Monument Valley, one of the most polished and loved premium mobile games ever, has made $15m in its lifetime. Meanwhile, there are multiple F2P games with over $1b in revenue.
Now, $15m is fantastic, especially for a small studio. But high-production value F2P games from bigger studios cost around $3-5m to make, not including marketing/UA, so its pretty clear to see why studios aren't investing in premium titles at all, unless they are ports of existing content.
Interestingly, there's game theory in play: some developers nowadays are switching to premium games (Assassin's Creed and Crashlands for recent examples) because there is too much competition in the F2P space. Even super polished games with premium licenses get left in the dust if they do not catch on immediately. (Star Wars: Uprising and Marvel's Avengers Alliance 2 for examples).
Whether or not that's a good idea is hard to determine without hard numbers, though.
I can't speak to Assasin's Creed, but in the case of Crashlands we can see that it was a very good idea: they've made enough money that for the first time they're paying themselves salary and even expanding their studio with two new hires. There's no way their original F2P plans for that game would have succeeded at that level - I bought the game because it was premium and because I had a good experience with the premium game Punch Club that same week and wanted more "real gaming." (I've since become a gigantic fan of Butterscotch Shenanigans, the developer, and have a lot of insight into their operations. Their Game Dev comedy podcast, Coffee with Butterscotch, is the highlight of my week.)
Of course that works for them because they're a small studio with small budgets aren't looking for Clash of Clans levels of success. The ceiling is so much lower on a premium game, but it's plenty high for their current situation, and the competition is so much less severe (so the risk is way lower for such a quality game, which again fits their situation).
Those F2P games are in a whole different league of replayability compared to Monument Valley. I played through MV once. The F2P games you refer to are endless competitions.
True, from a gamer's perspective those games are trash, but unfortunately studios discovered it's much easier to make money selling cocaine rather than a fine cuisine.
Immutability? Chess has tens of thousands of books written on all facets of the game. Its strategies have evolved over a period of centuries of study and development by countless players who have since lent their names, cities, or countries to those lines. Now, with the aid of computers, the game evolves at a faster rate than ever. What worked at one tournament may be refuted at the next! Chess is anything but immutable!
Ahhh. Another interesting distinction is to compare game trees. Chess has a finite though extremely large game tree. MTG, on the other hand, is potentially infinite. Heck, MTG is even Turing complete so even a single play has the potential to fail to halt!
I feel like the "immutability" refers more to the rules and gameplay mechanics of chess than the strategies. Certainly the strategies of chess evolve, but that is a result of players developing new and different ways to play the game.
This is opposed to a game like Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone or even DOTA 2 where the strategies change because the game itself is constantly being changed
Depends on your definition of gamer; I'm sure the millions of people that love the games (and are willing to spend that much money on it) disagree with your assertion.
Whoa there. We cannot fall into the trap of slandering the competition to excuse ourselves for not doing as well. I have never played the game in question, in fact hadn't heard about it till today; guess I don't get out much.
Its apparent that the definition of gamers isn't what some suspect it to be. Which means, which segment are you aiming for and are you hitting it. Again, make sure you are hitting where you want to and don't use the low sales as proof.
The same is true of movies. The regurgative crap pulls in the bux, so that's what's made. It makes more sense when you think of the industry as a business rather than a charity.
Theoretically, yes. But I've played plenty of F2P games without dumping a single cent in, eventually hit the paywall and delete the game. (I think the minute you pay a single penny into the game, sunk cost fallacy sets in, so I avoid starting that in the first place).
Pretty much. I wouldn't be surprised if F2P games price their offerings to get people "on the treadmill". As they progress through the game it starts requiring more and more money to sustain your current pace.
That being said, I think the utility I get from each game is probably equivalent. Monument valley was an amazing experience, where as these games are several alright experiences that add up to about the same level of enjoyment.
It's really not fair to keep citing the "F2P is evil!" meme nowadays.
If you haven't played a F2P game in 2016, I strongly recommend taking a look. Game like Clash Royale, Hearthstone, and Kingdom Hearts are fair and are not aggressive/condescending toward in the goal of generating revenue. Mostly because developers finally realized that making a good game is just as important as monetization.
