Play to the Audience #2: The Hold

How Successful Games Hold Your Attention

Introduction

This is the second part of Play to the Audience, a series on how games form and maintain a connection with players.  You can read Part One here.

Last time, I looked at how games catch the attention of players - now let's move on discussing how that attention can be maintained.

As with Part One, my focus is largely going to be on lower-budget commercial games with something of a PC bias.

Street Fighter V - Capcom

Wait But Why?

Does holding attention really matter? There is widespread agreement that a good commercial video game should be attention-grabbing but ongoing engagement (or "retention") is a more contentious topic.  Some - particularly those working on free-to-play mobile games - would argue that maximising some combination of player retention, conversion and LTV are the ultimate goals of game development.  Others characterise this focus - and many of the tactics used - as more appropriate for the casino than the living room.

Irrespective of where you fall on that spectrum, it makes sense to look at the data.  It is reasonably well demonstrated that a high number of hours played correlates with units sold, especially on PC.  While a vocal minority of players chafe against live service games and even any form of DLC, engagement with ongoing content has never been higher.

So why is this - surely time-strapped players in certain demographics would prefer shorter experiences?  Aren't many classic games linear affairs, free of excessive systematisation and endless content loops?  I believe there are two main factors here…

Engagement as a Proxy for Game Quality

Game quality is subjective but the closest thing to an empirical measurement we have is broadly "how much do people play the game"?  It makes intuitive sense that if players like something they will return to it again and again, choosing to devote more time to the experience.  If a game doesn't click initially, players will put it down immediately.  

Yes, it is possible to influence this behaviour directly with specific systems, and players do sometimes develop a problematic love/hate relationship with a given title (as anyone who has spent any time on a gaming subreddit will attest), but it is reasonable to believe that there is some very generalised base relationship here.  Caveats, of course, apply - more on that later.

The Recommendation Window

Let's look at a few significant contributors to a player's purchasing decision:

• Personal recommendation

• Endorsement by taste makers

• Store prompts (eg algorithmic recommendation)

• General positive sentiment ("buzz")

Greater retention simply provides greater raw opportunity for the above to occur: the window of time in which recommendations can occur is wider. Longer playtimes equal more Steam pop-ups, more streams, more videos, more social posts and so on.

Developers tend to get frustrated when marketing questions such as "should I do TikTok" or "should I do PR" are met with "it depends" but the reality is that marketing is cumulative and the relationship between its individual components is often ambiguous.  High retention simply maximises the chances for all of these interactions to occur: it could be considered both an input metric and a multiplying factor.

There is likely a form of selection bias happening here as well.  From a publishing and investment perspective, pitches that focus on adding systemic depth and deepening long-term player engagement tend to be much more attractive than those based on simplifying a genre or creating a "bite-size" experience.  While development might take slightly longer and balancing may be more somewhat more complicated, there is potentially a greater margin for error and course correction - if the assumption is that players will be playing happily for a long time, then incentives are aligned and there is less burden placed on creating an instantaneous viral hit.

This creates a loop: games are optimised more for retention, players expect more, publishers sign titles that incline in that direction, rinse and repeat.

Short Hold

As with anything in games, it's important not to be overly dogmatic.  There are plenty of successful shorter games and the myopic drive towards infinite-retention live service games at the high end of the industry has caused innumerable sustainability issues. One useful (though admittedly reductive) way to think about this is the following:

As games get shorter they must hit harder

If a game has a narrower recommendation window, it needs to deliver its payload more efficiently.  The titles that are able to capture player attention successfully over this shorter timeframe tend to be highly evocative experiences such as horror games or visually stunning outliers - they continue playing into the high emotional arousal discussed last time: less Hold, more Catch in some ways.  Big ticket AAA games can sometimes get away with shorter playtimes on the basis of IP, theming, visual impact and core appeal: indeed, with recent efforts like Assassin's Creed Mirage, we've seen a slight move away from maximalist single player content on the part of the bigger players.

To Have and To Hold

Holding attention is an active reciprocal process: the player is asking questions of the game and seeing how it responds - we can think about this in terms of four phases:

• Evaluation

• Exploration

• Integration

• Perpetuity

Phase One: Evaluation

Most players start up a game in "evaluation" mode - they are checking to see if it fundamentally works, if it generally performs as expected and if it meets the expectations established during The Catch. Here are some important considerations for passing this phase:

Bugaboo

It goes without saying that critical bugs early on in the experience are an absolute death blow for games in the modern era: so many promising Steam games with good wishlist counts have had their launches tank due to negative reviews centred on game-breaking bugs.  The cost of entry to the modern game market is a game that functions near-perfectly for the first hour.

Optionality

There was a trend a while ago for gaming YouTubers to head straight to a game's options menu and then lambast its developers if expected features were missing.  This seems to have died down a little but it's still worth thinking about as a facet of the first-time user experience: given that players will often be trying to set their resolution and other options straight away, can you make this experience a pleasant one?

