Is your game's on-ramp better than Facebook's?

so hello I'm Nicholas Louisville Jonathan Johnson John asked me to give a talk in 20 minutes i normally talk with something between an hour and a day so i'm going to go really really fast so amongst other things I run a website called games briefed by consult to a bunch of clients I write books you should follow my website I'm not going to keep going at this speed but what I want to do is introduce you to something which I think of is the fundamental core of free-to-play game success the talk is going to cover both business and design for the designers not an is it useful for you but it's useful for you to explain to your bosses why you're doing stuff for your bosses it's why you can go back to the designers and say makes your sessions shorter that doesn't mean they have to be shorter they have to be possible to be shorter and that's what I want to talk about to the next 15 minutes so um I call it sessioning and

the starting point is you need to accept that players are going to stop playing your game not ever Rick just pointed out that people may well play your game for days weeks months and years but every single day there's going to come a point where they're going to stop playing we need to sleep and we need to eat it's going to happen our job is to make it as easy as possible for them to come back as comfortable as possible for them to leave and to make damn sure that when they leave they come back again either later today or tomorrow and that for me is the cool building block of free-to-play success I'm not an artist you can probably tell but this is my drawing of this you want players to start playing your game you want them to have fun while they're there and there's a moment which I call well they are the on ramp play time and time to go where you essentially say it's okay guys you can leave I wouldn't be upset go away that's fine do come back but it's okay to leave so I want to break each of

these down through the next 13 minutes so does anybody know this game legend of grimrock because anybody played it you're not a core audience in here so okay more hands going up so is anybody old to remember dungeon master on the atari st or the amiga more hands that time so this is basically dungeon master but prettier and it's a game on steam that is quite cool and it's got quite a spatial awareness puzzle built into it it you've got to kind of put a weight over here and put a lever over here remember this clanking think something's moving over here and fight a monster it can take some time to get yourself back into the flow of playing that game anybody recognize this game put your hand up recognize this one you should recognize this in this room pocket planes guys you need to play more games I know it's old but even so so pocket planes a very different game it's a game where you basically move cargo and people around the world in planes and it's a lot of fun a few years ago a two

or three years ago now I was playing a lot of Grimrock on steam I put my kids to bed I came downstairs i sat down in the room where my steam computer lives and I thought I haven't got time to play legend of grimrock so I took out my iPad and I started playing pocket planes and two and a half hours later I hadn't moved it's not that I didn't have time to play this game is that this game required me to promise that i was going to sit down and take this game seriously this game made it really easy for me to get into it and then I carried on playing it for a very long time the equivalent in ordinary life is you come home after a day at a conference you get home you turn on the telly and you see 12 years a slave is on and you go I haven't got time to watch that and you turn on Britain's funniest animals and you watch that for three hours because it is that you've got time it's that the promise of committing to the game is a problem and that's our biggest advantage against console titles it's not that our games are better or worse or their games a better or worse is that when you sit down to play tomb raider you're

promising that you're going to spend at least half an hour with that game before you even turn it on because it under play dark souls it's way more than that if you sit down to play eve online you're promising you can spend five hours with this game it's not that this game can't draw you in the myth that we need short sessions is a myth session links can be very long but they need to have the promise of possibly being short simply in order to draw people into the game the fact that you have to commit to a long session is a big barrier to entry so for me the on-ramp makes it easy to say yes I've got time to play this game there's another thing to bear in mind the competition on this if you're in slots the competition this isn't other slots games for you in racing it's not other racing games for all of us it's Facebook you've always got time to go and check facebook and Facebook is just a game how much do people like my post how much is happening what's happening in this world you're on ramp has to be better than Facebook's on-ramp to really compete that's bloody hard our return

hooks are better than theirs but our on ramp it's very difficult to make it to make it as good as that so the on ramp leads to this question called books called the starbucks test was anybody familiar with this so i first heard it from torsten rile who runs natural motion which makes my horse and clumsy ninja and his titans out yet I don't know they've been promising it for a while have I got time to have a meaningful interaction with the game in the time it takes for my barista to make my macchiato because we're all a bit kind of hipster here but and it's this is massively misunderstood particularly in the core audience because that doesn't mean the session has to be short it means that I can have a meaningful interaction quickly which is a different question so the other thing to say very quickly as this depends on the device if you're making for mobile your phone is here here in your pocket you can go from thinking about playing to playing very quickly my iPads in my bag I want to sit

