Player Retention

Opinion

Mods not microtransactions: How to keep players engaged.

By Josiah Sapp

    Players invest a lot of their time and money in games that they believe in. We want the best experience for the investment. Developers and publishers make a living because we spend money on their product and spend time in their creation. It’s a highly competitive market and the tactics are cut throat. If a studio isn’t on top of the gaming trends, they get shut down or reallocated elsewhere. That’s why we get stories like Visceral studios being disbanded and their projects getting canceled. What they were working on, in theory, wasn’t being developed in line with future trends of the marketplace. Studios want their customers to return to their game while spending money on extra content. The avenue in which developers have achieved this retention and spending is through paid DLC and microtransactions to varying degrees of success. It seems, however, that all games are doomed to be in this rut for the foreseeable future.
    Take-Two (2K) Interactive, known for publishing 2K sports franchises and GTA, has recently made an announcement that all their future titles will have “recurring customer spending” mechanics baked into the gameplay. They say that it “won’t always be in game currency or DLC but are working on ways to keep the customer spending.” Business is business and at the end of the day, theses studios have to make their money back on what they spent but when did it become common practice to nickel and dime the hell out of the customer? If your game is good and I like what I see a studio doing, I will spend my money there. Period. Your craft should speak for itself and your community should speak for the product. These companies are preemptively making sure they don’t get my money by going this route. Is there any other option for developers to maintain retention and spending? I propose that there is.


Forge Mode Creation

    A game thrives when the community believes in the gameplay, story, mechanics and customization. It needs to have a reason to draw players back. If that hook is created by the player base, you have yourself a perpetual retaining system. The best example I can think of is Halo 3 and Halo Reach’s forge mode. A system designed and approved by Bungie to equip players with the tools to create their own multiplayer maps and game types. You could hop into a wide variety of pre-rendered maps and redesign any aspect that you wanted. New cover, traps, vehicles, weapon spawns and even create your very own bases with elevators and hallways. It was the perfect playground! Each week Bungie held a contest for the most creative and well balanced maps to be put into the rotation for the mainline game modes. I came back each week to see what the community had made and they delivered. Some of my fondest memories were made because of the modes and maps the community had created. That is how you maintain playability. Give players tools to be creative.

    The modding community has been around for quite sometime. Changing up the DNA of certain games to make something entirely different. Take a look at titles like Team Fortress 2 and DOTA. Both games started off as a mainline title, Quake and Warcraft 3 respectively. The communities of both franchises were given the resources and tools to tinker around with the core mechanics of the game. Swapping out color schemes, redesigning maps, designing new character models, sound effects, music. You name it! They were given the greenlight to go under the hood of these massively popular game titles and transform them into something new. That’s trust in your product and in your community

    Invest in your community and your community will invest in you. It’s that simple. The tighter the grip developers have on their games and assets, the less we trust them because it appears that they don’t believe in their product. Nintendo has come out swinging this year releasing two 10 out of 10 titles, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario: Odyssey. Why did they get such amazing reviews? They weren’t afraid to let the player break the game. In Zelda, every surface is climbable. You can climb every tree, cliff, wall, tower, fortress. Everything. That opens up a game in ways that Nintendo didn’t expect but they trusted that the player would have fun with it. Did it break the game? Of course it did but that didn’t deter Nintendo from designing the game that way. Mario has a similar story. Some of Mario’s new platforming and jumping mechanics made it so that players could combo together these insane sequences. They inevitably reached areas they weren’t supposed to but the game was made with that possibility in mind. Both these games are up for the game of the year award because Nintendo decided to give players the freedom to experience their games the they wanted to. They were confident that players would return because the freedom in their experience would draw them back. Not microtransactions. Not paid dlc. The freedom of choice retains the player base. Bake that into your game and I’ll be a customer for life.