What's next in the Monster Capture Genre of Video Games?

[monbattle]

Hey guys,

So Pokemon defined the monster capture sub-genre within the RPG genre.

Since then, there have been numerous other monster capture games, most of them clones of Pokemon in one form or another. Particularly on mobile and facebook which have been commonly viewed as money grabs.

While I see the negative stigma towards mobile/facebook games due to the negative public perception. Take a game like Hearthstone. It's on tablet and will be making it to iPhone this year. This game is what I consider monetization done right. You can purchase any of the in game items using the in game currency. And never need to pay in order to access any of the game's content. (Hearthstone has over 75 million players now.)

I think that as we move forward, games like Hearthstone will define how monetization should work on facebook/mobile.

As a fan of this sub genre, my question is, would you want to see a monster capture game in this genre, that's not just simply a clone of pokemon with a monetization system done right, like that of hearthstone? And what would it look like? I personally have grown tired of playing clones everywhere.

 

[verbatim]

what specifically makes you think Hearthstone does money "right"? I have no experience with the game and am curious as to how you differentiate it from other mobile games.

 

[vonFiedler]

I have no earthly idea how anyone could think a microtransaction system could be right for a monster capture game. That implies that you collect stuff through skill, not money. It's absolutely opposed to being pay to win.

 

[monbattle]

Hearthstone is setup in a way, in which you start with a large number of cards to form a deck of 30 cards. Then, you fight other players in turn based combat in order to obtain additional gold to purchase cards. The key to hearthstone's non "pay to win" strategy, is that from the cards you get, you can disenchant them for a non-purchasable currency that allows you to craft the cards you actually want, instead of constantly rolling the slot machine in hopes of getting what you want.

 

[Shinryu]

Hearthstone is setup in a way, in which you start with a large number of cards to form a deck of 30 cards. Then, you fight other players in turn based combat in order to obtain additional gold to purchase cards. The key to hearthstone's non "pay to win" strategy, is that from the cards you get, you can disenchant them for a non-purchasable currency that allows you to craft the cards you actually want, instead of constantly rolling the slot machine in hopes of getting what you want.

That's technically right from one viewpoint, but consider the amount of gold you earn in a day is extremely trivial given you have 1 daily for more, unless you literally spam battles and keep winning 3 in a row. So yeah, you can not give them a dime and still play, but you're going to get your ass handed to you by anyone who's either played longer since the start or spent money to get the good cards quicker unless you have some insane luck and pull lots of good legendaries (and not the shit ones). Sure there's the disenchant mechanic, but you get literally a quarter (for a legendary) or less of the dust it actually takes to make that card or others of its rarity level, so it's not very efficient at all except for filling in the odd one you don't have. And those useless starter cards? Can't DE them either. I suppose if you get really lucky in arena you can speed it up and make more than your 150g investment, but I've never gotten good draws to make anything decent in it. Like WoW, a lot of Hearthstone is just luck in getting stuff or draws in the game, which for me I really hate, probably why I quit most TCGs in general.

Adding to that, one expansion worth of cards is gated, unless you pay money to unlock them or (again) slowly save up what, 2800 gold to unlock it the free route, with another incoming. The power creep is evident as well, you might be able to get by initially with lower ones but if you don't have the gnomes/goblins ones or Naxx ones, you're going to lose in higher levels of play. There's a reason mechs are all the rage and no one uses old staples like Yeti and such.

So I dunno, if you ask me, it's not really any better or worse than other ftp games out there, it's just slightly more efficient in that you have no use for more than 2 copies of a given card (so you can trash the rest) and you can prioritize what ones to slowly make.

Anyways besides that, I've always liked the DQM series as an alternative to Pokemon. But given the fucked up way Squenix does ftp/micro-transactions with their iOS/Android games, it would be horrible and I'd much rather have the rare handheld release.

 

[Kinneas]

Well, it's happened. Blizzard has started advertising Hearthstone through highly elaborate forum spambots.

