King argues that it has mastered such data analysis. So you have to let the creative drive the direction but validate it with data.” “But you can’t use it to set the direction. Knowing how fast you are going is immensely useful,” he says. “Data: you can think of it like the speedometer of your car. Tasks are made easier or harder, while tools can be made more or less expensive to keep players hooked.ĭata about the smallest nuances of players’ habits and responses is invaluable, says Petri Järvilehto, a co-founder of the Finnish-American company Seriously and one of the creators of Angry Birds. If too many players are turning off at a particular point, they add something new to make it more exciting. To keep players interested, game designers constantly tweak and fine-tune their games. Supercell made $5.2m a day in February from just two games – Clash of Clans and Hay Day – substantially more than console publishing giant Electronic Arts makes from mobile with about 900 titles. “Once you’ve found something that is fun then you can actually make it better by just looking at the data and analysing it.”
“You can’t design fun on a spreadsheet,” says Ilkka Paananen, chief executive of Supercell, the game maker valued at $3bn last year. Its justification for a valuation of up to $7.6bn, largely on the back of the success of just one game, rests on its claim that it has discovered the “secret sauce” to creating yet more Candy Crush-style hits.Īs its reach grew to 93m daily players, Candy Crush struck a cultural nerve, like a popular television show.īut if designing the game is where creative talents let rip, keeping players engaged for months is where the science comes in. King will become the hero of these aspiring game makers when it lists on the New York Stock Exchange this week. The company behind Candy Crush, King Digital Entertainment, made 78 per cent of its $2bn in customer expenditure last year from the game. But for the developers in attendance hoping to create the next Candy Crush, this is not frivolous stuff. This may seem like over-analysis of the allure of “casual” games, which few people play for more than five minutes at a time. “Neuroscience teaches us that emotions help us to focus our attention and to remember.” Thus the sense of gratification from unleashing the pink hammer.įrustration, she explains, is one of the four emotions that every casual game must elicit, along with curiosity, desire and amusement. “At the peak of frustration, offer a way to relieve it,” counsels Nicole Lazzaro, the game designer and interaction researcher who runs XEODesign.
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