Have you ever wondered why some games that seemed like they had everything going for them burnt out or vanished due to a lack of players? Today I want to look into building games for Hardcore Players and focusing on a top down Player Pyramid development perspective. I wrote a post a few weeks back to explain the Player Pyramid in detail, for the full article you can find it here. To refresh your memory here is the basic Player Pyramid: -
Our references throughout today's post will be examples in the Trading Card Game (TCG) genre, however the concepts can be applied across a range of genres.
After Pokemon, Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! (aka the big 3 of the TCG industry) took off, there were lots of companies that wanted to move into this space. These games were smashing sales records year on year and the whole industry was essentially printing its own money. One thing that drew many players to Magic the Gathering was the Pro Tour events. These events offered a huge prize pool and lots of incentives to become a professional player. Wizards of the Cost (WotC) were selling a dream to many young players who wanted to make their fortune doing something they loved, in this case: playing Magic. The Pro Player Club was another feature of professional play which offered tons of benefits to high ranking players such as appearance fees for just showing up to tournaments (even if you didn't win a single game). The Pro Tour was extremely hard to qualify for. While the system has changed dramatically over the years, you could have as many as 100 players trying to compete for 1 invitation. The dream that WotC was selling was driving lots of players to go into local stores and play Magic the Gathering. The Pro Tour players can be considered our Hardcore players, all of the players that were inspired to get onto the Pro Tour that started going to tournaments can be considered the Core Players. The Core Players were consistent traffic for stores that generated a lot of sales. For an outsider looking in, the following equation could be considered: -
High level Tournaments + Cash Prizing + Great Marketing of a Dream = Huge volumes of sales in hobby stores
We will call this formula “The Game Plan”
This formula was considered the the road to El Dorado by many, believing it would generate huge profits that would keep coming for years. What you may have noticed, is that there were many games that took this route and failed. I want to use an example of a game that stuck to the game plan perfectly and still didn’t make it. The game in question was the VS System created by Upperdeck Entertainment back in 2004.
Upperdeck had brought the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game over from Japan and it simply exploded. Even in my home town of Bristol in the UK would get 100 players showing up each week to play in a store that had seating for 30 players at best. The rest of us would go to the local McDonald's to trade and play every weekend. Yu-Gi-Oh! Became the third of the big 3 and for a while was the clear front runner globally. Upperdeck wanted to diversify its successful lines within it’s TCG’s products and acquired the licences for Marvel and DC. These IP’s are decades old and are among some of the biggest IP’s in the world today. Both Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! were based on IP’s that acted as the marketing driver to get players into the game, it stood to reason that if you had a great IP and built your game around it and followed the game plan, you would hit the jackpot.
The VS system was an extremely cool game, there was so much depth to the mechanics. It used a resource system like Magic the Gathering where you need to play cards that generate resources for you each turn, but it fixed the issue Magic had by allowing you to use any card as a resource. It had formations, where the placements of your cards on the field affected who could and couldn’t be attacked, team attacks (where you could group multiple cards together to attack 1 target) and many more. If there is one major point I want to get across with the VS system, it is that the better player always won. There were so many decisions at every stage of the game that you had to make, the better player would win the game every single time. Despite working on one of the big 3 TCG’s for more than 8 years of my life, my life time win loss record vs the former head of Organized Play (OP) for Upperdeck UK Rob Hooley was a total of 0 wins and I lost count of how many losses. The VS system was also a hyper consistent game, this means that a player got to execute their ideal strategy in basically every game. There was very little chance in a game of the VS system which should have been another major point of it being the best game for tournaments. From the very start Upperdeck planned a $1 Million Pro Circuit before the game even came out.
