So, ok, we sell Lassen’s loop. We put it on Steam for PC and OSX, The App store for IOS, and Google Play for Android (to start with, we definitely want to do a Switch version down the road, and Epic Store/Windows Store/OSX store at some point, but we need to reign in the ambition out the gate!)
While this is not for free (although it will be cheap), once someone has bought the game, how do we keep them coming back?
Most larger mobile companies have groups that watch analytics and make adjustments daily, country specific. They run offers based in specific locations, and even, on analysis of spending habits for specific groups of people, will create offers targeted just at them, at what they are likely to go for, based on their playing/previous spending habits.
Groups like King are wildly successful at doing things like this.
But how does a small company like us compete? Well, we aren’t. That’s the bottom line. We don’t have the resources or the people to do this kind of per-day balancing. Oh, we have analytics, for sure, and we’ll definitely be using those but… we have to be more generic in terms of how we keep money coming in, because we don’t have a team of data scientists looking into what the best techniques are, to ensure people are buying new content.
So how do we do that??
Well, for a start, we are shipping with a hell of a lot of content. Like… over 3000 different Riff/Beat cards (Riff Cards being an 8 second snippet of midi music, for one polyphonic instrument, and Beat Cards being 8 seconds of percussion midi music, with up to 6 non polyphonic instruments), plus over a hundred instruments and a hundred SFX cards. So there’s a LOT of cards out there.
Now, there are some cards that the game comes with that are considered Default, in that these cards are not consumable. They will stick around no matter how many times they are used. Default Instruments, Default FX cards, and some default Riff/Beat cards, since they are required by the tutorial.
And we grant you a couple of packs of cards too, on initial creation of an account, so there are things you can play with. But if you want more cards to mess with, you’ll have to buy come In Game Currency, and then buy some card packs.
In Game Currency is also awarded on winning a multiplayer game too, so it’s in the players interests to play some games and win (and some achievements are based around this, too.)
Buy, still, once you’ve bought so cards, so what, right? You have them and you won’t need any more. Au Contraire! Cards are, by nature, consumable. Basically, if you use a card in an multiplayer game – no matter how many times you use it, you can use it as often as you want in that track – once the MP game is completed, that cards usage count goes down by 1. Once it hits zero, it’s gone.
This means that eventually, you’ll run out of cards. And need to buy some more.
Now, unlike other card games, our cards don’t have inherent value in terms of multiplayer. To put it another way, it’s not like a fighting card game, where if you have this one rare card, it gives you an advantage because it’s highly powered. All our cards of the same value as each other; it’s just variance that’s of value.
Because of that, we can offer purchasing of not only random packs of cards (of which, 50% of the cards you are awarded we guarantee you won’t have, unless you’ve got almost everything), but also a group of user selected cards. Want a particular FX card? You can select it in a specific bundle purchasing mode! There’s no reason to not offer this, so why not? Of course, this comes at a premium, but at least we offer this, as so many games will not, for obvious reasons.
Another thing we offer is the concept of Whale bundles. Whale Bundles are basically an ability to buy every card we currently offer, either as consumable, or non consumable – both options are available, at differing cost.
And we offer the ability to buy all cards that will ever be, too! Because yeah, we’ve built Lassen’s Loop so we can continue to create new card content post ship. We build them as bundles, the game picks up there is a new bundle, and downloads it automatically to your device. If you’ve bought the “Give me all cards ever” whale bundle, then they automatically become available to you. If not, they are now part of the range of cards that can be awarded when you buy other bundles of cards.
And that is one of the ways we intend to keep offering a long tail going. New content, consumable content, it’s allllllllll good!