Micro

I use the term "micro" (a slight bastardisation of terminology from strategy games) to encompass the player's moment-to-moment interactions.  Examples of elements that contribute to micro might be:

• The character controller in a third person platformer

• The "cognitive load of a turn" in a tactics game

• The "gun feel" and enemy behaviour in a shooter

This is where the real meat is - whether or not the player "feels right" going in is vastly more important than a nice font in your menus.

It's a complex area, but here are several factors to consider:

• UX Conventions

• Tutorialisation

• Animation and Responsiveness

• Visuals

• Base Genre Expectations

UX Conventions

"The game's control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down. Too often, you'll turn to face a foe and find that your weapon is aimed at the floor or ceiling while the alien gleefully hacks away at your midsection."

Gamespot review of Alien: Resurrection, 2000

The fundamental experience of playing the game needs to be as frictionless as possible: do the controls make sense and work as expected?

You might think that it would make sense to discuss tutorialisation first, but most players will enter your tutorial with a set of expectations derived from games they've played previously (as in the review above, written before the advent of standardised console FPS controls) - these need to be accounted for as wider context.  It's vitally important to look at similar games in your chosen genre, as well as common interaction paradigms.

If you are trying to do something new or different in terms of controls, you must communicate the value of this immediately: sell the changes.

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy - Bennett Foddy

Tutorialisation

Developers have to strike a balance between frictionless intuitive fun and leaving the player bewildered about what they're supposed to be doing.  Zero tutorial "Mario 1-1" style elegance can only work in hyper-specific circumstances; equally a laborious unskippable tour of every minor feature upfront is overkill.

A good rule of thumb for initial tutorials is "what does the player really need to know to start playing?"  Establishing this baseline, then testing it repeatedly with cohorts of new players, will get you to the point where you can be confident that there isn't a major roadblock in the first thirty minutes of gameplay.

Beyond that, making sure that players can access deeper tutorial information through tool-tips, overlays, help menus and other vectors is extremely helpful. Don’t lecture - enable and facilitate.  While there are plenty of highly successful games that become opaque quite rapidly, it never hurts to keep players informed about what they are trying to do.

Responsiveness

If your game involves moving things around in realtime then doing so needs to feel elegant and seamless.  As some elements of this can be challenging technically, many inexperienced dev teams tend to drop the ball here - I have seen far too many prototypes with issues around character controllers, animation blending or UI lag. 

As with most similar issues, the solution boils down to defining the problem and then doing the research necessary to solve it, both on a design and technical level.

Visuals

Aliens: Colonial Marines E3 2011 Demo vs Retail - Cycu1

Luckily, the industry has largely ceased some of the more dubious practices that were prevalent in the 90's around "bullshots" and "Not Actual Gameplay"-style marketing but this is still worth a quick mention.  Players are very quick to pick up on any dissonance (whether real or perceived) between marketing materials and the game itself - mess with their trust at your peril. Real game screenshots should line up exactly with what you have sold players.

Base Genre Expectations

Once all of these surface concerns are out of the way, the game needs to start illustrating to the player how it is leveraging against its genre.  If the player is expecting to build their character at the start of an RPG campaign, but some other alternative system is in play, they need to be shown where the advantages lie for them.  Again, you must sell the changes: players become dubious the second they feel like something is missing.

With Steam's current two hour refund window, this initial game experience can in some ways still be viewed as marketing.  It's a test-drive: you've got the player interested in taking it for a spin and now you need to facilitate their experience, interjecting where necessary to support or clarify, but mostly staying out of the way.

If users don't feel that your game has sufficient scope or potential they will churn quickly - they need to feel that they can live out their dreams! The Elder Scrolls classic "emerging from the dungeon" moment, or a blocky Minecraft biome stretching out to the horizon - this almost numinous experience is a spark that fires the gaming imagination, and it should show up early in your game. To bring things back down to earth, if players are not rapidly discovering new content, experiencing emergent situations or building towards an eventual goal from the get-go, they will start to hover over that refund button.

Phase Two: Exploration

Once a player has survived their initial encounter with your game, they will progress to the next phase: exploration.  This involves figuring out and testing the limits of the experience. 

A deep understanding of the dynamics of your chosen genre is critical to evaluating how players will react here.  It's one thing to create a set of base mechanics which most players will accept for 30 minutes and quite another to turn that into a substantial game.  Developers who have a true affinity for (and usually a large number of hours in) a particular genre are at a serious advantage.

In this recent insightful piece, Chris Zukowski wrote about how former AAA devs should select indie projects.  It's worth a look even if you don't come from that specific background - picking a broad genre that aligns with your interests and skills is critical.  Your work is a dialogue between yourself and a well-defined audience of players, so you'd better make sure you understand how they think.

Who am I talking to?

Many games teams have been told by well-meaning advisors to segment the market in some strange ways:  you'll see pitches referencing "fans of crafting" or "esports enjoyers". Funders will lament this and complain that this vague waffle makes a nonsense of attempts to calculate the addressable market, but the problem is much deeper than just an issue with the pitch deck.

