two & a half gamers session #19 - The King info Leak, 5 Game design tips to level up your game

[Music] welcome everybody you are listening to two and a half Gamers no [ __ ] gaming podcast session number 19 we are discussing latest news fun but also dropping knowledge let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion live so so so stop being so serious today we have Felix at monetization Guru barer we have yakob game design secret secret Whisperer Remar and we have myself mate U dad Lage in the house are you are you sure you're pronouncing that name right M yeah I'm pretty sure I know everybody's but butchering my name but [ __ ] it yeah why don't you switch your name m like come on let I should yeah I

should do the the US trick I always go with Matthew yeah Matthew yeah Matthew when I'm in us because way easier I mean it's it's mate in English basically so it's fine but still maek I'm going to call you maek from now on Mage is better Mage is better I know I know I know uh yeah it's it's ridiculous but I might probably just put the J in the in the brackets so everybody knows it's actually a silent J mate mate yeah I'm just going to be mate all right yeah but yeah uh so today we will discuss the king leag oh wait for that we have some corrections again uh who would said that and then the the Mr secret Whisperer is going to share some game design tips to level up your game all right so let's start with uh with the correction or yeah exactly so

after our episode our friends at vungle actually reached out and said had a little correction so what I said was the bidder doesn't go above 26 it turns out the vungle average is 26 so they did actually share with me kind of some actual ecpm averages uh some actual CPM averages which is quite interesting uh because you can kind of see here roughly what you can expect from the vungle bidder if you go live with different like yeah different game categories so right at the top you have scratcher and sweep Stakes uh average ecpm on the [ __ ] is that what the [ __ ] is that yeah I actually don't know but like it must be must be those like apps you download where you get offers surely right like yeah you're winning stuff yeah either way $ 39.3 average and basically hyper casual R Racing really big surprise for me 27.4 this must be reward video otherwise

this makes no sense and also Idol averages around 20.4 so the games I manage and where I have vungle I can tell you it's considerably less so I guess I need to talk to my wunga rep and see why it's not on this average yeah uh but yeah apologies uh for that uh for that wrong information so the bungle bidder does go above $26 but the average is 26 nice okay well you should uh you know you should learn better it's the second correction I do have I do have a really good excuse and I'm very fortunate to have this excuse I am blonde sometimes blonde make mistakes yeah okay that's fine but blondes have more fun oh yeah that's true that's true as well nice well all right so uh I hope this uh sets the the CPM prices and everything uh as it should be and uh we I'm not sure if we can share this list

with uh the listeners but definitely if you want to see that reach out or just hit the Subscribe button they did they did say I was allowed to share all these numbers so uh you know I hope I'm not stepping on your toes well yeah let me know yeah you know subscribe YouTube Spotify Apple wherever you want to be uh also in my newsletter if you want to be there all right Right Scoop time yeah let's uh let's do the the king leag so we have received multiple emails after our King episode uh with all all the analysis and we got some leaked information uh but you know these um let's uh see employees maybe maybe not they requested to remain anonymous so we respect that uh but we were mostly right about a lot of stuff so that makes us really happy so let's start with the let's

start with the with the UA and and the Performance Marketing so apparently I was right about King struggles to to retain the talent for more than like two or three years because you know they're a corporation and uh without having regular promotions it's kind of hard to retain the talent and I was also right about paying in the salaries so you know because apparently it looks like they hire Juniors with uh well pay them not that much and then you know after you just learn have some experience then uh you know you get poached by other companies and what you know what happens you get double your salary from the big tech companies there you go if you're smart enough uh you get all these offers all the time so why not and uh you know this this was um why King decided to go in house with everything in like 2016 I think or somewhere around that because they were losing a lot of time talent to

all their fre third party vendors and the agencies they were working with which kind of sucks of course but yeah well what can you do what can you do that's that's how it is it was always a problem in in Slovakia as well with the bigger companies uh and uh you know having not having a regular promotions and uh getting shitty shitty salary so there you go but then uh in terms of the creatives and the brands well apparently the brand team is very strict which we always as we expected yeah as we expected so um the Cornerstone of any successful Mark uh gaming company yeah some creatives um definitely were not as uh well as according to the brain guidelines as they should so um even if they performed quite well they were killed because well it wasn't supposed to you know Candy Crush can't look like uh some other uh

