets really interesting the strategy in them in maxing and they can you know these games even can include an afk mode so this is a game called Mistborn looks like an action RPG and in large part is but if you see like it says auto paths at the top you start playing the game and it just starts running off it kills people for you that it runs back accepts a quest like it's all doing it automatically for you and in large part like this is like an idol game right it's running on its own and you're just kind of watching it making occasional decisions it's about min maxing stats it's about collecting equipment putting the right things together and it's really interesting it's really deep but what we see is that Western audience would often don't react well to it and I think this is a large part a problem with expectation management you see this game that looks like an action RPG and you're expecting an action RPG but then you're getting this you know something that functions more like an idle game and so evening players who love idle games often don't like MMORPGs that play like other games so you know they're these are interesting games to study for some of the stuff that they do when it comes to min maxing when it comes to optimization but there's this weird thing psychological thing where they don't necessarily set the expectations properly and especially Western audiences who aren't used to it can sometimes have a negative reaction to it and then launch games so I'm sure you've seen these games around where you launch something you collect some cash and buy some upgrades you launch it again that sounds kind of familiar right it's actually a type of procedure system you know you don't actually have choice over when you're going to do your prestige it's when you land but the idea is still the same you do some you chord loop you get to the end you've gained some resources you spend them and then the next time it's like that lateral run you're getting farther each time and I think that's part of the reason that launch games are so much fun is that same idea of continuing growth and we just see that in idle games is like stretched out a little bit with a little more choice but the mechanic is still actually very similar so these games actually do monetize and I'll admit it surprised me a little bit when I think adventure catalyst was the first one that called me I was like hey can we put in our purchases in the game I'm like yeah I guess but I don't know if anyone's going to buy them I am NOT always right and I was happy to be wrong in that one so what do you what can you sell is in an idol game I mean really the game is just making a number go up right how can you monetize that well you can fill a cash infusion let's just get a burst of cash right away it's usually a percentage of whatever your current rate of income is that way so we can be relevant to you wherever you are or sometimes they just flat-out call it a time warp so you can say alright let's jump ahead 24 hours and you know you're you'll get whatever cash you would have earned all of your cooldowns finish off and then actually kind of compelling for someone who wants to just jump ahead maybe they're really close to something if they are okay I'll pay a dollar to get ahead I mean that's that's a fairly common mechanical we seen a lot of things it's a speed up you can also some of them will sell permanent speed multipliers adventure capitalists did this where you could buy a time three multiplier that just did at times three on everything you earn now that's fun and you accelerate faster but also because of the way the exponential growth works this isn't quite as much I mean it doesn't progress you through the game as fast as you might think so it's fun for players and they do go faster but it also doesn't completely break the game which is kind of interesting the instant prestige so usually you reset and start over right but we actually see games that'll say okay you can get all of your currency but you can stay where you are and that's very compelling for players who especially on games that have longer prestige loops being able to say okay I'm going to collect everything and keep going that's actually can be really really effective protection against negative events so you know make it rain with all the bribes money that can keep the FBI off your back in tap Titans you can actually lose heroes for periods of time but you can also buy a shield to protect them so that that's out there gotcha system we'll talk about this one a little bit but a clicker heroes actually has a Gacha system in it or for those who aren't familiar whether this is like random draws like a you know collectible card game kind of thing and even like event currencies so in venture capitalists they ran a holiday event where you were collecting candy canes you could open presents and you could actually buy things that would increase your candy cane production that would get you more presents that would you know earn these unique things you could only get during the the event very similar to something like you know the Simpsons tapped out or Family Guy quest for stuff where they have event currencies and specific things there you can still apply that to an idol game and they have done that you do see banners and interstitial ads so a Bitcoin billionaire did this really clever thing I don't know how readable that is but you know it says basically we're going to give you a bonus if you let us show you a banner ad and so you say oh cool I'm you actually ask them it's like yes please show me a banner ad and banner ad pops up and then you play an errand some more cash so the player it's and I think the only opt-in banner ad I've seen before you see a lot of like opt-in video ads they when you do an opt-in ad like an actual often end you'll often get like a short burst of cash some small bit of premium currency brief powerful boost release of the negative status or even like a kind of longer term but lower boost relief of the negative status so another example from Bitcoin billionaire you know something some 1/0 you're going to lose a quarter of all of your bytes so this actually feels a lot like the FBI thing from make it rain but they allow you to just watch an ad to get