
How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year - dna_polymerase
https://www.deconstructoroffun.com/blog/2018/2/27/u6ap146ff5rkmm7fj1qzuhggp395l4
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simonebrunozzi
What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to
extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper
defense for most people.

I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like
this one.

~~~
ordinaryradical
I think if we could wrap our minds around what is happening psychologically in
these games, most of them would be off-limits to children.

What's interesting is that we've decided to define gambling according the
rules of the game—in reality, "gambling" is probably more akin to a
psychological state that can be induced by many different rulesets and
experiences.

Mobile games today are largely thinly-veiled attempts to induce this state in
children through various Skinner Box mechanics in order to get at their
parents' wallets. Fine.

But the real question is: what happens to the mind of an eight-year-old if
they have a gambling simulator in their pocket every day? What happens to
their neurological development after five years of exposure to this "gambling"
state?

~~~
dna_polymerase
Underrated comment IMHO. Those "casual"-games look like a gateway drug to
gambling addiction to me. They borrow mechanics from games usually found in
casinos and it is frightening to see how we let our kids play these games
without much thought.

~~~
aeternus
Many of those games are actually implementing gambling with their virtual
currency. They have events where you buy an entry ticket using the in-game
currency then either double/triple-up or lose-it-all as the result of some
random event.

I'm surprised this is even legal in the US, and not caught for app store TOS
violations. It seems they've simply replaced the concept of casino chips with
virtual currency. They do have some 'gameplay' outside of this but it is not
much different from the various frills on video slot machines.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
As long as you don't have a way to exchange back for cash, it's likely
protected under all the same laws that make Chuck E Cheese legal.

And a lot of these basically copy the 'packs' mechanic from collectible card
games, so those would have to be affected too, by any new law.

~~~
zimbatm
That's the beauty of it, they don't even have to hand money back to the user.

The trick is to make the user perceive value in whatever digital artifact
their are providing. In the eye of the user it then becomes the same as money.

Make the user invest their time into the game. Time is money right? Create
fake rewards for arbitrary actions. Then when they are properly hooked, ramp
up the difficulty level to a limit where just paying a bit of money would make
the game as fun as it was during the evaluation phase.

~~~
njarboe
This is sort of like what advertising does to people in real life.

~~~
el_dev_hell
No really.

An ad convincing me to try X energy drink at least results in me getting an
energy drink.

Games like this are selling you on a worthless digital item.

~~~
njarboe
The idea is that advertising often gets people to buy things that are bad for
them (like maybe an energy drink?) that takes up resources to produce. Maybe
people buying virtual digital items is better for society than buying a brand
new Corvette.

------
hombre_fatal
It's interesting to see the same people who lambast Farmville get addicted to
a game like this.

It's like how Fortnite figured out how to get boys interested in dressing up
their virtual Barbies so much that players use "noskin" in a derogatory
manner.

~~~
hu3
People belittling others in a game for not having spent money on a bunch of
pixels is depressing.

This behavior is perpetrated even by streamers which are followed by many,
including children, as role models.

~~~
JakeTheAndroid
In CSGO, your skins are a direct representation of how good you are. This is
fact. If you spent 1k on a Dragonlore, you're one of the best AWPers in your
region, hands down.

~~~
charliesharding
As someone who drunkenly bought 10 keys and unboxed gloves I can confirm. I'm
now competing at a much higher level.

