Managing and Avoiding Content Treadmills
Some time ago, during a game review, I made a point that a particular game had a risk of becoming a content treadmill and that the team behind the game was not built to successfully handle that type of content creation volume. My feedback was partly countered by a counter question “Aren’t all games content treadmills?”.
Many developers who don’t have the experience of running a successful and highly content-driven game fail to understand how their operation will have to evolve once the game is live. Or they just take large team sizes as granted in running a successful freemium game. This post analyses content-driven games and successful mechanics to reduce the volume of content needed. I will also analyze the games, which use additional content so efficiently that they are able to almost fully mitigate the risk of ending up in a content treadmill.
Classic Content Treadmills
Level based games are what you can call content treadmills. This is because, in level based games, a player’s goal is to beat or pass a level in order to unlock new content and progress through the game. In theory, the more levels you have, the longer your players will play your game. And again, in theory, the longer you have players playing your game, the more likely they will convert into paying players. Thus creating more and more content becomes vital for your business - and you find yourself in a content treadmill.
Lets take a look at a classic free-to-play farming game as an example. In Hay Day, players plant crops and feed animals to generate ingredients, which they craft into various dishes that are sold for Coins. Selling dishes is also the main source of experience points (XP). As a player collects enough XP, they level up. Leveling up unlocks new crops, animals, dishes, crafting stations and areas. In other words, the player’s goal is to both earn enough Coins to build out their farm, and to earn enough XP to unlock new content.
In Hay Day completing game loop actions earns player XP which allows a player to level up. New levels unlock more content and new gameplay.
To keep their players engaged, the team making Hay Day, or any other level based simulation game, has to constantly create more levels and content. If the team is slow in their content generation, their most engaged, and often most valuable players, will have nothing to strive for. In addition to generating content at a rapid speed, the team has to also innovate with the new content added to the game. Simply offering new recipes and crafting stations only gets you so far. On regular intervals you also have to introduce content that offers something truly new and interesting. And as we all know, new and interesting takes a longer time to design, develop, QA and, ultimately, release.
New content is added on regular intervals to the game. Added content needs to also include new gameplay to keep players engaged.
Creating a successful level based freemium game is possible, as long as your studio is geared for it. The studio has to have the competence and the right processes to cost-efficiently create, QA and push extensive amounts of content on rapid cycles. This often leads to larger team sizes and quite monotonous game development, which is often offset by hiring developers in their early stages of their career.
Unlike with freemium games, level based progression is not an issue in paid games, which don’t really have to last for that long, since all of the players have already monetized. In fact, developers tend to want most of their players to go through all of the game content as they will be able to sell additional DLCs (downloadable content) to them.
Off-Setting Content Burn-Rate
It’s easy to say that one should avoid designing a game that is heavily dependent on adding new content. But what if you’re running a successful game where players are burning through the levels and you’re unable to keep up with the pace? There are two solutions in a case like this. One way to approach the problem is to increase the amount of content your team generates, but that can easily lead to a bigger team and, hence, a higher burn rate. Another approach is to make the existing content last longer by increasing replayability of the existing levels. Two of my favorite systems for off-setting content burn-rates are completion mechanics and dynamic tuning.
1) Completion Mechanics
drive us players to replay a level until we have truly mastered it. When this mechanic is implemented well, a player will want to master levels as it unlocks more content. When the demand for replayability has been created through the completion mechanic, each level is actually worth more game time. This leads to a decreased need for additional levels, coupled with increased engagement.
Angry Birds Rio rewards players for mastering levels. This increases the replayability for each level while increasing monetization by creating demand for power-ups.
During my time as the lead on Angry Birds Rio we faced a tough challenge: our players loved the game and they constantly wanted us to make new levels for them. Yet our compact team was only able to make around thirty levels each month and it took just a couple of hours for the most devoted players to beat all the new levels.
To tackle this issue, and to increase monetization, we came up with the following plan: We would introduce Star Levels, which a player can unlock by collecting certain thresholds of stars from each episode (a set of levels). This feature added replayability and engagement, as players suddenly had a strong reason to master every level in the game.
In addition to creating the demand for mastery, we also created a way for players to off-set the skill barrier needed to earn three stars on every level. A player had two options for obtaining the power-ups: They could either get them through daily bonuses, which encouraged daily loggings, or they were able to purchase them from the in-game store, which increased monetization. Needless to say, the introduction of Star Levels and power-ups through daily bonuses not only multiplied the engagement, but also boosted the monetization as players chose to purchase power-up bundles.
2) Dynamic Tuning
of is another mechanic that allows the team to not only make their levels more repayable but to also significantly increase engagement and monetization. The limitation of this method is that the game has to have a component of randomness that is tuned according to player behavior. The second limitation of this method is that it pretty much requires a data scientist on staff to analyze the data and help to tune it.
The image above shows same level in Juice Jam. As you can see, even though the level is the same, the composure of the starting pieces are different due to dynamic tuning. Dynamic tuning means changing the difficulty of a level based on player behavior. Successful match-3 games are perfect examples of dynamic tuning as the levels get more difficult or easy based on how fast a player is going through content.
Match three games are a perfect example of dynamic tuning. Every time the player restarts a level, the composition of the puzzle pieces is different. What this means is that the difficulty of a level can be dynamically tuned according to the player’s behavior, typically based on certain cohorts.
