How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
deconstructoroffun.com
deconstructoroffun.com
I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.
What's interesting is that we've decided to define gambling according the rules of the game—in reality, "gambling" is probably more akin to a psychological state that can be induced by many different rulesets and experiences.
Mobile games today are largely thinly-veiled attempts to induce this state in children through various Skinner Box mechanics in order to get at their parents' wallets. Fine.
But the real question is: what happens to the mind of an eight-year-old if they have a gambling simulator in their pocket every day? What happens to their neurological development after five years of exposure to this "gambling" state?
I'm a big fan of video games, but games that are essentially thinly-veiled attempts to get people addicted and extract money make me queasy.
There is zero reason these games should not have 13+ restrictions however. Under 13 and you're too young to play these games. Don't care if this means there's a bit of a double standard.
If there's anything to compare these kind of "games" with, maybe it's precisely with online gambling. They are thinly disguised online gambling, which makes them worse in my book.
If you look at the last 10 years in those places, the "gambling" games basically are taking over an ever-increasing amount of floorspace. Many games may as well be slot machines for all the interaction and experience they give.
I'm surprised this is even legal in the US, and not caught for app store TOS violations. It seems they've simply replaced the concept of casino chips with virtual currency. They do have some 'gameplay' outside of this but it is not much different from the various frills on video slot machines.
And a lot of these basically copy the 'packs' mechanic from collectible card games, so those would have to be affected too, by any new law.
The trick is to make the user perceive value in whatever digital artifact their are providing. In the eye of the user it then becomes the same as money.
Make the user invest their time into the game. Time is money right? Create fake rewards for arbitrary actions. Then when they are properly hooked, ramp up the difficulty level to a limit where just paying a bit of money would make the game as fun as it was during the evaluation phase.
An ad convincing me to try X energy drink at least results in me getting an energy drink.
Games like this are selling you on a worthless digital item.
This. Absolutely this. And scary as hell.
(I don't have an answer, fwiw, but I'm not overly keen on this solution)
1) Children are already restricted from consuming alcohol and coffee.
2) You can only drink so much coffee before your body asks you to stop, or gives up completely. It's not pleasant.
3) Coffee doesn't have this level of addictive properties (alcohol has, and as you'll note, alcoholism is a big problem, though see #5 and #6).
4) There are already "social antibodies" preventing most people from overconsumption of alcohol (and to some extent, coffee).
5) Alcohol prohibition didn't work because it unfairly punished the addiction-free majority, but what's proposed here isn't a restriction on video games, but on a particular aspect of a particular set of them. The proposal doesn't restrict the fun-giving part, only the addiction-inducing and addiction-exploiting parts.
6) Nobody designs alcohol or coffee with the sole intent of causing addiction their users that can be exploited for money. Whereas these games absolutely are designed like this.
However I still disagree that putting a $50 (for arguments sake) cap on the amount to be spent will even help. If that issue worked, it would work for alcohol too. Just because alcohol makes you ill doesn't stop people with an addiction from drinking themselves sick and waking up and immediately resuming drinking. Coffee may have been a bad example but tobacco is another reasonable comparison - limiting tobacco consumption to an arbitrary limit won't help people with a nicotine addiction.
There are many games out there (world of Warcraft for example) which impose weekly lockouts - no matter how much you play you can't progress past a certain point. What ends yo happening is people start at the lockout, burn through the allotted content as soon as possible, and then just wait a week and come back. Implementing a limit isn't going to stop people who are addicted to these games from finding 5-6-7 of them to make progress on to scratch that itch.
To address one of your claims directly:
> The proposal doesn't restrict the fun-giving part, only the addiction-inducing and addiction-exploiting parts.
Firstly how do you define which parts are fun giving and which parts are addiction inducing? There is a very fine line between engaging and enabling, and it's a fuzzy one. At their core, the majority of games are Skinner boxes, and everything else is dressing over that (even MP games). What is firmly in the camp of fun for many many people could easily be considered enabling for a large group of others. People enjoy progression systems in games, they are engaging and fun, and there are clear cases where these are abusive. I don't believe that saying "if you can get 20x more people addicted you can still earn the same" is the right way to punish those abuses though.
