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How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
- TwoNineA 7y agoReason they made so much money, in app purchases. The game is addictive, like myriad of other games, and coupled with IAPs, it's a goldmine.
- Twirrim 7y agoI tried Idle Heroes, out of curiosity. Compared to other "idle" games I've played, it's way up there for in-app purchases and the need to shell out money to progress.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kemayo 7y agoI haven't played this one... but saturation-level advertising in ad-supported games might have played into the loop here. I play Endless Frontier, which is another related game that has (optional) "view an ad for a reward" mechanics, and said ad is almost always for Idle Heroes. Insofar as Endless Frontier is pretty good about not forcing you to spend money, I've resisted trying another game which looks far more like whale-bait.
- oppressedgf 7y agoI've also been playing Endless Frontier.. It's one of the least pay to win games I've ever played.. You get rewards of in game currency every day and other super rare stuff for free, it makes no sense to buy anything imo
- kemayo 7y agoIt does makes a lot of sense to spend one dollar, because that gets you the VIP status that doubles a lot of those rewards. Makes the whole thing even more crazily-generous. I actually went and bought one of the packs (with a permanent spirit-highlands upgrade, so not one-off currency) recently, just because I figured I'd been playing for basically-free for so long that I might as well contribute a bit more.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoSame. There came a point where I was so oversaturated with the ads that I told myself I'd refuse to play it out of spite.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoWhat scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoCould you elaborate?
- toomuchtodo 7y agohttps://levelskip.com/misc/Skinners-Box-and-Video-Games https://levelskip.com/misc/Skinners-Box-and-Video-Games
- chaostheory 7y agoThese games are a modern version of slot machines. It's habit forming, and it burns time and money. tbf it's still slightly better than things that you see in a casino
- yoz-y 7y agoCoin ups existed a long time ago too. Arguably you got even less value from those per dollar spent.
- the_af 7y agoI suppose they have all the downsides of coin ups plus they are also more readily accessible. You don't have to go anywhere to get your fix, it's there in your phone.
- ken 7y agoBut with those, it only operated when it was fed coins. It's been shown that people spend less when they pay with cash than credit cards. Casual mobile games go beyond even credit cards and have users spend nebulous tokens. They go as far as they can to disconnect the play from the loss of money, and that's bad. I see a significant difference between "have people pay for a fun service" and "engineer an experience specifically to be addictive".
- sleibrock 7y agoI just had to stop playing this game because I was basically making no progress every day. It became less enjoyable and more of a chore every 10 hours. * Progress can be gauged by how far a team of heroes you construct can proceed in the "single player" stages of the game. Getting further into the single player campaign dictates how much experience/gold you will earn when not playing the game. * In order to make progress, you need to upgrade a full team of six heroes. * Not all heroes are equal and are graded on a scale of stars from 1 to 10, with 1 being the absolute worst and 10 being the best. * The best heroes start at a star rating of 5 (I will call them 5* to mean "5-star" and so on). In order to upgrade a hero to 6* and beyond, you need a second copy of that hero and 3 additional 5* heroes of the same faction color to promote it to 6. The drop-rate of getting 5* hero copies is very low across most opportunities. You can "summon" heroes from scrolls purchased with real-world-money, but the odds are very low here. There are also "prophet orbs", but these orbs are very rare and hard to attain more than one of them per day. * There are many 5* units in the game, and gameplay-balance wise, not all of them are even remotely good in the later parts of the game. There's two tier-lists mainted: one for player-vs-player, the other for player-vs-monster. If you get a 5* hero unlock and it's not on that list, it's junk and is only used as food for building your 6+ characters. There are ways to speed up the progress with money, but you will pay an arm and a leg to make about 1/6th of a dent in fully leveling a character. You'll be lucky if $100 USD gets you an inch. It's very much a lootbox casino game hidden behind an RPG-style idle game. I played it for about a month and I was unable to hit level 90 in time to get a second copy of one of the highest-rated characters in the game (Heart Watcher), so it felt very frustrating and not very enjoyable afterwards.
- slivanes 7y agoHow often did you encounter maxed-out players? Did you see players that must have spent hundreds of dollars?
- kamarg 7y agoHundreds of dollars is really not very much for many paying players to spend on these types of games. That would typically be considered a "casual" player which is just barely above a free-to-play player in terms of importance to the developers.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoIt's interesting to see the same people who lambast Farmville get addicted to a game like this. It's like how Fortnite figured out how to get boys interested in dressing up their virtual Barbies so much that players use "noskin" in a derogatory manner.
- hu3 7y agoPeople belittling others in a game for not having spent money on a bunch of pixels is depressing. This behavior is perpetrated even by streamers which are followed by many, including children, as role models.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y agoIn CSGO, your skins are a direct representation of how good you are. This is fact. If you spent 1k on a Dragonlore, you're one of the best AWPers in your region, hands down.
- charliesharding 7y agoAs someone who drunkenly bought 10 keys and unboxed gloves I can confirm. I'm now competing at a much higher level. Seriously though I think the loot box model is ethically wrong. However, I don't believe it's wrong to offer skins for sale - this is no different than people wearing different brands of clothing when they compete in sports
- caprese 7y ago> As someone who drunkenly bought 10 keys and unboxed gloves I can confirm. I'm now competing at a much higher level. That's life and I'm glad that worked out for you.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y agoI unboxed a knife and turned that into 2 knives and a pair of gloves. I am solidly in GN, but I do wonder if I had that better knife if I would be Global. But, I completely agree. And whats worse is that Valve has done little to combat the darkest side of this industry, such as the 'futures' and stuff like that. Every CSGO video has an ad for some gambling site, and major events are sponsored by these companies. The only part I like about the skins in CSGO is that you can actually 'own' the skin to a degree and make real money on it. But because of that, CSGO might also have one of the most predatory skin communities in all of gaming.
