Coming soon ...

My next talk is in creation. I decided not to do any Dissection talks anymore due to many reasons but someone convinced me to do this one - simply as I spend a long time analyzing it (3 years in fact), the longest ever it took to finalize this talk. I will let you know when and where I will hold this talk.

Common Mistakes in f2p Design - video!

Here is the video of my Casual Connect talk from this February - Common Mistakes in f2p Design.

Enjoy. And if you like it please consider visiting any of the four Casual Connects happening each year all over the globe.

Videos of my talks

Many developers watch my videos of my talks but are missing one or two here and there. So I created a playlist where I link most of them available - minus the ones on GDC Vault if they aren't public: Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVGQLTaJYT6MO7Z4hVHaUyAlyJyZNLG_P

The Damned App Store (Update)

Both of my versions (Amsterdam and Asia) of my talk for Casual Connect are online:

Asia / Singapore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4gpHtYxf0I&feature=youtu.be

Europe / Amsterdam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jU4sRmqNrI&feature=youtu.be

The video of the panel is also online now about Asian vs. Westenr mechanics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-pnSvEFztg&feature=youtu.be


Enjoy!

Quo Vadis 2014

The title doesn't mean I am asking where we go in 2014 but it is the name of the largest developer conference in Germany happening next week April 8th to 10th.

My talk on Thursday morning will dissect the monetization of Puzzle & Dragons. After my talk about doing the same with World of Tanks was so successful I decided to expand those topics. Btw this is the first talk I will hold on an iPhone!

At Casual Connect 2014 in San Francisco in July I will repeat that exercise with League of Legends.

I am doing this simply to educate teams how these games work. I usually pick top f2p games for this as they aren't at all "evil" - which seems to be a major criticism of f2p. I assign 3 pillars on those dissections:

Public Metrics
Numbers and data I find online, either from services like Appannie, Comcast or simply from the game providers PR or shareholder messages.

Own Monetization & Online Game Experience
I use my professional skills to take the game apart into its foundations and mechanics and examine them for their functions.

Self Experimentation
I play the game as a player for a while (usually until mid game) and then as a payer (note the missing L) and research what this changes in the game experience compared to the former experiment.

Those three usually give me enough information to understand fully how the game works in terms of game mechanics & monetization.

I hope to see you at one of the above conferences.

From another source

I am doing my talk at GDC Next today and in relation to this I would love to share this research done by Benedict Evans which clearly supports my point: A change is coming.

2013 11 mobile eating the world from Benedict Evans

My GDC Europe 2013 talk is online

GDC 2013 vault opened today and my talk "Getting past pay to win" is among the free content. Check it out here:

http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-europe-13 for a list of all talks

and

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019236/Getting-Past-Pay-to

for mine. Enjoy!

Randomness in games part II

Guess what: random numbers on computers aren't random. They are generated by algorithms and math tells us that formulas are not random. Proper random number generators also take CPU time - which is negligible unless you need thousands of random numbers per second - as it is in most online games (with combat drawing most random numbers).

The problem with programming is that lazy ones simply use the supplied rand() function supplied by their compiler. But compiler writers rarely spend a lot of time creating great random number generators.

What does random mean anyway. From our viewpoint it means that I get various results for a given action. I read feedback by the game and see some randomness to create variances in the game.

Imagine I would lose due to random numbers 3 times in a row. "That sucks" is the first reaction. But can it be? Sure it can, a random number generator theoretically could create numbers which lets you lose 10 times in a row. Not great, and bad for the game - so we try to prevent it.

Yes, I will now explain how we can make sure this doesn't happen, basically making random less random.
We need to make sure that there is no win or loss streak in the numbers, so we need to distribute them evenly. We also need to make sure that its random, not sorted.

We simply take a table (let's say 10.000 entries) and we fill the table with numbers from 0-99, sequentially until the table is full. Now we start to randomly exchange numbers until the table is totally jumbled and "random". Still streaks can appear so we analyze the table for those and remove them, we make sure there is a rough even distribution of random numbers for every sample we take.

