The Impact Factor

A Devious Pairing: Card Packs and Monetizing Free-to-Play

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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.