it is a barrier to entry / capital issue. "ding ding ding" games make massive amounts of money so you won't stay indie for long. BUT because they are such cash cows, there is a lot of competition there with very little differentiation. so you need to take the risk and spend massive amounts of money on ads to gain any traction. your competitors probably have deeper pockets so they can out-ad you. So you need to risk massive amounts of cash upfront, but if you succeed, you can make a lot of money. if you don't you lose it all.
So the initial capital requirements are high, you need to risk a lot of money. Which disqualifies most "indies". The indie loophole is making up for the lack of money by creativity, targeting smaller niches and using your free labor as a substitute for money that you don't have. Once you gain traction with a "ding ding ding" game though, you will make a lot of money and will need to spend strategically to maintain any kind of lead you might have so you will quickly have a team to do the job, which will no longer make you an indie, but a larger company that makes addictive games.
Your character has to invest in NFTs and cryptocurrencies to make enough money so that they can buy enough ads for their Slot Machine Game
Here's the ticker, Slot Machine Game Dev Simulator 2024 itself *is an NFT and a cryptocurrency*
$$$$$$$$$$$$
Your comment reminded me strongly of the [BCG Matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix).
I feel like many indies ignore basic economic theory way too much. They kinda wanna do it as business and a hobby at the same time and don't decide for either one and fail at both. Treat it either as a hobyby, have fun and don't expect to make a living, or treat it as a business and also do the economic research on what you are doing.
They see examples of success stories where people hitting home runs with projects that look like hobby / passion projects. Disregarding the fact that most of them are actually very calculated endeavors and not "this is what I like" projects going big, it is hard to have visibility on how *rare* that success story is. Realistically it is not easier than becoming a top athlete. The odds are similar. Or becoming a musician that delivers a global hit. I'd argue creating a top hit song is easier, it certainly is orders of magnitude less labor intensive. You can create tens of songs and test them in the market in the time it takes to develop a comprehensive game.
Agreed with this, which I why I think this bothered me so much. I assumed/hoped that there is a large group of folks like myself looking for a more strategic/deep experience in mobile games. I think that group is out there, but I'll admit that it's shocking (and a bit depressing) to me that a game with such a simple game loop could have such high retention and monetization, it definitely reveals a fair bit about human nature.
It is depressing... but a *lot* of life is depressing if you really look around and think of it that way. Ultimately people work very hard at work and are tired, and feel justified letting their brain literally rot when they are not actively working. It's just... how it is, doesn't seem likely to change, if anything we are moving the other direction. You can either embrace it and try to use the opportunity (not necessarily to exploit, you could try to improve the genre, for example... good luck!), or be depressed. You can even simply think of it as "if these people had the gumption to think while they played, I would have a lot more competition as a gamedev!"). But yes, every true artistic endeavor in particular, is, at its peak potential, a stone skipping on the sea of mindless entertainment, and incredibly incredibly rarely do those two worlds converge, and something truly great get the reverence it deserves. It's a side effect of competition, and it is sad, but societally we are presented with two options: adapt or fail.
Those revelations have been known forever. Every major hit that is mobile is a mindless button smasher. People don't want immersive gameplay like BG3 on their phone ....no one has time to read the dialogs and complete quests in their bathroom break.
You are judging a market you didn't understand before entering it. Mobile is mostly simple game loops because it's what hits the pleasure spot and also the time to complete Goldie locks range.
I know for a fact the moment you make me do too many tasks in one day on a mobile game...it will never be played again. Meanwhile I will do endless amounts of pointless tasks in a console/PC game because I have the available time when I normally engage in those games.
It sounds like you're making a console/PC style game for the mobile and there was no initial planning and research into that genre on a mobile device. Or even trying to find what mobile gamers exclusively are looking for in their medium.
> BUT because they are such cash cows, there is a lot of competition there with very little differentiation.
Just to add to that, because a lot of those games can’t differentiate themselves (or at least don’t attract attention) through gameplay, they tend to establish a following by leveraging an established IP instead. That’s another way in which it’s not a great space for indies to compete in.
I think this is probably all sound and true to a big degree, but it downplays a bit how hard it is to make a high retention game. This usually requires tons of iteration and data collecting, it isn't something as trivial as "just employ these shadowy evil psychology tricks and bam". If you're at the point that you can make a game with very high retention (while also being able to monetize well) there is no out-ad-ing, I believe. You just make more money than you pay to acquire users.
Tons of gatcha games by big companies close down all the time, regardless of money resources. Making a long term engaging addictive game is, thankfully, not easy
Monopoly Go spent an obscene amount of money on user acquisition. Because they're targeting an audience that can't tell the difference between products, they're competing on who can spend the most marketing money
I worked in a related space (not slot machine stuff, but similarly casual although lower traffic/profit) and the company spent millions of dollars to stay on top of the charts, and that was from a first mover in the market. You need a ton of money to be viable in that space.
It’s pricing.
On the smartphone app market, “gaming”, in any traditional sense, is dead and replaced by ding ding machines (and maybe Minecraft or something). I’m 99% sure that’s because of Apple’s initially aggressive pricing strategy which got people hooked on mobile spending with $0,99 apps. That created a race to the bottom where the cheapest dev cost/mass appeal formula was summoned, resulting in F2P as we know it.
The only reason we don’t have that elsewhere is that on dedicated gaming platforms on console and PC, there is still *minimal* curation going on to filter for higher quality games. But take one look at the “sales” page on the Switch game store or something and it becomes clear how that shit creeps into any market that allows it.
If you think about it, "cozy" games are really ding ding games with a diffferent aesthetic, most of them are rather railroady and the choices you make are entirely cosmetic.
It is. I know a few people who got their start in slot games or hypercasual before getting into a "real" game studio.
When we think of Indie we tend to think of a tiny, well-curated corner of the market driven mostly by word of mouth, but for every indie darling there are a hundred low effort casual games.
You've reminded me that there's an excellent GDC talk about drowning the app store in cheap slot machine games, the talk is really really good https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk?si=3KPGYMBpe7SsDSPh
I wouldn't say there's a lot out there, the problem is, what is out there is generally incompetently developed clones of slot machines. Not utilizing a social gaming approach to game loop and overall game purpose, they just cloned slot machines.
Like the other person answering you said though, cost of entry is a barrier. Last I checked, which is about 2 weeks ago, CPI bids for rewarded video in that category are about $6.50. Now, can an indie do it? Yes, but they need to have a good network. At my studio, we have a network of people who will invest in our UA, but require a 15 to 20% return within a short period, like 3-6 months.
Bingo. Before games, I used to be in casino operations. The power of the ding ding machine cannot be denied, it built Reno and Vegas.
So competent addition of quality ding ding in the game loop will create a game that hits multiple audiences. Or at least has the potential to.
[I’ve got action missiles](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1429350/MHZombie/) and nail rockets and multi-warhead heat-seeking mines, but if you don’t REALLY want to learn how to fly a helicopter we’re both SOL haha
They have monopoly branded slot machines in Vegas. This is just an extension of that.
(Fun fact, monopoly was designed as a cautionary tale about private land ownership and inequality by the Georgists. Somewhere along the line we lost the plot.)
> Somewhere along the line we lost the plot.
[When the game was stolen from the woman who originally designed it.](https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/monopolys-lost-female-inventor)
> Fun fact, monopoly was designed as a cautionary tale about private land ownership and inequality by the Georgists.
I tell people this whenever they ask me to play Monopoly. Nobody has ever asked me to play monopoly after that.
>there's no gambling mechanics
Except every single decision you make.
Buy a joker? Gamble.
Don't buy a joker? Gamble.
Focus too much on a powerful combination? Better hope the boss doesn't disable it! Gamble.
Buy a pack? Gamble.
Pulling cards? Gamble.
Yeah, it doesn't involve real money, but the mechanics of risk and reward based on chance are definetly there and it is meant to be addictive. I love this game btw.
Ok, poker doesn’t use jokers. Poker uses a betting mechanic using chips, where balatro uses chips to score. Poker doesn’t have tarot cards. Balatro uses an 8 card hand by default, poker always uses 5. So on and so forth. It’s like saying Hearthstone is literally Magic because both use mana, minion/creatures, spells. Like yeah, they definitely share mechanics, but Hearthstone and Magic have vast differences and they’re at least in the same genre, where Balatro isn’t when compared to Poker. Where are pokers rogue-like mechanics? Frankly the only similarity is the usage of pair > royal flush, and that’s hardly exclusive to poker, which wasn’t even the first appearance of that scoring system.
And we both know when I said gambling mechanics I was clearly using the first dictionary definition of gambling 1. “play games of chance for money”. You can’t bet chips in balatro. Chips = money by law.
