Forever Games: The Gold Standard of Modern Games.
Great games will be played for more than 100 years. Creating great games is not enough anymore, but serving players in a live game that's remembered forever.
To properly understand the Tacter vision, we need to understand the kind of games we believe are the gold standard of gaming—the so-called Games as a Service (GaaS), more recently, also known as Forever Games.
Some years ago, a video game was a packaged good for which you pay 60 dollars in exchange for at least 60 hours of enjoyment. Games were a product. When finished, you look for another one, and so on. As a game developer, your job was building hit after hit to keep players hooked.
Multiplayer Online games, in particular Doom, changed this forever. They allowed players unlimited enjoyment by competing or collaborating with other players in an endless play pattern. The 60 hours became 600, 6000, or even 60.000 hours of playability with similar upfront development costs for game studios.
This new kind of game put the industry upside-down:
They had a considerable need for ongoing maintenance: bug fixing, patches, updates, etc., transforming games from products to services. (to solve this need is why Steam was born initially)
They unlock massive upselling opportunities. Players were retained for long periods, so why limit your business model to packaged sales? Free-to-play and in-game items were born.
They changed the incentives for game studios. Why try to develop a new hit when you already have one that can evolve with new content, events, etc.? Live services were born.
These changes led to what today we know as Games as a Service (Gaas) or, more recently, Forever Games. Games that players have been playing and continue to for an incredible number of years.
Let’s think about it this way:
How many years have people been playing chess? and poker? What about sports like football or basketball? Hundreds of years. And those are games that are still being played today, and probably more than ever!
Why was this not happening in video games? Well, now it is happening: Counter-Strike is 23 years old and hitting active player records (source), World of Warcraft is 19 years old, League of Legends is 14 years old, and Clash of Clans is 11 years old.
All of those games are not a product anymore but services that the game studio provides players on an ongoing basis.
Let me remark on the importance of this: Top game studios are not just focused on building the next big hit but maintaining the good ones for as long as possible.
In the words of Ilkka Paananen, co-founder and CEO of SuperCell in his annual post for 2023:
Supercell’s mission is to create great games that as many people as possible play for years and that are remembered forever.
Once upon a time, “all” we had to do was create a great game […] we now have TWO simultaneous challenges:
1. Creating Great New Games, That Have A Shot At Becoming Cultural Phenomena.
2. Serving Players in a Live Game They Love, So It’s Played and Remembered Forever
(Source)
Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins dedicated a podcast episode to the Forever Games. They identified five characteristics that might make a game become a forever game:
1. Balance
The game has a perfect equilibrium between complexity and flow state. It also forces you to a conclusion (e.g., A clash of clan match is about 3 mins, and a League of Legends match is about 30 mins) and welcomes different players at different stages to play together. The general mantra here is: easy to play, impossible to master:
In the beginning, you want to progress faster and learn the game: level up, climb the ladder, get better, etc
In the end, you play differently. You want status, master complex combos, become the best, etc.
In my opinion, Online Multiplayer is non-negotiable here, and it should mix perfectly with another play pattern that varies from one game to another: battle royale, tower defense, RPG, etc.
2. Community
Introducing community in a game is necessary when aiming for the long term. It fosters a sense of belonging and engagement between players that last forever. The game becomes a cultural phenomenon that goes beyond playing.
Your existing players become the best advocates for new players, creating a virtuous loop. They’re the ones who know more about the game. Many game-changing developments are community-led (e.g., Counter-Strike was a community-developed mod on top of Half-Life), or, for example, publishers like Roblox delegate the new game creations directly to their community.
UGC is a dimension where we expect many innovations to happen in the upcoming years when mixing new technologies like Web3 and IA and recent success cases like Roblox.
3. Eventfulness
The game is live and in constant evolution. In the same way, a traditional sport has competitions, seasons, transfer markets, etc. Forever games need re-engagement mechanisms over time that make existing players come back: seasons, expansion packs, balance changes, special events, etc., are examples of live operations that keep the game fresh. It attracts new players and re-engages existing ones.
The game stops being a single-shot product to become a live service, with something always happening at any time.
4. Competition
Competition raises the status within the game and generates an infinite end-game: you can always become better, learn new tricks, or climb the rankings.
Some of the existing forever games are creating esports around them, and the professional players are celebrities within the game, as in any other traditional sport.
This also aligns perfectly with community and eventfulness. Some of the biggest game competitions are community-driven, and competitions are one of the best re-engagement mechanisms.
It is not weird to find players that stopped playing years ago but still follow the game’s competitions. Those are players still engaged around the game even without playing!
5. Player Investment
This is the persistence of the player's achievements over time. Players not only invest money but time and effort. Those investments must pile up—acquired knowledge, skills, in-game items, badges, levels, etc. Your past achievements in the game are what build your status and are valuable: The more the player invests the less likely to churn.
An extreme example is World of Warcraft. People did not cancel their subscriptions even without playing to avoid losing their characters forever. They eventually come back to play for new expansions (eventfulness), but they did not churn in the meantime even though they were not playing anymore.
These are the main characteristics of a Forever Game. I believe that it is not crazy to think that if Chess or Football have been played for more than 300 years, why a video game cannot achieve the same?
New generations prefer to kill dragons with their friends in Roblox rather than put a ball in a basket - and this is a cultural phenomenon.
I’m sure Forever games are not going anywhere near soon, and this is the kind of game that we’re looking to support on Tacter.
M.