1259: Gross

My year and a bit reviewing social and mobile games was enough to make me never, ever want to play one of them ever again, but I feel it is worth educating people on the things that these games are doing — seriously unpleasant things.

I’ll preface this with the caveat that not all social and mobile games do these things. But a huge majority of them do. And you should be aware of it, if you’re not already.

First thing to do is read this.

If you read that, I probably don’t actually need to say any more. But I will anyway.

“Coercive monetization.” Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Well, it is; it’s the practice of convincing players that they “need” to spend money, and that it’s their “choice” to spend money. It’s underhanded trickery, in other words, and it’s massively commonplace in the free-to-play sector — but particularly in the realms of mobile and social games.

That post’s author Ramin Shokrizade describes the use of coercive monetization techniques in relation to “fun pain” — a term coined by Roger Dickey from Zynga to describe games that actively put obstacles in the way of the player’s fun. These could be any of a wide variety of things — an energy system telling them they can’t play any more; a timer saying they can’t use this building/hero/object until it’s been readied/built; an object which is just slightly too expensive, and which is all but necessary to progress. All of these things are used in order to get the player making that all-important first payment — to “convert” them from a freeloading bastard (albeit one with some common sense) into a person blindly willing to continue paying into an obviously manipulative business model while under the illusion of having “fun”.

Shokrizade cites one of my least favourite games ever in his piece — King’s Candy Crush Saga. This game is immensely popular, yet is 1) a Bejeweled ripoff and 2) one of the most manipulative, exploitative, outright unpleasant games I have ever encountered.

It begins innocently enough. You’re given levels that are pretty straightforward to complete, and you’ll make good progress through them. Gradually, they’ll get more difficult, but not noticeably so — not until you reach an artificial barrier on the game map that requires you to either spam your friends with requests or pay real money to progress. Since to many people, spamming one’s friends with Facebook requests is becoming something of a taboo, many choose to pay the $1 fee to progress — but in doing so they break that seal and “convert” themselves into a paying player.

King knows this, and thus makes the levels after this barrier noticeably more difficult. But it doesn’t do this in a fair way; as with Bejeweled (and particularly its free-to-play social counterpart Bejeweled Blitz) Candy Crush Saga is primarily based on luck rather than skill — you can’t plan ahead because you don’t know what’s going to fall from the top of the screen, so more often than not running out of moves is unavoidable. What Candy Crush Saga does as it progresses is weight the behind-the-scenes random number generators significantly against the player so it will be very difficult for them to progress without paying up for boosts, or extra lives, or permanent upgrades, many of which are extremely expensive.

You may feel that there’s no harm in this, and indeed some people make it a badge of personal pride to play through something like Candy Crush Saga without paying a penny. But in the process, they’re having a frustrating, boring experience. Why would you deliberately do that to yourself, when you can pay, say, $1 for the iOS version of Bejeweled and have literally infinitely more fun than with Candy Crush Saga?

These manipulative business models are not harmless, nor are they worthy of praise, regardless of how many millions of dollars they’re bringing in every day. They’re making money from conning gullible idiots — and while some of you may argue that people with no common sense need to be woken up a bit, it’s not really fair to take advantage of people in this manner, particularly when many of them are children.

I find the whole practice utterly reprehensible, and I can’t help hoping that the whole bubble on free-to-play social and mobile games bursts very soon. Unfortunately, with the amount of money many of the more popular titles are making every day — and the sheer number of the bastard things that are released each day — I don’t see that happening any time soon, making mobile gaming in particular all but a lost cause for me these days.

Do yourself a favour: if you’re currently playing something like Candy Crush Saga or its ilk, stop. You’re being manipulated. Find a low-cost game with the same mechanics, pay for it, then play it as much as you want. This is the way it’s always been in the past, and I long to go back to a time where that is the only model.

“Coercive monetization” is gross. It is borderline unethical. So don’t support it.

1198: ThreeDeeEss

After some hesitation — and despite owning several games for it — I finally got my own 3DS today. We’ve actually had one in the household since Andie’s last birthday — it belongs to her — but with the combination of Fire Emblem: Awakening and the copy of Luigi’s Mansion 2 my brother got me for my birthday (thanks!) I figured it was probably about time I got my own rather than depriving Andie of the opportunity to play Harvest Moon whenever she pleased.

And, as predicted, just a short period of time with the 3DS has reminded me once again that people who claim traditional handhelds are on the way out and that mobile phone/tablet gaming is the future are talking out of their arse. Yes indeed.

The quality of the experiences on the 3DS and Vita is just in a completely different league to that you get on a smartphone. Completely. It also makes the rapidly-widening schism between free-to-play/”freemium” and traditionally-sold “pay once, play forever” games extremely apparent.

Today, for work (last day! Woo!) I reviewed the new Transformers game for iOS and Android. Said game is the latest in the interminable string of “card battle” games that are available for those two platforms, which means it’s a monotonous, tedious, strategy-and-gameplay-free experience that has only the most tenuous link to its source material. It is, in short, designed as little more than a means of getting people addicted enough to the sight of little bars filling up to want to pay money to “collect” virtual cards that don’t actually exist. “This is a super rare card!” they’ll say, failing to point out that it is data rather than a physical object and is thus only as “rare” as they decide it should be at any given point in time. There’s no joy in playing that game; it’s mindless busywork — something to do for the sake of having something to fiddle with rather than something that actually engages your brain and makes you interested in what’s going on.

The phrase “mindless busywork” describes probably 90% of the new mobile and social games that are released every day. Which is why I have no desire whatsoever to play them in my free time.

Compare and contrast the crap that is Transformers Legends to Fire Emblem: Awakening on 3DS, then. Ostensibly, the two games are of the same genre: RPG. And yet the difference in quality is apparent from the moment you fire up the game. And it only gets more painful to even contemplate this difference as you go on.

