Mobile crap - ads

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

A game does not need in-game ads to be profitable. Real-money transactions can do the job if the game is polished and the business model solid. See Clash of Clans for example.

But even if we ignore the games with traditional ads, there are still many with some sort of advertising. For example, Puzzle and Dragons has no in-game ads per se, but they do frequently collaborate with third-parties to advertise their games. Among these collabs, PAD introduced a dungeon themed after Angry Birds, and Angry Birds placed a banner or introduced a temporary content themed after PAD. These collaborations may have been profitable for the marketing of both PAD and Angry Birds, but 1) the theme of PAD has now become an inconsistent mess: I would much rather have new content themed after dragons or gods than dragons plus Angry Birds plus Batman plus ... 2) in a collecting game like PAD, the players who start after a collab has ended will never be able to collect the monsters from that collab, and 3) it reminds the player that if she did not pay to play, then she is the product. As a player, I dislike collabs.

There are also many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean games on the app store. One of them is Mother of Myth. In-between levels, they frequently display an in-game ad for ... their own paid content! These ads may increase the number of payers, but 1) they disrupt the play experience, 2) why use an old-fashioned ad when a well-designed game mechanic could do it? If you have to use an ad, then either your game design sucks, or you are not selling the right thing.

And then, of course, there are tons of ad-like messages that my brain ignores automatically. One such message is login through Facebook to play with your friends. PAD remains discreet about it - you can play decently without friends. But Birzzle was much heavier and splashed a bring-your-friends ad after every level.

Mobile crap - poor English

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

Not much to say here. Among the many bad-English apps, I only mention the most recent ones. Dungeon Hearts is sometimes Engrish, sometimes poor English with typos. It's odd because its single American developer seems able to speak proper English. Maybe something to do with the publisher? Puzzle and Dragons is half Engrish, half poor English. I expected a big company like Gung Ho to hire professional translators, but apparently not. The dialogs and the story in the Korean game Mother of Myth seem to have been written by a ten year-old kid. It's just terrible.

Most of the poor-English apps I have seen come from Asia. They have great graphics and art, but lack polish on their dialogs and menus, as mentioned in player reviews. It might be a good idea to invest in a copywriter for the ads, and a professional reviewer, or at least a native speaker, for the in-game content.

Mobile crap - upgrades

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

The upgrade mechanic is found in more and more iOS games. In Clash of Clans or Birzzle, the player spends coins to upgrade something. In Mother of Myths and Star Wars: Assault Team, the player must use a specific category of loot (e.g. spells for spells in MoM). In Plundernauts, the player must follow recipes using specific items previously looted in battle (e.g. 3 Poltergas for a Poltergas Tank). In Mutants, the player can breed two mutants of type A and B together to make a stronger mutant of type A and B. Finally, in Birzzle, owning more birds increases the play time, and the sum of the bird levels provides a score bonus. The only purpose of this mechanic is to make players buy birds with real money - not to make the game more interesting.

This kind of upgrades is not new, and not exclusive to mobile games: UO had crafting in 2000, Ragnarok Online gear could be upgraded up to ten times with materials in 2003, Diablo 3 has it nowadays with gems and enchanting, and some games in the Final Fantasy series must have had something close to it as well. It seems that iOS developers have just realized that they could use this decade-old mechanic everywhere they need players to grind - and therefore pay real money to skip the grind.

Mobile crap - daily login

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

Designers could invent new mechanics to improve the core gameplay, and thereby improve retention metrics in the long run. But they cheat: they invent new mechanics to immediately improve retention metrics, thereby ignoring or forgetting to improve the core gameplay.

Mobile games try to maximize various metrics: their number of daily and monthly active users (DAU and MAU), the average session length, and so on. To do so, they introduce game mechanics that encourage players to come back every day or play longer. In games like Clash of Clans or Farmville, the come-back mechanic is the core game loop, so it is not a problem. Waiting and coming back is what these games are about. But in traditional fighting, racing, or match-three games, the only reason why players would come back or play longer is because they like the fighting, racing, or match-three mechanics, not because they like waiting.

More and more games have been adding come-back mechanics on top of their core gameplay. In 2004, World of Warcraft started granting a rest XP bonus to players who do not login for a long time. Blizzard designers originally implemented the rest mechanic to prevent hardcore players to level up too quickly. Beta-testers hated it, so Blizzard made it a reward for casual players instead of a punishment for hardcore players. Nothing changed mathematically, but players prefer mechanics if they are framed as a reward.

More recently in mobile games, Plundernauts has been giving out a welcome-back reward for logging in. They also give out bounties which must be completed within 24 hours - an incentive to play at least a few battles during the day, most likely in one session. 24-hour bounties are great for metrics such as the average session length, but they do not make the game more fun in the long run.

Puzzle and Dragons gives two login bonuses: 1) a consecutive login bonus, with rewards increasing every consecutive day, and reset the day the player does not login, and 2) a cumulative login bonus, increasing every day the player logs in, and never reset. Also, there are 5 exclamation marks for 7 lines of text in the login bonus message. By abusing the exclamation mark they over-emphasize my login, and it looks very amateur.

And finally, mobile games such as Birzzle or Mother of Myths show a daily login calendar when the player logs in. Some calendars focus on the week (4x7 cells), others on the month (5x6 cells). The calendar resembles an Advent Calendar, except 1) nothing happens at the end, and 2) the calendar mechanic is not properly tied to the core gameplay (receive more and more gold, or increasingly better gifts). The only point of the calendar is to keep people logging in for the rewards, not to have more fun playing the game.

A lot of mobile games have mediocre and dull core gameplay. These games are often sugarcoated in happy-shiny graphics and habit-forming mechanics. None of those improve their core gameplay. These games remain shallow.

Mobile crap - clones

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

Ideally, designers should keep a working recipe and incorporate new mechanics into it, or at least aim for a fresh take on an old recipe. These days, entire genres should be avoided entirely: designs involving a match-three mechanic have nearly all been done, one way or another. I covered Clash of Clans clones before, Raph Koster and others came up with a small family tree of shmups, and somebody probably covered the lineage of match-three games. I won't talk much about cloning in itself - everybody knows it is omnipresent in the game industry. So I focus on the imperfect features that cloners should upgrade or replace, but actually keep by laziness.

UI-wise, some developers are really lazy: instead of trying to improve an existing one, they just copy-paste it blindly. For example, Dungeon Keeper's UI HUD is a near-exact copy of Clash of Clans. Yet CoC had, and still has, several UI issues raised on the CoC forums by the players. For example, the default battle zoom-in forced players to always zoom-out before starting a fight. The team behind CoC fixed it, but the Dungeon Keeper team could have thought about it too. Another CoC example is the spells that remain selected when players try to deploy troops, thereby wasting a spell. One solution would be to deselect the spell after it has been cast, but this issue has not been fixed yet, and it's easy to spot with playtesters. A last example of UI laziness can be found in Plundernauts. Plundernauts adapted the item game made famous by WoW and Diablo to spaceship battles. They changed nothing to the UI when displaying equipment stats. In short, if you are cloning a mechanic, at least try to question and improve the interface.

Finally, the name. I understand that developers target a particular audience. Sometimes, this audience needs to know that the game is a puzzle game. So they make the name of their game rhyme with puzzle: Birzzle, Chuzzle, and so on. It's nice, but it looks like even the names are clones!