Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

deconstructoroffun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 138 posts

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

#81

Post by moate »

ricardobeat wrote: post #77

I had no idea what 'autobattle', 'heroes charge', 'idle game' meant, and wonder what exactly gets people interested in games of this kind. It doesn't even look like a game in the traditional sense at all - for enjoyment / fulfillment / fun. More like a colorful spreadsheet, with cheap visuals and not even mechanical skill. 'Gameplay' videos on youtube show people flipping cards and clicking through a dozen inventory…

As an avid fan of very complex board games and a player in an "advanced stat" fantasy baseball league, I can promise you that long term grinding using spread sheets and optimization trees is fun for some people.

You play to show off fast twitch muscle memory, but you play games like this to show a different sort of ability. Perseverance? Intellect? I'm not sure what it is for each person specifically, but they can be fun.

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

#82

Post by phil21 »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #12
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 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…

I made the "sad" joke to my kid who loved arcades like Dave and Busters/etc. while growing up that the ticket games are kid gambling.

If you look at the last 10 years in those places, the "gambling" games basically are taking over an ever-increasing amount of floorspace. Many games may as well be slot machines for all the interaction and experience they give.

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

#83

Post by shostack »

ricardobeat wrote: post #77

I had no idea what 'autobattle', 'heroes charge', 'idle game' meant, and wonder what exactly gets people interested in games of this kind. It doesn't even look like a game in the traditional sense at all - for enjoyment / fulfillment / fun. More like a colorful spreadsheet, with cheap visuals and not even mechanical skill. 'Gameplay' videos on youtube show people flipping cards and clicking through a dozen inventory…

If you want to get a taste with a quality game that doesn't prey on people with IAP, check out Kittens Game.[1]

You can play free online. I paid $2 one-time fee to play on my phone. There's a vibrant community on /r/kittensgame on Reddit and the dev is active there.

It is also arguably one of the most well-done idle/incremental games I've played after playing a few. The depth of it is jaw-dropping once you really start getting into the mechanics of late stage play, and you'll hit several points along the way where you think you are there only to find out everything you've been working on gets abstracted away into new growth concept that becomes critical to the next stage.

[1]http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/

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

#84

Post by moate »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #74
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.

>There's no proper defense for most people. Education is a defense. Once a person is aware of the psychological dark patterns being used against them, they start becoming less susceptible. Whether it's by video games, salesmen, politicians, etc. education is the best defense.

Agreed, but that doesn't mean it's easy. For one, there's so many dark patterns and bad actors in so many sectors of your life. I might be aware of the 80% of stuff that's happening (and hopefully it's the most likely 80%) but I'm not aware of that other 20% and there's always new bad things that come up. It's a constant battle, and many people just don't have the bandwidth to keep up.

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

#85

Post by Kiro »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #22
mdorazio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on this and I think the problem really got started when Zynga began actively optimizing to monetize underlying addiction in its core users years ago. The real solution here is that we need legislation for "casual" games that puts addictive games into the same bucket as gambling, but doing that is going to be really difficult (how do you even legally define bad addicting gameplay?).

A really simple solution would be to cap the amount of money a user can spend on a single game in a certain time period after the initial buy-in (so games could still charge hundreds of dollars for Premium/GOTY/etc editions). Even something like $50/mo would stop whales

I'm happy to be a whale. I can afford it. Why do you want to stop me? I get a lot of joy from spending money on mobile games. I think it should be regulated somehow but not like that.

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

#86

Post by Kiro »

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.

I would say spending money on games like Idle Heroes is fundamentally different than spending money on cosmetics. In Idle Heroes you literally need to spend money in order to progress and it's a deceiving feeling. Fortnite or skins are not comparable.

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

#87

Post by tomp »

ralusek wrote: post #59
bairrd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you define as the third party in cigarettes? Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition, yet I find it pretty hard to accept that the current legislation against cigarette companies hasn't done a world of good for humanity.

I don't think that the role of the government is to do good for humanity. The role of the government, at least in a liberal democracy like the US, is to preserve liberty. In a state where the primary mandate is to pursue actions on behalf of the "good," the obvious problem is to do with how we define "good." There are plenty of cases to be made for the prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes altogether, and there have…

The role of the government is to solve problems that the market cannot. There's tons of market failures described in the literature (e.g. information asymmetries, principal–agent problems, or negative externalities), and others that the government can simply solve more efficiently (e.g. nationalized infrastructure prevents each private player from building their own, ultimately redundant, infrastructure, and lowers cost to entry for new players).

In my opinion, governments overreach is when governments starts to control the population's choices (e.g. prohibition or ban of illegal & experimental drugs). Government influencing the population's choices (guiding them towards "good" choices, e.g. by limiting gambling, taxing alcohol, enforcing true labels on food) can be a very good thing, [edit:] especially in situations when humans tend to behave irrationally (i.e. because our psychology / evolutionary mechanisms are hijacked).

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

#88

Post by ra66it »

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…

The game made an interesting decision that both you and the article completely missed.

A significant portion of the progress players is available via events.

Weekly and monthly events. Events on a rotating schedule give you bonuses for using each metagame system to the fullest.

Examples: - monthly Tavern complete X # of quests for guaranteed rewards - monthly fight X # of times in PVP for guaranteed rewards - monthly PVE battle for guaranteed rewards - weekly gacha summon - summon 500. During this event likelihood of 5* is doubled and guaranteed rewards - weekly random gem boxes - weekly blacksmith event - weekly campaign loot event - guaranteed 5* for logging in

Utilizing these events to the fullest separates the long-term players from short-term players.

Wasting $$ outside of these events is not recommended.

This turns the game back into a fair amount of idling as you collect the resources to fill each event and wait for the right opportunity to utilize them. Then you often get major boosts of power and multiple copies of high rated characters.

So a single month of playing is barely enough to make it through one rotation and probably not enough to utilize any of them.

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

#89

Post by njarboe »

zimbatm wrote: post #70
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the beauty of it, they don't even have to hand money back to the user. The trick is to make the user perceive value in whatever digital artifact their are providing. In the eye of the user it then becomes the same as money. Make the user invest their time into the game. Time is money right? Create fake rewards for arbitrary actions. Then when they are properly hooked, ramp up the difficulty level to a limit wh…

This is sort of like what advertising does to people in real life.

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

#90

Post by SkyBelow »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #60
SkyBelow wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is a simple solution, then there likely is a simple work around. In this case, large companies with multiple games can have cross game promotions. Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.

> Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble. The business model for these games is that 99% of players spend negligible amounts, and 1% spend hundreds or thousands; the minnows are a loss leader to get to the whales. Restricting spending to $50 or $100/month would destroy games like this entirely. (Which I'm fine with, per…

It would destroy the current whale business model, but it might still result in going after big spenders in other fashions by getting more games for them to play a shorter time each and it might result in them modifying the feedback loop to get more people spending the maximum allowed.

Also, are the minnows really loss leaders or just not as profitable?

Post reply on HN