Lost Crypts is fast-paced coop dungeon crawling web game. Think "Gauntlet" meets "Rogue" in your browser. A lot of players have found it fun, but a solid fun game doesn't necessarily equal $$$. The following is a post-mortem of the monetization for the game looking three reasons why Lost Crypts monetized poorly as a web game.
Problem 1: Non-ideal gameplay for free-to-play monetization.
When I first started work on the game, monetization was not the most important factor in the design-- I had wanted to make a Gauntlet-like web game for some time. I had a somewhat naive idea that players having fun leads to players spending money. But I had played very few games that used microtransactions and not spent money on any. During development I continued to research monetization options and adjusted the game design accordingly.
One thing I learned from several sources was that the game play model I was going with was likely to face an uphill battle in free to play monetization. Successfully monetized webgames tend to be non-arcade, social and revolve around a large number of short sessions. One monetization expert I talked with had some great suggestions, but warned me that, "roguelike, shooter, and real-time party multiplayer are honestly all warning signs for us that a game is going to have trouble monetizing."
Another source, a Playnomics report on social, web and mobile games, had a large amount of game data and gave similar warning signs for an action-oriented game: Arcade game players have a lifetime average of 1.4 sessions and 23.9 minutes of total game time. Non-arcade game players average 17.9 sessions and 516.9 minutes of game time.
Problem 2: Weak retention
Most of the revenue for free to play games comes from a few highly engaged players over a long period of time. A great free to play game that entertains players for an hour or two will have much lower revenue than a good game that entertains players for tens of hours over a period of months. I'm generalizing here, but this presentation from Kongregate is fairly convincing:
Look at slides 14 and 16, and note how much revenue comes from long engagement-- more than half of revenue comes from players who play more than 500+ sessions and 90% comes from players who play at least 50 sessions.
Shooter/arcade style games have difficulty retaining players for those durations and Lost Crypts has not been an exception-- most players, even those who play 10+ minutes in their first session, never return for a second game. Furthermore, even highly engaged players who spend an hour or more in the game frequently seem to exhaust themselves on the game after only a handful of sessions. Lost Crypts' most dedicated player has played fewer than 50 games, despite having exhausted most of the game's content in the 17+ hours he has logged in the dungeons.
I have continuously incorporated features into Lost Crypts to improve player retention, but it currently seems unlikely that some incremental changes will push a significant number of players into the many hours of play where many successful free-to-play games generate most of their revenue.
Problem 3: Players satisfied with the free experience
Players have the reasonable expectation with free to play games that they can play your game for free. And not just a demo where players must pay to unlock the rest of the game. Players expect they should be able to play all of the game's primary content without spending a dime. F2P games get players to open their wallets in several ways: by selling items that make the game easier, by limiting the rate of free play, or by selling additional content that isn't necessary for the core game experience.
Lost Crypts uses Soulstones as its premium currency. Every player starts with 3 and they recharge over time, but only to a maximum of 3. Initially, Soulstones had just one use: resurrecting when you died so you could keep playing from where you were. After the introduction of magic items and some stronger persistence mechanics, they gained a second use: letting you protect items from being lost if you died. Now there are additional uses: starting at deeper levels (you can start at half your deepest unlocked level for free) and creating private game instances (this is the only feature that requires players to make a purchase).
Players are using Soulstones, but the vast majority of players are getting lots of playtime using just the free ones. The most dedicated player managed to consume most of the games content and even was exploring depths of the dungeon I had not thought reachable during early beta using the free stones.
I have since adjusted game play to make progression slower with the free stones, but currently it is still too easy to reach mid to late game content in a few days play and there is a limit to how much the difficulty can be dialed up before it becomes either frustrating or perceived as a "pay to win" game.
So if the game is fun, can't you make money on the small percentage of players who do pay?
This is essentially the case with almost all free to play games, as discussed in Problem 1. However there are some financial realities:
- I can't work for free forever. I started the game from a comfortable position of having saved enough money over the years that I can afford to take some time off to do something that isn't necessarily profitable, particularly something that makes an impressive portfolio piece. So I can't continue to add features and make iterations indefinitely in hopes that one of them will make the game massively profitable.
- The game has ongoing costs.
Here's the back of the envelope math using ballpark figures:
The technical design makes it relatively easy (although not automatic) to scale the number of servers in response to demand using Amazon ec2 instances. I estimate that a medium ec2 instance can support approximately 50-100 concurrent players. Let's say the number is 75.
Players do not distribute themselves evenly throughout the day, so if I want the server to support the maximum, data shows that the maximum is between 2.5 and 3 times the average number of users. So a medium ec2 instance can support an average of 25 users, about 18,000 user hours per month.
A medium ec2 instance is 12 cents an hour, or $90 a month, plus bandwidth. That means that if the game makes $0.005 per user hour, it is guaranteed to lose money under ideal circumstances. If the game is making that much or less, I could improve profitability by preventing people from playing it.
Reality is less forgiving than the ideal scenario: instances will often be under utilized, plus there will be additional costs related to the game excluding development. So let's say that $0.01 per user hour is the cost per player for hosting.
The good news is that the game currently steps over this conspicuously low bar. The bad news is it still ignores many additional costs that are either fixed or do not scale linearly with the number of players and making enough money for me to live on.
