How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year • Hacker News Board

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#41

Post by shados » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #8

What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.

Taking away people with gambling addictions, children, etc (all good reasons for these games not to exist at all), I've felt for a while that their success is a great example of disparity in disposable income.

I'll be forward and be completely honest: I've spent several thousands of dollars on a single of these games. And I've played many of them. Some with just straight micro-transactions (eg: League of Legends skins), some straight up "gacha" or "lootboxes" (eg: Fire Emblem Heroes, FF Brave Exvius, and so on).

When you look at a videogame compared to other form of entertainment, is just how efficient they are in a "fun per dollar" point of view. MMORPGs that cost $10-15/month and people play obsessively several hours a day are way better than going to a bar to drink, money wise. But what if efficiency is tossed out of the window, how much is "fun" worth to someone?

It's likely a factor of their disposable income. But we're now at a point where adult professionals are very much part of the player base. So if a game is free to play, but has a loot box mechanic that can make it "more fun", what happens? Well, for people without money to burn in a fire pit, it might not be worth it at all, so they won't spend a dime. For the senior executive who makes 500k or 1million a year? They could blow through 5 grands in an afternoon without really caring.

So if you have a gaming population where 90% (I'm making numbers up) don't spend a dime, 9% is spending a moderate amount because of predatory practices (kids, addicts, etc) or because they like it, and then 1% spend an INSANE amount of money because they have no real "limit", you may come up WAY ahead than if you charged a flat fee and the same amount to everyone. Because the rich people are just THAT much richer to make up for everyone else.

I know I've read some articles (none that I can find to confirm my memory) where some of the smaller gacha games with a few tens of thousands of players run fully on the pockets of a few hundred people, if that.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#42

Post by aeternus » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

dna_polymerase wrote: post #32

ordinaryradical wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we could wrap our minds around what is happening psychologically in these games, most of them would be off-limits to children. What's interesting is that we've decided to define gambling according the rules of the game—in reality, "gambling" is probably more akin to a psychological state that can be induced by many different rulesets and experiences. Mobile games today are largely thinly-veiled attempts to…

Underrated comment IMHO. Those "casual"-games look like a gateway drug to gambling addiction to me. They borrow mechanics from games usually found in casinos and it is frightening to see how we let our kids play these games without much thought.

Many of those games are actually implementing gambling with their virtual currency. They have events where you buy an entry ticket using the in-game currency then either double/triple-up or lose-it-all as the result of some random event.

I'm surprised this is even legal in the US, and not caught for app store TOS violations. It seems they've simply replaced the concept of casino chips with virtual currency. They do have some 'gameplay' outside of this but it is not much different from the various frills on video slot machines.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#43

Post by JakeTheAndroid » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #34

hombre_fatal wrote: post #15

It's interesting to see the same people who lambast Farmville get addicted to a game like this. It's like how Fortnite figured out how to get boys interested in dressing up their virtual Barbies so much that players use "noskin" in a derogatory manner.

People belittling others in a game for not having spent money on a bunch of pixels is depressing. This behavior is perpetrated even by streamers which are followed by many, including children, as role models.

In CSGO, your skins are a direct representation of how good you are. This is fact. If you spent 1k on a Dragonlore, you're one of the best AWPers in your region, hands down.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#44

Post by shados » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

mattnewport wrote: post #36

tarr11 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think comments like this are too dismissive of how important and valuable games are in many people's lives. Personally, I fear the opposite, that over-regulation of rapidly changing industries based on fear and anecdata will make people's lives worse.

I think it's reasonable to draw distinctions among different types of games. Having spent much of my near 20 year career in the games industry, I'm saddened and disgusted by much of what has happened with the monetization strategies pioneered by mobile and free to play games. Maybe there's some grumpy old man syndrome at work but I also have a degree in psychology and the way these games are transparently optimized t…

> I'm saddened and disgusted by much of what has happened with the monetization strategies pioneered by mobile and free to play games.

There's a lot to be said that its easier to attract 1000 people and extract $500 from 10 of them than it is to get 5 bucks from all of them. Even more so when you add piracy to the mix.

Would these strategies have been a thing if so many people didn't flip their shit because a near AAA level game tried to charge a few bucks?

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#45

Post by kamarg » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

slivanes wrote: post #21

sleibrock wrote: post #11

I just had to stop playing this game because I was basically making no progress every day. It became less enjoyable and more of a chore every 10 hours. * Progress can be gauged by how far a team of heroes you construct can proceed in the "single player" stages of the game. Getting further into the single player campaign dictates how much experience/gold you will earn when not playing the game. * In order to make prog…

How often did you encounter maxed-out players? Did you see players that must have spent hundreds of dollars?

Hundreds of dollars is really not very much for many paying players to spend on these types of games. That would typically be considered a "casual" player which is just barely above a free-to-play player in terms of importance to the developers.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#46

Post by ragona » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

fwip wrote: post #31

ragona wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about this often. I contend that we are getting better at extracting money from people. Is there some sort of line we will cross at which point the majority of people are psychologically unprepared to resist spending their money in a way that causes them financial harm? We understand that friction causes consumers to consider their purchase more carefully, so we've worked hard to lower friction, and this has…

> the bulk of the economy is simply driven by overriding our better instincts Not to take away from your point, but you could probably argue that advertising pushed us past that point decades ago.

I completely agree! I’m not sure how to define the horizon, so I’m not sure whether we’ve passed it. It’s not clear to me exactly how effective advertising is, and its effectiveness also clearly oscillates over time and between demographics!

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#47

Post by mattnewport » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

shados wrote: post #41

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #8

What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.

Taking away people with gambling addictions, children, etc (all good reasons for these games not to exist at all), I've felt for a while that their success is a great example of disparity in disposable income. I'll be forward and be completely honest: I've spent several thousands of dollars on a single of these games. And I've played many of them. Some with just straight micro-transactions (eg: League of Legends skin…

Do you feel happy with your purchases still? Is there any buyer's remorse? I'm interested to know how many people who weren't obviously exploited and could afford to spend hundreds or thousands on these games feel honestly satisfied with their purchases and wouldn't in retrospect have preferred to use that money for something else.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#48

Post by kevin_b_er » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #8

What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.

I believe a time will come where these game types are recognized in many places as fundamentally evil for their psychological manipulation of children.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#49

Post by ApolloFortyNine » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

aeternus wrote: post #42

dna_polymerase wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underrated comment IMHO. Those "casual"-games look like a gateway drug to gambling addiction to me. They borrow mechanics from games usually found in casinos and it is frightening to see how we let our kids play these games without much thought.

Many of those games are actually implementing gambling with their virtual currency. They have events where you buy an entry ticket using the in-game currency then either double/triple-up or lose-it-all as the result of some random event. I'm surprised this is even legal in the US, and not caught for app store TOS violations. It seems they've simply replaced the concept of casino chips with virtual currency. They do h…

As long as you don't have a way to exchange back for cash, it's likely protected under all the same laws that make Chuck E Cheese legal.

And a lot of these basically copy the 'packs' mechanic from collectible card games, so those would have to be affected too, by any new law.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#50

Post by the_af » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:20 PM UTC

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #28

yoz-y wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coin ups existed a long time ago too. Arguably you got even less value from those per dollar spent.

Ever carried around $20 in quarters in a fanny pack as a five year old? It's pretty heavy. There's a pretty low ceiling on how much you could spend back in the day and it was impossible to silently, digitally spend an unlimited quantity of your parents' money.

Also, in the early/mid days of coin-up games, a skilled player could win a game with a single coin while having fun in the process and using their skills instead of simply waiting for stuff to happen.