Adam Clare

For many free to play (freemium) games their revenue relies on whales. Whales are players that spend a disproportionate amount of money on a game relative to other players, and they make up a very small percentage of players.

Wero Creative’s freemium game AstroDoge

This approach to game revenue can be rather problematic if you’re game doesn’t get thousands or millions of players. And as the mobile app stores get more and more saturated reaching that critical number of players becomes a bigger and bigger challenge.

Encouraging these players to play for freemium upgrades can be a challenge and game designers need to design for free to play from the start of the design process. Still, what can game companies do to attract these whale players and is it a good idea?

Michael Lewis at the Toronto Star takes a look into how game companies hunt elusive whales to stay afloat. He even interviewed me about whales and how game companies make their business plans.

Whales, moreover, are not likely to admit they are such, according to Adam Clare, who teaches games design at George Brown College and develops games at Wero Creative.
The vast majority of gamers who play free games never spend on them regardless of how many in-app purchases they offer, he said.
“So the business model has boiled down to getting as many players as possible, then hoping that someone out there will love the game so much they spend a tonne of money on it.”
Game developers have always assumed that this random approach is logical, he said, even though developers also assumed that the people spending $50 or more a month on a game for extra time or virtual prizes must be misguided.
Some research on whales suggests in fact that they are not impulsive but more rational in a kind of hedonistic way — long-term thinkers, cool-headed and methodical who see expenditure on gaming as part of their entertainment budget.

Now go get Wero’s free to play game AstroDoge.

First version of Stardoz

Stardoz is a crazy experimental biometric-driven game I built at TOJam a few weeks back. In the game you fly around in a spaceship shooting at giant floating heads and hands. It’s similar to many flying in space combat games.

The catch is that your heartbeat controls the spawn rate of enemies. The pulsing red border on the screen shows the player’s heart at work.

If floating heads seems familiar to you, it’s because you may remember the movie Zardoz starring Sean Connery. Just watch the trailer to see how zany the movie is.

Really, the gameplay is similar in play insofar that “the gun is good” and that one survives by ‘killing’. It’s very simple gameplay with a neat twist. I made Stardoz to test out some space-based game mechanics and to incorporate some biometric data into a game.

Playtesters have liked the heartbeat spawn mechanic and only one player took issue that the game is hard for people with high resting heart rates. I’m still tweaking the spawn rate but it’s alright for the most part.

The art confuses players and that’s a design goal of mine. I wanted it to cross between the ridiculous and the overly-symbolic. Thus, instead of a score it lists how many egos you’ve destroyed and how many emotions you have. .

You are flying through space (or is mindspace?) destroying representations of human forms. In some cases it’s heavy handed and in some ways quite subtle (only one person has figured out the symbolic placement of the TOJam goat).

Getting the Heartbeat

With the excellent help of J Lee, I was able to get an Arduino Uno board to work with a pulse sensor which meant that heartbeats could be tracked using Unity. The heartbeat is tracked using this pulse sensor which was really easy to connect to the Arduino and to configure it into Unity.

“Fun fact”: for Windows use COM4 and /dev/cu.usbmodem1421 for Macs as the port for Unity to talk to the Arduino. At least this is what worked for my setup. Results may vary.

The pulse sensor goes around the player’s finger and surprisingly doesn’t interfere with gameplay controls. It can be attached to the player’s ear but it just feels weird.

Here it is in action around the left index finger of a player:

Next Steps

For this game will be to see if I can get it working with the Apple Watch (or Android Wear), if it works maybe I’ll release it for anyone to play. In the meantime I’m hoping to show it at upcoming events.

Game thinking from Adam Clare

Author: Adam ClarePage 20 of 262

Whales in Free to Play Games

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Stardoz! My Game Which Uses Heartbeats To Spawn Enemies

Getting the Heartbeat

Next Steps

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Author: Adam ClarePage 20 of 262

Whales in Free to Play Games

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Like this:

Stardoz! My Game Which Uses Heartbeats To Spawn Enemies

Getting the Heartbeat

Next Steps

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