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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

Have you actually played Clash of Clans or Hay Day? Those things are amazingly well designed for money printing purposes. Everything in the games are designed to be slippery conversion funnels filled with hooks that pull you deeper and deeper. The idea is to monetize addiction with very high conversion rates.

Some of the ingredients: free to play, every action prompts a IAP (wait or pay), quick&easy progress in beginning, instantly addictive, competitive (leaderboards&prizes), social pressure (you have to join a clan and fight for it) etc. All of this very well executed in a great game.

Edit: So, the author's point that they 'just executed proven idea better and added content' is not the reason why they are so successful. It's the starting point. Real innovation here is that they are probably among the first who really focus on conversion optimization in games.

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I'm the author and I highly doubt that. They are far from the first company to really focus on conversion optimization.

I paid a statistician to reverse engineer the economy of Dragonvale, Tap Pet Hotel and Tap Zoo. All of the games follow a VERY similar pattern on every stat. Here is an example on XP and Level ratios:

http://www.treylink.com/uploads/xp_leve_ratio.png

We've done ton of research on this and most of these games copy each others economy very closely.

I could go on about that forever, but go play Galaxy Life and then Clash of Clans. You'll see it's the EXACT same tutorial story and setup. I mean, screen for screen. I'm not hating, it's just the nature of the business.

The fact is this:

Innovation is a risky business model. The companies can see what worked, tweak the theme and add to the game content, and have a MUCH higher chance of success.

I agree that those monetization patterns aren't unique to them, but they are fairly recent trends in gaming, in general. Well, Valve innovated something with TF2 free-to-play model. And now, with IAPs and stuff, I think more game developers are consciously focusing on tricks in conversion optimization. Not just 'how to make a fun game that everyone will buy'.

Of course, that doesn't help if the actual game isn't good/addictive enough, which might be the case with Galaxy Life (or app market dynamics/luck/anything). However, Supercell probably 'recreated' it just because they saw a great monetization potential in that type of game.

The first few games to use an exponential XP curve may have copied each other, but by now basic things like this are simply conventional wisdom in game design.

Here's Diablo II's incremental XP vs. level graph — essentially identical: http://hothardware.com/articleimages/Item1824/D2-XPScale.png

See my other reply, it wasn't just XP and Level. Earn Rates per minute, cost of items per level, etc was also similar.

>Innovation is a risky business model. The companies can see what worked, tweak the theme and add to the game content, and have a MUCH higher chance of success.

Sorry for the hijack, but this is a key point to understanding why we need some kind of patent system. Thanks for this comment that I can come back to whenever there's another patent fight. :)

You paid someone to tell you and XP is an exponential function of Level? Every game since D&D in 1974 (and probably earlier) has had that.

Heck, the human ear has an exponential relationship between air pressure and perceived loudness. As does the human eye for light and perceived brightness.

Haha, no. I did not pay someone to do that. I paid someone to find out how much of these economies are copied. We had numbers for everything including cost of unit per level, earn rate per minute per level, etc.

Everything followed the same pattern, not just level and XP.

It really stood out when you said that you paid an statistician to analyze these games. I assume you did it to understand and try to replicate the successes of the top grossing games. What did you learn that was surprising? Did this level of analysis help you make better games?

For sure, we learned a ton :)

I enjoyed your talk recorded last year. There was a time when you felt that doing a game is too competitive and it may be better to do some other app. What are your thoughts now?

Can you share more of your research?

They are finely-tuned psychological conditioning/manipulation machines.

Do not confuse them for games.

I'm sorry, but bullshit.

Clash of clans is a great game. I have played it nearly every day since I've downloaded it. Am I a zombie, sucked in to the compulsion loop so tightly that I can't escape? No. iOS games are not habit-forming drugs. They're pixels on a screen.

I play every day because it's fun as hell. I love searching for opponents, analyzing their bases, discovering their weaknesses, and exploiting them with my troops. I love building my clan and getting higher on the leaderboard. I love discussing the ever-shifting optimal layout metagame with my clanmates. These things are FUN.

