Category: Social Media Games

Classics as Social Media Games

Oregon Trail is now on Facebook. It is kind of lousy. Take the old game and extend it so it cannot reasonably be completed in one day, to say nothing of one play session. Add in the social media mechanic of a limited number of turns/amount of energy, in this case several separate bars for that. Add in the social media mechanics of items requiring RMT or soliciting the help of several friends. Add in minimal spamminess. Serve tepid.

Civilization is now on Facebook. It is rather lousy. Take the names from the usual game and throw out pretty much everything. Keep the tech tree in a weird form. Keep the resource types. Replace most of the mechanics with a few mini-games. Remove the world map. What guilds are in most games, nations are here.

This is actually a good idea that makes sense. CivWorld makes superior use of social media gameplay mechanics, if only there were more of a game underneath. Isolated city-states can be competitive early on, but large and/or organized nations own the late-game; this makes sense, and you cannot “rush” it by wiping out other nations, so the game inexorably pushes towards social integration or failure. Instead of “come back in x hours to harvest,” the game accumulates harvests that you can cash in to make everything produce. There is a hard cap on how much real money you are allowed to spend per unit time. I cannot see much/any reason to spam your friends to do the equivalent of tending your crops. They are being a good corporate partner here, not trying to make up for the horrible game by adding addictive elements.

But the games are still horrible. Maybe there is some depth of whatever, were I to spend a few weeks playing HARDCORE, but they play like the original games fed through a food processor then dribbled over a featureless path that takes two weeks to walk.

: Zubon

Referral Benefits

Word of mouth is nice, but bribing your customers to bring their friends is a stronger way to improve your network effects. Your customers like it too — free stuff for them and it can make it easier to get more of their friends into the new game. Of course, nothing is truly free, and it must be paid for somewhere, but the customer sees no incremental cost, and on the developer side, you can get people recruiting by offering surprisingly little. Just look at all those games on Facebook that offer you 50 imaginary bananas for inviting your friends to help you farm! Friends recruited me to two games over the holidays, so I am pondering their referral benefits. Both are free to play with paid components. When do you offer people stuff and what do you offer them?

Blatant shilling, my referral link: League of Legends. League of Legends counts referrals at level 5, no money paid. Level 5 is basically free in your first night or two of play; the XP curve is reduced so that it costs more to get from 5 to 6 than from 1 to 5, so if you are not level 5, you have not really tried the game. (Of course, if you have played DotA, you have already played League of Legends (I think LoL is too cleaned-up to ever go back to DotA, which is another post), so you may have tried it that way.) It is a minimal hurdle to keep people from mass-referring themselves for benefits. What do they offer referrers? You get a boost to earning in-game currency, the value of which I estimate around $1 (lots of fuzziness there), and then tiered benefits for inviting more friends. My friends seemed rather impressed by them, but personally I found them most decorative except for the 10-referral free champion ($5-$10 value?). At 100, you get the box that costs $20 in stores; at 200, you get $76 of their real money currency; and everything else is decorative titles and skins until you get to 4 digits. You can look, the rewards in 4+ digits are very fancy, and I promise to ask for “Zubon’s Trousers” if I somehow get to 1,000, but I imagine few people will claim those unless popular website operators link their many readers … which would be really great advertising for the game, if someone with a million-reader site got 1% of his/her readers to try it. So my friends have become motivated to recruit based on a free champion and a $1 (in-game currency) referral fee. Pretty efficient on the developer side, and the players seem happy with it.

Global Agenda (think Borderlands with better match-making, less silly, and less run-down; again, another post) counts referrals once your friend spends money (Guild Wars model, no subscription fee). They have the wisdom to make referrals in-game achievements, so if you want to check off those boxes, recruit your friends. They are less aspirational, offering benefits up to 50 recruits, with special hats for the first 5 then pets at 20 and 50. Again, my friends tell me the pets are nice, but what do I know as a newb? If there is a referral link, I do not know how to find it, but Global Agenda instead gives coupon codes for friends (half -off the box cost). (Shilling: if you want one of my 10, GACOU438265797100 through …104 and GACOU438265776370 through …374.) Do you get new ones, with only 10 codes to create a false sense of scarcity? Global Agenda offers more to people being referred (real cash discount versus nothing) but less to people making referrals (fewer and smaller benefits), and the referral system is less intuitive (“sign up and enter this code while buying” versus “click this link”). I do not think it is working as well for them; with two friends encouraging me to join them for occasional play, neither bothered to send a code.