Fire Emblem is a game designed to entertain you and challenge you. It’s not designed to massage your ego through giving you tasks to do that are completely free of any sort of challenge, and then extract money from you while you’re feeling good. It has the means of extracting money from you through its paid (optional) downloadable content, but the experience in and of itself is complete, and it doesn’t nag you at any point to do something that will cost you money. It doesn’t tell you how long you can play before you have to either stop or pay, it doesn’t tease you with “if you pay $5 you might get this awesome hero” nonsense — note, “might” — and it doesn’t thrust gigantic screen-filling adverts in your fucking face every five minutes like most modern mobile games do. Nothing breaks immersion for me more quickly than happily playing a game then suddenly everything stopping and the device on which I’m playing said game asking me if I want to download another, completely unrelated free game. The answer is, without exception, “no, fuck off.”

And if the adverts don’t break immersion, the “user retention” strategies certainly do. “Play the Daily Spin now!” announces a game that is attempting to be a gritty depiction of medieval life, failing to see how completely inappropriate a slot machine is in this context. “Spin the wheel for prizes!” barks Gollum in the official mobile game of The Hobbit. “Get free coins every day!” bellows whatever shitty puzzle game has ripped off Bejeweled and monetized it out the arse this week.

No. So long as mobile phone gaming is the preserve of sleazy chancers who prey on the weak and stupid, traditional handhelds have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Were you an advocate of mobile and tablet gaming, you may well point to the disparity in price between mobile games and 3DS/Vita games and make some sort of non-specific sneering noise at this point. My response to that is very simply “you get what you pay for.”

1194: Courting the ‘Core’

Social games, it’s fair to say, have a bad reputation among those who are euphemistically referred to as “core gamers”. This bad reputation isn’t altogether unjustified, of course — social games are, in many cases, derivative, exploitative or just plain boring — but despite the prevalence of Men In Suits (or, probably more accurately, Men In Trendy T-Shirts And/Or Turtleneck Sweaters) who have never played a video game before in their life running the show for the most part, there’s a lot of talent in that particular sector of the industry.

So why the hell doesn’t this part of the industry do more to attract the “core”?

It’s at this point that, if I was talking about this in person with someone directly involved with the industry, that they would point to one of the following facts: 1) Candy Crush Saga having approximately 15 million daily active users; 2) CSR Racing on iOS earning somewhere in the region of $12 million a month when it launched; 3) The Top Grossing chart on iOS being dominated by games that are free to download.

These are all facts, and cannot be ignored. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re good things. As I’ve said many times in the past, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Candy Crush Saga has 15 million daily active users because it nags them via notifications to come back and play; CSR Racing earned $12 million a month by forcing people to pay up for “gas” for their cars if they didn’t want to wait; and don’t even get me started on what I think of the Top Grossing chart on iOS and the awful crap therein.

Aside from these matters, the fact that the social and mobile games sectors aren’t courting the “core” more aggressively is just baffling to me. While those who identify as “core” gamers — i.e. those who will happily sit down in front of a computer or console for several hours at a time to use it as their primary means of entertainment rather than an idle timewaster — do not exist in as vast a number as those who have a Facebook account and who have tried Candy Crush Saga at least once, there are some important things to bear in mind.

Most crucially, of those 15 million daily active users that Candy Crush Saga has, only a tiny fraction of them actually pay anything. Some of them might pay a lot — these people are rather revoltingly referred to as “whales” by people in the industry — but an awful lot of them will either refuse to pay out of principle or just not enjoy the game enough to want to spend money on it.

Here’s the thing: “core” gamers spend a lot of money. “Core” gamers will happily spent £40 on a brand new game without having read a review. “Core” gamers will pay a premium to get pointless cool stuff that they can show off. “Core” gamers are a lucrative source of income, in other words. Much as it pains me to break it down that way — I’d much rather games be seen as creative works than business products — it is, in fact, true.

So, then, I have to question why more of an effort isn’t being made to make “core” gamers take social and mobile games seriously. Because it’s not. “Core” gamers see the majority of social and mobile games as a massive joke — a festering boil on the arse of the industry; a source of interactive entertainment that doesn’t create “proper games” and instead puts out the very worst sort of shovelware.

They’re right, to an extent. So here’s a few things the social and mobile sectors could do to be taken a bit more seriously by potentially one of the most lucrative markets out there.

Stop ripping the same things off all the time.

Seriously. Cut it out. We’ve all played Puzzle Bobble. We’ve all played Bejeweled. Stop trying to make out your puzzle game is new and innovative when, in fact, it is simply either Puzzle Bobble or Bejeweled (or, in a few cases, Jawbreaker).

If you must draw inspiration from past titles, that’s fine; just stop drawing inspiration from such a small pool. Just in the puzzle game genre there are hundreds of great games begging for a social adaptation — Columns, Klax, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Puzzle League, Dr Mario, Baku Baku Animal… I could go on — so why are we constantly subjected to the same “match-3” bollocks over and over?

This isn’t just an issue in the puzzle genre — social RPGs all rip off Mafia Wars; farming sims all rip off FarmVille; citybuilders all rip off CityVille, and none of them were actually that good in the first place.

Stop ripping yourself off.

If you already have a match-3 puzzle game in your portfolio, you don’t need another one. King, currently the biggest social game company in the world thanks to the aforementioned Candy Crush Saga, is terrible for this. Now that Candy Crush Saga is the top performing game on Facebook, they’ve put out another game. What kind of game do you think that is? That’s right; a game where you swap coloured things around to make groups of 3 in horizontal or vertical lines. Only this time they’re fruit and vegetables!

Or how about Kabam, who have now released the exact same game with slightly different graphics and a different name four times (Kingdoms of Camelot, Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North, Arcane Empires, The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth) and no-one (except me) has called them on it.

The fact that people buy into this is just depressing.

Hire some fucking writers.

Quite a few social games these days are very well presented, with quality graphics and decent sound and music. In many cases, they actually create quite an impressive atmosphere… until the player is asked to read anything and it becomes very apparent that the “plot” of the game, such as it is, was written by a dyslexic Russian 10-year old who had just played Magic: The Gathering for the first time.

Good writing is just as important as the more immediate parts of your game’s presentation. Don’t skimp on it. And even if you’re not going for an epic plot in your game — incidentally, puzzle games do not need plots, so just stop trying to cram one in — at least get someone to proofread the in-game text, fix any typos and glaring grammatical errors… and make sure if you’re releasing it in English-speaking territories that all of the game’s text is actually in fucking English.

