Idle Games: The Mechanics and Monetization of Self-Playing Games

[Music] okay so um this is a talk titled Idol games the mechanics and monetization of self-playing games uh so let's get right into it uh a quick introduction um I am uh I've been at congregate for about six years uh directing our U browser-based virtual Goods business uh also recently picked up um production for a mobile game called Adventure capitalist uh which actually just launched about two Weeks ago um and we'll be talking about that um quite a bit in this talk as it is also an idle game uh I also um founded uh a

studio called level up labs and um we're probably best known for our game Defenders Quest and are currently working on a sequel congregate uh we are if anyone is not familiar with us an open platform for browser based games uh with a variety of Technologies basically anything that runs in the browser we're Happy to uh support we have around 16 million that might be a slightly old number but um somewhere around 16 million monthly unique visitors worldwide um our demographic tends to be more of a core gamer uh demographic than you usually think of with

browser based games um heavily male average age about 22 years old uh popular genres are more MMOs RPGs uh collectible card games um not really as much of the casual and social games that you might see on other Sites we have a platform level uh currency called creds that you can spend in our free-to-play games uh and we were acquired by GameStop in July of 2010 we work with a variety of part Partners um that are both uh you know Western and Eastern big companies small companies um have all published through us um or distributed

through us on the web uh we also um in the last about year and a half or so have become a mobile publisher and uh these are some of our Games we have quite a few more um that are out now and and regularly launching um so that's that's kind of our core business so that's the good background of where a lot of this data is coming from so I want to open with a question for the audience um how many of you have played Cookie Clicker or some other Idol game can you pick up

put up your hands all right I want you to leave hold on on leave your hands up if you have played what you would describe an embarrassing Amount of it all right a lot of hands stayed up for that thank you so that gives us three interesting pieces of information one almost every hand went up for the first question these are very popular games they're well known a lot of people play them two a lot of hands stayed up for playing an embarrassing amount which means that people play them a lot and keep playing them

and three there is this sort of self shame around them People don't usually talk about playing games an embarrassing amount if it's like a really great game they're proud of but there's this weird thing about um Idol games so I want to kind of dig into to all of that so this is a a game called number uh it was a kind of a spoof parody game Tyler GLE created uh you want to make your number go up it goes up a certain speed when you can afford more you make it go up faster it's

boiled down to the most minimal Level and yet this is actually kind of compelling it's I played this an embarrassing amount to be frank um so why is that what what is it about this genre and why are we talking about this in the first place well for one it's a birth of a new genre we don't actually get to see that very often in the games industry probably the most recent one prior to this was maybe mobas um to see like kind of a legit new genre coming uh and becoming very popular uh it's

only About two years old in its modern form uh and it is very popular uh right now this is our screenshot of the top most played games on congregate in the last 30 days and three of those top five are Idol games uh it's so popular you actually can watch Twitch streams of self-playing games like the guy's not even playing this he's just running it through his um through his uh browser but it's like six people are actively watching this5 200 people have favored This channel of a self-playing game without even a person there they

have fabulous retention stats we'll look at some specific ones but these are some of the best retaining games on all of congregate tocom and they actually generate really great Revenue the uh the arpus the lifetime values of these games are well above most SLE player games that we have and actually are competing with a lot of our multiplayer games um also for those Taking pictures um we'll post these slides on our website as well so you're welcome to take pictures but um if you miss some please don't worry about it we'll uh they'll be available

afterwards as as well so I want to do kind of a quick survey of the sort of the history and evolution of idol games to sort of understand how we've gotten to where we are probably the first one was progress Quest um by Eric Frederickson in 2002 This was a parody of MMO RPGs and it was basically a character sheet that just ran itself it's a zero player game you cannot interact with this even if you want to outside of the character creation which doesn't have any impact on the game um it's you know so

much so that the Wikipedia page kind of cheekily puts quotes around the word game throughout it it's not really interactive in any way but it's still kind of people it was still popular I Mean how many people have played progress Quest right okay this is not a game you can play but that many people are aware of it and have played it so already we were seeing something interesting happening congregate in particular actually ended up being sort of an early reading ground for idle games and I think the main reason is that we have a

chat room uh that plays next to the games and you can only be in chat if you have a game running so there Was this demand for games that people didn't actually want to play they just wanted to be in chat but you had to something up so we started seeing games the oldest one uh that has an idle tag is a game called congregate chat it was made just so you could chat um and not really be playing a game um not long after that that was 2007 2008 we started seeing some rudimentary RPGs

appearing um nowhere near the complexity of what we see in current Idol games but already This idea of a game that mostly plays itself with very little interaction was starting to occur uh in 2009 probably most popular early Idol game was a game called anti- Idol and this game got crazy it was incredibly complicated it had active elements and idle elements it's actually really different from current idle games but it did a lot of pioneering work uh in that um concept um tons of content it's six years old and they are still Adding new features

literally yesterday he push pushed out a uh an update to it so uh it's it's an incredible game and and has been really popular for a very long time cow clicker is um one of the ones that got a lot of media attention um Ian bogos was trying to really poke fun at Farmville and other kind of appointment uh games and social games and so the idea was you got this cow you would click it then you have to wait six hours and then you can come back and Click it again and by click it

I mean one time you only get one click per six hours and that was about it um you could invite some friends and if they clicked on their cow you got some Mooney um and and you know that was that was the entirety of the game and much to um in boo surprise it really caught on um and he ended up adding some more features to it and growing out a little bit and but still trying to Champion this idea that you know social games and farm games are Silly at least in his opinion uh

a quick mention they're they're a bit different but a dark room and candy box um are you know idle games in many ways uh there was a lot of progress that would happen without active interaction um but they actually are a bit different from most of what we're talking about now they are finite they can be beaten um they're a lot more puzzle likee in Exploration based they're great games I definely Recommend them if you haven't played them um but they are a little different from where this talk will be going so Cookie Clicker this

is the one that really kicked it off um it was actually a parody of candy Bock um and uh got really popular and um orti was quoted as saying you know at first I couldn't tell if people were just going along with the joke or if they were actually being serious uh it turns out they were being serious um you know there was something Even though it was funny and you kind of enjoyed it there was something extremely compelling about the system that he set up for for it and I I forget what the number

was but like a ridiculous number of players played this game and continued to play this game um it was the first major mainstream hit of the genre uh arguably creating it um so this is why I'm saying it's 2 years old is this is where it really came into its modern Form and it really established a basis for the progression for the upgrading for all of these tropes that we see mimicked in most of the current Idol games this was the game that really um put brought those into mainstream and kind of uh solidified them