Monopoly Go is not a board game and it's not trying to be. It's more of an idle game in the style of Pirate Kings or Coin Master as you say, and it's aimed at an entirely difference audience. It's hard to adopt a lot of board games into a F2P model, which is why they don't do as well on mobile, and tend to be more premium experiences along the lines of Uno or Ticket to Ride.
The "Shut Up and Sit Down" crew touched on this in a review of Rummiukub. It's the distinction between a game and an activity. Monopoly Go is an activity that is intentionally simple. It's primary goal is to facilitate a group of people enjoying each others company, and it supersedes the goal of creating interesting systems to grapple with.
I think it's a little arrogant to just assume that most people are stupid and so they like stupid games. Rather, I think it's likely that when groups of people get together many/most of them do it to enjoy their company, more so than solve a systems puzzle. And a game that requires too much attention won't give them what they want from the night.
Exactly.
People talk about the death of the third place.
Bowling alleys.
Pubs.
Everywhere wants you to spend money and get on out for the next group.
Free to play games are trying to create the space where you still hang out, some people are willing to spend money, but not everyone has to, and you never gotta leave.
That's the way it's built, not as a subject of conversation but simply to be the place where conversation can take place.
Before the awkward silences between topics of conversation were filled by cheers for strikes or whatever sports game was on the telly. Now it's idle chat about what happens in monopoly, but no one cares so much about the monopoly, as long as they have folks to share it with
I mean, it's happened already. Club Penguin, Neopets, Habbo Hotel. It's all functionally the same concept - social engine with a "game" on top. For a while, everyone just wanted to talk about Farmville. [And there's entire articles about how that went.](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/technology/farmville-zynga-facebook.html)
Then there are actual games with social concepts that bloomed into communities like Minecraft and WoW. I'm not hip with what's cool these days, I'm sure there are more modern examples.
My first thought on reading your comment was Bingo! There is little skill other than the ability to listen and mark numbers and yet it was a hugely successful social event for decades. As you say, it just filled a mental gap while doing something else and acted as an excuse to get together.
Is socialising the ultimate F2P game, with some monetisation aspects tacked on by an increasingly greedy society? A night out has players, rules, objectives. People with money can pay for cosmetics, unique locations and even favourable rules.
I don't even think it's necessarily greedy. Facilitating social venues takes resources, you need to recoup those costs one way or another. Churches take tithes, parks and rec departments take taxes, bingo nights have some sort of admission fee.
>some people are willing to spend money, but not everyone has to, and you never gotta leave.
Except when you run out of dice rolls and have no choice but to wait 5-6hrs for them to replenish or just spend money.
I downloaded Monopoly Go a few weeks ago because I thought it would require strategy like the actual board game.
After a short time, I realized all you do in the game is roll dice and promptly uninstalled it.
There's basically no strategy required. All video games are a waste of time, but this just felt insulting to play. I don't understand how people find it fun compared to other free mobile games that are actually good.
TLDR: They make the distinction between "Game" and "Activity" and kinda place Rummikub in the latter category. It's something you do to spend time with your nan because you find it fun to/want to spend time with your nan, not something that's inherently fun in itself.
It's not that it's unfun, it's just that it's barely fun enough to constitute something that you'd do instead of nothing.
I agree with your proposition here that facilitating social interaction is a primary motivator for play, absolutely. I'd argue that the social interaction one gets playing monopoly go is tacked on and marginal at best, primarily used as a way for them to get you to invite your friends to play.
You deal with it in many ways. Some of them from my experience are below.
- Realize that not only do different people want different things, but they also want different things at different times. Someone who loves deep, complex strategy games may also enjoy some mindless shooter games, idle phone games, etc as well.
- Genres like "digital board games" are super wide. The existence of more casual games does not automatically cannibalize the audience for deeper, more complex games. In many cases the opposite can be true, new players are drawn in through casual, easy games and then end up looking for more and growing the audiences of other games.
- Realize that compared to "all games" or "everyone playing games on a phone" you are in a small niche. This is ok! finding your niche is the best way to be successful as a small developer when you can't complete with the money and reach of large ones.
- Stop worrying about games you are not actually competing with. The indie game movement really started to come into its own when both players and developers stopped looking to it like AAA-lite, and started looking to it for the unique games, stories, and experiences they could provide.
- Stop making blanket assumptions on why things were done. Things like "Even the dice are automated as rolling the dice is apparently too tedious" is jumping to a conclusion that almost certainly isn't true, and is designed to paint both the game \_AND\_ its players (**many of which likely overlap with your players**) negatively without any substance.
> Things like "Even the dice are automated as rolling the dice is apparently too tedious" is jumping to a conclusion that almost certainly isn't true
I mostly agree with you and I think the reason Monopoly Go does it probably is different from most serious strategy games, but I would actually argue that rolling dice "by hand" in a video game is pretty tedious. If I'm playing your strategy game and I have to click a button (or worse, do a gesture or something) and then watch an animation of dice rolling to find out what my roll is, all you're doing is making me sit back and do nothing for a few seconds instead of actually engaging with the game and making the decisions that people play strategy games to make.
> If I'm playing your strategy game and I have to click a button (or worse, do a gesture or something) and then watch an animation of dice rolling to find out what my roll is, all you're doing is making me sit back and do nothing for a few seconds instead of actually engaging with the game and making the decisions that people play strategy games to make.
I'm with you.
This really irked me in BG3.
Keep in mind, the Monopoly license is also incredibly popular with slot machines. This an entirely different market segment.
My grandma enjoys Monopoly licensed slot machines but would never play any kind of board game because she's not into any of those aspects of interesting decisions and strategic thinking. People are looking for different things from their games and you just have to be able to put yourself in their shoes somewhat.
There's absolutely a market for digital board games. Monopoly Go doesn't really represent any of that, one way or another.
Years ago, before smart phones existed, a friend of mine who is no longer with us pitched his game idea to me. He called it Press A, Get Points and the concept was that as you press the A button, you get more points. We would laugh about it at the time but he was completely serious.
You are describing [Cow Clicker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker). The game was made as a joke by the developer and to his surprise/horror it became hugely popular.
You might find this [GDC talk](https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk?si=dEO0KUUigRx4hVGV) cathartic. It’s two guys who released their respective dream games, and they flopped horribly. So, jaded as hell, they met each other and decided to release the most cookie cutter slot game that they could… and it was (moderately) successful. The story gets better from there.
This still feels a bit unethical to me, but it's insane and unbelievable that it's still much better than free mobile games nowadays. They didn't really do anything wrong. Weird and sad I guess.
It's literally an obfuscated slot machine. I'm not being facetious, that's actually how it was designed from the bottom up. It even has the big red button... Compare it to other digital slot machines, and the design direction becomes very obvious.
Online gambling apps for mobile users, are not our competition. They have muscled their way onto our platforms, but they don't target the same markets. Think of it like a weed that invades a garden; nobody wants it there, but it's going to be sucking up all the water and nutrients it can before the gardener finds the right herbicide
It preys on addictional. Daily quest, pop up deal, leaderboard, you name it. Once it fades, you will never hear about it again. Highest grossing cause it's a whale game, doesn't mean it's good or has and valuable qualities like classic board game.
One of the lessons I've learned growing up is that the world is absolutely filled with simple people & stupid people. That you might constantly grow, learn and mature as you age, and need to absorb media/experiences that have a lot of meat to them. But a huge chunk of the population is dull as a butter knife and will never mature beyond teenage years, and forever be easily satisfied with pretty blinking lights.
Why do you think most casinos are just flashy slot machines? Why do you think all of the money in gaming is going into predatory design patterns? Way more people than you might be comfortable with are completely weak to this sort of thing. Some because they're dumb as bricks and some because they just have very simple tastes and not a lot of psychological defense against addictive patterns.
I'm just starting to get to the point where I'm feeling OK about not associating with that demographic and that I don't need to consume media/habits/ideas from them. I have my own tastes that get served by people like you and stuff that has a bit more meat. There's room for everyone, and hopefully in an ideal economy a healthy industry serves everyone (in hopefully not predatory ways) instead of only focusing on the demographic that is the easiest to manipulate.
All of the above said, it's all a spectrum. I've got friends who I'm reasonably close with, who are smart and intelligent and yet "OOO PRETTY LIGHTS!!" totally works on them. But in this context it's not really played as anything more than a distraction, like a fidget toy would be. Their minds are just optimized for a different kind of smart, with simple tastes and can be easily amused. Now none of them play anything truly predatory and none are whales but the power of a simple time killing dopamine button is real. That's basically what tiktok has achieved for everyone.
Edit: I think a good lesson here is take inspiration from vampire survivors. That game perfected the dopamine blinky lights feeling but attached it to a genuinely fun game. As if it's exploring what it could be like to have that slot machine feeling attached to something that's explicitly not being predatory.
