Remember Dungeon Keeper? No, not that one, the other one. You know, the one that was universally derided on release as an unrepentant cash grab, a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing free-to-play catastrophe hiding behind a beloved license? The one that was so universally hated that it forced EA’s own CEO to disown it?

Well, if you’re easily shocked, prepare to reach for your pearls because EA has once again revived a beloved PC franchise as a mobile game. This time, the beneficiary (victim?) of EA’s growing interest in mobile is the venerable SimCity franchise with SimCity BuildIt (iOS/Android). True to form, the haters were out in full-force upon the game’s worldwide release, peppering it with one-star reviews and ripping into the game for its over-reliance on micro-transactions and timers to engage users and monetize. The difference this time is that the community’s anger is misplaced. Beneath the SimCity veneer is a surprisingly thoughtful mobile experience, a game that is cognizant of mobile best practices for retention and monetization but not beholden to them. The game breaks new ground by being faithful to well-worn SimCity tropes while refreshing the game’s mechanics for a mobile-first design.

It's also very pretty. That’s not to say the game does everything right. Beyond its best-in-class core loop and impressive short-term progression, the game doesn’t offer much to keep players engaged for the medium- and long-term, leaving its long-term prospects in doubt. The game is also surprisingly light on social, especially coming from a company like EA that long ago embraced the power of community-driven engagement.

Those points aside, the teams at EA and Track Twenty have accomplished something remarkable – they’ve created a good mobile port, both in terms of quality and KPIs, of a significant PC franchise. Purists hate it, but the purists were going to hate it regardless. Just this once, they might be better served to focus their energy elsewhere.

Core Loop

Remember RCI? BuildIt’s developers sure do, and they’ve integrated these classic SimCity zones into the core loop in a way that will feel familiar to fans of the IP while incorporating best practices from other free-to-play games. Industrial zones – factories in BuildIt’s parlance – take time to produce basic goods.

Each one has a limited number of production slots, so the player has to return often to continue to collect goods and re-start production, driving sessions played per day. Commercial zones take the materials generated from factories and – after a period of time – craft them into finished goods. Building and upgrading residential zones consume both basic and finished goods and convert them into coins and XP. Over time, the XP causes the player to level up, earning her the ability to build new factories and commercial buildings. Purchasing these new buildings costs coins, which acts as the sink that closes the loop.

If BuildIt’s core loop seems suspiciously familiar it’s because the game liberally borrows best practices from the builder genre’s best games, most notably Hay Day. The goal of both loops is the same – converting time into currency – and comparing the games’ core loop steps against each other reveals a one-to-one mapping. Factories serve the same purpose as Hay Day’s crop plots, while commercial buildings stand in for Hay Day’s mix of animals and crafting stations. Residential buildings are BuildIt’s version of Hay Day’s order board, sinking materials and generating coins. And, like in Hay Day, the player must reinvest that hard-earned currency in manufacturing capacity in order to continue to grow and progress.

SimCity's core loop bears a striking resemblance to Hay Day. If you’re going to borrow, borrow from the best. Even at a quick glance, there can be no doubt that SimCity’s core loop is heavily influenced by Hay Day. That said, while it’s very easy to copy in mobile games, it’s often incredibly difficult to internalize what makes a system work and make it your own. In this regard, SimCity’s core loop is a grand achievement: it takes what works about the best in its genre and maps it perfectly to a fiction players have come to expect from SimCity.

Retention

As we’ve seen from previous deconstructs, the core loop is only the first step in the player’s progression. If a game doesn’t nail every tier of progression from the long-term aspiration all the way down to the core loop, it puts its retention and business potential at risk. Not only does SimCity BuildIt nail its short-term progression, it does so in a way that paves new ground (pun intended!) for the genre while staying true to the SimCity brand. On the other hand, when compared to the game’s rock-solid short-term play, the game’s medium-term goals and long-term aspiration feel uninspired. For these reasons, it is likely SimCity BuildIt has strong early (D1-D7) retention building to lackluster medium- (D14) and long-term (D30+) metrics as players get frustrated by the game’s mechanics and lose focus on the game’s murky elder progression.

Progression

Let’s use the framework introduced in the Kim Kardashian deconstruct to evaluate SimCity BuildIt’s progression:

• In this game, I: produce goods to build residences and earn coins
• To: Grow my population and level up
• That helps me: Unlock specializations and build specialization buildings
• That lets me:  Maximize my population

We’ll tackle each of these in the subsequent sections, but one thing that immediately jumps out as suspicious – especially if you’ve spent time with the Kim Kardashian deconstruct – is the long-term aspiration’s weakness. Compare “Maximize my population” to an aspiration statement like “Be the #1 celebrity on the A-List” and the difference is immediately clear. “Maximize my population” just isn’t as compelling an aspiration statement, full stop. As we’ll see, SimCity’s powerful core-loop and compelling short-term progression are undone by the lack of focus on the game’s medium-term goals and long-term aspiration.

Core Loop

SimCity BuildIt leverages many best-in-class mechanics from the builder genre in its core loop. While we’ve already covered these in detail in the prior section, there is another set of features that support the core loop. The goal of these features is to drive the player to engage with the game across multiple sessions per day while keeping the game economies balanced and slowing the player’s content progression. Many of these features are common to this type of free-to-play game, but this site hasn’t described them in detail in prior deconstructs. Let’s take a look at a few of them individually below.

Timers

The timers on SimCity BuildIt’s material production are the key drivers of the game’s core loop engagement. These timers require the player to return multiple times per day and days per week to collect materials and re-start production. Only then can the player make progress on the game’s short-term goals.

Typically, games in this genre have three different tiers of resource production timers with three distinct goals:

• Short (<3 minutes):   the goal of these timers is to extend the length of the player’s session by allowing her to go through multiple rounds of production before exiting out of the game
• Medium (10 minutes - 30 minutes):  the goal of these timers is to drive the player to play multiple sessions per day, returning to the game to harvest resources and reset production timers
• Long (>2 hours):  these timers typically have two goals:
  • Give the player a reason to return to the game tomorrow, driving next-day retention
  • Give the player a reason to upgrade her means of production in order to meet escalating resource needs, since these timers consume the means of production for a long period of time

Sure enough, SimCity BuildIt’s basic resources correspond to these tiers exactly:

Basic goods production for the first 20 levels. One other thing worth noting in the image above is how the resource creation timers correlate with the user’s level. Games in this genre employ a strategy for unlocking these materials that serves to encourage the player to play longer sessions earlier in the game’s progression. The first few resources unlocked in the game – often including crafted resources – fall into the “Short” timer category. This is done to guarantee that the player’s first few sessions are longer – often 30 minutes or more – and convey a sense of brisk progress. Over time, lengthening timers and increasing resource requirements should lower the number of core loop completions per session. Where early in the progression the player can complete the core loop multiple times in a single session, as the player progresses that number declines, and eventually the player completes less than one loop per session.