Some developers are not operating at a sufficient level of definition: understanding specific games that your audience is currently playing and the intricacies of how your work is positioned against those titles will give you a much clearer lens (and also make pitching easier). So how can you go about achieving this level of clarity without extensive personal experience of the genre?

Heavyweight Champions

It never hurts to start with the big hitters in a genre - it's obviously good to get hands-on time but be careful of dipping into too many games on a surface level if you're trying to go beyond onboarding and that exciting first couple of hours.  Watching streams and videos by experienced players can be a good way to look at higher-level decision making - make sure to jump ahead to the middle and end of a playthrough or run once you have a good fundamental understanding. Analyse the decisions being made and the language used to describe them - think about what it would take to get players to talk that way about your game.

NorthernLion playing Slay the Spire…again

Steam Reviews

Pictured: a game developer about to read some Steam reviews. (It’s actually Diablo 2 Resurrected - Blizzard)

There are probably many things you'd rather do than spend time reading Steam reviews but they can be an invaluable source of insight into the minds of some of the most demanding players. Let’s take an unusually pleasant example:

Reading reviews provides the opportunity for meaningful qualitative analysis: in the review above, the player talks about their "journey" with the game and their appreciation of its challenge.  While this isn't particularly hard to parse, it does set up an important benchmark for the dynamics of a game in this genre: a high skill-ceiling and sense of mastery is going to be critically important to players; as is the quality of the learning curve. Finishing a single run is an interim goal, but then the game opens up with strongly differentiated characters and decks.

When teasing out this information, you do not have to produce any particularly revelatory insights - as we'll discuss later, this is about establishing broad pillars which keep the development process honest and provide a point of reference when testing and engaging with the community prior to release.

For the roguelike tactical deckbuilder Fights in Tight Spaces (where I was the lead investor and publisher) I was keen to help the devs align with audience expectations at an early stage.  By means of illustration, here are some of the points we drew out together from looking at various games, both positive and negative:

Positive

• Strategic variety

• Emergence

• Long-term learning curve

• "Fairness"

• Run, encounter, enemy, item etc variety

• "The Wiki Effect"

• True replayability - "one more run"

• Turn integrity

Most of these should be clear but I'll clarify the more ambiguous ones.  "The Wiki Effect" refers to the game's possibility space being broad enough to inspire players to make their own secondary documentation of its systems.  Being able to think productively about a game and "theorycraft" while not actually playing it is a hallmark of effective strategy game design.

"Fairness" is a huge factor in player enjoyment for games which use a lot of procedural or randomly-generated content.  Balance is hugely challenging, so remaining alert for situations or content which "feel unfair" during testing is important.

"Turn integrity" is about individual turns providing substantial decisions, minimising "dead" or simplistic turns in the course of a level.  Early on, the game's movement system made ducking in and out of enemy range far too trivial, and that became the optimal (though unsatisfying) play style: addressing this helped to re-establish a wider range of options per turn.

Negative

• "Bad RNG"

• Unclear or unpredictable effects

• Not enough content

• Saminess

• Strategies too obvious or too opaque

These negative points are largely just the inverse of several mentioned above - sometimes this reframing can be useful further down the road in terms of how things are discussed.

For a more formalised and nuanced approach in a similar vein, consider checking out the practice of Kano analysis as described here.

Keeping it Real

Once you have these very broad pillars, you can use them to keep yourself honest. Succesful devs who work on high-retaining games have a very strong sense of their “stickiness” - they know where the bottlenecks are in player attention and sometimes have to be held back from adding more and more content to resolve them.

If your game is not hitting the standards you've established from surveying other similar titles, acknowledge its shortcomings and spend time investigating the issues. If you’re at an early stage or pitching, demonstrate how you are going to meet these standards from the get-go.

Eventually, you will need core community members who are willing to play the game regularly and guide you in the right direction.  On Fights, we used repeated rounds of playtesting with video and player narration, as well as continuous Discord feedback to check our assumptions about retention. This doesn’t have to be rocket science - you don’t need special systems - but you do have to put in the hours and engage fully with the feedback.

Phase Three: Integration

Integration occurs when a player is satisfied that they've started to figure out the approximate bounds of your game but want to continue playing anyway - essentially, they agree fundamentally with your design choices and want to either push themselves to complete the game or otherwise develop a long-term relationship with it.

So what are the traits that take a game from "this seems cool" to "I'm seriously playing this"?

Interesting Decisions

Without wandering too far across the "what is good game design" minefield, at this point the old Sid Meier "games are a series of interesting decisions" chestnut (as well as its rarer variant "a good game is a series of interesting choices") can come in handy.

Here is the man himself talking about this concept but I'll draw out a few key points.

"Interesting" player decisions often involve genuine, situationally specific trade-offs.  Ideally, the option chosen isn't always objectively better but reflects the player's personal approach to the problems the game is posing.  Varying levels of persistence (can the decision be reversed or revoked further down the line?) provide some spice.  Information flow is critical - does the player know too much, too little or just enough when it comes to making the decision?