Yes, games use certain tactics that when examined naively look like manipulation machines. But that's fucking hogwash. Clash of clans is #1 top grossing because it's hands-down the most widely accessible, deep, and fun strategy game for the iPhone. Nothing comes close.

Settlers was pretty damn fun, but there haven't been many that I would call AAA hits for the iPhone, despite having purchased something north of $500 worth of games for iOS in the last five years. Maybe a handful that got me as excited as Settlers did.

In general, people don't make fun "deep" games for the iPhone, they make them for the Console/PC. Any studio making something fun and free for the iPhone is probably more interested in extracting $$$ as quickly as possible from you, particular where you see the dreaded IAP. I'll try out Clash of Clans and see if it falls into that dreaded _suck the player in and force him to pay cash_. I suspect there will be Gems that I have to drop $$$ into in order to speed up building things instead of waiting 30 minutes. We'll see.

[Edit: 3 minutes later. Installed it. You need Gems to finish building things in reasonable (<5 minutes, in the case of a Gold storage, 30 minutes. ) time. My guess is the entire purpose of this game is to suck me in to the point at which I start shoveling money for IAP - doesn't this pattern annoy people? Or is it just because they haven't seen it dozens (hundreds?) of times before? I'll play with it for another 10 minutes, but so far, the game pattern looks pretty straight forward and not particularly entertaining or engrossing. I'll try and keep an open mind.]

[Edit 2: I'm sorry - I lasted all of 5 minutes with this thing. Buy Gems. Speed up Building. You can even use Gems to Acquire more "Gold" or more "Elixir" - they don't even attempt to hide the mechanics of cash extraction. It's almost a straightforward "Give us Cash and you can build things really fast and go attack others and win." Probably the shortest time any game has ever lasted on my iPhone, ever. I'm confused as to what fun people see in this...]

> I'm confused as to what fun people see in this...

Maybe they treat it as an asynchronous game, closer to academy of heroes or outwitters than to starcraft? That's what I do anyway: look up my options, queue up a few actions, then go do stuff, check back a few hours later. That's how I tend to play on my phone anyway, so it works nicely, and while it's explicit about the gem things it doesn't bash you over the head with it, and you can get gems through achievements.

I think his point was that games like that are engineered to maximize 'fun' that converts to profits.

Arguably, there are things they could have implemented that would have made the game more fun, but they chose not to implement them because they would harm their profitability.

nice try, Supercell.

> Have you actually played Clash of Clans or Hay Day?

I've tried Clash of Clans, and I was actually surprised at how different it was to the usual farmville-ish clone in that regard:

1. The important currency (the gem thing) can in large part be obtained from in-game achievements. Not in huge quantities, but...

2. It really only works as an accelerator: more builders, instant purchases and (in the last update) work acceleration. And the game does not hammer you with it at all, as opposed to some others I played in the past.

3. The one thing that shocked me the most, as you progress in the game it starts requiring less of your time. A good example is the collector things, they produce at a fixed hourly rate but store their production for collection so you don't have to open the game and click it every 10 mn, but more interestingly the internal storage grows faster than the production rate: the level 1 thing can store 2.5h worth of production, at level 6 it grows to ~15h.

> every action prompts a IAP (wait or pay)

That's not even true, when raising or upgrading buildings for instance there's only one flow, the IAP comes after that by reselecting the building itself after launching the action. There's surprisingly little prompting for consuming the crystal things, and I've yet to see a single in-your-face full-screen dialog suggesting buying these gems explicitly.

All of the top grossing free-to-play games are like that. DragonVale used to occupy the top spot, and is similar.

The current #7 top-grossing app is Slotomania. I like to think of all these free-to-play games like Slotomania. They're addictive, have colorful graphics, and either make you wait to earn more coins, or succumb to your addiction and pay up (real $) to get (fake $) coins NOW.

Some of software companies are "money printing" ,e.g,m$.

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