These long early sessions are meant to create a growing sense that the player has an investment in the game. Every successful completion of the core loop should strengthen this sense until, over time, the investment should slowly transform into an obligation to return. The player should feel like not tending to her citizens’ needs is the equivalent of neglecting a family member! The art of core loop tuning lies in creating that obligation by figuring out when to make the shift to more, shorter sessions while optimizing for retention and monetization.

Typical session progression driven by timer expansion. As you might expect, SimCity’s resource progression neatly follows these guidelines. In the early levels, the player only has access to materials with timers lower than five minutes. Five minutes – the timer on nails, the first crafted item – is a little on the long side, but a well-tuned early progression will allow the player to make other progress while waiting for those first crafted materials to finish. From there, the game slowly increases the length of timers to drive players to play more, shorter sessions per day. In order to play and make progress more quickly, the player has to pay real money.

Whether a game is successful at the art of generating obligation is dictated by the game’s performance, and the early results look promising for SimCity.

Crafting Queues

One other very common feature of builder-style games is the crafting queue. Unlike factories that can produce as many basic goods as there are available slots, commercial buildings can only produce one finished good at a time. The player may, however, “queue” additional finished goods in the additional available slots. While the player is away from the game, the commercial building will execute on all the items in the queue in order, so when she returns to the game any queued items will be completed.

Unlike Industrial buildings, commercial buildings execute one craft at a time.

Like the timers section above, crafting queues exist to manage the number of sessions per day the game asks the player to play. When placed, crafting buildings have a small number of queue slots (in SimCity that number is two). The player is therefore forced to return to the game frequently to collect finished goods and restart production, thereby maximize her city’s output.

Of course, longer queues mean the player can spend more time away from the game. In many games – SimCity included – the ability to stay away from the game for long periods of time while making progress is a right purchasable with premium currency, or SimCash. You might assume that would rule out the vast majority of the game’s installs from ever experiencing the joy of longer production queues, but take a look at the screenshot below and see if you notice anything interesting:

New slots are cheap!

Eight SimCash seems like a steal for another queue slot, especially when 250 SimCash (the smallest package) costs just $4.99. At that price, it’s less than a quarter for that first queue slot – a tiny amount of money for a permanent boost in free-to-play games. Turns out, even though most if not all players end up upgrading their commercial buildings by adding new slots, very few players actually end up spending real money to purchase the additional capacity.

The reason for this is granted premium currency. Over time, the player accumulates free SimCash by completing achievements, surfaced in SimCity in the game’s Mayor’s Mansion.

Achievements reward long-term engagement with SimCash

Most players – especially non-paying players – are wise enough to invest that currency in permanent increases in production capacity (i.e., they aren’t using free SimCash on temporary boosts or resources). In SimCity, the most visible (and affordable) permanent SimCash items are the commercial buildings’ production queues.

The game is, in fact, designed around the assumption that players will pour free SimCash into new crafting slots. The reasons why it’s in the game’s best interests for players to have more queue slots over time are threefold:

• Retention last resort – filling a production queue sets a timer farther in the future (often three hours or more) than basic goods crafting, allowing the game one more shot to send the player a notification to return and collect her finished goods
• Managing player fatigue – as mentioned in the section above, player fatigue can become a major issue if the game doesn’t manage the transition from frequent, long sessions to fewer, short sessions well. Queues help manage player fatigue by encouraging the player to spread out sessions to avoid burning out 
• Slowing content progression – players that leverage crafting queues can actually progress slower than players that don’t, because they’re away from the game for longer periods at a time. Most residences require a mix of short timer and long timer items, and waiting for a full queue to complete means the player is in the game less often generating those short-timer resources. Queues help slow the player’s progression in a way that makes the game’s content last longer, allowing the developers longer periods between game updates

A longer crafting queue allows more time away from the game

Allowing the player to take more time away from the game reduces long-term fatigue and slows player progress, while also setting a timer of last resort to encourage them to offer one final chance to coax them to return to the game. Thus, crafting queues are an important part of the expansion of SimCity’s core loop.

Inventory

Perhaps the genre’s most hated feature, inventory systems are also among the most crucial to a free-to-play game’s success. It’s natural that players would hate inventory systems – they’re a limitation on the ability to freely play and enjoy the game. Inventory systems place a cap on the number of resources a player can have in her possession at a given time. Every so often, players bump against this cap and have to stop playing and make a decision of which resources to sell or exchange for progress. It’s the virtual equivalent of cleaning your house.

Of course, developers wouldn’t add inventory systems if they weren’t an absolute necessity and, in fact, they are of critical importance to a free-to-play game’s success for a number of reasons:

• Drive long-term core loop engagement – without inventory caps, the player could stockpile massive amounts of goods to last for weeks if not months of play. During that period, the player wouldn’t need to engage with the core loop to make progress in the game 
• Drive sessions played per day – without inventory caps, the player could play incredibly long sessions focused on accumulating large amounts of basic resources. Then she would no longer need to play multiple sessions per day to fill her crafting queues and make progress in the game 
• Simplify elder game and cadence feature tuning – if the developers know the maximum inventory capacity a player has (as opposed to the number of a particular resource in an elder player’s inventory), they are able to tune elder and cadence features more effectively to maximize for engagement and monetization
• Act as a payer conversion opportunity – the player’s inventory can be expanded to add more capacity, offering another opportunity to convert a player into a paying user

Without inventory limits, players could stockpile enough basic and finished goods to disengage from the game for long periods of time while still completing all the content the game has to offer. Thus, inventory systems are critical to controlling player progress while maintaining a high level of sessions per day engagement for the long-term.

NPCs

What happens when the player bumps up against a game’s inventory cap? In games with hard inventory caps, players need a way to dump (or “vendor” in MMO terms) goods to clear inventory capacity. Obviously, the preferred way to clear inventory space is continued investment in the game’s progression (in SimCity, by building or upgrading a residential building), but for a variety of reasons that’s not always possible. For example, maybe a player accidentally collected resources in the wrong order, leaving her with an insufficient amount of goods to upgrade a building while stuck at the inventory cap.

In SimCity (and Hay Day and other games of this type), NPCs provide this service. Every so often, a thought bubble appears above a building in the player’s city. Tapping the button reveals an offer from the NPC to purchase some amount of the player’s inventory items. The player has the option to accept or decline the offer, or wait (in the event that she doesn’t yet have enough of the requested resource, or hasn’t decided what to dump).