The gameplay isn’t abysmal, it’s brilliant.
Which means you’ve identified your first problem - you don’t understand the single largest and BY FAR most lucrative segment of the game player market.
So either don’t try to sell it, or find a niche that thinks like you do.
And viewing this massive market disparagingly…honestly…dude, if you want to sell anything to anybody, you need to learn how to read people better. Or partner with someone who can, before you start building.
> The gameplay isn’t abysmal, it’s brilliant.
>
>
>
> Which means you’ve identified your first problem - you don’t understand the single largest and BY FAR most lucrative segment of the game player market.
Seriously. I feel like I am losing my mind reading the original post.
>The gameplay isn’t abysmal
But the thing is, it is. The only people engaging with a game like this are completely vapid. Yet it's somehow the 37th highest grossing mobile game ever. But it's barely a game. You basically have to sellout and give up your passion for the industry to make "games" like this. Mobile gaming is just filled with them.
The gameplay is objectively bad. So what OP really doesn't understand is that gameplay apparently doesn't matter for games that only look to force people into mtx. So many brainless people who are somehow entertained by the most mundane games, like they're completely oblivious to better games.
You're absolutely right about this and that's why it bothered me. I don't understand it as it doesn't appeal to me, which is why I'm struggling to wrap my head around it. I mean, I understand slots are a thing and a huge number of people play them. But playing slots for fake money is tough for my logic minded brain to grock, and why this surprised me that the appeal is so large. This is why I don't make these types of games and would likely be unsuccessful even if I did, I don't appreciate the appeal.
It’s like a mediation….if you’ve had the opportunity to watch the slot-pullers in a live casino….its like they disappear into another dimension.
I’m pretty convinced it’s a lot like a meditative state. A whacky one, lol…but still…
IMO!
The ratio of people that love textured decisions to people that are fooled by random actions with bells and whistles is heavily in favor of the latter. Think about the average intelligence of a person, half the people in the world are dumber than that.
Even the dumbest people in the world know how to play tic-tac-toe, a much more fun game with undefined amounts more thought and strategy compared to "games" like Monopoly Go. You don't actually do anything in Monopoly Go. A basic slot machine is more enjoyable.
There's way too many free games that are better than Monopoly Go. I don't understand who would willingly choose to play Monopoly Go over something else.
Lol "pinnacle of mobile gaming" now this is the true example of a sentence that should be saved for the ages, first of all there is no mobile games, there is mobile apps disguised as games designed from bottom up to be the most aggressive, predatory, deceptive, addictive ways know to mankind of scamming people of their money.
The pinnacle then of those apps is the one that earns more money that's the ONLY metric people judge mobile "gaming" aps therefore for now Monopoly Go is it, don't worry someone will make one even more greedier and take its place.
Mobile gaming is the cancer that plagues the gaming industry that will eventually kill gaming as an art form down to a money squeeze machine.
Hyper casual games work bc people just want something to pass the time without putting their mind to it. There is no learning curve per se and that's why it appeals to the general mass you just click a button and the rest of the action is done by the game.
While the surface of it sounds simple the backend is probably more strategic with lots of api hooked up for telemetry. The strategic triggers for in-game pop ups to tempt the user to spent with limited time offer wall and pack recommendations etc. Game monetization strategy is an art of its own.
There is also an entire market of retired elders and house wives that has a dominant market presences see candy crush/ pogo games / gardenscape
But that's why we have player demographic. So its super important to understand who your audience is and how much market your audience capture.
The market wants what it wants. I think too often we (creatives, game devs, etc) forget that. If you’re going to spend time making games you need to understand why and pivot towards it. There’s a huge difference between a labour of love and chasing $$$. If you try and do both you will probably fail. So make games for fun and be happy with small audience and money or make games you probably wouldn’t play yourself to try and earn money.
Scopely are really good at this kind of game. Take a massive IP, wrap a game around it, market the absolute balls out of it and then keep it fresh with live operations. They are happy, the studio is happy, share holders are happy, IP owner is happy and millions of players are happy. It’s a completely different world to hand crafted Indy and small team projects.
>Monopoly
The owners don't care much about it other than milking it for cash. They stole the idea from a lady, her version was made to teach about Georgism, so they changed a few rules to make it pro-capitalism.
This is actually a fun design exercise. Given that there's [already a version](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marmalade.monopoly&hl=en_US) for the traditionalists, imagine that you're assigned the Monopoly brand name and told to design a mass market casual game. How would you do it?
A slot machine is the easy choice, but was there a better one?
You can make a ton of money making cheap fast food burgers or you can make a ton of money making gourmet steak. It's up to you which avenue you go down.
This has been analyzed in depth by DoF, which is a high quality blog in the game industry. As a fellow game designer I recommend the read!
https://www.deconstructoroffun.com/blog/2024/4/29/battle-royale-meets-casino-royale
Thanks for this one, that explains a lot. Yeah, I think what ticks me off then is that they are presenting/advertising Monopoly Go like it's based on monopoly. If they presented it as a slot machine, it would be less irksome. And I'm crazy jealous of how much they're killing it. Not that making money is ever the goal of a true artist of course.
Yeah the crossover area between traditional games and video games is ugly territory. A jaunty railroaded reverie of full screen animations and shameless money grabs. I don't understan dhow somepeople survive *not* being a hardcore gamer. Like, how did they learn math skills? ;)
I played this for a short time... What I learned was that the game basically revolves around the sticker albums and collection of stickers. If that part of the game was removed, people would get bored of it in a few hours. It's that hunt to complete your sticker album, opening up the sticker packs, etc, that keep people playing it forever.
There are discords/communities dedicated solely to trading stickers in Monopoly Go.
Also... the game is possible to cheat, and it has a competitive element, so it's really abysmal because the people winning the top prizes in contests (all of which are rare sticker packs) are obviously cheating the game to do it.
The game is also ridiculously expensive to play if you actually want to play the game longer than 5 minutes a day. You are limited on dice rolls, to the point where you'll run out really fast, and then have absolutely nothing else in the game to do. Your only option is to buy more dice rolls... and the prices are astronomical for the amount of game time you get from the dice purchased.
The cheat, at least from what I recall when it worked, was to basically roll dice, if you don't get the dice roll you want, there were methods of crashing/quitting the game and reloading it that would allow you to re-roll the dice without wasting your dice roll... effectively letting you get to a specific space that was of more value. By doing this tedious process, you could amass thousands of dice, to basically play the game for free. That's how cheating players manage super high scores in the PvP contests. I normally wouldn't reveal a cheat for a game like this, but this entire thing is hardly a game, and more of a money trap. There are people actually dropping hundreds of dollars a month on this game... for digital stickers.
I'm about to disagree with you in a brutal form, that doesn't align with the general gaming dev community, but it is a blunt truth.
If you can't see why Monopoly Go is top grossing, then you have a bias.
The game is extremely well polished. Kind of polish you don't find in some AAA. Each UI interaction, each animation is probably worked and reworked 2-3-10 times.
In a freemium mobile game is normal practice for the entire UI to be remade quite a few times from scratch (3+)
The economy is handcrafted (even if it's heavily based on coin master), and trust me when I tell you they probably have 10+ designers studying player behavior and tuning difficulty curves.
It is predatory, and relies on casino and addiction mechanics? Yes.
But it is an absolute masterpiece in doing so.
This is the mobile market. To have a top grossing / top 100 game, you need a level of polish that most can't even comprehend. These type of games have more designers staffed than any mmo on the market.
PC/indie gaming focuses on gameplay.
Mobile focuses on UI/UX and player progression (meta)
This has been the way for the past 15 years, it just evolved.
Honest opinion, if you dislike Monopoly GO, don't see it as a masterpiece, and you don't want to deconstruct it, and adapt it's mechanics, then stay away from mobile development, you will just be miserable otherwise.
Well said, they have obviously mastered it for the genre that it is, and as you mention the graphics and animations are cute and well done. I don't think I made it far enough into the game to see a difficulty curve, or what could be construed as difficult.
I saw the ads that is was the number one game so I played it for an hour or so. Absolute brain rot. No strategy, skill or anything other than going down a predetermined path.
Scrabble mobile used to be EA and purist. No pay to win. I forget what they monetized.
But it failed. Now Scopely has it, and it's monetized like Words with Friends and it's successful.
$10/month for no ads. But they still want you to pay for gems and watch more ads for more stuff and pay for more tiles etc.
Mobile is the wrong market for games with integrity unless you don't mind having a small market.
It honestly has nothing to do with the gameplay and literally everything to do with the Monopoly name. Monopoly is a household name and the most popular board game in North America, potentially the world? When the average person thinks about a board game, they think of Monopoly.
