Voodoo is well known for their success in the hyper-casual space – producing countless games focused on simple gameplay loops that attract huge volumes of downloads and monetise through in-game ads (IAAs) – with IAAs generating around 85% of their game revenue.
The company pivoted strategy in 2021/2022 following major regulatory changes around ads and user tracking, looking to apply casual/mid-core metagame systems to their hyper-casual portfolio to increase the longevity of their products. This should allow a natural shift towards a revenue split with a majority share from IAPs. This model has been commonly termed as hybridcasual.
Mob Control is their first hybridcasual success, with IAP revenue climbing steadily from Q4 2022, reaching monthly heights of $2m in Net Revenue. (Block Jam 3D has rapidly followed suit – I will cover this in a later post!
This post aims to provide an overview of the key metagame systems driving Mob Control’s IAP Revenue.
What is Mob Control
Before we get into this, what is this game? If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend spending 15 mins playing it – but we’re all busy people, so here is a short description.
Mob Control is a hybridcasual gate runner where users fire blue soldiers through ‘multiplier gates’ that increase the size of their army. They use this army to destroy enemy bases and stop red soldiers from reaching your side of the screen.
The game adds variability through level design – varying obstacles, enemy difficulty levels, enemy types, gate multiplier numbers and smaller level objectives. This introduces a light puzzle-solving feeling, solvable with minimal brain power, but enough to leave the user with a feeling of accomplishment and agency.
Additional note – the game plays with one thumb and in portrait, the holy grail for mobile games.
Metagame Loop
The metagame systems can be split into three areas:
- Progression
- Collection
- Battle Pass
Each system is fuelled by interacting with the core loop but encourages different behaviours.
Progression System
Base System – Scene-building metagame (Short- and mid-term engagement system)
MC uses a scene-building metagame progression system, like Royal Match & Project Makeover. These systems’ goals are to deliver consistent feelings of progression by breaking up larger goals, like an overall scene, into smaller parts, and then re-enforce this with ever-present visual reminders on the home screen.
Royal Match & Project Makeover’s systems have a key issue – their production cost is high. MC has produced a cost-efficient, no-thrills version that delivers on the key goals. It achieves this by providing lower fidelity art that follows a formula, providing users with no choice and producing simple numbered bases after ~40, allowing them to scale to 999 with ease (which will grow impossibly challenging to reach so is essentially infinite).
Every time you play a game round you gain blue bricks; these funnel directly into your base. Each time you progress your base, you gain stars, feeding into the Champions’ League system (explained in the next section). This is a compelling force for engagement at all stages of the user journey, encouraging that ‘just one more battle’ feeling to get the next part of the base built, and extremely long play sessions to prove your worth in the endgame.
The number of blue bricks awarded depends on your performance in each game round – high performance will lead to considerably higher amounts, building a simple and coherent positive feedback loop. Combine this with unit progression and different power-ups, and it’s really clear for users to understand the value-proposition for spending – they will gain significantly more bricks and progress much faster.
Champions League – (Mid-Long term engagement system)
MC’s Champions League launched in 2023, adding competitive and social drivers to the product. Users ‘climb collecting stars, advancing to higher leagues when they reach the top position’. Users in the top league compete in an ‘exclusive God Tier tournament’, which is visible to all users. Users are consistently seeing themselves ranked against others based on their star count.
The core source for stars is through the base progressions system, with the scene-building metagame awarding stars for milestone completion. The most lucrative means to collect stars is through events – which is where the top payers and the most engaged users will earn the biggest portion of their stars.
Gaining positions is incredibly satisfying and frequent, especially early on – building a strong positive feedback loop with the target demographic, ‘duellists’.
These leaderboards are filled with bots, which is a cheaper and more controllable solution to typical league features. Users are given a bucket of ‘players’ that are all within a reasonable distance to allow for meaningful position jumps and attainable short/mid-term goals.
The World Leaderboard displays your position vs all users, although these numbers also feel fake – exaggerated to provide a stronger feeling of social proof.
Users who reach the top tier, Immortal tier, are invited to participate in the God Tier Cup. This is the ultimate long-term goal for users, as this limited event is where the top players battle it out to be the best. This event yields no rewards outside of visual indicators to flex to other users.
This system monetises indirectly by encouraging collection upgrades, power-ups and rewards multipliers to maximise blue bricks gained and LiveOps event performance, which translates to a faster accumulation of stars.