NPCs help clear inventory space while generating coins, so not a total loss

Obviously, the other option is for the game to allow players to delete items from their inventories, but that forces the player to have to make a bad decision and lose hard-earned resources and progress. By allowing players to “vendor” low value goods, the player can feel like she’s making progress – by earning coins for her goods – while also freeing up space to continue along the game’s progression.

Coin Collection

One other mechanic borrowed from another successful free-to-play game is SimCity BuildIt’s City Hall. The building accumulates coins in a fashion similar to Clash of Clans’s resource buildings. The player doesn’t have to do any work – the City Hall building simply accumulates coins. When the player comes into the game, she can tap the City Hall building to claim the coins.

Tap that City Hall to collect those coins!

Features like this act as a “timer of last resort” of sorts. The player can come into the game at any time and claim whatever coins have accumulated to that point, but if the player doesn’t come back often enough the building reaches its “capacity” to hold coins. Once it reaches that point, it will no longer accumulate coins until the player returns to the game. The risk of lost progress can often drive players to return at least as often as the building hits capacity.

As the chart above shows, after twenty-four hours have elapsed the player stops accumulating coins in her City Hall. Thus, she must return at least once per day to play the game optimally. Conveniently, the game generates a notification when this timer has nearly elapsed to remind the player to return and claim her coins.

In this way, the City Hall building acts as a driver of daily retention, to ensure the player must return at least once per day to play the game optimally.

Short-Term Progression

Games in the builder genre typically have a very simple and straightforward short-term progression. Players earn currency by completing the core loop and use that currency to invest in production capacity. 

The game reinforces that continued investment by asking the player for new resources, gating progress for players that haven’t yet unlocked the latest crafting building. Ultimately, though, it’s all about consuming earned soft currency in exchange for progress toward unlocking the next milestone.

Hay Day is a classic example of this progression. In Hay Day and its countless imitators, players complete orders to earn currency and XP, then use that currency to purchase new crafting stations (animals or buildings) that are unlocked by XP. In that game, the crafting stations are the milestones that mark the player’s progression through the game, and seeing a new building or animal on the horizon – combined with a sprinkling of achievements – drives the player to stay engaged with the game.

Hay Day's short-term progression is content-driven

SimCity innovates on this model in a way that will be instantly familiar to fans of the series while providing much-needed variety in the free-to-play builder genre. The goal of the short-term progression is to keep your Sims happy so they don’t move out – decreasing population – and continue upgrading their residences – increasing population. Ultimately, as with other games in the genre, the method for doing this comes down to exchanging currency for progress.

Keeping your Sims happy is the key to growing your population

In SimCity, though, the “what” you’re trading for mimics the pushback mechanics that have been a series hallmark for decades.

Pushback

Progress in SimCity BuildIt takes two forms, both of which consume resources to grow the player’s population and grant XP and coins. The player’s first option is to “build out” by placing and consuming resources to complete a new residential building.

The second option is to “build up”, exchanging resources to upgrade an existing residential building.

The game’s genius lies in its implementation of systems to constrain the player’s ability to grow her population. The game’s pushback mechanics take three forms, each conspiring with the others to force the player to think strategically about growth and city layout in a way that cannot be matched by other games.

Building Out

Early in the game, the player’s primary method for growing the population is to place and build new residential zones. To constrain the player’s ability to add new residents by placing new zones, the game has four different city services – Power, Sewage, Water, and Trash – that correspond to residents’ needs.

 Services like waste management force the player to spend coins to keep building out

Each of these services has a maximum building capacity, and adding new buildings fills that capacity. Once the cap is exceeded, these needs are no longer met for newly added buildings and the residents might move out, decreasing the player’s population. Only by increasing the city’s capacity to provide these services – by spending coins to purchase new service buildings – can the player restore her population to its maximum possible level.

Building Up

So if the player is constrained on building out, then she’s naturally going to focus all her efforts on building up to avoid spending hard-earned coins on service buildings. Well, SimCity’s developers thought of this and added another pushback mechanism – traffic – to combat this exact strategy. As the player places more high-population buildings along the same road, that road’s traffic becomes more and more congested and the citizen’s will complain.

Traffic keeps players from building up without spending coins

Once again, if the roads aren’t upgraded, the citizens will eventually move out and the player’s population will decline. The player’s only recourse? You guessed it – spending coins to add lanes to the roads, reducing the congestion and allowing the citizens to move back in.

Spread Out

As we’ve seen, SimCity BuildIt constrains the player’s ability to add new residences and upgrade those residences in close proximity. The smart player, therefore, might employ a slightly modified strategy – limit the number of buildings on the game board, but place them all over the map in order to avoid hitting the traffic congestion threshold. In what may not come as a surprise, the developers thought of this strategy as well, and introduced still another set of three services – Fire, Police, and Health – that constrain the player’s ability to spread residences out on the board. These three systems use area effects to force players to place residences in close proximity to one another. The player must place residences in proximity to a service building – for example, a fire station – in order for the residences to be “protected” by that building.

Police protection area effect, with one building outside the protection sphere

If the residences are placed outside of the service building’s protective bubble, the residents will complain and ultimately move out. As the player’s base of residences grows, she will need to continue to build new service buildings using coins to ensure coverage for all residents, maximizing population. Larger and more expensive service buildings cover a larger area, so the player can strategize the cost versus benefit of spending more coins less frequently. 

Constraining Space

Even with all these systems in place, the player will eventually master the pushback and grow her population. To further constrain the player, the game employs one additional pushback system – Pollution – and standard free-to-play expansions. Pollution works like an inverse area of effect service – there’s a radius around industrial buildings and some service buildings in which residences are “polluted”. Polluted sims are much more likely to move out, decreasing the player’s population and slowing progression, than non-polluted sims.

As the city grows, pollution forces players to either upgrade factories to pollute less or expand

Like the above, there are two ways to combat this pushback mechanic. First, the player can – you guessed it – spend coins to purchase more advanced factories and service buildings with smaller pollution radii (eventually, the radius for many polluting buildings becomes zero). Second, the player can expand her city to open up more territory. 

Expansions open up more land

Expansions require special items earned from happy citizens by tapping on their thought bubbles during a game session. Occasionally, tapping these bubbles rewards the player with an expansion item (or, later, a disaster item).

Tap that thought bubble and see what happens!

