A Devious Pairing: Card Packs and
Monetizing Free-to-Play
Article
Abstract: The race to the bottom in mobile
gaming markets has led to an advent of free to play (F2P) games that monetize via in-game purchases. Subtractive and exploitative in-game purchases
sullied the image of F2P games and left developers & companies alike
searching for solutions. The wild success of the F2P card game Hearthstone has fueled a revolution in
the F2P space, in which buying card packs fuels huge revenues. Opening card
packs is deeply satisfying and, for now, a novel (but devious) solution to
monetizing free games. The perceived value, guaranteed rewards and the joy of
collection keeps players opening packs and invested in the game, be it
financially or otherwise. It looks like card packs might be here to stay.
It’s
electric. Your purchase of ten packs has been so-so. You’ve
gotten rares that you have already opened before and a bevy of commons. But
you’re down to your last two packs. Your big win is coming. That epic you’ve
always wanted. That legendary that forever seemed out of your grasp. You know
that, while unlikely, these next two packs could be the best you’ve ever
opened. It’s the fuel that keeps you buying, keeps you opening, and keeps you invested.
Welcome to the wonderful world of card packs.
It’s a
feeling, a high, I’ve felt off and on throughout my life. I started
playing Magic: The Gathering when I
was five or six. I loved the art, the strategies, the deck building, the
community. But above all, I liked the packs. 15 glorious cards packed perfectly
into a thin foil wrapper. A wonderful mystery sold for the low price of just a
few bucks. Money burned a hole in my pocket in my early childhood—as soon as I
got my allowance I begged to go to the card store so I could finally get my
pack opening fix. Each new pack was an endorphin shot. It was gambling, but not
really. Every pack worked towards my
end goals of collection and of having the cards I needed to build new
decks. I was hooked.
 |
| The opiate of my early childhood. |
What I
never expected, especially once I had mostly moved away from buying Magic cards, was that I would get
trapped in the pack opening vortex once again, but this time in free-to-play
(F2P) mobile games. It took the video game industry a while but they finally
stumbled upon the secret sauce Magic had been pumping out for nearly 20 years. And from what I can
tell, that ‘sauce’ has fueled a revolution in F2P games that’s shaping the
future of gaming.
Mobile
gaming is a market largely defined by its sweeping trends. An idea is sparked
and it catches like wildfire, with the biggest of the big hoping to secure
their place and the small and the imitators hoping to get a small sliver of the
gigantic pie. One such trend is the so-called “race to the bottom.” The crowded
gaming ecosystem made it harder and harder for developers to convince consumers
to play their titles, let alone to
spend money on their game. Game developers and analysts alike noticed that
mobile consumers budgeted very little money towards buying smartphone games. In
response, the price for mobile games dropped dramatically. From $10 to $5 to $2
to the bottom: to free. Making games, marketing them, and getting them placed
on digital store fronts is not an inexpensive process, however, so companies
needed to find ways to make back their financial investment.
 |
| There is a whole lot of 'free' out there. |
The
solution for most was microtransactions: small purchases that contribute to
your gameplay experience. Generally these microtransactions ask for just a few
dollars at a time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, companies found that players
already invested in the game’s ecosystem by playing for free were more likely
to spend money on the final product. Plus, since the game is advertised as
free, many thousands more might try it out. Playing is as simple as downloading
the app. As it turns out, however, F2P games with microtransactions did not
turn out as pro-player as they seemed. In order to ensure some financial
return, key gameplay features were often gated behind microtransactions. For
example, you could have a racing game that offers one track and one car for
free, but all remaining tracks and cars would have to be purchased for real
money. Microtransactions were also used to allow players to keep playing. Many
F2P games used artificial walls to halt player progress that could only be
bypassed by either a) waiting for several hours or b) spending money. Other F2P
titles would pit players against immense challenges that could only be beaten
by a) spending many hours doing repetitious leveling up / resource collecting
or b) spending money to skip that ‘grind.’ F2P-game microtransactions got so
bad that many players moved away from these kinds of games entirely. They felt
exploitative. They felt unfair. They felt mean. So if you were a developer
hoping to make a F2P game with microtransactions as your revenue source, you
needed to do something different.
 |
| I enjoyed Jurassic Park Builder for a while, but the obtrusive and mean-spirited pay walls killed all my enthusiasm. |
That
something different, it turns out, was Hearthstone:
Heroes of Warcraft. Hearthstone
is a F2P card game that I’ve written about a lot here on The Impact Factor (my
review, my
joy of playing, card
balance, new
set reviews, & more). Though it started as a PC/Mac title, Hearthstone rapidly found its home in
the mobile market. Smart design and good marketing made Hearthstone a fast success. Players and critics alike were raving
about it. And Hearthstone was making a lot of money. Hearthstone was a huge contributor to Blizzard’s record
2015, with greatly increased revenues over the previous year. It’s been reported that Hearthstone pulls in more
than $20 million a month. The bulk of that revenue? Players spending money
buying packs. Hearthstone found a way
to get players to spend money on a F2P game and not feel cheated.