A shout-out to 5th Planet Games here, who actually make an effort with this sort of thing, even if the gameplay of the games sometimes isn’t up to much; Legacy of a Thousand Suns may be a Mafia Wars ripoff in terms of gameplay, but at least it has some consistently well-written story text throughout, unlike Mafia Wars, which didn’t even try in this regard.

Stop using outdated tech.

Adobe is winding down Flash support, so it’s time for Web-based games to do the same. Relying on Flash means that you limit yourself to those using a computer that supports Flash, and excludes those on tablets and mobile phones. There are a ton of cross-platform solutions available now that allow you to deploy an app on the Web, mobile platforms and as a standalone PC, Mac or Linux executable, so there’s really very little excuse for not using one.

Not only that, but your average computer these days is more than capable of dealing with some simple 3D graphics — in fact, most are more than capable of handling decent-quality 3D graphics. Unity is a solid option that makes porting between platforms a snap; use it.

Stop using stupid, inappropriate aesthetics.

This is what the artwork for the CSI Miami Facebook game looks like:

This is a screenshot from the official House M.D. Facebook game, developed by the same team:

And this is what a zombie looks like in the Walking Dead social game:

I don’t think I really need to say anything else on that note.

If it doesn’t belong in the game, don’t put it in the game.

You want to keep your players coming back day after day? Don’t shoehorn in a stupid roulette game that makes absolutely no thematic sense whatsoever; instead, simply make a good game that people will want to keep playing.

Stop assuming I’m an idiot.

“Core” gamers have played games before. They don’t need your tutorial to unfold over the course of the first 20 levels of your puzzle game. Make it brief, and make it skippable.

Along the same lines, it’s okay to tell someone to do something and then not put a gigantic flashing arrow over the top of it and simultaneously darken the rest of the screen, just in case they missed the gigantic flashing arrow. Allow the player to experiment and discover things for themselves rather than pointing every single thing out to them. At the same time, provide a detailed Help file and/or tooltip system so that they can look things up if they aren’t clear.

On a slightly different but related note, it’s okay for games to be complex. Again, “core” gamers have played games before and are okay with complex mechanics. Important note: “complex” is not the same as “boring”. Kabam and anyone else making “midcore strategy games”, please learn this.

Make it so fun I want to pay, not so inconvenient I have to pay.

This is the biggie. Monetisation is the biggest challenge in free-to-play gaming in general, and particularly in mobile and social games, which often attract huge audiences but relatively tiny proportions of paying customers.

“Core” gamers do not like feeling nickel and dimed. Look at the negative response to stuff like Dead Space 3, or Real Racing 3 — both of which, not coincidentally, are by EA.

“Core” gamers also do not like having their time wasted. This does not mean that they will pay to bypass wait timers in your game; it means they will simply stop playing.

Provide “core” gamers with stuff they can buy that improves their experience, but which doesn’t break the game. Throw out that stupid energy system — a “core” gamer will stop playing when they’re good and ready, not when you tell them to stop. Throw out that “it takes three hours of real time to harvest your crops” bullshit — if you explicitly send them away, they won’t come back. Instead provide them with cool stuff that they want to show off — new outfits for their character, new paint jobs for their car, new background music or even whole new levels or areas to explore. If you want a good example of how to do it right, look at stuff like DC Universe Online and Perfect World’s free-to-play MMOs — all are satisfying to play for free, but all offer a ton of non-game-breaking benefits to those willing to pony up and buy some premium currency.

Talking of which…

Quit the “pay to win” crap.

“Core” gamers complain. A lot. Particularly when they believe that a game isn’t being fair. They’ll whinge about mages being nerfed, shotguns being OP’d and generally anything else that breaks the game balance. “Core” gamers play a lot of games and are thus very good at spotting when a game is unbalanced to an unfair degree. Do not make your game so that a crap player can buy their way to dominance over a skilled player; make it so the crap player wants to get better at the game. Reward the skilled player with cool stuff and allow the crap player to see all the awesome stuff they could earn if they were just a bit better; but don’t allow them to buy their way to success.

Along the same lines, quit the “Get More Coins” nonsense. Part of the satisfaction of experiences like role-playing games and business sims for “core” gamers is feeling like they’ve struggled against all odds to earn their rewards. The second you allow them to simply purchase all the money in the game world for $50, you devalue those rewards and make them meaningless. You also, again, break the game balance. Instead, pace your game in such a way that the rewards are earned at a good, satisfying rate, and save the paid stuff for purely cosmetic items. If you must use a virtual currency for premium items, make it a completely separate currency that it’s clear can only be acquired through spending money. Keep the “Cash Shop” stuff separate from the normal shop. And for heaven’s sake stop plastering the screen with special offers and other sparkling icons — nothing breaks the atmosphere of your otherwise well-rendered fantasy world quicker than a large flashing icon bellowing about “20% Off Gems!”

____

I accept that many of these things are more difficult to implement than what is being done by many mobile and social games now. But they, among other things that I’ve undoubtedly forgotten — feel free to chime in in the comments — are why “core” gamers do not take mobile and social games seriously.

Court the “core” and you’ll make a lot of money. Continue to alienate them, however, and you’ll always be a big joke to a significant proportion of people who are willing to spend a lot of money on their favourite hobby.

1173: Am I Missing Something?

Yesterday, game-centric social network Raptr reported that in the month of March, its members played more of King’s Candy Crush Saga than StarCraft II, World of Tanks and Halo: Reach (all historically very popular games) combined.

This is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it shows that Raptr is getting some pretty wide usage by more casual gamers as well as those who care about achievements, hour counts and whatnot — demonstrating (arguably) that a lot of people playing Candy Crush Saga are “serious” enough about their gaming to sign up for a game-centric social network and tracking service.

Secondly, it shows something we all know: the vast numbers of people playing Facebook and mobile games far outstrips those who have perhaps grown up with the industry and who play what one might call “traditional” video games — players whom mobile and social gaming companies euphemistically refer to as “core” gamers.