Tying It All Together

All these pushback systems seem interesting in isolation, and may have made the game monetize at a higher rate than some competitors in a vacuum, but one inspired design choice caused them to be integral both to the game progression and the player’s strategy. That decision was to tie the generation of coins and XP to building and upgrading residential buildings.

BuildIt's short-term progression loop

The simple act of earning coins in SimCity BuildIt will eventually require the player to make strategic decisions about how to combat these pushback mechanics in order to maintain Sim happiness and population. This ensures that there are a sufficient number of sinks in the player’s early progression that she must stay engaged with the core loop, playing multiple sessions per day, in order to grow her population. In addition, that moment of surprise when an upgrade triggers a warning on one of the game’s HUD elements might just be enough to push a player to spend real money to upgrade a road or purchase a new sewage facility.

 No time to celebrate - that new residence just exceeded the sewage cap!

This one design decision – tying coins and XP to the act of building or improving residential buildings – makes the whole system work!

Summarizing

If it feels like the developers have thought of everything, they have! At first glance, this may seem like a lot of systems for the player to need to manage at one time, but the game does a remarkable job of rolling these systems out at a cadence that doesn’t make it feel overwhelming. There are a few significant benefits to having so many systems in the game, especially if they’re well integrated into the fiction:

• Small investments at every level – the player always feels a need to sink a little bit of currency on expanding or improving a service as she progresses through the game (similar to Hay Day's drip of inexpensive animals)
• Big investments on a reliable cadence – every few levels, the game can dump a huge challenge on the player – spend hundreds of thousands of coins to provide hospital coverage for your entire city, for example – to drive a boost in sessions played per day and increase buyer conversion as players scramble to restore happiness to the city (similar to Hay Day's expensive crafting stations)

Unlocking new services means a huge investment, driving sessions per day and increased payer conversion

• Meaningful strategy for the player – the player actually feels like she is making strategic decisions about where and how to deploy resources, and not just following a script, which can lead to higher engagement
• Dynamic city – one major problem with most decorating-focused city building games is that once a neighborhood has been laid out, the player almost never touches it again, leaving large parts of the board essentially unplayable. SimCity actively encourages the player to re-zone old neighborhoods to maximize resources and increase population 

These factors all contribute to a short-term game progression that feels hugely rewarding and dynamic to the player, while resting on rock-solid free-to-play retention and monetization fundamentals. In particular, the last two factors really break new ground for the city building genre. Ultimately, the short-term progression of SimCity and all other games in the genre is the same – spend coins to upgrade capacity and continue to progress – but SimCity’s designers have internalized what makes the game special and created a system that really fits with the fiction.  

Other games have incorporated area effects and other mechanics to drive player strategy, but not in a way that materially impacts gameplay like they do in SimCity. They make this feel like a true SimCity game instead of a standard free-to-play cash-in.

Happier Sims means higher population, more coins from taxes, and more awesome buildings

For these reasons, it seems likely that early retention in SimCity is strong, and sessions played per day in that early period are near best-in-class levels. Of course, as we’ll see in later sections, these refreshing changes to the genre’s tired formulas ultimately become the game’s undoing once the player reaches the elder game.

Medium-Term Goals

SimCity BuildIt’s medium-term goals build on its short-term progression, offering new ways for the player to continue to grow her population. The game introduces a new type of building category – specializations – and a new currency for players to earn to obtain these buildings.

It’s in this area that the game’s progression begins to lose steam, and it’s likely the grind of obtaining these buildings while managing the pushback mechanics mentioned above could cause medium-term retention to be soft relative to best-in-class games. This combined with some questionable decisions around Keys – the newly introduced currency – serve to hamstring the games mid- to late-term progression, possibly impacting long-term retention.

Specializations

Specializations in SimCity are really not that different from the area effect service buildings described above. The player must spend a large amount of coins – 40,000 or more – to purchase a “Department of…” specialization building, which unlocks the right to purchase other buildings in the category. The high price suggests that these buildings are meant to be aspirational, because managing pushback while obtaining the necessary coins to purchase these buildings can take a long time. Despite this, the first of the specializations – transportation and education – unlock very early in the game’s progression. This seems like an odd choice as it adds yet another thing for the player to be thinking about when soft currency tuning is at its tightest.

Unlike service buildings, which limit the population downside of buildings in their radius, these buildings greatly raise the population of buildings within their area of effect.

Transportation, one of the first specializations unlocked

Specialization buildings are special in name only – the player can actually unlock all the possible specializations, and would likely be expected to in order to maximize her population.

Before diving into the mechanics of earning the higher-tier specialization buildings, let’s discuss why these buildings might not be effective at driving long-term player engagement:

Tangential to the core game progression

- Unlike XP, which unlocks items of significance to the player’s core game progression – factories, commercial buildings, residences – population only unlocks buildings that provide more population. There appears to be some relationship between population and the amount of taxes the player can collect, but it’s difficult if not impossible to glean at a glance.

See if you can figure out what 12,825 is 20% of

Thus, the game’s medium-term goals are completely optional should the player want to focus solely on the game’s core loop.

Reinforcing the grind

- Making a big purchase to unlock a new specialization should feel like a major accomplishment! Unfortunately, in SimCity BuildIt, that sense of pride soon turns to frustration, because:

• The specialization’s area effect means the player needs to reshuffle her buildings to take advantage of the effect, and the game’s placement tools are rudimentary at best 
• It’s possible – likely even – that this reshuffling will lead to the player needing to spend even more coins on service buildings to overcome the game’s pushback systems, so it’s possible the player’s population will actually decline in the short-term 
• The player will have to repeat this cycle for every new specialization building purchased, which gets tiresome quickly 

What starts out as a fun and even strategic take on the genre quickly turns into a grind when the player has to fight the game’s sub-par placement tools to reshuffle her buildings every few levels.

A more appropriate strategy may have been to focus the medium-term progression on expansions. One method that has worked successfully in other games like Farmville 2: Country Escape is placing “landmarks” – partially completed buildings or points of interest – on the player’s board to drive her to expand in their direction. Once unlocked, these items could provide additional gameplay - perhaps in the form of new finished goods to produce – creating a soft requirement for the player to expand to continue building and upgrading residences.

Farmville 2's medium-term goals are all about expanding to unlock points of interest

As it currently stands, expansions are an afterthought in relation to the core loop. You can – and will – eventually be able to open all the expansions simply by having the game open and tapping building thought bubbles. Even in Hay Day, the parts required to unlock expansions are gained from completing core loop actions, primarily harvesting crops.

If expanding were better tied to the core loop, it could be used to encourage mid-term engagement. Now, there’s little motivation for the player to expand until very late in the game – and even then, a well laid out city can have over 200,000 residents with just a few of the expansions unlocked.

