A few months ago, my partner got me playing one of those mobile strategy games - you know the type - build a city, train troops, join an alliance, fight other players etc.. They had already tried two others before - one shut down, and the other didn’t quite stick.

I avoided playing any of the previous ones, mainly on principle - I didn’t want to play a P2W game. But then they seemed to be having so much fun, so I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m not proud of it. I keep thinking that I should quit, that I shouldn’t spend money on it.

What keeps me in it?

The community is genuinely good. The alliance I’m in has brought together smart, funny, generous people from across the world who I wouldn’t have met any other way. We coordinate across time zones. We celebrate each other’s real-life milestones. We’ve built something that feels, improbably, like a small society.

The game, though. The game grates at me constantly.

And the more I’ve thought about why, the more I’ve come to an uncomfortable conclusion: there is no game there. There never was.

Monetisation as Design

Looking in from the outside, I figured these were games which allowed you to skip time / effort by spending money. I was woefully naive.

Every single aspect of the game is built to:

• Feel like what you want is just out of reach
• Train you to spend (gems, speed ups, stacks of other currency types)
• Manufacture social pressure to level up, support your alliance
• Blur the line between in-game currency and real money
• Make ego bruising a de-facto standard, forcing impulsive spend
• Design specific events to funnel actions into spending

Let’s take each of these in turn

Just out of reach

There is the basic timer-gating of everything as you’d expect, but it gets more sophisticated. At first, there is a cap of 30 for the city level.

Everybody races there - spending money. The F2P players don’t stand a chance. You need to spend hundreds of dollars to get there. Then it extends into fire crystal. The free players are forever falling even further behind.

Spend, spend, spend

When I first started playing, I hoarded stuff - gems, speed ups, chests etc. Then I realised that just slows me down. The “way to play the game” is to spend everything as soon as you get it. That rewards you with more stuff, which you then spend.

There are red dots everywhere guiding you through all the stuff you get “for free” and you’ll “earn” by spending other currency.

The faster you can spend stuff, the faster you get stuff, and the faster you grow.

Social Pressure

Most servers end up with a Non-Aggression-Pact or NAP alliances - starting with the 10 most powerful alliances. This list tends to shrink as the wheat is separated from the chaff. No prizes for guessing how you end up a powerful alliance.

To be able to be competitive with the other alliances, we need to grow. If the other alliances have players that spend a lot of money, we’ll need to match them.

The top two alliances in our server have decided that they will rotate the “presidency” between them - because the other alliances are not strong enough. They want to encourage the other alliances to grow through competition or merges.

Why is that fair? Because, otherwise, it’ll demotivate the “whales” from spending money or playing the game. That was the literal justification from the leader of the top alliance.

In-game currency vs real money

The game trains you to click buttons - you get rewards. Some of them give you gems, some of them give you speed ups, resources - all useful stuff. It’s easy, and attractive to click the buttons.

There are paid packs - and they have attractive buttons too - but they look different enough that you wouldn’t accidentally buy something.

There is always a pack advertised when you open the game. You get into the habit of closing it quickly. Except, occasionally, they’ll offer a pack for free. So you “buy it.” You are being taught that buying a pack is easy, simple and profitable.

They have another event which is a series of purchases. The first one is free, which unlocks one for £0.99, which unlocks two more free ones, then £1.99 and so on. The more expensive packs are ranked as epic / mythic etc. so it feels aspirational.

But wait - £0.99 for an extra build queue - that’s hands down the best deal ever - and it’s only a pound. It’s worth it at the start of the game. I’ll get that. I’ve just trained myself that it’s ok to spend money in the game. The floodgates have opened.

I found myself buying a pack the other day, on autopilot. I knew what was happening, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was only a pound - but it was 4000% of gem value - most of the packs are only 2000% - 3000%. What a good deal!

Buying Ego

Every single thing in this game is ranked. Most powerful player, alliance, heroes, troops - you name it - there is a ranking for it somewhere. Events (most of which are purely about spending) are also ranked.

Who wants to be ranked 523?

These rankings set up the sharper edge.

A powerful player from another alliance attacked everyone in our alliance. We were burning.

The top player in our alliance retaliated by burning almost everyone in their alliance. He burned through hundreds of dollars trying to burn the attacking player - and ultimately had to give up.

I felt bad for that player. He had spent all this money, and because the game lets your soldiers die, which a lot of his did in the endeavour, he wasn’t that much more powerful than when he started. He might as well have set his money literally on fire.

Several weeks later, a player in our sister alliance was attacked. The attacker was small enough that a small group of us was able to “exact vengeance.” However, I felt my blood boil - “how dare they?” If they were stronger, would I have burned money for vengeance?

Events Funnel To Spend

Of course, all of the above is not enough. Now, everything is wound tight - obstacles to spending have been removed, and the pavlovian behaviour has been well trained.

The next step is events where you fight against other alliances. The rewards are just enough to make it interesting - but the competitive environment is electric. Squad chat is buzzing, the commanders are directing. You are teleporting, attacking, there are small fires.

It is still timer-gated. You can teleport every x minutes. Your troops need to be healed immediately, so you’ll need to spend speed ups.

New areas open up so you have to teleport, then time runs out. Your friends are being attacked and they want you to help them. You don’t have any ports left - so what do you do? You buy them with gems. The next teleport is twice as expensive. You run out of gems. What do you do?

Why it works

For me, it’s the people. It’s not just that though. The game rewards you for clicking. It gives you red dots to clear, and it doesn’t take any cognitive load. The game has many layers of complexity. That is interesting to peel back and figure out.

There are regular events you can participate in, and it feels good when you get better at it.

All of this though is underpinned by the social aspect. You are not just getting better at the game, others in the alliance are watching you get better at the game. The witness aspect is truly rewarding.