down to play it it might be a minute or so if it's on Facebook you're already on facebook but you've got to fire up unity or whatever it is and in the game it's longer if you're trying to play games on Steam particular like me and you don't play that off and you go in and steam updates and it's slow and you frankly got time to make a cup of coffee while you're waiting for this and ok so I'm on ps3 not ps4 but bloody hell if i want to start playing a console game I've got 20 minutes between deciding I want to play and all the automatic updates actually having taken place so the starbucks test does vary by device are you don't think the phone and the tablet of the same device because the cases are so different so you can get away with a longer starbucks test how quickly can I get in and have a meaningful interaction on a tablet than you can on a phone so who passes the test here are some games some of them are quite old now which do really well these really early gains there in cocos2d I mean they load quickly 5 or 10

seconds between deciding to play and being able to collect some coins or make a decision these games much longer generally they're either higher graphical quality or require online connectivity so that slows down the starbucks test this game too bloody minutes it takes me on my iPad Mini to be able to play it and halfway through they stop and say do you want to load this vault right I've only got one bloody volt of course they do why did you make it so I have to stop in the middle I have enough time while trying to load fallout shelter to load up facebook on my phone to pass the time while I'm waiting for it to load now obviously fallout shelter is a very successful game so passing the starbucks test is not an absolute must do but and if they didn't have that brand that problem would literally have killed their game stone dead so the starbucks des is dressing two questions have i got time for this game right now and will it be worth it for the effort i have to go through when i do my master classes i

get in trouble for this slide because they say so we should do good things and not do bad things not necessarily in free-to-play there's no right or wrong everything is a trade-off between pros and cons so good things you load quickly as soon as you get in you say well done came back have some gold it doesn't make you turn up and immediately go everything you've done is turn to crap you have to fix it it makes you feel good for turning up animalcrossing breaks that rule not that it's free to play but it does say look your world is just rubbish it has one more go gameplay so you get in very quickly you can play Crossy Road and then have another ago it passes the starbucks test bad things a splash screen of splash me with a pause on it absolutely never but a splash clean that's very flattering animated unless it's covering up load times then it's really good but if it's slowing things down it's a terrible thing it's just your vanity stock unity in it is terrible for this is slow Unity's awesome you should probably be in unity but there's a trade-off pvp and

matchmaking half stone if I want to sit down and play hearthstone I need to know I have 20 minutes available I will choose to go to Facebook or into I'm not actually playing I'm deeply obsessed by a stone at the moment but into one of those idle games a farmer way or something like that I can go into that but I couldn't go into hearthstone online connectivity supercell insists on it most successful free-to-play games company in the world but it's bad for the on ramp and complexity get me into your game quickly to do something of value how those layers added later like I talked about with umm pocket planes and there is no excuse to interrupt the loading to ask me if I'm sure I want to play that's just stupid Bethesda and and equally as soon as I fold up my iPad I'm not sure everybody has this use case sure I play a lot of games my kids are a little bit older now but I play a lot of games where any moment I was likely to be interrupted where they need a wing and that means that any game will and I flip down the ipad and it collapses out which fallout shelter does I go I'm not

playing that game I'm going to go and play candy crush saga when I suspend the game I can jump straight back into where I was immediately now all of these things you know fallout shelter did amazingly well and looked beautiful but it came at a cost a cost which you have to think whether it's worth it for the game that you are making so that's what I just said and here are some really good games with terrible on runs so one set of trade-offs clay time the bit in the middle there should be fun rewarding satisfying profitable I could spend a whole day talking about that so I'm going to assume you've made a bit of game in the middle that's fun now let's move on because that's easy um so having made a bit of fun you need to say something okay I know you're going to leave how am I going to make it easy for you to go okay I can go now not necessarily I have to we did a lot of that with energy and I will discuss that but make it easy to say it's time to go come back later so let me give you one example from hearthstone who's playing hearthstone and who has played half

stone so okay so most of us have this example the most valuable thing in half Doan is cards and the way to get cards is to get gold that's kind of it so every day you get a chance to have a mission to win gold it's the fastest way of winning gold the next day you'll get another mission now you've got to the next day you'll get a third mission now you've got three and until you've cleared one of them you can't get anymore so it's a sort of fear of missing out reason to keep playing I've trained my seven-year-old very well he was very worried yesterday that we hadn't cleared enough mission so he went away and played a lot until he'd cleared some which is bad because I've trained my seven-year-old to play hearthstone but I have quite a lot of parental pride that he wins all his matches albeit in casual and so now I'm looking at this and I'm slightly twitching that I haven't cleared at least one of them because tonight at eleven o'clock because I'm a core player so I know that's going to happen a new mission would appear to give me gold if I've cleared one and if I haven't then I've

