Casual Competitive – Multiplayer for the Masses | Daniel Kromand
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Delivered at Casual Connect Europe 2016 Synchronous multiplayer is a fast growing field on mobile. While it presents great opportunity for user engagement, it involves extra requirements for design and technology. The speakers will discuss GameDuell’s approach to creating casual multiplayer games for mobile. They will share how they managed challenges in the production of prototypes and the recently released Grand Gin Rummy. The talk will be concluded with five suggestions for an engaging multiplayer experience on mobile.
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Casual Competitive – Multiplayer for the Masses | Daniel Kromand
- 1. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential Casual Competitive – Multiplayer for the masses Pablo Tesch - Producer Daniel Kromand - Producer
- 2. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 2 GameDuell
- 3. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 3 Why competitive?
- 4. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 4 Why Casual Competitive?
- 5. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 5 Synchronous multiplayer games on mobile Complexity Casual
- 6. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 6 5 tips for casual competitive
- 7. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 7 Grand Gin Rummy
- 8. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 8 1. Solve Liquidity
- 9. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 9 Liquidity success threshold time per day * fragmentation * players per game < DAU games per DAU * lobby wait time * worst hour factor
- 10. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 10 24 * 60 * 60 * 3 * 2 < 144 K 6 * 30 * 0.025 time per day * fragmentation * players per game < DAU games per DAU * lobby wait time * worst hour factor Liquidity for Grand Gin Rummy
- 11. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 11 Liquidity measures
- 12. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 12 2. Bound session length
- 13. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 13 Uncertain commitment
- 14. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 14 Time limits reduce stress
- 15. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 15 Adapting for shorter sessions
- 16. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 16 24 * 60 * 60 * 3 * 2 < 144 K 6 * 30 * 0.025 time per day * fragmentation * players per game < DAU games per DAU * lobby wait time * worst hour factor Shorter sessions = more games
- 17. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 17 3. Overcome ping
- 18. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 18 Turn-based gaming
- 19. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 20 Delays on real-time interaction
- 20. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 21 4. Make a social game
- 21. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 22 Multiplayer is naturally viral
- 22. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 23 An engaged community
- 23. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 24 The power of friendship!
- 24. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 25 5. Monetization is hard
- 25. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 26 Casual players & elder game
- 26. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 27 Multiplayer & boosters
- 27. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 28 Player activity
- 28. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 29 1. Implement liquidity measures 2. Bind session length 3. Make the game less reliant on ping 4. Let players be social with their friends 5. Monetization needs extra attention
- 29. © GameDuell 2016 | Confidential 30 Thanks for listening… Now you can ask questions!
Editor's Notes
- Hello, we are GameDuell. You may know us from our Skillgaming platform, but we are also developing F2P games. Currently we have Grand Gin Rummy – a competitve card game – in soft launch and we have another multiplayer arcade game in production.
- Why do we think, that the competitive aspect is so important? We believe that the strongest emotions in gaming come from multiplayer interactions. It‘s about the emotion of winning against others. Reaching the legendary rank in Hearthstone for example is clearly more fulfilling than solving the very hardest level in Candy Crush.
- And the same is true for casual competitive games. Winning a mini tournament in 8 Ball Pool is more exciting than a large upgrade in HayDay. The goal of casual competitve games is to bring this emotions to as many players as possible.
- Looking at different multiplayers games we decided for us to focus on the casual side. The main opportunties we see, are the braod reach of the casual audience, the gameplay innovations and the relativly few competitors.
- In this presentation we now want to share our 5 tips for casual competitve games.
- And we will use Grand Gin Rummy as our primary example, as it shows, how we solved some of the challenges. The game is based on the popular Gin card game and offers different fast paced multiplayer modes in an interesting 1920th hotel setting.
- Let me begin with with the first tip, how to solve liquidity. Liquidity is always needed so that players can find new opponents quickly whenever they desire to play.
- First you need to understand the liquidiy threshold for your game. How many players per day do you need to avoid churn because of waiting times? This is the formula that we use to calculate our daily player threshold.
- For Grand Gin Rummy this gives us a threshold of 144 thousand players per day. One of the biggest challenges is to acquire this amount of players already in soft launch. If you are applying this formula to your games, it can really help to identify the biggest potentials to lower the minimum liquidity. If you want to improve the worst hour factor for example, it could help to soft launch in different time zone clusters to get a more stable liwquidity throughout the day. If you want to improve the fragmentation factor you could try to focus on fewer game modes.
- One measure that we took is our internal cross-platform framework – the Duelltool – which allows us to release on multiple platforms that all contribute to a shared pool of players. And another liquidity measure ties in with our second tip.
