I hope you all had a happy holiday season. I am sure I am not the only one who catches themselves singing toss a coin to your witcher and then getting annoyed that they cannot get the song out of their head.
For today’s topic, we are going to look into competitive gaming and how it helps your product and the overall purpose of running tournaments and events.
In our last article we looked at the drawbacks of focusing on the top of the player pyramid and how this kind of design can be problematic. That said, tournaments and events (also referred to as Organized Play or OP) can help significantly with overall player investment into your game. While it is likely only the top parts of your pyramid will benefit directly from OP initiatives, they do give your casual players a reason to stay invested in your game for longer periods of time.
For those of you unfamiliar, gaming tournaments and leagues are events either organised by the company that runs the game (such as Riot Games with the LCS). Events can also be organised by third party organizations, such as Channel Fireball with MagicFest or your local card game store for your game of choice. What’s really interesting about this is that the publisher and third parties have different objectives and motivations for running these types of events.
For this article, I will break the organization down into 2 groups. Group 1 is the publisher, they are responsible for the creation and distribution of the game and make choices which directly impact the game. The second group are 3rd party organizations that do not have an overall say in the development of the game, but directly benefit from your game existing and help promote your game by running their own events.
For the publisher, the most important thing for you to know is that OP is a marketing activity. These events and tournaments are run at a loss almost all of the time. For the publisher, you want players to start playing and stay invested in your product for as long as possible. A proven way of doing this is by giving your players something to work towards, a goal that inspires them to keep playing. That goal could be I want to be a World Champion of my game, or it could be I want to win prizes. Tournaments are also fun and all the players that play get better at your game and become emotionally invested, which is a great thing. You are probably wondering, why would you ever run these events at a loss? Surely if you do that's just bad business? The reason for this is that your short term loss, on the event, generates much more in sales over the long run. To understand this we need to look at a basic player motivation chart, when it comes to competitive games.
To clarify the colours, Green is a choice the player makes, Black is the actual event and Red is the important part that represents a successful initiative. Once a player gets to this level once, they will most likely stay with your game and invest more time and energy. Even if your events make a loss, if enough players hit this point in the flow chart, the game will generate significant money over time which massively offsets the initial loss from tournaments. This is the point where a new or casual player becomes a core player. They will introduce more players to your game and in some cases even become influencers, who advocate your game and champion your brand. This is the core reason you run OP, to keep players invested and give them the drive to improve. The longer they stay the more revenue you generate each new release.
Group 2 is the third parties that run tournaments and events for a game, without having direct control over the game itself. An example of this would be Channel Fireball running MagicFest events. Channel Fireball will never be able to print a single card for Magic the Gathering, but they do directly benefit from supporting the game. Local stores are like this on a smaller basis. For these types of companies, running events at a loss would be a terrible idea. While players are likely to spend money during the event, it would be really hard to convince a store to use its space to support a game that gets 4 people showing up every other week verses a game that pulls 40 plus every week. For these organizations it makes sense to support what's popular and use the opportunity to monetize it in a way that is overall profitable. For digital games there are some amazing online platforms such as Battlefy that let anyone become an event organizer for whatever game they want. The same principles apply to these people with less of the overheads. Organizers want to run events to make a profit, as long as the game is succeeding it makes sense to support and promote events. On Battlefy, I may have no impact whatsoever over the next Hearthstone expansion, but if I run a successful series of tournaments its possible to profit from that games success, this indirectly actually helps the publisher by reinforcing the player motivation chart from above as they get invested in Hearthstone tournaments. The motivation for this category is to profit from a successful brand. Rather than accept a loss for running these events, the trick is to grab a successful product, and create your own product (the event) to profit from. It is a lot cheaper for me to go onto Battlefy and run a Shadowverse tournament than it is for me to make Shadowverse.
