Fallout Shelter
The IOS/Free-2-Play Fallout game
Has turned out to be one of the most odd and riveting games released this year.
Not because of the game itself really
but rather because of how it did in the market.
It challenged a lot of people's assumptions about Free-to-play
and brought up a lot of questions about
what the hardcore audience is really looking for from a Free-to-Play game.
See, there's been a prevailing idea that the hardcore DON'T want Free-to-Play games
So when Fallout Shelter tore up the charts
it caused a bit of an uproar in some of the design community
because this game is actually chock-full of what the hardcore demographic (as we define it)
usually rails against on forums and volgs and in user-reviews
So the question becomes:
Are these elements of Free-to-Play design really the problem?
Or is something about this game so great that it can overcome all that hardcore reluctance?
And truth is, while we don't have absolute demographic data on who's downloading this thing
and some portion of them is clearly not your traditional core audience or PC player
If you look at the user-reviews on Fallout Shelter a lot of them reference having played
Fallout 3 or New Vegas or even mention
hearing the E3 announcement for Fallout 4 which is pretty indicative of
being part of that hardcore audience.
On the Bethesda Forums there are even calls for it to be brought to steam so, it's clearly
not just demographically casual players playing this thing.
And more than that they're paying for it. Shortly after launch,
this game beat out Candy Crush for daily gross.
That's a lot of money people are throwing at this thing.
So let's take a look at the game itself:
As of launch,
it's central mechanic was
basically a simpler version of Tiny Tower
with an XCOM layout.
The majority of the gameplay was:
was looking at your unit's stats, and matching people with a high stat
to the room that used that particular stat. So basically you'd move
everybody with a high Strength score
into your power station
and then you wait for the game to generate resources.
This mechanic was popularised in
2011 and was designed to be as casual as possible.
There's basically nothing that qualified as
'hardcore' gameplay here.
By comparison,
Bejewled and Peggle
are both far more interactive,
far more mechanically deep games
than Tiny Tower type games.
and that's not to say Tiny Tower type games are bad,
there's actually genius behind that kind of game's design
But the industry at large had always thought that:
Tiny Tower's genius was genius for IT'S audience, not for the hardcore player.
Which leads me to my next point,
which is Fallout Shelter's lack of overall interactivity.
Often, one of the key complaints I see
from hardcore fans about many mobile and tablet free to play games
is their lack of interactivity.
and yet Fallout Shelter has barely ANY interactive components.
Exploring the wastes and wasteland combat,
is entirely non-interactive.
gathering resources is completely non-interactive other than
putting your people in the right rooms and
tapping every couple of minuites.
And getting new people for your shelter is, for the most part, an act of waiting too.
So it seems that lack of gameplay or interactivey
can't actually be the essential component to what is keeping the hardcore from playing these games.
But let's look a little deeper:
Fallout Shelter is a game of timers.
Almost all of the game is based around waiting for timers.
How do you gather resources?
Wait
Tap
and wait again.
How do you explore the Wasteland?
Assign someone to the task,
and then wait.
How do your get your loot once you've explored the wasteland?
You wait for them to come back.
How do you get new people into your shelter?
You assign people to the radio room and then wait,
Or you have your survivors get romantic in the lounge,
and then wait.
How do you increase your survivor's stats?
Assign them to the special stat increasing room of your choice,
and then wait.
When Fallout Shelter was announced at E3,
The audiance cheered when it was proudly proclaimed
that the game wouldn't make you wait for new vault rooms to be built,
but make no mistake,
The rest of the game IS about making you wait.
Being forced to wait,
is another one of those core complaints I always hear about Free-to-Play games,
and yet, this game is incredibly timer dependant.
Now interestingly, Fallout Shelter doesn't use an explicit
Energy System, but instead opts to use
timers to fulfill the same design role.
and that tiny bit of freedom the game gives you
in not forcing you to stop playing,
might be one of the things that makes
Fallout Shelter more palatable to a traditional hard-core audience.
But before I get more into
why I think Fallout Shelter worked,
I have to cover one last thing:
monetization
This game is monetized by a 'Gottchapon' collectable system
like
almost all other free-to-play games found on Tablet or Mobile these days.
