The Sad State of Player Retention

 I've been playing Jak and Daxter over again recently, and I noticed something peculiar about the trophies for that game. Because some trophies track progress by percent, and the percentage of those who get the trophy, I was able to make a graph of the number of players who made it to different points in the game over time. I knew that players would drop off over time, but the actual data for this random game example was shocking.

50% of all players, people who purchased the game for PS4, have never made it past the first 7-ish power cells out of 101! Getting 7 power cells is as simple as completing the tutorial (first 4 of them), talking to someone twice, and walking around the nearby beach until you found 2 more. For the average person, that would take about 25 minutes. I think this initial spike of people "noping" out of the game has many reasons. First, there are the players who quickly realize they made a mistake buying the game and that it isn't for them. These people are the type who get a refund after buying your game within the same day. Next are the shallow people who only bought the game because they wanted to, for a quick moment, be reminded of their childhood. That to them is all the game needed to do, and so they put it down forever. They already beat the game, so they don't bother me. Those are probably most of that cliff. Next are people who probably tested the game out, said to themselves they would come back and finish it one day when they made time for it (then never did). A tiny handful of people are making their way through this part of the game these days.

Notice that difficulty is not a reason for the dropoff; the game was quite easy right around that point in that you only need to walk around avoid slow-moving crabs, not to mention jumping on a rare occasion. Many people stayed just a little longer, and probably found a challenge they didn't like or just needed a little more time to consider quitting. People who beat the first section of the game (The Green Sage's domain) were incredibly motivated to keep playing for a couple more power cells, which meant that the excitement of exploring new locations kept leaving players at bay. I phrase it like that because after exploring this new area, a horde of people left before beating the local boss and moving on to Section 3. After that, very few people left, but by now, the damage is done: only one-third of the people who own the game get this far. The game becomes harder from this point on, and I think that is the only reason most of the people who kept leaving left. At this point, the game becoming a bit brutal isn't stopping people from leaving because they came to win, and maybe be guessing that the end is near.

80% of people who beat the game were completionists who collected everything they could. How many of those people loved the game, and how many of them felt the need to beat the game compulsively is unknown, but what this means is that about 10% or less of the players decided to beat the game with flying colors for reasons other than an abnormal need that is true for all videogames they play. Imagine you're selling a novel you wrote and you ask all who buy your book to call you on the phone when they finish reading. Imagine selling 100 books but only getting 10 phone calls in your lifetime. That's devastating: years of work for only a tiny fraction of eyes to see. Sure, this is a bad example game to use since it is the second re-release, but all the same, if you look at any traditional videogame (most of which are way longer than Jak and Daxter), the player retention is still abysmal.

The painful thing for developers like me to accept is that this is just a fact of life, and complaining about it won't help, and people shouldn't be accommodated for quitting your game either. Unless you are making a short game that practically plays itself (Telltale Games), the majority of players will not finish the game. I think this is the genius secret to Telltales, that their games are designed around high player retention, but an episodic casual game will not sell in most genres like it will for adventure games. When people buy an RPG, they violently demand it to be an absurd length (90+ hours in most cases, which is a little shorter than a Pokemon game). This is natural in that RPGs are about feeling apart of an expansive world, rather than just a visitor. You want to be surrounded by an RPG, and I get that. What I don't understand, and what I despise, is how dishonest players are with themselves when they vocally ask for longer RPGs but only play the first few hours and quit, regardless. In truth, those aren't the same people, but the watch guards of RPG length are the vocal minority, while most players listen and agree with those people on game length but will never last long enough for it to matter. What I'm saying is that the echo chamber of "Yeah, your right, it is a bad thing that this RPG
is short." among people who don't make it far into their games, really have no business allowing that to influence whether to skip a game.

This creates an interesting dilemma: Do we put a lopsided effort towards the front of the game, or do we keep the quality equal to reward the "true" fans? If we focus on the start, players have a better experience, and so we get better user reviews. The reverse is true: equal quality means maybe a better score from critics, and a much happier core, small fanbase. Either way, with Paper-Soul Theater, we'll have to tread lightly and do our best to draw people in at the start of the game to avoid that common huge falloff at the start of the experience.

KH Chain of Memories Inspires Me

Listen, Chain of Memories is dope. When I was a kid, I thought the whole damn thing was obtuse, but the problem was simply me being too young to appreciate it. I went into it young with unfair expectations, and it prevented me from seeing that CofM stands up by its own merits swimmingly. It was a hardcore game when the casual fans of the first game weren't ready for the sea change. It was a roguelike before the term existed. CofM revolved its plot around abstract concepts like emotion, memory, and existence while most action games are simplified versions of action flicks/ action anime. Therefore, CofM was ahead of its time, but beyond that, it's simply a damn-well constructed game! CofM has few flaws: A lackluster new game plus, the shortness of the soundtrack, and the blatant recoating of each world. That's all that I find to be even remotely egregious.

