泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
It's hard to study all the time
It seems like a brand new year started just a few days ago, however, it's already April 2015 at this moment writing this column. One-third of the year has already passed. I have been in the video-game-involved field for 13 years since I first stepped into the gaming industry. I have spent one-third of my whole life working in the game business. Numerous video games have been released. Some of them gained huge mainstream success and others disappeared being shunned by consumers.
Out of countless choices for recent online video games, Hearthstone, which is a digital collectible card game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, has left a deep impression on me. The game is a typical turn-based card game between two opponents. A player collects lots of cards, constructs the player's decks, and competes with the opponent. There are also an online match and a story mode. Nevertheless, the reason why I quite interested in the success of the Hearthstone is that it displays the difference from other recently released mobile games.
Newly released mobile games in the domestic market mainly feature slightly modified Role-playing game (RPG) in various ways. They are virtually the same type of RPGs focused on auto-battle system. Hearthstone, on the other hand, is probably unfamiliar to users who haven't played its PC version. Also, it would have been quite difficult to design game interfaces for mobile users to give them the same user environments with computer-based one.
One impressive feature is that the Blizzard game has solved the learning difficulties. Go-stop or poker games continuedly have been on the market because users can easily learn rules to start the games. Games such as Go, Jamggi, and Gomoku have been provided for a long time, without the big hit, because there are always users thanks to the universality of the rules.
The high barrier of entry for some video games, which is from the learning difficulties, has an absolute effect on user retention rate. Players probably won't waste their time to access the app unless they understand how to play it in the early stage of the game. Retention rate has a great impact on company's revenue since Free-to-play (F2P)—games that give players access to a significant portion of the content without paying and require payment to access additional content—video games have become common in the market. It makes developers reluctant to do any attempt under the influence of the customer retention rate.
As mentioned previously, I don't confident that F2P will be positive for the video game market. But users, who already get used to the current arrangements, probably don't want to go back to before. In these circumstances, difficult rules are something to avoid. Still, Blizzard has overcome the obstacle and had a stellar performance. Studying is hard all the time. Despite the form of entertainment, it's not easy to find a video game which makes not-so-fun rules enjoyable. I expect to see many fun games that help users to enjoy studying the rules.
※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.
(http://www.khgames.co.kr)
Translation by Kim Ki-hui