Adventure capital um was a kind of an experiment by Cody VG who worked at hyper hippo games um and it turned out to be really popular in hyper hippo then put more people on To it U but it's really a parody of capitalism and idle games you notice i' been saying parody a lot this is sort of a genre that almost doesn't want to exist it's it's it's a joke really but it keeps despite itself being really successful um and so you actually see a lot of humor in a lot of these games and and

that's a a reason for it um it was one of the first that I'm aware of to introduce offline progress so unlike Cookie Clicker where you had to have it Running your browser all the time this one would calculate the time between your last login and just give you credit for uh what everything you would have earned this was really freeing now you don't have to dedicate your CPU to watching you know little pointers clicking a clicker or a cookie uh you could just close it down come back the next day uh and I think

that was actually a big Advantage for it and it's now actually standard in most idle games Uh and it was also just really fun to look at there was a lot of Animation bars filling up everyone loves bars filling up so um it was it was really compelling um quicker Heroes 2014 uh this is one that was a lot more RPG like you hired Heroes you leveled them up you gained skills um and uh you know your your progress was measured or your power was measured in DPS damage per second uh they added the addition

of cooldown skills again um this added some Strategy and action elements to it uh and it had really great visuals in presentation and that's they didn't actually put all that into the idol game this was all repurposed assets from one of their MMO RPGs um but it made it one of the best looking Idol games of the time uh and then tap Titans um is not by play stour but is a kind of a close derivative that you may have seen on um on mobile that is very similar to to uh Clicker Heroes but did

a really great job kind of bringing that into Mobile all right almost done with the history uh Make It Rain was probably the first big mobile success um and a lot of that I think was just this hilarious concept You' sit there and you'd flick your finger over it like you're making it rain with dollar bills uh and it was very viral um a lot of Word of Mouth people just wanted to show each other this great concept and I think that Helped it really take off off um the idol elements were actually really limited

you could only collect so much money and then you'd have to come back in to um to get it and it would stop collecting once you got to a point um so you had to really check in regularly I had a very aggressive ad strategy where ADS were popping up all the time because you're doing this motion you'd actually click on them it was very clever um but I think it actually probably wore down The players a fair amount it was kind of annoying too um so I'm sure it was a great success for a

while but I bet it hurt their longer term retention uh I don't have the data to prove that though and they also had this pretty brutal like FBI monetization so the FBI would occasionally show up they would declare you guilty and you would lose not only a hunk of cash but actually a hunk of your cash per second which in an idol game is a really big deal and you'd have to Bribe them with you know real world money to not lose that um and that's that's that was I think that that's actually what kind

of like stopped me from playing the game is once I hit that that was such a negative thing that it um I just didn't want to go on um so that's a very very aggressive monetization strategy may have worked well but again I think it hurt the long term uh Bitcoin billionaire was another great um mobile game Apple loved it it Has really nice style tone and the topic was fun and very current presentation is really good um just kind of General design is really nice on it and one of the best things about it

is it's opt-in ads um this was one a lot of times people cite Disco Zoo is great opt-in ads this one I think also is really worth studying if you're ever going to be working with optin ads on mobile look at how at the many many ways that they do it and we'll actually look at a few Of them later on in the talk but that's it's something that Bitcoin did really nicely um they similarly to Make It Rain had really strong bit U um sorry uh appointment mechanics um very limited offline progress and it

was actually offline progress is one of their Central monetization elements I think this was actually a mistake on them um and we'll talk about why a little bit later uh two quick notable entries that aren't really um as well known but uh Drip stat uh is really just a cookie clicker clone but it had amazing um visualization uh you could really understand what was contributing uh to what it has a global Live Leaderboard so if you look in like the top left area here I can see my Global ranking and every time I drip more

bites into the machine um I'd actually seen my rank move up uh and there's actually even realtime contributions from other players so you can see this plus one gab From user you know whatever that is uh that's not me that's someone else that has just done that in real time so even though it's a single player game you get this feeling that you're playing in a world with other people and that was something that I haven't seen done much in Idol games and and this one did really nicely uh and the other one I want

to mention uh swarm simulator has only been out for a couple of weeks at least on congregate I'm not sure where It started earlier than that um it it explores a new kind of funnel based economy so they're actually playing around with a different way of doing the idol game economies that's really interesting uh even though it's only a couple weeks old it's proving to be extremely popular so in the last couple weeks it's been played a million times on congregate alone uh so I think we actually probably will see this one um uh catching

on a lot you'll probably Will hear about it if you haven't already uh I definitely recommend checking out it's really nice uh even though it's like a lot of these just sort of a glorified spreadsheet with some really neat mechanics in it so speaking of vital game core mechanics what makes these games so interesting what is unique about them compared to most other games progress without interaction this is sort of the the most basic thing about idle games is where They get their name right uh and I should say uh I'm saying idle games you'll

often hear incremental games used as well um if you hop on Reddit you can get into a very long argument about this um I'm going to use them fairly interchangeably and not uh address that debate um so prodest interaction it's a low pressure experience you don't have to be constantly playing if you go away for a while and you come back that's okay you got some stuff you can keep Going it's a it's a very kind of Positive Growth positive feedback um everything is is going up right with no lose conditions you might not go

as fast as other people but you constantly feel like you're making progress um and quick check-ins can be very profitable every time you check in you buy a couple of things it shifts up your uh your curve so that you're gaining faster and then you go away for a while and you've actually made a lot of progress even With a very short check-in and this is really good for social and especially mobile uh interactions when you're looking for that like I want to pull it out for a minute make a couple decisions and put it

