Design A Game: The Full Tutorial

This eight-part forum post walks you through the basics of game design and distribution.

Level Design Lessons from Super Mario Bros 3

Significant Bits, a blog by video game designer Radek Koncewicz, goes into detail about how SMB3′s game design made it so easy to pick up and play.

Beginning Level Design, Part 1

This is a classic Gamasutra article from the way back machine: April 16th, 1999. This 5-page article gives you a great overview of level design for the advanced beginner.

Roger Dickey’s Hacks for Game Monetization

We couldn’t help but include this awesome video that was taken from Roger Dickey’s presentation at our Game Monetization meetup. His 35 minute video is a gold mine of awesome monetization ideas and applications for virtual-currency based games.

My Game Design Hat

An indie game developer reveals his engineering-based approach to game design and how it helped him build a successful game.

What made those old 2D platformers so great

Another post by SignificantBits, this time about the design that went into the simple joy of our favorite 2D platform games like Donkey Kong Country. It’s even more relevant today as mobile games often return to this 2D platformer model.

Practical Game Design: The Rule of Threes

This article shows how to teach players new game mechanics by using three different ways of showing a new challenge.

An atomic theory of fun game design

In a 2004 essay that later became a GDC talk, Raph Koster outlines his “atomic theory of game design”. This one is a good read and well worth the time it takes to read it.

Game Design Insights from John Romero & Brenda Brathwaithe

Two legends of the game industry, John Romero and Brenda Brathwaithe, gave a talk at game industry college Cogswell Polytechnical College packs with great insights.

Bonus: If Mario Was Designed In 2010

Hey, not all of these posts have to be serious! In one of the most viral posts among the game industry in 2010, Zack Hiwiller mocked modern social games by showing what Mario would look like if it included their hooks and viral loops. This one is always worth a good laugh, and it should give you some hints on what not to do. Enjoy!

While opinions differed, I think we can agree that all game developers want to put food on their tables. The problem and opportunity raised by monetization in modern social and mobile games, especially freemium games, is that making money must be integrated into the game itself. For game designers, this means that their decisions will impact not only the user experience, but also how much money the game makes. Instead of getting paid $50 upfront for a game, your game’s monetization hooks translate directly into revenue.

Often times, this means game designers have to make trade-offs between gameplay and monetization. So how do you monetize your game effectively without tarnishing your game’s creative vision? When it came to discussing this question, opinions were strong but largely reflected the same principles:

Content is key
If you’re creating a game, the majority of what makes that game worthwhile is content. If you are making a freemium game, there should be enough free content to make the game worth downloading. Asking users to pay for new content is perfectly acceptable.

Be honest
One respondent wisely stated that “each payment should purchase a system that was designed with the best intentions to provide the experience promised.” Simply put, if you make your customers pay for something and it doesn’t deliver what you promised, they won’t give you a second chance.

Sell experiences, not upgrades
You can charge to unlock Knights or Clerics, but it’s a terrible idea to charge for “Knights that do more damage” or “Clerics that can heal more”. Not only does this break gameplay balance in multiplayer games, but it will give you major headaches when balancing single-player games too.

Make it unique
When creating new content to be sold, you should be selling something interesting rather than a rehash of something old. Notice how each group of new levels in Where’s My Water feature new gameplay challenges and environments.

Limit the treadmill
Your game shouldn’t make paying the only alternative to a miserable, boring grind. To this end, one method of managing grinding was highlighted by Roger Dickey on our blog. It’s called Grind vs. Spam vs. Pay: to obtain pieces of a special item, players can grind, ask their friends, or pay. This gives the players more options for obtaining an item, and they can buy the item at a discount if they get tired of grinding part-way through.

Avoid obnoxious ads
Like low-rent industrial zones in Sim City, quick and dirty advertising tactics are both the easiest way to make money and the quickest way you can pollute your game’s environment. This includes immersion-killing full-page ads, distracting banners in gameplay screens, and even promotion of in-game paid content. Instead, regulate ads to non-gameplay screens, like the inventory screen, and only include full-page ads if it fits with a natural disruption in gameplay, such as between turns in Hero Academy.

