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Why You Shouldn't Design Games Through Analytics
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer Tadhg Kelly writes at TechCrunch about a trend many gamers have noticed over the past decade: designers increasingly relying on statistics — and only statistics — to inform their design decisions. You know the type; the ones who'll change the background color if they think it'll eke out a few more players, or the ones who'll scrap interesting game mechanics in favor of making the game more easily understandable to a broader market. Naturally, this leads to homogenization and boring games. Kelly says, 'Obsessed with measuring everything and therefore defining all of their problems in numerical terms, social game makers have come to believe that those numbers are all there is, and this is why they cannot permit themselves to invent. Like TV people, they are effectively in search of that one number that will explain fun to them. There must, they reason, be some combination of LTV and ARPU and DAU and so on that captures fun, like hunting for the Higgs boson. It must be out there somewhere. ... Unlike every other major game revolution (arcade, console, PC, casual, MMO, etc.), social game developers have proved consistently unable to understand that fun is dynamic in this way. ... They are hunting for the fun boson, but it does not exist.'"
Didn't they actually just find the Higgs ? Kinda blows the analogy,
Can I light a sig ?
The goal is money: get more people to buy the game and get more people to buy in-game purchase items.
MVP and F2P eventually passed into regular industry jargon along with a boat load of other terms. Most every company involved in the space now talks about DAU, LTV, ARPU, ARPPU, ARPDAU and even ARPPDAU. They talk about performing cohort analyses. Some of them ask whether they are working on an MVP or an MDP? Most don’t really bother discussing viral K-factors any more, and instead obsess about the CPA of players. These are significant changes for an industry that used to worry more about Metacritic ratings.
Jesus, some executive just had a seizure on that guy's keyboard.
Social games aren't supposed to be *fun*. The objective is to keep people playing. Fun is one way to do that, but there are other methods that can be just as capable or even more so. Social games depend on a few effective psychological hooks:
- Time sinks. Once you have gotten the player to invest enough hours, they become reluctant to leave and throw away the invested time.
- Social interdependance. Allow players to assist each other. That way if someone does want to stop playing, they'll have to abandon friends who need their help.
- Constant progress. Players need to feel like they are constantly getting further and further, so an effective social game makes sure there is always a new milestone just ahead - and that there is a way to show off this success.
- Ease of promition: Make sure your players can tell everyone else they play via facebook.
Social games aren't about fun. They are about operant conditioning. Zynga has a psychologist on staff to advise their designers on how to make a game people will feel compelled to play, and the approach works.
None of these actually require the game be fun. Or have we forgotten Cow Clicker, the parody of social gaming deliberatly designed to be as dull and un-fun as possible, yet which still achieved a moderate level of success purely by following the rules of social manipulation.
I hate any company that is driven through spreadsheet thinking but I think this story only really applies to the Zyngas of the world. My beef is a little bit different. It is where multiplayer games slowly cut off all the interesting discoveries. Too perfect a sniping spot; modify it to make it vulnerable. Room too perfect for a grenade tossed by a defender; change it. Gun a little too powerful; tone it down. All these fixes make eventual sense in that once enough people make one of these discoveries then they exploit the crap out of it and it really ticks the other players off. But at the same time these discoveries are cool. When I find that perfect ambush site I will annoy a bunch of players until they just start tossing a grenade into that spot every time they walk by. So if the spot is too perfect by all means fix it but then create another "too perfect" problem. Let people find it and then fix it. Too many multiplayer games get fixed until it is just a boring stalemate while other games never get fixed and that perfect sniping spot just runs all the other players out of town. In real war you often have move/counter moves the whole war along which is the thinking that drives the whole "Fighting the last war" syndrome where after the war the winning side keeps countering the enemy's last move better and better. But in many games all the counter moves just fix existing problems while not actively seeking to create new ones.
This article only makes sense if you assume that "social game" or F2P game developers actually care about those metrics because they are trying to find "fun."
They aren't. They care about those metrics because they are trying to maximize revenue for the current title. After experimentation, they then take the combination of factors that had the maximum revenue for the previous title and then repackage it into a rebranded version of the same game with that combination as the starting point. It's more like casino design than game design.