away this type of system is is great for that um so what this actually does is it creates a celebratory moment every time you come back to the game uh so and a lot of these actually call it explicitly so they say like welcome back you just Earned a ridiculous amount of money you should spend it and so it it creates this positive feedback of oh man I just came back I get to spend all this stuff this is a lot of fun um and beyond that the longer you're away the bigger the reason to

return so if you've been gone for a week or so you don't feel like in some games you've fallen behind here you've actually gotten ahead right and if you go back you're gonna have even more money to spend and so um you know Here where I was gone five five hours instead of a day I get a lot more being gone for a day um so Force appointment mechanics I would actually say are unnecessary players naturally want to come back because of the way the system works um and uh and that's that's a really kind

of magical thing so uh you know even daily rewards I don't see used in these games um and you know maybe they they could be but the fact is they don't really need it because the Retention is already off the charts so here here is a um a chart of retention um d17 uh I think 14 and 30 or no 30 and 90 sorry um the actual numbers don't really matter but uh and you'll notice our d1s look kind of low this is the uh the top 10 monetizing games of 2014 on congregate um the

d1s look low compared to what you see on mobile and that's because there's a lot less friction when you go to play a browser game you don't Have to install it you just check out the page so um what I'm doing this is to give kind of a sense of sort of a baseline of some of our best performing games uh and then now I'm going to pop on our three um Idol games that have the purchases in them you'll notice they dwarf all of our other best performing games so the retention is amazing on

these games there's something really special happening there and that's again without daily Rewards without saying you have to come back to check in without any kind of forced mechanics to bring players back another core mechanic is the rapid growth of costs and uh and power and rewards in the game so this leads to a sense of progress It's psychologically fun and satisfying like that's what number was right your number is going up we like collecting things we like advancing we like improving ourselves and this these really really get into it And do it at sort

of a ridiculous level uh Adventure capitalist actually writes out the words fully um and you end up sort of speaking a new language as you play this game so you learn what the next you know multiple of a thousand is called the uh Duo Quadra gentian um you know that actually starts to make sense to you as you play the game other games will just flat out you scientific notation because the numbers are just getting so outrageous um but it's also Just really f fun to have that kind of growth and it's a sort of

level of growth you don't usually expect experience in games um we actually couldn't even for adventure capitalist the game center uh leaderboards don't support numbers that big we had to take a log a logarithm just to uh to record uh high scores um so the core Loop of these games is you log in you spend all your cash and then you log out and you come Back a few hours later and do it again now that sounds kind of familiar that's what we see in social games and in energy games right you get a certain

amount of energy it spend it all and then you leave and the energy comes back and then you go do it again but the difference is energy games are this Force mechanic that's put on top of the core game while with um with idle games it has the sort of Natural Energy System without the need for an energy currency And uh this ends up being a lot more palatable to to players and especially kind of like the core Gamers who rebel against the social games and the Facebook games um they we find that they really

are perfectly happy with this kind of a setup and I think there's a few reasons for that it it has a real world analog it makes sense right like you're not dealing with lightning bolts that are just kind of like added on to it it's like oh I'm out Of cash I can't buy anything else that makes sense to me so I'm just going to come back later when I've got more cash Additionally the player takes ownership over this decision the game is not saying you can't do anything else it's you could sit there and

you could wait and actively play it and probably buy something in five minutes or so but you as a player say I could wait but my time's more with while in this I'm not going to sit here and watch this I'm Just going to come back later and so it overall is a just sort of a better experience a cleaner experience and uh one that comes out of the natural mechanic rather than something artificially put on top of it um it also counterbalances offline play so you get big rewards but those rewards grow linearly um

and so time actually loses value without interaction so let's let's take a look at that what that means um so here is a uh a curve This is a an exponential growth um where it's saying across the bottom we have like game sessions and basically um in this case I'm roughly assuming game sessions kind of a once a day thing and every day you get about 10 x as powerful as the previous day and that's totally normal in in uh idle games if not even a little slow um it's also impossible to read like this

so we're going to do a log scale instead so we can make it a little more linear and understand it so Now if you're playing once a day every day under this kind of rough approximation then your Daily Progress is going to be right in line with that right now if you were to play on the first day and then wait s days and come back um on that you know a week later instead of having the this is a little weird but you know on your second game session if you're playing every day you're

going to have about 100 you know 10 times what you had before here you Have 700 you were gone for 7even days so you collected 100 for seven days what this means though is even though you were gone for seven days your actual is this showing up yeah okay your actual um uh amount of cash only puts you at about where day three would be um for someone who's playing every day so even though you were gone for a week it's not like you're a week ahead of people are playing actively you're actually only you

know partway to where the next Session would have been anyway and the thing is this keeps going if you're gone for a month so you're gone for 30 days yeah that gets you up to your 3,000 but that's still only around somewhere around the day three of someone who's actively playing you can go away for a year come back 365 days later and oh look you're sitting somewhere in the the fourth session so what this means is that you don't have to cap off learn uh spending or off learn earnings that's Why I think these

forced appointment mechanics but beyond the fact that they're not necessary um from a retention standpoint they're not even necessary from a game standpoint the math makes it sorry I'm a math major so I think this is really cool the the math makes it so that offline progress as linear progress becomes irrelevant because your growth is actually exponential so you can let the players keep earning lots and they're going to Feel great come back seven days I have tons of cash compared to where I was but in terms of the progress of the game they're actually

not getting that far and this gives you the freedom as a developer to not be forcing them to do things to let them kind of experience it on their own and to let the math control the progress something else you tend to see in a lot of these games is tons of goals and achievements um lots of unlocks this Eventure capist has 500 unlocks right now they're adding more all the time um part of this is providing moments of joy throughout the game I mean the more the core game is you're making your number go