Dota 2 has an interesting f2p monetization strategy: create a competitive game, then sell a $9.99 "compendium" each year. It's basically a virtual goodie bag. Of each $9.99 sale, $2.50 goes towards increasing the prize pool of their yearly tournament, The International.
With that strategy alone, they're likely to surpass a $20 million prize pool this year, which means $60m in pure profit for Valve.
The impressive part is that none of the compendium affects gameplay whatsoever. It's solely things like cosmetics that make your character look cool.
It's tempting to call Dota a one-off, but I think this model could be followed by many other games: make your game competitive, then fund a yearly tournament. The reason Dota is so huge today is because Valve personally seeded the first International's prize pool with a million dollars, which was simply unheard of at the time.
Valve's choice to switch to a casino 'random chance' instead of being able to buy the cosmetics you like has moved them into the darker side of F2P imo.
I play DOTA still when I can, but have lost a lot of my willingness to believe they're not just as evil as everyone else. What keeps me playing are the people I play with, no longer the game.
And I think this model's success is reflected in Dota's reputation compared to that over games like League of Legends.
LoL has a lot of characters and a lot of them cost money (at least for a time). And they keep adding more. Regardless of whether or not the characters they add that cost money are better than the others, it still makes the game less balanced and less competitively interesting in the low-to-mid level than Dota is. Sure, high level LoL is probably interesting, but I do not have the money to find out if I could ever enjoy that myself
Almost all of the money I've spent on League of Legends has been on cosmetics. If you're time rather than cash-limited (like most of us here, I would assume) - you won't have time to actually deeply learn all that many champions. The free champions rotation is great, and gives you plenty of time to try people and then buy with in-game currency if you like the play-style.
You're never going to play 123 champions all the time anyway, so dropping money on them doesn't make much sense until you're already deep in the game. You absolutely don't need to unlock 100+ to enjoy yourself with it.
You're never going to play 123 champions all the time
Speak for yourself. As a veteran of both hon and dota, I'm a frequent player of "all random" mode. In both games, this means you get a different experience every game. You may say that you'll never master all of them by doing it this way but that's besides the point. By playing a character you learn all of their abilities and how they work, what their cool downs, mana costs, attack and ability ranges are etc. Doing this at least once for every character gives you a much better grasp of what you're up against than trying to learn only by way of opposition.
The 'all the time' part of my statement was quite an important bit.
Sure, ARAM exists - but like I said there's an always-changing array of free champions, so it's not like you'll never get them. And again - if you're just starting out, there's going to be some time before you even get around to trying every champion for the first time. Even if you go with ~30 minutes per game(below the average length in normal modes, slightly above average on ARAM) - you're looking at upwards of 60 hours of playtime just to try everyone once.
You can complain about F2P games all you like, but I don't think for a second we'd have had as many new champions released if they'd been on a pay-once model. I don't think that's exploitative, just different.
-edit- before my play patterns are criticised again, I should say I've been playing LoL to varying degrees of intensity for about 5 years. I think it's more accessible in terms of champion acquisition now than it was then.
It dampens the competitive scene not to have access to all the characters. It's difficult to join a team and play support if you don't have access to the support character you need to play. And since the most recent Dota world champion was 16 years old at the time, kids matter. And kids can't purchase the characters they need to purchase, since they have no money.
There's a thriving competitive scene in both games, so maybe the effect isn't so bad in practice. But if you want to play soccer, you'd find it difficult if you didn't have access to certain parts of the field unless you pay money. That seems like an accurate description of League's model.
The central issue is this: If you want to follow the strategy of making a new game competitive and then funding a yearly tournament, your game is more likely to fail if it uses League-style "pay for access to the competitive landscape."
League works for League. It's largely thanks to history and timing that League grew to such a degree: When League launched, there was no Dota 2 and no HoN to compete with them. League's model is less likely to be replicable to a new game.
All Random in hon and dota is played on the standard map with standard rules. Each player gets a random hero chosen from the entire pool. The only restriction is no duplicates. This mode can be played from the very first game on a brand new account.
ARAM in League is totally different. It's not even available to players until they have purchased/unlocked enough champions to have a pool, a situation that could take a very long time to resolve for players who have no money to buy them.