It'll change over time, but don't try to follow what looks like a trend. You'll only hurt your games more by dumbing down the mechanics. You'll then not only have a game no one knows about, but it'll be a bad game no one knows about.
> You'll only hurt your games more by dumbing down the mechanics.
It depends a lot on the game and what the game's trying to be: Buckshot Roulette, for instance, is designed around an extremely simple core mechanic: shoot the dealer or shoot yourself. It introduces a few more mechanics as the game goes on, but the mechanics themselves are very simple and pretty obvious. In some cases, they're even more simple than they appear: the Dealer's AI is borderline moronic, but the interactions of the systems and the way the human mind engages with them (boy are humans *really* bad at probability), combined with the atmosphere, make the game extremely engaging.
It's simple because it was *designed* from the ground up to be simple, not because things were dumbed down from a more ambitious and complex concept.
It's also, interestingly, an example of a game that uses a lot of the same "just one more pull/go" and other psychologically manipulative techniques we usually talk about in terms of gambling, gacha, and other predatory money-grubbing stuff ...while being a cheap one-time purchase game.
This is a useless video. There was nothing said beyond the blatantly obvious.
It’s literally packaged in the same way as the substance-less mobile games it’s covering.
It's just a different market. Removing the cringe elitism from the wording, gaming is like, 5 completely different hobbies/activities under one name. I consider mobile different in the way I consider MMOs different or even people who only play first party mega hits every few months vs people who play 4 hours a day (Once again not saying any of these are better or "true gamers", just different groups).
Mobile also now has such stigma around monetization and such deflated prices (even deep traditional games that port well usually can't go past $10.00) it becomes self fulfilling. If you make the world's deepest worker placement Eurostyle game, can you recoup costs with how that market functions as is?
>Is the simple idle game really the pinnacle of mobile board gaming?
It's probably the pinnacle of mobile period.
>This clearly shows that is not what the larger market wants.
Yes.
Why are you surprised by this? Genuinely? Never heard of casinos? Loot boxes?
I mean that is partially just F2P design but even the most popular premium digital board game series, Mario Party, is more or less gambling. The choices don’t really matter, which to me shows most players are uninterested in pursuing any kind of strategy beyond “roll dice and win” and they care far more about having dynamic matches with lots of big upsets.
I felt the same way but quantified that it just feels right in the hand. The addicting part is its simplicity. Anything beyond that, and its attempt to complicate it, I would just abandon it and not care for it.
I recently watched a YouTube video about this and they were describing how undercover it's essentially a slot machine game without you knowing when you start and you get sucked in.
In what world and alternate timeline did you get the impression that tedious strategy games are more popular then games you can actually finish in less then a hour
Mindless fun ain't bad. But the game isn't even fun. You don't actually do anything. I guess it's like a convoluted slot machine but even basic slot machines are more enjoyable.
Maybe this is something to do with the company we keep, but I spend a lot of time around ***super***-casual people. Folks who thought Wii Sports was a little confusing. For whom Uno is a game they just barely understand, and need to be reminded the rules literally every round.
These people are the majority of the population! So when you intentionally design a game where the level of electronic engagement is custom built for them, what on earth do you think is going to happen?
If you read the above few paragraphs and thought that the people surrounding me are not very intelligent, then you have some serious game design and usability issues to work through, and any success you may have gathered up until now has only been because you managed to dodge this issue.
We are technical people. Which means, we are the deviants of society that actually "enjoy" exerting our brains. We do it for entertainment, frequently. Each of us has our desired flavor, but that is the common denominator.
The vast majority of people are non-technical, and find literally 0 pleasure exerting their brain an inch further than is required to do what it is that they actually wanted to do.
The fact that a game so accurately captured this second group's interests is not a failure by the developers or designers. By all means, take issue with their predatory behaviour, but this is not lack of design, just a design that is not targeted to either you or me.
The key is not just lack of depth, it's marketing, a well established franchise and a simple game that anyone could enjoy. It's kind of like music, pop music isn't the deepest but it's easy to enjoy and remember, so the masses can enjoy it together.
So if I understand this correctly, you are complaining that Monopoly Go has a larger target audience than your game? This reminds me of the metalheads who complain endlessly about pop music.
Before Monopoly GO there was Pirate Kings, Coin Master, Board Kings, Dice Dreams, etc. Monopoly GO does absolutely nothing different, other than the IP visuals and name. That's the power of the brand for you.
Remember a few days ago how there was that super post on here how people in the community are coddled and their games are actually not well made and they complain because of X reason, that is this post and thread right here. People argued about "respecting the craft" in that other post. People argued about "but games are art".
This post right here is the type of people that the other post was referring to. People who have no clue how the industry works, no clue who their target audience is, no clue how to utilize the platform even, and come on here gatekeeping and complaining over stupid things.
You want to make money or you want to make "art/craftwork"?
"Oh why does my detailed and depth driven stuff not work while this simple game gets so popular". Because your stuff sucks. We're back at the other post again about coddling people. Game design isn't about just making ideas. Game design isn't about trying to make something "cool" in your own mind. Game design is knowing your target audience and compromising/changing the ideas and feature to fit with what players will actually want.
My argument isn't that the game isn't art. The art and animations are top notch in the game. My argument is more that they are showing that game design is irrelevant. To put it in extremist terms: A simple gambling/collecting mechanic is all people really want and therefore the only differentiator is the brand slapped on top of it and the amount of acquisition money a company can spend.
> My argument is more that they are showing that game design is irrelevant
Did you work for the company? Did you do the design for the game or work with the people designing the game? How many iterations did they do before landing on this design? How many protos did they do? How many attempts at a VS did they do?
Or are you projecting your gatekeeping attitude here because you're mad that a company was able to settle on a simple design that you wish you thought of. You don't know anything about the team that made this game or how much work or time the designers put into it.
This was exactly the point of my first comment. You have some high and might attitude on what you think design should be when you're games are probably bad. And their bad because you spend way too much time overly complicating things and going too much into details because it strokes your own ego that you're somehow better because you spend so much wasted time on this.
Sure, all of that, but obviously game design is not what is driving their user acquisition. Their user retention, yes, definitely. They present the game as somehow based on monopoly. if they presented it as a slot machine, I don't think i'd have issue with it, other than I'm surprised that the market is that big for fake money slot machines, but that is what it is.
Want to know the secret? It's a ding ding ding machine. People love that.
Yep. There will never be as many people playing AAA masterpieces as there will be playing slot machines.
In that case I gotta ask: is the indie game market drowning in slot machines and if not why not?
it is a barrier to entry / capital issue. "ding ding ding" games make massive amounts of money so you won't stay indie for long. BUT because they are such cash cows, there is a lot of competition there with very little differentiation. so you need to take the risk and spend massive amounts of money on ads to gain any traction. your competitors probably have deeper pockets so they can out-ad you. So you need to risk massive amounts of cash upfront, but if you succeed, you can make a lot of money. if you don't you lose it all. So the initial capital requirements are high, you need to risk a lot of money. Which disqualifies most "indies". The indie loophole is making up for the lack of money by creativity, targeting smaller niches and using your free labor as a substitute for money that you don't have. Once you gain traction with a "ding ding ding" game though, you will make a lot of money and will need to spend strategically to maintain any kind of lead you might have so you will quickly have a team to do the job, which will no longer make you an indie, but a larger company that makes addictive games.
So, making a ding ding ding machine is much like playing a high stakes ding ding ding machine, gotta love the recursion.
I feel like theres some kind of business idea here.
Slot Machine Game Dev Simulator 2024 on mobile?
Your character has to invest in NFTs and cryptocurrencies to make enough money so that they can buy enough ads for their Slot Machine Game Here's the ticker, Slot Machine Game Dev Simulator 2024 itself *is an NFT and a cryptocurrency* $$$$$$$$$$$$
its ding ding ding all the way down... lol
Your comment reminded me strongly of the [BCG Matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix). I feel like many indies ignore basic economic theory way too much. They kinda wanna do it as business and a hobby at the same time and don't decide for either one and fail at both. Treat it either as a hobyby, have fun and don't expect to make a living, or treat it as a business and also do the economic research on what you are doing.
They see examples of success stories where people hitting home runs with projects that look like hobby / passion projects. Disregarding the fact that most of them are actually very calculated endeavors and not "this is what I like" projects going big, it is hard to have visibility on how *rare* that success story is. Realistically it is not easier than becoming a top athlete. The odds are similar. Or becoming a musician that delivers a global hit. I'd argue creating a top hit song is easier, it certainly is orders of magnitude less labor intensive. You can create tens of songs and test them in the market in the time it takes to develop a comprehensive game.