5 years after its release, the VS system got discontinued. So how did a game that seemingly had everything going for it fail? A big part of that is that you may have noticed that in all of the above I haven't mentioned the 2 biggest parts of the player Pyramid, Casual players and New players. The VS system was so hard to learn how to play well. Your beginning journey against a player that had been playing for a while would result in you losing a lot as you learned the ropes. Also to get onto the Pro Circuit you needed to win a qualifier, the issue is the best players in the game would travel to each event and scoop these up along with the $250 prizing for the tournaments. The attendance started to fall and Upperdeck made some changes to the OP program to stop the same players from winning all of the events. The issue was that the change actually made it so most players could never qualify for the Pro Circuit. In time attendance shrank more and sales dried up. Stores went back to using their space for the big 3 and the VS system went off quietly into the night.
The entire VS system was built for the top of the Player Pyramid. As soon as the Core Players failed to progress up the competitive ladder they left the game. This had a catastrophic impact on the very foundation that the VS system was designed on. With no new players coming in or casual players to support the sales of the product, the game failed.
One of the key things that games need in this age is to be accessible. That is not to say that everything has to be care bear friendly and hold your hand the whole time, but your game needs to be able to attract new players. Some successful titles that are certainly not easy are things like Darkest Dungeon, or the Total War Series. Both of these games are really hard with players needing to make many critical decisions to stay in the game. Players are eased into the difficulty of these games carefully, but the core mechanics of the game require you to grasp concepts and make smart decisions about them very quickly.
To build a successful title these days, I personally think it is incorrect to base your entire business model on Hard Core players, the competition for these games is fierce and in the long run you would be leaving lots of money on the table. You can make your game challenging but you need to design your game with an entry point in mind. I prefer to build from the grass roots up (meaning, you start with the player experience, then consider the local store and generating traffic then move onto planning tournaments and marketing your product with them). The best players of your game will always be the ones that want to play your game because it’s amazing. These Players will also market your game to their friends and will pull more players onto your product. If you only focus on the glory seekers, you are taking a risk that those players will abandon you when something new comes along or intimidate weaker players and push them away from your game. By all means, build your game to allow the great players to succeed, you should consider your competitive aspects in the game design. I would just advise you consider all possible player types when building your game and make sure your whole pyramid is supported.
We started talking a bit about the Magic the Gathering at the start of this article. If you look into their past and how the game ended up with this huge professional circuit that pushed players in to stores in droves, you will notice that they have over the years shifted strategies. There is a huge segment of the audience of games that can be called “The Invisibles”. These are the players that go into a store, buy product then go home and play at the kitchen table. You have no way to track who these players are or why they love your game, they never register for tournaments or may not even follow your game on social media. These players can generate huge sums of money but you will never have full vision over what they do. As I mentioned before in the player pyramid article, if you ask a Core player what do they think of your game or how to improve it, they will give you an answer that will appeal to core players. If you always listen and implement features for core players, you might actually drive away "The Invisibles". Magic the Gathering has dramatically improved how accessible the game is over the years. You can find many products that appeal to Casual or New Players and even the game design has been streamlined to be really easy to understand.
Sticking to “The Game Plan” does not guarantee success. When you design your game consider the whole picture and make your decisions accordingly. There are 2 new TCG’s that seem to be following “The Game Plan” for their release. These are Argent Saga and also Flesh and Blood TCG. Both of these games look really cool and I am looking forward to getting my hands on some cards to play with friends. For Flesh and Blood TCG, I love the art and the setting of the game, 2 characters having a straight up fight with gear and attacks rather than using creatures. It reminds me of Diablo and that was the hook that got me interested. Argent Saga has its own charm and the story of the world has me intrigued enough to want to give it a try. Both games are marketing towards Hardcore Players with their marketing geared towards big tournaments. I hope both of these games succeed, I do however believe that their strategy is very high risk. A rising tide raises all boats, so even if professionally these games are the competition, I will be ecstatic once both games get off the ground. Remember, Hardcore players can always go play Magic the Gathering, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh! so directly trying to compete for attention against these established games for their most loyal of players is going to be an uphill struggle. If you get a chance, try these games out. If you want to take it a step further, consider how easy the game is to pick up. If you get it right away, grab a friend who has never played a card game before and teach them and see if its easy. Ask your friend questions and use the experience to help you improve your own design and business strategies to build successful products.
-Matt