An open letter to the team behind Planets.Nu.
Dear developers!
First of all, thank you for keeping this project up. There is simply no other game like VGA planets, and you made it possible to play it in browser age. I am very happy to be here, and I would very much like for this project to be successful for many years to come.
Which is why I would like to voice some of my concerns on the direction you guys appear to be taking with this project. I have been making online games for 20 years, as designer, developer, and product (i.e. revenue) manager. Maybe some of what I am about to say will help.
Let me start with what I think we are good at, what are our potential USPs.
- we have distinct strategies and tactics for practically every race - something most successful 4X games don't deliver
- we offer a fun and meaningful PvP experience for multiple players in a game - again, many turn-based strategy games out are only so-so at PvP, and almost no one has anything better than 1v1
- we have a passionate and dedicated community that is willing to help - ok not a USP but still a good thing
Areas where we are not so good:
- there are many outdated game design elements - for example, having both missions and special friendly codes is confusing
- we are not a good fit for a casual game - Planets is meant to be a hardcore strategy player experience, one that requires dedication
With that in mind, let's see how this maps onto plans announced at the PlanetsCon.
In his presentation BB said you guys are getting most of your traffic from mobile (partly because you have better visibility there due to keyword searches in app stores?). The numbers given - 2% first day retention - sadly, are abysmal, and we also lose many of those who persevere after they get crushed in the first game. (For the record, today's industry's idea of target numbers for a good mobile game's retention is 40-20-10 - that is, 40% of your players come back to play the next day after installation, 20% still come back after a week, and 10% still play in a month.) It seemed to me that the train of thought went like this: since we are getting most of our traffic from mobile, mobile is where we're going to get our new regulars from, but we're not doing a good job at getting these players interested, so there are two areas of improvement: we need to make game playable on mobile devices, and we need to do a much better job onboarding new players.
While I'm all for interface and tutorial improvements, I would like to talk about the end goal for these efforts.
Planets, the full game, is not really a mobile friendly game - especially so for phones, which are actually quite a different animal than tablets. You can't really make complete turns in meaningful games while sitting on a toilet or waiting for a bus - no matter how friendly the UI is, no matter how good the onboarding is, you need the utility of a reasonably large screen to fully realize the game strategy's potential. I made a few turns out of necessity using an iPad last year; it was painful but borderline acceptable, but laptop/desktop screen is clearly superior. So if the end goal for the mobile interface improvement is to provide an mobile alternative to PC experience, then I would urge you to ditch phones and focus solely on tablets.
Maybe one could only keep phones available for a 1v1 beginner level game, where UI is simple and there are few decisions to make every turn, and to nudge the player to "get a tablet/computer for full experience". But then the question is how much would this kind of player be interested in the full game. If it is our potential sophisticated strategy game player, then we are not really showing them the good things about our game, so they may be deterred by simplicity of their initial experience; and if it is a player who would only be interested in that kind of level of complexity, they won't play the full game anyways, so the whole point is moot.
And yes good mobile UI would work well for blitzes, new games, diplomacy, taking a quick look at a new turn, or making small changes to a turn, but none of these replace the experience of a real game. Unless you're looking at getting mostly-Blitz players, or some sort of simplified kind of game as your end goal, in which case it is no longer core VGA Planets experience, but rather a "create some sort of VGA Planets derivative and hope it would work out better for retention than the core game" kind of initiative.
Second, on traffic quality. I would argue that since we are a rather niche'y game, people who are looking for a mobile experience are in general not a good match for this kind of hardcore games. There is already a game out there that IS a good fit for the mobile audience, called Neptune's Pride (https://np.ironhelmet.com/), and which is essentially a dumbed down to the core PBEM. (Their UI design is actually decent, so definitely worth taking a look as a reference.) I kind of feel that game (NP) goes about as far as core mobile experience could possibly get you strategy depth-wise - which is perhaps 10% of what Planets can offer. With that in mind, I believe the problem with mobile signups is less that the game is doing a poor job of getting these players interested, and more that they wouldn't be THAT much interested even under ideal conditions after all. And so providing them with better UI and better onboarding is not really going to solve much of the root cause problem.