You gave an estimate of 60 hours for a new player to try all 120 heroes in hon or dota. That could be accomplished in one week by a dedicated new player. How many hours do you think it'd take to unlock every champion in league? Thousands upon thousands, at least.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that in hon/dota you get to play a hero at their full power and effectiveness from the very beginning. This means that a veteran of one game who switches to another is not at a disadvantage, unlike a new player to league playing against people who have played long enough to max out their summoner level, runes, and masteries.
Without going into the balance/entertainment part: You can get all of the LoL characters for free, even the new ones (although those will be a bit more expensive for 1 week). I haven't been following the game closely lately but as far as I remember all the content can be unlocked for free now (that includes skins).
Hearthstone is a unique bird as its playerbase is used to Blizzard and Magic and so expects to pay something like a AAA game price for card unlocks. It's not really necessary for Blizzard to sell the idea of paying in Hearthstone.
Clash Royale is very aggressive about getting money. It does appear passive because it's better for revenue if non-enthusiastic players progress slowly, but trying to do anything but play a few games a day without spending money is intentionally made difficult as you'll run into progress blocks faster that way. It's quite clever. It also benefits from increased sophistication of players in that it can signal when to make the premium purchases more subtly than was necessary a few years ago.
I haven't played Assassin's Creed, but it makes sense to me that a AAA game franchise has a better chance standing out on mobile as a premium game, rather than associating with less prestigious IP. I certainly think Ubi has learned from its poor attempts to milk its lower-priority IP by farming it out to F2P developers, so a transition has been made in the company overall.
> I haven't played Assassin's Creed, but it makes sense to me that a AAA game franchise has a better chance standing out on mobile as a premium game, rather than associating with less prestigious IP.
A little more context: Assassin's Creed was F2P during soft launch, but player feedback drove Ubisoft to retool it as a paid title without typical F2P gimmicks (although online-only requirement remains): http://toucharcade.com/2016/02/24/assassins-creed-identity-b...
> trying to do anything but play a few games a day without spending money is intentionally made difficult as you'll run into progress blocks faster that way.
In contrast with many games which are nearly pure skinner boxes, Clash Royale's gameplay itself is fun and there are skills to be mastered.
The monetization scheme is just as bad as other games in that it lets you put in exponential dollars for linear gain. But the refreshing thing is the base game is fun and can be played freely without any time limits or other barriers.
That said after about 100 hours I may have finally reached my top skill and may get bored of the game before I unlock any new cards.
I struggled so hard with that game before eventually "winning" my internal battle and deleting it. As you say, the core gameplay is actually really fun and skill based but the psychological pressures at play with all the chests and timers just felt too oppressive. Opening the app just got to feel too much like exposing myself to radioactive highly optimized whale food, and I had to just say "NO!"
There have always been a few F2P games that aren't awful, and if there's starting to be more of them now, that's excellent news.
But the fact remains that 95%+ of F2P games build their entire business model around dark patterns[1], and as long as that remains true, new games will reasonably be expected to prove themselves better than that.
So Supercell, Blizzard, and Square Enix/Success are not awful. That's great, but what about all of the others? Kabam, Big Fish, Machine Zone, King, Playtika, EA, and the list goes on.
It's even worse than that. ustwo isn't a small studio. They're a digital product studio with offices in London, Sydney, Malmö, and New York. They have a few hundred employees.
Their games are basically marketing for their real business.
> Meanwhile, there are multiple F2P games with over $1b in revenue.
But how many make near to nothing? I'm told that some, small-to-medium players particularly, are moving back towards premium because the initial effort of generating sufficient content (or tweaking and testing the algorithms that generate content programatically, or fine-tuning the balance of PvP/co-op segments) is quite a risk.
The bigger players can afford to invest in a number of such projects on the risk/value analysis of one or two being successful will more than cover the cost of the ones that aren't, and very small players (individuals, small indie groups) do it by sinking time not money (i.e. products that start out as an experiment or side project), but in between it becomes harder to justify.
Amazing Indie films pale in box office numbers compared to summer blockbusters. Both have their place and will attract different type of creative individuals.
I love MV but I've gotten 100x the enjoyment from Boom Beach which was released around the same time and on which I've spent a grand total of $5 which could easily have been zero.