The Golden Rule: “Don’t be a dick”
Put on your player hat and ask yourself, what is reasonable? If you make these games, you probably play them too. When playing, make a note of when a monetization hook frustrates you and (more importantly) when it doesn’t.

The struggle here is that everyone wants to make money, but opinions differ greatly on how much you should have allow monetization to encroach on gameplay. While monetization will always be a bitter pill for some game developers to swallow, the above principles should help you make money from your game while preserving gameplay.

I do Marketing at Betable, the first ever platform that lets game developers legally add real-money play to their games. Honestly, one of the reasons I joined Betable is because it gives developers a way to monetize that doesn’t sacrifice gameplay. If you’re interested, shoot me a tweet at @davidtyleryork or @betable.

Data points from the article:

• CLV per paying user: $150
• Paid Customer Lifetime: 12 – 15 months
• Attrition rate (roughly): 20%

Based on the data shown above and Zynga’s updated S-1, we did a little bit of back-of-the-napkin math of our own.

From that, we can calculate the following:

• Estimated ARPPU: $11   ($150 / 13.5 months)
• Estimated free-to-paid conversion: 1.5%   (3.4m paying users / 228m MAUs)
• Estimated ARPU: $0.165   ($11 * 1.5%)

Again, all back of the napkin, but an ARPU of $0.165 isn’t too far off from what other sources have mentioned in the past. To put this number in perspective, it’s one dime, one nickel and one-and-a-half pennies.

Which raises the question:
why are social game developers happy with making this much per user?

Betable is the only platform that lets you legally add real-money gambling and betting to your games and apps, unlocking up to 300X more revenue than virtual currency. We are currently in private alpha, but you can reserve your account now to get priority access.

However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone. This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time, gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made an extremely similar game.

Unfortunately, the line between inspiration and copying is incredibly blurry at best. The one thing that’s certain is that copying is here to stay. Copying has been present in some form since the dawn of capitalism (if you need proof, just go to the toothpaste isle of your local supermarket). The game industry is no stranger to this trend: game companies have been copying each other for years. Given it’s repeated success, there’s little reason to think that this practice will stop. Indie flash game studio XGEN Studios posted a response to Nimblebit, showing that their hit games were also copied:

Some would even argue that the incredibly successful iOS game Angry Birds was a copy of the popular Armor Games flash game, Crush the Castle, but then Crush the Castle was inspired by others that game before it. Social games even borrow many of their game mechanics from slot machines to increase retention. So what is copying, or more importantly, which parts of it are moral and immoral? Everyone seems to have a different answer, but it’s safe to say that people always copy the most successful ideas. The one thing that those in the Zynga-Nimblebit conversation seems to have overlooked is that everyone copies others in some way.

Of course, while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it doesn’t feel good to be imitated when a competitor comes after your users. In this case, people may question Zynga’s authenticity and make a distinction between inspiration and outright duplication. But at the same time, Zynga’s continued success with the “watch, then replicate” model shows that marketing, analytics, and operations can improve on an existing game concept. Or just give them the firepower to beat out the original game, depending on how you look at it.

I want to hear your thoughts: Should game companies be encouraged or punished for taking the best ideas from other games? Where do you draw the line between inspiration and duplication? Sound off in the comments.

To lend credence to these rumors, there were two massive acquisitions of Facebook casino game companies within the last two weeks. On December 30th, Caesars Casino elected to purchase the 49% it did not own of Playtika, one of Facebook’s larger casino game makers with over 5 million monthly active users. But the announcement that turned heads was gambling heavyweight IGT’s $500 million acquisition of DoubleDown Interactive.