Keys

Once the initial “Department of…” building is purchased, the subsequent buildings in a specialization are purchasable for a new currency called Keys. Why introduce a new currency at this point? In games that have robust trading systems and no caps on coins, by the mid-game the coin economy is often broken for many highly engaged players. As a result, if these buildings were purchasable for coins, many elder players would be able to quickly snap them all up. With Keys, the player has to start from zero, investing in new systems - often with high initial and ongoing gates to drive daily engagement and slow progression - and effectively start over from zero.

The game gives players two paths to earn these keys, both of which – Cargo Ship orders and Disaster Challenges – we’ll address here. 

Cargo Ship

The Cargo Ship asks players to provide some quantity of three distinct goods in a set time period. If the player completes the entire order before the time expires, she is rewarded with some number of Keys depending on the difficulty of the order. 

13 more hours to make those bricks!

SimCity’s Cargo Ship shares a lot in common with Hay Day’s Boat Orders. The similarities are as follows: 

• Coins and timer required to build
• Games typically gate these types of features as a way to encourage players to monetize to get started earning keys as quickly as possible 
• Timed orders
• Timers are meant to drive players to play more sessions per day – or spend money – to complete challenging orders
• Partial completion rewards
• The game grants partial completion – in the form of coins – for completing individual items but not full orders. This ensures that players don’t lose out on progress in the core game if they happen to just miss completing the full order
• “Cooldown”
• The reason for the cooldown period between orders is twofold: 
• Give players a chance to take a breather and avoid burnout, or stockpile resources in advance of a coming order, driving even more sessions played per day 
• Set a return timer for the player that will generate a notification to launch the game

It’s easy at a glance to think the Cargo Ship and Hay Day’s boat orders are equivalent, but the similarities are only skin deep. Here are a few of the major differences:

• Grant coins but not XP – as mentioned above, players trying to level up are actively encouraged to skip the Cargo Ship as they do not provide XP either as an immediate reward or from the specialization buildings purchased with Keys 
• Tuning – SimCity’s orders are much less challenging than Hay Day’s. It’s likely they do very little to inflect sessions played per day or influence payer conversion, and exist solely to provide players a reason to play every day in the elder game 
• Progression – Unlike Hay Day, where every order completed earns you boat “points” in addition to the game’s voucher currency, SimCity’s orders only reward Keys. Players thus have little incentive to undertake harder orders that may still only be worth a small number of keys
• Social – as we’ll delve into in more detail in the Social section, the Cargo Ship’s lack of social is a huge miss that likely negatively impacts engagement with the feature 

For these reasons, it seems likely that the Cargo Ship orders are less effective at driving both sessions per day and days played per week engagement, as well as at motivating players to convert to paying than Hay Day’s boat order system.

Disaster Challenges

One of the major challenges faced by city building games on mobile platforms is space constraints. Mobile devices have a limited amount of memory that puts a hard cap on the size of a player’s city. While SimCity BuildIt’s complex core loop gives the game a head start on its competition in terms of slowing the need to grow the city’s footprint, ultimately a hard limit will be reached.

The developers’ short-term strategy for dealing with that hard limit is disaster challenges. Before these challenges can be undertaken, the player mush reach 90,000 population, spend a large amount of coins, and wait for a timer to complete. Then, to activate a challenge, the player must collect items in a method similar to expansion items.

Once activated, a disaster destroys some number of the player’s residential buildings.

ALIENS!

The player must rebuild these buildings – using basic and finished goods as before – to earn Keys.

It seems unlikely that these disaster challenges drive any meaningful short-term metrics and are primarily meant as a bulwark against players maxing out their playable board space. The reasons for this are:

• High initiation costs – anything off the core loop that requires a cost to activate will have a narrower engagement funnel
• Off the core loop – Disasters function like expansions in that the parts required to trigger them can be obtained without engaging with the core loop, which means that triggering them won't inflect sessions played per day
• No pressure to complete – the player can take her sweet time to complete these challenges since they aren’t timed, so it seems unlikely they drive a meaningful inflection in sessions per day or days played per week 
• Alternate method to earn rewards – the cargo ship is non-destructive and – outside of the initial cost to build – has no ongoing cost to initiate, so it’s a much more straightforward way to earn the same currency (though in smaller daily doses)
• Neither coins nor XP – the player is forced to choose between progress along the core progression or progress growing population when engaging with this feature 

For these reasons, it’s likely disaster challenges are meant to keep elder players engaged, grinding toward unlocking all the landmarks, as opposed to driving an inflection in sessions played per day or payer conversion.

Long-Term Aspiration

Ultimately, SimCity BuildIt’s long-term aspiration is to maximize the city’s population. Doing this requires the player to unlock and earn all of the game’s specializations, and purchase all the subsequent buildings with Keys.

As you can see, the player’s goals don’t really evolve from the short-term progression to the game’s aspiration. Part of the issue is with how the aspiration is framed – every action leading up to acquiring more population feels transactional rather than aspirational. Even approaching the elder game, there is more than one way to achieve the goal of increasing population and, in fact, continuing to build buildings is required to purchase some of the advanced specialization buildings.

What are some ways the game could have done a better job of framing this aspiration? We’ll examine two below.

Collections

The game’s landmark grind is a de-facto collection aspiration with some super compelling rewards – who doesn’t want the Empire State Building or the Leaning Tower of Pisa in their city? Unfortunately, this aspiration isn’t supported by typical collection mechanics. 

Take Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff as an example. The aspiration of that game is simple – to unlock every character from the Family Guy universe – and the game supports that aspiration with a super simple but effective Facebook-like interface.

Family Guy's character collecting interface

That game actively encourages the collection compulsion by not only telling the player what percentage of the characters she has unlocked, but also by rewarding the player for completing sub-collections with premium currency. A similar interface could help SimCity BuildIt better articulate the aspiration to collect all the interesting landmarks the game has to offer.

Milestones / NPC Competitions

Let’s say the developers want to keep the game’s aspiration about maximizing the city’s population. Some sort of milestone markers along the path to the largest city – similar to Kim Kardashian’s Fame Lists – could help reinforce in the player’s mind that she is aspiring to something more than managing the day-to-day growth of her city.

Kim Kardashian's powerful Top Stars aspiration

Even old SimCity games provided milestone markers – Town, City, Metropolis, Megalopolis – to drive players to continue growing their population. Mimicking Kim Kardashian’s structure with similar milestones in SimCity BuildIt would help reinforce the player’s aspiration and drive improved long-term retention.