We should look at ways of reducing the reasons why people fall I to these traps, and look at regulating the monetisation methods of these games, otherwise they'll just change tack and appear in a slightly different form in 18 months time with creative workarounds (which have already been mentioned - multiple games with tie ins, gifting, streaks, external purchased to interact with the game)
As for the "fine line between engaging and enabling", two points. One, it's not just "enabling". Selling tobacco is "enabling", those games are actively designed to max out the addiction factor. Two, I agree the line is fuzzy, but I think the "you'll know it when you'll see it" argument does apply in this case. There is a meaningful difference between games optimized for being fun and an artistic expression - like most video games in 80s, 90s and 2000s - and skinner boxes thinly wrapped in a theme. It's hard to define what that difference is, because it ultimately is a difference of Colour[0], which is something hard to capture in laws. But I believe that we must try to discourage people from creating "games" of the "Skinner-box" colour.
To give random examples of games I spent ridiculous amount of time on as a kid: StarCraft and Fallout 1 and 2. They were "addictive" in the sense a good book or a good sports can be addictive. But they were first and foremost designed to be fun and tell a story, addictiveness was incidental. At no point they tried to use it to get more money from me/my parents.
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In this case, large companies with multiple games can have cross game promotions. Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.
The business model for these games is that 99% of players spend negligible amounts, and 1% spend hundreds or thousands; the minnows are a loss leader to get to the whales. Restricting spending to $50 or $100/month would destroy games like this entirely. (Which I'm fine with, personally.)
Also, are the minnows really loss leaders or just not as profitable?
My current point of view is that once a problem becomes large-scale and systemic, to the point you can actually model it at population-scale, it needs top-down attention and top-down solutions. That usually means regulation - either new, modified, or existing but better enforced. In other words, once something grows to the point it wouldn't be out of place on a SimCity/Civilizations-style game dashboard, it needs SimCity/Civilization-style solutions. In yet different words, there ain't such thing as free will and informed consent if I can reliably predict that a population under influence X will have Y% incidence of $bad-thing.
See also: vaccines, smoking, air pollution, climate change, overfishing, and countless other things where people left to their own devices and their own local, small-scale perspective reliably and fully predictably end up doing stupid things.
Sure they do. If rates of lung cancer go up because more people smoke, insurance rates for the populace at large will also go up, thereby driving down expendable income for many consumers and depressing economic growth. All of society is the third party when it comes to people making poor decisions about their health.
As an aside, I realize this reasoning can certainly be abused as a justification to make any number of questionable but possibly legitimate behaviors illegal, but it doesn't make it less true in specific cases.
But the illusory nature of "good" isn't even the primary problem. The real problem is tyranny. Government is force, no matter what, and even democracy is tyranny of a thin majority. Unless the powers of the state are limited in terms of its objective capabilities, then what is subjectively being enforced by its authoritative capacity is necessarily tyrannical to the minority.
Prohibition of alcohol wasn't a problem because mitigating social issues caused by its abuse is a bad idea. Prohibition was a problem because it was a bad tool for the job; it didn't solve the issues it was meant to, and caused many more of its own.
Drugs, pornography, prostitution and violent video games aren't the problem (except for people who don't think much). Drug abuse-related crime and health issues are the problem. Sexual abuse and crimes are the problem. Human trafficking and forcing people into sex work are the problem. Violence is the problem. I agree that bans are a wrong idea, but I also disagree about the role of the government. It's absolutely a responsibility of governments to deal with these issues - because really, no one else can.
> Government is force, no matter what, and even democracy is tyranny of a thin majority.
If democracy is a tyranny, then so is the "free" market. A tyranny of those who have more, who rule over those who have less. The tyranny of the economy that forces most people to make bad choice after bad choice, because the alternative is starvation. Truth is, there is no absolute freedom to find anywhere. Not in a world with so many people, not when the "minimum viable reproductive unit" of human species is a village. It's a game of finding the balance that ensures most freedom and most happiness.
