189B. Forever Games: Definition and Design
Here I describe in detail games that are designed to be played 20+ years. This is the product of 25 years of intense personal design innovation, focused on maximizing revenue per dollar invested.
As I begin to describe my vision of a “Forever Game”, please keep two things in mind:
No studio on the planet currently is set up to produce such a game. Setting up production for this technology is also complicated so the next paper in this series (190C.) will be dedicated to describing that.
All of the technology needed to produce a Forever Game already exists. We just have not chosen to either deploy it and/or fund it. Every AAA studio wants this, but they don’t know how to do it.
As I will describe here, the design technology is extremely complicated and took decades of intense focused work to complete. The only equivalent example I can think of by a solo expert was Bill James who developed Sabermetrics over a period of 30 years for the baseball industry. His work was the basis of the movie and book Moneyball (2011) which I’ve written several papers on. But to make the movie more Hollywood, Bill James was entirely omitted from the movie. Thus an entire generation of business leaders was misinformed as they learned the wonders of data from Brad Pitt while watching their screen on business flights.
That’s not conjecture, I had several AAA studio execs contact me in 2012 and 2013 asking me to help them set up analytics teams to do what they saw in the movie.
Asymmetry
I began developing this technology going all the way back to 2000 when I was contributing double full time balancing the math and designing the diplomacy layer for Nexon’s Shattered Galaxy, the first English language MMORTS (2001 release year). SG was big, even larger in scale than the stuff Chris Taylor was designing. To me, what really distinguished it from other MMO’s was just how asymmetrical it was.
What I mean here is that unlike today’s games where everyone is kept equal in a match, there was no attempt to match player strengths and each match could have 15 players on each side. In some rare cases I think it could go to 17 players on a side. To Nexon’s credit, SG is the only game where they put my real name in the credits. I’m also considered one of the top 3 players of the game of all time (under my game name Sarcerok), and I often would get cornered and have to fight 15 enemy players solo. The typical result of such a matchup was a draw. I would have a hard time capturing all 3 Points of Contention (PoCs) simultaneously since I only had so many units, all of superior quality, and the enemy often would gain one but lose another as I anticipated all their actions.
The metrics showed that moving to Asymmetry in WoWs and removing the unfairness of premium (gold) ammo made it perform even better than World of Tanks. Recent research by NetEase, which is becoming a powerhouse in gaming, showed scientifically that asymmetrical matches are preferred by players. But like with WoWs, the asymmetry they tested was extremely minor. Huge asymmetry as I will discuss here, requires an incredible amount of complexity that is normally game and revenue breaking.
The reason this asymmetry is critical is because players need to feel a sense of progression over time. They don’t get that experience in most popular shooters, and even in World of Warships you could hit a cap and stop progressing after a few months. Players experience depression, real depression, when they hit the progression cap in games and stop getting rewarded. But there is no way to allow players to continue to progress in today’s games without breaking the monetisation models and without creating churn due to unfairness. The longer a game runs, the more serious these issues become. A game won’t last 20+ years without it being built to remedy this future disruption, before it is even launched.
Fairness
Maintaining fairness is also critical, and was a real problem in the industry prior to the publication of my 2012 Supremacy Goods microeconomic model. Supremacy Goods was accepted as gospel by the industry and fairness largely returned to online games within a year, with the exception of some mobile game holdouts.
But to create that fairness we introduced completely symmetrical teams, which also made games a bit boring and predictable. Making one player stronger than another is almost always considered unfair, so making it seem fair is a very complicated mathematical and psychological process. This involves the application of what I call an Asymmetrical Matchmaker that balances teams much like large scale tabletop wargames did. Also, unless a game is a clone, usually the content is different in every game. Thus the math that would allow an asymmetrical game would also be different. That requires an appropriately trained mathematician and since we are increasingly becoming computer dependent, those math skills are disappearing from the labor pool. AI is of little help as the complexity is also beyond the ability of AI to handle.
Of course those mathematicians also need to be trained. My last two employers have tried to get me to train others in how to do that. I’ve always said no. If they want my tech, they have to go through me. Or they could just flat out steal it like XLGames (out of Korea) told me to my face they were going to do when they met with me in Novato, California in 2013 while we were building Civilization Online for Take Two. That resulted in the end of the CO project and made me extra careful about who I show any elements of the tech to. Or they can engage in espionage or try to buy the tech from anyone I’ve worked with. Both of those things have happened, just in the last few years. So please be understanding about how careful I am.
