The Hidden Evil of the Micro Transaction
The Hidden Evil of the Micro Transaction
Over the last year a lot of time has been spent thinking, writing and developing my thoughts on social gaming and by extension micro transactions. The last few months of my professional life have involved some fairly complex and sometimes scary monetisation designs and discussions. Moving from consoles to social web games has been an interesting path to walk, with many lessons to be learned.
Micro-transactions are not Evil!
I prefer the Yummies
The classic line from Hamlet, “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” is the one which applies here. MTX is a valid business model which, when used correctly, can enhance a game experience and bring a product to a wider audience.
A key barrier to entry for so many people is breaking open their wallet. For this reason I love Facebook games, but also XBLA games. The trial mode enforced by Microsoft does not get enough credit for upholding really good accessibility and up-sell standards. It enforces the “try before you buy” on developers and does some really intelligent things.
That being said poor monetisation design or a mismatched business model can destroy a product. Some quick examples:
- ESports != Game Affecting Micro transactions
- Experimental MMO != Upfront Cost + High Sub Cost
- Awareness Raising Serious Game != Fixed Cost Model
Greed is NOT Good
Many, not all, business and marketing characters I’ve met are so focused on the bottom line they cannot see the product. Now in some cases, this is just greed but more often they are not gamers, they do not partake in the craft nor enjoy its fruits.
Some quick numbers and explanations for you.
| ARPPU | Average Revenue Per Paying User is measured on a per month basis. | It varies a lot and is one of the less visible numbers in the industry. |
| LTV | Lifetime Value of a User | Varies MASSIVELY |
| Engagement | DAU / MAU | 20% Average |
| DAU | Daily Active Users | Top 40 all above 7 million |
| MAU | Monthly Active Users | Top 40 all above 1 million |
| Conversion Ratio | Monthly Conversion rate of Players to Payers | 2% Average |
| Organic Traffic | Amount of Traffic you get that isn’t due to Ads, Purchased Traffic or Partnerships. | Hard number to pin down and the real value is often hidden behind marketing dollars. |
First thing that your money people are going to focus on are those numbers, especially the ARPPU. As a game designer your key metric should be the Engagement, Lifetime value and some of the softer metrics.
Instead of gobbling the raw ingredients like a lazy fat child, put in some work to cook up a feast. Take some risks, aspire to improve the game so people want to play it rather than feel compelled to play it. Drive up the engagement, word of mouth buzz and reduce the churn (loss of players). In short, take the long view.
Grey Areas are Green-lit by Greed
The problem with all this is this it is an ambiguous, grey area. The real kicker is that grey areas are always green-lit by greed. In the interest of a “little more”, so much wrong has been done. So many ideas ruined, communities broken, and teams overstretched by wanting that little bit more. The old sustainable farming arguments come into play here.
The massive problem is that you as the Games Designer or other development members do not always have the final say, but you can still fight your corner. You can build your arguments and try to provide some strong research and data to help your money people see the long term view.
The problem is this Green lighting of Grey areas doesn’t only hit the money people can filter into your team. Money is a great excuse to put your toe over the line.
Strong Vision Holder
The saving grace is if your company founder, CEO or similar authority is a strong vision holder. Failing that, you can have a hard-headed idiotic bitch of a lead designer in heels with a baseball bat and a South African sized chip on her shoulder or your local equivalent, who is willing to fight your corner.
The design and vision has to remain consistent, lines must be drawn and values upheld. From this position you can try to innovate and develop. It’s scary and frightening and there is no guarantee you will get it right. Trust, Integrity and Values can be sold if you’re starving. They can never be bought if you’re fat and wealthy.
Girl’s gotta Eat
So all this being said we aren’t making games for free and we need to eat. I’ve never met anyone in the trenches of game development who wasn’t filled with passion for their craft. I’ve got a whole other blog post to write about: compromise, tips on winning people over and facing the harsh realities.
At this point, however, I will just recommend this brilliant, fiery rant of awesome.
GDC 2011: No Freakin’ Respect! Social Game Developers Rant Back by Brenda Brathwaite
Along with this counter point argument
Redesigning Wild Ones into Playdom's Top Game: A Social Game Design Reboot by Joshua Dallman
We do it because we love our games, not the money… but a girl’s gotta eat.
A Kiss is always harder than a Kill
Originally written for #AltDevBlog: Link to Original Post
Games let us craft interactive systems in which we can play and explore. We play with limited rule-sets, physics, combat, squad based AI, and a million other complex systems which give us a world to explore. Why then is one of the core human experiences, our social nature, all but missing from games?
[Delete several paragraphs explaining where we are and why – assume audience knowledge]
Jump to Nuts & Bolts discussion.
It all boils down to the fact in many ways the dialogue tree system we are so comfortable with is a local maxima in evolution of social interactions and needs to be discarded to make progress.