If you look at the numbers as they are now, there’s no reason for IGT to pay $500 million for DoubleDown. DoubleDown was rumored by AllThingsD to be making $140,000 per day, which equates to about $51 million in revenue per year. This puts the purchase price for DoubleDown at almost 10X their revenue, which is high even for the frothy social gaming market. Furthermore, DoubleDown Casino, their only game, has approximately 4.7 million monthly active users, which means that IGT paid over $100 per monthly active user. [Click to Tweet]

This purchase would only make sense if real-money gambling is coming to Facebook. Whether you view it as a land grab (DoubleDown Casino was the #4 game on Facebook by daily active users in 2011), or as a smart buy for the future (online casino players are worth roughly $1,800 over their lifetime), this acquisition is a sign of things to come. With social game giants EA and Zynga rumored to be looking into the real-money gambling opportunity,  social game developers would be wise to stake their claim in the market as soon as possible.

[Image credit: TechCrunch, TeePeeGames]

It almost seems like overnight, social gaming became a $2 billion industry with over hundreds of millions of players worldwide. As we mentioned in our blog post, Exposing Social Gaming’s Hidden Lever, social gaming leverages the same game mechanics and psychological cues as slot machines to hook players. To us, it was no surprise when we found that social gaming is popular with the same demographics as slot machines.

Take a look at the audience that modern social games attracts. Much of the gigantic player base that the most popular social games has acquired was gained from demographics far outside the typical video gamer. An InsideNetwork study concluded that on average, almost 70% of social gamers were female:

This flies in the face of the typical “gamer”, but it’s quite similar to the typical slot machine player. Among women polled in a Harrah’s survey, 81% of women favored slots and electronic gaming. This shows that while women are not necessarily the majority of gamblers, when they do gamble they prefer slot machines. The correlation becomes even more apparent when you see social gaming’s demographics by age:

While the sample size is limited in this study, the data paints a convincing picture: both Social City and FrontierVille see half of their player base come from players aged 26-45. More data was released supporting these findings when GigaOm reported that the average social gamer is a 43 year old woman. When you compare this with slot machine players surveyed in a University of Waterloo study, whose average age was found to be 39-45 years old, you see a clear overlap between slot machine players and social game players.

Before social gaming, women young and old were a relatively untapped gaming market, and one that had both time and money to spend on games that could capture their interest. Once they realized the potential opportunity, Zynga and other social game companies openly pursued this new market, with Zynga’s chief game designer Brian Reynolds’ stated goal being to make “mass-market entertainment everyone can play”. Reinforcing these demographic trends is the fact that female focused games like It Girl have become massive successes.

Social gaming’s use of gambling mechanics to engage and retain users also helped unlock a massive new market of female players. It’s no surprise to us that these mechanics are effective with a similar group of users across different industries. And with women now playing more mobile games than men, we expect these mechanics to cross over as countless game companies try to recreate social gaming’s success on mobile.

But why do social game companies use gambling mechanics? Short answer: they work. Over 60 percent of social gamers say that they play for over half an hour at a time, and 28 percent of them have purchased virtual currency with real-world currency. However, this means that 72 percent of social game players have never purchased virtual currency.

This is no surprise: unlike in a slot machine, when users purchase virtual currency they know that they are never getting their money out. While social gaming’s $2 billion market is nothing to scoff at, slot machines nationwide pull down $1 billion a day. Could more of those 72 percent never-purchasers  be converted into paying customers if they had a chance to win cash playing their favorite games?

This is why real-money play is such a great fit for social games. The social gaming market has the same demographics as slot machine players, and over 50% of social game players are outside of the US. This would be a win-win for social game companies and their players: social game companies could leverage their existing games and player base, while players would get the option to win cash when playing their favorite games. Real-money play is a compelling opportunity to innovate in the social game space in a way that boosts revenues. Social game companies should take note.

Google YouTube PM Hunter Walk asked on Twitter Monday:

There are some serious competitive advantages that Zynga would bring to the table if they decided to pursue this idea and provide legal online poker to its Zynga Poker players. For one, Zynga’s poker game currently holds over 28 million active players, which makes it the world’s largest poker site of any kind.