weird hyper casual game and just used all these tricks because you know you have brand department so there you go but um I might you know get some uh some people uh angry because you know the brand team is small so there can be slep here and there so they can't see everything you use on the UA side because they're a big Corporation now so uh you know they decided to go brand over the the performance which is unfortunate but I understand I understand completely although I don't understand that if you want to make less money so yeah well I'm pretty happy about the the analysis we've done and uh apparently this this was pretty correct so kudos to myself so moving on from uh Mar's you know patting himself on the back to me patting myself on the back uh with ad

monetization cuz it turns out I was completely right about the ecpm assumptions that I made you you should see you should seen him on in Vegas at the Mau he was like super happy smiling like hey seen that information I was so right this I was right so I estimated it at $17 global average ecpm what they're currently seeing is 16 so pretty much bang on and you know you go Victory lap so the interesting thing is here so I didn't know this uh which came out now was that King does have its own um like uh its own proprietary self-built mediation platform but the interesting thing is like that back in 2013 that's when King started actually experimenting with ads and the chief creative officer I think we're seeing a

trend here basically killed the whole thing because he saw ads for breast enlargements and basically that led to them killing ads for like a couple of years and which is to me like a very knee-jerk reaction by someone who probably got very angry like if you work with ads what you do at that point is you look over your block list and if it's a serious issue you basically hire more people that can help you with a block list and policing of your own ads so you don't cut the revenue off at the knees so yeah to me that was quite interesting to read um also after that there was set some rules that every single ad had to be approved by king a king employee directly and they allowed no gaming No gambling no alcohol and no tobacco uh gambling Alcohol Tobacco fine left yeah no like yeah gambling tobacco and like yeah alcohol is fine like in terms of your performance mix that won't

have any impact on your overall ad Revenue if you ban that because it's such a small part but no gaming that's an absolute killer like if you block that you have your ecpm easily so apparently in 2016 like they launched like ads again in kind of a beta by hiring some big sales Executives from the US uh which kind of went quite well in non C titles like Candy Crush titles so but in 2017 this is where it got really intense apparently they hired a 100 AD salespeople to sell their inventory directly what so apparently they hired some main guy from snap uh who basically got referred or something but basically for me this is insane because no matter how big king is on ads

like they're still tiny compared to a network cuz like yeah sure they have 20 million M but like comparing that to maybe an app loving or iron Source ad Network that's absolutely nothing so hiring and to sell that direct is just completely like outlandish to me so apparently later on they allowed some more ad networks and moved like yeah moved to selling direct with Facebook and Google exactly what I said and basically now they're focusing more and more on ads and I was wrong with one one wrong thing I was wrong about the Impressions that they're currently getting I assumed quite a lot lower Impressions but actually this must be higher because if they're averaging a $16 ecpm their actual run rate according to an investment banker uh that basically tracks the gaming industry is that King made uh last year $350 million from ads so it's scaling up for them but

like it really sounds as there's still a lot of headwinds against ads and if you're building your own mediation that is going to cost an absolute fortune and one of the emails actually mentioned this that they had been building this under their own subsidiary but it's basically just like super expensive and yeah it's just super interesting because uh like we had discussion like I've had this discussion with so many gaming companies like should we build our mediation I'm like guys you have two experts in the industry that live breathe and like live breathe and die by building their own mediation that's iron source and app loving and it's still kind of weird that you can assume that you can build a better mediation than these guys and it's just like just accept that you will get your pants pulled down over something but you'll be better off it on like a bottom line as a company and that's fine like I can accept that kind

of tradeoff nice yeah so the lesson is don't build your own mediation still as it was before it will be in the future 100% like lot of lot of companies they're like obsessed with building their own uh in-house Solutions which sometimes can work well but if there is like a lot of other possibilities why would you just you know reinvent the ve over again it's just doesn't make any sense plus also like now with iron source and like app loving like they have their own network which is like sure that's where they earn their money but like it also earns you money like it's you have very similar kind of you're in the same like similar interests like in this like similar goals so it's yeah yeah for me it's just yeah super interesting but I guess like if you build the most like one of the most successful gaming like Mobile gaming companies ever like you can justify these things