The second point isn’t all that surprising; how many people do you know who don’t have a Facebook account? While we’re not yet in a world where every single person is permanently jacked in to the social network via a transmitter in their spinal column, I’m willing to bet that regardless of your age, there’s probably a large proportion of the people you know who have Facebook accounts, and of those people most of them have probably tried playing some games at least once. The exact same situation is true when we consider smartphone ownership these days — of those who have acquired a new mobile phone recently, it’s highly likely that it was one of the two most well-supported platforms out there: iOS and Android. And of those who haven’t acquired a new mobile phone recently, a lot of people are investigating tablets as a home computer solution — pretty much all of which run, you guessed it, iOS and Android.

It’s the first point that surprises me, though. Raptr is the sort of service that is historically only of interest to those “core” gamers we mentioned earlier, as your average soccer mom who only plays games on Facebook has no real need or desire to keep up with industry happenings or the latest stupid thing that a Microsoft employee has said on social media — let alone how their number of hours played stacks up against their friends. So what does it mean when the number of hours racked up on Candy Crush Saga outstrips some of Raptr’s most heavily-tracked, popular titles?

Well, it could mean one of a couple of things. Firstly, it could mean that Facebook and/or mobile gamers are more serious about tracking their playtime and achievements in the games they play than most people thought. I find this rather difficult to believe, to be honest, as the sort of people who only play Facebook and mobile games are typically playing them as a means to fill a spare few minutes rather than as an engaging form of entertainment that they feel particularly passionate about.

Secondly, it could mean that those “core” gamers out there are playing Facebook and mobile games as well as (apparently, more than) “traditional” computer and console games that are aimed specifically at them? Judging by the notifications that pop up on the Raptr client that runs on my PC, this is much more likely; there are several people on my friends list whom I would describe as “core” gamers by that definition, but who are regularly seen playing everything from FarmVille to Marvel Avengers Alliance and Candy Crush Saga.

One question, though: why?

No, seriously, why?

If you’re a “core” gamer by the popular definition, you’re serious about your interactive entertainment. You might play games instead of (or as much as) watching movies and TV shows. Your exact reasons for playing may vary — those who enjoy Call of Duty play it much like a competitive team sport, while people like me prefer narrative-centric experiences that stimulate similar parts of the brain to movies and TV shows — but the fact is, you’re highly likely to make time for your gaming rather than indulge in it as an idle diversion. You’ll sit down, you’ll play a game for a not-inconsiderable amount of time, then you’ll switch off and do something else. Or pass out with the controller in your sweaty mitts.

So if you’re investing time and probably money into what is, after all, a hobby rather than a mindless pastime, why, dear “core” gamers, aren’t you playing anything better? Don’t get me wrong, Candy Crush Saga has performed so well because it’s a polished product that is pretty accessible even to those who haven’t played many games before, but 1) it’s a Bejeweled ripoff, and Bejeweled 3 (or just Bejeweled as it is called on mobile) is a better game with more variety; 2) it’s rammed to the gills with obnoxious enforced “social” features that don’t actually promote social interaction at all (ask for lives! ask friends to unlock levels! brag about your score!); 3) it’s rammed to its other gills with obnoxious monetization — aside from the fact that every so often you’ll run into a wall where it literally just stops you from playing unless you either wait for several hours or pay money, there’s one powerup in the game that costs £35 and can be used once per level. Thirty-five pounds. Bejeweled 3, which, as previously mentioned, is an infinitely superior game that doesn’t bug you every five fucking seconds to insert coins or invite friends, costs £14.99 — less than half the price of that one powerup in Candy Crush Saga — on Steam (and is regularly reduced in price in sales), and sixty-nine pence on mobile phones.

“But Candy Crush Saga is free to download!” I hear you cry. “Surely people aren’t dimwitted enough to repeatedly spend money on this when they could just buy a copy of Bejeweled outright and then never have to pay again!” Wrong. Candy Crush Saga is, as I write this, the number 1 Top Grossing app on the App Store. Note: “app” not “game”. (It is also the number 1 Top Grossing game, but that shouldn’t be surprising given its other position.)

Let me reiterate that. Candy Crush Saga, which is free to download, is making more money than apps that cost money. By a significant margin. It is making more money than high-quality productivity apps for professionals, which typically carry a relatively hefty price tag. It is making more money than high-quality “pay once, play forever” games. It is making more money than Bejeweled, which is basically the same fucking game for the price of a packet of Chewits. It is making more money than anything else on the App Store.

It is at this point I throw my hands up and say I absolutely do not understand why this is the case. It absolutely boggles my mind, because I can see why I wouldn’t want to repeatedly and indefinitely churn money into a game that isn’t noticeably better than another game I’ve already paid for once (Bejeweled), so why can’t these hundreds, thousands, millions of other people? It does not make any sense whatsoever. And this isn’t even considering the question above of why on Earth “core” gamers are apparently playing this game so much when there is so much other good stuff out there — too much for one games enthusiast to ever hope to fit into one lifetime, even if they became hikikomori in order to try and do so.

I am so, so torn about this sort of thing, and have been for a while now. On the one hand, it’s great that more and more people are embracing video games as a pastime, form of entertainment or even hobby. On the other, the swathes of people who are coming to gaming as a result of free-to-play mobile and social games are perpetuating a business model that, while immensely profitable, is not particularly friendly to the consumer and is actually quite unsafe to people who don’t keep a tight rein on their finances. More people playing games? Good. Sending the message that charging £35 for one powerup is okay? Very, very bad.

1109: Killachine

Another day, another article declaring the console will be “dead” before we know it. Lots of people — mostly analysts and business-savvy people who work in the mobile and social sectors — have been saying things like this recently, so it must be true, right?

Nah. ‘Tis bollocks, as usual. While it’s impossible to deny the huge impact that mobile devices have had on bringing the concept of playing games to the masses — the actually-not-all-that-good Temple Run 2 recently surpassed a whopping 50 million downloads — to say that they are going to “kill” consoles and/or dedicated gaming handhelds is, frankly, ridiculous.

