Game Design vs. Monetization: Why Are We Fighting?

Two recent occurrences have got me thinking about this whole new "monetization" approach to game development. First, I read the article "Who killed videogames," which focuses on this exact topic. The gist is that social games "hook you before you've started playing." Play for 1 minute, you're hooked for five. Play for 10 minutes, you're hooked for an hour. Don't give them too much game at once or they'll see no reason to come back. Make them wait for 2 hours and then make their phone buzz. It's a psychological attack, a kid constantly tugging at your arm in the grocery store and saying, "I'm hungry!" In the world of social games, this makes money. How? Spend money to speed up the process. Once people have learned the basic systems, they'll put in a dollar to speed those systems up.

The second occurrence happened the next day when I received an email which asked, "What is your monetization strategy for Children of Liberty?" to which I responded, "Sales." Their heads must have exploded.

Now I'll admit, I am no stranger to social games. Many people think that just because I ignore every request for Farmville and Frontierville that I loathe all games on the internet. This is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I spent an entire year playing Lord of Ultima, a game I highly recommend for several reasons.

• The gameplay goes thousands of times deeper strategically than anything you can find on Facebook.
• No one in the game is truly an ally. No one has to come by and water your crops, and no one is locked into their alliance. This means threats to your castles and palaces, cities with powerful buildings which give you and your alliance major stat and military bonuses, loom everywhere.
• It is hands-down the most aesthetically pleasing social game in existence.

I had played Lord of Ultima for about 6 months before I dropped $10 on Diamonds, the in-game microtransaction resource. This was, to this day, the only time I've spent money on a social game. But, being in the #2 alliance on the server, and a war with the #1 alliance looming, I felt I needed the boost to up my defenses and speed development of my military cities. If you're into strategy games that are heavily stats-based and have a relatively steep learning curve, play it. It doesn't follow the "wait 2 hours to do anything," beyond the first few days. Eventually, you'll always have something to do.

What Lord of Ultima taught me is that social games can in fact follow a different pattern than "same game, different metaphor." Even Zynga has started doing this with Adventure World, and discovering the benefits of deeper gameplay, but I guarantee its taken a few years of cajoling executives to break away from the "5 minutes of gameplay, make them wait an hour" blueprint, whether or not it means they'll make less money.

Unfortunately, microtransactions do still come down to a "pay to cheat" model. I can hear you now, screaming, "But Dan, you can't call it cheating if it doesn't alter gameplay! Don't you know the people are SUPPOSED to pay to make everything go faster?" As a matter of fact, I do, but here's the simple fact of the matter. The majority of your players will pay a grand total of $0.00 and just have the game go slowly. The majority rules, and in this case it's the majority's rules. Then you have those who will pay $10 for some temporary boosts, and one person who will pay $10,000 for a lifetime of boosts. These are the people who have typed in IDDQD and eliminated all challenge. THEY have changed the rules of the game because YOU gave them a way to make it EASIER.

You may argue that arcades did the same thing, that games became "easier" as you pumped in more quarters. I rebute this fallacy by pointing out that quarters never actually changed the rules of the game. By today's microtransaction standards, a quarter would give you 2X attack power in Street Fighter II for 3 minutes, and the true champion wouldn't be determined by who had the most skill, but by who brought the biggest bag of quarters (under normal circumstances, you can hardly call someone a champion if they're stuck on the character select screen because their friend was 1 quarter short and now can't play). Putting a quarter into an arcade machine's slot was, quite simply, renting the game for a very limited amount of time.

There is no "right way" to handle monetization. If you're going to make your game free-to-play, you have to come to grips with the fact that some money has to come from somewhere. Team Fortress 2 does this with hats. League of Legends does this with variations on character models, and runes that give minor boosts to your stats. The current build of my game is online for free, but with a donation button next to it.

The fact of the matter is, businesses need to make money, but if games are art (they are) then game design is an artform (my BFA says so). I personally feel that the art of game design is lost on many of these businessmen who go into game development because they hear there's a ton of money to be made on Facebook. To be fair, investors are hungry as hell to for Facebook game developers. So, someone new to the field will see Restaurant City or Sims Social, say, "I can make that!" and create the same feedback loops "Click This, Wait 5 Minutes Till You Can Click It Again OR Pay $1 to Click It Again Now" for everything in the game, and done. Heck, you can put in a leveling system to make the player feel like they're progressing, but all you're really doing is increasing the amount of time they have to wait between clicks. Meanwhile, the Diablo III beta takes OVER 9000 clicks to get through. Can you imagine if THOSE clicks were monetized? Even 1 cent per click would set the player back $90 by the end of 2 hours of gameplay, and social game developers think they have it right by making players pay to speed gameplay up? Of course, this exact scenario was poked fun at by the Blizzard team in an episode of the Jace Hall Show. I'm not encouraging this kind of design, I'm just pointing out that it could, in fact, happen. Would it make many gamers angry? Yes. Would some still play it? Oh you bet. Luckily, Blizzard has come up with a unique monetization system in the form of Diablo III trading, letting you spend real money to buy other player's items. Will this give an advantage to people with money to spend on loot? Absolutely. Can you find this loot in the world just by adventuring? Well, how do you think the seller found it?

In conclusion, the point I am trying to make is that game design can be used to fuel monetization. Do not abandon the craft, and most importantly do not attempt to bleed your audience's wallets dry. We know you like money. Heck, I like money. But now is not the time economically for trying to bankrupt your players. At the very least, truly reward them for spending extra money while not breaking the game's balance. I don't think we've hit this point of fair business practices in game design yet, but when we do, we'll all be able to breathe a sigh of relief that the real game designers took social game design away from the suits.