cuz if you have really big like budgets it just must be so easy to go like yeah we'll build it ourselves it's not that much but in reality probably is much if you compare it to any other like place but yeah so that's what I thought that was the most interesting uh thanks a lot for all the information I think that sums it up for me yeah how about yourself Mr yakob Blue's brother for like the like finishing the topic here like I guess most of these kind of hidden costs are within maintaining and upgrading the solution that you built not really kind of a building itself like I don't think so that's the hardest part the hardest part is like keeping it up to date and that's where like this kind of a sun and costy can really bite you off but yeah like seen this in few companies I I was in before this this kind of yeah it's a recurring nightmare let's say yeah recurring nightmare if you've built a mobile game for iOS or

Android you've experienced user turn you can win those users back but it's getting more and more expensive even more so to acquire totally new users enter cross promotion with adct by identifying your users likely to turn early you can showcase another game in your portfolio before they leave forever transforming a lost user into a new user increasing your revenues learn more now at addict.com nice okay and anyway um yeah so in context of the last episodes where we were talking some few tips on UA and AD monetization let's try to do the Third Wheel here and try to do some actual game design and product tips actual design oh look at you what actual design um yeah so I was looking at this uh from kind of a broader perspective of not really talking about features but there are some techniques that are not

that kind of common within the industry let me just say first that game design equals monetization in free toop playay if you are kind of disregarding this topic or let's say if you don't think so or you have these teams separate it usually creates a lot of problems so in like the previous model where you would have either pay and play the premium one where you would create the game and then sell it uh yeah this was not the case really because you didn't really care after the person actually purchased the game and it's Pro proven that even three playa games had much lower retentions uh than like actual free-to-play games have where you know there's not that many people finishing Witcher three till the end that that's just proven fact I didn't even finish like two hours of the game play two hours of the game play it's [ __ ] boring no it's it's one of the greatest RPGs ever made of course anyway yeah yeah so the the monetization drives a lot of mechan here and needs to be

entwined deep into the design of the game otherwise you are just duct tap duct taping it over it or risking some kind of really really big problems later down the line which are not really obvious from the start but later down the line they yeah return with an interest so that's that's one of the bigger problems so under Assumption of these let me just go into some of these so the first tip would be model your economy I know this can sound trival or like yeah everybody probably do this no they told sounds like [ __ ] to me yeah and most people don't don't even have this because what I'm talking about here is that of course you need to be able to control your sources and things it means that you know how much stuff is going in and how much stuff you're demanding from the players that's one thing usually you have those in some kind of parameter sheet they're you know they need to be there if you're better you have those in some kind of simulation she then you know the cumulation but what I'm talking about is actually mod the progression of

an average player at how much time it takes him to get from point A to point B and this is where it gets kind of hazy because which player question so if I'm decoding Remo's talk right now rule one model your economy basically no [ __ ] version of that don't be lazy get an Excel sheet and do a model in Excel on the different players and how they can progress in your game yeah let's say let's say that in Felix to it feels like there you go and isn't that hard yeah of course everybody it isn't hard just that like 80% people don't have that because the problem is that you cannot really justify like this kind of average player you need to pick one and is usually a modular player that doesn't exist but you need to model him anyway so you pick a whale a minow and like no no no not calling about payment TI is more based on engagement so how do we model these you pick up some kind of a recurring session pattern that you

expect that people will play like you can check this with your metrics with your average daily uh sessions or average daily session play time and try to kind of model it around sometimes they increase sometimes they decrease that's also one of the problems you should be looking at because some games just screw up their sessions like the Old Farm whe where you could you know when you were collecting your first crops and by the time you collect your last crops the first ones already grew up so it would go into Loop so you need to control your session time but but yeah by picking some kind of average engagement you then based on that engagement try to model the sessioning of a player and by the thing you try to model the resources and the demand that he's requested from the game and this is actually the part where you create deficiencies where the game starts demanding more resources off of the player than he gets otherwise there's no reason to spend money of course do do you have any examples of these that you're allowed to share cuz man I would actually love to see what actually one of these looks like is it actually if it's well made um don't know if there's like a really

