As a primarily PC gamer, I simply do not install "free" mobile games because the experience is always atrocious. If the game seems good and has a no-ad paid version and was designed for mobile UX, I buy it to play on mobile instead of PC. As you can imagine, I do not own many mobile games.

I bought multiple premium games, some of them had also the in app purchases on top of that. Kingdom Rush and Iron Marines, for example. I never regretted to buy them, sincerely, and they were also very cheap in my opinion. I reverse you the question, how many times you payed a F2P game at least 2-3K? Do you know how it feels, when you stop playing it? For experience I know that who defends this kind of business model, often do it because it's developing one. With the hope, the dream, that he will become rich with it.

Simone Pinto never spent more than $10 on a f2p game and not developing one either, I actually have released one years ago and our problem was that we were too kind... even though we had millions of downloads, very good ratings, since the game was too kind and we didnt want to milk money out of players, we didnt monetize nearly enough to pay ourselves regular wages... developing f2p is often seen as the culmination of all evil and souless games, but in fact designing a f2p game that is not that and is still successful is a truly hard exercise, because unlike pc or premium games, you NEED people to like your game so so much that they will pay for pieces of it, whereas premium has the luxury of being able to convince the player with nice visuals and still be a crappy game, which so often happens. I honestly hate 99,9% of f2p games, I can see the grind in 2 seconds and get turned off immediately, but the millions of active players they have, 99% of which never spend a dime, enjoy playing them enough to stick to the game for months, even years...

I'm buying premium pc and console games. Why does they have MTX and weirded out balance too? Not playing on mobile.

Well, I only watched this video today, so sorry I am so late to answer. Still going to reply in case it helps someone else out who looks in the comments for an explanation of this chart. The white columns are decided by the designer, while the shaded columns are calculated from the white column's values. The first two columns are a player's level and how much time the designer plans for a player to need to get through a level by upgrading all their buildings. The shaded column Total Time is just this value summed, so the value for Total Time at Level 7 is the time to go from Level 1 through Level 7. Next we have the number of buildings a player has at their level. So a level 1 player only has 1 building while a level 7 has 8 buildings. While at a player level, let's assume each player needs to upgrade all of their buildings to get to the next level. Upgrade Cost is just how much it costs to upgrade each building and Cost/Level is how much it costs to upgrade all of the buildings at your level, so it's just Upgrade Cost * # Buildings. Finally we can use all of these numbers to determine how much in game currency/material a player should get on average at a level if we assume the average player opens our mobile game 4 times a day. So if we want it to take 2 days to get through level 7 and the total cost to upgrade all our buildings to get to the next level is 195800 resources, then we need to give the player 195800 / 2 days to get through this level / 4 times opening our game a day / 8 resource producing buildings = our Payout/Harvest.

Freaky

Same here. I read about it on r/gamedesign and searched on google. Published 3h ago...

@@necooo it was 1 min ago when I found it and I was in their channel looking for videos on mobile system design.

@@ShoresDev OK, that definitely beats my lame story :D I should reach out to you for my GDC Vault needs, for you appear to have some psychic powers :p

F2P is not a huge market @ Genshin Impact: * exists *

@@badunius_code maybe before of making jokes one has to learn to read, first. I said that F2P IS a huge market.

@@sentendo7647 late hour, sleepy eyes. F2P is fine, predatory monetization is cancer. P.S. I swear I saw a "NOT" there

@@badunius_code no worries, happened to me a lot of time. Predatory monetization is the result of a bad led project usually. I worked on a bunch of f2p projects (I am a game designer) and there is no evil mind behind. It's just that things get badly led and teams start to forget to care of their Players. It is very hard to keep a good service live during years.

@@sentendo7647 you right, it *is* hard to keep the boat floating over the years, both revenue and playability-wise. And that is _exactly_ why I expect thing like _this_ discussed on GDC. Not another milking technique. Gameplay is a core. Due to the sanctions, Russian WoW-killer Allods Online increased their playerbase tenfold. Note that there are F2P and Subscription servers, and it is the later that are overpopulated rn. People are fine with monthly fee, all you need is deliver a playable product. Another example is Runescape. They are not at the top of the most profitable games list. But they are still alive and developing. And believe me, they are doing better than WoW.

Thing is also, the mobile market is very very different from the console or pc market. mobile players are, in general, not willing to shell out 30$ for a game, most wouldn't even pay 10$. On console and pc, those are considered rather low prices for games with a lot of content.

