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Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

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Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#101

Post by romanovcode »

sago wrote: post #53

A great piece, an ethical decision, and I hope the start of something bigger. I agree that free to play is often horribly exploitative, not to mention horrible game design. But that price point. That makes me worried. Browse around Steam to see the company they are trying to keep at $30. In the reddit thread the dev said they've chosen this price point based on $2m production budget. Fair enough they've done their ho…

If it has no in-game shop the price is perfectly valid IMO, and I wish every mobile game was like this.

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#102

Post by alexmorenodev »

rangibaby wrote: post #74
Deimorz wrote: post #61

I'm really surprised to see this from a company that makes, of all possible genres, clicker games . Clicker games usually have almost no actual gameplay, and pretty much only interest people because they exploit many of the same type of psychological tricks that free-to-play games use to keep players hooked. They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people i…

> They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression. If anyone wants to try this type of "game" give cookie clicker a try.

Don't try kittens game. Please.

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#103

Post by alexmorenodev »

rplnt wrote: post #79
rangibaby wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression. If anyone wants to try this type of "game" give cookie clicker a try.

One more with the niche of this forum, and one that doesn't take that much time (depending on your take on the task), is Paperclips http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

I love how paperclips is extremely addicting, but short. These games can eat up all your free time for months easily. Paperclips takes one day or two.

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#104

Post by exDM69 »

rocky1138 wrote: post #12
cortesoft wrote: post #9

I wonder if you could still have free to play, but just had a limit to how many different things to buy. Say, you could buy everything for $60. That way, you don’t have to worry about someone spending thousands because they wouldn’t get any more than if they spent $60.

Train Simulator 2018 does that. All the DLC comes to $7800.

This is something that comes up often as an example, usually mentioned by someone who doesn't actually play the game.

Simulators are different. You do not gain competitive advantage by buying DLC. You get some more content, and usually they're high quality, historically accurate and come with nice documentation (checklists, etc).

No-one would have the time to play with all the DLC in train simulator. There is hours worth of playing in each. Heck, it took me an hour just to figure out how to get a steam locomotive out of the rail yard.

Flight simulators and racing sims (iRacing) are similar. You can expect to spend hours of time with a new aircraft or race car. In racing, you race against others with the same or similar car, so you gain no advantage.

I can warmly recommend trying out Train Simulator or Trainz. It's fun and relaxing gameplay.

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#105

Post by vanderZwan »

rplnt wrote: post #79
rangibaby wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're a great demonstration of how the illusion of progressing at something is all you need to keep people interested, even when the only thing they're progressing towards is... the opportunity for more progression. If anyone wants to try this type of "game" give cookie clicker a try.

One more with the niche of this forum, and one that doesn't take that much time (depending on your take on the task), is Paperclips http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

What is interesting about both Cookie Clicker and Paperclips is that their stories (yes, they have one, although perhaps it falls somewhere between "theme" and "story") are implicit critiques about clicker games themselves. Especially paperclips is on the nose, since the famous "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment fits the game mechanics so well[0].

Games have the ability to let you have a kind of "lived" experience of something. Sure, a good book makes you live the story through the eyes of the protagonist, but adding the act of making choices within a game framework on top of that changes this fundamentally. This more than anything else is what defines games as a medium.

Clicker games are in a way very interesting deconstructions of what it means to be a game. Cookie Clicker started out as a joke making fun of other game mechanics[1]. Which shouldn't be surprising, since some of the best jokes are deconstructions.

[0] https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html

[1] https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/gaming/cookie-clicker-julien...

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#106

Post by norlys »

stingraycharles wrote: post #39
colmvp wrote: post #27

I hope (though I'm not truly that optimistic) in a decade that the trend of F2P will have passed. I find them extremely parasitic, exploiting human behavior. I also hate the term free-to-play, because it purposefully hides the fact that for many games, you either need to grind a lot to acquire content/in-game currency or have to spend a lot.