around it so it's still that negative experience but it's not nearly as punishing for the player it's really just saying hey you've had a bad luck now you have to watch 15 seconds of Kate Upton so it works out small more palatable so into a couple of case studies real quick of games that are on Kongregate that the developers very kindly said that we could share some numbers for I'm only sharing per user numbers so no total revenue or anything like that but at least some insight as to how games are performing so I'd like to rule the gods this is a one guy created this game it's not a high production game but it definitely has some really interesting systems branched out with some new mechanics it was at a time that we were seeing a lot of direct clones of cookie clicker and adventure capitalist and this did some different things that players reacted well to like any of them very rapid iteration adding tons of new stuff made a lot of UI changes so this was the kind of the old UI the new ones not drastically different but there are a lot of UI our UX changes where there were more options there were easier things for players to do like players would ask for features and he would just do it and the players loved that they loved that it felt like it was growing and improving all the time I probably should get an art budget but that's okay um sorry for me there were a lot of really complicated actions or interactions in this game and deep dense systems the players are digging into and that's really really fun for them you know crazy math at calculate your attack is your battle plus you're creating strength over 2 plus physical / 4 / 943 you know which he surfaces to the players so they can start optimizing that right and that's you know that kind of depth is always going to be fun for players who want to try them in max the monetization in the game is heavily focused on god power is basically their premium currency and you can either keep the god power and use it to provide multipliers to different areas of the game or you can spend it and get permanent multipliers but the permanent boosts tend to be what players react really well to in this game in particular they do have some temporary boosts where you could do like a 90 minute boost or even like a boost until you prestige again and that's still decently but it's only about 12 percent of the revenue so it's really the kind of a permanent boost or the kind of investment side that we see selling best for for this particular game just to share a couple of charts this is the lifetime content buyers on Kongregate the first part with some testing data so please ignore the early part of that but ends up somewhere around 1.3 percent buyer rate so as perspective usually we see games kind of like you're doing okay through about 0.5% good games usually doing one to two percent purchase rates a few games will be three percent or higher so it's actually got a pretty good if not a bit above average purchase rate on the game and the lifetime average revenue per paying user so this is lifetime not monthly or daily or anything like that but the average per paying user is sitting around $25 and that's actually quite good especially for a single player game a lot of our single player games will get you know five or ten dollars for a premium version or somewhere in that range so to get players spending twenty five dollars on average for those who had spent it's actually quite good and overall leads to a pretty decent LTV for the game clicker heroes so this one a couple things that it does really interesting it does a great job of spreading value across heroes so a lot of times all of your old investments your older things you get become irrelevant very quickly this one actually makes them relevant much later in the game and keeps it interesting keeps you kind of like on your toes in terms of what you're going to focus on the use of RBG like cooldowns as I said before it provides these kind of like quick action gameplay and some strategy you can see that this list of these are the cooldowns right here and so you have the sorry I can't quite read it here but this is the one that gives you more damage for like 30 seconds or something and that has a cool down for a few hours and they can monetize that's cool down take quick you can get your cooldowns back immediately but it also is just fun like you log in and all of your stuff scroll down and then you decide you like you can go up to the next boss and you fire them off in the right order you want the doubler to go right between right before the click boost that goes then before the higher counter order I don't know if I'm doing the order right but there's actually a bit of strategy behind it which is which is fun for people who you know I appeal star VG players their prestige system involves the currency that has a trade-off between your DPS bonus and your you know the summoning of these ancients so you you get these these hero's souls that you know increase your DPS but you can also spend those to get these cool bonuses and so become this idea not just when do i prestige but how do what do I spend my prestige points and if so how do I do that more interesting questions for the players so again the core loop is mostly a self playing game but once you start making these bigger decisions is actually very interesting discuss decisions for the player to engage in in terms of monetization they have the cash infusion and the instant proceeds that are pretty standard in idle games which of those first two you see here you know +1 ascension and get the hero souls right away but they also have this plus three random gilded hero's and this is one of the the innovations they really brought brought in this is a very simple but effective Gacha system these are all of the heroes you can earn in the game and you can draw what's called a gilded hero which makes that hero do plus 50% damage permanently and you can guild multiple times so plus 100 percent plus 250% this is fun from a collection standpoint you ideally would want all of your heroes gilded and then you because you can buy multiple times you can actually get it so that you want to still keep you know making purchases and granting these random buildings so that you can increase