Forever games thrive on attributes like balance, community engagement, and player investment for lasting appeal.
Estimating customer lifetime value in online games involves predicting spending behavior and adapting to evolving player dynamics.
Live operation games sustain success through continuous updates, community activities, and dynamic player engagement strategies.
Deep dives
Evolution of Video Game Companies to Online Services
Video game companies evolved from offline publishers to online services, shifting to new success metrics like customer acquisition cost, retention, and average revenue per user. This transition replaced old norms like marketing spending and sell-through with more suitable evaluation methods for online businesses.
Attributes of Forever Games: Balance, Community, Eventfulness, Competition, and Player Investment
Forever games possess key attributes like balance, community engagement, eventfulness, competition, and player investment. These attributes contribute to the longevity of games over periods of time ranging from five to twenty years, ensuring their lasting appeal to players.
Challenges of Estimating Customer Lifetime Value
Estimating customer lifetime value poses challenges, as it involves predicting a customer's long-term spending behavior early in the product lifecycle. Factors like retention dynamics, in-game spending hooks, and evolving player behavior impact accurate estimation of customer lifetime value, critical for successful game monetization.
Transition to Live Operations in Modern Multiplayer Games
Modern multiplayer games have evolved into live operation games, involving continuous updates, balance changes, and player engagement strategies. Features like live events, community-led activities, and dynamic responses to user behavior contribute to the ongoing success and longevity of these games.
The Enduring Legacy of Age of Empires II and Starcraft
Age of Empires II, initially released in 1999 and still actively updated by Microsoft, maintains its relevance in the gaming community with the ongoing Red Bull Wolo Lo tournament in Germany highlighting its enduring popularity. Similarly, Starcraft, launched in 1998, became a pivotal game, particularly in Korea, shaping modern concepts of video game success. While Microsoft has successfully updated Age of Empires II, Blizzard's underinvestment in updating franchises like Warcraft left room for other companies to capitalize on the evolving gaming landscape.
Evolution of the Forever Game with World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Fortnite
World of Warcraft's success in 2004 marked a resurgence in MMO popularity, demonstrating Blizzard's ability to adapt its IP to the changing gaming landscape. The introduction of League of Legends by Riot Games in 2009 showcased a new approach to the forever game concept, focusing on player investment and iterative improvements. Fortnite's meteoric rise in 2017 further exemplified the forever game model with innovative business strategies, collaborative events, and continuous updates, setting new standards for long-term player engagement and success.
Mitch and Blake discuss how the rise of games-as-services has privileged durable, long-duration play-patterns -- leading to the modern idea of the "Forever Game" which can persist for decades. Mitch outlines his five attributes of long-term engagement and provides examples of each from games like Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires, and League of Legends. They look at the two distinct strands of long-duration play that emerged in the 1990's -- the massively-multiplayer online role playing game and the session-based online competitive game -- and how those genres evolved and cross-polinated to produce multi-billion dollar online games that have remained viable for a decade or more.