Why? Because they cater to completely different markets and tastes. Mobile and social games are, for the most part, designed for players to while away a few minutes while something else is going on — perhaps a lengthy dump, a wait for a bus or a particularly boring meeting with a conveniently-placed table to hide what you’re up to — while computer and console games are, for the most part, designed for players to sit down in front of for a more protracted period of time and immerse themselves in the experience. There are exceptions in both cases, of course — hence the “for the most part” disclaimers — but, on the whole, that’s where we stand. And there’s nothing wrong with either aspect of gaming — they both exist, and they will both more than likely continue to exist.

The word “games” isn’t all that useful any more, in fact, because the medium it describes is now too diverse to be covered by a single word. I can say “I like playing games” and that will mean something completely different to what someone else means when they say it. When I say it, I mean that I like relaxing on my couch with a controller in my hand, staring at the TV and immersing myself in a game with depth, an interesting story, or both. When someone else says it, they might mean that they have three-starred all the levels on Angry Birds, or that they fire up FarmVille during quiet periods in the office, or that they have fifteen Words With Friends games on the go at any one time. These are obviously completely different experiences, though there can be a degree of crossover between the two extremes — there’s nothing to stop someone who, say, is big into competitive League of Legends play also enjoying playing Scramble With Friends against their less gaming-savvy friends and family.

Where we start to get problems is when developers and/or publishers from one group start to try and step across the invisible line into the other group. More often than not, this is seen in the form of mobile and social developers promising a mobile or social experience that will appeal to “core gamers” — in other words, the group that, like me, enjoys immersing themselves in an experience for hours at a time rather than as a throwaway diversion. It is, sadly, abundantly clear that a huge number of developers who try and take this route have absolutely no clue whatsoever how to design a game that will appeal to these players. The article I linked above is from the CEO of a company called Kabam, who specialise in developing a variety of almost-identical “strategy” (and I use the term loosely) games that supposedly appeal to “core” players. All of their games are the same (literally — I tested three side-by-side as an experiment once, and the quests the player was expected to follow were completely identical, right down to the wording) albeit with a slightly different visual aesthetic, and all of them are as dull as ditchwater.

The bewildering thing is that someone, somewhere, is playing these games — and, more to the point, spending money on them — enough to let them be considered a “success”. So more and more of them start appearing, each inevitably following the exact same template, making all the same mistakes and pissing off the same people while somehow convincing the same others that reaching for their credit card is a really, really good idea.

Note that I’m not saying here that mobile, social and/or free-to-play games are inherently bad in and of themselves; it’s that in many of these cases — particularly those that are supposed to be designed to appeal to “core” gamers — they are designed by people with an astonishingly strong sense of business savvy, and a complete lack of understanding in what makes a game actually fun or interesting to play. In other words, the fact that something is financially successful should not be the only criteria for it being considered “good” — you just have to look at Mobage/Cygames’ shockingly awful Rage of Bahamut, one of the top-grossing mobile games in the world, to see how this is the case.

No, the problem that we have is that everything new always has to “kill” something else. This flawed logic has been seen with numerous other technologies in the past; laptops would kill desktops, tablets would kill laptops, TV and video would kill the cinema… the list goes on. In very few cases is it actually true. Okay, DVD killed VHS, but that was a simple case of a superior format doing the same thing rather than two vaguely related — but not identical — things battling it out for supremacy. People still use desktops as well as laptops because big screens are nice and more practical in many circumstances. People still use laptops as well as tablets because typing on a touchscreen is still a horrid experience. People still go to the cinema as well as watching TV or DVD/videos because it’s nice to see something on a huge screen with room-shaking sound.

Why does everything have to be reduced to binaries? Why does something new always have to “kill” something else, even if it clearly isn’t performing the same function? Can’t these people just accept that certain parts of the populace are happy with one thing, and others are happy with another?

Ahh, if only.

#oneaday Day 737: Attack of the Clones

So it seems that Zynga, lords of the social gaming space, are cloning Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower. This isn’t the first time Zynga has ripped off someone else’s game and removed all trace of personality from its visuals, and it certainly won’t be the last. The different this time is that people are actually taking notice, because Tiny Tower, for all its faults — and it has many, that not even its glorious retro pixel art aesthetic can counter — was extremely popular, made Nimblebit a fair amount of money and was even chosen by Apple as its iPhone game of the year.

Zynga’s new game is called Dream Heights and one of the guys from Nimblebit conveniently compared it to his game here. As you can see, it has pretty much all the gameplay of Tiny Tower with none of the visual appeal.

Now, in the mainstream games market, this sort of thing is generally frowned upon quite a bit. For all of the complaining that the big shooter franchises all look very similar, they at least try to differentiate themselves with how they play, the modes they offer and the like. Battlefield 3 offers a very different experience to Call of Duty. I don’t care for either of them, but I can appreciate that each appeals to a different subsection of the audience,

In mobile and social gaming, however, developers and publishers seem to have no such scruples. In my current position writing game reviews for Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, I regularly see games that are almost identical to each other. Most of them follow the FarmVille model to one degree or another — you click on things, there’s a countdown timer before you can click on them again to get a reward, there’s a list of insultingly simple “quests” on the left side of the screen, you get experience points every time you exhale and, generally speaking, the game is designed to be a series of not very well disguised Skinner boxes.

Other popular genres include the growing hidden object genre, where you’re sent into a cluttered room/street/train carriage and tasked with locating lists of completely arbitrary items, with scenes tied together by an often flimsy excuse for a plot. Just in the last couple of weeks, Zynga released Hidden Chronicles on Facebook, only to be followed this week by the almost identical World Mysteries from Brazilian developer Vostu. See, it’s not just Zynga doing it — it goes both ways, too.

Fans of Spry Fox’s fun puzzle game Triple Town on Facebook and Google+ may also want to check out Yeti Town on iOS by the obnoxiously-named 6waves Lolapps. This game has drawn criticism for ripping off Triple Town completely and releasing on iOS before Spry Fox were ready to release their own iOS version of their game. You may argue that Spry Fox should have been quicker off the mark in getting their iOS version to market, but it’s hard to believe that 6waves Lolapps came up with an identical concept (not almost-identical, identical) completely independently of Triple Town.

Independent developer Vlambeer ran into this issue last year when, like Spry Fox, they were beaten to the punch on an iOS game. Gamenauts’ Ninja Fishing hit the App Store shortly before Vlambeer was ready to release its own title Ridiculous Fishing, itself a reimagining-cum-sequel of its earlier Web-based title Radical Fishing. I’m very pleased to see that Vlambeer will be speaking publicly about this debacle at GDC this year.

