You can learn a lot by watching things that are not made with you in mind. If you’re ever curious about a field you find unsettling or ideologically abhorrent, you can find industry talks, pitch videos to investors, and 1 million TEDx clones confirming your worst fears about these ghouls in great detail. Maybe the subject matter was written for a specific audience in mind, but listening to what they’re saying when they think they’re among friends can be enlightening.
I have a specific fixation on scams and psychological traps, so I’m drawn to learning more about the companies that dominate the online advertising space. Honey, Rocket Money, BetterHelp, each craven in their own way, and when I’m feeling dramatic I’d call them corrosive barnacles that form on the hull of an utterly stagnant society. One such barnacle that’s near and dear to my heart is the video game publishing industry. Because publishers need a new buzzword every 3-5 years to assure investors they’re doing something in their office, you should expect to start hearing “Hybrid Casual” from the worst people in the video games industry and cynical YouTubers alike. It’s not quite a genre, or even a specific design trend, it’s more of a monetization philosophy and a response to changes in player behavior and Mobile platforms such as the App Store.
“Kwalee Games” is a minor devil in comparison to those massive data harvesting operations, but they’re interesting because they don’t have the finesse needed to hide what they’re really after. Half of the video output of Kwalee Games is dedicated to their truly abysmal catalog of games. They’ve got it all, AI generated romance slop, a Hollow Knight clone, one of them is literally called “Landlord Simulator”. The other half is something between a pitch to reel in smaller developers and an earnest attempt to create informative content about the games industry. It is informative, but not in the way they intended.
In what I would call Kwalee’s Magnum Opus “What is a Hybrid Casual Game?”, we’re introduced to Nilay, founding lord of the “Hybrid Casual Studio” within the company. Nilay attempts to define Hybrid Casual with another industry term of “Hypercasual” games, which he loosely defined as games that are “Insanely Snackable”, a phrase that already has me kicking my legs and screaming into my pillow like a lovestruck suitor, and we’re only 20 seconds into the video. He calls Hybrid Casual the midpoint between those Snackable Hypercausal games and games with a greater focus on Long Term Retention and “Deeper Engagement”. If this sounds a bit sinister to you, don’t worry it gets worse. He goes on the describe the “meta” of Hybrid game development in a quote that I think is telling:
“We split games into the ‘Meta’, which is the mechanics that are focused on retention and keeping people's interests on the scale of weeks months and years and the ‘core game’ the repeatable loop which people actually derive fun”
The part of development that is focused on keeping people’s interest for years is explicitly not the same as the game loop that people are supposed to find fun. What Nilay is saying here is that design choices are being made in their games not based on what would be fun for the players, but purely in service of retention. We could have assumed this was the case based on their output, but it is fascinating to hear him say it out loud. Again, this isn’t meant for us.
We gain some insights into how that retention is being implemented into games later on in the video. Multiple times Nilay emphasizes the importance of Repeatability and Scalability in gameplay. The repeatability is pretty self explanatory, if you can create a system where the core gameplay loop can be repeated over and over without losing the player, there’s less game you have to make, and more time you can focus on your other development efforts. Scalability is an interesting one because he seems to mean it both in how easy it is to create new content for the game, but he also makes specific mention that they want usage data to be “Portable” to other projects. If the information they gain from tracking user behavior can be implemented to keep people playing the other games in their catalog, they can “refine” their products all the more quickly.
Finally, there is the platform influence on the emergence of Hybrid Casual games. Nilay keeps a brave face when talking about Apple implementing a policy that will impact his livelihood, but he is straightforward in saying that “Apple's tracking transparency initiative has led to [Cost Per Impression] drastically increasing”. Here lies the core of why there is a shift from our ever so snackable Hypercasual games to games that are more focused on player retention. More stringent personal information laws and policies are making potential new customers more expensive to find, so the focus is turning toward keeping everyone you already have in your environment. We already knew that monetization was a core driver of how decisions were being made about these games, but the more “forward thinking” publishers are already thinking of how to bunker down and hold on to as many users in preparation for data being less freely available in the future
The video is full of internal definitions of words as they relate to publishing, but you have to remember, this video isn’t for you, it’s for whoever is planning on making the next idle game Kwalee can aggressively advertise and skim revenue from for the next couple months. Despite Nilay’s promise of “years of engaging content” coming into these games, they’re visibly providing the bare minimum and they have no incentive to do otherwise. They know precisely how much effort they need to put in to retain the bulk of their users, and they’re not using an ounce more.
I think there are 2 reasons you should give a shit about this. First is that the thing that seems to get left out of the Attention Economy and Retention equation is that people are on the other end of this design. Most people who get sucked into the vortex of apps precision engineered to take as much time from you as possible will eventually get out and move on with their lives, but some are going to get stuck. Games that use “Petabyte scale data analytics” to ensure people are being “retained” are going to snare some people in a way that is genuinely going to fuck up their lives.
The second reason is that you’re fucked too. For now these design trends are largely being implemented in low effort mobile games, but they’re making money, and historically larger studios have not been shy about making embarrassing cash grabs (SquareEnix NFT game screenshot), to the detriment of their players and developers alike. Your favorite Studios are not immune to the temptations of the market, and pieces of this kind of design will worm it’s way into the things you like. It’s not hard to imagine an MMO using their petabytes of user data to try and “smooth out” their games experience, keeping the content “engaging enough” while crunching down any difficulty that could turn off a more casual player.