- TomMckenny 7y agoExtremely interesting analysis. But it would be nice to know their marketing budget. Without that, we don't really know whether the design or the advertising is the reason for revenue.
- musicale 7y ago"There are more stat checks in the game and to get better in those stats you need to engage with the metasystems and monetize because the grind is so painful." A game that's optimized for monetization over fun is not the kind of game I want to play.
- ralusek 7y agoThen please join the rest of us in not playing it. You are an independent agent and I have full faith in your ability to resist.
- dyarosla 7y agoI can't believe this is the ONLY sentence in the article that directly addresses HOW the game even monetizes to begin with. So much for "How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year".
- sleepybrett 7y agocongratulations, you made a skinner box.
- iscrewyou 7y agoReminds me of Battleheart(!!) on iOS. Now, THAT was an idle game. Seems like these people just took that concept online...
- slowhadoken 7y agoI like casual games, they’ve designed interesting systems that handle micro managing. But a game that plays itself isn’t much of a game.
- ricardobeat 7y agoI had no idea what 'autobattle', 'heroes charge', 'idle game' meant, and wonder what exactly gets people interested in games of this kind. It doesn't even look like a game in the traditional sense at all - for enjoyment / fulfillment / fun. More like a colorful spreadsheet, with cheap visuals and not even mechanical skill. 'Gameplay' videos on youtube show people flipping cards and clicking through a dozen inventory management screens, nothing really happens. Really puzzling. Is this what getting old feels like?
- mlrtime 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_game
- moate 7y agoAs an avid fan of very complex board games and a player in an "advanced stat" fantasy baseball league, I can promise you that long term grinding using spread sheets and optimization trees is fun for some people. You play <name of FPS de jour> to show off fast twitch muscle memory, but you play games like this to show a different sort of ability. Perseverance? Intellect? I'm not sure what it is for each person specifically, but they can be fun.
- shostack 7y agoIf you want to get a taste with a quality game that doesn't prey on people with IAP, check out Kittens Game.[1] You can play free online. I paid $2 one-time fee to play on my phone. There's a vibrant community on /r/kittensgame on Reddit and the dev is active there. It is also arguably one of the most well-done idle/incremental games I've played after playing a few. The depth of it is jaw-dropping once you really start getting into the mechanics of late stage play, and you'll hit several points along the way where you think you are there only to find out everything you've been working on gets abstracted away into new growth concept that becomes critical to the next stage. [1]http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/ http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
- b_tterc_p 7y agoI played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The top tier players are an order of magnitude more powerful, but that costs thousands of dollars. And, on top of that, this gap can be crossed with about a year of play, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. I’m fine being top 95% rather than top 99%. In both games I have reached a point where I not only am fully capable, but am fully capable with tons of resources that would otherwise cost lots of money and I simply haven’t used because the value props of events people are lured into are deceptively low. I like these games, because they offer a small amount of tasks to do and a super long term scale sense of progression to plan out. It’s not pay to win, it’s pay to win quickly. You can beat everything freely without much trouble (or course other games won’t be so generous perhaps. I would guess idle heroes to be more of a financial grind)
- jbattle 7y agoI never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards
- ngold 7y agoSeems like a broken game.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoFor something like Fire Emblem I don’t think so as spending was neither required nor especially important for clearing all of the game’s content. Although one observation I had was that money was used as a crutch by bad players who incorrectly assumed it was necessary. It’s a turn based strategy game with relatively little entropy so a lot of it is skill. A smart player would think about positioning and how to safely take out enemies. Dumber players were fond of saying how they favored defensive builds, or in other words, creating units that were strong enough to stand there and win on counter attacks. The issue with this was that as the game ramped up in difficulty this would gradually get more difficult to accomplish. So if you refuse to play the game intelligently you have to try to upgrade your characters with cash. But then after a while you hit a wall where your characters are maximally strong (which is less than 10% better stats no matter how much you spend), you’re _still_ not going to be strong enough to handle the hardest content without playing smart. So... money can help you get through the first 80% of content, but it won’t be enough and is not required for the last 20%... but then is required again for the side bit of absolute top tier pvp. From a game design, I actually think this looks pretty healthy for the game’s integrity. Not the gambling habits it induces.
- umvi 7y ago"idle" games are cancer. Literally just games that waste electricity playing themselves and trying to addict you into revisiting periodically.
- otikik 7y agoThat sounds like a slot machine, not a game.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoMany successful games can be reduced to a slot machine, even games that have a lot of solid gameplay or even outlets for creativity. The central mechanism of Minecraft is mining. Mining is repeatedly punching through rocks hoping that you'll get something cool behind the next rock.
- otikik 7y agoAll human processes can be reduced to slot machines if you go abstract enough. By extension that includes all games. My criticism was that what this make the exchange so blatantly abusive. All those psychological mechanisms to "ensure engagement" and "pursue the whales" (or whatever soft term they come up for them) ... makes me sick. I actually think I prefer a slot machine to this. It is less dishonest.
- chriselles 7y agoA psychologist I have worked with on a human performance assessment programme and I have spoken at length about things like the ethics of psychologists working on gambling/gaming machines with their vastly increased potential for amygdala hijacking and behavioural nudging. There will always be trained and capable folks willing to cash a big paycheque or justify unethical professional behaviour to further their objectives. I think open frank discussion and resilience built within families and cohorts of friends is the best defence. No one is immune. But a small team based approach might be useful. The concept of digital nutrition and labelling sounds promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1WXSjUpchQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1WXSjUpchQ