Agreed with this, which I why I think this bothered me so much. I assumed/hoped that there is a large group of folks like myself looking for a more strategic/deep experience in mobile games. I think that group is out there, but I'll admit that it's shocking (and a bit depressing) to me that a game with such a simple game loop could have such high retention and monetization, it definitely reveals a fair bit about human nature.
It is depressing... but a *lot* of life is depressing if you really look around and think of it that way. Ultimately people work very hard at work and are tired, and feel justified letting their brain literally rot when they are not actively working. It's just... how it is, doesn't seem likely to change, if anything we are moving the other direction. You can either embrace it and try to use the opportunity (not necessarily to exploit, you could try to improve the genre, for example... good luck!), or be depressed. You can even simply think of it as "if these people had the gumption to think while they played, I would have a lot more competition as a gamedev!"). But yes, every true artistic endeavor in particular, is, at its peak potential, a stone skipping on the sea of mindless entertainment, and incredibly incredibly rarely do those two worlds converge, and something truly great get the reverence it deserves. It's a side effect of competition, and it is sad, but societally we are presented with two options: adapt or fail.
Those revelations have been known forever. Every major hit that is mobile is a mindless button smasher. People don't want immersive gameplay like BG3 on their phone ....no one has time to read the dialogs and complete quests in their bathroom break. You are judging a market you didn't understand before entering it. Mobile is mostly simple game loops because it's what hits the pleasure spot and also the time to complete Goldie locks range. I know for a fact the moment you make me do too many tasks in one day on a mobile game...it will never be played again. Meanwhile I will do endless amounts of pointless tasks in a console/PC game because I have the available time when I normally engage in those games. It sounds like you're making a console/PC style game for the mobile and there was no initial planning and research into that genre on a mobile device. Or even trying to find what mobile gamers exclusively are looking for in their medium.
> BUT because they are such cash cows, there is a lot of competition there with very little differentiation. Just to add to that, because a lot of those games can’t differentiate themselves (or at least don’t attract attention) through gameplay, they tend to establish a following by leveraging an established IP instead. That’s another way in which it’s not a great space for indies to compete in.
I think this is probably all sound and true to a big degree, but it downplays a bit how hard it is to make a high retention game. This usually requires tons of iteration and data collecting, it isn't something as trivial as "just employ these shadowy evil psychology tricks and bam". If you're at the point that you can make a game with very high retention (while also being able to monetize well) there is no out-ad-ing, I believe. You just make more money than you pay to acquire users. Tons of gatcha games by big companies close down all the time, regardless of money resources. Making a long term engaging addictive game is, thankfully, not easy
There is a poetic justice at work here
Monopoly Go spent an obscene amount of money on user acquisition. Because they're targeting an audience that can't tell the difference between products, they're competing on who can spend the most marketing money
I worked in a related space (not slot machine stuff, but similarly casual although lower traffic/profit) and the company spent millions of dollars to stay on top of the charts, and that was from a first mover in the market. You need a ton of money to be viable in that space.
On my first web game, we were spending about $16k a day on advertising. However, I was making about $300k a day in revenue.
Monopoly Go has a ROAS of 4. Now you can work back from their overall revenue to figure out how much they're spending.
Vampire Survivors was made by someone from the casino industry and has a lot of influence from slot machines.
Yeah, it is, there’s been a tsunami of indie studios making these types of games. Mostly badly. Almost always unsuccessfully.
It’s pricing. On the smartphone app market, “gaming”, in any traditional sense, is dead and replaced by ding ding machines (and maybe Minecraft or something). I’m 99% sure that’s because of Apple’s initially aggressive pricing strategy which got people hooked on mobile spending with $0,99 apps. That created a race to the bottom where the cheapest dev cost/mass appeal formula was summoned, resulting in F2P as we know it. The only reason we don’t have that elsewhere is that on dedicated gaming platforms on console and PC, there is still *minimal* curation going on to filter for higher quality games. But take one look at the “sales” page on the Switch game store or something and it becomes clear how that shit creeps into any market that allows it.
If you think about it, "cozy" games are really ding ding games with a diffferent aesthetic, most of them are rather railroady and the choices you make are entirely cosmetic.
It is. I know a few people who got their start in slot games or hypercasual before getting into a "real" game studio. When we think of Indie we tend to think of a tiny, well-curated corner of the market driven mostly by word of mouth, but for every indie darling there are a hundred low effort casual games.
You've reminded me that there's an excellent GDC talk about drowning the app store in cheap slot machine games, the talk is really really good https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk?si=3KPGYMBpe7SsDSPh
Search the net for that one video of the indie devs that created a couple of thousand slot machines by automated scripts, it's worth a watch
>In that case I gotta ask: is the indie game market drowning in slot machines and if not why not? Different markets.
I wouldn't say there's a lot out there, the problem is, what is out there is generally incompetently developed clones of slot machines. Not utilizing a social gaming approach to game loop and overall game purpose, they just cloned slot machines. Like the other person answering you said though, cost of entry is a barrier. Last I checked, which is about 2 weeks ago, CPI bids for rewarded video in that category are about $6.50. Now, can an indie do it? Yes, but they need to have a good network. At my studio, we have a network of people who will invest in our UA, but require a 15 to 20% return within a short period, like 3-6 months.
Check out Vampire Survivors. It's indie, ding ding and fairly addictive.
There will never be as many people playing AA masterpieces as there will be playing AAA graphics orgies.
Bingo. Before games, I used to be in casino operations. The power of the ding ding machine cannot be denied, it built Reno and Vegas. So competent addition of quality ding ding in the game loop will create a game that hits multiple audiences. Or at least has the potential to.
Yep. It really lights up the ol' medulla oblongata. Lizard brain like ding ding, like when ding ding make bright light!
It lacks kick ass fighting games with action missiles
[I’ve got action missiles](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1429350/MHZombie/) and nail rockets and multi-warhead heat-seeking mines, but if you don’t REALLY want to learn how to fly a helicopter we’re both SOL haha
[No, Colonel Sanders. You're wrong.](https://youtu.be/rOTd39Vruns?si=LkB-1dDg0eG0bHP9)
They have monopoly branded slot machines in Vegas. This is just an extension of that. (Fun fact, monopoly was designed as a cautionary tale about private land ownership and inequality by the Georgists. Somewhere along the line we lost the plot.)
> Somewhere along the line we lost the plot. [When the game was stolen from the woman who originally designed it.](https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/monopolys-lost-female-inventor)
> Fun fact, monopoly was designed as a cautionary tale about private land ownership and inequality by the Georgists. I tell people this whenever they ask me to play Monopoly. Nobody has ever asked me to play monopoly after that.
That's a win in my book.
The only winning move is not to play.
samesies.
> Somewhere along the line we lost the plot. People started making up stupid house rules to stretch out the game time.
And then Fortune Street came along and added stocks, promotions & dynamic board.
One should never underestimate the ding ding machine.
Made with 100% *real* fruit juice *flavor*
It has what plants crave.
People have argued with me about Balatro leaning heavily into these tricks
I mean, it's literally poker.
It’s not literally poker, there’s no gambling mechanics.
>there's no gambling mechanics Except every single decision you make. Buy a joker? Gamble. Don't buy a joker? Gamble. Focus too much on a powerful combination? Better hope the boss doesn't disable it! Gamble. Buy a pack? Gamble. Pulling cards? Gamble. Yeah, it doesn't involve real money, but the mechanics of risk and reward based on chance are definetly there and it is meant to be addictive. I love this game btw.
Ok, poker doesn’t use jokers. Poker uses a betting mechanic using chips, where balatro uses chips to score. Poker doesn’t have tarot cards. Balatro uses an 8 card hand by default, poker always uses 5. So on and so forth. It’s like saying Hearthstone is literally Magic because both use mana, minion/creatures, spells. Like yeah, they definitely share mechanics, but Hearthstone and Magic have vast differences and they’re at least in the same genre, where Balatro isn’t when compared to Poker. Where are pokers rogue-like mechanics? Frankly the only similarity is the usage of pair > royal flush, and that’s hardly exclusive to poker, which wasn’t even the first appearance of that scoring system. And we both know when I said gambling mechanics I was clearly using the first dictionary definition of gambling 1. “play games of chance for money”. You can’t bet chips in balatro. Chips = money by law.
Slay the Spire is also very successful though, so there is some hope for humanity.
Our brains were wired to love the ding ding.
True
Monopoly Go is not a board game and it's not trying to be. It's more of an idle game in the style of Pirate Kings or Coin Master as you say, and it's aimed at an entirely difference audience. It's hard to adopt a lot of board games into a F2P model, which is why they don't do as well on mobile, and tend to be more premium experiences along the lines of Uno or Ticket to Ride.