really good example here but let me like let's say let's use the example of clash Royale Clash Royale economy is built on gold scarcity so the more you progress through the game the more cards you have and you always have like lots of these to upgrade but you have less and less kind of a gold to spend compared to the amount of upgrades of cars that you have so at some point somebody in Clash Royale supercell design team decides okay this is the time where where gold will you will be really gold starved and this is the time where you know you need to grind and some people monetize and convert right there some people just move through the grind and go on so forth so forth so and and and that's the point where you pretty much decide on the steepness of these curves that how much you want to push like like the current theme in the industry of course is the spending that of Diablo Immortal somebody there was also kind of projecting these numbers and says okay by level 60 you don't really feel

anything because we have this kind of a 20 hour long campaign that you can play through you will feel great everything will pretty much die off but at some point the content of the game will scale to the level that you need to have like an external source of gold which if you don't pay you need to grind and that's that's the point so you have need to have this kind of a behind the scenes plans from the economy doesn't just kind of happen and then you monetize suddenly and this is one of the other bigger mistakes that people make that they don't really kind of count out their sources as they add more and more features into the game this needs to be readjusted all the time because you know suddenly you get these achievements so you get some resources out of there we are giving this event so we give you these amount of resources we're giving you that and so on so forth these still needs to be kind of like a live organism I know it's kind of hard now that like you know we laid out all that needs to be put into it but yeah this is really really good to have um the next good thing about this is uh

double check reality through dashboards uh so even if you have this kind of a really really sophisticated model of your economy make sure that you also build your dashboards and you check with the actual kind of a game that's being played behind the scenes and players are playing it as you wanted and resources are flowing as you wanted them to flow because this could be also one of the other problems that even though you designed it some way players are either finding a different way how to get resources out of the game or some kind of un intended scenarios happen within the game and then you see those in the chart which always happens because you know everything looks good on paper everything looks good on the paper but then in reality it's like way different exactly like I I remember uh seeing games that were kind of like yeah we're going to sell this and this and this will be our main yeah nobody cared for that nobody literally nobody and some kind of like completely different item was the main source of the revenue yeah you mean like with x infinity right

the what happened was was wasn't in the original plan and then exploded and then they died again so it's fine yeah like you know wasn't adjusted to that kind of a scenario because you always need to remember that you're pushing your game against the hive mind of the internet that will always main Max it always there's no like like yeah we're going to get off with this like it's no never there will be people doing the Excel sheets for you like for the player base so better do them yourself first uh as for the dashboards I would also advise not only building the primary kpis but also secondary kpis so let me get through it usually how you see dashboards being building companies is that you have these kind of primary kpis that you Benchmark against industry such as like rpu D3 D7 retention I don't know D30 LTV average revenue per or whatever something you know these kind

of usual metrics that are really really easily to Benchmark against and everybody needs to know them like you know the monetization team the UI team everyone but then you have these kind of secondary kpi metrics which are really really specific to the game and they mostly help the design team to either balance the game or just check how much of it like how how much the content is performing especially the new one that is being slotted into the game so I'm talking about some stuff such as like number of battles played per day number of levels passed through day number of I don't know mechanics added somewhere and play them with like for instance I know match three games excel at these like they literally measure everything and for instance the the pass through rate of levels like big match three games they have constant AB tests on the plan that they constantly wants to get the best index against monetization conversion and churn you have this kind of a you know golden sweet spot frustration tolerance where that one

level pieces you off and you really really want to pass it yeah but it cannot be that hard because otherwise you turn the game and leave and so so they are in this kind of influx of constant testing and there's numerous of these other kind of a secondary mechanics that other games have developed for themselves like like it's mostly done in genre expertise but just just want to say like if you don't have those have them because they're really important and slowly over time you can even build on those if you just don't have any experience with those but they will be really really interesting especially when you're adding new content into the game or like you're changing stuff so let me give you an example um we loving examples love examples as well finally yeah I I I I would really really like to see what happened to Hearthstone when they added that new Battleground mode which pretty much kind of they shoot themselves into food with their monetization because there you could pretty much play with all the cards and you don't need to kind of buy new ones and the interesting metric would be the share of time the user would then spend in this other mode