As someone who has played Hearthstone completely free to play since beta and hit legend, I... I don't really have anything to say actually. I'm really confused as to what Hearthstone's monetization model has to do with Monster Capture games or how it could even apply. I was hoping you'd found a cool game to play or something.

And for the record, Hearthstone's model is okay, but it makes it beyond difficult for new players to really be able to get involved with the game on any serious level since the amount of grinding involved to catch up with the past two expansions and the next one that's coming in a month is ridiculous. As I said, I've been free-to-play since beta and play at what's considered the highest level, and I'm still forced to already be saving up gold 4 weeks prior to the next expansion release because I know I'll be needing those cards to compete once the meta incorporates them. I've tried to get friends from Smogon involved in hearthstone and the amount of grinding for new cards put them off to the point that they stopped playing.

Would I like to see a new monster capture game that was any good? Sure.

Would I like it to incorporate a monetization model that doesn't punish free-to-play players to the point where they are forced to pay up or have a sub-optimal experience? Sure, I guess, if it needs one at all.

What would that look like? I have no idea. As long as things that cost money don't affect the core game, I'm fine with monetization and micro-payments. I would think that a monster capture/battle game, which would be competitive by definition, would benefit far more from a monetization model like Riot's with LoL, where the only thing that can be purchased with money is skins that don't affect the core gameplay. All stat boosts, mechanics, things that affect the competitive nature of the game are tied to things that can't be monetized. Hearthstone doesn't do that because the cards are the only thing you can buy and the only thing the game needs.

What a confusing thread.

 

[monbattle]

Well have you guys seen any free to play games that have done it well?

 

[Soul Fly]

I've almost given up on hearthstone.

I'm not sitting in a room cooped up for 10 hours a day just to "catch up"

 

[Shinryu]

Thinking about it, this is why I prefer Pokemon to never hit iOS or Android as an app game; imagine having to use "energy" or the in game currency to pick an attack, move a space, or whatever limiting mechanic they tack on to tie a micro-transaction to. What a nightmare that would be...breeding Pokemon? Sure if you have a week's worth of steps or in-game money to use, or you could pay $10 to hatch that egg now >.>

 

[Sanger Zonvolt]

Well have you guys seen any free to play games that have done it well?

I've played a few on Android, and they all have the same issue: yes, you can get to the top by playing for free, but the time taken to get there for free is exponentially more than the time taken paying for it. The only ftp game I have where I managed to get a reasonably maxed out team without making a micro transaction is Brave Frontier, and that has a lot to do with learning how to manage the free gems they give out and the fact that they redid the energy system so you can get more actions in daily. Even then the capture system is RNG-based, and I'm pretty sure my success ties in way more with lucking out on the RNG than my management of my resources. Incidentally, the fact that the game has made enough money for them to make a TV commercial sickens me to no end.

Either way, just about every FTP game has the same issue. The developers need some sort of income to be able to pay people to maintain the server(s), design new units, perform coding, etc, and at the end of the day you only have 3 ways to get the income: ad spamming (ruins game flow), making players pay for the game (defeats the purpose), and micro transactions. If you use micro transactions, then one of, if not the best, way to motivate people to buy them in a competitive game is help ensure that doing so will give a player an edge over others.

 

[monbattle]

I've played a few on Android, and they all have the same issue: yes, you can get to the top by playing for free, but the time taken to get there for free is exponentially more than the time taken paying for it. The only ftp game I have where I managed to get a reasonably maxed out team without making a micro transaction is Brave Frontier, and that has a lot to do with learning how to manage the free gems they give out and the fact that they redid the energy system so you can get more actions in daily. Even then the capture system is RNG-based, and I'm pretty sure my success ties in way more with lucking out on the RNG than my management of my resources. Incidentally, the fact that the game has made enough money for them to make a TV commercial sickens me to no end.

Either way, just about every FTP game has the same issue. The developers need some sort of income to be able to pay people to maintain the server(s), design new units, perform coding, etc, and at the end of the day you only have 3 ways to get the income: ad spamming (ruins game flow), making players pay for the game (defeats the purpose), and micro transactions. If you use micro transactions, then one of, if not the best, way to motivate people to buy them in a competitive game is help ensure that doing so will give a player an edge over others.