Old SimCities had milestones for the player to achieve

It’s a shame that a game with such a strong core loop and early progression mechanics has such a lackluster aspiration. Hopefully the developers will take the time to address this lack of long-term goals in future updates to the game.

Monetization

Given how quickly it climbed the top grossing charts, SimCity must be doing something right when it comes to monetization. Like most games in the genre – Hay Day included – SimCity BuildIt monetizes player impatience. There are two types of features driving the kind of impatience that monetizes in the game – one-time gates and over-time skips. We’ll take a look at each and the reasons for each below.

One-Time

Typically, one-time gates bar the player’s access from access to new features. SimCity BuildIt has two of these features, both described in detail above – the Cargo Ship and the Disaster Tower.

One-time gating features

As in most games, SimCity BuildIt’s one-time gating monetization features have three components:

• XP gate – the player must reach a certain XP level before she is eligible to complete the feature 
• Coin gate – the player must accumulate a large amount of premium currency (or pay) to unlock the building
• Time gate – once the player pays the coin price, she must wait for a long timer to count down to “finish” building the feature

Each of these elements plays an important role in driving a critical player behavior change:

Reset player expectations for engagement -

The high soft currency price to unlock these features is meant to encourage the player to shift into a higher engagement tier. To earn enough soft currency to complete the feature, the player will have to play more sessions per day and days per week.

Often these features are strategically placed in the progression – locked by XP level – to encourage the development of the sense of obligation mentioned above. Once some players see these gates, they’ll step up their engagement and – with the help of the unlocked feature – maintain them at the new level until they’re asked to step up again by the next feature.

Drive new buyer conversion -

The long countdown timer will encourage some impatient players with money to burn to pay the skip price. Since the timer is long, the skip price is high and these players will have to spent real money to buy the needed premium currency to proceed.

Act as repeat buyer converter of last resort -

Features locked to late-game levels will encourage some payers with empty currency wallets – emptied by previous one-time gates and ongoing over-time skips – to once again pay. These features serve as the conversion mechanism of last resort, meant to forcefully remind once-payers of the value inherent in spending money on the game.

Over-Time

SimCity BuildIt’s over-time skips are the engine that drives repeat-buyer behavior in the game. One-time features are great at getting players to convert that first time, but it’s the daily grind of skipping timers and paying for resources that sink down premium currency wallets, encouraging payers to pull out their Apple ID passwords. In keeping with its implementation of best practices from the genre, SimCity BuildIt has the most common over-time skips in free-to-play games, including:

Insufficient Resources

If the player wants to perform an action – creating a finished good, for example, or starting a disaster challenge – but she doesn’t have the required resources, the game allows the player to purchase them for premium currency. This is a very common flow in these types of games that capitalizes on two things, one good and one not-so-good: 

• Player impatience – some players won’t want to cancel out of the current flow to go find the crafting building and wait for the resource to be generated 
• Player incompetence – this will sound bad, but there are absolutely some players that don’t even know where some of the resources come from (e.g., from another crafting building that's already been placed on their board), and these types of flows prey on those players by getting them to pay for resources they could just as easily have made for free in a minute or two

Insufficient Soft Currency

Like insufficient resources, the insufficient soft currency flow triggers when the player attempts to perform an action but is lacking one of the inputs to do so. In this case, that input is soft currency.

As is common for the genre, the player cannot purchase soft currency for real money, but must first purchase premium currency and convert it to soft currency.

One interesting note about the conversion is that there are actually two ways to convert premium currency to soft currency – the flow mentioned above and by simply tapping on the “+” button next to the coin balance in the HUD. It turns out the exchange rate by tapping the “+” and purchasing a coin pack is actually preferable to going through the flow above!

Take a look at the chart below to see some data points used for the test, when compared against the package prices in the soft currency store:

As you can see, it’s much more lucrative for players to convert their premium currency to coins using the “+” button that through the Insufficient Coins flow. In fact, the “+” button flow is probably the “true” conversion rate, and the Insufficient Resources flow is adding a convenience surcharge. Payers are effectively paying for the convenience of getting the right amount of coins versus slightly more or less.

Regardless, if you plan on implementing these flows, it might be worth experimenting with a slightly higher Insufficient Coins flow price for coins versus the packages page in the store.

Pay to Skip

The final common over-time skip flow utilized by SimCity BuildIt is the ability to pay to skip resource generation timers. Ultimately, these are meant to convert the “I need it NOW!” players into payers by presenting them with timers that would cause them to have to end a session and return later if they don’t pay.

As above, there are actually two different types of these pay to skip opportunities in BuildIt. The first is the basic goods completion timer. These are very straightforward timers – the player starts a good and she can pay premium currency to get that item now.

The second is the ability to pay to skip a crafting timer. This one is slightly more interesting in that it leverages the crafting queue to extract more spend from impatient players. As an example, let’s look at the screenshot below:

Let’s say you desperately needed that last measuring tape to complete a building that just became upgradeable. How do you get it now? Well, you need to pay for all of the items in the queue ahead of it first! In this way, the crafting queue acts both as a good way to extend the length of time between player sessions, slowing progress, and also as a way to sink ever more premium currency from impatient players’ wallets.

Without the queue, the player could pay to accelerate that measuring tape for less than 10 SimCash, but with the queue it’s likely more than 50!

Coin Economy

In the early game, SimCity BuildIt's soft currency economy is tuned on the tight side, especially compared to prior titles in the genre. In particular, the inclusion of pushback mechanics makes it so there are a significant number of meaningful currency sinks in the first fifteen levels of the game, and players are constantly emptying their soft currency wallets to compensate. This means it takes a lot more investment from the player to earn enough soft currency to make steady progress in the game. The implications of this on monetization is that it's likely the game has higher-than-average new buyer conversion. As the game progresses, making coins is much easier and - as mentioned above - none of the elder systems generate sufficient pressure to encourage repeat buyer behavier. Thus, it seems likely repeat buyer conversion is weaker than in other games in the genre.

This hunch is validated by the fact that the game stuck to the top of the top grossing charts while it was featured in the App Store, but declined once the featuring ended. If it did a better job converting one-time buyers into repeat buyers, you would expect it to stick to the top of the charts.

The other risk with such hard tuning in the early game is that it negatively impacts retention. When combined with the games lackluster medium-term goals and aspiration, the drag on long-term retention is probably severe.

Decorations

While SimCity BuildIt does have a few decorations, it’s unlikely they are a major driver of spend. They don’t contribute to the core loop or short-term progression (outside of adding more population to buildings within their area of effect), and they don’t even have their own top-level category in the store. There are also very few of them in the game, and the high price points (many are $5 or more) suggest they’re most likely they’re there as an option for the few players that fall into the decorator persona that will download and play the game. 