against their main mode so again these kind of secondary kPa metrics would help you to kind of evaluate oh did we really improve the game like aren't that users now spending I don't know 40% more time in this other mode and 30% Less in the main mode which means there's like much less spending now because they don't need the cards actually in the new mode and you would see that immediately so how how features are done this way I would always advise if you're like doing some really really big changes to the game and you don't want to run it through AAS because you can't do them through an event and that event if it works well add it permanently to the game if it doesn't work well change it and do it again do it again very clever good advice are you looking at the number of sessions as well like uh a day or any time period um yeah like again depends on what you want to achieve here you definitely cannot really push it that much with within some Gam G so make sure that you don't prolong the session too

much when it gets like you know it's still better to have more uh session throughout the day with less session time rather than very very big sessions that just you know because never ending yeah yeah because then you kill the granularity which means that when your player is you know waiting for that Cafe at Starbucks or walking down the street or waiting for something he cannot just pull up his phone do his little session and then you know return later because he knows always it will take me like 20 minutes just to get into something so yeah I cannot do it so like epic Legends on at the moment I can't play it because I need 20 minutes and if I'm 20 minutes sitting on the toilet then my leg hurts yeah hurt and these These are exactly the things that these kind of secondary dashboards will help you to kind of check through so just the sessioning just the like battles play then like after these kind of changes always look through then make sure that you know you are in control of your game otherwise the worst that can happen you add a feature and you don't know what

happens Revenue goes up so you took it as like yeah we increased the revenue but then suddenly something happens and you don't know what's happening because you didn't kind of you know attribute it correctly in the first place so these are kind of culprits or like hidden hidden problems if you don't really are in charge of your kpis but yeah those are really hard to do to be honest sometimes games behave really mysteriously uh sometimes users just find fun in something that you don't really find fun but they will and you cannot stop them so yeah we'll see yeah they always try to find Loop holes and uh and exploit everything they can yeah but it's like that's one of the greatest feelings that you can get like players are trying to break your game and they find enjoyment in it and that's great like idle Miner Tycoon still they haven't fixed that bug if you change your date in the phone basically putting it like at Future like couple years down the line you get all the gems you can just skip to the like as like far ahead in the game as possible and they still

haven't updated that and it's been four years that's not breaking the game that cheating and not having server wide infrastructure well you can call it whatever you whatever you want I mean yeah yeah and by the way this is also really good where if you want to spot cheaters this is the safest and easiest way that you can do through the secondary KPS that you can easily see like okay this player is you know getting too much resources too much power too much battle something your your community community support will also love these ones yeah look at look at this player it's that's definitely Felix is getting all the gems at once because he's in he's from the future do you not play at 2040 yeah of course yeah let's let's move on um wait wait wait wait so double check reality is number two which I'm going to translate to no [ __ ] to be don't be lazy measure everything yeah build your dashboards that's build your dashboards yeah because some some people don't even kind of have the dashboards they just kind of end up on the system that you

just ask the data team and they'll like pick up a query you know yeah that's what I wanted to ask like if you know uh if you are not able to build your dashboard then who should do that for you like your data team analyst uh you a guy who are you going uh you know to to approach yeah it's it's your data team or like a third party company if you can really do that but you really need those because like I would say for live game that's like 20% of the time of a designer to just look through all the dashboards that everything is okay especially after every update and then what kind of tools you use for the dashboarding is it just data Studio or is it looker I don't know tblo yeah depends on your pipeline you know how how your data team is comfortable with working with like in the end you are the one I mean the designer in the end who can set up the dashboards like you know you decide what to put build everything I want X and Y AIS and you know depends can you can you give just like as well

like like off the cuff some metrics that you should definitely have in your dashboard like just rattle off a couple of them that come to mind you already mentioned you already mentioned them you know the usual ones like all the conversions the retention like attribute installs you know if everything is working great if definitely have the flow of resources so how much resources has been given throughout the day how much has been burned out so if there's you know equilibrium somewhere or if you know stuff is inflated or not so check your inflations definitely and then uh yeah kind of Engagement rates I would say that would be the last one so make sure that let's say I don't know we have this new mode in the game and it's being engaged by I don't know 10% 20% of the player base what can we do to increase that so should we unlock it sooner into the final should we you know give more rewards maybe is there shitty rewards people don't want to play it maybe there's you know different problems the the charts won't won't tell you the solution they will just tell you the symptom of the problem so sure but at