I'd make one addition to this - the idea of "skill wagering".  If a game has a significant skill component, the player can "bet" on their own skill - maybe I can go into this statistically disadvantageous situation and somehow prevail by making some awesome moves?  Immersive sims and action roguelikes really play on this concept.

The player needs to be able to make these interesting decisions all the way along the progression curve. Yes, it’s fun to be overpowered and walk around stomping everything - and you should let the player have some moments of feeling that way - but these should be few and far between.

Much of this area boils down to expected value over time and how that relates to the player's emotions: what does their journey of tactical and strategic choices look like?

Good Numbers

(Hat tip to Tim Sheinman for recommending Alexander King's blog!)

The word "economy" has taken on some frustrating ambiguity when it comes to games: it's variously used to mean things like the monetisation system in a free-to-play game, the diegetic cost of items in in-game shops in single player games, or the player trading landscape in an MMO.  I'm going to use it more broadly - the economy of a game is the system that encapsulates every resource and currency that circulates within it, from player time investment to weapon damage values.  Thinking of this as a coherent quantifiable economic system can help clarify where issues might lie or where the game's design is underbaked.

This can be a little intimidating - especially to more intuitive or less maths-oriented designers - but there are fun ways to approach it which really take the edge off some of the thornier problems.  Alexander King's excellent "Good Numbers" series is an accessible and thought-provoking starting point.  For a cool-headed and clear look at how player time is fundamental, I strongly recommend this GDC talk from Evan Losi - it draws primarily from mobile games but its lessons are broad. Finally, this piece expresses some of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in economy design.

There are no perfect algorithms that spit out a balanced and fun game (although "maths first" design can work well in specific genres, such as incremental, idle or clicker games).  However, being intentional about the mathematical structure of a game and preparing a useful numerical model early on during the prototype process can save vast amounts of time and energy further down the road.

The Friends We Made Along the Way

Much has been made of "player personas" and Bartle types in the past - while it can be tempting to get lost in the weeds of taxonomy, there's still some value in this type of thinking.

Outside simply enjoying the dynamics of the genre, what are your players looking for?  Are there ways to interact socially or compete even in a game which may not seem an obvious candidate for such behaviour?  Could adding some character depth and narrative work lift the more mechanistic elements to the next level, particularly for those players who are looking for a more personal and emotive experience?  Is there an ever-expanding list of trinkets for completionists to find?

Adding game modes can be a real temptation for over-zealous designers who want to account for different player tastes: I generally always recommend focussing on a single core mode for most of a game's development however.  The demands of a modern audience are such that underbaked design in any form will often meet with early rejection: concentrate your effort on the experience that the majority of players will have.  Veteran design Raph Koster has a great blog on different flavours of game content that drive retention - could these fit into the core loop?

Integrate and Iterate

Integration is one of those tricky things - either players will get there or they won’t. To attempt to exert some influence over this, iteration and testing are the best weapons. So many devs devote their testing time to bugs, onboarding and UX - as we’ve seen, these are very important for initial impressions but perhaps more critical is addressing the question “why do players stop playing”?

Phase Four: Perpetuity

We've tackled some general approaches to holding attention, but what really causes a game to stick for the ultra long-term?  What if we're really going for it and trying to maximise retention?

TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik characterised this as a "thousand hour game" in his recent post.  He mentions that enormous open worlds which sustain continuous content development can be prohibitively expensive for all but the best capitalised developers and then focuses on emergence as the most productive route for indies: "games that are based on systems instead of content".  He emphasises allowing players to develop their skills in the long-term and avoiding "content lock" bottlenecks.

As a broad philosophy, this makes a lot of sense: the combinatorial effect of systemic interactions will always create a longer trajectory than a single defined path.  If you're a developer who is this way inclined, I'd encourage you to lean into it: there is surely much more interesting new territory to be discovered beyond the somewhat repetitive crafting, loot and survival loops which have seeped into so many genres. Give us some improved systems!

I do disagree with Nichiporchik's analysis on several points, one being design which is focussed on the following maxim: "your level is your skill of how to use the acquired gear".  Players can be compelled by a more subtle interaction between numerical attainment and skill mastery, as many RPG's show - this isn't quite as clear-cut as he would like it to be.

I mentioned the Prison Architect subreddit in Part One: here players frequently post examples of their own personal demented problem solving approach or bizarre in-game situation - the game is effectively functioning as a story generator.  "Skill" is a limited lens for this - here players are enjoying the chaos.  Hyper-systemic games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud or Kenshi also have this effect: "players can tell an infinite array of stories" is an intriguing design pillar that can be approached in different ways.

The Long View

Having completed our look at the evolving relationship players have with a game, it's time for some practical examples.

