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Comment by treysmith | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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