Freemium Mobile Games: Design & Monetization by Dimitar Draganov

Author:Dimitar Draganov [Draganov, Dimitar]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dimitar Draganov
Published: 2014-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6: The hobby

In this final game design chapter we examine what makes the hobby phase of a game worthwhile from a player's perspective and how a developer should properly leverage game mechanics and continuous fun for a game's players to improve their retention and monetization KPIs. Up until now we have discussed how to build up the players' initial enthusiasm for a game and how to model their experience so that this enthusiasm and positive emotions are channeled into the development of a habit of investing time and possibly money into a game on a regular basis. This last game design chapter looks at how to make players regularly spend much longer periods of time inside a game, so that their habit of playing that game transforms into a hobby and their moral impediments to spend money or to sacrifice real-world responsibilities in order to cater to the game's needs collapse.

We divide the chapter into three parts developers need to be aware of during the whole production and evolution cycles of the game. First we examine the metagame - the hidden layers of strategic play that can potentially lead a player and his/her team to victory in any game contest, but which require large amounts of time and resources to experiment and consequently find optimality conditions or game design loopholes to use to one's advantage. Then we move on to whales - a large portion of the people who reach the hobby phase have already spent or will in their game lifetime spend thousands of dollars on that game. As we already explained in the first part, the freemium games as a business model wouldn't be functional without whales and making sure a game in general and its hobby phase in particular are the right environment for whales is a crucial part of any game's success. Finally, we will also look at different game designs that can invigorate a hobby phase. The endgame needs to be exciting and the developer's job is to successfully achieve this by creating dynamics that make players happy and give them plenty of reasons to come back and invest time and money into the game.

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