Eventually a player will get to a point where investing more money doesn't actually improve their performance. A very clear example of this can be found in Trading Card Games. Eventually you have all the cards or there are no cards available that would improve your tournament results. This is where everything falls back on you as the game designer to answer this question: How do you create your game so that no player will ever have the perfect resources and no longer need to invest? For card games this has been a problem since their inception. The industry as a whole has come to different conclusions on how to tackle this issue. Magic the Gathering introduced a format of set rotation. This means that tournaments seasons are played in cycles. Roughly once every 2 years, an expansion of cards goes from legal to no longer legal for tournaments (or at least the most supported format). For the game designers, this solved a massive problem known as Power Creep.
Power Creep is when you intentionally make a card better than another card that does the same thing. For example, you had a card that says kill target creature that has a yellow hat and it costs 3 in game resources, power creep would be to release a card that costs 3 resources and just kills any creature without any additional restrictions. As long as these 2 cards exist side by side, why would you ever seriously shackle yourself to only killing creatures with yellow hats. This works fine for a while as it gives players a very clear way to upgrade and improve their decks. In the long run however you are actually narrowing the design space you have access to by making your overall cards significantly stronger. For a while this will get players to buy new cards, but eventually to avoid players having a perfect deck you will have to print a card that costs 2 resources and kills a creature and also make sure that there are creatures that a player actually needs to kill. To avoid this, set rotation allowed Wizard of the Coast to prevent them having to compete with earlier designs, while also allowing players in the Red box of the diagram to have something to purchase in order to improve. Eventually you make the card that killed a creature with a yellow hat no longer legal for play in most tournaments, and players start looking at the new card that kills a creature with a sombrero for 3 much more favorably. The problem with set rotation is that you actively give players a reason to leave your game every time you make older cards no longer legal. My friends Hearthstone collection is no longer legal for normal play and as a result, to get back into the game he would have to very heavily reinvest to build decks. He isn’t in love enough with Hearthstone to do that, so, in a sense, Blizzard rotated him out of the game. An argument could be made that he was not a big enough spender to cater to which is understandable. Hearthstone did release a format where all cards are legal called wild format. The catch is, the new cards are also really good there so you need to reinvest either way if you want to keep up.
Another way of answering this question is to change your core rules, every so often, so that you shift the balance of the game to offset needs to power as much. This is a successful but difficult strategy, as every time you do this you add complexity, which makes it harder for new players to join the game. We can look at the game Heroes of the Storm as a great example of this. Heroes of the Storm is similar to titles such as League of Legends and DOTA 2, the objective of the game is to destroy the other team's base. Each team has 5 players and each map has a number of lanes which AI minions travel down throughout the match. In order to add new heroes to the game, there is a level of power creep (*Cough* Deathwing). But it is possible to add strength to other aspects of the game by changing the rules. In one of its recent patches, the minions that players kills in order to level up their team now drop experience orbs. Before you could stand at a safe distance and get all of the experience for your team. This change now means that you have to walk closer to where the minion died in order to get the most experience. This subtle change massively powers up more durable characters, who can walk into the orbs to get the experience vs characters that do lots of damage, but would put themselves at a great risk if they move in too close to collect the experience. This shifts the focus of the game, by making players have to actively consider this when strategizing for a match. Power Creep will eventually resume until another change is made, but for the most part if your long range characters are too strong, this change suddenly makes durable characters much more interesting to play.
As a game designer, it is likely that you will not be involved with the specifics of how these events are run, yet every decision you make will affect everyone who participates giving you a lot of accountability without directly working on these projects. You are responsible for creating the experience that players want to have at these events. Like in the above Heroes of The Storm example, this change will impact which characters are considered stronger for play in tournaments, even if they never attend a meeting about how third parties are still running tournaments for Heroes of the Storm.
The important takeaway from this article, if you are creating a competitive game, is that you should create your own player motivation flowchart and consider how your design leads players to the red box. There is no reason to run competitive play without an end goal of generating more sales.
- Matt