Where does it end, though? Games are a creative art form and for all these clones to hit the market is to do the medium a disservice. You don’t get books hitting store shelves where an author has simply done a Find and Replace on all the characters’ names from someone else’s work, nor do you get movies which are simply shot-by-shot reconstructions of another movie. We get remakes, sure, but at least those are usually reimagined for a contemporary audience — and they’re being honest about their source material rather than attempting to pass themselves off as a completely new product.

This practice needs to stop. Unfortunately, cloning, it seems, is already an established part of mobile and social game development. In the long term it will only hurt everyone’s business.

So devs? Be bold. Come up with an original idea. Don’t call your game “innovative” if it’s the same as something someone released last week, and the week before, and the week before. Try something new. Break out of established conventions. The most memorable games in the mainstream are the ones which tried something new. The moment we see a successful social game break out of the market’s conventions is the same moment we’ll see people willing to be a bit less cynical and a bit more enthusiastic to see what this burgeoning industry has to offer.

#oneaday Day 690: Tickets, Please!

RememberTheme Park? That awesome sim from Peter Molyneux’s pre-Lionhead studio Bullfrog? Good, wasn’t it? Not only did it have bags of charm and character, but its attractive presentation (albeit with a few grammatical errors — “charity begin’s at home” anyone?) masked an incredibly deep, immensely satisfying business sim.

And the things you could tweak and spy on! You could find out what an individual little person wandering around was thinking. You could adjust the amount of salt on the chips and inflate the prices of the conveniently adjacent drinks stand. There were tons of rides on offer. Even building your queues was a strategic challenge — how do you make them look shorter than they actually are? And when you had a badass park, you could sit back and watch the money roll in, satisfied with the knowledge of a job well done.

Fast forward to this week, and Theme Park has been released on iOS. “Yay!” you may be thinking, eager to sink your teeth into something with more depth than the ubiquitous Tiny Tower. “Finally, a true classic of PC gaming resurrected for the smartphone era!”

It’s not an unreasonable thing to be excited about. Theme Park’s mouse-driven interface would be ideally suited to a touchscreen, particularly a nice big one like an iPad, and the original game itself still holds up well today.

As you may already know, however, the version of Theme Park which has hit iOS is not the original Bullfrog classic. Very far from it, in fact. It’s a brand new game.

No bad thing, you might be thinking. RollerCoaster Tycoon picked up the park management reins a while back and has been doing well since, so why not incorporate some advances in the genre?

Why not indeed. Instead, EA in their infinite wisdom have decided to turn Theme Park into a freemium social game with quite the most outrageously priced premium items I’ve ever seen.

Let’s take the social game angle first. Aesthetically, many social games resemble the isometric 3D strategy games of the late 90s in terms of visual presentation, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Gameplay is generally pretty free of any strategy, instead involving buying the most expensive/best item you can afford/have unlocked, and then clicking on everything you’ve built every few minutes to collect cash and experience points. As you level up, you unlock different items. Occasionally there are incredibly patronising quests to complete. The whole thing is one big Skinner box, designed to get you hooked enough to want to spend money.

Real money can be spent on the acquisition of “Super Tickets”, which can themselves be spent on either speeding up lengthy build times, unlocking rides early or, and here’s the kicker, purchasing some “premium” rides which can only be bought with Tickets. If you’ve played The Sims Social, it’s just like the items that can only be purchased with premium currency SimCash.

So far, so freemium, you might think. But the real kick in the teeth is the price of some of these items. The most expensive rides cost in the region of £35 to purchase. £35. For one virtual item in one not very good game. That’s £35 you could spend on an actual game in a shop. Or a large selection of actual full games on the App Store. You could even purchase several Square Enix titles from the App Store for that, which just goes to show how insanely priced it is.

Fortunately, App Store reviewers, usually imbecilic morons but for once seeing the Emperor in all his nudey glory, have been rightly panning the game for this. Unfortunately, it only takes one “whale” to buy even one of those premium items to make the whole thing worthwhile for EA.

So in short, I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed that such a beloved game franchise is tarnished with this nonsense. And I’m disappointed at the shameless money-grubbing that this title represents.

But am I surprised? Of course I’m not, and that’s perhaps the saddest thing of all.

#oneaday Day 573: The Completely Subjective Guide to the Current State of G+ Games

So you’re on Google+ and you’ve seen with some trepidation that social games have come to the platform. Firstly, fear not, because all the game posts are confined to their own stream that is separate from the day to day social interactions. Said game stream needs some work — you can’t filter it in any way at the moment, for example — but at least it means your conversations aren’t continually interrupted with “HEY! I NEED SOME PAINTBRUSHES! CLICK HERE AND GET FREE GIFTS!” as they are on Facebook. The lack of the “Wall” as a concept on G+ also helps with this — interactions take place in a timeline, like Twitter, but with comments, like Facebook. It’s a good system.

But you want to know about these games, right? Millions of people play Facebook/social games every day and you’ve never dared take the plunge. So here’s a brief look at each of them, gleaned from myself taking a brief look at each of them so you don’t have to. I’m not pretending these are in-depth or even fair reviews, just first impressions from the amount of time an average user might take to decide whether or not to pursue playing a game further.

Angry Birds

You probably know by now whether or not you love or hate Angry Birds and its unpredictable physics model. This is no different from the norm. Well, there is one slight difference: the “teamwork” levels. Don’t get too excited by the prospect of multiplayer action, though — all the “teamwork” aspect is is all your friends’ stars being added together in an attempt to unlock further levels.

Bejeweled Blitz

It’s Bejeweled Blitz, the one-minute twist on traditional Bejeweled play. It features a tournament system and doesn’t hassle you every two minutes to share everything you’ve done. It does feature a completely unnecessary experience point system, however.

Bubble Island

It’s Bust A Move, demonstrating ably the first refuge of an unfortunately large number of unscrupulous social game developers: ripping off someone else’s game and reskinning it. It’s not a bad version of Bust A Move, but the fact it’s a shameless clone is a little grating.