up right and at some point that gets kind of boring but if you're getting little achievements and little bursts of speed throughout that helps break it up a little bit it also gives you um the ability to have momentto moment optimizations so you may be deciding in This example um you know the you have one thing that you can get here if you get to 2,000 newspapers you'll get uh times 15 on your pizza deliveries or if you get to 2200 you get time three on your car washes well you're making a decision now like

which one should I try to go for which one's going to be the better uh optimization and so you actually do have some decisions that at least temporarily are meaningful they they min max a little bit longterm yeah You'll be able to afford it but you're going to be able to afford things faster if you play more optimally so it actually gives some strategy to the player rather than just number go up faster prestiging um or kind of New Game Plus anyone know where the term New Game Plus comes from sorry anyone it's Chrono Trigger

um I I did not know that until I was researching this but apparently that was the first one to uh ever use the term Sorry random trivia now you know uh so you get to choose to reset your game um to kind of get a boost the next time through so this one's tap Titans and you it's not a force you you can do it whenever you want but you kind of get the options like all right now I want to do my reset I'm going to get some bonus I'm going to completely start over

but you're going to do it with more power and you're going to accelerate through the early part of the game and this is Really really Central to the espe the most successful Idol games um it provides a strategic decision to the player so a lot of the little minmax decisions you know those are nice they're fun and there's some opportunity there but when to reset is a really really important decision do I reset when I'm going to double my speed or do I do it at one and a half times and try to do that

uh repeatedly at a faster rate and hope that it stacks on top more Than the doubles go there are long discussions and forms about this there's a uh a group of math Majors that I'm working with at a university that are trying to model this out and to pick out the best uh strategies for idle games like it's it's actually an interesting question and a really good strategic opportunity um it's often tied to a separate currency so in this previous shot um you can see like you earn these uh uh sorry relics um based on

your Progress and you're only earning like five or 10 relics despite the fact that you have some you know octillion damage per second that you're doing there and so this actually lets you transform exponential growth back to linear so now you're getting back into sort an actual gameplay progression you're sort of you know taking a L of your progress and so the players are seeing all these giant numbers but you as a game developer get to turn it back into something that's a Bit more linear and more controlled um and this also leads to a

new gameplay Loop you start getting faster and like your core Loop of buying all your upgrades and getting through it then gets you know wrapped around or wrapped within this idea of prestiging and sometimes you're prestiging like once a day for some of these games and that becomes a second almost core loop as fast as it goes uh and players get into a rhythm and it's really Fun um so let's go go back to our exponential growth curve we take our log of it now in the last one we said that your progress was basically

right in line with the power there but when you start doing a Prestige Loop your costs are going up that way but your uh earnings are going to be a little bit below that right so early on you're going to be earning above the cost but then it's going to Trail off and you're going to be unable to progress uh this Is not a hard wall the game is not saying you have to progress but it's going to start feeling slower and slower and the player is going to be getting a little bit bored until

they get the option to do a prestige now when you do a Prestige you're multiplying um I think by three in this case you're going to multiply your earnings so boom now you're taking the exact same earnings line like nothing has changed in the balance but you shifted it up and what This means is that the early part of the game is going to accelerate you're going to fly through that early stuff and you're going to get farther than you did before but then you're going to start you know trailing off again you're going to

hit a different soft wall and at some point you're going to decide okay it's time to prestige again and you can keep doing this and you're going to keep progressing through the content of the game but do it in this kind of repeat Way uh and it creates this interesting Loop that's really fun for players um it's this uh ladder climbing idea each time you're going a rung higher um even though you're starting over uh and it gives this amazing sense of progress It's one of like the greatest rushes of a uh of an idol

game as as many of you know if you got into a cookie clicker uh you do your your your prestige and then all of a sudden you get to buy everything and it's incredibly fun it's A really good player experience and it's a core part of the uh the game progression um Regular Updates this seems like a weird thing to I to I call a mechanic I guess it's more of a um a quality that we've identified but because I I think in large part because the games are fairly simple there's not a lot of

assets it's all just kind of like spreadsheets and balance and uiux um you actually can iterate on it fairly Quickly and what we've seen so this is uh the Swarm simulator um release log that's like every day all of the you know he's putting out a release with you know not just like a minor fix like you know fair amount and what we've actually seen is that I think I can actually say every single highly successful um Idol game on congregate has had a rapid release cycle of like every couple days they'll do something new

um it's you know I don't know that it's necessary But it is a very clear observation that we've seen the players react well to it with math this weird like trying to get the balance right is really hard so being able to iterate on that is actually kind of important um it's just something that we've seen over and over again is a quality that has been Su that has been a part of success for idle games uh make it bumpy so this was kind of interesting um this was a story from Cody ve who is

the uh the adventure Capitalist designer um originally he did a very smooth progression curve and it turns out that was really boring you know what's coming there's no surprise and Delight associated with it so you have your cost curve and your um uh and your earnings curve and it's it's totally flat you know exactly what you're going to do uh and so we ended up intentionally screwing up the curve and that made a lot more interesting you make it bumpy and you're going to have Areas of Rapid acceleration when things are going real well and

then you're going to have kind of slow parts and this provides variety it keeps it interesting you don't know exactly what's going to come next and that's actually fun to discover and then when you start prestiging the Interac the the intersection points you know also change and so again you're going to have different points where things are going to be happening things are going to be Going really fast and they're fun and other parts where they slow down a little bit maybe you ease off come back a day later and then you can get back

into it uh it just makes the whole process a lot more interesting um so we have uh we actually see a lot of these elements in other games like you know many of them are not unique to idle games um so like in realtime social and strategy games you do often see progress while gone though often with Hard uh caps so in um you know Heyday you you're seeing your your farm is growing but only the stuff that you planted and if you go away for weeks it's no better than going away for however long

your longest timer is um Mafia wars kind of like the energy based games same type set up uh and even game of war sorry there we go uh game of war um the uh you have all of your earnings but there's also a Max um uh storage that you can have so there is still this Idea of earning while you're gone and that's still fun for players but they all cap it out in a way that I think misses out a little bit on an opportunity there that going putting some math into the exponential growth

