One modern video game mechanism I detest is the real-life countdown timer. Especially if the game already has a built-in notion of “time.”
I’m currently playing a sports game where the free agent market turns over every hour. This means there are times when my incentive is to not play the game, and instead wait for the market to turn over.
A game should always incentivize you to play it. This makes it more likely that the rewards the game provides are intrinsic rather than extrinsic.
I know that a timer makes the game easier to monetize, but I strongly feel that this winds up hurting the game long-term, as players (especially “whales”) are more likely to drop out.
In this particular game, I feel that progressing through the season should act as the in-game timer. There’s still an incentive for whales to pay for early turnover of the free-agent market, but it also encourages players to interact with the fun part of the game.
Finally, from an ethical perspective, I feel that as a player, it should be up to me when I play the game. I should be playing on my schedule, not the game’s. The latter leads to real-life consequences, like degraded relationships with friends and family and a messed-up sleep schedule.
@gilhova
Having worked on games like this, here are the three main reasons for those real-world timers:
1: To turn the game into a habit. This is as insidious as it sounds. The first sessions are generous, then it starts to dry out. They want to make sure you come back later.
2: To give you something you can buy. A lot of free to play design is about creating obstacles for the player, which you can always pay to remove.
3: To make it seem like the game is bigger than it is. Some of the things I made for FoE would take you about three years to get to. As a player, I never made it there. #gamedesign#gamedevelopment#freemium#freetoplay
2: is harder to argue against, as games do need to be sustainable. Nevertheless, I feel like there are ways to pull this off without destructively hacking the players’ brain. Like in the example I gave, moving to an in-game timer would still give reasons for whales to pay.
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