Clearly, Zynga has the potential to be a real-money poker powerhouse
But what would that mean for them?

Hunter Walk, in a conversation with Keith Rabois, COO of Square, asked:

The comparison below reveals a massive gap between virtual goods revenue and real-money revenue:

Just to put some context behind those numbers, real-money online poker earns 213 times more per player per month than virtual currency poker.

The BusinessInsider article published today puts this opportunity at over  $1 billion in annual revenue, based on the statistics of other online poker companies. But why stop at poker apps?

The same competitive advantages that would support Zynga’s move into the real-money poker space apply to social games and social game companies. Social game companies have a deep understanding of development and marketing on new platforms (such as Facebook, iPhone and Android), detailed data on their massive user bases containing hundreds of millions of people, and their user demographics are largely similar to those of gambling players.

Social games even employ the same game mechanics and psychological tricks as a modern slot machine. Considering they already produce gambling-inspired games with massive audiences, social game companies could tap into real-money play in a similar way.

When you compare casual social games against real-money casino games, the revenue gap is even more dramatic:

Given these numbers, real-money casino games earn 1,612X more per player per month than virtual currency casual social games. Even when you use a fraction of typical 2% virtual currency free-to-paid conversion rate to estimate the amount of players that would convert to real-money currency, the resulting revenue would still be several multiples higher. Which begs the question…

Given the tremendous revenue opportunity, why haven’t social game companies already offered real-money play?

No, not because Facebook doesn’t allow gambling
While this was true in the past, Facebook may soon allow real-money gambling on it’s platform. Even so, social games are on countless other platforms where gambling is already permitted in legal jurisdictions, including Android, iOS, and Google+. These companies didn’t pursue real-money social games for any of these platforms.

No, not because gambling is illegal in the US
While the Department of Justice opened the door for states to regulate online gambling within their jurisdictions, the fact that the US market was closed before wouldn’t have stopped major social game companies in foreign markets. The addressable ex-US worldwide gambling market contains millions of players that would give real-money social games the audience they needs to succeed.

The reason game companies haven’t implemented real-money play is because gambling licenses are tremendously expensive and time consuming to acquire.

While theoretically possible, the process is so painful that the vast majority of game companies don’t even consider it. The time (≥18 months) and money (≥$1M including all associated costs) are an enourmous barrier to entry for most game studios. Even if a studio could afford those costs, steps must be undertaken sequentially and spending more money doesn’t shorten the period of time it takes to get a license. There is also the added layer of complication arises from the necessary corporate structuring and off-shoring that must take place to comply with gambling regulations.

These time & money costs are simply too great for the vast majority of small-to-medium sized game studios, and the compliance issues become increasingly prohibitive as you look at large game companies. These huge pains have prevented Zynga and other game companies from offering real-money play to non-US players in spite of the massive potential revenue opportunity. Game companies have been better off investing their limited resources into virtual currency revenue streams because they will monetize immediately, although relatively poorly.

Which is where we come in
This is why we founded Betable: we went through the massive pain of acquiring gambling licenses and wanted to help game companies avoid the same fate. Our platform lets game developers legally integrate real-money play into their games, unlocking the massive revenue potential offered by real-money gaming. To find out more, go to http://developers.betable.com.

Sources:
Casual Online Poker User Base:

• http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/2389801228-texas-holdem-poker
• http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/158243717529
• http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/106932686001126-mynet-anak-okey
• http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/119468838217-doubledown-casino-free-slots-blackjack-poker

Real-Money Online Poker User Base:

• http://pokerplayersresearch.com/Documents/ToplineTrendsPoker2010.pptx

Casual Online Poker ARPU and CLV:

• Nick Talarico, Former Rev Ops Manager at Sibblingz and Publisher Dev Lead at Offerpal.