By and large F2P games are not really about creating a "fun" experience. They are about creating an addictive experience loop which yields them income through impulse micro-transaction purchases. While "fun" is a factor (the game has to be interesting, after all) it certainly is not the primary goal of this part of the industry. Although some games buck this trend, the top-grossing ones are certainly not games which would typically be considered wholly "fun" compared to standard console/PC game titles.
None of these acronyms have found their way into mainstream console or PC title development. They are all monetization terms which are primarily applicable to "games" which have the sole purpose of monetization. This should not be surprising.
What's a sig?
See: The homogenization of WoW over the last 8 years while throwing more and more shiny at it to try to call that the creativity. They tried to go against the numbers ONCE but called it so badly that their subscriber base revolted and they lost a large portion of their North American/European subscribers.
TL;DR for rest of this: World of Warcraft has shot itself in the foot for several reasons but mainly due to exactly the reasons stated in the article. They relied on numbers, and then when they realized numbers weren't getting them anywhere as a lot of people didn't like where the game design was headed... they relied on the absolute worst group of people to advise them: The hardest of hardcore gamers.
They removed the wrong functionality based on the opinions of elite players. While overall class homogenization and general horribleness really started its massive downwards spiral in Wrath of the Lich King, Wrath had one thing going for it: Variety of raids. Elite players in wrath had difficulty filling raid spots even just a month after the world first lich king kill because there were things to do. Thus when consulted they put their own interests ahead of everyone else and voted in a removal of seperate cooldowns for difficulty mode of raid encounters. This was ostensibly done for good reasons but since gated raids with gear from previous raid instances being required to progress into harder raids are no longer there... removing this trashed the list of things to do for the folks that "populate" the game world. The people that are on constantly. The ones that have little to no life outside of the game. These are the guys that get made fun of the most and they are absolutely vital to your games success. Most of them are quite friendly and helpful and they deserve better. Besides that they broke the nostalgia factor of re-rolling alts for most of their older players, who no longer fully return to the game because they don't feel like re-learning the zones in addition to the classes.
They continued homogenization while removing those things in Cata leaving everyone in the semi-hardcore(people who play a lot but not super competitively) bracket bored out of their fscking minds.
The graphics don't help.... original gfx were grittier and less cartoony. When the graphics were updated for Cata they went wayyyy too far into the looney toons bin for myself and a lot of others. I would have preferred mildly more realistic environments than vanilla(but not too realistic, the original art style had a "fun-looking" appeal to them) with much more realistic player characters. The fact that my dwarf hunters nose and hands with the new cartoonier textures look nearly as bad as the graphics in Aidyn Chronicles from the N64 is fucking depressing. Especially when its stressing a computer with hardware powerful enough to account for a 20x10 server room full of N64s.
Their numbers and polls state that graphics don't matter to their customers however, which is only partially true. Graphics quality doesn't matter AS MUCH but graphics style most certainly does. Its one of those intangibles that will likely never show up on most exit surveys unless you start forcing people to give you their top 5 reasons for leaving instead of one or two. Blizzardat the moment gets one or two.
The thing is, once you start getting the 5.... if the top 1-2 reasons are varied and split around a relatively even-looking pie-chart... then they all need work but its probably already being worked on for your next expansion etc. If 95%+ of people leaving place an issue in their top 5... it needs to be addressed immediately.
Additionally... don't just poll people who are currently playing. Poll those who have quit. Those who respond who have quit probably want to return but won't due to the reasons they list. If wow was trying to get its subscriber base back, this is where it needs to start.
I really hope people (that matter) read that last paragraph. Allow me to quote it and stress it: Poll those players that have quit. Asking the players that are around for their opinion is pointless, they are already here and they are already staying. It's like looking at the bombers that make it back from the enemy raid and reinforce the parts that have holes in them. They don't need reinforcement, those bombers made it back, you should reinforce the OTHER parts of your bombers because those are the parts where those were hit that did NOT get back.
What's worse is actually that every maker of MMOs out there tries to copy WoW, ignoring the fact that those that want to play WoW are already playing WoW, and those that are not are looking for something that is NOT WoW. Now, how should making a clone of a game I don't want to play convince me that I want to play yours?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.