Book Image

Practical Game Design - Second Edition

By : Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci
Book Image

Practical Game Design - Second Edition

By: Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci

Overview of this book

If you’re in search of a cutting-edge actionable guide to game design, your quest ends here! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with expert guidance from veterans with decades of game design experience across a variety of genres and platforms. The second edition of this book remains dedicated to its original goal of helping you master the fundamentals of game design in a practical manner with the addition of some of the latest trends in game design and a whole lot of fresh, real-world examples from games of the current generation. This update brings a new chapter on games as a service, explaining the evolving role of the game designer and diving deeper into the design of games that are meant to be played forever. From conceptualizing a game idea, you’ll gradually move on to devising a design plan and adapting solutions from existing games, exploring the craft of producing original game mechanics, and eliminating anticipated design risks through testing. You’ll then be introduced to level design, interactive storytelling, user experience and accessibility. By the end of this game design book, you’ll have learned how to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the challenges of designing free-to-play games and games as a service, and significantly improve their quality through iteration, playtesting, and polishing.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
12
Chapter 12: Building a Great User Interface and User Experience

Using season passes for monetization

Standard season passes are great at two things: conversion to spend (due to high EV) and engagement (play to earn rewards; once players make the investment, they have more reasons to return and get value back).

If your game has a relatively small but highly dedicated and engaged community and relies on high average revenue per DAU (ARPDAU), the season pass will likely be a retention, not monetization feature—pass sales won’t make up a meaningful chunk of sales in a game such as Star Trek Fleet Command, which relies on engaged players repeatedly purchasing $99 in-game resource and item bundles.

For games with low ARPDAU but a large player base (for example, Fortnite, League of Legends), passes can represent a meaningful chunk of the revenue. Still, at the time of writing, the seasonal item store in Fortnite made up for the majority (over 60%) of the revenue, with season pass sales comprising the remainder.

In general, skipping...