I remember when Words With Friends was a bona fide hit game. And it was just scrabble. Simpler times we had.
Describing it as an idle game actually makes it sound more interesting lol
it's not your audience. You and the indie market in general do not exist for them. Heck, these people don't play the AAA, either
The "Shut Up and Sit Down" crew touched on this in a review of Rummiukub. It's the distinction between a game and an activity. Monopoly Go is an activity that is intentionally simple. It's primary goal is to facilitate a group of people enjoying each others company, and it supersedes the goal of creating interesting systems to grapple with. I think it's a little arrogant to just assume that most people are stupid and so they like stupid games. Rather, I think it's likely that when groups of people get together many/most of them do it to enjoy their company, more so than solve a systems puzzle. And a game that requires too much attention won't give them what they want from the night.
I think this is probably a really good take
Exactly. People talk about the death of the third place. Bowling alleys. Pubs. Everywhere wants you to spend money and get on out for the next group. Free to play games are trying to create the space where you still hang out, some people are willing to spend money, but not everyone has to, and you never gotta leave. That's the way it's built, not as a subject of conversation but simply to be the place where conversation can take place. Before the awkward silences between topics of conversation were filled by cheers for strikes or whatever sports game was on the telly. Now it's idle chat about what happens in monopoly, but no one cares so much about the monopoly, as long as they have folks to share it with
What a haunting, soulless replacement. Rather have no 3rd space than it being this predatory bullshit masquerading as a game.
I mean, it's happened already. Club Penguin, Neopets, Habbo Hotel. It's all functionally the same concept - social engine with a "game" on top. For a while, everyone just wanted to talk about Farmville. [And there's entire articles about how that went.](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/technology/farmville-zynga-facebook.html) Then there are actual games with social concepts that bloomed into communities like Minecraft and WoW. I'm not hip with what's cool these days, I'm sure there are more modern examples.
My first thought on reading your comment was Bingo! There is little skill other than the ability to listen and mark numbers and yet it was a hugely successful social event for decades. As you say, it just filled a mental gap while doing something else and acted as an excuse to get together. Is socialising the ultimate F2P game, with some monetisation aspects tacked on by an increasingly greedy society? A night out has players, rules, objectives. People with money can pay for cosmetics, unique locations and even favourable rules.
I don't even think it's necessarily greedy. Facilitating social venues takes resources, you need to recoup those costs one way or another. Churches take tithes, parks and rec departments take taxes, bingo nights have some sort of admission fee.
>some people are willing to spend money, but not everyone has to, and you never gotta leave. Except when you run out of dice rolls and have no choice but to wait 5-6hrs for them to replenish or just spend money. I downloaded Monopoly Go a few weeks ago because I thought it would require strategy like the actual board game. After a short time, I realized all you do in the game is roll dice and promptly uninstalled it. There's basically no strategy required. All video games are a waste of time, but this just felt insulting to play. I don't understand how people find it fun compared to other free mobile games that are actually good.
This is a great explanation. I almost want to try out Monopoly Go.
But then how can I arrogantly feel like a glorious game designer who shits gold
>The "Shut Up and Sit Down" crew touched on this in a review of Rummiukub. Now I want to know what they thought of Rummikub. 🤔
TLDR: They make the distinction between "Game" and "Activity" and kinda place Rummikub in the latter category. It's something you do to spend time with your nan because you find it fun to/want to spend time with your nan, not something that's inherently fun in itself. It's not that it's unfun, it's just that it's barely fun enough to constitute something that you'd do instead of nothing.
Makes sense. Also a perfect description. We often play it when I visit my parents place, so it definitely fits that category perfectly.
I agree with your proposition here that facilitating social interaction is a primary motivator for play, absolutely. I'd argue that the social interaction one gets playing monopoly go is tacked on and marginal at best, primarily used as a way for them to get you to invite your friends to play.
^ yes! It fills a role like Mario Party
mario party contains real games you play
>I think it's a little arrogant to just assume that most people are stupid We don't need to assume, we have the data already. Good point otherwise
yeah. it's not a game; it's a toy.
You deal with it in many ways. Some of them from my experience are below. - Realize that not only do different people want different things, but they also want different things at different times. Someone who loves deep, complex strategy games may also enjoy some mindless shooter games, idle phone games, etc as well. - Genres like "digital board games" are super wide. The existence of more casual games does not automatically cannibalize the audience for deeper, more complex games. In many cases the opposite can be true, new players are drawn in through casual, easy games and then end up looking for more and growing the audiences of other games. - Realize that compared to "all games" or "everyone playing games on a phone" you are in a small niche. This is ok! finding your niche is the best way to be successful as a small developer when you can't complete with the money and reach of large ones. - Stop worrying about games you are not actually competing with. The indie game movement really started to come into its own when both players and developers stopped looking to it like AAA-lite, and started looking to it for the unique games, stories, and experiences they could provide. - Stop making blanket assumptions on why things were done. Things like "Even the dice are automated as rolling the dice is apparently too tedious" is jumping to a conclusion that almost certainly isn't true, and is designed to paint both the game \_AND\_ its players (**many of which likely overlap with your players**) negatively without any substance.
> Things like "Even the dice are automated as rolling the dice is apparently too tedious" is jumping to a conclusion that almost certainly isn't true I mostly agree with you and I think the reason Monopoly Go does it probably is different from most serious strategy games, but I would actually argue that rolling dice "by hand" in a video game is pretty tedious. If I'm playing your strategy game and I have to click a button (or worse, do a gesture or something) and then watch an animation of dice rolling to find out what my roll is, all you're doing is making me sit back and do nothing for a few seconds instead of actually engaging with the game and making the decisions that people play strategy games to make.
> If I'm playing your strategy game and I have to click a button (or worse, do a gesture or something) and then watch an animation of dice rolling to find out what my roll is, all you're doing is making me sit back and do nothing for a few seconds instead of actually engaging with the game and making the decisions that people play strategy games to make. I'm with you. This really irked me in BG3.
It works nicely in Disco Elysium. Has such a nice punch to it.
Keep in mind, the Monopoly license is also incredibly popular with slot machines. This an entirely different market segment. My grandma enjoys Monopoly licensed slot machines but would never play any kind of board game because she's not into any of those aspects of interesting decisions and strategic thinking. People are looking for different things from their games and you just have to be able to put yourself in their shoes somewhat. There's absolutely a market for digital board games. Monopoly Go doesn't really represent any of that, one way or another.
Years ago, before smart phones existed, a friend of mine who is no longer with us pitched his game idea to me. He called it Press A, Get Points and the concept was that as you press the A button, you get more points. We would laugh about it at the time but he was completely serious.
You are describing [Cow Clicker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker). The game was made as a joke by the developer and to his surprise/horror it became hugely popular.
its a skinner box
You might find this [GDC talk](https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk?si=dEO0KUUigRx4hVGV) cathartic. It’s two guys who released their respective dream games, and they flopped horribly. So, jaded as hell, they met each other and decided to release the most cookie cutter slot game that they could… and it was (moderately) successful. The story gets better from there.
This still feels a bit unethical to me, but it's insane and unbelievable that it's still much better than free mobile games nowadays. They didn't really do anything wrong. Weird and sad I guess.
It's literally an obfuscated slot machine. I'm not being facetious, that's actually how it was designed from the bottom up. It even has the big red button... Compare it to other digital slot machines, and the design direction becomes very obvious. Online gambling apps for mobile users, are not our competition. They have muscled their way onto our platforms, but they don't target the same markets. Think of it like a weed that invades a garden; nobody wants it there, but it's going to be sucking up all the water and nutrients it can before the gardener finds the right herbicide
Slots are the ultimate in human expression
Farmville, Flappy bird, Clash of Clans, Candy Crush, Pokemon Go!, Monopoly Go, [You are here].
its a slot machine
It preys on addictional. Daily quest, pop up deal, leaderboard, you name it. Once it fades, you will never hear about it again. Highest grossing cause it's a whale game, doesn't mean it's good or has and valuable qualities like classic board game.
Yea... that garbage game hooked me. I played for maybe two months and gave them entirely too much money.