Here’s how dynamic tuning works in practice. Say you haven’t played Candy Crush Saga in a while. Upon returning to the game, you’ll likely clear the first few levels quickly as the game tunes the level to be easier so that you get into a rhythm. As you re-engage, the levels will quickly get harder until you reach a level that you get stuck on. At this point you’ll be primed to spend money to proceed. In case you don’t spend money, the level will eventually ease up and allow you to pass.
3) Energy Mechanic
is the third viable option to slow down the rate a player burns through the content of your game. I’m personally a fan of energy mechanics, both as a player and game maker.
An energy mechanic slows the rate at which a player goes through the levels, adds virality through social integration, and increases monetization.
As a player, energy gives me a reason to finish the session feeling satisfied. It also prevents me from burning out of the game as I’m not playing a particularly hard level until I rage quit. From the game maker's perspective, an energy mechanic results in an increase to a few key metrics. Firstly it tends to increase the number of play sessions and overall retention, as players play several times a day and return to the game the following day, once their energy is refilled. Secondly, an energy mechanic increases monetization as players tend to purchase energy to continue playing during longer “binge-sessions”. Some developers believe that an energy mechanic is not good as it artificially restricts play time. Based on the success of many games with energy mechanics, I don't think this is true, and energy mechanics are in fact a great feature for mobile games.
The three mechanics above all help make the levels and/or content of the game last longer. Naturally it depends on the design of the game, as well as the stage of the game, whether the mechanics fit a game in question. For example, you don’t want to be adding an energy mechanic to a game that is already live as that’s the easiest way to earn single star reviews.
Avoiding Content Treadmills
Having a successful live game that isn’t dependent in the constant generation of new content is pretty much a dream-come-true for a games studio. When you’re not tied to new content creation, you can actually spend that scarce development time on improving the game with new meaningful features. The key to avoid a content treadmill is to have that as a goal very early on in development.
In my mind, the key to avoiding a content treadmill is to design a strong metagame accompanied with fundamentally social gameplay. Now the word metagame is unfortunately often used too liberally to describe everything from completion to gacha mechanics. But the fact is that metagame is any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset. In other words, changes in the metagame directly affect the way players play the game.
Clash Royale is in my mind one of the best examples of a successful mobile game that has a strong social metagame to counter dependency on new content. Winning battles in Royale requires both strategy for meta-game and mastery of gameplay. Strategy is needed to build card decks. A player has to make sure that the average cost of the deck stays in control and that there is a right distribution of different kind of cards. Mastery on the other hand is needed during the battle in order to use the right cards at the right time in the perfect location.
Royale’s metagame is all about building a balanced deck of 8 cards. Instead of focusing on specific powerful cards, a player needs to build his/her deck based on synergy. The goal is to make every card work with all the other ones as it allows that perfect flow of attacks, defenses and counter attacks. What makes deck building so interesting is the fact that the cards are so well balanced, which ensures that pretty much every opponent you face will have a different hand. The metagame of building decks is also never static. As players rack up Trophies and move through arenas, they unlock new cards along with opponents who are using these cards in their decks.
Every card in Clash Royale has its strengths and weaknesses. The metagame is all about finding the balance and synergy between steadily increasing the amount of cards.
Much like in Clash of Clans, the meta-game of Royale is extremely well balanced and there is no card that would make another card obsolete. Royale offers numerous combinations of winning decks as different cards are balanced so that they fill the categories described above. This close to perfect balance of cards is evident when watching the top matches in Royale TV, as every high-level deck is different than the other ones. The lack of a perfect hand also pushes players to modify their decks daily.
So how does the nearly perfectly balanced metagame of cards make Clash Royale avoid the content treadmill? Well, balance means that every card has a place in the game. As new cards are added, the overall balance changes - encouraging players to either start using this new card or add a card and/or strategy into their deck to counter the new card. Thus an addition of one new card has a potential to alter the way a large portion of players playing the game. This is drastically larger effect than adding 100 new levels to a game in a content treadmill as those levels will cater only a minority of the player-base after they’re initially added.
In the end, even a strong metagame accompanied with fundamentally social gameplay is not enough to keep you away from a content treadmill. Just look at Vainglory by Super Evil Megacorp. Vainglory has one of the deepest and well-balanced metagames on touchscreen devices. And the game is also as social as you can get, pitting two teams of three players in synchronous battles. Yet because Vainglory lacks progression mechanics, such as card upgrades, like in Clash Royale, and competitive mechanics, such as the Arena mode in Hearthstone, the game is in a content treadmill off adding new heroes every month. The importance of new heroes in Vainglory can be clearly seen by looking at their gross ranking data which spikes and drops after each release.
Just Be Smart About It
Being dependent on the rapid generation of new content is definitely a challenge, but it doesn't keep the game from succeeding. Just look at King and their massive portfolio of puzzle games all relying on constant updates. Candy Crush Saga alone must have well over a thousand of levels by now and it still relies on a cadence of 15 new levels every two weeks.
This post analyzed the methods of easing the dependency on new content by generating more value from existing content. There are a few big publishers that can afford to simply add more people to the game team, but in general, this practice creates more problems down the road for those labour-heavy studios.
In the end, unless your studio is geared to create content driven games, you should avoid making one. The reason why so many developers still create content treadmills is, in my opinion, simply the lack of experience in designing, building and operating social metagames. You see, it is so much more simple to design, track and tune a game where progression is built around levels. But as we very well know, building and shipping a game is just the start of the journey, not the end point.
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