Let’s take a brutal approach to a social interaction with a game agent. Now if we look at the three stages we can separate them nicely. Currently Inputs are stupidly simple, the game-pad offers the emotional range Morse code, no wonder the agent has trouble interacting. I’m less concerned here because of Kinetic and the brilliant academic research being conducted in this field.
Our outputs however are extremely high quality with amazing voice acting, great visuals and delivery in our high end products. Though the methods we use aren’t scalable, and impractical for dynamic systems. Again there is great research in text-to-speech, automated lip syncing and similar technologies. So great strides being made in this area, but it will be the most painful transition to make as early version of this technology just can’t compete with the pre-baked polished deliveries we have at our disposal.
While challenging I think both of those areas are moving forward at a good pace and will be solved in the near future.
Then we get down to the gritty problem of the agent itself and the formulation of a response. Something we are getting very good at for say tactical combat simulation, where the inputs are better and the outputs rule governed. The dialogue tree however is at the end of the day a static graph (path manipulation through skill rolls or simple scripting doesn’t count) which creates a dumb but effective reflex agent.
How can we grow this agent into a more intelligent system which allows for play and exploration? Can we make an agent who processes and develops an opinion of our actions rather than simply reacting to them by a cast iron static reflex system?
Now while research is going on in this area its super fluffy and long range and does not get as much funding, mostly due to past developments in academia (see AI Winter). One of the trickiest areas with an intelligent response is it requires some degree of knowledge, and knowledge representation is a damn tricky problem in the AI world.
Nuts & Bolts
The key point to the entire problem is that the agent in a game-world, unlike an agent trying to exist in “reality”, lives in a world where we know everything. Using this we can seed them with knowledge they require and a basic relationship network. Through this they can perceive and understand any event which is within the scope of the game world as we have provided them with a working knowledge base from which to understand it.
This will allow us to make advances faster than our “reality” counter parts with quicker results as we have limited the scope of the problem space. Game developers like to cheat 
. It would also help if for the short term if we allow ourselves to use clunky or unappealing input or output systems which would not be acceptable in a commercial product 
Now I know this all sounds very fluffy and I sound like a crazy newbie who has discovered neural nets for the first time and has a naïve grin ear to ear. Though I do acknowledge the scope of this problem and I know the way forward is solving a lot of smaller problems to construct the tools to solve the larger. My dissertation which focussed on building a query/response framework along with the concept of 2nd degree authorship was the umpteenth step for me but the 1st solid piece of results.
2nd Degree authorship had to be proven because I know that at the end of the day we do still want to write and construct narratives, rather than pure random simulation situations. I proved this with a fairly simple rule-based modifier system, one possible solution to procedural authorship of social interactions.
Another requirement is data model which was generic enough to be expanded without being reworked. Again I manage to propose a fairly simple atomic model which would work for several game systems.
Finally I looked at building a query response model which could hold context and remain fairly generic. My research mostly hit dead ends until I considered representing a conversation as a tree, which provides context and a query as a path through that tree with null nodes. Response then could be sub-trees. XPath nicely fitted to this concept and I’m quite happy with the flexibility of the resulting system.
The full details up to this point can be read in my dissertation here.
The next step is build a system in which agents can observe a self-contained play session, discuss it with a player entity or another agent and have a personality persists over multiple sessions. I had two possible planned prototypes to explore this concept. This is the thing I was struggling over for the last week.
The detective prototype was appealing due to its lack of what we will call secondary work (not directly pertaining to the research). In this scenario we would use 2nd degree authorship aided by some procedural systems to generate a crime scenario. The player would then interrogate several agents to try build a picture of the truth. The agents would of course have a personal partial vision of the situation and be manipulating their responses to remove the appearance of guilt.
This is an appealing prototype firmly built on my previous work with little need for secondary work. The two key concerns however were that it strongly depended on the strength of my generation algorithm and would therefore possible reach a dead-end or be handicapped if that system were inferior. It also caters to a fairly narrow spectrum of games, not having many traditional games systems interaction with the social model.
So the second prototype is a tactical turn based shooter. A game I’ve been throwing around for the last year or so, in which the world is persistent but the missions are throw-away and players build reputation. The idea is that the agents (in this case infiltrating squad members, or defence agents) can debrief their controller after the mission about the events. These agents would be persistent over the game world getting hired, fired and killed.
The main point here is the social information is mostly being scraped from a “live” game session in which one side (the defender) is not actually present. The downtime between missions however can be used to de-brief and casually talk about items. This means the game itself is not reliant on the social system, making it easier to have multiple versions, swap out or rewrite the social component without altering the game itself.
Also the persistent nature of the agents mean if I leave a server running long enough distinct social ecosystems should hopefully evolve.
Well that’s the plan; I’ll discuss more details in future posts and as the project advances. If you have any interest in this field or my research please do contact me I’m always looking for people to bounce ideas off and just share my crazy dream to cut-down the dialogue tree and burn its pitiful remains in the fires of progress.
Further ramblings on the matter are on my site, FlammablePenguins.com
Jagged Alliance Online Announced
Okay so talk about timing. Just days after my last post it's announced classic team based tactical game Jagged Alliance is getting an online treatment.
