1. INTRODUCTION
The freemium model has changed online gaming over the past decade. Revenue from mobile games exceeds that from consoles and PCs combined, 64.5% of which comes from the top 10% of paying players called whales. It is essential to know how whales interact with this model to advance game mechanics. This essay studies play theories related to whales’ incentives, aiming to find the influence on virtual economy via a game called Clash Royal (abbr.CR).
The Swrve Monetization Report 2019 (1)
The Screenshots of Clash Royal (by this research)
2. SEVEN RHETORICS OF PLAY
The Ambiguity of Play (Sutton-Smith, 2009) elaborates Seven Rhetorics of Play for easier acceptance. It is reliable to match players’ incentives with this theoretical foundation. Firstly, the rhetoric as progress indicates children playing for physical and intelligent development, like games prompting better memories or strategies. Secondly, the rhetoric as fate shows how gambling or probability works, not relating to resources, abilities, or intelligence. Thirdly, the rhetoric as power strengthens a strongman controlling conflicts for honor, resources, or lands. Fourthly, the rhetoric as identity underlines maintaining reliance and cooperation. Fifthly, the rhetoric as imaginary creates an experience of aesthetic, freedom, or reverse reality. Sixthly, the rhetoric as self spotlights the intrinsic experience to cognize oneself. Seventhly, the rhetoric as frivolous serves as the contrast of the others.
The Ambiguity of Play
This research analyzes whales’ paying preferences to match the virtual economy(Yamaguchi, 2004) in CR along with game mechanics, and compares the current design with the past (R. A. Bartle, 2004).
3. ANALYSIS OF IN-GAME ECONOMIES
The core gameplay of CR is battling level-matching opponents with strategical cards, types of which include troop, spell, and building sorted by function, and common, rare, epic, and legendary classified by quality. Based on two simplified virtual economies, to analyze commodities for selling, the main economic flow, whales’ preferences, or inducements of consumption are legible to sense.
A simplified view of two parallel economies(Simpson, 2000)
Shop Screenshots (by this research)
Economic flow and mechanics of CR (by this research)
4. WHALES’ INCENTIVES AND INFLUENCE ON VIRTUAL ECONOMY
From the detailed mechanism above, compared to common players, the rich buy gems and priorities to get high-quality cards with less time and more quantities, which means a powerful control over rapidly upgrading levels and winning resources as a virtuous cycle. This inducement is an incentive of power. Meanwhile, clans have become a social center for clanmates to cooperate, implying the motivation of identity. Other intentions are less likely to attribute precisely. For instance, knowing battle strategies is not the purpose of progress, otherwise counted, and the rich spend various resources for chests as lotteries, not like the rhetoric of fate. Also, the simple aesthetics of CR cannot be imaginary, and then intrinsic experience (play for self) or frivolous behavior significantly depends on individual cases hard to distinguish. Ultimately, the crucial incentives of whales are motivated by power and identity, mostly as Achievers. (R. Bartle, 1996)
To achieve more efficiently, whales paid a lot more for time-saving (unlock chests) and fruit-harvesting (more rewards), leading to a principal gap of efficiency (=fruit/time) between them and the others, which changed the relationships of player-to-player and player-to-NPC, and the value of virtual resources to an unbalance. To make the virtual world sustainable, the balance of gameplay is increasingly vital (Taylor, 2006). As a result, game designers have advanced card attributes, commodity prices, economic flowability among players and NPCs to narrow the gap, for example, shorter time to unlock chests, broader channels to generate resources, newer stuff to purchase, bigger quantity to obtain, and diverse relations to maintain.
5. CONCLUSIONS
Whales are a significant stimulus for development in the era of freemium, and future games should combine players, companies, and researchers. Extended research or design could be how to realistically simulate economic situations inside virtual worlds with AI.
NOTE
(1) https://blog.swrve.com/its-here-the-swrve-monetization-report-2019
REFERENCES
[1] Bartle, R. (1996). Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDs. Journal of MUD research, 1(1), 19.
[2] Bartle, R. A. (2004). Designing virtual worlds: New Riders.
[3] Simpson, Z. B. (2000). The in-game economics of Ultima Online. Paper presented at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference, San Jose, CA.
[4] Sutton-Smith, B. (2009). The ambiguity of play: Harvard University Press.
[5] Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture: The MIT Press.
[6] Yamaguchi, H. (2004). An analysis of virtual currencies in online games. Available at SSRN 544422.
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