As a game designer, there are some challenges you would always face working on F2P games no matter what genre, which target audience group or the size of the project.

1. Shayan Amiri
Medrick Game Studio
Five challenges you must deal as
a F2P designer
Track: Design

2. Who am I?
• At Medrick for 3 years , designing our F2P games
• Game designer for Rooster Wars series
• Lead designer and product owner of Spirit Wars

4. F2P Games
• Classic form of trade
• In Premium games, You create fun in exchange of revenue.
• In F2P games, You have to create fun and make revenue in the same
time.
• Keeping up the fun for a free product is the challenge you take as a
developer or more importantly, as a game designer.

5. Let’s overcome the challenge
• It doesn’t depend on :
• Studio culture
• Client | IP | Live project | From Scratch
• Multiple genres
Some challenges apply to all, no matter what is your situation.

6. 1- How to define your creative box?

7. Creative Box
• Creative limitation
• “We need to first be limited in order
to become limitless. “
-Phil Hansen , Ted Talk 2015
• Oulipo, A way French writers and
poets used to create notable pieces.

9. Define your box
• Set the phase you want to work with the box
• IP or seed definition
• Studio background
• Your team’s characteristics and special abilities
• Or anything else that can form the box to fit your idea in it!

10. Existing IP based project
• Rooster Wars
• The box was defined in the
concept phase.
• A new creative box was
defined in the boundaries of
box that formed the concept.

11. Client order
• EggShoot
• The box was already
there.
• Who says not to expand
the box? :D

12. New IP based project
• Rooster Wars : Tactics
• IP’s unique aspects form the
box fundamentally
• Genre, Scenario, Story, …
complete the box

13. 2- How to set your audience?

14. Target audience
• First of all, Why should you define a target audience?
• Define them in a measureable way.
• Quantize players’ needs

15. Measurable audience
• Player types
• Motivators
• Gender – Age
• Reasons to play mobile games

16. A glance to our target audience

17. 3- How to test your core mechanics?

18. A familiar dialog…
- Is the mechanic set you’ve designed fun enough?
- YES! There aren’t any games which can compete us! (Excited as hell)
- Oh! Let’s form a high scale team and build it in no time!

19. Do not jump to the end so fast
• High cost of production and marketing
• Risk to fail is much higher these days
“Iterative design is a design methodology based on a cyclic
process of prototyping,testing, analyzing, and refining a
product or process.”

20. Define targets
• Set target KPIs
• Retention Rate could be used for this matter. D1 is the most important one
to measure the quantity of fun there.
• Each core mechanic has some unique selling points. If they work, You would
be blessed.
• Define metrics which can measure USPs
• Analyze, Analyze and Analyze!

21. Test approaches
• In-house test
• Closed beta test
• Fake Launch
• Soft Launch ( Could be divided into some separate phases)

22. It’s not soft at all!

23. 4- How to design for expansion?

24. Big picture
• You draw a big picture in pre-production phase.
• There are some KPIs that you can’t take your eyes off them.
• Each feature ( developed or to be developed) should address those
KPIs.
• Plan to make the time span between updates shorter as possible (2-
4 weeks)

25. I’m ready for the next update
• Find out the current status of your project in term of KPIs
• Look at the production plan you’ve written months ago.
• Prioritize and set alternatives based on the KPIs ( and of course the
release plan!)

26. Analyze and analyze!
• Monitor all the KPI changes after each update
• Also set priority on KPIs to know which one to look first
• Consider plan B in all situations

27. Life saver feature
• The balance between sink and source of the economy was not
working and it had got worse each day passed
• Tournament feature got selected from our feature pool and entered
the production
• Shortly after the release, our revenue got 2 times better than 6
months before and everything went back to normal.

28. 5- How to include BI team?

29. BI team
• Stands for Business Intelligence.
• They are responsible for all the “DATA” gathered by your products
• They provide you benchmarks, Analyze deeper and help you to
define next step.
• Should be in-house team

30. Marketing team
• Marketing team is an inseparable part of your team
• Responsible for delivering your game as efficiently as possible
• Could be both in-house or out-source.

31. Say hello to your new teammates
• They should be on the same page you’re about core design.
• These teams may have new ideas for you
• Listen to them when they have comments
• These come from DATA/FEEDBACK not personal!

32. Recap
• Don’t limit your challenge, Challenge your limits to find the most
creative idea in the history of mankind!
• If you want to build a F2P game, be careful where you’re going.
There is a wild world out there, survive with DATA!
• Divide and conquer.
• Never forget to analyze everything.
• NEW is always better! New ideas, new workflows, new everything!

33. Thank you for your time!
Do not hesitate to contact me on sh.amiri@medrick.info