The next aspect is the electricity in the battles - whether it is fighting for a facility, or the events, the adrenaline is pumping, and your heart is pounding.

I remember, a few weeks ago a couple of us were garrisoned in a building with a couple of minutes left in the timer. The enemy literally surrounded us. There were perhaps a dozen red cities to our two or three blue ones.

We needed one more person to come and reinforce us. The air sparkled blue, flashes of lightning and someone ported in. They backed us up, and we won!

Another time, similar situation, we were woefully outnumbered, but we were just about holding it. Then someone teleports in, and starts burning the enemy cities. One by one, they get ported out. We hold the building. We win.

Of course, sometimes we lose - but that bonds us too.

The game creates intense relationships with people all across the world - with people we will probably never meet in real life. If we met these people in real life, we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other because most of them speak another language.

Well, let’s make it ethical

The obvious response is: build the same game with ethical monetisation. Cosmetics only. No pay-to-win. Keep the city builder, keep the alliance politics, keep the territory wars.

I don’t think that’ll work.

The engagement in these games - the reason people stay, the reason alliances form, the reason anyone cares about territory - is almost entirely downstream of the pressure. Remove the monetised pressure and you have to replace it with something else, or the game has no tension.

What keeps you logging in isn’t love of the game mechanics. It’s social obligation created by artificial scarcity. Fix the artificial scarcity and the logins stop. Which means the alliance coordination stops. Which means the community - the genuinely good thing these games accidentally create - stops.

Without the whales, there is nothing to rail against - so the free players would all just get along with little conflict.

There are times when we would turn up to take over a facility and smaller alliances would just leave the territory. They might have taken the facility already, but instead of trying to hold it, they just leave. They don’t want to recoup any potential damage.

Without the option of paying money to get more powerful - maybe everyone would just leave when someone clearly more powerful came along. Maybe people would focus more on the co-operative aspects. But the co-operative aspects aren’t necessarily fun by themselves - they’re the chores you do to be more powerful and fight in PvP.

Sure PvP takes skill, some tactics and practice - no question. However, these requirements are there only to legitimise it when people spend money. “It’s not just about spending money” - but if that’s the case, then why do so many people spend so much money?

This is not a strategy / city building game. It’s a how-quickly-can-I-drain-my-bank-account game.

Good Live Service Games

There are three good live service games that I point people to. Path of Exile (1 & 2), Guild Wars (1 & 2) and Eve Online.

They all focus on paying for convenience rather than pay to win, and of course cosmetics.

They are all very different games from this though. I have played PoE, and GW, both 1 and 2 for hundreds of hours but I did not build these intense relationships in there. In fact, I built no real friendships in those games.

But then, I didn’t really play PvP - I stuck to the PvE and never felt pulled into the competitive layer the way this mobile game pulled me in.

Eve Online would probably be the closer fit - and I really enjoyed it. The main problem I had with it was that it doesn’t force you into alliances (or corporations in their parlance) like these mobile games do.

The world feels humungous and difficult to navigate. On these mobile games, you quickly get a sense of the whole population on the server. You see the same people over and over again at facilities, or event leaderboards. You are forced into an alliance to survive and there is alliance chat front and centre.

Without the highly extractive spine of these mobile games, is it possible to create a game capable of high engagement and tight-knit communities?

The Fundamentals

To be able to make a game that creates the best of these mobile games without the worst of it, the first thing that needs to be set correctly is the incentive

• not for the players, but for the ones creating the game.

A studio optimising for extraction will build different systems than one optimising for a game worth playing. Everything downstream follows from that choice.

This part is difficult to get right. It needs trust, and faith.

Grinding Gear Games, who made Path of Exile, mainly focused on building a really good game and trusted their player base to appreciate it.

I spent over £100 on Guild Wars 2 buying all the expansions and a bunch of stuff from the store. Content and features were gated behind these purchases, but I was happy to spend the money - this time I was also happy to unlock features I wanted.

I don’t care about cosmetics - I never have - and yet, I spent money on Path of Exile cosmetic packs. I can’t help it. I feel fantastic when I spend money with GGG buying things I don’t care about. I’ve spent over £100 on their packs.

I’ve spent maybe £50 on this mobile game - and I felt like a chump after every transaction.

Player Value

With community and bonding as the highest items of player value, intense shared player experiences become the central piece of the game.

The language barrier has to be lifted. Automated translations are a minimum requirement - and ideally better quality than what’s in these games.

These experiences should not be fully on the player schedule. Being forced into an encounter is part of the intensity of the experience. Without that, it’s easy to just forget about engaging.

It needs to be people-led - as it is now - the alliances are the core component. Negotiating with other alliances and players for non-aggression pacts, punishing poorly behaved players, are all important aspects of building the sense of community and belonging.

GGG uses seasonal resets to powerful effect. Having an end state after which the whole server starts again helps avoid constant power creep. It also gives players another chance to start from the beginning, using all the knowledge and experience they’ve gained.

I think it would still be important to allow people to pay for boosts. There will be people who would rather spend money on the game than time. I am not opposed to that - but it should not be the driving force. Spending money should not let a player overtake one who did not spend money. Pay for convenience, not power.

Competing to build something together could be a really rewarding ending for a season. Instead of more fighting in a server vs server where you might lose, having a clear and defined victory condition that is collaborative would leave everyone feeling positive. Once completed, they can bask in the joy of the finished task. Perhaps it could be a really difficult battle the server has to band together to win. People who were once enemies now backing you up. You finish the season with even more friends - forged in battle.

What I’m Left With

I keep wishing that I could make something different, that the world treated its people as better than just a money machine.

In the meantime, I am left paying for these small hits of community, of friends forged in fire. The cost, to my bank account, at least is small.