Fallout Shelter - How a Casual Game Won Over Hardcore Players - Extra Credits

Fallout Shelter, the iOS free-to-play Fallout game, has turned out to be one of the most odd and riveting games released this year. Not because of the game itself, really, but rather because of how it did in the market. It challenged a lot of people's assumptions about free-to-play and brought up a lot of questions about what the hardcore audience is really looking for from a free-to-play game. See, there's been a prevailing idea that the hardcore don't want free-to-play games. So, when Fallout Shelter tore up the charts, it caused a bit of an uproar in some of the design community. Because this game is actually chuck-full of what the hardcore demographic, as we define it, usually rails against on forums, in vlogs, and in user reviews. So, the question becomes, are these elements of free-to-play design really the problem? Or is something about this game so great that it can overcome all of that hardcore reluctance? And truth is, while we don't have absolute demographic data on who's downloading this thing, and some portion of them is clearly not your traditional core audience or PC player, if you look at the user reviews on Fallout Shelter, a lot of them reference

having played Fallout 3 or New Vegas, or even mention hearing the E3 announcement for Fallout 4, which is pretty indicative of being among that hardcore audience. On the Bethesda forums, there are even calls for it to be brought to Steam. So, it's clearly not just demographically casual players playing this thing. And more than that, they're paying for it. Shortly after launch, this game beat out Candy Crush for daily gross. That's a lot of money people are throwing at this thing. So, let's take a look at the game itself. As of launch, its central mechanic was basically a simpler version of Tiny Tower with an XCOM layout. The majority of the gameplay was looking at your unit stats and matching people with a high stat to the room that used that particular stat. So, basically, you'd move everybody with a high strength score into your power station, and then you wait for the game to generate resources. This mechanic was popularized in 2011 and was designed to be as casual as possible. There's basically nothing that qualifies as hardcore gameplay here. By comparison, Bejeweled and Peggle are both far more interactive, far more mechanically deep games than Tiny Tower type games. And

that's not to say Tiny Tower games are bad. There's actually genius behind that type of games design. But the industry at large had always thought that Tiny Tower's genius was genius for its audience, not for the hardcore player. Which leads me to my next point, which is Fallout Shelter's lack of overall interactivity. Often, one of the key complaints I see from hardcore fans about many mobile and tablet free-to-play games is their lack of interactivity. And yet Fallout Shelter has barely any interactive components. Exploring the wastes and wasteland combat is entirely non-interactive. Gathering resources is completely non-interactive other than putting your people in the right rooms and tapping every couple minutes. And getting new people for your shelter is for the most part an active waiting, too. So it seems that lack of gameplay or interactivity can't actually be the essential component to what's keeping the hardcore from playing these games. But let's look a little deeper. Fallout Shelter is a game of timers. Almost all of the game is based around waiting for timers. How do you gather resources? Wait, tap, and wait again. How do you explore the wasteland? Assign someone to the task,

then wait. How do you get your loot once you've explored the wasteland? You wait for them to come back. How do you get new people into your shelter? You assign people to the radio room and then wait. Or you have your survivors get romantic in the lounge and then wait. How do you increase your survivor stats? Assign them to the special stat increasing room of your choice and then wait. When Fallout Shelter was announced at E3, the audience cheered when it was proudly proclaimed that the game wouldn't make you wait for new vault rooms to be built. But make no mistake, the rest of the game is about making you wait. Being forced to wait is another one of those core complaints I always hear about free-to-play games, and yet this game is incredibly timer dependent. Now, interestingly, Fallout Shelter doesn't use an explicit energy system, but instead opts to use timers to fulfill the same design role. And that tiny bit of freedom the game gives you in not forcing you to stop playing might be one of the things that makes Fallout Shelter more palatable to a to a hardcore audience. But before I go more into why I think Fallout Shelter worked, I have to cover one last thing, monetization. This game is monetized by a gashapon collectible system like almost all other