Real-Money Online Poker ARPU and CLV:

• http://www.bwinparty.com/~/media/Files/CorpWeb/Investors/Financial%20Reports/bwinparty%20-%20Our%20Future.ashx
• http://www.bwinparty.com/~/media/Files/CorpWeb/Investors/Shareholder%20Documentation/Historical%20pro%20forma%20KPI%20data%20Q108%20-%20Q111.ashx
• http://corporate.betfair.com/investor-relations/kpis.aspx

Casual Social Games User Base:

• Note: This is aggregated from http://www.appdata.com//leaderboard/developers and is a sum of all players in all games. While this does include duplicates (players playing multiple games), they still could contribute revenue to multiple games and so therefore we felt that this was a fair evaluation.
  

Real-Money Online Casino Games User Base:

• Estimated using most recent public data from http://www.casinospage.com/faqs.htm#2

Casual Social Games ARPU and CLV:

• http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28456/GDC_Canada_Super_Rewards_Bailey_Quit_Your_Job_And_Make_Facebook_Games.php

Real-Money Online Casino Games ARPU and CLV:

• http://www.bwinparty.com/~/media/Files/CorpWeb/Investors/Financial%20Reports/bwinparty%20-%20Our%20Future.ashx
• http://www.bwinparty.com/~/media/Files/CorpWeb/Investors/Shareholder%20Documentation/Historical%20pro%20forma%20KPI%20data%20Q108%20-%20Q111.ashx
• http://corporate.betfair.com/investor-relations/kpis.aspx

Last week’s Wall Street Journal article, “Gaming’s New Frontier After Zynga”, talks about how the future of games is new, high-quality massively multiplayer online role-playing games (commonly known as MMORPGs). The author alleges that innovative new MMORPGs created by companies like Trion and Tiny Speck will lead to a revolution akin to social games’ emergence over the last 5 years. While this article captures part of the trend, it misses the bigger picture.

The future of gaming is not immersive massively multiplayer games. People have been saying that MMORPGs were the “future of gaming” since back in the days of the original Everquest. To quote David Radd from his IndustryGamers post last week, “things didn’t quite pan out as planned”.

Today, the resurgence of MMOs is just one piece of the larger trend:

The intersection between virtual worlds and the real world is the future of gaming. [Click to Tweet]

For MMO games, as virtual worlds become ever more immersive and realistically detailed, they become increasingly indistinguishable from real life. As World of Warcraft showed, millions of people will pay sizable subscription fees for access to their favorite alternate reality.

For social games, this means making games truly social rather than just being games that are played together on a social network. Big bets are already being placed on games that heavily incorporate cooperation and competition between you and your friends.

For mobile games, dozens of location-based gaming startups have popped up in just the last few months. From zombie invasions to mob wars to Pokemon-inspired, these games will connect virtual worlds to real life by taking advantage of location-aware technology for mobile devices.

For all game types mentioned above, the natural transition to more integration between virtual worlds and the real world begs for the use of real-money currency in games. Blizzard’s decision to incorporate real-money purchases into the in-game economy of their next massive title, “Diablo 3”, signals that this change is imminent. From giving players actual cash for their treasure, to letting players up the ante by wagering on their matches, there are countless ways that real money could be applied to enhance game-play.

Earlier this month, Roger Dickey spoke at our Game Monetization meetup event. Roger is the creator of Mafia Wars, one of the most successful social games of all time, and also served as the GM of Fishville once his company was acquired by Zynga. You can watch the full video below, but we wanted to pull out one topic today that we found really interesting: mining the theme space.

Mining the theme space
When working at Zynga as GM for Fishville, Roger Dickey and his team spent a good amount of time doing what he calls “mining the theme space”. They read books on fish and put up fish posters around the office to make sure that they were immersed in the world they were creating. That way, when it came time for game design meetings, the team was usually full of new ideas for gameplay and content. This is a powerful idea, and while I am sure a lot of studios employ it in some form, few embrace it like Roger did.