One of the lessons I've learned growing up is that the world is absolutely filled with simple people & stupid people. That you might constantly grow, learn and mature as you age, and need to absorb media/experiences that have a lot of meat to them. But a huge chunk of the population is dull as a butter knife and will never mature beyond teenage years, and forever be easily satisfied with pretty blinking lights. Why do you think most casinos are just flashy slot machines? Why do you think all of the money in gaming is going into predatory design patterns? Way more people than you might be comfortable with are completely weak to this sort of thing. Some because they're dumb as bricks and some because they just have very simple tastes and not a lot of psychological defense against addictive patterns. I'm just starting to get to the point where I'm feeling OK about not associating with that demographic and that I don't need to consume media/habits/ideas from them. I have my own tastes that get served by people like you and stuff that has a bit more meat. There's room for everyone, and hopefully in an ideal economy a healthy industry serves everyone (in hopefully not predatory ways) instead of only focusing on the demographic that is the easiest to manipulate. All of the above said, it's all a spectrum. I've got friends who I'm reasonably close with, who are smart and intelligent and yet "OOO PRETTY LIGHTS!!" totally works on them. But in this context it's not really played as anything more than a distraction, like a fidget toy would be. Their minds are just optimized for a different kind of smart, with simple tastes and can be easily amused. Now none of them play anything truly predatory and none are whales but the power of a simple time killing dopamine button is real. That's basically what tiktok has achieved for everyone. Edit: I think a good lesson here is take inspiration from vampire survivors. That game perfected the dopamine blinky lights feeling but attached it to a genuinely fun game. As if it's exploring what it could be like to have that slot machine feeling attached to something that's explicitly not being predatory.
The gameplay isn’t abysmal, it’s brilliant. Which means you’ve identified your first problem - you don’t understand the single largest and BY FAR most lucrative segment of the game player market. So either don’t try to sell it, or find a niche that thinks like you do. And viewing this massive market disparagingly…honestly…dude, if you want to sell anything to anybody, you need to learn how to read people better. Or partner with someone who can, before you start building.
> The gameplay isn’t abysmal, it’s brilliant. > > > > Which means you’ve identified your first problem - you don’t understand the single largest and BY FAR most lucrative segment of the game player market. Seriously. I feel like I am losing my mind reading the original post.
>The gameplay isn’t abysmal But the thing is, it is. The only people engaging with a game like this are completely vapid. Yet it's somehow the 37th highest grossing mobile game ever. But it's barely a game. You basically have to sellout and give up your passion for the industry to make "games" like this. Mobile gaming is just filled with them. The gameplay is objectively bad. So what OP really doesn't understand is that gameplay apparently doesn't matter for games that only look to force people into mtx. So many brainless people who are somehow entertained by the most mundane games, like they're completely oblivious to better games.
You don’t get to decide what is “vapid” or “objectively bad”. > so many brainless people Only brainless people view other people like that.
> Only brainless people view other people like that. so like you?
Monopoly go is the mcdonalds of gaming: low quality slop designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Lets not pretend that it isn’t
Do you want to feel self righteous, or do you want to ship successful games?
You're absolutely right about this and that's why it bothered me. I don't understand it as it doesn't appeal to me, which is why I'm struggling to wrap my head around it. I mean, I understand slots are a thing and a huge number of people play them. But playing slots for fake money is tough for my logic minded brain to grock, and why this surprised me that the appeal is so large. This is why I don't make these types of games and would likely be unsuccessful even if I did, I don't appreciate the appeal.
It’s like a mediation….if you’ve had the opportunity to watch the slot-pullers in a live casino….its like they disappear into another dimension. I’m pretty convinced it’s a lot like a meditative state. A whacky one, lol…but still… IMO!
The ratio of people that love textured decisions to people that are fooled by random actions with bells and whistles is heavily in favor of the latter. Think about the average intelligence of a person, half the people in the world are dumber than that.
Even the dumbest people in the world know how to play tic-tac-toe, a much more fun game with undefined amounts more thought and strategy compared to "games" like Monopoly Go. You don't actually do anything in Monopoly Go. A basic slot machine is more enjoyable. There's way too many free games that are better than Monopoly Go. I don't understand who would willingly choose to play Monopoly Go over something else.
Lol "pinnacle of mobile gaming" now this is the true example of a sentence that should be saved for the ages, first of all there is no mobile games, there is mobile apps disguised as games designed from bottom up to be the most aggressive, predatory, deceptive, addictive ways know to mankind of scamming people of their money. The pinnacle then of those apps is the one that earns more money that's the ONLY metric people judge mobile "gaming" aps therefore for now Monopoly Go is it, don't worry someone will make one even more greedier and take its place. Mobile gaming is the cancer that plagues the gaming industry that will eventually kill gaming as an art form down to a money squeeze machine.
They harnessed the idea and image of Monopoly and made a **medium** for enjoyment. That's all it is, don't worry about it too much.
Hyper casual games work bc people just want something to pass the time without putting their mind to it. There is no learning curve per se and that's why it appeals to the general mass you just click a button and the rest of the action is done by the game. While the surface of it sounds simple the backend is probably more strategic with lots of api hooked up for telemetry. The strategic triggers for in-game pop ups to tempt the user to spent with limited time offer wall and pack recommendations etc. Game monetization strategy is an art of its own. There is also an entire market of retired elders and house wives that has a dominant market presences see candy crush/ pogo games / gardenscape But that's why we have player demographic. So its super important to understand who your audience is and how much market your audience capture.
The market wants what it wants. I think too often we (creatives, game devs, etc) forget that. If you’re going to spend time making games you need to understand why and pivot towards it. There’s a huge difference between a labour of love and chasing $$$. If you try and do both you will probably fail. So make games for fun and be happy with small audience and money or make games you probably wouldn’t play yourself to try and earn money.
Scopely are really good at this kind of game. Take a massive IP, wrap a game around it, market the absolute balls out of it and then keep it fresh with live operations. They are happy, the studio is happy, share holders are happy, IP owner is happy and millions of players are happy. It’s a completely different world to hand crafted Indy and small team projects.
Wait until you hear this... More people shop from temu, shein and Ali express compared to skilled local tailors
>Monopoly The owners don't care much about it other than milking it for cash. They stole the idea from a lady, her version was made to teach about Georgism, so they changed a few rules to make it pro-capitalism.
This is actually a fun design exercise. Given that there's [already a version](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marmalade.monopoly&hl=en_US) for the traditionalists, imagine that you're assigned the Monopoly brand name and told to design a mass market casual game. How would you do it? A slot machine is the easy choice, but was there a better one?
You can make a ton of money making cheap fast food burgers or you can make a ton of money making gourmet steak. It's up to you which avenue you go down.
This has been analyzed in depth by DoF, which is a high quality blog in the game industry. As a fellow game designer I recommend the read! https://www.deconstructoroffun.com/blog/2024/4/29/battle-royale-meets-casino-royale
Thanks for this one, that explains a lot. Yeah, I think what ticks me off then is that they are presenting/advertising Monopoly Go like it's based on monopoly. If they presented it as a slot machine, it would be less irksome. And I'm crazy jealous of how much they're killing it. Not that making money is ever the goal of a true artist of course.
Yeah the crossover area between traditional games and video games is ugly territory. A jaunty railroaded reverie of full screen animations and shameless money grabs. I don't understan dhow somepeople survive *not* being a hardcore gamer. Like, how did they learn math skills? ;)
I played this for a short time... What I learned was that the game basically revolves around the sticker albums and collection of stickers. If that part of the game was removed, people would get bored of it in a few hours. It's that hunt to complete your sticker album, opening up the sticker packs, etc, that keep people playing it forever. There are discords/communities dedicated solely to trading stickers in Monopoly Go. Also... the game is possible to cheat, and it has a competitive element, so it's really abysmal because the people winning the top prizes in contests (all of which are rare sticker packs) are obviously cheating the game to do it. The game is also ridiculously expensive to play if you actually want to play the game longer than 5 minutes a day. You are limited on dice rolls, to the point where you'll run out really fast, and then have absolutely nothing else in the game to do. Your only option is to buy more dice rolls... and the prices are astronomical for the amount of game time you get from the dice purchased. The cheat, at least from what I recall when it worked, was to basically roll dice, if you don't get the dice roll you want, there were methods of crashing/quitting the game and reloading it that would allow you to re-roll the dice without wasting your dice roll... effectively letting you get to a specific space that was of more value. By doing this tedious process, you could amass thousands of dice, to basically play the game for free. That's how cheating players manage super high scores in the PvP contests. I normally wouldn't reveal a cheat for a game like this, but this entire thing is hardly a game, and more of a money trap. There are people actually dropping hundreds of dollars a month on this game... for digital stickers.