Hi EU, thanks for your comment. Yes, mostly i agree with you. The games back then are still enveloped by nostalgia today, and this make a bias in people's mind (me included). Yes, i think you are right also about the mobile industry, the far greater reach, and the 2 mins or less sessions. What i don't agree with, is that when you buy something, you should be aware of the price, in advance. Or at least have an honest approximative idea on how much you will spend, at the end. Many F2P games, play the player, and cheat the probabilities without any shame. They are not random, at all. If the player is a "Whale" or not, he receive different things in the packs, to make him an addict. This is horrible. I remember what Zinga made, some years ago (it was discovered by accident). When you start to play with people's mind and addictions, it's where ethic ends. Have you ever seen an in-game ad, and when you click to discover more on the store page.. you quickly realize that it's a completely different game? Maybe its a F2P mmo or F2P empire builder.. and you thought "those guys cheated on me, they show misleading ads without any shame"? If they are not honest not even in the ad.. i imagine what they can do, dishonestly, to trick your mind to feel bad if you don't buy more packs or gems. I hope you understand why the big majority of game developers are against those F2P "Games" practices, and where their bad reputation came from. Have a beautiful day.

@@meditationsanddimensions542 Hey Simone, thanks for the response! Yes it's a discussion worth having about 'suprise mechanics' or 'gacha'. Mobile has relied on this method of monetisation for a long time and I completely disagree with it. One thing I will clarify is that the probabilities to obtain items from these loot boxes must be fixed. For example 5% probability for a 'Super Rare' item. This is a legal requirement in most countries that these probabilities must be fixed and often shown to the user. So there aren't differences in the packs if you're a 'whale' or not. That doesn't make it a good monetisation method though, and I think most companies are waking up to it. Hunting for 'whales' in games is futile since there are too few of them to be statistically significant, so while some mobile companies try to optimise their games for 'whales' it's probably, actually, doing more harm than good. As I said, most big mobile developers are waking up to this and changing to make a better experience for all players, rather than just the 'whales'. As for ads, I agree misleading ads are a big problem, but it's not just the advertisers fault, the blame also lies with the ad networks for this, such as Facebook/Google. If they allow misleading ads in their networks then advertisers will use them. So these networks need to enforce better rules, though I wouldn't keep my hopes up that this will happen any time soon. Let's not forget that traditional console/pc games are also guilty of misleading marketing. How many times have you seen an awesome game advertised, then spent $60 to buy it and it turns out to be awful and nothing like the hype built up to be. In my opinion that is worse. With a free mobile game if it turns out to be badly advertised you can just uninstall it. With a paid for game you have to return it or claim a refund, which sometimes you can't do after a few days.

@@EUArrow Yes and no on mobile moving away from real gacha mechanics. Where we define gacha as big pools with a ton of options with low chances for the super rare things and high chances for common ones that are often only useful in the early game. Western mobile games moved into those after Puzzles & Dragons started doing super well over here, and they're still not really backing off. What we're seeing is a movement towards direct purchase of packs with dollar signs and away from only hard currency driven pools. Mobile always tried to separate the experience for free players vs low and high spenders. It tries to be fun for all of them, but give them different levels of play since as you say, that's how it makes its money. Only making the game fun for whales results in so low retention your game doesn't last very long. On the other hand, subsidizing free players on those who want to spend hundreds or thousands on a game is still happening in core and mid-core. Mobile costs per install are just too high for a game with a huge live operations budget to survive otherwise. But there are a lot more "Pay $99 to get this character outright" packs that are doing very well. It goes to the idea that people who spend a ton on these games WANT to be spending a ton and want to know what they're getting for it. Those are the players who in games like the one mentioned here will spend hundreds on tickets and pull the gacha over and over. Low but steady spenders, the "minnows" to your "whales" in industry slang, would rather skip the gacha and get a guarantee. Making it possible for engaged players to unlock the character every event, but giving them a $5 pack for the last 10% for those that got close but didn't make it this week. That sort of thing.

​@@zerynsa Hey Evan, thanks for your response, really nice! This is a good discussion. I really do think mobile f2p is already moving away from gacha, and probably eventually it will be forced to if it hasn't already as governments really are scrutinising this, Belgium is one example of a country that has already introduced a ban, the UK is another with proposals to ban or regulate. Just two off the top of my head. As I mentioned I can see developers moving away from gacha all the time, it's not as successful as it used to be. Smaller studios tend to follow the bigger mobile studios like Supercell, who are moving into things like Battle Passes and other monetisation methods that double up as retention/engagement mechanics, they're more successful and provide much higher conversion rates. That's super important because higher CVR means they can go into UA and more consistently acquire paying users, it's a much easier optimisation problem for the ad networks. On top of that, Apple iOS14 privacy changes and SKAdNetwork are going to make it nigh on impossible to target 'whales'. Google is likely to follow with similar privacy features within the next couple of years so this whale-dependent f2p model is going to be a lot harder to sustain or scale. Even before these changes the number of whales is so small and statistically insignificant so they are difficult enough to acquire anyway. Relying on whales to subsidise high CPIs is not a sustainable or reliable approach. This is why known IP is such a big deal, free audience of dedicated players. I've worked in studios where your $5 to get the last 10% event idea were tried. It's quite a typical suggestion from Product. These things are often designed into the event beforehand so players find it particularly difficult or impossible to finish towards the end, unless they spend. It's not sustainable. The first event works like a charm and money rolls in, but the player base quickly realises they're being conned in subsequent events. Working hard to achieve something then having to pay for it to have any meaning leaves a sour taste. Compare that to a battle pass for example: play free but regularly and have some nice things, but pay up front get some sweet stuff right away, keep playing you get more and more sweet stuff. It's a better proposition for the player, they aren't conned into thinking they can finish it before they have to buy to make all their hard work have any results. We need to be careful as an industry saying that whales "want" to empty their pockets and spend 1000s of dollars in our games, when we have enabled and engineered the situation as to encourage them to do that.

