If the player didn’t come back before this time, the plant was withered. Each time a player would plant a crop, the crop would have a limit of how long it was harvestable. This system is a version of FarmVille’s “ plant and wither” mechanic which drove very strong commitment for players to return.
So how do we effectively pace traditional gamers?ĭisguise the pacing systems to feel different from traditional free to play systems.īest example of a disguised free to play mechanic is the wasteland mission system. Without long term retention, a free to play game can’t succeed ( more on this here). But pacing is the key to long term retention. We can all read from the reviews, forums, and rants that gamers hate timers, pay-to-skip and energy systems. So for core gamers, they never feel like they are being pushed out of the game for no apparent reason, rather they are making strategic choices about when to stay and when to leave. Just tries to slowly decrease the value of sticking around. Overall the game never really forces the player to leave. It is strategic to leave and come back later. The longer you are in the session, the more rooms you rush, the higher risk you have of bad effects. So the more you rush rooms, the more likely a fire or radroach attack happens. However, the more you rush a single room, the higher the incident chance will go up. This rewards with faster resource production and bottle caps (a key currency for progression). In the beginning, the player is trained to continually rush production of rooms. For fallout, the rush feature is no longer a monetization feature, it is a session design feature. Rushing takes the place of a “ skip for premium currency” button which free to play games have. Not told to leave.Ī good example of the game increasing pressure over a session is the “rush” feature. You want to build session design so that the player feels smart about leaving. This is built intentionally so that players eventually opt-in to leaving the game. However, the longer the player remains in the session, the less rewarding the game is. Production timers are short, so coming back every 5-10 minutes rewards the player with lots of resources and some occasional level ups of their dwellers. It feels very rewarding to return to the game every time.Įach time the player enters the game there are a ton of things to reward them. Lots of rooms with lots of resources to collect. This is the typical screen the player returns to each time they come back to the game. Instead of having an abrupt end to the session with energy, Fallout Shelter slowly tweaks the gameplay so you as a player feel smart for leaving. The player enters the game, feels rewarded, but the game slowly increases the pressure to leave. But as we’ve seen in previous posts ( here and here), having a limit on sessions and progression is absolutely necessary to drive long term retention.įallout Shelter employs what I like to call “Flexible Sessions”.
There’s no blocker such as energy which says “you must leave now”. There’s always something positive to do with your vault. How did Fallout Shelter become a beacon of acceptable free-to-play design for core gamers? #1 No Arbitrary Session Capsįallout Shelter never forces its players to leave. So what was so different about this launch? We have seen this many times before ending poorly (see Dungeon Keeper, Sonic the Hedgehog).
Here is a game that was developed by a traditional developer, taken a brand many gamers love (as a premium title), and then changed it completely to be free to play. To make marketing on the AppStore affordable, brand recognition is becoming more and more important.īut the marketing aside, what shocked me was the response from players to this game. Every game studio since the launch of Kim Kardashian by Glu has known this. It attracted loyal gamers and drove massive organic growth on the AppStore. I don’t think anyone can doubt that the brand of Fallout was huge for this launch. Many (including myself) have been preaching about the unchanging stasis that exists at the top of the AppStore, and Bethesda came in and changed that completely.Īs the smoke cleared, and I watch Fallout Shelter slowly fade from the top charts, I’m left with: “so what did we learn?” Fallout Shelter shocked many people when it reached the top grossing charts.