The Pyramid of Game Design

Designing, Producing and Launching Service Games

Nicholas Lovell

• Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429815669
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Game design is changing. The emergence of service games on PC, mobile and console has created new expectations amongst consumers and requires new techniques from game makers.

In The Pyramid of Game Design, Nicholas Lovell identifies and explains the frameworks and techniques you need to deliver fun, profitable games. Using examples of games ranging from modern free-to-play titles to the earliest arcade games, via PC strategy and traditional boxed titles, Lovell shows how game development has evolved, and provides game makers with the tools to evolve with it.

• Harness the Base, Retention and Superfan Layers to create a powerful Core Loop.
• Design the player Session to keep players playing while being respectful of their time.
• Accept that there are few fixed rules: just trade-offs with consequences.
• Adopt Agile and Lean techniques to "learn what you need you learn" quickly
• Use analytics, paired with design skills and player feedback, to improve the fun, engagement and profitability of your games.
• Adapt your marketing techniques to the reality of the service game era
• Consider the ethics of game design in a rapidly changing world.

Lovell shows how service games require all the skills of product game development, and more. He provides a toolset for game makers of all varieties to create fun, profitable games. Filled with practical advice, memorable anecdotes and a wealth of game knowledge, the Pyramid of Game Design is a must-read for all game developers.

Key Features

Harness the Base, Retention and Superfan Layers to create a powerful Core Loop.

Design the player Session to keep players playing while being respectful of their time.

Accept that there are few fixed rules: just trade-offs with consequences.

Adopt Agile and Lean techniques to "learn what you need you learn" quickly.

Use analytics, paired with design skills and player feedback, to improve the fun, engagement and profitability of your games.

Adapt your marketing techniques to the reality of the service game era.

Consider the ethics of game design in a rapidly changing world.

CHAPTER 1

The Pyramid

GAMES ARE CHANGING.

We have vast experience crafting polished, enjoyable and profitable games. Yet people who have worked on those games often struggle to make a successful transition to service games. The tools and frameworks that help to make better boxed games are less helpful when making service games.

The Pyramid of Game Design provides a new framework and new tools to help you make better service games. Better means more fun, more profitable and with less risk. Service games means games that offer compelling, ongoing experiences to players and an ongoing source of revenue for the game makers. That covers free-to-play (F2P), as well as a new generation of AAA games with a product heritage and a service mentality.

WHY IS FREE-TO-PLAY SO DOMINANT IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GAME DESIGN

Free-to-play games have two fundamental advantages over traditional boxed products:

• Widening the funnel: Being free reduces the barrier to entry, increases the potential audience and makes it easier to get people to try your game. Just being free is not enough to get customers, particularly on mobile. Whether you choose to be free or stick with paid, you are competing with free, and you need a plan to win that contest.

• Enabling Superfans: Service games embrace a variable pricing model that enables players who are heavily engaged with your game to spend lots of money on it. This has always been possible. Just think of the thousands of dollars that fans of RuneScape or EVE Online or World of Warcraft have spent on flights, hotels and food when they attend Runefest or FanFest or Blizzcon. The difference now is that the game company, rather than third parties, receives the money from Superfans.

The poster children of the industry are household names that have become billion-dollar franchises. League of Legends has 140 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and generated $1.9 billion in 2016.¹ Supercell generated $1.3 billion from Clash of Clans and $1.2 billion from Clash Royale in 2016, and the studio was acquired by Chinese internet giant Tencent in June 2016 at a valuation of more than $10 billion. Fortnite launched as a free-to-play rival to PUBG and other battle royale-style games and trounced its competition, generating $1 billion in revenue in its first year. Candy Crush Saga had 93 million Daily Active Users (DAUs) and generated $1.5 billion in revenue in 2013, the year before parent company King’s stock market flotation.² King was eventually acquired by Activision Blizzard in November 2015 for $5.9 billion. It’s not just about new companies. Nintendo, Niantic and the Pokémon Company saw phenomenal success with Pokémon Go, which reached the billion-dollar milestone in early 2017.³ Valve has seen success with both free and paid service games like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Established companies have embraced free-to-play, sometimes without the “free” part. Digital distribution has enabled ongoing direct relationships with players, in a way that was impossible—or not cost-effective—in a physical era. Publisher Paradox, the master of grand strategy games, offers dozens of downloadable content (DLC) packs for games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. Blizzard embraced free-to-play with its collectible card game Hearthstone. With a year to go until launch, Blizzard had not decided whether Overwatch was going to be a paid game or a free game, which is why it looks like a free-to-play game that decided at the last minute to charge upfront.⁴