Because most mobile "games" talks focus on how to monetize things, how to sell more gems and packs, and are often run by people who have in mind only one thing. I let you guess what. I have seen the whole video. I never had the impression that the speaker cared a cent about the player feelings or that the game was really a nice and surprising experience. I had the impression, all the time, that was all about "don't run out of content to sell!" or "Always know where the player should be, in his paying (sorry, i wanted to say Playing) curve!". Sorry, i just feel no emotions, for him, or for his company. Just a sad feeling of shame and betrayal, toward us game developers. Sorry, of course, it's just my opinion. Have a nice day sir.

Because thinking of *everything* only in terms of profit is definitely a trait of worthy, mature human beings.

@@meditationsanddimensions542 He has talked about the player feelings. Making sure they're not getting bored, that the game is neither going too slow or too fast for them, and making sure the monetization is appreciated instead of unfortunate.

free to play is usually pretty bad indeed, but that is an unfair way to look at it. Back in those golden days you talk about, games were niche, they required high commitment and high skill level to progress, and mind you, most of them were extremely hard exactly to get nickels out of you, not because they had soul and the passion and what not. Now, specially on free to play, games are more accessible and millions of people do enjoy those games even if they never pay a dime for it, even though its far from free to make and maintain such a game. Not saying free to play is great, I honestly thing it sucks and the way its done it hurts the game industry because it creates the expectation that great games are "free", so its nearly damn impossible to charge for them (on mobile at least) and this ends up forcing the hands on the free to play side, since no one wants to spend a dime on the games they are playing save the 1%. User acquisition costs are through the roof thanks to competition for ad space, user value is down the drain because of the culture the games themselves created... but truth be told, while its easy to say that most of these cash grab f2p games suck, they are grossing the way they are because a lot of people actually like, play, and want to pay to play those games...

@@schwarzenego Or maybe the games are designed to exploit addictive behaviour and the players can't differentiate addiction from true enjoyment.

@@ideallyyours they certainly are designed to be addictive in the worst way possible, but, do you know someone that paid for boosters in clash royale... or that is aiming for a hero in star wars... and actually spent money to get that? I can tell you that 100% of the friends I have that do spend money on f2p, actually enjoy their purchases and see the spenditure as "coffee spend", they are not whales in any way. I've known a few whales too (not as friends though) and for the ones I talked to at least, its also "coffee spend", even though "coffee" for them is more money than I have lol

@@schwarzenego Thanks for the reply, and yes i mostly agree with you. Well, it's not about how many people actually likes and enjoy them. it's more about how much money is spent in them. The 1% can spend 2-3k or more on them, each player. Players don't trust us anymore. Thanks to those companies that used against the players the worst short-term cash-grab strategies they could think of, because their investors had to claim their short-term quarter bonuses. All the players i personally know, are quite sad and frustrated about Free-to-play "games". This model has a bad reputation among all the people i know, except the developers who are developing one, and for good reasons. Thanks again for the reply, have a beautiful day.

did you watch the video? It's mostly about how to balance systems. Also "start with a good game" LOL as if you could just wave your smart phone and summon one.

@@n8n8n8 Warp Zone has his reasons to speak like that, n8. Reasons that most of us developers understand and agree upon. "Make a good game", right. A good game. Make it that no human can complete it, unless he spend thousand of dollars in repeated "micro" transactions, or just spend the next 20 years of his life playing this game compulsively. But hey, it's Free-to-play, right? The first dose it's free, isn't it? Well.. Yes, you are right. Start with a good game. But what you will end up with, after adding the "spend the gems here"-tutorial and the "shop starter pack 9.99"-overlay, it's what you should worry about. This is my opinion, i have spoken.

@@n8n8n8 Does that mean that another GACHA F2P ANIME PLEASE-WAIT-4-HOURS-TO-HAVE+1RESSOURCE is a right start for you ? In that case, please grow a brain.

You don't get to pretend you're the hero of game dev when you're reducing 'make a good game' to a single, magical step that can be done by pressing a button.

This comment thread is cancer. Lmfao. All-in-all, he covers points that can be generalized in all gaming mediums. Depressing how it's performed.

They literally call some players "WHALES", the ones who pays the most. Just a curiosity, how they call the ones who don't spend thousands of dollars in their game? Maybe "Chickens to grow"? Shame.

It's because people on mobile don't want to buy games. How many mobile games did you buy for over 20$? How many people do you know that did? Imma gamble that number is below 5.

@Luke Griffiths Are you plain dense ?