The monetization is, in a number of ways,
less elegant from a design perspective than
that used by many other companies.
where many Free-to-Play companies allow the player
a thousand subtle ways to continuously grind out paid content for their account if they don't want to shell out money,
Fallout Shelter has just one:
Lunchboxes, the Gotchapon mechanic in Fallout Shelter,
Can occasionally be gotten by completing quests.
What's interesting though
is that the system is SO explicit about the fact that
ALL the best stuff will only be gotten through buying Lunchboxes.
Every basic dweller who comes to live in your shelter has the same
base-line for their stats.
And every child born into your shelter will simply have a random
+1 tacked onto one of those base-line stats,
making it impossible to breed super children by pairing off your most skilled Vault inhabitants.
So every single dweller who shows up at your door or
is born into your community
will have their default stats cap out at one or two
but the ones you find in Lunchboxes often have sevens or eights.
This exact sort of explicit 'Paying is better system'
is often the BIGGEST complaint against Free-to-Play
and yet here it seems to have been met with little objection.
In fact, the surprising thing is that Fallout Shelter actually gives the player
free Lunchboxes LESS frequently than most Free-to-Play games that have to fight this stigma.
So with all of that said,
now I'm gonna tell you why I think this worked for Fallout Shelter
and a lot of my industry friends are probably gonna think this is crazy but here we go:
Without a doubt, a lot of the embracing of Fallout Shelter
is driven by love for the Fallout franchise
but I give the 'hardcore' audience more credit than to think
that they would drop all objections simply because they're blinded by a brand they like.
No, I've got a different answer,
one that goes against all industry wisdom and
YEARS of Free-to-Play design:
I think that a lot of the reason why a 'hardcore' audience
was willing to put up with all these things
is because Fallout Shelter lacked PvP.
You see, our whole Free-to-Play industry has been built
around the idea of PvP.
Everyone working in it will tell you that
PvP drives sales,
that it's what makes the whales out there pay the big bucks,
It's what keeps the top users monetizing over and over again.
And yes, that's totally true but as counter-intuitive as it seems,
it may not be the best plan for a traditional hardcore audience.
You see, one of the roots of all these 'core gamer' complaints,
the complaints about timers,
the complaints about monetization that encourages buying power,
is that many players feel like they can't keep up,
that they can't compete unless
spend thousands of dollars, unless they wrap their whole lives around the game.
And if they can't possibly keep up,
why pay at all?
why play at all?
but here, where the player was competing with no one but themselves,
where they were setting their own goals and objectives,
they can move at whatever pace they wanted
the timers didn't make them feel like they a slave to the machine
like they had to set an alarm in the middle of the night to be as efficient as possible.
because being as efficient as possible didn't get you ahead of anybody
instead, players could sleep through the night,
check in when they felt like it,
and have fun with whatever resources they did get rather than
fretting about the ones they missed.
The same is true for monetization:
sure the Fallout Shelter monetization is actually
pretty heavy-handed compared to most Free-to-Play games,
but there's no real pressure to do it.
You're not going to lose anything by not having those S.P.E.C.I.A.L characters.
No other player's gonna raid your base and take your stuff because they paid and you didn't,
You're not gonna miss out on any special event prize
that really only the people who paid a thousand dollars
even had any chance at getting.
Instead the game simply says:
"Hey you enjoying this?"
You wanna get some more efficient guys and better guns for your shelter quickly?"
"Gimme some money."
And it doesn't matter if you do this the moment you boot up the game or a hundred hours in
because the game won't punish you just because you didn't want to cough up money.
It's my guess that by the time this out,
Fallout Shelter won't be topping the charts like it did at launch.
At the end of the day, there's just not a ton of substantive gameplay in there
I don't think even Bethesda anticipated Fallout Shelter getting the initial response it did,
and wasn't prepared to revamp the game to create the depth necessary to keep 'hardcore' players in for the long haul.
But even so, I think it may have shown us a valuable lesson about making Free-to-Play appealing to the 'hardcore'
We may have to buck conventional wisdom and drop competitive components which
force the player to be continuously tied to the machine,
which punish a player for not putting large quantities of money into the game,
at least if we want to use elements of traditional
tablet and mobile to play design to appeal to the 'hardcore' audience.
See ya next week.
(Outro Music)
Subtitles by Angela Ralphs