I'll now take a brief look at a selection of current genres and systems which give devs great opportunities for holding attention.  As ever, I'm keen to support and encourage those who want to go for something completely new and different so please don't take this as a suggestion that the only viable genres are the ones I mention.  Also, while I'll trespass into AAA at times, I'm looking primarily to draw out possible opportunities without a gigantic financial barrier to entry.  Buyer beware, your mileage may vary etc, let's jump in…

Trad Multiplayer

Large-Scale Multiplayer

It's impossible to have a conversaton about holding attention without talking about the impact of games like Fortnite, Battlefield, PUBG or more niche experiences like Escape from Tarkov.  I'd even include other "battle royale" variants like Fall Guys in this category.

Grand scale multiplayer allows for a combinatorial array of player interactions in terms of status and skill as well as on a social level - there is always a reason to come back to the game and compete, and no two matches are ever the same.  While this style of gameplay seemed completely inaccessible to smaller teams for years, recent efforts like Battlebit and Foxhole have disproved this.

Team Multiplayer

A more traditional variant of this type of play, team-based multiplayer games (often shooters) still have a huge impact on the gaming landscape.  Games like CS, League of Legends, Valorant, Apex Legends and Rainbow Six: Siege lean heavily into skill-based competition but also feature significant social elements via skins and other cosmetics.

Players tend to cluster around a very small number of these games - several attempts to break the MOBO hegemony of DotA and League in the past, including Blizzard's entertaining effort Heroes of the Storm failed to get lasting traction - so it's difficult to see where this type of gameplay will go next.  However, there could always be another Rocket League-style outlier surprise on the horizon and so any game which can genuinely hook both casual and professional-level players in a short-form competitive environment should never be ignored.

Deathmatch / 1v1 Multiplayer

While currently less popular than in the heyday of Quake (or more recently Starcraft 2), 1v1 competitive match-based gameplay can still have significant retention value.  Pure skill-based gameplay is understandably a more niche option in a world where more entertaining casual multiplayer fare is commonplace, but in terms of pure mechanical depth and strategic richness, RTS strategy games in particular have made huge contributions to modern game design.  One area where 1v1 gameplay still thrives is fighting games, with current iterations of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Smash Bros and a panoply of anime fighters drawing significant audiences.  Again, this is a very tough area for new entrants but niche games like Skullgirls have managed to make an impression.

Points to Consider

Skill

Competitive multiplayer offers some of the most advanced player skill development available, and skill acquisition is a huge driver of retention.  The "easy to learn / hard to master" maxim is readily applicable here.  Matchmaking, leaderboards and other social incentives can have a huge impact on skill-based multiplayer experiences and developers need to be mindful of how these are organised.

Skill also requires attention to microscopic detail - f your game relies heavily on skill then be prepared for long iteration and testing cycles before you nail the right feel.

The significance of skill varies across the board and it can be a fruitful dimension for designers to play with in unexpected ways.  It is always worth challenging the role of skill and how it interacts with other systems, particularly in the long-term.

Builds

The concept of builds and loadouts will come up several times as we look at different gameplay systems, but RTS and MOBA games particularly exemplify how the development, memorisation and deployment of appropriate build sequences can be a compelling behaviour that players want to experience again and again.  The knowledge of what to do and when, with situational pivots and wildly creative meta-breaking counter-play is a thrilling drama that can lend an almost infinite possibility space to competitive interactions.

The Esports Problem

As esports rose in popularity, so too did the number of games being pitched as "appealing to esports fans" at the concept stage.  This outside-in approach to development makes little sense, as esports competition arises organically around competitive games that draw a persistent audience, rather than by design.  Esports fans tend to focus specifically on their game of choice - one that they want to invest hundreds of hours in following or playing.

Instead of "trying to build an esport", devs are better off focussing on creating a game that is still fun to play after the 10,000th match.

Awards Ceremony

Multiplayer games often great at summarising player achievements after a round, granting them unlocks or otherwise celebrating their play with “play of the game” style moments. “Ceremony” is an important component of UX that can help to amplify the player experience and increase retention.

Survival

Asymmetric Survival / Survival Horror

Survival Horror has traditionally been a huge single player genre with titles like Outlast and Amnesia fuelling an early phase of the modern indie explosion.  Recently, co-op multiplayer has taken a front seat as the success of Dead by Daylight, Phasmaphobia and the recent explosive hit Lethal Company have shown.

These games present dynamic, emotive gameplay possibilities coupled with a powerful social element.  Streaming has always played a role in marketing for horror titles, but allowing multiple content creators to interact in the same space has a strong attentional pull - players immediately want to join in the fun and recreate the experience with their own friends.  Co-op is often worth considering as an option but as the success of many of these titles rely on trends, it's not a catch-all solution.

Instant emotion, evolving systems and socialisation: it's a powerful combo.

Sandbox / Survival / Crafting

Since the more innocent days of Minecraft, Terraria and Don't Starve, this broad category of games has come a long way with countless flavours and iterations.  Done right, there can be enormous potential for systemic expansion or even crossover with other attention-holding systems we've discussed (The Forest and its recent sequel combine horror survival elements with a broader sandbox approach, for example).