- Bound session length. What we mean with this, is that sessions are designed in a way, so that players can predict their time commitment. This is particularly important in multiplayer games, because leaving a game is hurting the experience for the other players as well. And apart from a few trolls nobody likes to do this.
- One bad example of bound session length is the otherwise great game Hearthstone. The time commitment here is very uncertain, depending on the types of deck and how fast the players are making their decisions. In Hearthstone this leads to lesser diversity as faster decks are more efficient in ranking up, even if the win rates are worse.
- A mechanic that helps players to understand their commitment are time limits. They are most effective in real-time games, if the entire game has a limit and not only a turn. But time limits can also reduce stress, because players know exactly when the pressure of the competition ends.
- For Grand Gin Rummy we took a combination of measures to reduce the session lenght. We optimised the animation timings, because all these milliseconds add up to passive minutes without interactions. We also added bonus points per round, which reduces the amount of rounds per game. Both led to a better experience and to players starting more matches, which again helps to reduce the liquidity threshold.
- But the session length can also be a factor to improve liquidity. And this can be one of the least harmful ways to do so.
- When building any time of multi-player game – especially for mobile – ping will be a major issue, since it can ruin the player experience. Developing design that reduces the impact of poor connectivity can avoid many big technical obstacles down the road of release.
- Of course the simplest way to deal with ping is to make the game turn-based, which is what we did with Grand Gin Rummy, since that’s the way gun rummy is actually played. However, we did choose to make the game synchronous, turn-based: Meaning that both players are live. Many turn-based games opt for asynchronous, like Outwitters here, since this reduces the complexity and expense. We do believe though that synchronous MP gives a more engaging experience and higher completion rates.
- But if you want to avoid turn-based, one way to still be ping resilient is to add a delay to player actions. This delay can either be a few seconds or hours, but it allows the game server to sync data and know what’s coming up. As an extension of these real-time interaction delays, it’s also great to have predictable AI behavior. Meaning that the players issue commands to AI which act predictably and can be supported or obstructed by the two players. The example here is from the soft-launched game Clash Royale.
- Something that consistently comes up when we design games for this market is the social aspect. Multiplayer games are by definition social, but when I bring “social game” it has some strong preconceptions on design, etc.
- I don’t want this to be taken as a critique against the typical “social game”. What they do very well, and which many multiplayer games fail on, is to incentivize playing with friends. In Hearthstone for example, if you have limited time to play and want to maximize output, then you should avoid playing with friends since this doesn’t give any gold. Of course they do it to avoid cheating, but to me it feels like a missed opportunity to drive more play amongst friends.
- To illustrate I have my favorite example of a great social game: Flappy Golf. The graph here is from Summer 2014 when the game did really well on the download chart despite not having any marketing support. The developer own explanation is that it spread through-out the week days in schools and workplaces, which is highlighted by these dips that happen on every weekend. The game can be downloaded quickly and has little on-boarding time, which makes it perfect for virality when friends ask you to join in on the game.
- And this is something we encountered with another card we have: When we included tournaments we found out that a few players were gaming the matching algorithm to get matched with themselves and be able to cheat. So we had to update the match-making to disable players on the same network to get matched. In our design however, we didn’t include the option to play with friends, and by updating the match-making we essentially barred friends from connecting in the game. They were using a feature we didn’t include, and then we had to disable that, which from a user perspective is a shitty experience.
- The final issue is monetization. Obviously we all need to make money, but I believe there are some extra hurdles to cross when design for casual, synchronous multiplayer.
- The biggest one is the development of elder game. Most mobile games monetize on elder game, but elder game often requires heavy systems and that the player understands the systems. Typically more casual minded players are less prone to engage with systems and try to maximize their performance. When we prototype new games this part is often the deal breaker. However, some games, like 8ball pool, manage to add in these layers in for example the cues that can be bought and recharged, even if the concept seems to veer a little from any real world analogy.
- Boosters are another typical monetization mechanic that has serious issues in synchronous multiplayer, because it’s basically hard to convince the opposing player that this isn’t cheating. The best known example of successful boosters are probably the extra moves from CCS, but another game – also from King- Shuffle Cats lets players do a mulligan with soft currency. However, this is something we chose not to do in our card game, because we feared player backlash.
- Mobile games have typically monetized player activity via various energy mechanics. But for multiplayer games it is better to decrease the incentive to play over time rather than adding in a paywall. Hearthstone does this well by making daily quests the fastest route to more gold, and once they are finished the return on time invested is rather small.