At the moment, I do not have many thoughts beyond which seems more productive (give to referrers, not to the referred). You already know many other plans, from WoW’s zebras and triple-XP to the CoX free half-month per referral (for both, a large benefit I see less chatter about). Consider these data points for future ponderings. Impressions of the games forthcoming, and if you want to find me in either, I am Zubon as usual.

: Zubon

Gift Economy

To avoid having people set up 10 accounts and send themselves lots of free daily gifts, my Facebook restaurant game limits you to trading ingredients 1-for-1. You can set up extra accounts, and you can all send each other those daily gifts, but you cannot then go to each of those 10 accounts and send yourself the 10 gifts each received. Ignore the multi-account question and consider what this does to the game’s economy.

The best way to get what you want is to give it to someone else. First, if you need lots of beef, the easiest way to signal this is to send everyone beef. (You could also post it explicitly.) The default Facebook “send one back” option will get you beef. Let’s say you still want more beef. If the people you sent it to did not want it, you can trade with them, your whatever for the beef you just sent them.

To me, the interesting part is the deflation in the meat market. Flood the game with as much beef as you can for as many days as you can. This is entirely given away, so while you have lost nothing, you have gained no beef. But you still want beef, which other people now have excess amounts of. You can trade anything for beef, because people have more than they know what to do with.

In an MMO, when you flood the market with something, you are a seller and are driving down your own price. In a social media game, when you flood the market with something, you are a gifter and are driving down the price you pay.

: Zubon

Brilliant Cash Shop Scheme

The one social networking game still clinging to my Facebook account is Restaurant City. EA bought Playfish, so I do not exactly promote the game, but I am still sufficiently amused to visit a few times a day to keep my imaginary staff running. Playfish has recently made some simple adjustments that I expect to produce increases in their cash shop revenue.

Another of their games, Pet Society, has long had mystery boxes (and eggs, etc.). They are bought with in-game currency, although they have added some cash-only boxes. Mystery boxes have random items from an appropriately themed pool, although the initial boxes were just “pay for something random!” These must have been sufficiently popular (slot machines tend to be) because they added cash shop mystery boxes to their other games. That is step zero the revenue enhancement.

Continue reading Brilliant Cash Shop Scheme

It’s All Cosmetic, It’s All Mini-Games

I have one social networking game left, and as I clicked things in my imaginary restaurant, I remarked to myself that I use my imaginary currency for gameplay-relevant items rather than cosmetics. Then it struck me that there was only vaguely potentially gameplay benefit from perfecting my 132nd recipe, even though that is pretty much what you do in the game. I look at some of the cosmetic items and wonder why you would spend that much (real money) on something that does nothing for you, then I wonder what good it does me to be at the level cap. Heck, I have so many “gourmet points” beyond the level cap that I am instantly at the new level cap whenever they raise it. So what does that do except for putting an 85 next to my name in a game relatively few of my friends even deign to notice?

I am rigidly gameplay focused. I am not visually stimulated enough to care about most cosmetic options. But there are no meta-ethics that privilege gameplay over other aspects of the game, nor any that say you should care much about any game. Why should anyone be impressed that you have 6 level-capped WoW characters? You know there are people who will actively look down on you for it.

I am not much of a raider. I have dabbled, but I am not drawn by what boils down to online choreographed dancing. I am drawn to crafting, but I do not expect you to be terribly impressed by my ability to grind out 600 fields of imaginary strawberries. I do not hang out at the Prancing Pony, and while I appreciate in the abstract that someone might be one of the most respected RP leaders on the server, it will not mean much to me, nor might you much care about my time writing for the events team on A Tale in the Desert a few tellings ago.

Viewed as a mini-game, MMO combat is usually pretty poor. Tab-1-1-2-1-1-4, next. Bejeweled requires more thought than solo WoW. But it is the central mini-game supported in WoW, with most of the other mini-games contributing to it. There are crafting mini-games that are even less dynamic. RP is a mini-game that can be entirely independent of the game mechanics. The economic mini-game of the auction house is probably the most thought-intensive, and that is a skill that carries over between games (and potentially into meatspace). But does it do you much good to hit the gold cap in WoW, or is it just decorative once you are past however much money you “need”? Well, does it do you much good to be at the level cap in WoW, or is it just decorative once you have enough levels to do whatever amuses you in-game? I suppose the combat and gear optimization mini-games help you with the other mini-games like completing achievements, collecting mounts and mini-pets, and having resources to buy your way to the end of some other mini-games.