free-to-play games found on tablet and mobile these days. The monetization is in a number of ways less elegant from a design perspective than that used by many other companies. Where many free-to-play companies allow the player a thousand subtle ways to continuously grind out paid content for their account if they don't want to shell out money, Fallout Shelter has just one, lunchboxes. The gashapon mechanic in Fallout Shelter can occasionally be gotten by completing quests. What's interesting though is that the system is so explicit about the fact that all the best stuff will only be gotten through buying lunchboxes. Every basic dweller who comes to live in your shelter has the same baseline for their stats, and every child born into your shelter will simply have a random plus one tacked on to one of those baseline stats, making it impossible for you to breed super children by pairing off your most skilled vault inhabitants. So, every single dweller who shows up at your door or is born into your community will have their default stats cap out at one or two, but the ones you find in lunchboxes frequently have sevens or eights. This exact sort of explicit paying is better system is often the biggest complaint

against free-to-play, and yet here it seems to have met with little objection. In fact, the surprising thing is that Fallout Shelter actually gives the player free lunchboxes less frequently than most free-to-play games that have to fight this stigma. So, with all of that said, now I'm going to tell you why I think this worked for Fallout Shelter. And a lot of my industry friends are probably going to think this is crazy, but here we go. Without a doubt, a lot of the embracing of Fallout Shelter is driven by love for the Fallout franchise, but I give the hardcore audience more credit than to think that they would drop all objections simply because they're blinded by a brand they like. No, I've got a different answer, one that goes against all industry wisdom and years of free-to-play design. I think that a lot of the reason why a hardcore audience was willing to put up with all these things is because Fallout Shelter lacked PvP. You see, our whole free-to-play industry has been built around the idea of PvP. Everyone working in it will tell you that PvP drives sales, that it's what makes the whales out there pay the big bucks. It's what keeps the top users monetizing over and over again. And yes, that's totally true. But as counterintuitive as it

seems, it may not be the best plan for a traditional hardcore audience. You see, one of the roots of all of these core gamer complaints, the complaints about timers, the complaints about monetization that encourages buying power, is that many players feel like they can't keep up. That they can't compete unless they spend thousands of dollars, unless they wrap their whole lives around the game. And if they can't possibly keep up, why pay at all? Why play at all? But here, where the player was competing with no one but themselves, where they were setting their own goals and objectives, they could move at whatever pace they wanted. The timers didn't make them feel like they were a slave to the machine, like they had to set an alarm in the middle of the night to be as efficient as possible. Because being as efficient as possible didn't get you ahead of anybody. Instead, players could sleep through the night, check in when they felt like it, and have fun with whatever resources they did get, rather than fretting about the ones they missed. The same is true for monetization. Sure, the Fallout Shelter monetization is actually pretty heavy-handed compared to most free-to-play games, but there's no real pressure to do it. You're not going to lose anything by not having those special characters. No other player is

going to raid your base and take your stuff because they paid and you didn't. You're not going to miss out on any special event prize that really only the people who paid a thousand dollars had any chance of getting. Instead, the game simply says, "Hey, you enjoying this? You want to get some more efficient guys and better gear for your base quickly? Give me some money." And it doesn't matter if you do this the moment you boot up the game or a hundred hours in, because the game won't punish you just because you didn't want to cough up money. It's my guess that by the time this episode comes out, Fallout Shelter won't be topping the charts like it did at launch. At the end of the day, there's just not a ton of substantive gameplay in there. I don't think even Bethesda anticipated Fallout Shelter getting the initial response it did, and wasn't prepared to revamp the game to create the depth necessary to keep hardcore players in for the long haul. But even so, I think it may have shown us a valuable lesson about making free-to-play appealing to the hardcore. We may have to buck conventional wisdom and drop competitive components which force the player to be continuously tied to the machine, which punish a player for not putting large quantities of money into the game. At least if we want to use elements of traditional tablet and mobile free-to-play design to appeal

to the hardcore audience. See you next week.