Bear with me I'm going to travel back in time here for an example from 1999 and then tie it to mobile practices in 2014 ..
Punishment Gaming is something I first became aware of in 1999 playing the MMO EverQuest.
I certainly lay no claim to have coined the term "Punishment Gaming" myself but certainly it was a unique thought to me at that time; after playing through certain scenarios in EverQuest over a year it occurred to me I was being punished as part of playing the game.
There were two categories of punishments that EverQuest utilized (which admittedly have some overlap but feel different to the player):
- Time Sinks
- Death Penalties
The simplest example of time sinks were travel related.. you want to go from game content A to game continent B? Be prepared to wait at the docks for 10 minutes for a boat to show up.
But if you paid a Wizard or a Druid for a teleport you could travel instantly to another continent!
Unfortunately Druid's and Wizards usually had their own things they wanted to do and often either hid from other players or charged exhorbitant rates to keep hundreds of people constantly asking them for teleports.
Does this sound familiar at all to anyone who's played Candy Crush Saga or the new Dungeon Keeper for mobile (article here, another article here) or even many other modern mobile applications? You can wait a certain amount of time; or pay in-game currency to progress now ...
However time sinks were deeply ingrained in to every aspect of the game often in a exponential way.
The most egregious time sinks were associated with the death penalty in the game which caused me to come up with the term Punishment Gaming so let me explain what it entailed. Please realize this is from memory over 10 years ago so some numbers are estimates based on what I can remember but the overall idea is reasonably accurate:
- Level your character from 49 to 50 took approximately 40+ hours of game play
- Upon reaching level 50 play for 4 weeks to get appropriate 'end game gear'
- Go with your group of 30 players to the Plane of Hate (an end-game instance which requires you to be level 50 to enter it)
- Die in a massive raid wipe ( punishment 1 you died)
- After dying you spawned without your end-game gear at your 'bind' point which was usually in a capital city (punishment 2 you just lost your gear) (punishment 3 you now have to travel back to the dungeon which involves travel time cost)
- As part of dying you lose experience towards your level 50. This could include de-leveling your character. (punishment 4 de-leveling / experience loss)
- Assuming you de-leveled you now had to go and regain level 50 to be allowed to go back to the dungeon and pick up your end game gear. (punishment 5 spend time gaining experience back)
- If you could not get your level back quick enough; or perhaps due to the loss of your end-game gear and your now weakened backup-gear set you ran the risk of permanently losing your primary gear if you did not pick it up within a certain amount of time or before a server reset whichever came first. (punishment 6 permanent gear loss)
The developers of EverQuest were reasonably open and shared their thoughts with their audience in community forums frequently and when players complained about problems stemming from the aforementioned areas the designers would quote their philosophy of "risk vs reward" and that the game wouldn't be as fun without a significant risk or time commitment for the reward you were seeking.
If you had any argument that actually made sense (as people often did) they resorted to the mystical quote of "that doesn't fit the vision".
The vision was this magical product design vision that we (the customers)were never fully allowed to understand. But over time it developed a pattern that I developed some conclusions about. I sincerely believe "the vision" (or lets go ahead and call it design, monetezation and retention philosophy rooted in making tasks take an extremely long time) was deeply rooted in the fact that they wanted you to subscribe to generate recurring revenue for their company as long as possible.
Recurring revenue of course is the golden goose for any developer. Pay me one time - I'll take it. But pay me the same amount every month for years? Eureka! We're rich!!
To be fair many other games have implemented similar time sinks such as World of Warcraft. Any serious end-game raider in World of Warcraft knows you often have to work at farming gear, money, and consumables during the week just to finance your weekend raid. This is another use of the time sink.
And so now finally were back to the state of punishment gaming in 2014 and what we see in the mobile arena.
It seems the biggest challenge faced by most companies is how to make a game that people will pay for that is fun rather than punishing.
I've been speaking about punishment gaming in terms of examples up to now; so finally that we have some solid examples I'm going to define what I mean by punishment gaming more solidly:
Punishment Gaming is where the player is penalized with any regularity as part of or specifically for playing the game.
Example: You've been playing the game for 5 minutes and a pay-wall / time-wall appears.
You have just been punished because you played the game for 5 minutes.
95+ % of your customers will stop playing at this time. That is crazy! You just lost 95% of your customers? Are you insane? That's the best you can do?
To be clear : I'm not saying that having a character die in a RPG is punishment gaming. Part of the thrill of combat is that you might die. But the EverQuest example quoted above shows what punishment really is. When your character dies you feel a sense of disappointment and loss and some people even get literally upset or angry.