your power overall and because they did a good job of balancing the characters to be relevant throughout even if you get some of the you know the lower end ones those are going to relevant to you at times as well so this was really cool yeah lots for multiple purchases so looking at their numbers their lifetime first Empire ended up a good bit better than even I linked to ruled the gods at almost 3 percent that's a very strong percent fire rate on Kongregate and I think in large part due to the Gacha system they actually ended up in a similar $25 our kethu so doing really well especially with the extra buyer percentage in terms of LCDs on the site alright last case study we're getting through it a venture capitalist so this really appeals to both browser and mobile audiences we were able to take it to mobile got some great features from Apple and Google which is awesome we it has a really heavy use of the theme the tone and the humor in the game so these are some of the managers you get and you see like you know W Heisenberg is the carwash manager and Forest Trump runs via the shrimp business and it's a Canadian game so you had this Jim Thornton joke in here too for anyone's import and fan so that humor really really resonates with players like seeing what kind of what are the names of the managers coming up what are the new upgrades coming and that turned out really really nice for just kind of some word-of-mouth and some retention but just in general keeping the style of the game going one thing that I think we did really well with it was have a really effective ad implementation so you the player we don't talk lets up automatically the player will have a little button they can press and this will pop up and say hey looking for a boost you can get four hours times to all of your of your income if you watch this ad and you can only watch five of these per day and so it fits the theme well-liked good it's very tongue-in-cheek like hey hey you will you watch this for us and they'll do something for you like we really kind of play up the the story behind it it provides high value to player you get to double your income for four hours it's relatively scarce so you're not watching ads constantly and so we may be leaving some impressions on the table but the players are actively making sure that they can get in and watch as many of those ads as possible to hit their daily quota which I also think helps you know it's only been out for a couple of weeks so we don't know you know exactly but I think it's going to help not get player fatigue around the ads to sort of limit it a little bit it does have some bugs and people complain to us that they can't watch ads and I feel like there's no better way to know that we did the ads well than to have people say hey I can't watch your ads fixing like okay cool well we'll work on that but that's awesome this is our store and you have kind of the normal the angel claim is the the instant prestige you can buy the time three multiplier they have a time warp the timestream multiplier is extremely compelling you spend I think two dollars and you get its permanent time three multiplier and that converts extremely well I'll show you the conversion rates in just a second I think is one of the highest buyer percentages on all of congregate com you also can unlock bulk bulk multiplayers multipliers over time so if they're you've seen you know the times three is the the highest one you can get well we actually asked you by the times three you unlock another one and it actually keeps going so we have you know times 12 times 27 times down Rosamond 501 is the highest one so players who are especially the bigger spenders are kind of like curious like how high does this go and we'll have people who go up and just like kind of find out how big it goes and then I get the big multiplier and have fun with that as well so I said they had a good buyer rate remember clicker Harris was doing well at almost 3% yeah they're sitting at like almost 8% it's fallen off a little bit as we got some some wider promotion and played it out a little bit of pricing but you know six seven percent is phenomenal for you know in terms of the congregate standards so that that time three buyer rate I think initially really big part of that and the lifetime our Babu because they have such a high buyer percentage and a lot of people are just just buying that times three you do see the our perp is a bit lower but it has been heading up as we've been doing a lot of optimization providing some deeper spend opportunities adding some opportunity for to like engage in the the holiday events there is this flat period right here and there were actually no updates were added to the game and people just stopped spending as you would expect so you know just like any other game live servicing is very important to a successful idle game and you will see revenue flattened out if you're not supporting it in this case they were actually working on the mobile version of it but the web stats you know faltered until we started paying attention to web again this is this is all these shirts are for congregate to come we were happy to see that the mobile retention is held up so far well so far again we've only been out for two weeks so I only have so much data but d1 retention sitting somewhere around 55 60 percent so it looks like the the theory that good retention you know that maintained on mobile rd7 again we don't have a lot of data yet but that sitting somewhere around 35% which we are extremely happy with so yeah they retain well on web and retain well on mobile Mobile are poopoo also held up so this is a cohort chart of congregated data and the reason I broke out the cohorts is because we made some automation changes and so you'll see the are poppy was actually pretty low for people who joined a few months ago or like a while ago but in the last few months the Opera foods have been sitting somewhere around twelve fifteen dollars on iOS we're looking at around $18 are for food right now an android we're sitting somewhere around $13 so we're seeing pretty consistent spending patterns across be to the platform the buyer percentages are different because of a variety of things around friction and you know having