There is a risk of traditional recipe-based crafting and looting eventually becoming stale, so a degree of creative novelty is a good consideration for devs moving into this space.  Consider the success of Zero Sievert, a lo-fi 2D homage to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (yes I did the full-stops) series - again, using skill as a modulating element and finding a unique thematic twist can be a winning formula.

Points to Consider

Frameworks

Survival-style games are a broad spectrum, varying hugely in scope depending on their inclusion of sandbox and crafting elements.  They are proof that both tight round-based matches or levels, and much more open-ended exploratory play can work, depending on the integrity of the systems they contain.  Looting and crafting are about risk, reward and combination: developers don't need to be so literal about copying these systems from the previous hot survival game; there is space for innovation as long as they sell the changes.

Hyper Systems

It can be informative for survival developers to look at the evolution of No Man's Sky from sparse exploration sim with survival elements to full-blown hyper-systemic automation-fest over the course of its many updates. While its initial design represented a more distinct and original direction, the game built a wider audience as it added systems.

Social Elements

While Among Us and a handful of other titles like Town of Salem currently dominate the purist "social deduction" space on PC, survival multiplayer with a social twist continues to be a significant area.  While players have limited slots for co-op or other group multiplayer experiences in their gaming time, adding interpersonal drama just might give your game a shot at making it into the rotation.  Hell is other people, after all.

Environments and Progression

Gaining mastery over a complex enviroment is a hugely powerful human motivator - very few other genres present such a compelling psychological proposition. Demonstrating the scope of the ground that the player can cover - whether literally or metaphorically - early on can have a profound effect.

Simulation

Trad Simulation / Management / Automation / Farming

Traditional simulation games in the vein of SimCity or Transport Tycoon are perennial favourites, offering players maximal creativity in the systems they build.  It's also a healthy area for indies with titles like Production Line or Let's Build A Zoo showing huge capacity for ongoing play.  The most common indie dev advice several years ago was "just make a city builder" - despite an enormous number of genre entrants, city-builder-with-a-twist persists as a great way to maintain long-term engagement.

Farming games often provide a lighter version of this style of gameplay - much of the "wholesome" area revolves around slightly simpler systems that hold attention in a gentler, slower-burning manner.

At the other end of the spectrum, you could argue that idle games are a form of brute-force automation gameplay - they do away with most of the trappings to reveal the endless spreadsheet beneath.

Role Simulation

"Simulator" style games abound on both PC and consoles, with Power Wash Simulator being a recent breakout success, and novel settings such that depicted in as Spilt Milk’s recently Kickstarted Trash Goblin popping up in the indie space.   Throwing a player into first-person and letting them do any task, no matter how mundane, can help to create a flow state and enable long-term goal-setting.

Points to Consider

Big Goals, Slow Burn

While the rubric of "simulation" is now so wide as to be nearly meaningless, one thing most simulation-style games have in common is the ability for players to project themselves forward into the future and think about what they might accomplish.  The brilliant programming and automation games from Zachtronics have this quality in abundance - there's a huge feeling of power and potential as you learn to build your own solutions to increasingly complex problems.

Simulations also allow for the control of progression across varying timescales: developers have a lot of direct access to the pacing of their game and this can help re-ignite and spread out player attention where appropriate.

Optimisation

Can players tweak or optimise their performance as they go?  What levels of granularity are they able to address - can they make both huge strategic changes and microscopic alterations?  Optimisation is a form of strategic skill - it can be deeply satisfying to cultivate in a game, and stepping back occasionally from the design to ask questions about the optimisation space is a useful tactic.

Role-playing

Trad RPG

Baldur's Gate 3 has just thrown the traditional CRPG genre back into the mainstream spotlight once again after years of being considered a niche pursuit - it's a style of gaming which has stood the test of time and is still ripe for modern innovation.  Indies like Disco Elysium and Kenshi have taken the RPG into uncharted territory, and smaller games like Citizen Sleeper and Roadwarden have cleverly deployed RPG mechanics to augment a narrative adventure game structure and keep players interested over time.

Action RPG / Soulslike

"Action RPG" is another category which encompasses almost diametrically opposed game design philosophies: Diablo and Path of Exile are hands-off clickfests during casual play (although high-level and PvP are a very different story) while Dark Souls and its multifarious progeny require intense skill development and memorisation as the cost of entry - another example of skill modulating systems.  What both styles have in common though is that they provide enormous scope for player development - surviving either type of game may be an achievement for many players but true mastery takes years.

MMORPG

The hardcore traditional MMO still has a tremendous audience, as Old School Runescape and Wow Classic have proved.  I suspect there is still quite a lot of room in this genre, as it was neglected after an inevitable gold rush attempt from bigger publishers.  Years ago, indie-scale MMO's like Dead Frontier and Realm of the Mad God proved that you could put a low-budget spin on things and still generate great returns - perhaps there's more to be done.

Points to Consider

Rolling the Dice

RPG's do a great job of making chance and probabilistic elements explicit - the current trend for on-screen dice rolls creates drama and tension without players feeling like they're overly beholden to RNG.  Combining dice rolls with stats or equipment creates a clear delineation - it shows players what they are missing and what they can aspire to as their character improves.