Sounds confusing? Check these links out for some table references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Random_Digits_with_100,000_Normal_Deviates
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html

So these tables guarantee that I get true random numbers but no winning streaks or losing streaks - AND they are much faster for the game as I simply take one number after the other.
AND they can be persistent as I simply save the index (the current random number I took) for each player - so the player doesn't see a repetitive behavior in the game.
So now you know how World of Warcraft generates their randomness. As I knew how they work I could even play with their randomness and increase the likelihood of epic drops. See my 7 year old blog entry which explains this:
http://teut.blogspot.de/2006/11/my-t1-item-xyz-doesnt-drop.html

Important: Never use these tables for gambling sites like Poker, otherwise some bright MIT students will forecast your 'random' numbers and loot your savings! (it really happened to Poker sites years ago).

So now you know how to generate the numbers - but how do we use randomness? If a game is truly random its actually very boring as random feedback doesn't create a good game.

But this is part of on of my next blog entries - coming soon.

Randomness in games

Random numbers play a large role in any computer game. They are key to many game mechanics to introduce variety in feedback.

Some games however take it too far and randomize too much. If you play many rogue likes then you are used to this randomness of loot and dungeon layouts: these games randomize the dungeon floors and all loot.

The dungeon layout works in this case as its part of the global feedback: you enter a dungeon which leads to hell and if you die you have to start from scratch. Would the dungeon be identical every time you start over then you would be bored real quick. To prevent this the dungeon layout is random.

This doesn't work for all games however. People love to talk about exploration and their findings. So in World of Warcraft there are hundreds if not thousands of sites listing the maps and loot tables of the dungeons.

Lesson: if multiple of these sites exist then there is a demand. If there is a demand then the overall mechanic works nicely.

Note: you won't find any of these sites about Diablo with the exception of items.

But regarding items in Diablo here is the thing: if you look for epic items it doesn't matter which boss monsters you kill. The drip chance is random, the item in question is random. So you simply farm any monsters you find and sell your stuff in the auction house - the rewarding gold you spend on items - guess where - in the auction house. Basically the auction house becomes an item shop supplied by random drops of players.

This undermines the exploration, the reward to have killed a specific monster and finally your favorite epic drops. Worse: if the player realizes that all drops are random then the content you supply doesn't matter anymore - as items can be found anywhere. You could theoretically limit your game to one zone and boss - of course I over simplify.

Generally randomness should not give only random rewards. Randomness should introduce variety to feedback, not generate random feedback.

Next up: how to use random generators effectively in games.

Target audience(s) in online games

In the old economy we tended to focus a lot on the target audience. We specifically did things in the game design & marketing to target the player we had in mind. After years of retail experience this is done pretty accurate by the publishers.

However in online games this is different, very different.

First difference: retail games are usually fire and forget products. After they are on the shelf they get their DLC or add on and then its off to new products. Sequels reset the cycle.

So the target audience in retail games are a static entity. They don't change as the time is simply too short. They might change for the sequel due to new data, but that's it.

In online games the audience shifts a lot. We talk about games which lasts for a decade or longer. The audience of such an online game is not static. Players come and leave on a daily basis. You might have a constant number of active users but this still doesn't mean the users are identical to last months users.

This means that your target audience is a moving target. They change over time. As within a decade a lot of things happen:

- a console cycle or two passes by
- your computer is 5x as powerful
- things gets invented like the internet or smartphones
- social networks gets created and have a billion users.

So no wonder that online games need a different approach to user targeting.

Why am I writing this? As I always have to fight the notion of the "old economy" that they speak about "THE" target audience. Also what happens if we have all users targeted, is there something like saturation within an online games user acquisition? No.

Well get this: if your online games live 10 years then all former 10 year olds are 20 and represent a wonderful new audience. You have an endless supply of new users simply because we always produce new ones and even more year by year!

Image source: Wikipedia.org

The styles of free to play monetization

Yes, free to play monetization comes in various styles, even trends, they might be even fashionable so to say.

As I have the luxury to experience different companies "styles" of monetization I noticed something unusual.

Companies tend to stick to their style and also think it is the only one which works for them. So they create games and always adapt their monetization style to them - which usually worked unless the games genre or mechanics are not fitting that style. As a consequence those games usually do worse than the original.

So that said company tries a different style it saw at games of another company - and fails. It doesn't work very well as that other company worked years to optimize their "style" and that one might not fit your game at all.