Mining the theme space can be applicable to any aspect of your game’s evolution, from content design to storyboarding to monetization. Roger recommended monetizing on the aspects that players already focus on within the theme space. For Fishville, 60% of the players just fed their fish every day and that was all that they did. Clearly, these players were most interested in having a pet fish, and didn’t feel a need to dive deeper into the game. Therefore, they came up with superfood that players could buy to make their fish very happy. Roger’s team had planned to take this concept further and build out mammals, a second tier of fish like dolphins and sharks that were very cool, but ate the superfood or smaller fish to survive. This would reflect the theme and also provide greater avenues for immersion and monetization.

Map it out
When working with the theme space, Roger stressed the importance of building a roadmap. You should draw out the entire space and determine where and when you want to release specific aspects of it. An example of this could be the second tier fish that we mentioned prior. Timing the release of the major pieces of the theme space need to be done with the whole space in mind.

These kind of decisions needed to be made with a business mindset, because it is a business need that drives a product need that eventually becomes a game design need. Roger recommended this strategy because it gave you quantifiable goals to hit, and then you could work backwards. One example for this design progression might be:

• Business need: Increase the number of invites sent per day by 50%
• Product need: Give players in-game rewards for inviting their friends
• Game design need: Create awesome fish that can only be fed by superfood that players earn when they invite their friends

This should be directly tied into how the theme progresses in real life. For instance, in a city game, you would want to expand your city, so that should be part of the goals and aspirations of your players. This also serves to keep the game engaging by letting players progress through the theme space in a symbolic, significant way.

Engagement is the heart of your game
Roger Dickey started off his presentation outlining the three R’s of social games:
Reach, Retention, and Revenue.

• Reach is how many people that your game touches, both through gameplay and also impressions in viral channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Retention is how many people keep playing your game over time.
• Revenue is money, of course.

Roger argues that if these were in a graph, engagement would be in the center. He compares engagement to the heart of your game because “it is effectively pumping blood to every other part of your game”. Engaged users will help you reach more people by sharing the game with your friend, they will retain longer, and they will be more willing to pay. At a high level, engagement is the key metric you should be watching before you worry about ARPU or ARPDAU.

“Fun Pain”
One of Roger’s most interesting points was that “fun pain” was the key to social games’ success. Think about how a player needed to click each square to plant or harvest their crops in Farmville. This is a perfect example of “fun pain”, something that is simultaneously entertaining and a little bit annoying. This type of game mechanic gave Zynga the opportunity to upsell the player on pain-reducing items, such as a tractor that clicked four fields at once. These items were extremely popular among players, even though they only existed because it was painful to play the game in the first place!

Grind vs. Spam vs. Pay
This social game monetization tactic is frequently employed with special items that are built via a combination of parts. Typically, you can earn the parts for the special item in three ways:

1. Grind for them over a long period of time [Engagement]
2. Spam your friends to have the send you the pieces you need [Virality]
3. Pay for the parts that you are missing [Monetization]

Players almost always start with Grind or Spam to kick off their pursuit of the item. However, as the player grows weary of grinding and doesn’t see the response he was hoping for from his friends, he is left with a partially completed item and no use for the parts. Now, the user is willing to pay for the item to be completed.

Estimating your game’s monetization
A simple, rough formula to estimate how much a casual social game could earn via industry standard game mechanics can be broken out as follows:

• An energy mechanic was worth $0.03 ARPU
• A decorative factor was worth $0.02 ARPU
• Competitive gameplay was worth $0.05 ARPU

This is a pretty high level estimation that begs the question…

What do people pay for?
Roger found that people pay for the following in social games:

Identity expression
Players will pay for anything that is socially surfaced in the game because you’re presenting your farm, city, or avatar to your friends.

Vanity
This drives demand for exclusive items: people will pay more when there is only a limited number of an item available, or to get things before other players.

Fun
Items that make the game more convenient and tip the “fun pain” scale more towards fun are worth a lot to a wide variety of players.

Exclusive features
Having certain features or aspects of gameplay only become available for a fee can be an effective monetization model, as we see often with free-to-play games and freemium software.