Just yesterday I was looking for a simcity-like game for my iPad to play that didn’t use microtransactions. It’s simply not there. Not a single city simulator that you can actually play without paying for some stupid credit system. I was easily willing to spend $10 for such a game, because of the scarcity. I would expect some indy dev to jump into this space, but I guess microtransactions are just too lucrative?

Try Cities: Skylines. They offer a lot of (in my opinion) overpriced DLCs, but it's already a great game without them. You can get it in a Humble Bundle for about 10(?) bucks right now.

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#107

Post by viridian »

arkades wrote: post #92
chii wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pay $30 up front to play it i'd rather pay upfront than be nickeled and dimed afterwards. Esp. if the production quality of the game is up to scratch (e.g., no unrecoverable bugs, good looking graphics/sound, and intuitive UI etc).

But there's no gameplay! Sorry, I mean to say: there's no inherent evolution of plot or mechanics. It's a game that's literally defined by "numbers increasing on the side of the screen, and microtransactions to make those numbers go up quicker." What would that look like without the microtransactions? while True: i++ print i Done.

It's a bit more complicated than that, and you can make decisions which can heavily penalize you. The person above who said that the optimal way to way would involve spreadsheets is correct, but this one isn't. Ultimately you have (when I tried it a couple of years ago) two main resources, and three meta resources.

Try to think of each of them as a graph of growth over time. Gold is roughly upstream of DPS, but There are additive, multiplicative, and even quadratic effects than may be applied to that relationship in the form of hero powers, items?, etc. However, since by design the relationship between hundreds of effects (mostly in the form of hero powers) isn't clear, some purchases are easily 100,000,000,000,000% better than others, which is to say one wastes your gold.

It's more of a long term time based math puzzle than a game, but there is definitely an evolution of mechanics, as you put it. Also despite the name, I'm pretty sure you pretty much never click in it past the first 10 minutes.

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#108

Post by exDM69 »

koonsolo wrote: post #57
ge0rg wrote: post #55

We made a lot of money from these players who spent thousands. They are known to the industry as "Whales". I haven't seen this addressed yet, but what if the whales we are seeing are not poor addicted victims nor rich people but simple fraudsters? It really makes sense if you are a person with access to "unlimited" credit that you can't spend in a way that can be traced back to you. There is so much credit card fraud…

I've heard multiple stories (firsthand) of kids accidentally ordering virtual stuff on mobile for thousand(s). It happens only once, but there is no way to recover the money.

Might depend on your location but I've heard several stories of successfully getting a refund from kids purchases in games and app stores. It's still a lot of trouble to file for a refund, not worth doing for a few bucks.

But this might be because in my legislation there are strong consumer protection laws. Ymmv.

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#109

Post by vanderZwan »

sago wrote: post #53

A great piece, an ethical decision, and I hope the start of something bigger. I agree that free to play is often horribly exploitative, not to mention horrible game design. But that price point. That makes me worried. Browse around Steam to see the company they are trying to keep at $30. In the reddit thread the dev said they've chosen this price point based on $2m production budget. Fair enough they've done their ho…

I suspect it's all about whether your game is mainstream or niche. The latter probably will earn more with a slightly higher price point. It won't achieve mainstream success anyway, and you also do not have to worry about scaring the dedicated core audience away.

Cogmind is a good example of this[0]. Traditional roguelikes are typically in the "completely free" category. But that core audience that loves the genre is a lot more likely to pay twenty dollars for such an extremely polished and well-crafted game in this genre.

EDIT: Of course, whether or not clicker games are niche games with a hard core audience is highly questionable. If anything they are surprise addictions for casual players browsing the web.

[0] http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

Re: Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

#110

Post by richrichardsson »

A bit off topic, but I would be extremely interested in a post mortem of the disaster that befell Micro Machines on mobile. My guess is people have completely abandoned the game due to it not working in iOS 11 for nigh on 6 weeks, and now there just aren't enough players to get regularly matched into a game. This must have decimated their revenue stream.
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