Electronic Arts (EA) has added a component to its FIFA series, FIFA Ultimate Team, in which gamers assemble teams by buying or trading packs of soccer players. EA announced at a Morgan Stanley investor conference in March 2017 that the Ultimate Team addition to its sports franchises generated $800 million a year in revenue. About 75% of gamers who buy EA’s sports games join Ultimate Team and about half spend some money, an impressive lifetime conversion rate in the region of 35%.⁵ That revenue is highly profitable because digital content generates higher margins than physical content. With 30% of EA’s full game sales now in digital form, together with extra digital content, Jorgenson said EA’s gross margins had grown from “the low 50s to now, this year, the low 70s.”⁶

GAAP VERSUS GAAS

GAMES AS A PRODUCT (GAAP) OR PRODUCT GAMES

Traditional PC and console model. Fire-and-forget games that are complete when they launch. The marketing team focuses on a big launch splash and has little ongoing relationship with players. Sales weighted towards the first month.

Examples: The Last of Us, Dear Esther, Grand Theft Auto.

GAMES AS A SERVICE (GAAS) OR SERVICE GAMES

The free-to-play model. Games that are continually developed. Many features not developed at time of release to public. The marketing team focuses on user acquisition over time. Often free, with a variable pricing model such that different players spend different amounts in the game.

Examples: Clash Royale, Gardenscapes, Crossfire, League of Legends.

HYBRID GAMES

The distinction between the two models is blurring. Both sides of the industry are learning and adopting the best, most successful of each other’s techniques. This is not without controversy. Electronic Arts withdrew microtransaction from Star Wars Battlefront II on the day before release following a consumer backlash and an intervention from Star Wars licence owner Disney.⁹

Examples: Destiny, Overwatch, FIFA Ultimate Team.

The new service model has also enabled indies to thrive, whether it is the pixel-art Nimblebit, makers of Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, or PC castle-building specialists Firefly, makers of Stronghold Kingdoms. British developer Lockwood Publishing created social virtual world Avakin Life on mobile. It has 2.5 million MAUs and reached $1 million in monthly revenue in November 2016.⁷ Many of the techniques that service games require are percolating through the games industry. Kickstarter campaigns, open development, Early Access, downloadable content, retention hooks, microtransactions and loot boxes all draw on the two advantages of the digital age: direct access to customers and a variable pricing strategy that allows those who love what you do to spend lots of money on things they really value.⁸

The transition to service games has not been entirely positive. There have been significant casualties, notably studios who make double-AA quality games for console or PC as well as narrative games as a genre. There are ethical considerations to the variable pricing model, and it is my belief that service games will be regulated by government. We will discuss ethical issues throughout the book.

I think F2P is one of the best things that has happened to games. This book will focus on how YOU can make better, more enjoyable, more successful and more profitable games.

PRODUCT VERSUS SERVICE GAMES

The Pyramid and the other tools that I introduce in this book improve both product and service games. They are much more important for service games.

Imagine two different scenarios:

Maria has heard good things about Generic Shooter 3: This Time It’s Personal. Everyone she knows is excited for it, and the pre-order offer looks sweet. She goes to collect it from her local GameStop on launch day and plays it over the weekend. The graphics are amazing, but the gameplay, well, let’s just say that she’s seen it before. By Monday, she’s less enamoured, and over time, the shooter stays un-launched, as Maria returns to Destiny or replays Uncharted for the third time.

