The Browser Game

In my self-imposed hermitdom, I’ve been playing a lot of Browser Games as a change of pace and essentially as a time-eater.  In particular the titles I’ve paid most attention to are Ikariam, Travian, and more recently Wild Guns.  Ikariam and Travian are conceptually what you would get if you made a casual version of Civilization, built it as a browser game, and made it a lot shittier.  Wild Guns is made by the same company as Ikariam, and it looks like they saw Travian, stole the gameplay and business models, and put a wild west theme on it.

A number of years ago I spent a lot of time playing browser games like Archmage, and while the production quality seems to have increased somewhat, the game play is not significantly better.

Gameplay works like this:  Resources exist, and they are given to you as a function of infrastructure you have built over long swaths of time (like, hours).  The purpose of this is to make you log on every day or several times a day, over weeks and weeks to maintain your kingdom.  You use these resources to build further infrastructure, which in turn either generates more resources, or allows you to build a stronger military.  You are then encouraged to attack other players using this military.

For me, this is where the game starts to fall apart.  As there is essentially an indomitable amount of players in the game, you can’t hope to destroy them all.  The only reward for attacking others is further resources, but the amount of resources you raid are almost certainly less than the resources it took to create the military you lost during the raid.  There is no endgame, only an endless series of skirmishes, which are in themselves, unsatisfying.

Archmage happens to be an exception, in that if you manage to survive long enough, and become powerful enough, you can cast a spell which destroys the world, thus ending the game until the server is reset.  You gain a certain amount of recognition for doing this.  Nevertheless, any task that requires occasional maintenance has potential for addiction (see Tamagotchi), and I remain a willing slave, to a certain extent, until I finish the tech tree and will the inevitably get bored.

What irritates me more than the lack of solid javascript-based strategy games (Facebook is full of inane stunts in this manner) is the business model these games operate under.  The business model itself serves no purpose other than to undermine the very foundations of the game they’ve delivered, however sloppily.

Ikariam, Travian, and Wild Guns all use the same principles:  The game is free to play, nothing is restricted, and no ads are served.  However, there are premium services you can buy for a micro-payment.  The first form of these is an increase in the rate at which you generate resources.  Essentially you can pay the company to gain a direct competitive edge.  The reason this is horrendous is because it complete destroys game balance by giving players that are willing to pay a substantial advantage over those who are not willing to pay.  You then have the choice to shell out a few dollars for more resources per hour (but only for a week, after which point you need to pay again!), or you can get slaughtered by those who will.  From a design standpoint, this is exceptionally poor.

Even worse than this however, is the “Premium Account” bonus.  If you give these companies an amount of money which is roughly equivelant to bumping up the production of every resource in the game, they give you access to a better user interface.  They have developed a user interface which is better than the default one:  it provides you with a build queue so that you don’t need to log in every time something finishes building to start the next build, gives you more detailed information about combat, a better layout with details about when your stockpiles will be full, what time you’ll be able to build something at current rates of production, etc.  The company has built these things, but they withhold them from you unless you pay them.  Even if you pay them, you only get them for a week, and then you have to pay them again.  Jon Crowley was appalled, so you know it’s a bad move.

Three Rings has a much better handle on it (although I suppose their games aren’t strictly in-browser).  In Puzzle Pirates, for example, payment confers the ability to captain a ship, as well as earn vanity items (e.g. clothing, furniture, etc.).  This allows the hardcore to be hardcore without upsetting the balance for the non-paying crowd.  In any case, any casual browser game needs to support itself on a small percentage of their entire user base actually paying money to play.  GameForge AG nearly went bankrupt last year, Puzzle Pirates has 3 million pirate accounts.  You tell me which business model is working better.