um could could fix though it would be a little bit weird in these two um Chinese MMO RPG so there's a current trend of becoming very heavily autoplay um players uh and especially Chinese players are really really Savvy at MMO RPGs they want to get through the early part very quickly and get to the end game where it gets really interesting the strategy in the M maxing um and they can you know these games even can include in AFK mode so this is a game called mythborn uh looks like an action RPG and in large

part is but if you see like it says autop paath at the top like you start playing the game and it just starts running off it kills people for you then it runs back accepts a quest Like it's all doing it automatically for you um and in large part like this is like an idle game right it's running on its own and you're just kind of watching it making occasional decisions um it's it's about Min maxing stats it's about collecting equipment putting the right things together uh and it's it's really interesting it's really deep but

what we see is that Western audiences often don't react well to it and I think this is in large part uh a Problem with expectation management you see this game that looks like an action RPG and you're expecting an action RPG but then you're getting this you know something that functions more like an idle game and so even players who love idle games often don't like MMO RPGs that play like idle games so uh you know there're these are interesting games to study for some of the stuff that they do um when it comes to

Min maxing when it comes to optimization um but there's This weird thing uh psychological thing where they don't necessarily set the expectations properly and especially Western audiences who aren't used to it uh can sometimes have a negative reaction to it and then launch games so uh I'm sure you've you've seen these games around where you launch something you collect some and you buy some upgrades you launch it again that sounds kind of familiar right it's actually a type Loop Prestige system um you know You don't actually have Choice over when you're going to do your

prestige it's when you land but the idea is still the same you do some you know your core Loop you get to the end you've gained some uh resources you spend them and then the next time it's like that Ladder rung you're getting farther each time and I think that's part of the reason that launch games are so much fun it's that same idea of continuing growth and we just see that in idle games is like Stretched out a little bit with a little more Choice um but the mechanic is still actually very Sim similar

so these games actually do monetize um and I'll admit it surprised me a little bit when uh our I think Adventure capitalist was the first one that called me I was like hey can we put in purchases in the game I'm like yeah I guess but I don't know if anyone's going to buy them um I am not always right and I was happy to be wrong in that one um So what do you what can you sell uh as in an idol game I mean really the game is just making a number go up

right how can you monetize that well you can sell a cash INF Fusion let's just get a burst of cash right away um it's usually a percentage of whatever your current rate of income is that way it's always going to be relevant to you wherever you are or sometimes they just flat out call it a Time Warp um so you can say all right let's jump ahead 24 hours and you know You're you'll get whatever cash you would have earned all of your cooldowns finish off and that's actually kind of compelling for someone who wants

to just jump ahead maybe they're really close to something they'll say oh okay I'll pay a dollar to get ahead I mean that's that's a fairly common U mechanic that we seen in a lot of things it's a speed up um you can also some of them will sell permanent speed multipliers um Adventure capitalist did this where you could buy A time three multiplier that just did a permanent times three on everything you earned now that's fun and you accelerate faster but also because of the way the exponential growth works this isn't quite as much

I mean it doesn't progress you through the game as fast as you might think um so it's fun for players and they do go faster but it also doesn't completely break the game which was kind of interesting um the instant prestige so usually you reset and start Over right but uh we actually see games that'll say okay you can get all of your currency but you can stay where you are and that's very compelling for players who especially on games that have long longer Prestige Loops being able to say okay I'm going to collect everything

and keep going um that's that actually can be really really effective um protection against negative events so you know Make It Rain with all the bribe money that can keep the FBI off your back um in tap Titans you can actually lose Heroes for periods of time but you can also buy a shield to protect them um so that that's out there uh gotcha system U we'll we'll talk about this one a little bit but um uh clicker Heroes actually has a gacha system in it um or for those who aren't familiar with it this

is like random draws um like a you know col card game kind of thing um and even like event currencies uh so in adventure capitalist they ran a A holiday event where you Were collecting candy canes you could open presents and you could actually buy things that would increase your candy cane production that would get you more presents that would you know earn these unique things you could only get during the uh the event very similar to something like uh um you know the Simpsons tapped out or Family Guy Quest for Stuff where they have

event currencies and and specific things there you can still apply that to an idol game And and they have done that uh you do see banners and interstitial ads um so Bitcoin billionaire did this really clever thing uh I don't know how readable that is but um you know it says basically we're going to give you a bonus if you let us show you a banner ad and so you say oh cool and you actually ask them it's like yes please show me a banner ad and a banner ad pops up and then you play

and earn some more cash um so the player it's an it's I think the Only opt-in Banner ad I've seen before you see a lot of like opt-in video ads um they when you do an optin ad like an actual opin ad you'll often get like a short burst of cash some small bit of Premium currency uh brief powerful boost um relief of a negative status or even like a kind of a longer term but lower boost um the relief of the negative status so another example from Bitcoin billionaire you know something someone divided by

zero you're going to lose a Quarter of all of your btes so this actually feels a lot like the FBI thing from uh um Make It Rain but they allow you to just watch an ad to get around it so it's still that negative experience but it's not nearly as punishing for the player it's really just saying hey you had bad luck now you have to watch 15 seconds of Kate Upton um so it works out it's a little more palatable um so we going to do a couple of case studies real quick um of

games That are on congregate that the developers very kindly said that we could uh share some numbers for um I'm only sharing per user numbers so uh no total revenue or anything like that but at least some insight as to how games are performing um so idling to rule the gods this is a one guy created this game it's not a high production game um but it definitely has some really interesting systems um branched out with some new mechanics It was at a time that we were seeing a lot of direct clones of cookie clicker

and Adventure capitalist uh and this did some different things that players reacted well to um like any of them very rapid iteration adding tons of new stuff um made a lot of UI changes so this was kind of the old UI the new one's not drastically different but there were a lot of UI um or ux changes where there were more options there were easier things for players to do like players Would ask for features and he would just do it and the players loved that they love that it felt like it was growing and

improving all the time um I he probably should get an art budget but that's okay um sorry it was mean um there were a lot of really complicated action uh interactions in this game and deep dense systems that players are digging into uh and that's really really fun for them um you know crazy math that calculate your attack is Your battle plus your creating strength over two plus physical over four divided by 943 um you know which he surfaces to the player so they can start optimizing that right um and that's you know that kind

of depth is is always going to be fun for players who want to try to min max the monetization in the game is heavily focused on God power this is basically their premium currency um and you can either keep the god power and use it to provide um multipliers to Different areas of the game or you can spend it and get permanent multipliers um but the permanent boosts tend to be what players react really well to um in in this game in particular uh they do have some temporary boosts where you could do like a