Seriously though I think the loot box model is ethically wrong. However, I
don't believe it's wrong to offer skins for sale - this is no different than
people wearing different brands of clothing when they compete in sports

~~~
JakeTheAndroid
I unboxed a knife and turned that into 2 knives and a pair of gloves. I am
solidly in GN, but I do wonder if I had that better knife if I would be
Global.

But, I completely agree. And whats worse is that Valve has done little to
combat the darkest side of this industry, such as the 'futures' and stuff like
that. Every CSGO video has an ad for some gambling site, and major events are
sponsored by these companies.

The only part I like about the skins in CSGO is that you can actually 'own'
the skin to a degree and make real money on it. But because of that, CSGO
might also have one of the most predatory skin communities in all of gaming.

------
sleibrock
I just had to stop playing this game because I was basically making no
progress every day. It became less enjoyable and more of a chore every 10
hours.

* Progress can be gauged by how far a team of heroes you construct can proceed in the "single player" stages of the game. Getting further into the single player campaign dictates how much experience/gold you will earn when not playing the game.

* In order to make progress, you need to upgrade a full team of six heroes.

* Not all heroes are equal and are graded on a scale of stars from 1 to 10, with 1 being the absolute worst and 10 being the best.

* The best heroes start at a star rating of 5 (I will call them 5* to mean "5-star" and so on). In order to upgrade a hero to 6* and beyond, you need a second copy of that hero and 3 additional 5* heroes of the same faction color to promote it to 6 _.

_ The drop-rate of getting 5* hero copies is very low across most
opportunities. You can "summon" heroes from scrolls purchased with real-world-
money, but the odds are very low here. There are also "prophet orbs", but
these orbs are very rare and hard to attain more than one of them per day.

* There are many 5* units in the game, and gameplay-balance wise, not all of them are even remotely good in the later parts of the game. There's two tier-lists mainted: one for player-vs-player, the other for player-vs-monster. If you get a 5* hero unlock and it's not on that list, it's junk and is only used as food for building your 6 _\+ characters.

_ There are ways to speed up the progress with money, but you will pay an arm
and a leg to make about 1/6th of a dent in fully leveling a character. You'll
be lucky if $100 USD gets you an inch.

It's very much a lootbox casino game hidden behind an RPG-style idle game. I
played it for about a month and I was unable to hit level 90 in time to get a
second copy of one of the highest-rated characters in the game (Heart
Watcher), so it felt very frustrating and not very enjoyable afterwards.

~~~
slivanes
How often did you encounter maxed-out players? Did you see players that must
have spent hundreds of dollars?

~~~
kamarg
Hundreds of dollars is really not very much for many paying players to spend
on these types of games. That would typically be considered a "casual" player
which is just barely above a free-to-play player in terms of importance to the
developers.

------
musicale
"There are more stat checks in the game and to get better in those stats you
need to engage with the metasystems and monetize because the grind is so
painful."

A game that's optimized for monetization over fun is not the kind of game I
want to play.

~~~
dyarosla
I can't believe this is the ONLY sentence in the article that directly
addresses _HOW_ the game even monetizes to begin with. So much for "How Idle
Heroes Made $100M in a Year".

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kemayo
I haven't played this one... but saturation-level advertising in ad-supported
games might have played into the loop here. I play Endless Frontier, which is
another related game that has (optional) "view an ad for a reward" mechanics,
and said ad is almost always for Idle Heroes.

Insofar as Endless Frontier is pretty good about not forcing you to spend
money, I've resisted trying another game which looks far more like whale-bait.

~~~
oppressedgf
I've also been playing Endless Frontier.. It's one of the least pay to win
games I've ever played.. You get rewards of in game currency every day and
other super rare stuff for free, it makes no sense to buy anything imo

~~~
kemayo
It does makes a lot of sense to spend one dollar, because that gets you the
VIP status that doubles a lot of those rewards. Makes the whole thing even
more crazily-generous.

I actually went and bought one of the packs (with a permanent spirit-highlands
upgrade, so not one-off currency) recently, just because I figured I'd been
playing for basically-free for so long that I might as well contribute a bit
more.

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TwoNineA
Reason they made so much money, in app purchases. The game is addictive, like
myriad of other games, and coupled with IAPs, it's a goldmine.

~~~
Twirrim
I tried Idle Heroes, out of curiosity. Compared to other "idle" games I've
played, it's way up there for in-app purchases and the need to shell out money
to progress.

------
ricardobeat
I had no idea what 'autobattle', 'heroes charge', 'idle game' meant, and
wonder what exactly gets people interested in games of this kind.

It doesn't even look like a game in the traditional sense at all - for
enjoyment / fulfillment / fun. More like a colorful spreadsheet, with cheap
visuals and not even mechanical skill. 'Gameplay' videos on youtube show
people flipping cards and clicking through a dozen inventory management
screens, nothing really happens. Really puzzling.

Is this what getting old feels like?

~~~
shostack
If you want to get a taste with a quality game that doesn't prey on people
with IAP, check out Kittens Game.[1]

You can play free online. I paid $2 one-time fee to play on my phone. There's
a vibrant community on /r/kittensgame on Reddit and the dev is active there.

It is also arguably one of the most well-done idle/incremental games I've
played after playing a few. The depth of it is jaw-dropping once you really
start getting into the mechanics of late stage play, and you'll hit several
points along the way where you think you are there only to find out everything
you've been working on gets abstracted away into new growth concept that
becomes critical to the next stage.

