Editor’s note: Arcade action game Nimble Quest is the latest offering from Tiny Towers and Pocket Planes developer NimbleBit. Kevin Oke, Lead Designer at both Adrian Crook & Associates, a social-mobile game design consultancy, and PlayRank, a second screen startup, analyzes the stickiness in Nimble Quest. He previously wrote a guest post for Inside Mobile Apps that analyzed engagement in Supercell’s Clash of Clans.

NimbleBit, creators of Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, released their latest title the aptly named Nimble Quest at the end of March. While it’s a fun game, I’ve found four key issues described below that I believe limit its stickiness and in turn, its ability to monetize.

According to AppData, after a strong start peaking at No. 6 on the top free iPhone apps chart for the games genre, it has slid to No. 217 as of this writing. Its rank on the top grossing iPhone apps chart for the games genre is at No. 190. These positions may be at least partially attributable to the issues I found.

The Compulsion Loop

This is the biggest barrier for Nimble Quest to overcome. The nature of its compulsion loop makes for a very grind heavy experience that hinders its stickiness.

It’s a rule of thumb in game design that the shorter the loop, the more addictive the experience. By analyzing the loop (diagram above), one can see that unless the player is willing to spend hard currency, they have to restart from the beginning every time. The variable session length nature of the game means that as the player and their friends improve, it takes more and more time for them to challenge their ever-increasing high scores.

Essentially Nimble Quest is banking on players getting invested enough in leaderboard competition to start paying once the grind becomes too much to bear. This is a risky hook to rely on here, as it’s one that is much better suited to games with more of a sense of permanence and ownership, like city builders and strategy games such as Kingdoms of Camelot by Kabam. The reason being that without such permanence, it’s much easier for the player to decide to quit when the grinding gets tiresome.

As in any freemium game leveraging the player’s time for money, if the player tires of the grind too quickly and churns out, they can’t be monetized. However Nimble Quest is especially at risk here because of their compulsion loop. Fixed session lengths with level progression and difficulty determined by a party XP level would have provided more stickiness. (more…)

At the 2013 Penny Arcade Expo East, Blizzard Entertainment today announced Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, a fee-to-play collectible card game, coming to PC, Mac and iPad.

The game features player-versus-player gameplay, more than 300 cards to collect, with a user receiving five cards for every pack of cards they earn or purchase, and multiplayer hosted via Battle.net matchmaking.

Similar to other collectible card games like Rage of Bahamut, users can craft cards by fusing cards together to make other cards. Hearthstone also features a deck-building system, which allows users to construct their deck automatically or customized down to the last card. Users build their deck around a character class such as a rogue. Users can earn or purchase a pack of cards with five random cards of various card types like common, rare, epic and legendary. It’s a similar mechanic in gacha-infusion games like Blood Brothers where the user can obtain cards, but what they get depends on luck.

Users interested in getting their hands on the game early, can sign up for the beta, which starts this summer, here. An official release date was not revealed other than Blizzard planning to launch the title this year.

Editor’s note: Clash of Clans, one of two titles from Finnish mobile developer Supercell, has continually topped the iOS charts and raked in loads of money for the studio. Kevin Oke, Lead Designer at both Adrian Crook & Associates, a social-mobile game design consultancy, and PlayRank, a second screen startup, takes a deep dive into how Clash of Clans effectively engages and retains players.

Supercell’s Clash of Clans (CoC) has been a top grossing title on the iOS app store for months now, and in the course of playing (and becoming addicted to) the game, I began to unravel just how it manages to engage and retain players so well.

Meaningful Downtime Mechanics

Games relying on appointment mechanics as part of their compulsion loop typically have trouble addressing the downtime that arises in between these appointments. Specifically, how to engage players during this time, as generally the most engaging gameplay and core mechanics are intertwined with these downtime-creating appointment mechanics. In city builder games, usually the only thing available to the player during downtime is re-organizing their cities — shallow gameplay, generally speaking.

In this sense, CoC is no different. However the composition of the player’s village is not only vital to success, but a downtime session of moving gold mines and cannons around can directly lead to a micro-transaction.

A quick explanation for those that have not played CoC: The layout of your buildings, walls, traps, and weaponry are key, as you need to defend against raids from other players. An airtight defense quickly becomes the obsession of CoC players as they try to protect their stores of gold and elixir. Using the Replay feature (more on this later), they watch and learn from their defeats, tweaking their layout to patch holes in their defense.

In short, this is a fantastic downtime mechanic. Why?