credit card access and that kind of thing but in terms of depth of spend for those who decide to spend it actually is relatively consistent across these flat farm alright and last couple so spender categories this will you'll recognize this is a type of chart that we that congregate often does so we wanted to break out what spenders look like for these games and so what this chart is is that readable if they're somewhat okay so this is by how much they spend so this orange section here is people who spent less than ten dollars on the game and then it kind of goes around ten to fifty sorry went out of order fifty to one hundred all the way up to these tiny little slivers of one hundred five hundred and five hundred dollars or more on the game and so we have this chart for clicker heroes and idling through all the gods adventure capitalist remember had a really good conversion rate but a lot of those conversions were at like a single purchase and so that's why you see that really really big percentage of people only spending under ten dollars while clicker heroes in Ireland evil gods I had to check a couple of times I thought it was the same chart but they actually are slightly different but they have markedly similar numbers but it's interesting it's important to look the vast majority are the under ten to fifty which is tiny little slivers of the fifty to five hundred group in all of them right now each of these games has multiple thousand dollar plus spenders so you know it just like any other game you do have big spenders if you want to find out more about big spenders current CEO Emmeline Greer is giving a talk about them tomorrow so I'm not going to talk about them here but that's a good talk and I'll just plug her but yeah so we do see big spenders even in these idle games but if we were to take this so this is distribution by how many players have spent in those groups if we now go and instead look at how the revenue distribution looks then pop all three of them up there so the the small groups are contributing a relatively small percentage of the actual revenue and I'm sorry this is hard for me to see down here you end up seeing that the groups of the $50 150 and 500 are 300 500 500 plus are actually contributing rather large percentages and actually most of the revenue outside of event capitalist to these games so just like on any of the other successful games that we see pretty much every successful game we see theory and our purchases especially outside of the casual I even casual big spenders Drive a lot it's not most of the revenue so these games they monetize they you have to live service them their attentions very similar like they ultimately are just like any other successful game our game as a service in terms of really all of the numbers that we see and that you know it's not really just an idle game they they are games that are compelling and fun and work just like every other game so just a couple kind of like wrap up like you know what's next make some kind of random predictions you know I think the classic kind of spreadsheet like idle games probably going to start to lose favor players have seen a lot of them we're starting to see some more sophisticated visualization and presentation so you know the kind of like easy you know jump in and create a quick idle games probably starting to run to run out as we're seeing better production values and people would take more note of the genre I think we'll be seeing idle spin also games and brands clicker heroes for example with a spinoff of cloud stone by play source there's an adventure quest dragons spin-off that's actually I don't know exactly what the relationship was when you load it up those like being I'm partnered with clicker heroes so I'm sorry partnered with cookie clicker so somehow they work together to do this spin-off game and I imagine we'll see kind of more of those occurring I think I'll it's going to become sort of a genre modifier like RPG that your action RPG your strategy RPG your tactics RPG well you could have idle tactics action idle RPG idle match-three and in fact idle match-three has been done so this was a public buzz which was a and repeller Ana's one of our internal developers and he created an idle mesh 3 game so this little bar at the top here fills up on its own and will match that color and you can interact and you can play faster than it but it will run on its own if you go away it'll keep matching for you and you're basically charging up these little characters that are going over and trying to break your friends free from that amber gel thingy but you can just apply these a lot of these idle game ideas to other genres just like RPG I guess and I think you know so and where that kind of goes from there is Idol design philosophies are going to start getting integrated into the meta games of standard of other types of genres you know not all of us work exponential growth is going to be weird in some games but I think you you gain a lot from you know these types of energy system approaches these types of positive progress and feedback and trying to find ways to bring that into other genres I think is you know a good bit of where the future is and that's you know I certainly would encourage everyone to try making an L game if you want it's fun it's relatively quick but trying to figure out how to bring some of this into other genres I think is you know what I'd really like to see some people do and we haven't really seen yet so that's that's my talk here's some contact information you can check out our developer website if you have browser game questions or mobile game questions those your kind of best contacts and then my email address cool so I guess we can open up for questions we have time for that thank you yeah please come up to the mics if you'd like to ask also just a quick shout out if if you enjoy the talk please give me you know a good rating if you didn't yeah go ahead and fill it out except like at least learn from it but you know doing these evaluations is really helpful you know it helps us learn and also if you enjoy the talks please fill it out because then I can give more talks later so thank you so much for coming everyone is heading out and let's take some questions hi Matt