The Bottom Feeder: Make Your Game Easy. Then Make It Easier.
People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a grudge, and never buy your games again.
I really couldn’t disagree with this article much more. Easiness and depth are almost mutually exclusive and both have their place. If you want high user numbers and low RPU (think Farmtown) then yeah, dumb it down until you can’t dumb it down anymore. Think to yourself “could the average person who owns a Sarah Palin t-shirt play this game?”.
If you’re going the opposite way though, with relatively low sales volume and high RPU (like any console game or my latest Facebook game, Starfleet Commander) then you want the game to be hard. Difficulty is directly proportional to engagement.
And by that I do not mean hard to use of course. A good model to look at is Ocarina of Time. The puzzles and the game were as difficult as anything out at the time short of maybe Myst, but the controls were as intuitive and easy to use as the many 3d RPGs still being made a decade later.
I think this is the direction in which Facebook games are moving too because the RPUs of a real game are obscene. Engagement is directly proportional to RPU (revenue per user, by the way) and higher RPU means you can spend more money acquiring a customer. With organic growth stalling, or on the web where it’s largely unproven, squeezing dimes out of users is going to be extremely key to long-term success.
If Facebook’s invite system removes organic growth like a lot of people suspect, you’ll see the flood of Farm games and other easy to play, low RPU, high volume Flash games turn into a trickle.
And there’s a line there clearly, difficulty and engagement don’t scale together forever. At some point it becomes just painful. But difficulty (which, even in an RPG, does not necessarily equate to a player dying) is not something to be shunned.
