F2P Design: from WTF to Awesome

2015-07-15 1947 speaker: Simon Davis, Producer at King.com event: IGDA meetup ** background originally a trained musician spent the last 6 years on F2P games ** F2P has greater reach LoL has over 67 million user every month huge AAA can hope for 5-10 million units ** does not discriminate between those who can afford and those who can’t the great democratisation of gaming, F2P penetration in the developing world is huge F2P allows players who are time poor and cash rich to be competitive ** games as a service traditional games are “fire and forget” F2P developers are responsible for the game on a day to day basis ** paid players get an unfair advantage most games manage to monetize less than 10% of the users Candy Crush Saga can be completed without paying a single cent ** F2P is great for an online game where users can invest lots of time ** F2P success formula ARPDAU x Avg retention > cost to acquire a user + infrastructure cost per user ARPDAU = average revenue per daily active user ** Myth of “build it and they will come” why will players give up games they’ve investe months to come play yours? what is your unique selling point? can you explain it in one simple sentence? ** Epic tutorials that are too long ** Complex UX drives the player away ** Make them want more the design should encourage the habit session length management, an energy system daily challenges tease the task list/achivements ** Make spending a positive experience getting a legendary card in Hearthstone ** Goodwill doesn’t pay the bills scalable item systems the LoL fallacy: we will sell vanity items proposition > price ** social to reduce cost of user acquisition ** don’t fear the data know what are the key metrics you can measure “fun” check the data before building features ** F2P games are not the best platform to showcase the story causes players to drop out allow users to project their own stories on to the game universe some story to tie into live ops such as double xp events ** who are you making your game for?