Dying is the first penalty for failing an encounter in that scenario; and often its really the only needed one.
But very few people play games with the hope that their character is going to die. That's not the fun part.
People play games for fun and challenging experiences. People play games for sense of wonder and exploration. People play games because they are stuck at the dentist, airport, or in line and want to spend 5 minutes in pleasure instead of staring at the wall.
Also people do not play games hoping to see a pay wall, or a "please wait 2 minutes for this task to complete or pay us 99 cents to continue now"
There are a lot of challenges developers in the mobile arena have to face such as the cost to acquire users, ARPU's and more; but this is specifically about punishment gaming today so I'm not going to get in to that, but they are still relevant to a larger discussion so I bring them up briefly to not be dismissive.
And in fact it appears that the companies making the most revenue put "fun" last in line when it comes to designing their products core cycle.
Time sinks, pay walls, pay-to-win, and other terms are what games are all about these days and that is a problem for the long term health of both those companies and gaming in general for the mid term.
There will come a day when people wise-up and notice their cell phone bills and stop participating in this kind of predatory game design and monetezation techniques.
They will wake up and say "This game is like a job, but even worse, it is like a job that I have to continually pay for to continue going to ... why would any sane person do that?" and that is the day you lose that customer.
But not only that as the mass of people have an opportunity to come to that realization over time and become aware and jaded of these techniques the companies that rely upon them will suddenly find themselves scrambling to survive.
Oh wait; it is already starting -- look at Zynga.
People are already getting wise, and tired. But the companies that rely on these techniques are trying to suck every last drop of blood ... I mean money ... out of their customers.
But what they should really be doing is trying to spend some of that money and R&D time to develop a new game model that is fun to play; that makes you want to come back and spend 5 minutes whenever you can because you genuinely have fun when you play it.
Even the truly big monetezation/punishment giants have extremely low number of users who actually ever make a payment. Many statistics point to 5% being a 'good' amount of paying customers.
And here is where the conclusion starts tying in , aka the State of Punishment Gaming.
If your best effort is only getting 5% of your customers to pay.. (and I don't care if you are making thousands or millions when I say this) then your technique is ultimately a failure and you should be trying to find better ways to get more customers to buy in to your products.
It is extremely telling that punishment gaming as a business model typically nets in a 5% or less conversion rate of free customers becoming paid customers!
- The State of Punishment Gaming is that is a failure.
- Punishment Gaming makes for shitty game play.
- 95% of customers don't like it because they stop playing your game when you do it.
- Even those who do buy in will eventually quit because many will eventually see the treadmill and get off.
And its funny to read it like that isn't it? Because when you read articles about how to properly monetize your mobile game and core game loops it never mentions those bullet points does it?
But if 95-98% of customers don't like it (notice stats here from 2012 , here from 2011, some 2013 numbers here about halfway down, averaging about 3% of free to play users become paying users) because they stop playing your game when you do it why are other developers trying to mimic this behavior? Because Candy Crush Saga is doing well right now?
That feels short sighted to me.
Just because EverQuest was good at Punishment Gaming doesn't mean World of Warcraft had to do everything the same.
And in fact they did not.
Something I did not mention above was that the peak of EverQuest subscriptions was about 550,000 users , whereas the peak of World of Warcraft subscribers was about 12,000,000 (12 million).
Assuredly one of the reasons for this titanic subscription difference was that World of Warcraft reduced and eliminated 90% or more of the time sinks and death penalties for users below the level cap. At the level cap World of Warcraft admittedly does continue some punishing techniques - that I sincerely believe could be further reduced or eliminated. But for the purpose of comparison as of the date that I last played these two MMO's World of Warcraft had the gentler treatment for its end game customers over EverQuest by several factors of scale.
In other words ; by punishing their customers less they both obtained and retained more customers.
Obviously these companies and products have many other differences but in the area where we are discussing today the differences are very significant.
So I believe that some day a "World of Warcraft" of monetezation is going to arise in the mobile ( &/or social) market who will destroy all previous revenue expectations as well as conversion rates ; and additionally I'm going to predict that the product that does it will utilize considerably less punishing game mechanics and pay-walls than the current crop of games.
That moment will be a pivotal moment (for the better of gamers, customers, and our industry) and will spawn a rush of 'me too' players in to the patterns that derive the success.
The real questions are:
Who is who is it going to be? What will it look like? How much money will they make?
And most importantly ; how fun will the game be?
Punishment Gaming will live for many years to come; but one day we'll have a brighter formula that is is more engaging and honest with our customers trading value (read: fun) for their money and I can't wait for it.
- punchy out
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