Gambling does not violate consent. Drug usage does not violate consent. Prostitution does not violate consent, or in the cases that do, those independent instances are where enforcement needs to occur.
Is this a matter of competence or a matter of principle?
If I can talk to some people and without threats or deceit convince a good number of them to hand me over all their savings (using a zeroday in wetware for example), does the government has a right / responsibility to stop me?
I expect ad-tech and other persuasion techniques will only become more effective. At what point do we declare regular people unable to consent similar to the way we say children and few other groups can't legally consent?
In my opinion, governments overreach is when governments starts to control the population's choices (e.g. prohibition or ban of illegal & experimental drugs). Government influencing the population's choices (guiding them towards "good" choices, e.g. by limiting gambling, taxing alcohol, enforcing true labels on food) can be a very good thing, [edit:] especially in situations when humans tend to behave irrationally (i.e. because our psychology / evolutionary mechanisms are hijacked).
But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point.
I don't think it's the government's job to control the populace. They can force companies to make risks clear, but if the consumer accepts the risk, that should be that.
It doesn't solve anything when the problem is with externalities and prisoner's dilemmas.
Taxes on sugar and smoking can be argued on the grounds of increased load on national heathcare, at least in countries with publicly-funded healthcare. Taxes (or rather, pulling back on subsidies) on meat can be pretty strongly argued as effective means of reducing emissions and slowing down/mitigating climate change. Almost all situations where externalities are the problem share the exact same pattern: "it would be better if nobody did X, but since everyone does X, why should I stop and deprive myself of the value X gives me?".
Personally, I came to believe that the job - perhaps the main job - of the government should in fact be to act as a central coordinator, to prevent citizens from falling into emergent prisonner's dilemma-like traps.
As for regulating gambling and smoking and many other things you can see as "limiting freedom" - it's not like an individual decision leading to self-harm is always, or usually, an unique situation. Gambling isn't a random event, it's an exploitation scheme perpetrated fully intentionally by other people, who have literal textbooks describing the best way to fuck their fellow men and women over. It would be a pretty inhumane government that didn't take an interest in curtailing this.
With gambling there exists the chance you can bet your last $20 and make enough to pay off your debt. I don't think anyone is planning on getting rich off Idle Heroes.
Where is sugar being regulated as tightly as tobacco?
("Sin tax" is the popular dysphemism, BTW.)
>But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point.
I'm just confused what you're arguing (and why it led to this post being downvoted). I didn't compare tax to consumption under 18.
Parents could buy the subscription and know that their kids would have access to quality games that don't employ these dirty mechanics and work off-line, with no ads.
I think the subscription will do well for this one reason alone.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/apple-introduces-appl...
We understand that friction causes consumers to consider their purchase more carefully, so we've worked hard to lower friction, and this has a statistically noticeable increase in users who complete their purchase.
I'm genuinely curious whether we'll eventually reach some sort of threshold where the bulk of the economy is simply driven by overriding our better instincts.
Not to take away from your point, but you could probably argue that advertising pushed us past that point decades ago.
I'll be forward and be completely honest: I've spent several thousands of dollars on a single of these games. And I've played many of them. Some with just straight micro-transactions (eg: League of Legends skins), some straight up "gacha" or "lootboxes" (eg: Fire Emblem Heroes, FF Brave Exvius, and so on).
When you look at a videogame compared to other form of entertainment, is just how efficient they are in a "fun per dollar" point of view. MMORPGs that cost $10-15/month and people play obsessively several hours a day are way better than going to a bar to drink, money wise. But what if efficiency is tossed out of the window, how much is "fun" worth to someone?
It's likely a factor of their disposable income. But we're now at a point where adult professionals are very much part of the player base. So if a game is free to play, but has a loot box mechanic that can make it "more fun", what happens? Well, for people without money to burn in a fire pit, it might not be worth it at all, so they won't spend a dime. For the senior executive who makes 500k or 1million a year? They could blow through 5 grands in an afternoon without really caring.
So if you have a gaming population where 90% (I'm making numbers up) don't spend a dime, 9% is spending a moderate amount because of predatory practices (kids, addicts, etc) or because they like it, and then 1% spend an INSANE amount of money because they have no real "limit", you may come up WAY ahead than if you charged a flat fee and the same amount to everyone. Because the rich people are just THAT much richer to make up for everyone else.