• It’s meaningful.
• It creates additional, long play sessions (a level 20 player could easily spend half an hour doing a total revamp of their defenses).
• Spurs on purchases — “I could defend the south side of the village with just these two cannons if they were upgraded. But I don’t have enough gold … But if I don’t upgrade, I’m too vulnerable.” A perfect example of this mechanic leading to a micro-transaction.
• The player’s fortress layout is personal and unique. This attachment is great for engagement long-term.

As you can see, this isn’t just a fantastic downtime mechanic, but a fantastic gameplay mechanic period.

Loop Optimization

Loop optimization provides the player with tricks to discover and exploit over the course of their lifetime within the game. A prime example in social games is Farmville players finding and planting the seeds with the best coin/XP cost ratio. Instances of loop optimization help with long-term engagement by making a game more difficult to grok, and in competitive games, providing an edge to players with the will to unearth them. In social games with appointment mechanics, they also create more sessions per day.

Loop optimization in CoC is centered on resource collecting and raids. In classic appointment mechanic fashion, for the player to most efficiently harvest gold and elixir they need to return to the game and harvest right when the resource generating structures are at max capacity. Harvest any time past that point, and it’s the equivalent of turning on a tap to fill a bucket and leaving, coming back, and seeing the bucket overflowing — wasted resources. This is not unique to CoC in any way, but it’s still important in maximizing the number of daily sessions per player.

The more interesting loop optimization comes from player vs. player (PvP) and the threat of raids. Leaving hoards of gold and elixir sitting around makes the player a very appealing target for raids. Thus they are encouraged to check in often and do one of two things:

• Collect their resources from the buildings that generate them, moving them into their storage units, which if the player is smart, are behind fortifications.
• Collect and spend their resources immediately.

As the player can only build a certain number of defenses at any given time (based on the level of their town hall), they can never provide adequate protection for all of their structures.

Thus the need to check in often and spend, or move the gold and elixir to storage units that are better protected — it’s a common strategy to keep storage units behind walls and near archery towers and cannons, and leave gold mines and elixir collectors out in the open, as they store much less and therefore are less of a loss if pillaged.

This all means that saving up for big-ticket upgrades and buildings is risky. The more time spent saving up, the bigger the loss and time wasted if the player is raided. Recognizing that a moment of tension and risk is a great time to conduct a micro-transaction, Supercell offers a shield that will protect the player from raids while they are saving up. Or the player can just buy the item in question immediately with hard currency. (more…)

Developer Scattered Entertainment’s Ben Cousins recently gave Inside Mobile Apps an in-depth look at the developer’s upcoming horror first-person shooter (FPS) The Drowning. Cousins, the general manager of the studio, filled us in on the title’s innovative controls, monetization hooks and social features.

The Stockholm-based studio, which is a subsidiary of DeNA, consists of team members that had previously worked on multiple console FPS franchises including Halo, Crysis, Far Cry and Battlefield. Industry veteran Cousins is the man leading the ship at Scattered Entertainment, who had previously worked at Acclaim Entertainment, Lionhead Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment, and most recently at Electronic Arts. He joined DeNA because he wanted to work at a company where free-to-play and digital were the primary focus in terms of revenue.

“We didn’t feel like core gamers needs were being served particularly well,” he says. “Not in terms of giving them enormous single-player games that they sit down and play for eight hours, but more creating games that have the adult tone, violence, excitement, drama, and high-end visuals that they would expect from a console game.”

The Drowning’s core gameplay loops and controls

The free-to-play game, which runs on the Unity3D engine, is aimed at the core audience and places the user as survivor of the apocalypse who’s stranded on a series of islands in the pacific northwest of the U.S. The user starts with just a pistol and is soon attacked by zombie-like creatures. The player is then rescued by another survivor named Charlotte, who turns out to be a gunsmith that operates a workshop. Users are then tasked with going out to various locations nearby to clear out baddies and scavenge for parts to craft weapons and upgrade existing weapons.

There are two core gameplay loops in The Drowning. First, users go to these various island environments and play a two-minute long round where they have to kill as many zombies as possible in as violent of a way as possible via head shots, chaining kills, knocking out baddies, and more, to rack up the highest score possible. The score represents how long zombies will retreat from an environment before they return. Second, while the baddies are away, this gives the user the opportunity to scavenge the environment for parts and broken weapons. The scavenge mode, Cousins says, plays like a slots game where the user presses a button and then receives a random part — such as a broken AK-47, grease, duct tape or a battery. The higher the score in the game round, the higher likelihood the player will nab a rarer part. None of these parts are useful alone, but the parts can crafted together to create a functional Ak-47, for example.