[1][http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/](http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/)

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
How similar is Kittens Game to CivClicker?

[http://dhmstark.co.uk/games/civclicker/](http://dhmstark.co.uk/games/civclicker/)

~~~
shostack
This looks pretty cool and appears pretty similar in some ways. Not sure how
advanced the late game is as that's where Kittens Game REALLY shines.

Is there a version for Android? I see CivCrafter, but that looks like a
monetized knockoff.

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b_tterc_p
I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered
spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value
was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you
think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to
get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to
cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The top tier players are an order of
magnitude more powerful, but that costs thousands of dollars. And, on top of
that, this gap can be crossed with about a year of play, which seems perfectly
reasonable to me.

I’m fine being top 95% rather than top 99%. In both games I have reached a
point where I not only am fully capable, but am fully capable with tons of
resources that would otherwise cost lots of money and I simply haven’t used
because the value props of events people are lured into are deceptively low.

I like these games, because they offer a small amount of tasks to do and a
super long term scale sense of progression to plan out. It’s not pay to win,
it’s pay to win quickly. You can beat everything freely without much trouble
(or course other games won’t be so generous perhaps. I would guess idle heroes
to be more of a financial grind)

~~~
jbattle
I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with
faster. Seems backwards

~~~
ngold
Seems like a broken game.

~~~
b_tterc_p
For something like Fire Emblem I don’t think so as spending was neither
required nor especially important for clearing all of the game’s content.

Although one observation I had was that money was used as a crutch by bad
players who incorrectly assumed it was necessary. It’s a turn based strategy
game with relatively little entropy so a lot of it is skill. A smart player
would think about positioning and how to safely take out enemies. Dumber
players were fond of saying how they favored defensive builds, or in other
words, creating units that were strong enough to stand there and win on
counter attacks. The issue with this was that as the game ramped up in
difficulty this would gradually get more difficult to accomplish. So if you
refuse to play the game intelligently you have to try to upgrade your
characters with cash.

But then after a while you hit a wall where your characters are maximally
strong (which is less than 10% better stats no matter how much you spend),
you’re _still_ not going to be strong enough to handle the hardest content
without playing smart.

So... money can help you get through the first 80% of content, but it won’t be
enough and is not required for the last 20%... but then is required again for
the side bit of absolute top tier pvp.

From a game design, I actually think this looks pretty healthy for the game’s
integrity. Not the gambling habits it induces.

------
chriselles
A psychologist I have worked with on a human performance assessment programme
and I have spoken at length about things like the ethics of psychologists
working on gambling/gaming machines with their vastly increased potential for
amygdala hijacking and behavioural nudging.

There will always be trained and capable folks willing to cash a big paycheque
or justify unethical professional behaviour to further their objectives.

I think open frank discussion and resilience built within families and cohorts
of friends is the best defence.

No one is immune.

But a small team based approach might be useful.

The concept of digital nutrition and labelling sounds promising:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1WXSjUpchQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1WXSjUpchQ)

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TomMckenny
Extremely interesting analysis. But it would be nice to know their marketing
budget.

Without that, we don't really know whether the design or the advertising is
the reason for revenue.

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umvi
"idle" games are cancer. Literally just games that waste electricity playing
themselves and trying to addict you into revisiting periodically.

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slowhadoken
I like casual games, they’ve designed interesting systems that handle micro
managing. But a game that plays itself isn’t much of a game.

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iscrewyou
Reminds me of Battleheart(!!) on iOS. Now, THAT was an idle game. Seems like
these people just took that concept online...

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sleepybrett
congratulations, you made a skinner box.

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otikik
That sounds like a slot machine, not a game.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Many successful games can be reduced to a slot machine, even games that have a
lot of solid gameplay or even outlets for creativity. The central mechanism of
Minecraft is mining. Mining is repeatedly punching through rocks hoping that
you'll get something cool behind the next rock.

~~~
otikik
All human processes can be reduced to slot machines if you go abstract enough.
By extension that includes all games.

My criticism was that what this make the exchange so blatantly abusive. All
those psychological mechanisms to "ensure engagement" and "pursue the whales"
(or whatever soft term they come up for them) ... makes me sick.

I actually think I prefer a slot machine to this. It is less dishonest.