I know I've read some articles (none that I can find to confirm my memory) where some of the smaller gacha games with a few tens of thousands of players run fully on the pockets of a few hundred people, if that.
Perhaps it wasn't clear that I meant to lump angels and VCs together as "early investors". "Pre-IPO investors" would require unpacking a TLA.
The key is in your last sentence: "wouldn't in retrospect have preferred to use that money for something else."
Unless I went and blew 50k on the game (which I fortunately never did and likely never will!), that's not even a question. Whatever money I'll spend on these, I -still- have to spend on something else. I only spend a tiny fraction of my disposable income. I (and many "whales") just have a LOT of disposable income. Very few people who go and blow 1500 bucks in a night on these actually empty their bank account (at least from my experience being part of a lot of gacha game communities. I obviously don't talk to all the whales).
I have a kind of "limit" I set myself, with zero expectations. When you blow enough money, statistically the odds of getting what you want are really high. I've gotten really unlucky at times, but usually I'll get what I was whaling for. And sometimes the game shuts down, and it's like, whatever, it happens.
I've personally encountered whales in two situations:
One was someone in an MMORPG trading equipment. Okay, I kind of get the skipping work part, especially if the money doesn't matter.
But then there were the logs I've encountered while doing support for a browser based MMO RTS. Players clicking the same few buttons to get a small fixed amount of resources. Over and over and over again. Only interrupted to recharge the currency. How can that be satisfying? Just the "work" alone seemed demoralizing to me, but then even paying for that?
Have you ever experienced something like this? Is the process of spending enjoyable? Or does the end justify the means, especially for non-random outcomes?
The fun part (and what distinguish the good gacha games from the bad ones) is how much fun you can have with what you get. Some feel like the transactions and the gambling is the end goal. You play to get currency to get random stuff. Boring.
This seems like a strange measure to me. No judgment on how you choose to spend your money - I've certainly spent money on things I later regret, and I've also spent large sums on relatively frivolous things which I don't particularly regret. There's always an opportunity cost though - I could have spent the money on something else, I could have saved more, I could have given more to charity. Over time I try not to repeat the expenditures I regret and focus more on the ones that I don't.
It works like that, except you usually still have something for a long time, even though it's digital.
It was fun for awhile but I am still shocked that I still spent thousands of dollars that I really needed at a later time. I fault myself more than the game's system for those decisions. Sometimes one can forget the value of money until once again experiencing the effects of not having it.
A lot of young professionals are making more money than they really need, and with the perception that they won't need it in the future. Therefore, there's a lot of people out there taking it for granted, and therefore not making it a second thought to spend on these pay to win mobile games. If you were to take away these mobile games, then this class of people would find some other equally stupid way to waste their money. In western society, there will never be a shortage of those possibilities.
Personally, I fear the opposite, that over-regulation of rapidly changing industries based on fear and anecdata will make people's lives worse.
I left the industry in part because of these trends and I won't be letting my own kids play these types of games. I don't know that regulation is the answer (and I'm generally anti regulation) but I do think there's a real problem here.
There's a lot to be said that its easier to attract 1000 people and extract $500 from 10 of them than it is to get 5 bucks from all of them. Even more so when you add piracy to the mix.
Would these strategies have been a thing if so many people didn't flip their shit because a near AAA level game tried to charge a few bucks?
Yes, since AAA Studios want all the money they can possibly get. Thus we'd always end with them trying to squeeze every last penny they can get out of their customers. And predatory tactics seem to work best for that.
I can't help but think you're purposefully trying to obscure that point.
I have spent some money on doom, counterstrike, quake, unreal or even chess. Or none on games like tremulous. I've spent a lot of time in these games, I've found friends in this games that I by now know for more than a decade.
A lot of that is gone with modern match making, and modern match making is made worse with transactions. Because you need to funnel more people into the matchmaking grinder.
Education is a defense. Once a person is aware of the psychological dark patterns being used against them, they start becoming less susceptible. Whether it's by video games, salesmen, politicians, etc. education is the best defense.