The conventional wisdom around much of the internet about f2p is, while true for many titles, just incredibly myopic as a general pigeonhole. F2P games can be great. Clash Royale, on which I've spent nothing, is by far the best new mobile game I've played in over a year.
How pushy is it in regards to buying consumables? I don't mind F2P with a $2-$5 "no ads" unlock or similar. (I'll get unreasonably angry if I see a single ad after that, though)
AFAIK it doesn't have ads, you pay for in-game currency to spend on cards which can also be won in-game. It's entirely possible to play the game without spending any money, although grinding may or may not be fun. I played a bit when it launched and stopped after a week or two.
Is that true? I thought (even though it says 2015) that the ~5m ish was total revenue for the project? This seemed pretty good, and clearly I was happy for the devs as over a 3 year period if you back out the costs and divide by 3 it was ~$1.4M profit a year, a nice bottom line. $15m would be better, but again not the mega block buster.
Where did that $15 number come from btw?
less office/backoffice/distribution ect...so not really a bottom line.
ahh thanks. I was looking at just the year 2 stats[0]. Good for them. Not only is the disclosure/information super cool and forthcoming and a good way to help out the community, but just a cool take on an industry that is typically secretive and cutththroat.
I don't understand why Android continues to do so badly in comparison to iOS revenue numbers. As an Android user it's very disappointing. Bigger user base, but almost inconsequential when it comes to revenue. I'm surprised game developers support Android at all, I want the games that are on iOS for my phone but even I'm not sure it's worth it.
This is just my guess, but Android phones are on average much cheaper than iPhones. An iPhone costs $400-800, the only Android phones in that range are the very top of the line (Samsung S7, LG G5). Most of the huge Android user base is on inexpensive phones sold for $0-100 on contract.
While you can't say for sure that Android users have less money, you can say they're spending less money on their phones which likely means they'll spend less on apps on that phone.
This is partially because it is much, much, easier to pirate premium games on Android than it is on iOS. There are tons of 3rd party APK sites that are well trafficked. On F2P the platforms are much more equally split.
Also, as Android has a higher footprint in Asia, making games that resonate with the Japanese/Korean audience is pretty important, and I'm not sure if Monument Valley qualifies.
This is 100% true. Advertising-based revenue models are far superior on Android due to piracy. I have a Google alert set up for our games, and updates hit APK sites less than 24 hours after hitting the play store.
That would be super frustrating. Is there just no recourse for sites like this? I assume they are hosted overseas, but do hosts not respond at all to complaints?
You'd be playing wack-a-mole so hard that your legal team would cost more than any gains. I had similar google alerts as the previous poster, and the sites would have every single popular game -- I don't think anyone fought it effectively, although I never did a true survey.
I think the stigma with pirating a premium PC game is higher than "just" pirating an Android game. I know a lot of people who see mobile apps as disposable and so have no problem downloading them for free. A PC game like Doom carries a different weight to it that makes these same people at least consider the premium purchase. Not saying it makes any sense, but that's been my observation.
It's certainly more difficult to pirate a PC game than an android game. Maybe the difficulty of figuring out how to run cracks and the fear of accidentally downloading a virus is the X factor. The whole process is much easier, less riskier and overall feels "nicer" than pirating a PC game or app, that's for sure.
It could do better if Google would pull their head out of the ass and bring Play gift cards to countries where there are less credit cards used on Play because people in majority don't have one by default (East and Central Europe for example). And it's not just you can't buy one, you can't redeem one bought in a neighbour country as well, you have to either do it in the country or use a VPN, which is batshit insane to me.
At the other hand iTunes cards are basically everywhere.
Because that's how you fight piracy - making possible that people can buy your shit easier in the first place.
You're hearing "gift" and imagining this is about birthday parties. Think "prepaid cards" if you like. Imagine a country with more fraud and less consumer credit availability than yours.
What you're saying may be true in general, but the numbers here are saying something different. MV just wasn't that popular on the Android platform to begin with compared with its popularity on iOS, about a million Android users next to almost 12 million iOS users. But the revenue per Google Play download is over 2 1/2 times that of the revenue per iOS download. So, each Android customer is punching far above their own weight.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't iDreamSky one of China's largest third-party Android app stores?