So you're stuck. Either you continue making games which fit your monetization style or you learn how to create perfectly fitting monetization styles to your game. But that means you understand the fundamentals behind it - that you created a formula or schematics which can be made fit to various game styles.

Note that this is true for the inventors of the "European style" of monetization in free to play. Some of them stuck to their style and didn't grow, some of them opened up and are growing beyond their original hit games.

The reason for this "one style" style is of course that their performing games are analyzed and they know exactly what works and what doesn't.So they copy/paste those mechanics to other games and they work as well - but not as good as the original. The title isn't suited perfectly to that mechanic after all. So you create more and more "copies" of the original which deteriorate in quality or revenue over time.

Time to adapt your monetization style. Key learning: monetization works really well if it is fitted perfectly to your game design.

Just like in fashion - they only fit it to bodies (nsfw).

What bothers me in most computer games

Yesterday I answered an interview of the magazine Spiegel about Eve Online and one of the questions was "What do find so fascinating about Eve?"

When I answered I realized what the single thing is what bothers me on most games to date: they tell me what to do and how to do it. The freedom is so limited that you feel like a game on rails. Worst invention of the industry in this regard: QTE. Yes I mean you Call of Duty.

The one single player game I played recently for longer was Dishonored. I could pick up my mission when I wanted, still could roam around my base afterwards and went to the boat which dropped me in the mission area. Even there I could approach my goal as I wanted, there was no timer, path or QTE telling me how to do it. I love that game.

In MMO's its similar: World of Warcraft has a path of success. You level up, then you do your attunement quests (old times), then you did 5 man heroics until you get bored and finally you raid and progress until you beat the end boss of the current expansion and have the ultimate gear ... until the next expansion made it worthless. What a waste of time? What a way to be masochistic?

In Eve Online you are a pilot of a space ship. So there. Thats it. What do you do? Well what do you WANT to do? Simply do it. Pirate? Diplomat? Spy? Trader? Logistics? Flying missions? Troll? Scammer? Being part of large scale war? Explore the universe for alien artifacts?

And here is the problem why those "sandbox" games aren't as big as World of Warcraft: in order to enjoy the scope for the game you have to know what you want, you need to motivate yourself. And exactly here most players fail: they want to be entertained but not work for it. They are lazy.

And game developers are lazy too. Because producing a game on rails is easier than creating a sandbox. Otherwise we would see more of them as they are very successful even as single player games.

A/B testing for lazies

Every time there is a question hanging in the air people call for A/B tests to find out the right solution. Isn't that a bit lazy? You don't have the time to test out everything with A/B tests, considering they aren't as easy to do as you think.

My answer is always do what best practice is from successful online games. So you simply take a bunch of them and look how they do it. Most of the long running ones have tested the hell out of their systems, so why don't you take their lesson and simply steal their key findings? They have it right there for you, online, in their game.

So there was a question recently if its better to sort your premium currency packages low to high or high to low. The answer is now really obvious if you follow my advice. You don't need to run an A/B test to find out.

You can learn so much by looking at good f2p games and what they do. Some of them even have fan made statistic sites which you can use how successful they are in various countries, popular items or vehicles. Simply look for them.

So open your eyes. All knowledge is right there in front of you, a simple search away.

Additional signs of change

EA posted its financial earnings and it disappoints. Without their cash of 1.6b in the bank they would be gone by now. "Don't expect growth on the giants EA and Activision" they say. Ok, so why do others grow like hell. And some new mobile companies have a market cap of 9 billion. Wtf.

Those are all signs of disruption. Its happening and quick. The old games market will change dramatically in the next 2-3 years, so don't moan if your favorite FPS is no longer the #1 topic on the web sites.

Then EA announced they bought the Star Wars license. Oh my. Thanks no, I see what you did to Harry Potter. And fail, major fail: the license excludes online, social and mobile platforms. That deal is like an ancient relic. Fire the guy who did it.

But then its all about small 90 men companies doing more money than the old economy.

So when are you joining?

LoL is not a good role model for f2p

League of Legends, or LoL for short, is often mentioned as a successful f2p game you should learn from. Fact is that LoL is one of the largest MMO's to date. Of course it makes tons of money for Riot and their owner Tencent.

