Hey folks,
Thought I’d clear up a couple of things in this thread.
TL;DR: Just covering a few misconceptions about games & F2P (in particular top-grossing lists & trading)
1. You’re not in the top 10/50/150 top-grossing games… OMG! You are losing money and unsuccessful!
That’s actually NOT how the top grossing games work. Note the name: “Top GROSSING Games”.
The F2P business model has 2 parts to the equation:
Part 1 involves INFLOW… that’s the part you hear a lot about - the amount of money a game generates, and some of the numbers for some games are truly impressive. If this is high, you make the Top Grossing Games list.
Part 2 is the OUTFLOW, and the 2 main parts to this are Support Costs and User Acquisition. Support cost is obvious - that’s just how much us devs need to buy pizza, beer, and clean shirts. User Acquisition is often overlooked though. Mobile games acquire players by spending ad money to get clicks and installs. And lot of very high-grossing games churn through their player-base very quickly, hence the need to keep doing more and more acquisition. And it’s EXPENSIVE - think DOLLARS per install!
So, the summary here is some games which are very high-grossing are also spending huge chunks of their income acquiring new users. In fact some games that spike high on the charts might actually LOSE money. The trick is to try and push them up there and hope they stick.
Gems of War is NOT one of these games!
In actual fact, what is MORE important from a long-term perspective is how long players stick around (along with how much a player spends of course… no use hiding the fact… we need to make money!)
In short, why aren’t we up in the top 10/50/150? We don’t spend tons of money advertising. We may do this in the future sometime, but for now we’re content tuning the game to make sure it’s first and foremost a great experience that people want to stick around and play (and we CAN still do much better there, I know!)
2. Trading is the solution
Now I have a very open mind about all potential features of the game, but I am highly sceptical of a Trading feature. Most recent F2P games with collection mechanics, which are successful, (e.g. Hearthstone, Summers War, Puzzle & Dragon, et al.) have been shying away from this feature, because the numbers we’ve seen mark it as too risky to the game economy.
When you look at successful mobile TCG games that use trading, I think you’ll find most of them got into the space early (e.g. Rage of Bahamut), and they were rewarded for being first, rather than for a specific feature.
As a player, I completely understand the desire to trade cards, but I think there might be other ways to scratch that itch (e.g. Hearthstone’s Dust & Crafting system), and we’ll get to them in time. But our main priorities right now are:
- Better PvP
- Better Heroes
- Making Guilds super-exciting