You could say that each Google Play customer is punching above their weight, but GooglePlay+Amazon+AmazonUnderground+iDreamSky technically means that Android makes up 58% of the customers and only about 1/4 of the revenue compared to iOS.
From what I'm observing, cheap Android phones are prevalent among users who just want a phone, but don't care about the whole apps thing (often even don't have data plan enabled).
Android users are way, way poorer than iOS users on average, and I suspect that willingness to purchase an app or game correlates very strongly with willingness to pay for an iPhone. The difference is even more skewed outside the US.
To be honest, I usually expect my Android apps to be free, and there's huge friction for paying for anything because Google doesn't support standard payment methods in my country (heck, in my continent, South America), they keep expecting international credit cards which almost no-one has.
I understand that my country is tiny and no sane company would implement payment systems for us, but the use of Boleto would probably increase the Android app market by a lot, currently people use hacks like buying gift cards through the eBay equivalent with Boleto, but it obviously implies a lot of friction:
There's an interesting lesson in that a local company called wOOw beat Groupon head-to-head in the deals market simply by enabling the popular payment methods, while Groupon was unable to adapt to the local conditions and kept asking for credit cards. Groupon ended up closing in Uruguay.
If you were to go into /r/Android and read the comments on any Monument Valley story, you'll find a lot of people who seem to suffer from a persecution complex. They claim they'll never support a developer who "treats them like second class citizens". They'll justify their piracy of everything by saying this.
This is generally true but there are some exceptions. I've read multiple reports of devs saying that their revenue on Android matches or exceeds their revenue on iOS. I'm not sure what the differentiator is here but it does happen.
Monument Valley is one of the first mobile games I paid for, and I'm glad that it provided such an excellent experience -- unparalleled by anything I've tried since -- because even though other games I've bought since haven't been as beautiful or as fun as Monument Valley, it made me feel okay about buying games in general. If Monument Valley hadn't been good, I never would have ponied up for Smash Hit or any of my other favorites.
This may be true for games (I'm not sure), but I'm not sure it's good advice for startups in general (in case anyone was thinking that.) Throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Don't fall victim to sunk cost fallacy.
You have a point. But today's world quality and polish matters a lot. Point is before you judge make sure you provided good quality and a polished product. The idea matters a lot but if you don't present it well its good for nothing.
It seems that a buried nugget of info here is how seemingly pointless Amazon Underground is in terms of revenue. Admittedly MV seems a bad fit for it because of its low replayability.
Also, what's with iDreamSky? They basically give the game away for free to China for...what? Or is that part of the 6% "other"?
Crashlands! An action adventure game with a crafting component that's fun even for people who don't like crafting games - you have an infinite auto-managed inventory that just gets out of your way - with a funny, quirky storyline and easily over 50 hours of gameplay, all for $5 (on mobile, or $15 on Steam). Oh, and there's cross-platform saves so you can spend $20 to get the game on both platforms and switch back and forth on your same saved game at your leisure! (I'm a big fan of Crashlands, as you can see.)
The link lists interesting stats about their revenue. Does anybody know if they've published estimates on their costs (team size, developer hours, etc)?
I would love a set of new levels once a year, as an annual tradition at the start of the summer. Whatever new add-ons they create, I'll be paying for and downloading immediately. Such a great game. I replay it every few months (enough time for the levels to feel fresh)
I've been starting to accept that we've moved into an "IP never dies" era. Seeing Batman reborn over and over, Ghostbusters coming back, all this DLC... I've started to think that you release one original version of something, and then if people love it you just keep doing re-releases forever.
Some people just like tradition and familiarity.
I used to be a little more upset about the lack of fresh IPs being created, but I'm relaxing lately. You can still put the bulk of your team on the big ambitious new game, but I no longer see a problem in having a small team that just focuses on regular DLC for an old property. Even if it's just an annual "Monument Valley 2017" release with some new stages. The world changes, why not let your game adapt a little.
It's almost like making a theme park with continuous admission than a game.
Now, $15m is fantastic, especially for a small studio. But high-production value F2P games from bigger studios cost around $3-5m to make, not including marketing/UA, so its pretty clear to see why studios aren't investing in premium titles at all, unless they are ports of existing content.