Social Layers and Interdependency
People go online to meet and interact with other people. If they didn’t need this, they would get a better and less expensive option with a Finite game. While I almost universally disagree with Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) on approach, this is one thing that I feel he really got right. In any F2P online game, the players are as much the product as the game content is. You see a similar dynamic in dating apps, which are to me also games. That’s why I discuss both in detail in my substack. Thus I use F2P to onboard new players but try to quickly move them to higher quality and higher paying models that give richer experiences for more committed participants. Dating apps are still in the dark ages of Pay to Win.
My issues with Roblox, and all of the would be investors that keep asking me to make another Roblox, is that the above applies even more so to children. If they aren’t paying, and don’t have near constant adult supervision, then they are the product. Until legal protections can adequately protect them from exploitation, I warn parents not to subject their minor children to the F2P business model. In my child-friendly models, I charge children AND make sure they have parental informed consent. I also try to encourage parents to play with their children or otherwise give parents feedback as to who their children are in daily contact with. This is just an obvious need anytime you drop your children off at a playground, and virtual playgrounds are no different (and not safer). My StarGarden project at my company Arrivant was built for this purpose. But until Roblox is sufficiently required to protect and not exploit children, investors would rather invest in Roblox. That’s not speculation, that’s what they told me. Thus there are a lot of adults benefiting from the problems affecting children at Roblox and this is why it has persisted (or even gotten worse) for almost 20 years.
Interdependency is a very complicated but essential element in long term engagement. People need to feel needed. I explain this in some detail in my 2018 Game Economics Defined paper. Game economies are there to create these critical interdependencies. If you don’t have a game economy (as I define it), you don’t have interdependencies and vice versa. 99% of the “game economies” out there now don’t meet my definition of game economies because they don’t provide this service.
Gamified Subscriptions
Games like World of Warships have optional subscriptions. But they provide a lot of value so conversion rates are high. In my more recent designs (over the last 10 years) my designs all contain gamified subscriptions which allow many subscription options and price points. Again, this is possible because I’m selling asymmetry. The reward for all that complexity on my end, is I can charge more to gamers. Thus stronger subscriptions on the following chart mean more subscription options and higher overall monetisation rates.
Cyclical Progression
Cyclical progression radically reduces the cost and time of content production by having players repeat content in a way that is enjoyable, not tedious. Grinding leads to depression and churn, but having players go through content in a different way refreshes the experience so that it is not interpreted as grinding. MMORPGs take advantage of this by allowing players to go through all of the available content with a new character and class.
World of Tanks and World of Warships went a step further by encouraging playing through all the content again with new tanks/ships. This was done by linking playthroughs to increased progression rewards for every vehicle that you played each day. If you had two ships you could get those bonuses twice. If you had 30 ships you could get those bonuses 30 times. This keeps the play varied and reduces “grind”.
Both of these are modest attempts to encourage cycling, so I would call these “pseudo cycling” or weak cycling. Still, that’s a big improvement and largely the reason why gamers can play World of Warcraft or World of Warships for 10+ years without feeling that they are grinding. Full cycling involves having all players play together on a server for 3 to 6 months and then starting over at the end. Based on performance they get to keep some buffs, similar to how “rogue-likes” today use the same mechanic to boost product lifespan.
This was a powerful mechanic that got gamers playing Shattered Galaxy for 10 years after Nexon had abandoned development. But SG had no asymmetrical matchmaker to keep gameplay fair and thus became wildly imbalanced. This also favored veteran players over new players, which prevented organic player base expansion. This issue also plagues EVEOnline and has prevented player base expansion.
Games like EVE or all MMORPGs have persistent worlds, not cyclical worlds, so player balance becomes disrupted. This discourages new players and simultaneously “grind” causes churn among veteran players. This is certain if PvP and PvV (player versus Victim) are allowed. Cyclical worlds allow new content to be built and added to each new cycle, keeping it fresh. New rules sets can also be used when cycles reset, giving gameplay a novel twist.
Forever Games Characteristic Table
* Early MMOs had organic player economies and interdependencies. When Blizzard forbade this in their 2004 WoW EULA this ended and the entire industry pivoted to microtransactions by 2011 (Zynga Era).
WoWs is pseudocyclical, not cyclical.