I see a significant difference between "have people pay for a fun service" and "engineer an experience specifically to be addictive".
Sort of weird how most "social" games are both a( trash and b( almost entirely single player with a tacked on multiplayer 'tournament' mode in which you play single player against some other player's template. Even in turn based games that would not suffer from a mobile connection's latency, they still have you go up against the AI with another player's template.
Regression from the 1990s: absolutely pathetic. I wonder if legalization of internet slot machines would wipe out mobile gaming revenue and just expose it for what it is which is a workaround for laws against gambling.
Most “social games” are like that because if a game isn't like that, even if it has social elements, it's not considered a “social game”, even if on top of the social elements it has either gameplay-affecting (e.g., any of the wargaming.net games) or cosmetic (e.g., PUBG Mobile) lootboxes.
It's like how Fortnite figured out how to get boys interested in dressing up their virtual Barbies so much that players use "noskin" in a derogatory manner.
This behavior is perpetrated even by streamers which are followed by many, including children, as role models.
Seriously though I think the loot box model is ethically wrong. However, I don't believe it's wrong to offer skins for sale - this is no different than people wearing different brands of clothing when they compete in sports
But, I completely agree. And whats worse is that Valve has done little to combat the darkest side of this industry, such as the 'futures' and stuff like that. Every CSGO video has an ad for some gambling site, and major events are sponsored by these companies.
The only part I like about the skins in CSGO is that you can actually 'own' the skin to a degree and make real money on it. But because of that, CSGO might also have one of the most predatory skin communities in all of gaming.
That's life and I'm glad that worked out for you.
This is a really weird change. I guess monetarily expected. Eh.
* Progress can be gauged by how far a team of heroes you construct can proceed in the "single player" stages of the game. Getting further into the single player campaign dictates how much experience/gold you will earn when not playing the game.
* In order to make progress, you need to upgrade a full team of six heroes.
* Not all heroes are equal and are graded on a scale of stars from 1 to 10, with 1 being the absolute worst and 10 being the best.
* The best heroes start at a star rating of 5 (I will call them 5* to mean "5-star" and so on). In order to upgrade a hero to 6* and beyond, you need a second copy of that hero and 3 additional 5* heroes of the same faction color to promote it to 6.
The drop-rate of getting 5* hero copies is very low across most opportunities. You can "summon" heroes from scrolls purchased with real-world-money, but the odds are very low here. There are also "prophet orbs", but these orbs are very rare and hard to attain more than one of them per day.
* There are many 5* units in the game, and gameplay-balance wise, not all of them are even remotely good in the later parts of the game. There's two tier-lists mainted: one for player-vs-player, the other for player-vs-monster. If you get a 5* hero unlock and it's not on that list, it's junk and is only used as food for building your 6+ characters.
There are ways to speed up the progress with money, but you will pay an arm and a leg to make about 1/6th of a dent in fully leveling a character. You'll be lucky if $100 USD gets you an inch.
It's very much a lootbox casino game hidden behind an RPG-style idle game. I played it for about a month and I was unable to hit level 90 in time to get a second copy of one of the highest-rated characters in the game (Heart Watcher), so it felt very frustrating and not very enjoyable afterwards.
A significant portion of the progress players is available via events.
Weekly and monthly events. Events on a rotating schedule give you bonuses for using each metagame system to the fullest.
Examples: - monthly Tavern complete X # of quests for guaranteed rewards - monthly fight X # of times in PVP for guaranteed rewards - monthly PVE battle for guaranteed rewards - weekly gacha summon - summon 500. During this event likelihood of 5* is doubled and guaranteed rewards - weekly random gem boxes - weekly blacksmith event - weekly campaign loot event - guaranteed 5* for logging in
Utilizing these events to the fullest separates the long-term players from short-term players.
Wasting $$ outside of these events is not recommended.
This turns the game back into a fair amount of idling as you collect the resources to fill each event and wait for the right opportunity to utilize them. Then you often get major boosts of power and multiple copies of high rated characters.
