Web3 Games, it's still all about Content
Digital collectables in games, is that indeed the next big thing?
For so many web3 offerings, the elusive piece has been utility, i.e. an actual point. Utility almost sounds easy in the context of fun games. Games have a clear path to delivering on Big Utility for Things You Can Own. So here we are at the intersection of explosive potential and things proven to light fuses.
And why not be bullish? There is a huge appetite for all types of games, and a whole lot of money involved. The mobile games segment alone is currently a $90Bn per year business, with massive growth expectations. Not all of that activity is directly related to collectables, but a good chunk of it is. Games that have playable collectables at the core of the experience can see very, very substantial consumer spend. Many of the titles commanding the highest player lifetime values are exactly that.
Some of the promises of web3 gaming have in part already been delivered by older and still booming games. Sense of permanence, ownership, scarcity, social value, impact in the game world - all of these elements can be at play in a closed game economy. It’s just that web3, if done right, can act as a major amplifier. Familiar, but better.
The opportunities are there. That does not mean that all of the upcoming games will do anything remotely sensible with player-owned assets. In the free-to-play market, the distance between a weak integration of collectables and a strong one is not trivial. This can mean the difference between an unscalable commercial failure and a billion dollar game.
Is it that hard though? Unfortunately, and in way luckily: yes. In the free-to-play world, most studios are not at all confident when it comes to economy design. There are far more followers than innovators. The most scary area is at the intersection of “economy” and the “rest of the game”. This is where many critical content topics live. With essentially no working models to copy, you can see how the more risk-averse studios might want to hold off on their open economy experiments.
Ok - maybe we’ve established that “fun” alone is not necessarily what is standing in the way of some crypto games and long term success.
Let’s dig deeper.
How do you spot the deep utility games from ones that will only ever have superficial utility?
How do you design for super hot collectables?
My starting point in assessing game economies has always been to zoom in on content: what is it exactly, and what does it do for me?
What is Content
There are different types of content for different games, and some grey area for what even constitutes content.
Candy Crush Saga has 12 185 puzzle levels, and more added all the time. Puzzle&Dragons (pictured above) has had over 9000 monsters to collect. This is all content. Developers may dread the content treadmill: having to continuously pump out more stuff to keep players entertained.
We can do a split between challenge content and player owned content. Some solutions to ease the burden for challenge content include multiplayer dynamics, user generated content and procedural generation. There are simpler things yet with modular content pieces, rule changes, variations and difficulty tiers. This is however not the focus this time.
So: levels, side quests, big bosses - all content, but not the topic for today.
Here we can are focusing on a specific type of content: player owned assets.
Evaluating player-owned content
The best content questions vary case by case, but there are also many general topics that cut across games and genres. My go-to grouping for these topics has been as follows: Content, Context, Distribution.
This is not a clean split and things tend to overlap. In early stages of development, designers may be running between content design questions and the gameplay functions for said content. Some talk about Itemization: what are our gameplay mechanics and which ones do we embed in collectables or consumables.
Let’s go through the pillars from left to right.
The first pillar focuses on content properties. What types of content will we have, and what does it take to produce them? What defines a piece of content, and what makes it attractive?
Some of these questions go directly at the intrinsic appeal of content. You might want characters with a lot character, whether using existing IP or not. Spaceships, superweapons and sportscars are tangible, and usually more attractive to own than shovels, sharp sticks and colourful orbs. Players draw comparisons to things familiar to them. We know that an Olympic Gold Medal has value beyond its weight in gold. A Darth Vader is probably powerful. That expectation is easy to form without seeing their stats.
Some games have less than fifty primary content pieces, some have thousands. More isn’t always better.
Is there a saturation point after which new content makes things worse, not better? What would break if you tripled the amounts? If you are going for high volume, you’ll want to know where the bottlenecks are. It is not great to end up with a live-ops strategy that assumes frequent content drops, but a game that can’t actually support that. Web3 games need to tread extremely carefully to not have new content diminish the roles of older content pieces.
Some types of content tend to be a lot more expensive than others. There are production costs involved, but you may also want to think of cost in terms of complexity added to the game. Clash Royale offers a good example for recycling mechanics. The game creates variety without overwhelming the player with too many rules and exceptions. Once the player knows how skeletons behave, they’ll be able to find them inside several cards: Graveyard, Witch, Skeleton Army, Skeleton Barrel…
Content is usually created by mixing and matching parameters and functionality. Anyone part of the current NFT scene is familiar with this in the context of visual traits. This ape has Laser Eyes, that one has 3D Glasses. Some NFT collections use attributes closer to the gaming world: tiers, families and even elemental systems. Mapping those differences to intuitive and meaningful game mechanics would be a separate challenge. That takes us to the central pillar: the role of content in the game’s context.
The central pillar is where a lot of game happens. The in-game utility for content can can be untangled in many ways. You could start with the player fantasies and goals, and work backwards to see how content plays into them. You might want to map content interactions to existing and potential systems. What works and where are the weak links? How can the different features, mechanics and dynamics help make content pop?
For cosmetic content, some keywords are visibility and social context. Overwatch matches end on a victory pose for the winning team, followed by a Play of the Game showcase. These features have several functions. One of them is drawing everyone’s attention to cosmetic content in a positive setting.
With more functional content, the thinking often goes like this: how does this content help me get access to other content? The chase for content is integral to many games. Dragon Vale and Crypto Kitties are examples of games where the purpose of content is to produce more content.
In PvP games, the setting is often my content vs your content. With PvE games, my content is pitted against challenge content. Accomplishing hard things can be followed by rewards, and access to more content.
Not everyone will be playing with all of the content. In many cases the goal structure of a game fights against experimentation. This means that players focus on a narrow set of content. Players having a sticky go-to strategy is fine for some games and boring for others. In many cases you do want players to “go wide” with content and play with a lot of it. Some games employ loadout rotation mechanics: soft and hard nudges to get you out of your comfort zone.
Contextualized rules often work a lot better. You might see more blunt mechanics like buffs or entry rules targeting certain content parameters: only dwarves can enter. Constraints can be good, but players might have a bad reaction to ones that feel arbitrary.
Then there’s the important piece of how content interacts with other content. You may want content pieces to act as complements to each other, rather than substitutes. Building synergies and sets is a very appealing goal that works in many settings. Another concept we always keep referring to is situational power. As Stefan Engblom put it in his 2017 GDC talk Balancing Cards in Clash Royale: “every card needs its moment”.
The final pillar in our framework deals with content distribution. Supply side topics tend to get a lot of focus on game economy discussions, both for web2 and web3 games. This makes sense, as among other things, this where the monetization mechanics exist in f2p games. This is also a layer from where you often hear those killer anecdotes of “changed one detail, increased revenue by 5%”.
There are critical differences between closed economy and open economy games here, and these deserve a separate post. Where trading is allowed, gating access to content is less of a thing. We are also no longer thinking of only individual player inventories, but aggregate stocks and inflows. Easing access for one player has implications for the whole ecosystem.
I would not start design work or breakdowns from the distribution angle. Clever supply side designs are not worth much unless the demand for content is strong. It’s nice to get +5%, but ever nicer to get to 5x.
That is it for now, but we are likely to likely return to the same themes later.
Many game economy issues do loop back to content.
Whether evaluating or designing game economies, you need a good handle on content topics. Weak links can be anywhere: differentiation, surfacing of mechanics, balancing…
Many web3 games are being built to create utility for different types of digital collectables. They’ll need smart designs to support those assets and deliver on the big promises.
In the f2p world, great integrations of exciting player owned content have produced more than a few megahits.
-Arto