Competition
Hardcore players, especially males, will pay to get a competitive advantage against their opponents.

Social value
Your players want their friends to play and by helping them, they increase their friend’s chance of sticking with the game. Once power becomes social, it becomes much more valuable and people pay for it.

Chance
Roger found that random chance was a huge incentive for people to buy. We wrote a blog post that highlights the power of the Mystery Box that covers this in more detail.

Stat Progress
Players will pay for progress or temporary power in a game, especially a competitive one. Many game developers love this game mechanic because it monetizes so consistently.

Story
Surprisingly, people will pay very well to advance the story. They feel a sense of progress when completing quests and will pay to overcome roadblocks in that progression.

Measure everything
Roger was adamant about launching with game analytics and metrics already in place. Furthermore, he pushed for game studios to record every single click or action that players did in the game. This requires reams of data but is always worth it when you’re looking to optimize your game down the road. Much of the insights that Roger gained about player behavior was from data that he didn’t even know he needed when he built his analytics systems.

Cohorts
Breaking your users into cohorts is an incredibly important tactic for monetizing your game. Roger’s recommended cohorts goes far beyond the typical hardcore vs. casual groupings. He recommended using the following cohorts:

• Play Frequency – how often do people play
• Socialness – how viral or willing to share are they
• Spending profile – how often do they pay for an in-game item
• Lifetime – how long have they been playing, how long will they play

Mine the theme space
When working at Zynga as the GM for Fishville, Roger Dickey and his team spent a good amount of time doing what he calls “mining the theme space”. They read books on fish and put up fish posters around the office to make sure that they were immersed in the world they were creating. That way, when it came time for game design meetings, the team was usually full of new ideas for new gameplay and content.

Master plan for monetization
Lastly, Roger emphasized the need for a master plan for game monetization. This means including monetization strategy from the very onset of the game design’s inception. To this end, he offered up a number of tips and strategies from his game monetization toolkit:

Negative reinforcement
Your obligation to your creations is a real driver of engagement. You don’t want your fish to die and float to the top of your tank because they look ugly and show your neglect for all your friends to see.

Fairness
It is worth noting that players care much less about payer vs. non-payer fairness than a game designer would think.

Consumables
When working to launch a competing game in Japan, Roger studied Kaido Royale extensively. In this Mafia Wars-style game, you needed to not only buy a gun to use but also the bullets to fire the gun, and this consumable use system helped the game monetize extremely well.

Energy
“If you give somebody a huge bucket of candy, they’re gonna love the candy for a week, and then never want any again. If you give them 10 pieces a day, they’ll keep coming back for years”.

Premium decorations
“Farmville was at one point mostly a canvas for people to decorate on.”

Territory expansion
In any game where the long term goal is to build, territory expansion is a big part of the game.

Seasonal content
A necessary evil that helps the game retain users by keeping it interesting and dynamic.

Content grab bags
When buying multiple items at once, players simultaneously feel like they’re getting a deal and that they’re buying something more substantial than a virtual gun.

Sponsorship
This is a decent way to increase revenues, just don’t let sponsored content “go all Myspace and take over the whole game.”

Free currency
This doesn’t monetize well, but low level players will purchase free currency to advance faster or complete quests.

Collection completion
This means mechanics like ‘do this 10 times and master it’ in Mafia Wars. “It’s kind of funny sitting there as a game designer and being like ‘our game is already kind of mundane… what if we make everyone do things 10 times?’ Well, it can work.”

First time buyer incentive
To get people to convert from free-to-paid, first time buyer incentive gives players that haven’t purchased a ‘deal’ that gets them over that crucial first purchase hurdle.

Wagering
The ability to wager on the outcome of your game could be a game changer. Betable is the first platform that makes it possible for game developers to implement this in their games.

Roger Dickey’s presentation gave us a ton of insight into game monetization and the psychology behind social game mechanics. A big thanks goes out to Roger for sharing his strategies with our San Francisco Game Monetization meetup.