What am I suggesting as alternative then? Recruiting from PC 4X strategy games playerbase. There are plenty of players playing games by Paradox studio, and plenty of players playing games by Amplitude studio, and many of them are our potential players. And boy oh boy, do we have something to offer them! Only Endless Space series comes somewhere close in how different their races are, but even the least similar races in ES2 are more similar to each other than Rebels and Colonies in Planets. So if you guys have a marketing budget, I would kindly suggest to try to target these. Yes, the problem of onboarding still applies here as well, but, frankly, anyone who survived the UI and featureset of Europa Universalis is not going to be intimidated by ours either - as long as they see the potential. And to see this potential, they need a mix of great MvM experience, plus a good way to bring friends over without disrupting the free-for-all fabric of the experience, as nothing beats a first-hand introduction to a complicated system. (For this last purpose perhaps it would make sense to implement some sort of a clan system here where resources collected by individual members are pooled, but clan members can't participate in the same "ranked" game other than as part of a team in a team game.) That is where I believe the primary focus of the team should be.
Finally, I would like to comment on two closely related things - the current player progression system (known as "meta-game" in game design) and monetization. I really like how the rating/title system is designed, that is a complicated task and what has been implemented seems to be doing the job nicely. I also like the mechanic of leveling up individual "officers" to indicate everyone's performance with each race. What I do find myself confused is the whole Campaign and gathering-resources-to-research-advantages system. It is currently designed to work like this: there is a game with a superset of Planets features, and my progression as player is reflected by how many features I am able to use in these games, competing against people who likely unlocked more or fewer said features. This really only works if I want to play Campaign more than the game wants me to play Campaign, and I doubt that has to be the case:
- Campaign is different from Planets enough so as long as core audience is mostly VGA Planets players, it's going to be "not the same game".
- Campaign features have not really been tested well, and are thus rather unbalanced. These features need players to playtest them - and the system is set up to artificially restrict players from doing so.
- Making availability of Campaign features through progression a la carte means people are in different starting positions depending on their contribution to the game, so similar to pay-to-win models to some degree. It's like going to play a chess game with a rook in place of a queen because you haven't unlocked queens yet, and playing against a guy with 7 knights because they are just starting out.
At the very least what I would do instead is provide "full research of a race advantages in campaign" packs for a nominal amount - say, $3-5 per race, and $20-40 for all race advantages in a bundle. (It should still be possible to earn these through accumulation of resources from regular games.) This way, we at least know that everyone in each Campaign game is on equal footing as far as their starting options for their race are concerned. But ultimately I think what should be happening instead is you should be slowly adding things to Standard that do not cause for drastic swings in game balance or strategies (like what almost all emperor ships do), but rather fix the balance, and possibly also adding some utility and flavor for rarely used ships. And in the ideal scenario, introducing new content for playable races - say, 1 per year, again, available as a separate purchase. (Just not like Horwasps; I'm really sorry but that particular design is so bad for multiple reasons, I'd personally never play them, or in any game with them. But there are definitely ways to make it work.) Campaign may be used as a playground for these features, but I don't expect it to become the go-to mode of playing for most.
This may sound a bit weird coming from a player, but I do feel the game doesn't really give us enough reasons to pay you money. The $3 per month is fine, but we are in general older than average gamer audience, and have jobs, and usually have some change lying around to spare. Yet there is literally nothing to pay for! Personally I would pay for a custom ship icons pack, maybe some other simple vanity stuff like a star next to a name in forums. And it is equally important for the new players to see these status symbols of dedicated veterans, to desire them themselves, and it also shows them that there are people who played the game long enough. And more money can always be used to purchase more user traffic to bring more new players. I haven't really given a lot of thought on monetization routes, but I'm sure there is a lot of low hanging fruit that doesn't require a lot of coding to implement.
Thanks fore reading, I would be happy to reply and comment more if anyone is interested in continuing this conversation. (I really wanted to visit the PlanetsCon, but I couldn't to leave my daughter - who is younger than the game I am currently playing in - even for a week back here in Cyprus. Maybe next year, fingers crossed.)
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