The Drowning’s control scheme is one of the bigger selling points for the game. The controls are not designed around virtual joysticks. Rather, the game is controlled using common touch interface gestures like taps, swipes and pinches. Users can tap the screen with two fingers to shoot, and the bullet is fired to the center point of the two fingers, resulting in the ability to track moving target or multiple baddies without moving the camera. Players can also tap to walk, swipe to look and pinch to zoom. (more…)

Inside Mobile Apps yesterday got a hands-on preview of Real Racing 3. We also spoke with Ptolemy Oberin, one of the game’s programmers and project lead at developer Firemonkeys, about the studio’s experience going free-to-play and the game’s Time-Shifted Multiplayer feature.

Real Racing 3 is the first game in the Real Racing franchise that’s developed by Firemonkeys, a studio consisting of developers Firemint and IronMonkey. In July 2012, Electronic Arts merged Firemint, the developer of the first two Real Racing titles, Flight Control and SPY mouse, with IronMonkey. Melbourne-based IronMonkey was purchased by EA in February 2010, and are known for bringing EA franchises to mobile as it did with Mass Effect Infiltrator, Dead Space and The Sims FreePlay. Firemint, a Melbourne-based studio as well, was acquired by EA in May 2011.

Modifications made to Real Racing 3

The most noticeable difference going from Real Racing 2 to the third installment is the graphics. Oberin tells us that Real Racing 3 is pushing about the same graphic fidelity seen in PlayStation 3 titles such as Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 5 and Xbox 360 games like Turn 10 Studios’ Forza Horizon. Oberin adds that Real Racing 3, which runs on Firemonkeys’ in-house engine Mint3D, is pushing around five to six times more polygons in the cars, and that the tracks have been upgraded graphically as well. Other graphical touches include full damage visibility on cars, multiple camera angles and real-time images on the mirrors in cockpit view.

The game is broken down into multiple series, each featuring various events. According to Oberin, who was the project lead for Flight Control Rocket and SPY mouse, there are about 900 events in total. There are 46 licensed cars in total from 12 car manufacturers including Audi, Bugatti, Ford and more. Control-wise, users steer the car by tilting a device side-to-side and braking by pressing the screen — the gas pedal is automatically pressed down.

The biggest change in Real Racing 3 is Time-Shifted Multiplayer (TSM). TSM records a real person’s skill level and attributes on EA’s servers. That data is then used to program the AI opponents in races. This works because every user that plays the game will have their driving data recorded. If a user integrates with Facebook or GameCenter, they can then asynchronously race versus AI opponent that are programmed by a user’s friends. Oberin says the cars are not just ghost racers, he described the AI driving the cars as an “AI doppelgänger.”  It should be noted that TSM isn’t a mode, it’s in every race. Real Racing 3′s TSM will also be platform agonistic, meaning players can compete against each other’s TSM AI-controlled driver whether they are on iOS or Android devices. (more…)

Mobile analytics provider Apsalar drilled down into its iOS data to determine which mobile game genre developers should build their free-to-play games around in order to maximize revenue. The company, which offers a free mobile app SDK that provides in-app and campaign attribution analytics, discovered that certain game genres show a higher correlation between high engagement and high monetization through in-app purchases.

Apsalar pulled data from its Big Data Lab product, which has collected insights on about 430 million unique active iOS and Android devices, on millions of in-app purchases from iOS mobile games. The company used this data to analyze which game categories were the most effective at driving in-app purchases, and how engagement correlated to users converting to paid users.

The results showed that games in the strategy, trivia, adventure, family and RPG genres had the highest tendency for in-app purchases, with strategy games having a 18.5 times higher likelihood to generate money. The difference between the top five categories and the five categories that follow was significant, according to Apsalar. For example, the simulation category, the No. 6 ranking genre, generated approximately half as much money from in-app purchases compared to the No. 5 ranking genre, RPGs. Interestingly, action genre games ranked low in terms of in-app purchases.

The San Francisco-based company also looked into app engagement by app category, digging into its data on the average daily session length per user in each category. The company found that the ideal session lasted around two minutes. One notable genre was the arcade category, which had a high average daily session length of 1.58 minutes per user, but generate a low number of in-app purchases.