lost that gold forever so every day I might come back every three days I definitely come back but once I've played this the game says look you can keep playing it's not energy hasn't kicked me out but it's told me that you know what if you're just min maxing this if you're just trying to be efficient for gold you've done everything you need to do today you can go now hey date is the same thing you come into a day and you harvest your crops and you make your farm work and you set up your crops running you can now spend hours pottering me designing your farm doing all sorts of things but you don't have to if you just wanted two min max or if you don't have very much time or if your macchiato is now ready you can go I go in I grab that stuff I left clearly you can't do ha stone while you're waiting for a macchiato unless they're very slow um I'm going to drop in John I've got two minutes left and we allowed to overrun how long five minutes more okay so the energy I'm going to keep negotiating this it's a little bit it's

a little bit more I'll leave you hanging so please let him finish um it might be muddy there um the energy i'm against energy it's incredibly useful i use it in a bunch of my incline related games but it has quite a lot of negative i've even saw one client who had a system they called energy which was an energy mechanic so they had all of the bad stuff of using energy and being evil free to play without any of the benefits of it because i have to go fast i'm going to give you some pros and cons so good things about energy you finished the session you've played CSL racing you've used up 10 pips of fuel it's time to bugger off or pay up that's a bit Zynga resk and a bit not super silly and we're a bit more than the super cellular than the zynga era so be a bit cautious about that as a designer it allows us to control session links some people think this is us just being evil you make it so it's fun so you want to give us money and sure we do do some of that but the other point is going if I give you a chocolate cake and say here's a

chocolate cake eat it all of it all of it whereas if you go here's one slice that's nice tomorrow I'll have another slice the next I'll have another slice you actually like the cake more then if I make you eat it all in one day that isn't us being evil by not letting you have the cake you'll actually enjoy the cake more about being parceled out so there are cynical elements we think our game isn't good enough to entertain you for an hour if we let you play it so we only let you play 20 minutes you don't notice how rubbish we are versus the actually if you have too much of anything in one go it ceases to be fun energy is good for parceling that out which is the next point it can reduce player boredom and it can make choices matter more so let's say you're at the end of a CSR racing session you've got one pip of fuel left you could just grind in a really dull match you're certain to win but you go I'm going to stop after this maybe I'm going to push a bit earlier than I should for beating the boss because that will make me feel awesome by making energy have a purpose you're making the player choices in the

game feel better and more important than simply grinding so and you can monetize energy and we can sell energy but I don't I think these are the reasons which are more beneficial but the downsides it can be very clunky lots of people think energy is evil free-to-play I do blame sing to a lot for that it can prevent your biggest players from playing I want to keep playing for four hours why won't you let me and it's not generous some people think I'm weird about this but I think free-to-play is a generous business model we give a lot of stuff away for free in order to draw people in so they'll spend money on things they value putting a hard stop in front of it stopped some of that relationship and I believe there are better ways although some of them are simply having an energy mechanic that is essentially hidden in plain in plain sight so let's figure out ways to hide it one of the obvious ways of hiding it is something like in heyday when each farm plot is essentially a bit of energy once you've harvested your farm plot and replanted it there's nothing more you can do in that time

gated mechanic you can spend money to accelerate it it behaves just like energy but it doesn't have that energy thing at the top which means it doesn't look like the sign of evil free-to-play I'm going super fast now but i also want to leave the idea of pottering the old mud Mont model was play run out of energy now pay up or piss off and it's so hard to keep people in games now that the idea of kicking somebody else out ever is a big a big challenge but we don't want them to progress so fast through the game that our content treadmill becomes crazy what we want to do is let them spend time just pottering around if you're playing in hearthstone you can spend a lot of time just building decks and not actually playing them if you're playing in pretty well any farming or city builder you can make your place look prettier you can start planning out what it is that your next upgrade is going to be what your neck sketch of fusion is going to be but the idea is that for the bin max's we've said come in complete your task leave and for the other people who go i'm in i'm quite enjoying it clash of clans

