Effective Habit Design for Free to Play games
Recently I picked up the book ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear – it’s a nice, feel-good self-development book with the core message that small positive changes to your daily routine can lead to massive long-term growth. Ultimately, this book provides insight into human psychology and habit formation.
Anyway, once you’re finished becoming a better person by eating one extra broccoli floret a day; we can apply this knowledge on the human psyche to business and begin to understand why certain free-to-play games work better than others.
This post is essentially a book summary of ‘Atomic Habits’ with my key takeaways as a Games Analyst.
The 4 Stages of Habits
Humans are goal-orientated – we perform behaviours when we predict a reward. A habit is an automatic action, learned to help us obtain a reward. The book breaks habits down into a four-stage process:
- Cue – this is a bit of information that leads to the prediction of a reward
- Craving – motivation for the reward
- Response – an action to obtain the reward (the habit itself)
- Reward – the end-state
This process then loops depending on the cost of the response and the perceived value of the reward.
In games, we can consider stages 1-3 as the steps that encourage conversion, and stage 4 is what determines long-term revenue (repeat conversion).
It starts with a Cue
1st Law: Make It Obvious
‘Customers buy products not for the want, but for how they are presented to them’
Cues are the first step in the cycle – they are the bits of information we take in that let us predict a reward. For example, the smell of coffee as you pass your local coffee shop on the way to work may trigger the habit of buying a skinny iced sugar-free caramel latte.
Every behaviour is triggered by a cue, so it is essential that cues for behaviours we want to encourage are obvious, and cues for behaviours we want to discourage are invisible.
In games, we typically make cues more obvious through notifications, pop-ups, and red dots
- When your daily rewards are claimable, a user may be reminded through a notification on their morning commute
- Offers pop up on home screens or are featured in prominent positions on in-game stores to draw a user’s attention and action a purchase
- Visible currency balances trigger users to go grind for additional currency when low or drive users to check the store and make a purchase when high!
In contrast, we can make behaviours more unlikely by decreasing the visibility of cues. Some classic examples in games/apps are:
- ‘Log-out’ or ‘do not track’ options in a far-removed menu, out of sight
- Cookie preferences on websites are often displayed in bland text for ‘reject’ options, but the opposite is displayed with bold, vibrant colours
Key point: every behaviour is triggered by a cue, so we need to ensure these stand out.
Attractive cravings
2nd Law: Make It Attractive
We can make things as obvious as we want, but if they are unattractive, they will not be actioned. Cravings are the motivational force behind the habit. What you crave is not the habit, but the change in state it delivers. You don’t crave a level 99 in RuneScape, but the feeling of accomplishment and social prestige it provides.
The book describes this in an interesting way: actions are preceded by prediction, users buy predictions. They buy the prediction the product creates in your mind. If I buy Pepsi over Coca-Cola, I am predicting that Pepsi will be the more enjoyable experience. As such, we want people to predict our products will provide the most attractive outcomes.
This means it’s key to understand what our audience wants when we deliver a feature in our games.
- Clubs/guild features are used to connect with others through the chat and win social acceptance by displaying your worth
- Battle passes are bought because they provide users faster ways to relieve stress through challenges and rewards and, also can offer some social prestige through flexing character skins exclusive to the pass
In games, we have a few levers to make things more attractive.
- Price – typically cheaper is more attractive. We highlight discounts and ‘value’ to clearly show that the price is lower relative to the reward. Of course, this requires analysis to understand whether the increased number of sales gained from lower costs outweigh the reduced revenue per sale. I require twice the number of sales for a $1 IAP vs a $2 IAP to make the same revenue.
- Low social cost/high social reward. Participating in an event or purchasing an IAP should come with no social cost – if we may be ridiculed or shunned for some behaviour, we are unlikely to do it. In contrast, if praised we are more likely to do it! A guild/club leaderboard is a great way of providing users an incentive for their behaviour.
- Immediate pay-off – we like to know our reward will be with us quickly! Time is often used as a gate in mobile gaming, top-tier content requires endless hours of grinding to obtain! Allowing users to skip this via a purchase can be a very strong value proposition.
- Easy to perform. Users are attracted to a product that reduces the friction of their current habits, for example, a crate queuing system in a game-like Clash Royale. This type of product is attractive as it decreases the effort required to log in every X hours to select your next crate.