City of Wonder

Clearly trying to be Civilization, right down to ripping off the things the advisors say when they’re suggesting what to research next, this doesn’t have the depth of Meier’s game. If you enjoy building cities without having to worry about pesky geographical principles or simulation elements, then you might like this, otherwise it’s one to give a miss. Weird art style, too.

Crime City

Absolute garbage. A game about crime should be about the thrill and the tension of potentially getting caught; here, it’s about clicking on things and watching progress bars. In essence, it’s Farmville, only with guns. This might sound great, but it’s actually awful. A waste of a potentially rich theme; avoid.

Diamond Dash

A reasonable puzzle game with a simple premise — click groups of 3 or more gems that touch orthogonally to make them disappear. Repeat for one minute. It’s sort of like Bejeweled Blitz but with a different mechanic. There’s a weekly tournament option like PopCap’s classic, but you have to unlock it by levelling up to level 3. Players who play this game more have an unfair advantage by getting automatic score boosts depending on their “experience” level.

Dragon Age Legends

Probably the best of the bunch in that it demands some degree of interaction on the player, and makes use of your friends in an excellent way. Dragon Age Legends is a combat-focused RPG where they player moves from battle to battle, engaging increasingly tough hordes of enemies in turn-based combat with up to two companions initially. The social twist is that these companions are your friends who are also playing the game, complete with the equipment and skills they’ve chosen to outfit them with — essentially a form of asynchronous cooperative multiplayer. For those with no friends, the game also provides a selection of virtual friends for you, too.

While not as deep as a “real” RPG, Dragon Age Legends goes some way to showing that traditional game mechanics don’t necessarily have to be sacrificed for the sake of making the game friendly to the social network audience.

Dragons of Atlantis

This is by “hardcore social games” specialist Kabam, and is one of the most tedious games I’ve ever played, not helped by the fact that the tutorial (disguised as a list of “quests”, as usual) goes on for approximately fifteen bajillion years and steps you through EVERY SINGLE STEP YOU MIGHT HAVE ACTUALLY WANTED TO MAKE YOURSELF ANYWAY with “rewards” along the way. The game is about building your city state and then kicking the shit out of other players, but it will take you a good few hours to get to a stage where you’re able to attack another player — and you may well have been bored shitless prior to that due to the fact that some buildings take 30-60 minutes of real time to build.

Dragons of Atlantis is mildly unusual among social games in that it features a real-time chat interface, though. The community doesn’t know the words “you’re” and “they’re” exist, and there seems to be an awful lot of people trolling for cybersex. There are probably better places to do this than in a public chat window that is two lines of text high in a tedious game about running a city that’s supposedly in Atlantis (I thought Atlantis was a city?). Also there are dragons, apparently.

Edge World

Also from Kabam, this game gets going a bit quicker than Dragons of Atlantis but is fundamentally pretty much the same game, only with a sci-fi skin. It looks like StarCraft but it really isn’t — you have no direct strategic control over your troops when attacking a base, for example.

Wild Ones

It’s Worms, basically, though victory is determined by how much total damage you do, not by who is eliminated first. You have a significantly more limited arsenal than in Team 17’s classic, though.

Unusually for a social game, it offers simultaneous online play. Most of the community appear to have never played Worms before, meaning you can assure victory for yourself by having a slight understanding of physics.

Zynga Poker

A decent implementation of online poker. Not much more to say about that really! As the reviewing cliché goes, if you like poker, you’ll like this.

#oneaday Day 529: You Have a Tiny Tower

Have you played Tiny Tower on iOS? This is one of those games that should be complete shite but actually ends up being strangely compelling.

Why should it be shite? Well, because it incorporates a ton of the features that make Facebook games particularly obnoxious — real-time waits for things to happen, monetization allowing you to “buy victory” in the game and no real strategy or depth.

Despite this, though, Tiny Tower manages to remain addictive, compelling and entertaining, even though your interaction with your little people is limited to restocking floors that have run out of arbitrary products, carrying people in your lift and occasionally playing an impromptu game of Where’s Wally when someone bursts in demanding to know where Tammy Walters is.

A big, big part of the game’s appeal is surely down to its excellent pixel-art graphics. I say “excellent”, but they’re actually pretty primitive, being deliberately lower-resolution than even the older iPhone screens. The graphics are reminiscent of the late 8-bit to early 16-bit era and have a lot of character about them. The little “bitizens” who populate your tower are all based on the same basic model, but the sheer number of hats, moustaches, crazy glasses and whatnot that they walk in wearing makes each and every one of them seem like an individual — particularly once you get some residents staying in your tower and you find out what their names are. Because then not only do you assign them to a job, but you can also spy on their Facebook… sorry, Bitbook page, filled with the sort of vapid inanity that your average Facebook user spouts on a daily basis along with occasional gameplay hints that you don’t really need. (The Mexican restaurant is closed? No shit!)

One of the more appealing things about the game that makes it less obnoxious (though probably less profitable) than anything Zynga has ever put together is the fact that the game’s premium currency of Tower Bux can be earned rather than just bought. Sure, you can pony up some real-life cash to get a wad of Tower Bux to make your life easier, but through actively playing the game and participating in its silly little Where’s Wally challenges you can get a reasonable income of them without having to pay a penny. This is a Good Thing.

Then there’s the fact that you can ogle your friends’ towers at any point, with them organised by order of size, so you can get all frustrated when the person you’ve been several floors ahead of suddenly leapfrogs you.

In short, it’s an excellent example of an iOS game. It’s simple, easy to play, friendly to both long and short play sessions and, best of all, free. So, err, buy it.

#oneaday Day 510: Come Play with Me

Some of you may not be aware that I’ve been writing regular pieces on up-and-coming social games for Inside Social Games. A number of things have become apparent during my ongoing whistle-stop tour of the social gaming space. Firstly, Facebook games are getting better, and secondly, there’s still a lot of work to do.

Here’s a few things that, to my mind, would improve the Facebook gaming experience immensely. I’m not a professional analyst, nor have I done extensive research into online usage habits, so I imagine a man with a beard bigger than mine will probably be able to counter each and every one of these arguments, but anyway. This is my opinion — and some games do one or more of these already, so fair play to them, I say.