When looking at the correlation between monetization and engagement, Apsalar found a high correlation between high engagement and high monetization for most of the genres, with only two genres that were the exception. The arcade genre had high app engagement but low monetization from in-app purchases. The other genre was trivia, which demonstrated low average daily session lengths per user with a higher ability to monetize.

Apsalar double checked their data by analyzing the correlation between engagement and monetization on a two-by-two matrix graph as well. This graph also showed a high correlation between monetization and engagement. The company found the arcade genre to be the one genre with high engagement, but low monetization.

Apsalar concluded that mobile game developers have “no chance” of generating high revenue from in-app purchases without high engagement. Basically, for any developer who decides to go down the freemium route should know that’s it’s important to focus on building a great, engaging game in one of the more lucrative game genres for in-app purchases, then make sure to implement in-app purchasing hooks.

In its first four days since launch, Imangi Studios’ runner app Temple Run 2 for iOS raked in 20 million downloads in four days, with six million downloads on launch day alone. Also, the game skyrocketed up the charts to the No. 1 spot on the top free apps chart in a matter of eight hours.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based studio pushed Temple Run’s brand presence through licensing partnerships in 2012, which included Temple Run-branded apparel, digital comics, arcade machines, sleepwear and card and board games.

Founded in 2008, Imangi Studios’ original Temple Run has been downloaded more than 170 million times to date across the Apple App Store, Google Play and the Amazon marketplace. Other notable titles from the bootstrapped developer include Harbor Master and Disney Pixar movie tie-in, Temple Run: Brave.

According to our traffic tacking service AppData, Temple Run 2 is ranked No. 1 on both the top free iPhone and iPad apps charts, No. 3 on the top gross iPhone apps chart and No. 7 on the top grossing iPad apps chart. The game is scheduled to release on Android later this week.

Our review for Temple Run 2 can be found on our sister site, Inside Social Games, here.

Amazon announced today that consumers can now use their Amazon accounts to purchase virtual goods and currencies in PC, Mac and Web based games, as well as games in the official Amazon app stores for Kindle and Android.

As the world’s largest online retailer Amazon already has an enormous amount of users’ payment information. Developers are likely to see benefits as consumers within Amazon’s ecosystem will be able to make in-app purchases with little friction, much like markets in Japan and Korea where carrier billing is the norm.

The new in-app purchasing API for PC, Mac and web based games uses the same revenue formula as Amazon’s Kindle Fire store and the Amazon Appstore for Android. Developers earn 70 percent of list price on each paid app as well as on each in-app purchase. Amazon did not specify the revenue share on PC and Mac. The fee for distributing apps through Amazon’s Mobile App Distribution Program is $99 per year, though Amazon is currently waiving that fee.

Another interesting benefit of the API is that the in-apps items will also automatically be available on Amazon.com so that they could possible appear on best seller lists. This could potentially greatly increase an app’s visibility and help increase discoverability and user engagement.

Developers who are interested in Amazon’s in app-purchasing API can get started here.

Mobile game developer TinyCo’s monetization data finds that Google’s Nexus 7 tablet generates 50 percent higher ARPU than the average Android tablet.

“It’s encouraging for us,” says Mike Sandwick, TinyCo’s manager of strategic partnerships. “We have a reputation that’s pretty unique in terms of our commitment to Android. It’s continuing to pay off for us and Google is making these really great devices that have great user experiences like the Nexus 7 in terms of hardware. Jellybean is just awesome. We’re very, very pro everything that’s happening on Android right now, and we’re very psyched to be able to keep developing for the platform.”

Not only that, TinyCo says users are 50 percent more likely to make in-app purchases on the Nexus 7 compared to users of other Android tablets. Although the Nexus 7 only represents 15 percent of TinyCo’s Android tablet user base, 30 percent of TinyCo’s Android tablet revenue is generated by Nexus 7 users. Lastly, Nexus 7 users tend to demonstrate about 20 percent higher 7- and 30-day retention rates.

TinyCo didn’t take into account Kindle Fire data, which is a device that’s powered by the Android operating system, because there’s monetization system differences between the Amazon Appstore for Android and Google Play that affect metrics such as ARPU on TinyCo’s end.

There is the common thought in the industry that iOS monetizes better than Android, but that hasn’t always been the case for TinyCo, previously citing free-to-play game Tiny Village as an example of seeing higher levels of monetization on Android versus iOS.