Player-as-System

Where simulation and automation games are about building extrinsic systems, RPG's are more intimate, in that the player is often focussed on building their character or party.  Thinking of the RPG player-character as a simulated system in their own right can be productive design thinking - designers don't just need to stick to the traditional D&D stats or other mechanics.

Farm to Table

RPG elements combine well with farming and building mechanics - allowing the player another small system to look after in the game world helps create a further sense of progression and provides a reason to keep coming back.  Lighter subsystems like this can work even in more pared-down RPG's.

Stories in Context

Where shortform narrative games have struggled in recent times, smaller narrative RPG's can perform really well if they combine compelling systems and stories.  Designers coming from a narrative background should pay attention to long-term progression curves and the need to keep events and rolls fresh throughout the game - it’s important that the mechanics have real integrity.

The Elements in the Room

“Adding RPG elements” became almost a meme years ago as AAA developers attempted to shoehorn them in to add some cheap depth (with varying degrees of success). When blending unusual systems together, developers need to demonstrate a clear understanding of the implications: get it right, and you can spawn a whole new genre as happened with the advent of immersive sims in the late 90’s, which weaved RPG stats and nascent stealth mechanics into a zone which had been dominated by purely skill-based shooters. These are likely to make a comeback in the indie space soon with the arrival of Gloomwood and other post-boomer-shooter efforts, and so could be an area to watch.

Roguelike

Action Roguelike

The modern roguelike genre has exploded since Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac  over a decade ago, with games like Hades and Dead Cells proving that pairing evocative art with tight action controls and randomisation is a winning formula.

This has led some devs to assume that any game using elements of a roguelike structure - for example, procedurally generated levels and items - will gain an audience simply by virtue of placing itself in a cool category.  Obviously there is much more complexity to it than this - roguelike players can be a very demanding audience.  Games like Streets of Rogue combine nuanced systems with vast amounts of content to create a lavish, expansive experience - this is what the audience has come to expect.

Turn-based Roguelike / Roguelike Deckbuilder

The turn-based flavour of roguelike is also still surging in popularity - infinite replayability and classically "interesting" decisions based on trade-offs are a winning formula.  The obvious Slay the Spire, Monster Train and Darkest Dungeon-alikes abound but again, there is still a lot of space in the genre:  Dicey Dungeons, Luck Be A Landlord, Super Auto Pets and Peglin prove that mechanics other than trad turn-based combat or deckbuilding can deliver a lot of value.

Points to Consider

Gameplay Windows

Roguelikes provide a great opportunity for designers to think about holding attention in different time windows: the immediate momentary skill- or turn-based decisions; surviving to the next round by choosing appropriate upgrades and long-term build-based strategy.  Getting these right is the key to a compelling roguelike but it's a principle that should also be applied elsewhere.

The Long Haul

While it is relatively easy to build new content for most roguelikes compared to other genres, balancing and crafting long-term gameplay is a real time commitment for developers. This is something which is often not factored into development schedules - teams need to be clear on how long they expect this to take and how their efforts will be structured. Organising data and testing environments to streamline this process as much as possible will pay dividends later on the development process.

Infinite Unlocks

Gaining access to new items and item combinations which will refresh the next run is a huge component of roguelikes - the cadence with which regular items are handed out to the player, as well as the progressive unveiling of secrets, will determine how generous the game feels over the long-term.

Strategy

4x / Grand Strategy

The "Paradox Game" (or is it the "Hooded Horse Game" now?) seems like it will never go out of fashion, particularly with PC players.  Yes, the Civs and Crusader Kings of the world still dominate but smaller titles like Against the Storm are becoming increasingly common.  These games are among the most system-dense out there and can be very challenging to develop - especially as attempts to streamline or simplify them can frustrate players looking for infinite scope.

Grand Tactical

Games like XCOM which place tactical encounters in a larger strategic context can perform very well - look at the Xenonauts series for an indie example.  Pure tactical games often struggle as players perceive them to be too bite-sized and potentially repetitive - they need that magical FTL or Into the Breach quality to them in order to transcend those expectations.  However, adding longer-term objectives in the form of a detailed, living "world map" or other systems can change things up.

Points to Consider

World Domination

Large-scale strategy games offer a lot of space for players to expand into - the classic Civ sensation of growing from a single unit to a globe-spanning empire provides a clear set of innate long-term goals and possibilities.  It’s almost the interface equivalent of the expansive terrain in a survival game: games which go big on theming often allow themselves a natural scope for ambitious systems.

Strategic Layering

Every layer of a larger strategy game needs to work as a coherent system in its own right. Development time focusing on iterating each one and asking playtesters to concentrate their efforts there for a time is essential - taking a modular approach is a good way to develop deeper experiences in general.

Expressive Data

Players need to feel that, although they are interacting with hyper complex systems, their actions are still meaningful beyond “spreadsheet impact”.  Designer Soren Johnson is excellent on this topic and his 2022 GDC talk is a must-watch for anyone interested in this general area of game design and production.