least you know there is something wrong and you know where to find it definitely okay next one plan your content scaling for longer periods of time yeah this is more of like building a game TI rather than like your current tip but uh yeah every game that wants to be successful eventually ends up in this scenario where you definitely want to kind of pre-plan how to scale the game a long time scale means like years on on average like usually when I Hear What I Hear in the industry is like yeah we want to run the game for at least five to six years let's say and after that like that's I would say would be the usual time time span of a successful mobile game if we're talking like Candy Crash or Clash of Clans level of course they're 10 years plus counting but let's take but if you if you have a small game and you don't even know or small company you don't even know if you're going to be in business in five years so yeah it doesn't mean don't you're not supposed to build it you need to plan for it that's that's the thing okay that's the magic thing here because the problem is

that uh of course nobody's forcing you to build all you know all those levels and everything like I remember what was it when I was last checking like some of the original match three games like uh Angry Birds blast or tomb blast like they they start to do like three to 400 levels but yeah they have like thousands of levels now but in order to have those levels they need to first kind of device a metrix or like a system in order to build mechanics on top of it like if you look into the match Tre games for instance I think what was it to toy blast or tomb blast they add like a new mechanic every 40 levels and this is constant so they know that they have this kind of a matrix of mechanics of parameters they just switch around and like add new content on top of it so let's say you have this whatever bubble gum mechanic where you need to blast two two times near it then you add like a third one into it so you need to blast three times it's a snowman then you need to whatever it hangs in space it doesn't affect by gravity and there's another mechanic so they have a

formula behind it where there's a clear design Vector that says okay we'll go this way and we can scale it and we can have thousands of levels because it's okay but that plan was probably done somewhere like before the launch not like somewhere later down the line that's one of the other big problems that games faces when they just launch the game yeah soft lunch is great everything is looking good golden cohort is performing well and then suddenly after three months everything goes to [ __ ] because the content just runs out yeah of course because even even if you plan for three months like like you said before like there are players that are going through the content in way different pace that you would expect so you need to plan more than three months of content like what six months year of content is there any you know a best practice for for that yeah usually the the more the better I know yeah we're getting to that kind of a dreaded content threadmill but eventually this is like the end game of any successful mobile free toplay game like sometimes you can build it better or in a way just

by the nature of the game play so I would say Clash Royale team for instance I wouldn't say is that demanding based on content threadmill so they just add new heroes or you know new Arenas or events or something like that but if you have like a Candy Crush model you add like 40 levels every two weeks or three weeks I don't know what what currently CAD they running man the discipline to do that without knowing if your game is going to be a success and put in all that work that requires some discipline yeah yeah like you know you need to know what you're doing and just imagine like they add 40 levels every two or three weeks how many of those would be shot down and only like the best ones would get actually into the build and they're still testing those so they would be like hundreds of levels probably they like doing and only the best ones get into the build so yeah sometimes these content threadmills can be spotted even like during production and you need to go around them and make sure that you have the capacity to kind of be able to run them otherwise they can run you over into the ground which means users will

reach the end they will consume your content and then leave the game that's that's yeah so just some other things that are kind of useful to talk about um is power creep here like this is one of the let's say most used mechanic when you're running out of content and people pretty much have everything uh especially RPG games run into this is you eventually will be doing power creep power creep means that you're doing pretty much similar content than previously but you are making it much more stronger therefore the players need to buy in order to stay competitive but usually that means that you're also building up new content that they can defeat that content with that new Heroes that are power creeped on top of it so it's not just you know pure stats so another example how I would not really do it would be if you remember the Diablo I formula for Unix after their big kind of a reshuffle of the game

economy after they closed the auction house so it was kind of a loot Fest from that point on and people are pretty much showered with legendaries every run yeah and and what happened that people were just going for these like really really small percentage increases in the stats of those legendaries and though were those were pretty much the best ones so at some point they introduced these kind of legendary legendaries which means like I think they were called like acient or something and and it means that they had like 10% more better stats like a randomization pool than the previous pool so what happens next after people already jump and farm the [ __ ] out of these they add like Ancient Ancient which they just add another 10 percentage and this is the problem that my guess was that unfortunately Diablo team was just underst stuffed with building content so like the you know the easiest way you can do this power creep mechanic is through just you know spreading your Excel sheet forward do you think there'll be an ancient anci ancient thing I think they went even even that like there was like it's the