I'm about to disagree with you in a brutal form, that doesn't align with the general gaming dev community, but it is a blunt truth. If you can't see why Monopoly Go is top grossing, then you have a bias. The game is extremely well polished. Kind of polish you don't find in some AAA. Each UI interaction, each animation is probably worked and reworked 2-3-10 times. In a freemium mobile game is normal practice for the entire UI to be remade quite a few times from scratch (3+) The economy is handcrafted (even if it's heavily based on coin master), and trust me when I tell you they probably have 10+ designers studying player behavior and tuning difficulty curves. It is predatory, and relies on casino and addiction mechanics? Yes. But it is an absolute masterpiece in doing so. This is the mobile market. To have a top grossing / top 100 game, you need a level of polish that most can't even comprehend. These type of games have more designers staffed than any mmo on the market. PC/indie gaming focuses on gameplay. Mobile focuses on UI/UX and player progression (meta) This has been the way for the past 15 years, it just evolved. Honest opinion, if you dislike Monopoly GO, don't see it as a masterpiece, and you don't want to deconstruct it, and adapt it's mechanics, then stay away from mobile development, you will just be miserable otherwise.
Well said, they have obviously mastered it for the genre that it is, and as you mention the graphics and animations are cute and well done. I don't think I made it far enough into the game to see a difficulty curve, or what could be construed as difficult.
I saw the ads that is was the number one game so I played it for an hour or so. Absolute brain rot. No strategy, skill or anything other than going down a predetermined path.
Scrabble mobile used to be EA and purist. No pay to win. I forget what they monetized. But it failed. Now Scopely has it, and it's monetized like Words with Friends and it's successful. $10/month for no ads. But they still want you to pay for gems and watch more ads for more stuff and pay for more tiles etc. Mobile is the wrong market for games with integrity unless you don't mind having a small market.
It honestly has nothing to do with the gameplay and literally everything to do with the Monopoly name. Monopoly is a household name and the most popular board game in North America, potentially the world? When the average person thinks about a board game, they think of Monopoly. It'll change over time, but don't try to follow what looks like a trend. You'll only hurt your games more by dumbing down the mechanics. You'll then not only have a game no one knows about, but it'll be a bad game no one knows about.
> You'll only hurt your games more by dumbing down the mechanics. It depends a lot on the game and what the game's trying to be: Buckshot Roulette, for instance, is designed around an extremely simple core mechanic: shoot the dealer or shoot yourself. It introduces a few more mechanics as the game goes on, but the mechanics themselves are very simple and pretty obvious. In some cases, they're even more simple than they appear: the Dealer's AI is borderline moronic, but the interactions of the systems and the way the human mind engages with them (boy are humans *really* bad at probability), combined with the atmosphere, make the game extremely engaging. It's simple because it was *designed* from the ground up to be simple, not because things were dumbed down from a more ambitious and complex concept. It's also, interestingly, an example of a game that uses a lot of the same "just one more pull/go" and other psychologically manipulative techniques we usually talk about in terms of gambling, gacha, and other predatory money-grubbing stuff ...while being a cheap one-time purchase game.
here's an in depth video about it: [Monopoly GO's EVIL Strategy to Make You Poor (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1CfKgYuMjc)
This is a useless video. There was nothing said beyond the blatantly obvious. It’s literally packaged in the same way as the substance-less mobile games it’s covering.
she's just spewing buzzwords with dramatic music for 15 minutes. and people watching this pretend to be smarter than monopoly go players lol.
feeling bad about money you spent on a mobile game or something?
Yea a good and important watch.
Interesting. But why is she wearing headphones?
all gamers wear headphones constantly
It's just a different market. Removing the cringe elitism from the wording, gaming is like, 5 completely different hobbies/activities under one name. I consider mobile different in the way I consider MMOs different or even people who only play first party mega hits every few months vs people who play 4 hours a day (Once again not saying any of these are better or "true gamers", just different groups). Mobile also now has such stigma around monetization and such deflated prices (even deep traditional games that port well usually can't go past $10.00) it becomes self fulfilling. If you make the world's deepest worker placement Eurostyle game, can you recoup costs with how that market functions as is?
its basically an idler? heh. perfect game design
>Is the simple idle game really the pinnacle of mobile board gaming? It's probably the pinnacle of mobile period. >This clearly shows that is not what the larger market wants. Yes. Why are you surprised by this? Genuinely? Never heard of casinos? Loot boxes?
This thread made me download Monopoly Go lol it’s quite fun
Give yourself 30 minutes and review that thought
Welcome to 21st century
I mean that is partially just F2P design but even the most popular premium digital board game series, Mario Party, is more or less gambling. The choices don’t really matter, which to me shows most players are uninterested in pursuing any kind of strategy beyond “roll dice and win” and they care far more about having dynamic matches with lots of big upsets.
I think you know that hard-core games are for a limited market. Most of the 8 billion people just want diversionary fun.
I felt the same way but quantified that it just feels right in the hand. The addicting part is its simplicity. Anything beyond that, and its attempt to complicate it, I would just abandon it and not care for it.
Ever been to a casino?
I recently watched a YouTube video about this and they were describing how undercover it's essentially a slot machine game without you knowing when you start and you get sucked in.
ppl like blinking lights and not having to think. I played it for like a month before it became too repetitive and pointless
In what world and alternate timeline did you get the impression that tedious strategy games are more popular then games you can actually finish in less then a hour
Guess people want mindless fun, not strategic depth.
Mindless fun ain't bad. But the game isn't even fun. You don't actually do anything. I guess it's like a convoluted slot machine but even basic slot machines are more enjoyable.
Maybe this is something to do with the company we keep, but I spend a lot of time around ***super***-casual people. Folks who thought Wii Sports was a little confusing. For whom Uno is a game they just barely understand, and need to be reminded the rules literally every round. These people are the majority of the population! So when you intentionally design a game where the level of electronic engagement is custom built for them, what on earth do you think is going to happen? If you read the above few paragraphs and thought that the people surrounding me are not very intelligent, then you have some serious game design and usability issues to work through, and any success you may have gathered up until now has only been because you managed to dodge this issue. We are technical people. Which means, we are the deviants of society that actually "enjoy" exerting our brains. We do it for entertainment, frequently. Each of us has our desired flavor, but that is the common denominator. The vast majority of people are non-technical, and find literally 0 pleasure exerting their brain an inch further than is required to do what it is that they actually wanted to do. The fact that a game so accurately captured this second group's interests is not a failure by the developers or designers. By all means, take issue with their predatory behaviour, but this is not lack of design, just a design that is not targeted to either you or me.
Yeah. As simple as possible while still being enjoyable. If you can do it with 1 button don't think twice.
It makes me think of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
The key is not just lack of depth, it's marketing, a well established franchise and a simple game that anyone could enjoy. It's kind of like music, pop music isn't the deepest but it's easy to enjoy and remember, so the masses can enjoy it together.
And also it doesn't mean that crafting casual, simple games or pop music is easy.
A game doesn't need to be good, it just needs to be fun.
So if I understand this correctly, you are complaining that Monopoly Go has a larger target audience than your game? This reminds me of the metalheads who complain endlessly about pop music.
Before Monopoly GO there was Pirate Kings, Coin Master, Board Kings, Dice Dreams, etc. Monopoly GO does absolutely nothing different, other than the IP visuals and name. That's the power of the brand for you.
Remember a few days ago how there was that super post on here how people in the community are coddled and their games are actually not well made and they complain because of X reason, that is this post and thread right here. People argued about "respecting the craft" in that other post. People argued about "but games are art". This post right here is the type of people that the other post was referring to. People who have no clue how the industry works, no clue who their target audience is, no clue how to utilize the platform even, and come on here gatekeeping and complaining over stupid things. You want to make money or you want to make "art/craftwork"? "Oh why does my detailed and depth driven stuff not work while this simple game gets so popular". Because your stuff sucks. We're back at the other post again about coddling people. Game design isn't about just making ideas. Game design isn't about trying to make something "cool" in your own mind. Game design is knowing your target audience and compromising/changing the ideas and feature to fit with what players will actually want.
My argument isn't that the game isn't art. The art and animations are top notch in the game. My argument is more that they are showing that game design is irrelevant. To put it in extremist terms: A simple gambling/collecting mechanic is all people really want and therefore the only differentiator is the brand slapped on top of it and the amount of acquisition money a company can spend.
> My argument is more that they are showing that game design is irrelevant Did you work for the company? Did you do the design for the game or work with the people designing the game? How many iterations did they do before landing on this design? How many protos did they do? How many attempts at a VS did they do? Or are you projecting your gatekeeping attitude here because you're mad that a company was able to settle on a simple design that you wish you thought of. You don't know anything about the team that made this game or how much work or time the designers put into it. This was exactly the point of my first comment. You have some high and might attitude on what you think design should be when you're games are probably bad. And their bad because you spend way too much time overly complicating things and going too much into details because it strokes your own ego that you're somehow better because you spend so much wasted time on this.
Sure, all of that, but obviously game design is not what is driving their user acquisition. Their user retention, yes, definitely. They present the game as somehow based on monopoly. if they presented it as a slot machine, I don't think i'd have issue with it, other than I'm surprised that the market is that big for fake money slot machines, but that is what it is.