90-minute boost or even like a boost until you prestige again um and those sell decently but it's only about 12% of the revenue so it's really the um the kind of the permanent boost or the kind of investment side that we See selling best for for this particular game um just to share a couple of charts um this is the lifetime percent buyers on congregate um the first part was uh some testing data so please ignore the early part of that but ends up somewhere around 1.3% buyer rate so as perspective usually we see games

kind of like you're doing okay if you're about 0.5% good games usually doing one to 2% uh purchase rates a few games will do 3% or higher so he's actually got a pretty Good if not a bit above average uh purchase rate on the game and the lifetime average a revenue per paying user so this is Lifetime not monthly or daily or anything like that but the average per paying user is sitting around $25 um and that's actually quite good especially for a single player game a lot of our single player games will get you

know5 or $10 for you know a premium version or you know somewhere in that range so to get players spending $25 on average for those who decide to spend is actually quite good um and overall leads to a pretty decent LTV for the game uh clicker Heroes so this one a couple things that it does really interesting it does a great job of spreading value across Heroes so a lot of times all of your old Investments your older things that you get become irrelevant very quickly and this one actually makes them relevant um you know

Much later in the game uh keeps it interesting keeps you kind of like on your toes in terms of what you're going to focus on um the use of RPG like cooldowns um as I said before it provides these kind of like quick action gameplay and some strategy um you can see that uh this list of uh these are the cool Downs right here um and so you have the sorry I can't quite read it here but this is the one that I think gives you more damage for like 30 Seconds or something and then

it has a cool down for a few hours uh and they can monetize those cool Downs take quick you can get your cool Downs back immediately um but it also was just fun like you log in and all of your stuff's cooled down and then you decide like you're going to go up to the next boss and you fire them off in the right order you want the doubler to go right between right before the uh click boost that goes then before the uh uh the higher Counter order I don't know if I'm doing the

order right but there's actually a little bit of strategy behind it U which is which is fun for people who you know appeals to RPG players um their Prestige system um involves a currency that has a trade-off between your DPS bonus and your uh you know the summoning of these ancients so you you get these uh these uh hero Souls that you know increase your DPS but you can also spend those to get these cool bonuses and so it becomes This idea not just when do I prestige but how do I do I spend my

Prestige points and if so how do I do that more interesting uh uh questions for the player so again the core Loop is mostly a self-playing game but once you start making these bigger decisions it's actually very interesting discuss decisions for the player to engage in um in terms of monetization they have the cash infusion and the instant procceed that are pretty standard in Idol games Uh which are those first two that you see here uh you know plus one Ascension and get the hero Souls right away but they also have this plus three random

gilded Heroes and this is one of the the Innovations they really brought brought in this is a very simple but effective gacha system um these are all the heroes you can earn in the game and you can draw what's called a gilded hero which makes that hero do plus 50% damage permanently and you can Guild multiple Times so plus 100% plus 150% uh this is fun from a collection standpoint you ideally would want all of your Heroes gilded and then you uh because you can buy multiple times you can actually get it so that you

want to still keep you know making purchases and getting these random guildings so that you can increase your power overall uh and because they did a good job of balancing the characters to be relevant throughout um even if you get some of the you know The lower- end ones those are going to be relevant to you at times as well so this was really cool um yeah it last for multiple purchases so looking at their numbers um their lifetime perc buyer ended up a good bit better than uh even idling to rule of the Gods

um at almost 3% that's a very strong percent buyer rate on congregate um and I think in large part due to the gsha system they actually ended up in a similar $25 arao um so doing really well uh especially With the extra buyer percentage uh in terms of uh you know ltvs on the site all right last case study we're getting through it um Adventure capitalist so uh this really appealed to both browser and mobile audiences we were able to take it to mobile uh got some great features from Apple and Google which was awesome

um we uh it has a really heavy use of the theme the tone and the humor in the game so um you know these are some of the managers you can get you can see Like you know ww Heisenberg is the uh Car Wash manager and uh uh Forest Trump runs the uh um the shrimp business and it's a Canadian game so you have this Jim Thorton uh joke in here too for anyone that's a Tim Horton fan um so uh that that humor really really resonates with players they like seeing what kind of what

are the names of the managers coming up what are the new uh upgrades coming um and that turned out really really nice for just kind of some word Of mouth and some retention but uh just in general keeping the style of the game going um one thing that I think we did really well with it was have a really effective ad implementation so you the player we don't pop this up automatically the player will have a little button they can press um uh and this will pop up and say hey you're looking for a boost

you can get four hours times two all of your um of your income if you watch this ad and you can Only watch five of these per day and so it fits the theme well like it's uh it's very tongue and cheek like you know hey you uh you watch this for us and we'll do something for you like we really kind of play up the the story behind it uh it provides high value to the player you get to double your income for 4 hours um It's relatively scarce so you're not watching ads constantly

and so we may be leaving some Impressions on the table but the players are actively Making sure that they can get in and watch as many of those ads as possible um to hit their daily quota um which I also think helps um you know it's only been out for a couple of weeks so we don't know you know exactly but I think it's going to help um not get player fatigue around the ads to sort of limit it a little bit um it does have some bugs and people will complain to us that they

can't watch ads and I feel like there's no better way to know that we Did the ads well than to have people say hey I can't watch your ads fix it like okay cool we'll we'll work on that but that's awesome um this is our store um and you has kind of the normal the angel claim is the the instant prestige um you can buy the time three multiplier and they have a Time Warp um the time three multiplier is extremely compelling you spend uh I think $2 and you get this permanent time three multiplier