This all eventually led to Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories becoming my biggest inspiration. Let me explain:

1. CofM is a master at cutting corners. In any other scenario, I would have been livid upon discovering that the places I go to are the same damn thing every time, but by getting the locations out of the way early, they were able to spend the rest of their time polishing everything else and adding content to it in other ways. By streamlining the gameplay everywhere you go, CofM created a very focused experience. This is an action/ strategy, not an adventure game. It is not a JRPG or a 3D platformer about collection 101 Dalmatians, and it stays that way throughout the entire game without even the slightest compromise. Many people say the fun in Mario 64 is in playing as Mario, rather than exploring the locations in the game. CofM has the same kind of focus. Each battle (unless you become overpowered) is so fundamentally great that grinding no longer feels tedious, that each world can afford to be the same thing, that boss battles and friend cards are all that's needed to keep things fresh. It can be easy to get lost in ambitions for a game, but I believe CofM demonstrates how a simple game can outclass an ambitious one by having a healthy focus.
2. CofM knows how to balance action and strategy. Frankly, whoever managed to combine card game strategy with fast-paced action battles without watering down either genre is a genius. Sure, card games are all about stopping to think about how you're going to respond to the other person's cards, but you still have time to do that, it's just truncated, and relegated to before a match begins based on your last encounter with the character when you lost. In that way, it managed to retain its strategy by making use of the meta way players know what to expect from foes after they lose to them. A good action game needs moments to allow players to catch their breath. This avoids becoming monotonous through having the player work on their deck. Because both genres are accommodated equally, the player needs to like both aspects of the game (one doesn't carry the experience), but I think this is worth it in that it offers a unique, complex experience to write home about. I think that's the fate of games that combine genres or dare to be complex: the target audience shrinks, but the retained audience find an opener experience.
3. CofM is earnest and confident--specifically graceful in being earnest. There is something insanely satisfying about seeing an organization 13 member get violently, and suddenly decked in the stomach by Goofy from out of nowhere, to save the day. Out of context, having an oldfashioned Disney character violently attack a major, serious half-existing villain character sounds disastrously nonsensical and tonally imbalanced, but by using good story structure and caution, the writers managed to do the impossible, which is to make the world's weirdest fan fiction work as an ordinary story. Many stories attempt being earnest but have that backfire because it makes its flaws shine brighter, like in the case of Wonder Woman (2017) which was earnest in a way that comes off as oblivious to its flaws and unrealistic stance on optimism (AKA overconfidence). I find it very hard to describe with words why Kingdom Heart's setting works against all odds, while something equally as earnest as Wonder Woman falls on its face, but it might be that Kingdom Hearts exists because an artist had a loving vision, while Wonder Woman was a corporate blockbuster aiming abnormally hard to appease the largest audience possible while also desperately trying to seem progressive. In other words, Wonder Woman The Movie exists because society demanded a Super Heroine movie, while Kingdom Hearts flowed naturally out of a deep admiration for Disney films, and from undisturbed intuition as a storyteller. So maybe Wonder Woman is a foil from being made with paranoid second-guessing.

Here is how I hope to apply all three motivations to Paper-Soul Theater, our own RPG with strategy and action:

1. Paper-Soul Theater will not have cutting-edge graphics because pre-rendered Nintendo 64 era graphics are capable of delivering the experience we want. The main character will move in 6 horizontal directions, and on a hexagonal grid because free movement is not something that would add to our intended experience. We hope to cut plenty more corners as we create new prototypes, so I hope you get the picture that we are happy to remove any and everything from our videogame that isn't important to us, regardless of what players have come to expect from modern games. They don't see what we see, and as such we would be making a mistake coming to them rather than the other way around.
2. Most traditional RPGs are as dry as text adventures in so far as their action is represented with the imagination as if a lesser version of a table-top experience. With most RPGs, I don't feel present in the action. The reverse is true for action RPGs. In those games, I don't feel as if I'm experiencing an RPG, but instead a cheap imitation. An RPG isn't an RPG without the bitter, slow, calculated back-and-forth of battle. in Paper-Soul Theater, we present a world in which customs dictate that the key to battle is patience, and all actions, violent or not, have a satisfying build-up and release. It's a world where even monsters know instinctively that moral victory can only be achieved through a strict back-and-forth, like gunslingers who agree to a duel. A battle of life and death should require a very active participation from the player, even in a situation where both parties have silently agreed to take turns, as is the case in our world. In our game, all physical actions during battle must sync between the player and playable character so that they feel invested and responsible for the execution of their self-defense.
3. In the same way that Kingdom Hearts cares very dearly about making its psychopathic setup work well, so will we refuse to hold back on our ideas. Aponi is deeply religious. That alone is incredibly rare in videogame protagonists, but the norm was the last thing on my mind when this story came to me over time. In almost every case, censoring ourselves would be flippant and portraying our intuition. We want (arguably need) to show nudity for non-sexual, non-erotic reasons. Drugs, realistic bleeding, harsh opinions, and intimacy are all fair game NOT because we are trying to be controversial or to call attention to ourselves but because these things shouldn't be controversial in the first place among an adult audience, and are things that can easily be justified for use in ways that are moral. We look at antique paintings and call them art, regardless of if they portray sexual intercourse, deadly killing, etc because those aspects do not logically expel them from being artful, inherently. We simply want to tell a specific story. If we shatter outdated cultural norms in the process, then so be it. In the same way Kingdom Hearts sounds weird on paper, so will our game, but I want to give my ideas a chance to win over the hearts of our players, as Kingdom Hearts once did.