same like with the with creatives and the the versions like final final final final Final versus two final final Final the real final and stuff like that like it's always final Pro final ma yeah but the the problem here is that like there's clear diminishing returns here within power creep so if you don't really build a content for it then you know it's going to run yourself into the ground again because people won't really kind of appreciate them farming the same thing over and over again just for like 5% stat increase or something in that matter so uh I would say another example from Blazer doing it really good would be the transitions between the world of work expansions where they would do another expansion with a massive amount of content your gear would be then completely [ __ ] pretty much because a player in I don't know random blue gear in at level 72 would steamroll over you if you were like the decked out uh 70 from previous expansion but you had so

much more content to play through with it so people weren't that pissed that even though like so much time they put into like collecting the gear from previous expansion would be inflated away so this is one way to do it properly that build content for the power cre because that creates a great entry point for new players to jump in but also the like the new content for the power players that been there from the beginning they now have like a new playground to play with so they are not pissed that you know imagine if there would be just the start increase without the actual expansion of like land and quests and everything so everybody will be pissed pretty much yeah exactly so this this again returns us back to the previous problem that games require content treadmill and they are never kind of a done there are games a service usually so yeah let's face that um make sure that you are selling impactful content number four um again this is a more kind of a pre-production one or like design

pre-design one I would say um the problem that I you don't you just duct tape everything on top of your live game most probably not but but let me just say that this goes back to the to the original problem of you trying to sell something and it needs to matter to the actual player so a good example here would be um when Clash Royale came out in 2016 there were a lot of clones and lot of kind of games trying to fit the gacha mechanic into it let's just omit all the direct clones because they really didn't add any like anything into current discussion but I know there were a lot of games that were trying to add the gacha mechanic into something that didn't really fit the core game playay like I've seen a game that was trying to add the gacha mechanic into like poker and yeah that that didn't fit well or like uh yatsi like some some of these kind of you know like try to add gacha into chess like it

won't work in a way that the core game playay won't support the gacha mechanic you need to kind of have core gameplay design around that mechanic that it makes sense to scale the stats and a good example would be again golf Clash that would took the Clash Royale Shard GAA mechanic and the biggest problem or let's say the biggest design Innovation they did was create and design those parameters of the staffs and then on the environments that would be scaled through those so it actually means something when you have that kind of a parameter on your Club where you know it's resistant against wind or there's like a you're better now if you're firing from Sand or grass or whatever and and there's like a clear game here that you need to kind of follow because Clash Royale meta game is driven by uh PVP meta whereas golf Clash meta game is driven by the environment meta so there's like a clear thing where people were looking for stats on stuff based on

their requirements in the environment so there's the usual you know problem a requires stuff a problem B requires stuff B and you need to include those in your deck otherwise you are not able to overcome the challenge so I know it sounds kind of trivial but sometimes people forget this and they just say okay like you know we'll somehow duct tape it together it will work it won't and that that's the biggest problem that like the death of a gacha would be where one piece can of solves all your problems so you don't need to have like all the pieces upgraded or even don't need to interact with gacha from some point on and this goes again same here where the game play for instance you adding gacha into the poker wasn't that impactful so you could still win the game without any GAA upgrades or even the guy with you Decked Out fully to the GAA upgrades that he had because you just were able to play a nice Game of Poker so that's that's like I know it's kind of hard to grasp here but this this is a especially kind of important when you're designing a new game and trying

to I'm talking about you iterating usually on a new genre where you want to kind of you know get something new out of the formula like the golf Clash example or even tennis Clash example that's another good example where they took the tennis kind of core gameplay and try to add parameters on top of it so that's really important yeah and our favorite one yay that's my favorite know your spending depth this is such a good good one yeah and it's so like perfect timing right now with the whole Diablo immortal like talk this is going to be a good one yeah so now your spending dep this is really important um some people kind of assumes this some people just you know let's get the benchmarks from the other game just copy the number somewhere and it will somehow work um this is really important especially as you're improving the game and adding new layers of features on top of it because this will change and this will change dramatic Ally so it's really important that you know it from the first place