It wouldn't be SimCity without a llama...

Inventory and Expansions

These two features work in similar ways. The player can collect inventory and expansion items by tapping on citizens’ thought bubbles as they appear in the city.

Will this one add an item? Tap and find out!

What’s interesting isn’t the method for obtaining these items, it’s that the number of items the player has obtained doesn’t actually impact the Insufficient Resources price of the expansion or inventory upgrade! Take a look at the screenshot below:  

Notice anything peculiar? That’s right – unlike in our previous Kim Kardashian deconstruct, the amount of items required to complete the expansion has zero impact on the skip price. The inventory works the exact same way!

Why might the game do this when other games don’t? There are two potential reasons:

• Encourage payer conversion – the game has an aggressive drip of “free” premium currency, but doesn’t want players using SimCash earned from achievements to purchase these expansions, and so they’re keeping the price high to protect a finite resource from cheap, non-paying users 
• Encourage social – as we’ll see below, these features are perfectly designed to drive players into the game’s trading system 

This is a perfect segue into the next topic, where we’ll dive into why these two features work so well to encourage a robust social trading system in SimCity BuildIt!

Social

For social, SimCity BuildIt once again looks to competitive titles for inspiration. Let’s leverage the framework introduced in our

Kim Kardashian deconstruct to evaluate the game’s social capabilities:

Unlike Kim Kardashian, which has nothing but transactional social with very light competition, SimCity BuildIt actually incorporates cooperative social in the form of trading. In fact, its trading system – when combined with the aggressive early-game economy tuning and unique take on expansions and inventory – does a good job of driving social reliance among players at all levels. Let’s dive in below.

Trading

When done well, trading is one of the best ways to drive social reliance and cooperation in a free-to-play game. At the base level, most mobile game trading systems are the same. They include:

• Min/Max pricing – players can only price their items within a game-determined range. The game does this to keep soft currency inflation in check while protecting against fraudulent transactions and RMT
• Advertising – players have the option to advertise their sales on the global market. This serves two purposes: 
• Adds some friction to global market sales – players can only post one item per period of time with the option to spend real money to post more than one 
• Allows for “true” social trading – players can put items in their shops and tell guild mates / friends offline to visit them to purchase without going through the global market 
• Limited number of slots – puts a cap on the amount of trading soft currency the player can earn at a time 
• Pay-to-dump – Discourages the use of the trading interface as a secondary inventory, as the player either needs to wait for the NPC to purchase her goods or spend currency to empty the slot 

• Global marketplace – a second interface to browse items available for trade posted by other players 

These features are table stakes for a game planning to implement a trading system, and SimCity largely hits them, net of a few minor bugs (including one nasty one where the player attempts to purchase an item from the global marketplace that doesn’t exist). However, features by themselves are not sufficient for success. Like everything in free-to-play games, the success of a game’s trading system – as measured by user engagement – is heavily reliant on the game’s tuning.

In this regard, SimCity does a good job driving players into the system. As an example, let’s take a look at the game’s handling of inventory and expansion parts using an example.

Tuning Example – Expansion and Inventory Parts

As we’ve discussed, expansion and inventory parts are earned by tapping on thought bubbles that appear while the user is playing the game. The longer the session the user plays, the more of these pieces she is able to collect. Of course, typically it’s new installs early in the game that are playing the longest sessions, and these users have plenty of both inventory and board space relative to their needs. It seems odd, then, that they should be receiving a large number of expansion and inventory items relative to their need.

On the flipside, these players need coins – and lots of them! The early game is tuned aggressively hard for a free-to-play game, and the player is constantly encountering a new sink for her soft currency well above what she is able to reasonably produce. So, in the early game, the player has a surplus of largely useless items and a deficit of absolutely necessary soft currency.

Compare that with an elder player. This player plays more, shorter sessions per day, which means she isn’t accumulating nearly as many expansion and inventory items. She is also past the point where the game introduces an entirely new pushback system (the last of which, Health, unlocks at level 16), which means she is much more likely to have a surplus of coins.

Unlike the player above, though, she’s running out of space and is in desperate need of expansion parts. Also, due to the increasing resource requirements to build new buildings, she needs more inventory space to continue progressing in the game.

To summarize, both players have something the other needs and wants. The new player has parts and needs coins. The elder player has coins and needs parts. To correct this imbalance, the new player places her parts for sale in the global marketplace (conveniently, expansion and inventory parts are worth a bunch of coins) and the elder player buys the parts.

If the game isn’t tuned as it is, this sense of need by player level wouldn’t exist, and players would have no incentive to engage with the trading system. As it is, SimCity’s developers have done a great job using tuning and game progression to create a “need” for trading that drives social behavior and, by proxy, engagement with the game.

Visits

Visits in SimCity BuildIt are surprisingly limited. The only real reason to visit in the game is to purchase goods your friend has made available for trade. Unfortunately, without asking your friend – outside of the game – what she has for sale, you’ll need to actually visit to see if she has anything available for sale. Once you’re there, if it turns out others have already purchased her sale items, you’re out of luck – there’s nothing else to do during a visit.

Get used to seeing a lot of this if you plan on visiting neighbors

Hay Day has streamlined this flow by incorporating it directly into the market stand UI. This is a truly transactional use case, so removing as much of the friction as possible from engaging with trading makes a lot of sense, and frees up visits for less transactional and more cooperative social opportunities. This flow is something SimCity BuildIt should consider emulating in the future. 

For the reasons listed above, it seems likely that this is a very lightly used feature in the game, which is a shame as visiting can have a lot of benefits. One of the most important benefits of visits is as a powerful force to drive players to provide their social network credentials. Networks like Facebook are useful because they can drive viral traffic to the game – both in the form of new installs and existing users – and can reactivate lapsed users via push notification. It also makes it easier to track players across devices and operating systems, which is useful for targeting advertising campaigns and understanding true player behavior and LTV. Without some kind of core social feature, fewer people will provide their Facebook login credentials.

So what could SimCity have done to encourage more visits? There are a few potential options. In games like Hay Day, players can visit other players to help out around the farm. One example of this is the player’s ability to “ask for help” on boat orders. If a player asks for help on a boat order, visiting players can provide – from their personal inventories – items to help complete boat orders. This may create a sense of reciprocal obligation from the recipient that drives beneficial engagement in the game.

Hay Day allows visitors to help out with a neighbor's boat order

SimCity’s developers could easily re-tune the boat orders to accommodate such a social feature, which would undoubtedly improve the visit funnel and – by proxy – other beneficial long-term metrics.