Kyle clicked on an ad and downloaded Generic Farming Simulator 3. It’s a litany of “press here, click there” instructions, littered with large green arrows to indicate each interaction he must complete to level up, to harvest his crops and to buy new agricultural machinery. The game is well crafted and keeps him playing for a few sessions of half an hour each, but his interest wanes and, before long, he is no longer playing it. It lasts another week before he deletes it from his phone.

The scenarios seem similar, but there is a fundamental difference. Maria paid $60 for her pre-ordered copy of Generic Shooter 3. The retailer, the publisher and the developer all received revenue from her, even though she didn’t enjoy the game much and stopped playing after a few hours. Kyle also didn’t enjoy the game much and quit after a few hours as well. No-one made any money from Kyle. He was able to try out—and, in this case, reject—the game without any money changing hands.

FREE-TO-PLAY IS NOT SHAREWARE OR A DEMO

DEMO

Play part of the game to experience what it is like. Demos are often stand-alone: no progress is carried on from the demo into the game if you choose to buy it.

SHAREWARE

Popularised by Apogee Software in the early 1990s and how the first copies of Doom were distributed. Players can play the initial experience, often with lots of content, for free, but must pay to unlock the rest of the game. Progress is carried over from the free content into the paid content. For example, Doom consisted of three episodes when it was launched on December 10, 1993. Within five months, the first, free episode had been downloaded 1.3 million times and developer id Software was raking in $100,000 per day from players paying to get the remaining two episodes.¹⁰

FREE-TO-PLAY

In a free-to-play game, players can play the entire game for ever without spending money. In contrast to a demo or the shareware model, there is not an abrupt “pay up or stop playing temporarily” moment. Some F2P games monetise aggressively with paywalls demanding that players pay now or leave, but almost all let players come back after a while and resume playing.

Demo and shareware models are free trials of a product game. Service games are not a free trial; they are the game, and rarely slam down an impassable paywall.

Service game makers have no choice but to keep their players engaged in the game if they want to become a commercial success. They can’t rely on pre-order campaigns, on vast marketing budgets or on popular licences to drive revenue. For a service game, those techniques can only drive downloads. The game itself must be good enough to keep users playing for a long time and for some of those users to turn into payers.

The techniques these games use vary, from being awesomely fun like Crossy Road to being shamelessly manipulative like Pirate Kings. Service games put “keep players playing” at the top of their to-do list, whereas product games put “make players want to buy it” at the top of theirs. Product games have lengthy marketing-driven feature lists (multiplayer Tomb Raider or that level where you jump from jeep to truck to jeep again in Uncharted 2) that bloat the budget, but fulfil some need—real or imaginary—to make the gaming public and the gaming press pay attention to the game.

The evolution of the industry also explains the demise of a staple of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Author
• CHAPTER 1 ▪ THE PYRAMID
• CHAPTER 2 ▪ THE BASE LAYER
• CHAPTER 3 ▪ THE RETENTION LAYER
• CHAPTER 4 ▪ THE CORE LOOP AND THE GEARBOX
• CHAPTER 5 ▪ THE SESSION AND THE ON-RAMP
• CHAPTER 6 ▪ The Session: Playtime, the Off-Ramp and Return Hook
• CHAPTER 7 ▪ THE SUPERFAN LAYER
• CHAPTER 8 ▪ WHAT WILL PEOPLE PAY FOR?
• CHAPTER 9 ▪ PRODUCTION-CENTRIC VERSUS DESIGN-CENTRIC
• CHAPTER 10 ▪ HOW TO DEVELOP A SERVICE GAME
• CHAPTER 11 ▪ HOW TO PROTOTYPE AND WHEN TO PIVOT
• CHAPTER 12 ▪ PRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 13 ▪ MANAGING CREATIVITY
• CHAPTER 14 ▪ MARKETING YOUR LAUNCH
• CHAPTER 15 ▪ METRICS
• CHAPTER 16 ▪ ETHICS
• CHAPTER 17 ▪ THE PYRAMID OF GAME DESIGN AFTERWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• GLOSSARY
• ENDNOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• SOFTOGRAPHY
• INDEX