Stop copying each other.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when you’re making a game that is mechanically and aesthetically identical to a competitor’s product, you’re not giving a potential player a reason to play your game. Differentiate yourself — and not just by making the game in a different setting. Ripping off two distinct but similar titles does not count either, so if you make a city-building game where you can farm crops, think of something better. Little Cave Hero is a good example — while the city-building mechanics are similar to a million other titles out there, there are extra bits, such as your “factory” structures producing crap that either you or a friend have to clean up, user-generated content, and then the meat of the game — puzzle-based mine exploration.

Stop insisting I “share” everything.

The number one complaint people have about Facebook games is when a player spams their wall (and, in worst cases, other people’s walls) with bollocks about what they’ve just “achieved”. The reason for this is that in the vast majority of social games, completing any mundane task pops up a huge window inviting you to share your “achievement” with friends. In some more extreme cases, the “Share” button is much more obvious than the “No thanks, kindly piss off” button.

Sure, there’s a viral marketing thing at work here — but at least make it optional for people who just want to play the game. Add a Share button, sure, but don’t make it quite so in-your-face. Better yet, add the option for players to switch off notifications like this altogether.

Stop insisting I “give you a five star review”.

By all means solicit user feedback. But to be perfectly honest, many average Facebook users either aren’t that bright, aren’t very computer literate or — in some hopeless cases — are neither. As a result, many of them are apparently incapable of doing anything other than what is written in front of them. Invite them to “write an honest review” rather than “give a five star review” and you might get some honest, if badly-spelled, feedback. Invite them to “give a five star review” and you’ll get lots of five-star reviews, very often with no feedback whatsoever. This not only makes Facebook’s app rating system utterly worthless, it also removes a potential way for players to get their voices heard.

If you want me to Like your page, post something worth following and commenting on.

Screenshots of your game are not interesting — I’ve played it. I know what it looks like. Attempts to engage with the community are interesting. Take a vote on what new quest you should add next, or what character you’d like to see more of. Let the community play a part in the development of the game.

Stop claiming you’re the “first/best/most [something] on Facebook”.

If everyone says it — and they do — no-one believes it. If your game’s good, word will spread, both via the press and word of mouth. The elusive “core gamer” market isn’t going to flock to your Facebook game just because you say it’s built for core gamers.

Give my friends something to do.

Yes, being able to look at a friend’s town is cool. But it’s ultimately pretty meaningless if I can’t interact with anything there. Let us do stuff together. Provide some multiplayer content, or rebalance the single player content for people to play together — perhaps even simultaneously! Diablo did this years ago.

My friends aren’t going to want to play or add me as a neighbour if there’s no real reason to do so.

Don’t break the game with your premium items.

By all means monetize your game — you made it, so you deserve to earn something from it. But don’t make paid-for items into “win buttons”. Also, don’t allow people to buy their way out of quest objectives. Allow players who pay to make quicker progress — perhaps increase their experience gain — or customize their character/city/world to a greater degree, but don’t undermine the game mechanics.

Offer a subscription.

Someone who plays your game regularly will be quite happy to spend a fiver a month to get access to additional features or make quicker progress. Microtransactions can mount up easily without people noticing — good for business, not great for ethics.

Let me fail.

If I fuck something up, give me a consequence. Life isn’t all about happy-happy-joy-joy. Sometimes you get things wrong, in which case I should have some sort of penalty more severe than “wait five minutes and try again”. In city-building games, don’t let me move my buildings. If I built something in the wrong place or planned my city ineffectively, punish me by making me demolish my hard-earned building and spending the time and money to construct it again.

Make the tutorial optional.

Some Facebook gamers need step-by-step help on how to get started. Others have played games — either Facebook or otherwise — before and already know how it works. Offer the opportunity to skip the tutorial — especially if it’s a long and incredibly boring one.

Provide a reference manual.

Perhaps I’ve forgotten what one of your beautifully-designed but obtuse icons does. Perhaps I can’t remember how to do something. Let me look it up.

Let me start again.

Maybe I called my character the wrong thing. Maybe I hate my city and want to build a new one. Let me wipe everything out and start afresh.

Try a different look.

The vector-graphics Farmville look is old hat. Try a different look. This is one of those few instances where it’s actually desirable to have something that’s a bit more dark and gritty than normal. If your Facebook game is based on an established franchise, do try and make it look like other entries in the same franchise. You don’t have to “kiddy it up” for Facebook — grown-ups use Facebook, too.

Ditch game mechanics that don’t belong in a particular genre.

A game about completing wordsearches and crosswords has no place for an experience system. Allow players to unlock new challenges via their progress, not via arbitrarily-issued experience points. Similarly, ditch the Energy system, as it often leads to players being stuck halfway through something and then forgetting what they were doing when they come back to it. If you must control how much people play (and monetize the ability to play more) then find a different way that allows players to complete something before they get locked out.

Provide a meaningful mobile experience.

Create, at the very least, an iPhone and Android-compatible web experience. Ideally, you’d create an app for both iPhone and Android that allows players to participate in your game when they’re on the go. Don’t make a mobile version of your game that has nothing to do with the Facebook version!

Polish your game.

Proofread your text before you release to the public. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors look unprofessional. Make sure the game works and fix it promptly if it doesn’t. Little details like this can make the difference between a popular game and a laughing-stock.

Have some character.

Games are fun! Stop being so po-faced and get a proper writer to inject a bit of wit into your dialogue. If people are made to smile or even laugh by your game — or even be scared or upset by it — then they’re more likely to return for further emotional experiences. If the whole thing is very businesslike and dull, despite a cartoonish appearance, then it’s not going to hold anyone’s interest.

There we go. Some free advice for any of you developing or considering Facebook game development. As I say, I mention all these things with the caveat that I can’t develop games as I don’t have any programming experience. Many of these games are undoubtedly impressive technical, creative achievements. But for them to be taken more seriously by some parts of the community, changes need to be made — but making those changes will not only please those who feel turned off by Facebook games, it’ll also present additional revenue streams for the developers and publishers in question. Everyone’s a winner.