So a single month of playing is barely enough to make it through one rotation and probably not enough to utilize any of them.
So even the pay-to-win part is broken and more like pay-to-lose.
A game that's optimized for monetization over fun is not the kind of game I want to play.
Insofar as Endless Frontier is pretty good about not forcing you to spend money, I've resisted trying another game which looks far more like whale-bait.
I actually went and bought one of the packs (with a permanent spirit-highlands upgrade, so not one-off currency) recently, just because I figured I'd been playing for basically-free for so long that I might as well contribute a bit more.
It doesn't even look like a game in the traditional sense at all - for enjoyment / fulfillment / fun. More like a colorful spreadsheet, with cheap visuals and not even mechanical skill. 'Gameplay' videos on youtube show people flipping cards and clicking through a dozen inventory management screens, nothing really happens. Really puzzling.
Is this what getting old feels like?
You play <name of FPS de jour> to show off fast twitch muscle memory, but you play games like this to show a different sort of ability. Perseverance? Intellect? I'm not sure what it is for each person specifically, but they can be fun.
You can play free online. I paid $2 one-time fee to play on my phone. There's a vibrant community on /r/kittensgame on Reddit and the dev is active there.
It is also arguably one of the most well-done idle/incremental games I've played after playing a few. The depth of it is jaw-dropping once you really start getting into the mechanics of late stage play, and you'll hit several points along the way where you think you are there only to find out everything you've been working on gets abstracted away into new growth concept that becomes critical to the next stage.
Is there a version for Android? I see CivCrafter, but that looks like a monetized knockoff.
Some other sources of fun to mull over: Tamogatchis, fantasy football, pulling a lever on a slot machine.
I spent more time playing Adventure Capitalist than I'm really willing to admit to, but despite being an idle game I have to admit it has a fun core game loop that rewards you for checking in on it occasionally. I don't really recommend that game, since its ultimately a huge waste of time, but I'll just admit that it was fun while it lasted.
When I played Universal Paperclip I realized that the whole idle game genre has a lot of untapped potential. That game has neat shifts in gameplay as well as a story arc that ends in a pretty satisfying way. http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
I’m fine being top 95% rather than top 99%. In both games I have reached a point where I not only am fully capable, but am fully capable with tons of resources that would otherwise cost lots of money and I simply haven’t used because the value props of events people are lured into are deceptively low.
I like these games, because they offer a small amount of tasks to do and a super long term scale sense of progression to plan out. It’s not pay to win, it’s pay to win quickly. You can beat everything freely without much trouble (or course other games won’t be so generous perhaps. I would guess idle heroes to be more of a financial grind)
Although one observation I had was that money was used as a crutch by bad players who incorrectly assumed it was necessary. It’s a turn based strategy game with relatively little entropy so a lot of it is skill. A smart player would think about positioning and how to safely take out enemies. Dumber players were fond of saying how they favored defensive builds, or in other words, creating units that were strong enough to stand there and win on counter attacks. The issue with this was that as the game ramped up in difficulty this would gradually get more difficult to accomplish. So if you refuse to play the game intelligently you have to try to upgrade your characters with cash.
But then after a while you hit a wall where your characters are maximally strong (which is less than 10% better stats no matter how much you spend), you’re _still_ not going to be strong enough to handle the hardest content without playing smart.
So... money can help you get through the first 80% of content, but it won’t be enough and is not required for the last 20%... but then is required again for the side bit of absolute top tier pvp.
From a game design, I actually think this looks pretty healthy for the game’s integrity. Not the gambling habits it induces.
There will always be trained and capable folks willing to cash a big paycheque or justify unethical professional behaviour to further their objectives.
I think open frank discussion and resilience built within families and cohorts of friends is the best defence.
No one is immune.
But a small team based approach might be useful.
The concept of digital nutrition and labelling sounds promising:
Without that, we don't really know whether the design or the advertising is the reason for revenue.
My criticism was that what this make the exchange so blatantly abusive. All those psychological mechanisms to "ensure engagement" and "pursue the whales" (or whatever soft term they come up for them) ... makes me sick.
I actually think I prefer a slot machine to this. It is less dishonest.