So why am I hesitent to use LoL as a role model for good f2p models? The reaon is simple: their monetization system is very very specific and only works due to their reach.

Simple explanation: Revenue = Active users * conversion * ARPPU

Their active users is phenomenal high (42 million MAU as of this writing) and this multiplies the revenue formula to the skies.

But their conversion is low, i.e. how many players actively pay. That is my biggest critic. If you use LoL as a role model you might end up with a low conversion and if you fail to get the reach your game fails badly. That's a huge risk. A game can survive with an average reach and a good conversion easily, but rarely the other way around.

Note that the ARPPU is somewhat dependent on the conversion. If your conversion is low your ARPPU can be unusually high and vice versa.

Again: LoL works wonderfully for Riot and Tencent as their reach is so high. Sidenote: their reach is so high due to Tencents reach.

Major change incoming

We are living through a major change in technology and digital media. A large one incoming. Get ready.

This is my talk I held at Quo Vadis in Berlin 2013

Why mobile/Touch will win from Teut Weidemann

This is important

Times change fast, faster than ever before. I couldn't have made a better presentation than these guys: READ all slides to the end. World changing.

2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

F2p is not a game!

Free to play is not a game. Why do I say this obvious statement - because people do forget and put all f2p games into one basket.

So here he comes and tells me "This f2p game does this and that, we should be looking into this to adapt it as well".

Wrong: you can't copy/paste stuff from one f2p business model to another. And that's what it is: f2p is a business model - NOT A GAME.

So if you think that a feature from one f2p game fits yours you should better think twice and carefully analyze WHY it works for that game & genre, if at all (you usually do not know if it works!).

That is why most monetization mechanics from let's say Candy Crush Saga won't work in your f2p FPS or strategy game. Those are entirely different genres and games and the user does behave differently within the game environment. Of course you can learn a lot from King.com's cash cow but be professional when adapting mechanics!

This brings me to another point: most companies within the f2p space discovered "their" style of monetization model which works best for them and their games. You will find that within the portfolio of these companies  they implement the f2p business model in a very similar way.

This leads to some odd behaviors of f2p companies:

1: They think their model is the best
2: They think other models aren't working as they tried adapting them and failed (see above)

It is a very odd situation and basically is further made worse as real data of what works and what doesn't isn't readily available.

That's why specialists who has seen data of working games from more than one company within the f2p space are so high in demand - until this information is widely available.

Metric (design) (marketing)

In a time where most of the entertainment happens in the internet there is a craft creeping up the companies which is tied into metrics. Companies love metrics. Why? I explain below.

First: if you read this you are being tracked by Google. It just so happens that blogger.com is owned by Google and they just look at you where you came from before you read this and where to go when you leave. They also like to peek around your previous visits what you did there and save from which country and provider you came, and which OS, resolution etc. you were using. Don't worry though, the info is anonymous, so they don't actually know "its you". Its all about statistical analysis.

This information gathering is used by business intelligence to judge their strategies. But here is the catch. Metrics tell you WHAT happened, but rarely WHY it happened.

Again: WHAT happened. Is this enough to base your strategy upon? Hardly. Without understanding the WHY you might be completely wrong. You might be obsessed with the difference of correlation and dependence. This gets even pro's confused when they see data, so don't worry if you mix those two up all the time.

Why do I write this? Because here is an excellent article about why marketing might be so mislead by metrics right now. Go ahead and read it, its excellent:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/can-social-media-sell-soap.html

And as promised above here is my explanation why companies love metrics: because for the first time their suits understand what's happening - every single day-

Yes, you read that right. Often in the past marketing did some magic and was great, but management didn't really understand the fundamentals. The same was with game design in the past. It was considered sometimes black magic why certain game designers always seem to hit the good stuff. A mystic. Now with online games you clearly can see what element sucks and which rocks. Its all in the numbers.

But did you notice here what I did write above?

Let me quote myself from above: "their suits understand what's happening"

But not WHY. Think about it. This will change how companies operate in the next few years. Its already happening and the metric companies lead the pack. You have to go with them and hopefully teach them that people who know WHY are still important.

Cheers Teut