it's often chat you're spending time chatting with your other clan mates that's another form of pottering so very UK centric word it's not even an English word pottering basically means middle aged man goes down to his shed and pretends to do DIY or plant plots while actually just having a cup of tea to get away from his family that's what pottering really means and there's a huge value of that in free-to-play games because for most people free to play as an escape from their daily life so let them just stay there if they're having fun so hey day does it fall out shelter there's quite a lot of it you can go in you can quickly set all of your things going and then you're trying to turn your women into breeding machines which is a bit weird but that's what the game is broadly about it yeah it has some challenges with its concept of women but never mind and her phone has it too so in two minutes two minutes I'm going to run through a bunch of different return hooks how did you get people to come back to the game just be fun you're all trying to do this but this is lightning in a bottle I don't

think that you should say I'm going to make my game fun and that's enough you should be saying I'm going to make my game as awesomely fun as this one cross the road but if I fail let's make sure we've got some contingency plans to still keep people coming back let's have appointment mechanics if somebody plants pumpkins um I'm going to be deeply stereotypical now american soccer mom gets up in the morning a seven o'clock she goes I've got to take the kids to school do the laundry do the grocery shopping but I've got some me time now I'm not going to anymore meantime until three o'clock just before the kids come home so I'm playing farmville what I'm going to do I'm going to plant some pumpkins which will be ready in eight hours and her own personal to-do list has just changed to take the kids to school do the laundry do the grocery shopping and harvest some pumpkins you don't need to send her needy local notifications saying please come back and you're annoying boyfriend who keeps begging she's going to come back of her own accord because she promised the game that she'd collects those pumpkins at

three o'clock she will feel bad if she doesn't keep her promise and that's why you can I don't think you should but you can wither the crops because she made a promise it's going to leave you with a thought that it's not a tamagotchi i leave the designers amongst you to work out why this is different to Tamagotchi NOS appointment mechanic all come and hire me as a consultant or something um social mechanics I logged in to candy crush every day for several weeks after I'd stop playing because lots of my friends had given me tickets to open next levels and I felt guilty that I wasn't responding by give giving them tickets back I wasn't playing anymore so I went in every day to give them the tickets back because I said I wasn't playing that I was in the game and it was there so I just pressed plagues it was fun that's an example of an on-ramp the social pressure to draw me back in pulled me back in and then I was in I wasn't in facebook i was in candy crush so candy crush could then get me with its fun playtime if you don't log in regularly in clash of clans your mates will hate you eventually they'll kick you out so you have to go back in if your friends are

raiding in Warcraft and you're the healer you know you need to be there so social pressures are very powerful competition is very powerful get back in to get to the top two belegend or to beat other people um if you don't come back bad things will have happened i know i said earlier don't make me tidy your room that's because it's a bad on ramp but it's quite a strong return hook you just have to think about the balance for your individual game have events I'm anti events because if you have a game which relies on events to work it means the fundamental game isn't fun enough and you're using a plaster on elastoplast or a band-aid to fix it I love events because they really work don't build them into your soft launch test if your game is fun without events and then add them later and if you're going to do events for God's sake don't do halloween I had one client who had an Easter promotion which they launched the day after Easter cuz their schedule slipped and they didn't have enough money to wait for a year for it to happen your schedule will slip so make

events which are not quite as time sensitive as Easter or Ram Halloween or even Christmas try and make events which will work even if your schedule slips by six months eventually you'll need this stuff but that's mature stuff or have a daily log in bonus well done you came back I love you but don't put that in your soft launch either we know it works it drives retention but it's a band-aid you can add it during your soft launch it's not a gating item for getting too soft launch and finally be a needy boyfriend but nobody likes needy boyfriends so if your retention strategy is we will do a local notification your game sucks it needs to be that people know thank you very much reminding me i'm really grateful and then this stuff works but if this is just the heart of it you're stuffed so this is the session they came hey I've got time to play this they had fun they went it's okay the game doesn't mind if I leave now all I need to come back a bit later though and the cycle starts again that's the half of the player session thank you very much

not let you have any questions Sophie I've had one too late I could be cruel will not let them have any questions but I think we will let allow at least one question they don't have a question for Nick buzz about heavenly i went to sunny you covered it all i have to say i used to say for push notifications i had never seen a good push notification until I started playing farmer way so fun way it has very good push notifications as ones that make you laugh out loud and you're actually grateful that they turned actor and I think that makes a big difference thank you very much thank you very much an