Reading 08: A Casino in Your Pocket

Mobile games are weird. Think of when you got your first smartphone or tablet (or an iPod Touch if you were like me and had parents who hated fun). I remember eagerly loading up my account with iTunes gift cards and gleefully buying whatever piqued my interest. I was curious so I looked up my download history on the App Store. Back then, games were short and my attention span even shorter. I filled page after page of my iPod's home screen with flash game clones and prototypical free to play titles. It was a simpler time. Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, Jetpack Joyride, Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird...the list of 'classics' goes on and on.

Absolute classics I tell you

It's a little hard to trace, but I'd say around 2013-14, the App Store reached peak game saturation. As other parts of the device competed more for our storage space (read: phone cameras stopped sucking) it became much harder to get people into the App Store to download games. Obviously this dilemma did not go unnoticed by the big app developers. The solution to the issue of a shrinking user base was to increase the profit made from the remaining users. To do this companies took several important steps

1) Make the barrier to entry as low as possible. It may seem obvious but people are hesitant to spend money on an unknown entity. By making the game free to begin, or even better free to play entirely, it is easier to acquire new users. As for what the users will be doing, we want the core gameplay loop to be fairly simple, highly repeatable, and limit how much of it they can experience it in 1 sitting.

2) Once the player is there, keep them coming back. Daily login rewards, time limited events, and other incentives mean the user needs to keep coming back to the app. It's important to maximize this because finally

3) Offer the player opportunities to expedite more tedious parts of gameplay. This can be accomplished by speeding up timers, giving stronger items, or some other mechanic. However it is accomplished, a 'premium' currency is typically used.

Case Study: Fire Emblem Heroes (see also basically any mobile game made in Japan)

I'm not entirely sure they ever tell you what a fire emblem even is...

Fire Emblem Heroes embodies these 3 principles flawlessly. The game is completely free to play, in so-far as there is no subscription or purchase necessary to play the game. That is not to say this is easy. Rather the game goes out of the way to hinder players from rapidly progressing. In order to actually play levels of the game, 'stamina' must be spent. This is a limited currency that regenerates over time, at a rate of 1 point per 5 minutes. The initial stamina pool is relatively tiny, and increases by leveling up the player's account through the successful completion of missions. Typically these stamina pools rate limit the player to 3-4 levels in one sitting before the player must either wait or pay some sort of transaction in order to refresh their stamina.

This waiting period is crucial because in order to encourage players to spend money to regain stamina, limited time events occur almost constantly. These events typically require the player to complete special levels in order to fulfill some sort of objective, be it earning points or a special type of loot that can be exchanged for limited-time rewards. The fear of missing out on exclusive rewards that cannot be earned over the course of regular gameplay encourages players to spend money to ensure they don't miss out. It's important to note here that the rewards cannot be directly bought with real money; this would place an explicit value on the event and cap the amount of money that can be made. Rather, by encouraging the player to play more than they typically do over a time period, the potential profit is significantly higher.

It may be tempting while reading this to assume the game is pay to win, that is, that players who spend real money have access to equipment and characters that is inherently superior to that which non-paying players can acquire. This is typically not the case and is a key aspect of these games that allows for smaller player bases to sustain long term growth. Typically, mobile games following the formula operate a system similar to slot machines. Players spend a certain amount of premium currency for a number of 'pulls' from a box containing new characters. The characters have varying levels of rarity and, by extension, power. People who are significantly invested in getting a specific character can even run simulations to determine their odds of success. In Japanese, this system is called a gacha, so called because of its similarity to a popular toy dispensing machine. If this sounds similar to loot-boxes found in many newer games it's because those systems are directly inspired by these mechanics. (Read more here)

In summary, a lot of successful mobile games these days operate on a similar formula. It's tailor made to get players hooked on the game and get them to spend some $$$. Because of the often slot machine-esque mechanics, games can be sustained by a few very wealthy players, sometimes referred to as whales. If the system seems rigged against free-to-players its because often times it is. The games are designed to allow you enjoy playing but always feel like you'll be missing out if you don't spend money. While ethics of this are another question, there's no doubt that many mobile games these days are designed with monetization in mind. Whether or not that makes these games wrong to play is a far more difficult question, one that I'm not sure I have the answer to myself.

Obviously this is not to say that all games follow this model. In fact, some of the current top-grossing games significantly buck this trend.

Behold our lord and savior: The Unreal Engine

Most notably, Fortnite recently released a fully featured mobile version of the game that has full feature parity with the console/PC version. To reiterate, there are 0 play restrictions on the game at all. The only difference between versions of the game is platform and visual fidelity. Despite being completely free to play, Fortnite Mobile is smashing top seller lists. Even more remarkably the game has managed to do this with cosmetic only loot boxes. I think this really highlights the potential for mobile games to aspire to be something more than just a soulless virtual casino, and I hope more games embrace this model in the future.

Oh yeah PUBG Mobile is also a thing (#BetterThanFortnite)