because even when you look at like the current craze of I don't know battle passes battle passes in the end are cutting your spending Gap a lot because you're trading retention for monetization it's like economy on discount on steroids those are like th% like 2,000% discounts so like a great talk would be to look here where supercell team did their battle pass implementation into Clash of Clans I think yeah that was the one where their designer ano were having it and he was kind of talking about how were they able to push more people into the middle of the economy so there were kind of a lot of people on the lower levels and they wanted to push them higher into the you know so that an average Clash of Clans player will have more upgraded stuff so they intentionally cut their spending that because because now they had so much content that it didn't make sense to

like bear people with this kind of slow grow of progression and they tried to move them higher so but but you can only do this if you know that they will have spending afterwards and you have to dep to sustain it because they they they would not be able to do that in like the global lch of the game and the current example with Diablo uh is yeah something similar thing here that they don't really have the content to kind of offset this kind of big spending depths so they just you know increase the probabilities to some like really really measly numbers that there's you like I think there's like literally zero chance for like a free-to-play player to get that five SL five star gem or something like that which those are pretty much stats on on on the on your character but that's not additional content uh done into the game so yeah like but I I I still guess it will like grow money like like hell in Asia but uh 100% man 100% I have a question so like the big headline

like that was grabbing everything was like microtransactions in Diablo Immortal cost you 100,000 to max out your character like I was seeing that and I'm like if you're a Social Casino company looking at that you're were like like how do how does that Stack Up compared to like a Clash of Clans cuz it was such like you know grabby headlines but if you like are in the know like where does that Stack Up compared to some of the other like companies um I I don't know the the current spending that because I remember that like number 25k being thrown around before the days but they added like a new CT into it so I would maybe double that or triple depends but the the problem with your spending dep and that's like a design tip here is that you need to kind of again similar to modeling your you know average player progression you need to come up with some kind of set of things that you need during the end game that you then price into dollars because buying outright everything isn't really needed in these games like you don't really need you know all the characters from Clash Royale

upgraded to the max that's not your max spending dep your max spending de would be like a let's say if you're going easy like a fully upgraded one competitive deck in the current meta game at the end of like last rank in Clash Royale so only that is your you know biggest spending dep or let's say a team of Heroes that you are able to take I don't know all five star like three teams of five star heroes from every element in Empire and puzzles for instance you don't need need all the heroes all you know all all the upgrades you you just need to come up with some kind of endgame set of things that you then price into dollars and that that's your spending depth so what people are doing in Diablo Immortal they are pretty much yeah it it's kind of easy there because you have fixed um inventory slots there and if you cover all the slots with all the maximum prices on the gems then you get into those atrocious really big numbers so that's why it's kind of easy but you I don't think so you really need those post that much but in the end you can go there of course you don't need it

but if if you can buy it then why why wouldn't you yeah spend just 100K because uh why not yeah but as I said like it's really important especially in pre-production of the game or when you're before Global launching and trying to assess the monetization and everything know these numbers and make sure you can then cut from them because what what usually happens you have the base price in the shop as an anchor but all the offers or promotions are actually being done on discount I'm not even talking about the Battle passes which is the biggest discount but you know build it high in a way that you can then discount out of it when you're selling it because that's the you know the the sales offers that are kind of attempting yeah the main shop is just the anchor usually I would love to know the spending depth of slotto mania like that must be like insane just like yeah yeah all right so uh so we had these five gamees design tips to level up your game again model your economy

double check reality through dashboards plan your content scaling for longer periods of time and then make sure that you're selling impactful content and know your spending depth in this special episode and you know why is this the special episode guys ah you don't because we are in the [ __ ] same time zone finally yeah thanks a lot for that us trip y I know made this easy yeah but you know what what I found out so thanks to the fact I was in in us I was able to upload videos to Spotify so we could get the the Spotify with video now I moved back and I don't have the options anymore Spotify is even a Swedish company like come on guys dude yeah it's like it's ridiculous so but yeah well what can you do so they don't know they're spending depth nope yeah apparently yeah uh yeah thank you very

much for sharing this uh interesting and impa impactful tips oh that's great so next time uh I think we can do the the creative uh deconstruction of the ants underground what do you think next week that would be amazing that would be really need to catch up with the stories of ants defeating the oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah yeah oh yeah so yeah thank you very much for listening thank you very much guys for uh sharing all the knowledge and also don't forget to subscribe on YouTube Spotify and apple and whever uh thank you very much until next time bye-bye bye [Music]