A Frictionless Response
3rd Law: Make It Easy
The response is the habit – it’s the action performed to obtain the predicted reward.
People often ask how long it takes to learn a habit, but the question should be re-phrased to how many does it take to learn a habit. Behaviours are learned through repetition, the more you repeat an action the more likely it is to become a habit. This is exactly why session-ing in games is key – the more frequently a user opens the app, the more likely your app will be the app they open when they are bored. On the flip side, this can be why it’s hard to get users to join weekly/monthly events: these events happen too infrequently for users to develop habits easily.
When I look back at games that I’ve been hooked on, it’s been games that I’ve been rewarded with each app open! My favourite example is Supercell’s Everdale; this game has you deploy villagers to finish tasks for your town. These tasks are of varying length, so finish at different times throughout the day, encouraging frequent check-ins. The game uses its clubs/guild system to provoke this further as you are expected to keep up with the rest of the members of your guild – you must be efficient with your time! And then you go and throw on their notification system, in which you can select which tasks you want to be notified for by pressing a small bell above the task. These features combined lead to countless sessions throughout the day! This works because it’s easy:
- Rewards come within a few clicks of opening the app
- Notification system means I don’t need to think about when I need to log in
- Social pressure to keep up with the herd!
Humans are lazy, we do what is convenient! So, we should create an environment in our games where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Games use this by reducing the number of clicks needed to install the game, play a match or drive a purchase. This does not mean that all rewards in games should be easily obtainable – but the reward of reducing stress through making small incremental progress towards a long-term goal should be easy.
Where do we make things easier? Well, we have to start considering our product’s decisive moments: these are the entry points to the habits we want users to perform.
- The end of a level is a decisive moment: will a user put the phone down or play again?
- When a user runs out of energy: will they purchase more energy with hard currency or wait for it to refresh?
- When a user sees a LiveOps event: will they purchase the required items to enter the event or skip it?
The desired action in these moments needs to be as frictionless as possible.
- After each race a ‘race again’ button should take you directly to your next race
- Upon using your last energy, a pop-up to purchase energy should appear
- If you are missing items for a LiveOps event, a relevant offer should be featured alongside the event
A Satisfying Reward
4th Law: Make It Satisfying
The response delivers a reward – the end goal of every habit. The reward is what teaches us which actions are worth remembering, so is the reason for repeating the four-stage loop, driving repeat conversion and long-term revenue. Good rewards satisfy our cravings and satisfy them quickly!
We brush our teeth so that our teeth are clean and remain in good health for years to come! So why is flossing such a difficult-to-achieve habit? That’s because the first statement is a lie, brushing your teeth is picked up as a habit because of the immediate and strong positive sensory signal from the mint-tasting toothpaste. When we first start flossing, it is nothing but pain! ‘What is immediately rewarded is repeated, what is immediately punished is avoided.’
This explains why games go to such great lengths to make their loot box opening animations so insane – it is incredibly satisfying to see lights and explosions, followed by that glimmer of gold that hints at a Legendary drop!
For other desired actions, this can be achieved as easily as by setting up clear goals and having visual indicators of progress. When I complete this challenge my battle pass rank goes up, this gets me closer to achieving a rare character. Battle Passes use this idea on steroids, as every challenge has a progress bar, which gives you points towards a progress bar to the next battle pass level, which is ultimately a progress bar until your final reward – and this works wonders!
It’s important that long-term goals can be split up into smaller, short-term goals, or users will feel the cost of achieving the reward is too high! For example, achieving level 99 in a skill in Runescape is a daunting task that can take days of gameplay. This is made more satisfying as it is split into 99 levels, with each level unlocking new content in the game. I can see that 2 minutes of cooking has got me significantly closer to my next level, but I have made almost no progress to Level 99!
Closing Notes
When designing or analysing any feature in a game, we can likely gain a lot of useful insight by using James Clear’s ‘Four Laws of Habits’ as a framework for creating stimulating experiences!
Four Laws of Habits
- Cue – Make it Obvious
- Craving – Make it Attractive
- Response – Make it Easy
- Reward – Make it Satisfying
As mentioned above, this is a book summary from James Clear’s Atomic Habits.