So I guess you are saying that there is no free to play game that you are content with. Yeah, I agree that Hearthstone has its issues with the way it monetizes, but its a step forward for a game of that caliber. Premium prices games are always what you can play if you want it to seem "fairest", but for the people out there that don't want to invest upfront, I think Hearthstone is a step in the right direction. I personally have never felt the urge to spend a dime in hearthstone, and I throughly enjoy my playing experience.

 

[Sanger Zonvolt]

So I guess you are saying that there is no free to play game that you are content with. Yeah, I agree that Hearthstone has its issues with the way it monetizes, but its a step forward for a game of that caliber. Premium prices games are always what you can play if you want it to seem "fairest", but for the people out there that don't want to invest upfront, I think Hearthstone is a step in the right direction. I personally have never felt the urge to spend a dime in hearthstone, and I throughly enjoy my playing experience.

I'll admit that the ability to recycle bad cards you have to get better ones on paper is not a bad system in itself. The issue with Hearthstone (at least from what I hear) is the same issue that Yu-Gi-Oh!, Vanguard and other TCGs have: if people stop buying product, you're dead in the water, and the the best way to push product is through power creep. For Brave Frontier, you at least benefit from not being forced to compete with other players, which reduces the need to buy gems if you're patient. Hearthstone, however, is rooted in PvP, so that's not an option.

While being able to recycle stuff helps, I think honestly one the best things you can introduce is a trading system. Trading is what lets companies like Wizards and Konami push product: even if you end up with things you don't want, you can at least fall back on being able to trade anything of value that you don't need for something that you want. The ability to barter and maintain the value of what you get from purchases places gives a lot of players the comfort they need to take the gamble and open booster boxes for TCGs. This is evident in booster packs with bad pull rates: no one wants to buy them because you basically have 1 stupidly expensive card and a crap ton of junk cards. No one buys these packs except bad gamblers because no one has faith that they'll get their money's worth in product. By the sounds of it, Hearthstone would also benefit from a way to trade unneeded cards of high value for something of equivalent value as opposed to selling it back for pennies on the dollar.

Ultimately though, there's always going to be that issue of how accessible a game should be for free players. If free players can get to the same power level as non-free players without significant struggle, more and more non-free players will stop making micro-transactions because there's clearly no motivation to make them. Once your customers stop buying product, your game will be as good as dead. In a game's beta you can get away with free players doing as well as non-free players because you can basically treat it as free advertising. Heck I was playing Brave Frontier before they had 6-Star units introduced, so I was able to easily handle the evident power creep that's occurred. However, somewhere down the line you have to make people want to provide the necessary funding for your game, and unless you can provide a source of income other than creating power creep, eventually newer players will either have to pay to win or drown in mediocrity.

 

[monbattle]

What do you look for in a really good monster capture game? Like top 3 things.

 

[Sanger Zonvolt]

1. Reasonable room for creativity - by this, I mean even if not every mon is the best mon, I should be able to create an optimized team and yet have something unique enough that I can call it "my" team. If everyone's running the same 3 teams, it's not really "my" team more than it is "a" team. Even in card games like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic, two players can run the same strategy or theme, but have enough variations in ratios, tech and the sideboard that those two decks are considered different.

2. A decent combat system requiring human interaction - A lot of the FtP games have very little input on the user's part. I think what separates Pokemon, Dragon Quest Monster, and some of the Digimon games from the other monster collecting games (particularly FtP games) is the fact that once the team is built, there's enough going on that you can't just set the game on auto-pilot.

3. Reasonable control over how to get things - If I want a resource, there should be a reasonable, clear way for me to obtain that resource. In a TCG, if I want a card, I can either pay for the card I want directly or buy packs, pull things other people want, and trade those for what I want. Most FtP games do not have the option of trading or buying single units; you are paying for a chance to get what you want, and if you get other things you don't need you're just out of luck. In my mind, screwing with an RNG and praying that if I donate enough money to it I'll get what I want is not a reasonable way to obtain resources.