So now often people think strange things but often an idea's time has just come, the influences are there and given enough brains some will arrive at similar conclusions. This happened for Calculus for instance. Now in the international mono-culture it is even more common. I could point to a beta which was made public today and pull out a pitch document I wrote two years ago and you would be convinced it's the same game (not telling what the game is).
Back to the new game though. The following information is from the launch site.
Tactical Turn based Action in 3D isometric graphics with parameterized maps for fresh challenges
Procedural Generated content and browser based, these both get two massive thumbs up. Also this implies a low technical barrier to entry.
Management of mercenary company with extended RPG system
Levelling up characters and long term progression are key sticky factors keeping players engaged. It raises the barrier to entry a tiny bit if done right, and by a mile if done poorly.
Synchronous and asynchronous online PvE, co-op and PvP
Every word there is gold. Synchronous is nothing new but it is the most engaging way for players to interact and is always brilliant that you support it. Asynchronous is crucial in the busy online world and social environment, especially for casual players. As we discussed it was a key factor of new social Multiplayer elements, also means you need a much smaller player base before getting critical mass.
Co-op is key for the non-competitive players and if pitched right with the correct buffs ect... will be a key recruitment point. If you make co-op a powerful experience with rewards you can turn your player base into your most vocal recruiters. Finally PvP and PvE has to be in there for the more traditional player, and PvP tends to increase the depth of play significantly.
Build up your own HQ
This has social written all over it espcially if its easy to share and show-off. Build your own
Players can choose to accept campaigns, which are essentially a string of missions on a specific map that need to be resolved within a given time frame.
Player's can choose is a nice phrase, that power to the player that social systems push, but the kicker is the given time frame. The choice gives the sense of control but the time limit is the pull-back and the sticky factor. I assume the time frames will be very lenient but just short enough to encourage you to come back before your crops wither, so to speak.
Players can support other’s campaigns by renting mercenaries for a certain amount of time and can also bolster their roster by using their ally’s mercs.
Here comes another viral vector, and reason to recruit friends. It's the golden goose trick of turning a person's friends into a game resource. Making them ensure they have more, and therefore you have more players. It also provides a very passive social interaction which will keep reminding players to get back in because their friends are still playing.
The game can be played as a normal browser game, managing mercenaries and sending them on missions or players can dive into the action on the tactical map, improving their chances and rewards.
So the depth of engagement is chosen by the player, and how much time they have. Again it's smart because many people will be recruited by their friends but not be deeply invested enough, at first, to engage in tactical game-play. Think of it as getting someone into whiskey by giving them fruiting cocktails to start with.
This is also encouraging because it suggests the game will have the desired depth for us more traditional tactical players.
The game has three core layers of gameplay:
- The tactical map, where players control their mercs directly in turn based/real time combat.
- The management level, where players run their company, rent out mercs and choose missions or campaigns as well as build up their HQ facilities.
- The social layer, where players may support or fight others on campaigns or missions.
Again the different depths of engagement.
Overall they have landed a licence to one of the most seminal tactical titles in gaming history, and unlike the raping of the X-Com franchise.
Upgrading a franchise and making it relevant for a modern audience isn't hard. When done well it's like the new Star Trek movie, keeping the key things and rebooting it. All you do is brush it off look at the key mechanics and update it a bit. They have updated it without losing the core game-play which was key to the original title, and updated it to fit into the social gaming space.
Here's hoping it turns out well.
Should we worry about Social?
Image from Matt Hamm
So Games Horizon Conference for the second year running really pushed the social and freemium agenda. My viewpoint, shared by others I spoke to, is that the social gold rush is over but social is here to stay.
It's a highly competitive space but no matter how you slice it, its a very attractive space for investment. I won't go into boring details about risk curves, feedback loops and such. Needless to say on paper social is attractive from a business stand point.
Now here is the thing that worries me, in the television space a few years back we discovered reality television, and relaunched the talent show in a more social format. We injected more low cost programming fuelled by, now controversial, methods like call ins and vote systems. As Jesse Schell pointed out in his talk, people seem to have forgotten there is such a thing as a BAD virus. Many viral and manipulation methods used by these shows, and social games, are ranging from manipulative to morally questionable.
Talk to anyone in TV now and they will all say the same thing. The money just isn't there for original programming any more. We are filling prime hours with low cost programming, with little lasting creative value. Actors, writers and the medium is suffering. We still have bastions of quality with brilliant shows but they are sandwiched in between some horrible programming.
So this is my question, how do we avoid this in the game space or is it already happening?
I'm not speaking against social gaming, I'm speaking against low cost, low quality social gaming. Which through its social nature manages to maintain a popcorn like quality. It's the fast food which eats away at consumer mind share and fiscal investment. When asked which they prefer, Sopranos or X-Factor I think most people will put their vote on Sopranos but they are watching the X-Factor.
How do we keep high quality games, possible with high production costs, as an attractive investment?