um and that converts extremely well I'll show You the conversion uh rates in just a second but it is one of the highest buyer percentages on all of congregate tocom um you also can unlock bulk bulk multiplayers multipliers over time so there you see you know the times three is the uh the highest one you can get well we actually as you buy the times three you unlock another one and it actually keeps going so we have uh you know time 12 time 27 time uh I forget what that one was and then 501 is

the The highest one so players who are especially the bigger Spenders are kind of like Curious like how high does this go and we'll have people who go up and just like kind of find out how big it goes and then they get the big multiplier and have fun with that as well um so I said they had a good buyer rate remember um clicker Heroes was doing well at almost 3% yeah they're sitting at like almost 8% it's falling off a little bit as we got some some Wider promotion and played around a little

bit with pricing but you know six 7% uh is is phenomenal um for you know in terms of the congregate standards uh so uh that that times three buyer um rate I think is is a initial purchase is a really big part of that um at the lifetime aroo because it has such a high buyer percentage and a lot of people are just just buying that times three you do see the arapo is a bit lower um but it has been heading up as we've been doing A lot of optimization providing some deeper spend opportunities

um adding some opportunity for um uh to like engage in the the holiday events uh there was this flat period right here and there were actually no updates were added to the game and people just stopped spending as you would expect so you know just like any other game live servicing is very important to a successful Idol game uh and will see Revenue flatten out if you're not Supporting it uh in this case they were actively working on the mobile version of it but the web stats you know faltered until we started paying attention to

web again what platform is that uh this is this is all all of these charts are for congregate tocom um we were happy to see that the mobile retention has held up so well so far uh again we've only been out for two weeks so I only have so much data but uh D1 retention sitting somewhere around 55 60% um so you know looks like the the theory that good retention um uh you know that maintained uh on mobile uh or D7 again we don't have a lot of data yet but um that's sitting somewhere

around 35% uh which we are extremely happy with so uh yeah they retain well on web and retain well on mobile um mobile arapo uh also held up so this is our this is a cohort chart of um congregate data uh and the reason I broke out the cohorts is because we made Some monetization changes and so you'll see the aroo is actually pretty low for people who joined um a few months ago or like a while ago but in the last few months RPO have been sitting somewhere around 122 to $15 um on iOS

we're looking at around $18 RPO right now uh and Android we're sitting somewhere around $13 so we're seeing pretty consistent spending patterns across each of the um the platforms the buyer percentages are Different because of a variety of things around friction and you know having credit card access and that kind of thing but in terms of depth of spend for those who decide to spend uh it actually is relatively consistent across each platform um all right and last couple um so spender category uh this will you'll recognize this as um a type of chart that

we that congregate often does um so we wanted to break out uh what Spenders look like for these games uh and so what This chart is is that readable up there somewhat okay um so this is by uh how much they've spent so this orange section here is people have spent less than $10 on the game and then it kind of goes around uh 10 to 50 oh sorry went out of order 50 to 100 all the way up to these tiny little slivers of1 100 to 500 and $500 or more uh on the game

and so we have this chart for you know clicker Heroes and idling to rule the Gods uh Adventure capitalist remember had a Really good um um conversion rate but a lot of those conversions were at like a single purchase and so that's why you see that really really big percentage of people only spending under $10 um while clicker Heroes and iding R Gods I I had to check a couple times I thought it was the same chart but they actually are slightly different um but they have remarkably similar um uh numbers but it's it's interest

I me it's important to look the you know vast majority are The under 10 to 50 with just these tiny little slivers of the 50 to 500 group in in all of them right now each of these games has multiple, plus Spenders so you know it just like any other game you do have Big Spenders um if you want to find out more about Big Spenders um conre CEO Emily Greer is giving a talk about them tomorrow um so I'm not going to talk about them here but um that's that's a good talk and I'll

just plug her um but uh yeah so we do see Big Spenders even In these idle games um but if we were to take this this is distribution by how many players have spent in those groups if we now go and instead look at how the um Revenue distribution looks I'm going pop all three of them up there so the the small groups um are contributing a relatively small percentage of the actual revenue and uh sorry this is hard for me to see down here um you end up seeing that the groups of the $50

150 and 500 sorry 100 to 500 and 500 plus Are actually contributing rather large percentages and actually most of the revenue outside of Adventure capitalist to these games so just like all any of the other successful games um that we see pretty much every successful game we see um three Anna purchases uh especially outside of the Casual well even casual um Big Spenders drive a lot if not most of the revenue so these these games they monetize they uh you have to live service them the retention Is very similar like they ultimately are just like

any other successful game um or game as a service uh in terms of really all of the numbers that we see and that you know it's not really just an idle game they they are games that compelling and fun and work just like every other game so just a couple kind of like wrap-ups like you know what's next make some kind of random predictions um you know I think the classic kind of spreadsheet like Idol Games are probably going to start to lose favor players have seen a lot of them um we're starting to see

some more sophistic sophisticated visualization and presentation so um you know the kind of like easy you know jump in and create a quick idle game is probably starting to run you know to run out as we're seeing better production values and people take more note of the genre um I think we'll be seeing Idol spin-offs of games and Brands uh clicker Heroes for Example was a spin-off of uh cloudstone um by play sorus uh there's an Adventure Quest dragons um spin-off that's actually I don't know exactly what the relationship was but when you load it

up it says like you know partnered with clicker Heroes so I'm sorry partnered with uh Cookie Clicker so somehow they work together to do this spin-off game uh and I imagine we'll see kind of more of those occurring um I think idle is going to become sort of a genre modifier Like RPG you've got your action RPG your strategy RPG your tactics RPG well you could have idle tactics action Idol RPG idle Match 3 in fact idle Match 3 has been done um so this was uh yeah puzzle fuzz um which was a uh Andrew