Hearthstone's unexpected success has shifted the
F2P game space profoundly. We’re seeing an increasing number of games adopting Hearthstone’s pack-buying
microtransactions to fuel their new titles. Some are card games, some just use
the pack-buying content-collection loop to keep players invested. Duelyst
adapts a card game into a grid-based tactical battle where your units are found
by drawing cards out of your deck. Clash Royale is a tower defense slash
real-time strategy fusion that has players drawing troop cards from a deck. Plants
vs Zombies: Heroes is a new F2P card-based battle game using the beloved
PvZ IP. Even Pokemon is jumping on
board with Pokemon
Co-Master, a F2P board game
for smartphones where you can buy packs containing Pokemon figurines. And the list goes on.
 |
| It might not look like it, but Duelyst is a card game through and through. Sprit orbs = card packs. |
All of this
got me this got me thinking: why are card packs such a successful monetization
method for F2P games? What works about card packs that fails so miserably with
premium currencies or time-walls? I have boiled it down to three reasons.
1. Perceived Value
The
contentiousness surrounding microtransactions often centers around that fact
that they are subtractive. The notion is that developers take aspects of their
game and remove them from the free experience and charge for them. Or they put
in mechanisms that prevent you from playing without spending money. Card packs
work around this cleverly—the feel additive. You can play the base game, all
modes and features, for free. Cracking packs and getting new cards simply
changes the kind of experience you are having, rather than fill in the missing
pieces. Hearthstone, Duelyst and Clash Royale alike provide the player with a decent suite of free
cards to experiment with and build decks. For the best among these F2P
card-based games, new cards augment an already stellar base game. Buying a pack is therefore valuable not because it
completes your experience, but rather, gives you a new one.
 |
| New cards mean new experiences. |
Further,
the permanence of card acquisition goes a long way. Each new pack you open
gives you something concrete, and something that could potentially affect the
way you play the game for the duration of your experience. Spending real money
on a card pack feels worthwhile because the cards are not a one-time thing. Your
monetary investment doesn’t disappear after you spend it. Traditional
microtransaction purchases are transient—getting past that annoying 12 hour
wait by spending money doesn’t remove your future 12 hour waits. Whereas that
card you got from the pack will be sitting in your collection forever. Your purchase
has visual permanence. It’s easier to justify. It feels like a real, physical
commodity.
2. Guaranteed Reward
Gambling
taps into deeply rooted pleasure centers in the human brain. If history is any
indication, promising big rewards for small investments is a great way to
motivate people. And to get them to spend money. The problem with gambling, especially in the context of F2P
microtransactions, is that you lose. A lot. And losing feels bad. Losing can
feel like a complete waste of your money. In a casino, you can just leave or
move to a different game. If you walk away from a video game that you feel has
ripped you off, chances aren’t great that you’ll come back to be burned again. Navigating
gambling-like F2P purchases while avoiding that loosing feeling is a tough one. In
Puzzle and Dragons (a mobile F2P
RPG-match 3 dungeon crawler), for example, the most powerful monsters in the
game are obtained through playing a premium slot machine. To play the slot
machine more than a few times every couple of weeks, you need to spend money. When
you pull the handle and get a terrible result, it feels awful. Your investment
feels worthless.
Card packs
(partially) solve that problem. Like their real world counterparts, each pack
is guaranteed to have certain kinds of cards within. In Hearthstone, each pack contains at least one rare. In Clash Royale, each chest tells you the
gold & cards to expect. Opening a card pack isn’t exactly gambling, because you know you’re guaranteed to ‘win,’ it
just how much you win that’s in
question. It still feels bad to get the bare minimum rewards from a pack, but
it never feels like a total loss. The best F2P card games have ways to make
even the ‘bad’ rewards worth something. In Hearthstone,
cards can be discarded for a resource used to craft any card you want. In Clash Royale, repeat
cards can be used to level up your units or donated to members of your clan for
gold. When you open a pack, you are guaranteed to use every single card you
open in some way. Turns out that goes a long way.
 |
| All the rush of gambling with the reassurance of guaranteed rewards. |
3. The Joy of Collection
Opening packs of
cards taps into ingrained parts of the human psyche about making progress, building
up a collection, and getting the newest & best of whatever you care about. Each
new pack you open could fill in that missing slot in your collection, or that
missing slot in a deck you want to make. You’re one step closer to completing
something that takes a lot of effort to finish. The joyous moment of when you
open up a pack of cards should not be overlooked, either. You get to see your rewards unfurl one by one,
like opening presents on your birthday. The gradual reveal of a pack’s contents
heightens tension for all subsequent cards and protracts out that high you feel
when you get something new. A pack of five cards has five separate moments for
you to be surprised, elated, or crushed. Each pack is a rollercoaster. It makes
sense people want to pay to ride.
 |
| Pack opening is a one of the best rollercoasters I know. |
However the
future might look, F2P games with monetized cards packs are the new now. And
it’s easy to see why. Just be careful out there. It is easy to get trapped in the endorphin vortex. I would know, I live there.