Collection System
Cards
The foundation of MC’s overall metagame is their collection system, seen in products like Supercell’s Clash Royale and Hutch’s F1 Clash. These systems provide vertical and horizontal progression, encouraging high amounts of spend through card acquisition and upgrades. The driving forces of ownership and acquisition of power fuel them.
In MC, users have a collection of Cannons, Champions, Mobs and Ultimates. Users select one card from each category for each level they play – this is called a loadout.
Users can gain cards through playing game rounds, LiveOps events, daily log-in gifts, the battle pass, rewarded ads and direct IAP.
Cards can be upgraded by gaining duplicates – the number of duplicates required scales significantly, increasing the spend cap and product lifespan. These upgrades boost loadout strength, increasing chances of winning and earning higher bricks. At 3 level milestones, users receive a bundle of stars for the Champion’s League.
Collection metagame systems can achieve high levels of spend through the number of loadout slots, verticality, and strategic variety (horizontality). This product is fairly successful in this by providing high vertical level caps, rewarding users for reaching higher levels and utilising LiveOps like the Loadout event to drive the need for collection breadth.
Coins
The other mechanism in this system is coins, which is MC’s soft currency. The only use for coins is to upgrade their collection, through direct card upgrades and global cannon buffs. Like the duplicate system, upgrade costs scale with progression leading to increased pressure.
The system uses generous seeding to build the habit of frivolity in spend – providing you with more than enough to consistently upgrade all your cards as you progress naturally.
The system is not used for first conversion or small amounts of spend, early friction only occurs once the user has either received lots of cards through spending on booster packs or spends their currency on the global buff to increase the fire rate.
Coins become a stronger mechanism for monetisation as users progress further into the product – feeling pressure from harder bots and increased competition in LiveOps.
Battle Pass System
Battle Passes (BPs) are ubiquitous in modern mobile games – so are pretty common knowledge now! Instead of breaking down the system, I will discuss what it does differently and some general thoughts.
MC’s Battle Pass is at the cheaper end due to its hypercasual audience, priced at $4.99. A VIP subscription can bring it down to as cheap as $2.99.
The pass is split into four seasons, with two unique units for each season. One is available for payers, and the other for high engagement (finishing the pass).
The BP is used as an early/repeat conversion tool – generating a significant portion of MC’s revenue due to high DAU & install volume (data.ai suggesting 20% revenue in July 23). New users are compelled by unique units, the removal of ads and the low price point, whereas more engaged users are sold by the low-cost currencies (stars, coins and skip-its).
The challenges system is done particularly well:
- A combination of daily, weekly and seasonal challenges building an assortment of goals and adding variety to gameplay.
- Completing challenges is made simple by one button press – equipping all card loadout requirements.
- Daily challenges are selected to have some easy and some longer challenges. Completing all three allows you to refresh for three more, which all feel slightly harder. These help to drive long sessions without too much impact on the economy as BP rewards are finite and BP XP required scales dramatically.
Skip-its
Another metagame system I’d like to cover is the skip-its currency – a significant revenue driver for MC (data.ai suggesting >18% revenue in July 23). This system is a sub-system for both the Progression and Collection systems.
Skip-its are a currency used to skip rewarded ads – which, as the game stems from hypercasual roots, are present in valuable locations.
Key RV locations consist of end-of-level reward multipliers and power-ups purchasable during levels. These two have a natural synthesis – if you use a power-up you are more likely to have a high scoring level, unsurprisingly, this provides even more rewards when used with an end-of-level reward multiplier.
On the surface, this might not seem very valuable when you consider that making any purchase allows you to skip all ads (like the $2.99 Starter Pack). Well, the reality is that these only enable skipping obligatory ads – skip-its are the sole method for skipping rewarded ads.
When users begin competing in LiveOps, these become essential means to reduce friction, save time and increase your overall output, allowing you to battle for top spots.
LiveOps
In the same fashion as the scene-building metagame system, Voodoo strips back its LiveOps, providing low-cost events that execute the core goal of driving competition, gameplay variety and injecting life into the app.
The events reward you for engaging with the core loop, primarily rewarding you for higher engagement and stronger performance in game rounds, which naturally means higher levels of spend. There are only minor gameplay tweaks, where users might have to aim for one gate during a level, but these small challenges are enough to make the game feel different.
LiveOps events are repeatable, most running on a weekly schedule to help habit formation but provide enough event-type variability to avoid boredom.
