GUEST BLOG: There’s been a GaaS explosion but we missed the fun.

Boy oh boy, games as a service is a hot topic.  You can’t move without someone talking about retention or in-game events or PvP or how in the hell GREE’s Modern War is back in the Top 5 App Store grossing charts again.  Or how Puzzle and Dragons is making forty-three billion dollars a day or how King is going to be worth more than Facebook….

Struan Robertson

Fine, so I’m stretching the truth a little – not everyone is talking about games as a service.  For a start, I’m sitting on a train from Oxford to London and the two smart looking gentlemen sitting near me are doing what I would imagine to be the opposite of talking about games as a service – sleeping and reading a book about maths.  (I’m not making that up, dude’s reading about the golden ratio right now).  But increasingly developers and publishers are realising that the world of free-to-play has moved into a state where the service portion of the game is of prime importance and that retention should be prioritized ahead of monetization.  And this approach is resulting in titles that blow up and then stick around the top grossing like they own the joint.  As a neat way of proving my point, I can see at least three people playing Candy Crush Saga from here.

And you can kind of see why this hyperbole-riddled world of GaaS is taking hold.  As a principle for development, free-to-play games as a service offer quite an enticing opportunity.  If you get it right, you can keep people playing (and paying) in your world for years.  What seems to be eluding people is what ‘getting it right’ actually means.  People (myself included) spend a lot of time talking about the kinds of mechanics you need - for a tasty game as a service, stir in one part PvP, one part clans, three parts collectable cards, a dash of mystery box to taste and then bake for three years.  And sure, there are some mechanical aspects of a GaaS that will help with its success but mechanics alone is kind of missing the point. 

If you don’t have a fun thing in the first place – characters that people care about, a thing that makes people’s faces light up when they play it, something with its own sense of charm or place in the world - then you won’t develop anything of lasting meaning.  Concentrate on those game development principles of old like establishing your game pillars, establishing your game world and its history and concentrate on gameplay and player feedback to develop a Creative Core for your game.  Then use that ‘Creative Core’ as a foundation for the rest.

Maths Guy has moved onto quadratic equations now in case you’re interested.

This blog was written by Struan Robertson, Microsoft Lift London. The F2P Summit takes place on 10 October 2013 at RichMix in London. www.f2p-summit.com