Lawrence Rovio hello as quick question on the precision mechanic so it's actually really vital to a player progression in the long run but it's actually kind of an advanced level mechanism and it always requires player interaction to do it I've never seen one were actually leads the player to do it like parvis tutorial and that's one exam how to kind of really encourage players to get that method to 'ti I don't know that would get it into the fatuity like you said it's more of a later mechanic so you do want to Toria lies it but it's something that is a complexity level that you don't necessarily need to introduce right away the games are often compelling and fun on their own in the core loop and so players are sort of discovering and getting into that and then when it becomes appropriate so like in a venture capitalist once you get to fifty angels you would double your your amount and so I at that point we pop up a little thing and said hey now would be a good time to check out the prestige system and kind of introduce them to that so I think it's a the best way to do is you contextualize it to when it's appropriate to the player don't introduce it too early because they're not even understand it and they're already likely having fun so I think it's mostly about sort of targeting your the tutorial at the right time cool thank you ah hello Hey so you speak a little about how many people are buying these games and how many people are developing these games what's the ratio like the saturation in its genre and where do you see it going in the future and I'm sorry I was asked to repeat the question so the question was you know what is the saturation of genre where's it going to the future it is starting to get somewhat saturate especially with kind of like fast follows and clones those don't tend to have as much success the most recent success for us has been formed simulator and that's one that really branched out and did something very different in its approach and in the the economics of the game so I think there is still opportunity for that was two weeks ago so obviously there is still you know new ideas that are coming out there is still a duration that is happening an evolution of the mechanics you know it's it is something that it's gaining attention we've had multiple games in Idol genre are getting featured by the big platforms which means a lot more people than we paying attention to it you know it's a great experimentation and kind of breeding ground for ideas and so I you know we'll still see a lot I've been coming out on browser it's a little harder to get big on the web because you have our bond mobile because you have to kind of go through the app stores but I think there's still opportunity for the the main idol genre and then there's sort of the the second layer of you know taking some of those approaches and wrapping them around like the idol RP Idol RPG or the idol of match 3 where you're kind of providing a little more gameplay and then trying to balance that with some idol elements all right thanks thank you okay you mentioned that these games require a lot of updating in order to stay fresh is that updating primarily on the late game or earlier game or is it spread throughout the time or the levels that the player will be moving through yeah great question the question was what you know there are lots of updates in these games but where are those focus one of those updates look like so I found of them our end game and it depends a little bit on you know how long the game is when the first launch it but a lot of times players will get through it relatively quickly and you do want to provide content for at the end for those that have gotten there a lot of the updates are UI and UX you don't necessarily understand how players are going to interact with the game especially the ones that get really hardcore about it and so they'll start requesting things like allow me to buy up to 100 of something and automatically determine you know what the right one is and then show me my cash per second here there's a lot of requests about that so a lot of them are usability things that are helpful throughout the entire process the early game often doesn't change much outside of maybe some balancing sometimes you find that you know when you did the bumpier there was something with a bit too low and so you may shift that up a little bit but in general you're going to be providing either something on the end or something that's a little parallel with anti idle that's the one that's been going for like six years he's actually just like adding new mechanics so rather than just going on the end go ahead like another way to now there's a little fighting game in it now those are collectible card game in it he's kind of crazy I don't know that's the best way to go it but he's been over six years so we had to you know have a little bit of variety but yeah it's it's really just sort of the the games it's one that I think Minimum Viable Product is very very early on and so a lot of the iteration is just sort of like public beta testing and something that's very easy to quickly iterate on and so that's I think a little bit of what we're seeing with it cool thank you oh thank you yeah hi you mentioned that congregate has games from you know flash and html5 and unity is there any particular type that tends to be more successful or just common for idle games are they all flash or some html5 um so yeah the question was whether this particular technology that's better final games I think I can almost firmly say no adventure capitalist is unity clicker heroes is flash I think I linked with the gods is flash swarm simulator I believe is html5 so no we actually don't see any real requirement there for one ticker or another thanks any other questions all right well thank you so much again please fill out your evaluations and thank for coming up

Channel: GDC

Views: 63,908

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, idle games, kongregate, gamestop, cow clicker, bitcoin billionaire

Id: Lu-RjxeDpU8

Length: 55min 20sec (3320 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Phoenix00017]

Hey Bobbitibob! I'm glad you liked it. :) (that's me in the video). Happy to answer questions if you have any.