Rewards given from the events are unique – this encourages the behaviour of participating in multiple events each week, as these are the strongest ways to acquire each of the rewards. This builds nicely on top of each metagame system, adding time pressure and competition, encouraging periods of heightened playtime, session-ing and spending.
Below is a description of a few of their notable LiveOps events:
Loadout Challenge
Users play with specific loadout combinations to win rewards. This aims to encourage collection breadth, facilitating wider card accumulation and upgrading. This incentivises soft currency spend on upgrading and builds a stronger relationship between the user and their whole collection.
Piggy Race
Users play against a bucket of users and/or bots, depending on their selection. Coins accumulated during this time are split between all users in the bucket, with significantly higher shares going towards users who earn more points during the event.
God Tier
The top 10k users are invited to participate in the God Tier competition. This competition consists of 4 separate weeks of competition. Users are ranked by their stars gained during each period to gain a ‘G’ tag next to their name with the highest rank they have achieved.
Winning this event is highly strategic, requiring careful set-up of card levels to enable high star accumulation from upgrades, combined with high levels of engagement in LiveOps events.
Collect Challenges
These challenges last around 1 day each, in which users are challenged to collect items during normal game rounds. These items appear through specific gates on each level.
Collecting these items rewards users with Stars, Cards, or Coins, depending on the specific event.
Monetisation
So how did Mob Control move from generating less than $100k in Net IAP Revenue per month to $2m?
The strongest driver is the metagame systems design, these provide strong retention hooks, weekly engagement drivers and high levels of competition that enable monetisation. Increased time in the game leads to a reduction in ‘one-off’ high-value purchases, in favour of repeatable purchase versions.
LiveOps systems consistently add time pressure, building a thirst for power in a short time window, diving sales.
Rewarded Video Ads (RVs) (>18% IAP Revenue) – while these ads do not directly add to IAP sales, MC utilises the ‘Skip-it’ currency to uncap traditional one-time ‘No Ads’ IAP packages, providing a frequent purchase stream, new reward for event participation and subscription up-sell tool. These RVs are featured in key areas with clear value propositions, that enable strong event performance and faster progression – making them an essential part of any top competitor’s strategy. Voodoo recognises their importance, as they aimed to provide additional sinks through ‘power-ups’ in September 2023.
Season Pass (20% IAP Revenue) – the season pass is MC’s ‘no-brainer’ purchase each month, providing insane value for all player types – key in monetising MC’s high DAU.
Soft Currency (>20% IAP Revenue) – users can directly purchase soft currency from the store. While not likely an early-game converter, it has the capabilities of driving high early-game sales with the cannon fire rate upgrade. The majority of the spend will come later when upgrade costs scale above coin acquisition. Note: this will now happen more frequently due to higher mid-late retention metrics.
Club Subscriptions – these systems replace the ‘one-off’ Triple Cannon purchase (£9.99), with lifetime subscriptions at higher price points (£29.99 and £119.99) or monthly subscriptions (£5.99 and £17.99)
What do they do well?
Goals
Mob Control’s multitude of systems build out a huge number of short-, medium-, and long-term goals for the users – all that feel reachable and provide meaningful rewards.
LiveOps Events
These fit well into the system, providing unique rewards in large amounts periodically to encourage short-term spend. They successfully make the game feel more alive, encouraging frequent log-ins and session-ing.
Monetisation
MC successfully appeals to their low-spend user base, providing cheap IAPs like the battle pass and ‘no ads’ packs – understanding that these are the key friction points for early, and low-spend players. Moreover, MC has managed to significantly increase the cap for their high-spend players, providing clear pathways to power AND opportunities for small and frequent purchases to increase frivolity.
Low-cost solutions for expensive meta-game systems
MC consistently reduces key features in successful titles to their core, stripping back any extravagance for practicality. Their base-progression system is minimalist and LiveOps events are formulaic in design. Many of these systems feature across Voodoo’s portfolio.
Gameplay Variety
MC’s use of obstacles, enemy difficulty levels, enemy types, gate multipliers and smaller level objectives provide enough room for creativity in level design. Combined with LiveOps, day-to-day gameplay experiences more than enough variability.
Sources
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mob-control-2023-new-features-voodoo-io/
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/comment-and-opinion/79857/mob-control-hybridising-a-hypercasual-hit/
The Evolution of Hybridcasual
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