pelan is one of our internal developers and uh he created an idle match three game so this little bar at the top here fills up on its own and will match that color and you can interact and you can play faster than it but it will run on its own if You go away it'll keep matching for you and you're basically charging up these little characters that are going over and trying to break your the uh their friends free from that Amber gel thingy um but you can just apply these a lot of these idle

game ideas to other genres just like uh RPG um ideas uh and I think you know so and where that kind of goes from there is that idle design philosophies are going to start getting integrated into the metagames of Standard uh of other types of genres um you know not all of this will work exponential growth is going to be weird in some games um but I think you you gain a lot from you know these types of of Energy System approaches these types of positive progress um and feedback and trying to find ways to

bring that into other genres I think is you know a good bit of where the future is and that's you know I certainly would encourage everyone to try making an L game if you Want it's fun it's relatively quick um but trying to figure out how to bring some of this into other genres I think is you know what I'd really like to see some people do uh and we haven't really seen yet so uh that's that's my talk um here's some contact information um you can check out our developer website uh if you have

browser game questions or mobile game questions those are your kind of Best Contacts and then my email address um Co cool so um I guess we can Open up for questions do we have time for that thank you uh yeah please come up to the mics if you'd like to ask um also just a quick shout out uh if uh if you uh enjoyed the talk please give me uh you know a good rating if you didn't yeah go ahead and fill it out because I'd like to at least learn from it but uh you

know doing these valuations is really helpful um you know it it helps us learn Uh and also if you enjoy talk please fill it out because then I can give more talks later so thank you so much for coming everyone who's heading out and uh let's take some questions hi uh Matthew Lawrence roio a quick question on the prestiging mechanic so it's actually really vital for player progression in the long run but it's actually kind of an advanced level mechanism and it always requires player interaction to do it I've never seen one where actually Leads

the player to do it like part of a tutorial and I was wondering if any thoughts on how to kind of really encourage players to get that in the fouille um I I don't know that I would get into the fouille um like you said it's more of a a later um mechanic so you do want to tutorial IE it um but it's something that is a complexity level that you don't necessarily need to introduced right away the games are often compelling and fun on their own in The core Loop and so players are sort

of uh discovering and getting into that and then when it becomes appropriate so uh like in adventure capitalist U once you get to 50 Angels you would double your uh your amount and so I at that point we pop up a little thing and says hey now would be a good time to check out the prestige system and kind of introduce them to that so I think it's a the best way to do it is to context it to when it's appropriate to the player don't Introduce it too early because they're not even going to

understand it and they're already likely having fun um so I think it's it's mostly about sort of targeting your uh the tutorial at the right time cool thank you uhuh hello hey so you spoke a little about um how many people are buying these games and how many people are developing for these games what's the ratio like the saturation in this genre and where do you see it going in the Future um and I'm sorry I was asked to repeat the question so the question was you know what is the saturation of the genre where

is it going to the Future um you know it is starting to get somewhat saturated especially with kind of like Fast follows and clones um you know those don't tend to have as much success um the most recent success for us has been swarm simulator and that's one that really branched out and did something very different in its approach and in The um the economics of the game uh so I think there is still opportunity for I mean that was two weeks ago so obviously there is still um you know new ideas that are coming

out there is still iteration that is happening and and evolution of the mechanics um you know it's it is something that is gaining attention we've had uh multiple games uh in the idol genre are getting featured by the big platforms which means a lot more people going to be paying attention To it um you know it's a great experimentation uh kind of breeding ground for ideas and so I you know we'll still see a lot I think coming out on browser uh it's a little harder to get big on the web because you have or

on um mobile because you have to kind of go through the app stores but um I I I think there's still opportunity for the the main Idol genre and then there's sort of the the second layer of you know taking some some of those approaches and Wrapping them around like the the idol RP Idol RPG or the idol Match 3 um where you're kind of providing a little more gameplay and then trying to balance that with some idle elements all right thanks thank you uhuh over here you mentioned that these games require a lot of

uh updating in order to stay fresh is that updating primarily on the late game or earlier game or is it uh spread throughout uh the the time or or the levels that the player will be Moving through yeah great question uh so the question was you know are lots of updates in these games but where are those Focus what do those updates look like um so a fair number of them are endgame uh and it depends a little bit on you know how long the game is when you first launch it but a lot of

times players will get through it relatively quickly and you you do want to provide content for at the end for those that have gotten there uh a lot of the Updates are UI and ux um you don't necessarily understand how players are going to interact with the game especially the ones that get really hardcore about it um and so they'll start requesting things like allow me to buy uh up to 100 of something and automatically determine you know what the one is and then show me my cash per second here like there's a lot of

requests about that and so a lot of them are um usability things that are you Know are helpful throughout the entire process um the early game often doesn't change much outside of maybe some balancing sometimes you find that you know when you did the the bumpy there something was a bit too low and so you may shift that up a little bit um but in general you're going to be providing either something on the end or something that's a little parallel um with anti-al uh that the one that's been going for like six years he's

actually just like Adding new mechanics so rather than just going on the end he'll add like another way to you know now there's a little fighting game in it now there's a little collectible card game in it he's kind of crazy I don't know that's the best way to go it but and he's been doing it for six years so we had to you know have a little bit of variety but um yeah it's it's really just sort of the the games it's it's one that I think minimum viable product is very very early on

and So a lot of that iteration is just sort of like public beta testing and something that's very easy to quickly iterate on and so that's a think a little bit of what we're seeing with it cool thanks uhuh thank you yes hi you mentioned that congregate has games from you know Flash and HTML 5 and unity is there any particular type that tends to be more successful or just common for Idol games are they all flash or some HTML 5 or um so yeah the good the Question was um whether there's a particular uh

technology that's better idal games um and I think I can almost firmly say no uh Adventure capitalist is Unity uh clicker Heroes is Flash I think um Idol link Ru the gods is Flash uh swarm simulator I believe is HML um so no we actually don't see um any real requirement there for one uh Tech or another thanks M you're welcome any other questions all right well thank you so Much again please fill out your evaluations and uh thanks for coming up