Missed Opportunities

SimCity BuildIt’s launch social features do an adequate job of creating beneficial social interaction among players, but there is more work to be done. Two particularly glaring omissions from the launch feature set could potentially be implemented in the future to expand on the game’s social core and drive both player engagement and payer conversion.

True Cooperative Play

One area in which SimCity BuildIt could improve is in its cooperative play. Truly great cooperative social features are able to answer two very simple questions – “why” and “how”. The “why” question sets the player’s objective for engaging with the feature. If the player can’t easily answer why she should spend time interacting with a cooperative social feature, it probably isn’t very well implemented. Let’s take a look at social features from other games to see how they answer this question:

• Clash of Clans (Alliances) – to climb the clan leaderboard and become the top clan in the world…

• Farmville 2: Country Escape (Co-Ops) – to climb the co-op leaderboards and become the top co-op in the world...

Notice how similar these two statements are! Both these games leverage competition to generate social obligation and drive increased player engagement. You might, then, figure that these games are equally successful at generating the kind of beneficial obligation that moves KPIs in the right direction. 

Of course, that’s not the case, and the reason comes down to the “how” statement. Let’s take a look at the “how” statements for the same games:

• Clash of Clans – …by sharing troops to help members protect and earn medals 
• Farmville 2: Country Escape - …by sharing Farm Hands and completing achievements 

Once again, there are a lot of similarities between the two statements. However, a deeper look reveals why Clash of Clans’s “how” statement is a winner while Country Escape’s is a loser. 

Let’s deconstruct these two “how” and “why” statements, using the following framework to find hits and misses: 

• Reinforces Core Loop – the best “why” statements require either the sender or the recipient (or both) to engage in the core loop in order to complete a social action 
  • Clash of Clans – the troop donor has to engage in the core loop by spending resources to generate troops 
  • Country Escape – Farm Hands are tangentially related to the core loop, but the player can generate them without a core loop action 
  • Drives engagement with rewards – good “why” statements encourage participation by rewarding top teams with unique rewards 
    • Clash of Clans – top clans are granted in-game currency for “winning” 
    • Country Escape – no reward for win state 
    • Offers in-game chat for coordination – good cooperative systems allow players to coordinate efforts using chat 
      • Clash of Clans – supports chat to help coordinate defenses
      • Country Escape – supports chat, but again there is little coordination to be done as the resources are not related to the core loop and take no time to generate 
      • Overlays periodic competition ­– good cooperative systems reinforce continued engagement by resetting the competition periodically to give everyone a fighting chance at the top 
        • Clash of Clans – doesn’t fully reset medals but has Clan Tournaments to push top players to continue engaging and spending to stay at the top 
        • Country Escape – competitions do not reset 

You could make an argument that it’s simply a genre thing, and that no simulation / city builder-style game could possibly mimic the performance of Clash of Clans’s clan system. Well, that turns out not to be the case, and once again it falls to Hay Day to offer a best-in-class example for all in the genre to follow.

Let’s evaluate Hay Day’s neighborhoods against the same framework: 

• Reinforces core loop – Hay Day allows neighborhood members easy access to one another’s farms to streamline exchange of core loop resources via trading and boat orders 
• Drives engagement with rewards – Hay Day’s events features grant rewards upon completion, and encourages neighborhoods to participate 
• Offers in-game chat for coordination – Hay Day has an in-game chat system that allows neighborhood members to better plan resource exchange 
• Overlays periodic competition – Hay Day’s events have a “top neighborhoods” tab that encourages neighborhoods to compete to be recognized as the best 

So it is possible to do a truly great cooperative game system in this style of game. If SimCity BuildIt wants to take its social to the next level, it would do well to implement a system similar to Hay Day’s.

Competition

Another area of social where SimCity BuildIt is deficient is in competition. As mentioned in the Kim Kardashian deconstruct, competition systems are great at driving extreme sessions per day engagement and also at driving whale behavior among players. The reason for this is that competition is fundamentally uncapped. Unlike events or other periodic features with rewards, there is no “end state” for competition. The top team takes home the trophy, and the only way for the top team to stay on top is to continue to engage and spend.

This is why it’s always surprising that many mobile social games are slow to integrate competitive features. In nearly every example, adding competition to the game drives beneficial engagement and spend behavior with very little downside.

How could a game like SimCity BuildIt incorporate competition? It depends on what model they want to use: 

• Short-Term – Event-based 
  • Incorporate an event system, similar to Hay Day’s, that will encourage players to perform one particular, transient in-game action lots of times in a short period of time 
  • Layer on a competition system that rewards the top contributors

Hay Day’s event system incorporates competition to drive high engagement and spending behavior 

• Long-Term – Disaster / Boat
  • Adapt Hay Day’s boat points system to disasters or cargo orders
  • Players get a base number of points for completing a boat order / disaster challenge based on difficulty 
  • Points ramp up for completing them more quickly 
  • A leaderboard shows the top players 

Hay Day’s boat leaderboard rewards long-term engagement

How do you choose which system to use? Ultimately, it all comes down to what player behavior you are trying to drive. An event-based system is great at driving short-term spikes in player engagement and corresponding lifts in payer conversion and spend. A cargo- / disaster-based system is great at driving long-term retention and daily play. Hay Day has both systems for a reason: 

• Boat Leaderboards to encourage daily play and keep players around for the long haul
• Events to drive those long-term players to play more sessions per day and monetize 

Given that each system serves a different purpose, it would seem likely that SimCity would both a short- and long-term solution in development.

Wrap-Up

Returning to the comparison that started this deconstruct, it’s abundantly clear that the team at Track Twenty treated the SimCity franchise with far more reverence than was given to Dungeon Keeper. The developer internalized what makes the series great, and lovingly mapped those same mechanics into a design that can drive strong KPIs on mobile.

In particular, the game’s core loop and short-term progression are notably well implemented and tuned, leveraging proven free-to-play mechanics while cloaking them in a SimCity veneer. Unfortunately, that appears to be the exact amount of runway the developers were given to build the game, as the medium-term goals and long-term aspiration do not build on the strong core in a compelling way. Moreover, the game’s social features are lacking compared to competition, exacerbating what is likely low medium-term retention and sessions per day engagement. These issues will become more clear as the game laps its initial burst of installs, bolstered by preferential featuring over the holidays.

Ultimately, there will be little doubt SimCity BuildIt will be an ROI-positive endeavor. Whether it becomes a fixture on the top grossing charts like Hay Day remains to be seen, but unless the medium-term and elder game are improved and social features are implemented, that outcome seems unlikely.