“We see monetization that’s surprisingly similar,” says Nick Ross, TinyCo director of analytics and user acquisition. “If you just look at it across everything, there probably are some slight differences, but those are all due to known factors like the number of Singaporean users is different from one platform to the next.”

Google manufacturing it’s own first-party tablet allows developers to test and monetize better, Ross adds.

“It’s going to encourage other people to develop on the platform, which is awesome,” he says. “We’re pro more games on the platform.”

In a recent Q & A, W3i’s general manager Erik Lundberg told Inside Mobile Apps that since tablets are a luxury item, consumers monetize on tablet better than they do on smartphones. Google itself is even helping developers create better Android tablet apps, with Google’s Tablet App Quality Checklist, seeing as it’s in Google’s best interest to push Android tablet development now that they have their own tablet device on the market.

TinyCo analyzed it’s most recent Android game Tiny Monsters for the Android tablet data it shared with Inside Mobile Apps.

One of the world’s hottest gaming companies, Finnish startup Supercell, is reportedly generating $1 million in gross revenue a day from just Hay Day and Clash of Clans, the company’s only two active iOS games, according to recent reports from PandoDaily and The Next Web.

No more than three months ago, Supercell told the New York Times in October 2012 that it saw sales in upward of $500,000 a day and $15 million in gross revenue a month, with only two games in its stable. PandoDaily later reported in November 2012 $750,000 in gross revenue. Minus Apple’s standard 30 percent cut of transactions from the Apple App Store, Supercell would be currently pulling in $700,000 a day. The revenue is also nearly split evenly between iPad and iPhone. Costs to run the company each day are said to be as low as $60,000, says PandoDaily.

“It’s weird for us, even internally, seeing all this speculation about how much money we’re making per day,” Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen told PandoDaily.

November data from App store analytics company App Annie showed Supercell in first place in terms of monthly iOS revenue, topping big publishers such as Electronic Arts, GREE and Rovio. To put it into perspective, EA has 969 iOS apps in its portfolio compared to Supercell’s two. Clash of Clans and Hay Day nabbed the No. 1 and No. 2 spots (read our reviews for both titles here and here), respectively, on App Annie’s top iOS games by monthly revenue chart. In app tracking company Distimo’s 2012 year in review report, the company put together a top 10 chart of the highest grossing cross-platform publishers, with Supercell as the single app store exception. Distimo’s analytics product ApplQ showed us in Sept. 2012 that Clash of Clans was earning as much as $103,763 a day in U.S.

Apple confirmed the Helsinki-based developer’s success on Monday, stating that Supercell, although clumped together with developer Backflip Studios of DragonVale fame, pulled in $100 million in 2012.

Supercell isn’t without fault. The Finish developer axed three games including its first title Gunshine, a beta release of Battle Buddies, and an unannounced combat strategy game that was pulled in its early stage of development, says PandoDaily.

It’s also important to note that the gaming industry is a hit-driven business. OMGPOP’s Pictionary-like drawing game Draw Something bled users shortly after getting acquired by Zynga. The same fate could be dealt to Hay Day, which released in June 2012, and Clash of Clans, which released in July 2012.

The 70-person social gaming startup is known for their “tablet first” approach, which differentiates the Finnish developer from competitors such as Zynga, EA and GREE. Supercell makes money through in-app purchases from casual farm game Hay Day and village-building game Clash of Clans. Both titles have been at the top on the top grossing iOS apps charts for months. According to our traffic tracking service app data, Clash of Clans is currently the No. 1 grossing app for both iPhone and iPad, while Hay Day is the No. 2 grossing app on iPad and No. 5 on iPhone.

Finish developers in general are killing it in mobile gaming right now. Supercell is joined by Angry Birds developer Rovio, with Angry Birds Star Wars performing very well, and Oulu, Finland-based Fingersoft, with its hit title Hill Climb Racing, and Grey Area’s location-based MMORPG Shadow Cities.

Supercell, which was founded in 2010, has raised $15 million to date, $12 million of which from Accel Partners, with other backers including London Venture Partners, Initial Capital, Lifeline Ventures and Cerval Investments. According to PandoDaily, Supercell is the fastest growing company in terms of revenue that Accel Partners has ever seen. Keep in mind that this is a venture capital firm that has invested in the likes of Groupon, Spotify and Facebook. The company was rumored by PandoDaily to be valued at $600 million, with possible acquisition suitors like EA or Zynga.

In 2013, Supercell general manager for North America Greg Harper told The Next Web that the company plans to continue growing and supporting its existing titles and launch a few more games.