Hold Out

It's worth restating that I don't believe the correct strategy for newer developers is merely to select one of the above-mentioned genres in the hope of striking it rich.  For one thing, it's vitally important to work in a broad gameplay area that you and your team connect with on a personal level - you won't stay the course otherwise.

Also, there are many more subsections of gaming I could have mentioned - ultra skill-based games like “boomer shooters”, lavish outlier visual narrative experiences, unclassifiable procgen investigation games like Shadows of Doubt, technical outliers like Teardown, cosy toyboxes like Townscaper…there are so many individual examples of games and niche genres which capture the imagination of players that it is hard to select just a few without attempting to catalogue our entire medium.

Obviously, I haven’t touched much on mobile either - many successful mobile titles are drawing inspiration from PC classics when it comes to longer-term retention, inflecting their shorter session length which what Nicholas Lovell has defined as the “retention layer”. Many of the principles I’ve discussed here are the same, however there is a little more emphasis on getting players to return and so mechanics such as time-based rewards, log-in bonuses and idle progression coupled with offline push notifications are often deployed. Mobile developers tend to be more specific and aggressive about KPI’s and A/B testing - again, you don’t have to be making a full-blooded free-to-play time-sucker to investigate some of these tactics!

Conversely, PC indie devs are successfully bringing models over from mobile. For example, the recently launched Factory Town Idle capitalises on an increasing trend for clicker / idle games on PC with some clever use of offline mechanics. As its dev Eric Asmussen points out, this structure has been great for retention.

So what should developers and funders prioritise here, and what questions should they be asking about the projects they take on? Here’s a selection:

• Who are we targeting and what are their genre expectations?

• How do we sell the changes that our game makes to that audience?

• Can players build a true relationship with the game based on their own preferences?

• Are there game systems which help to avoid “content lock”?

• How does player skill modulate the game systems?

• Can players genuinely build systems themselves? What tools do they need?

• Are those systems a form of self-expression?

• Is cosmetic or aesthetic self-expression possible?

• Have we considered varying strategic time windows and decision persistence?

• Are social dynamics used as multipliers?

• How wide are the “build space” and “optimisation space”?

• Are truly divergent playstyles viable?

• What are the KPI’s we’re using to measure retention and how to do we plan to track these?

Against the Storm

As I mentioned at the outset, not every game needs to be a sprawling monstrosity.  A game needs to hold attention for the duration of its story - not its diagetic narrative, but the story that its players are crafting for themselves.  Starting from nothing, facing obstacles, challenges and setbacks, you want players to transform themselves and shift their priorities - their thought processes should embody the game's design themes by the time they are done with their playthrough.

Very high-retention games like grand strategy titles can take massive amounts of time and resources to build - smart indie devs often choose a more tactical approach.  This works well as long as the systemic depth is proportional to its commercial ambition, the game's Catch and initial emotional impact on the player are well configured and the game is explicit about its intentions.  Games like A Short Hike operate on this principle: a stunningly beautiful quirky world with strong interactions and little friction.  Bithell Games' Solitaire Conspiracy uses hyper-elegant visual design and witty narrative to augment a tried-and-tested gameplay system.  Both of the games I just mentioned were made to strict budgets and timelines: again, ambition and systemic depth need to scale together.

Of course, it is possible to break the "rules" completely (look at the runaway success of Pizza Tower, for example) or structure your business around a genre that you personally love if you are in it for the long-term: Wadjet Eye Games is a great example of this.  If you know a group of players inside out and you make games that hold their attention specifically, you will be at a huge long-term advantage over many developers who are out there to chase trending Steam tags.  While a game may be short, truly lasting emotional impact will always shine through.

If you're in a very challenging space, such as shortform narrative games, there are always new ways to add depth.  I enjoyed Simon Carless' recent dive into Slay the Princess for example, and there are plenty of other directions which could be tried in order to inflect story-rich games with some longer-term appeal - keep asking questions of yourself and your intended playerbase and don’t be afraid of innovation.

Played Out

Over the course of these two posts, I've argued that games need to pack a strong initial punch and then direct that engagement into a long-term structure in order to maximise their chances in today's absurdly busy marketplace.  When building and funding games, we need to be honest about what we're trying to accomplish - audience connections need to be tested and nurtured along the way; we can't just assume that because we're in a "hot category" or we have art that seems to align with other games that everything will go to plan.

Truly great game projects will stand up to tough questions: would this game cause someone to stop scrolling through their feed and then start a relationship which could last a lifetime?  Does it have the excitement and integrity to go the distance? Do we have a Rocket League on our hands - a project with so much sticking power and such a perfect skill curve that it transcends concerns around theming? If I go here, type in the relevant Steam tags and compare this project to the top ten games, can I imagine players migrating over?

The audience for games is wonderful and diverse, but it can also be hyper-judgemental and fickle - in order to craft experiences that engage with it effectively, we need to get ahead of its demands and build thrilling games that last.