Yay?

: Zubon

Comment Spotlight: Fun Economic Activity

sid67 comments at Hardcore Casual:

My criticism here is that [developers] usually don’t try to make the getting or the making [of items] itself very fun. For example, EVE has a great economy but the *doing* of it is about as fun as pissing on a flat rock.

This is the other reason I do not play EVE. I could have a merry time being a middleman and playing the spreadsheet. You see a 20% price differential between stations five jumps away, and you can capitalize on that. The actual gameplay involved in that is filling a cargo hold, waiting for a half-dozen jumps, and emptying a cargo hold. I decided not to pay to pretend to be an intergalactic trucker (in an environment where pirate attacks on your truck are surprisingly common).

Before that, I was drawn to the notion of mining. It sounded like a rarefied version of the MMO crafting I often enjoy, being the backbone of the economy, and potentially going from the very rocks to final production. The actual gameplay involved in that is activating a mining laser and waiting for the hold to fill. I decided not to pay to be mostly AFK (in an environment where pirates make a hobby of harassing miners).

And I have paid to pretend to make charcoal, flax, and linen in A Tale in the Desert. The actual gameplay of Facebook games often rivals the crafting in most MMOs.

: Zubon

Connecting Internal Networks

After wondering why we do not see more companies with multiple MMOs linking their games, I have come to wonder the same thing about Facebook. The leading developers (and many of the next tier) have about a dozen games each, usually clones of each others’ (“No really, our farm is different!). Despite using Facebook as a common platform, the games are almost entirely separate. They frequently even have separate cash shop currencies for their games.

There are exceptions. Cross-advertising is more common, by which I mean not just having “play our other games!” at the top, but placing decorative items in each game that reference the others. PlayFish (EA) has one currency across its games. Digital Chocolate sells you in-game character cards that apply to all their games, so your new hero does whatever is appropriate in all of their games at once; that seems like a great incentive to try more of their games and to spend money on them.

Why not have incentives to try all the games, really get someone entangled? The same company will have a farm and a restaurant and a city and a pet shop and… Why is there no option to send crops from my farm to my restaurant? Why can’t I have my restaurant and pet shop in my city? Why can’t the safari game send pets to the pet shop? If you could link all these games together, you would more or less have an MMO, one that is more crafting- than combat-focused.

Then we just need a way to link Farmville to World of Warcraft, and the world will end.

: Zubon

Breaking Your Game’s Economy

in one easy step!

Following Tobold’s link to NanoStar Siege, one of the other games from that company is NanoTowns. There are a variety of these on Facebook, usually Farmville clones with a different graphics theme, although this one is interesting in that it does not have the standard formula of “click 20 times then wait 12 hours to harvest.” It instead is the sort of thing where you do a lot of clicking every five minutes, and you use the resources you gather to complete “quests” like “Could you get me some fries?” If you have a large enough city, you can presumably keep clicking indefinitely once it starts taking more than five minutes to go through your city.

nacho1 And then I bought a taco stand. I suspect there is decimal place error, because it costs less to make it NOW than to wait five minutes. Maybe they meant it to be 550. And it sells for 29% more than it costs to make it. If only the game had a multi-create or multi-sell, this would be an infinite money loop. As it is, it is a tediously long positive sum money loop that requires many many many clicks. There does not seem to be a limit to how many times you can click; you can see that I went as far as 70 wondering if it would stop.

nacho2 Oh, this isn’t good. You can start it up and then hurry the completion. Hurrying the completion gives you money back. The game is not really sure how to feel about that; it gives you the money then fails to hurry completion. You can then exit that window and re-hurry. Smaller profit, fewer clicks, two nigh-infinite money loops in one!

And if anything brings home the gameplay of the standard Facebook game, it is “tediously click here for as long as you like to watch your numbers increase.” Kind of like ProgressQuest without the “fire and forget” feature.

: Zubon