2023 Game Development Trends
In 2023, three powerful forces will shape game development: the solo-to-social trend, the technologists-to-artists trend, and the games-to-economy trend.
Understanding these patterns is crucial for capitalising on large prospects, but they also provide new obstacles in game design, client acquisition, development technique, and live operations. Understanding both the problems and the potential will enable you to develop a long-term game business.
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This essay will help you comprehend this concept as well as some of the actual economics around networks, games, and communities.
From Solo to Social
People used to talk about "social games" that were formed on social networks years ago. Ironically, these games were nearly never social; instead, they benefited from spam and marketing via an unregulated social media ecosystem at the time (if you were around, you surely remember all the requests for nails to build barns in Farmville).
To be clear, I'm not referring to that, nor am I advocating a return to "social games."
I'm referring to games that are really sociable.
It is critical to remember that the gaming environment is more linked with communities than ever before. That often implies that previously alone gaming experiences are becoming social as a result of the "meta" that surrounds a game — the chat, contests, community, memes, esports, streaming, modding, and so on.
There are significant consequences for game design, operation, nurturing, and marketing. I'll go over each one briefly.
Undertale is an example.
Consider the game Undertale. My kids both enjoy Undertale, which has no multiplayer features. Nonetheless, they are active members of the streaming community and YouTubers. They make fan games out of it. They disseminated Undertale memes. My son even attends an Outschool class where kids get together once a week for a show-and-tell about Undertale... he's even picked up piano solely to learn to play the Undertale soundtrack.
From a business standpoint, what an incredible method to have sustained years of Undertale sales — and provided the ideal foundation for the debut of Delta Rune.
Game Developers' Lessons
Why does this happen in Undertale, and can game makers learn from it?
One set of lessons is to recall what makes a great game in the first place: a fantastic core loop that players adore. Characters who stick with you and emotional storytelling Wonderful music. Undertale has all of these, and socialisation would have been ineffective without them.
Because of the gameplay loop's simplicity, gamers were able to construct fan games. To riff on the experience, no-code/low-code tools such as Clickteam Fusion and Gamemaker Pro could be utilised. The characters and stories pique the interest of the audience, resulting in animated series and gameplay variations. One fan even made a game that included PvP and multiplayer elements that were not present in the original.
It all boils down to community participation: designing a game with the concept that if you present the correct features to your community, they will build around them. Here are some examples of how you can include that experience into your game:
A gameplay loop that players will love customising — you can make it even easier than Undertale did by including modding as a feature of your game from the start, so players don't have to spin up their own toolchain.
A community infrastructure that allows players to easily connect with one another: a Discord server is essential these days, and collaborating with some great streamers to help develop content (beyond marketing the core gameplay itself) is a vast unexplored area.
Game developers frequently consider themselves to be creators in the creator economy. True, but if you think of your game as a creator economy, you'll tap into one of the metaverse's key tendencies and establish a far larger business.
Making a Social Game into a Solo Game
What are your options throughout the game?
The game is a platform for your players to join the different community ecosystems you support, such as wikis, your Discord server, or anywhere your players hang out. Prepare to discover and support the places your gamers develop on your own. From within the game, you may discover information, people, and events in your community.
Even for single encounters, incorporating social components within the game is a wonderful idea. You can design events that encourage players to optimise around specific game elements, win bragging rights, and use it as an opportunity to disseminate awareness back through social media, YouTube, and Discord with minimal effort. These events can be designed fully around asynchronous, single-player gameplay.
Idle gaming is one of the gameplay genres that is progressively following the solo-to-social trend. Consider Cookie Clicker's success with its Discord community (almost 130K members at the time of writing). Or consider how games like Archer: Danger Phone and the soon-to-be-released The Office (both from East Side Games/Leaf Mobile) use tournaments, events, and leaderboards to enhance retention and reengagement.
Idle games, which are often played alone, are adding events and social components to the main loop.
Communities and Content Fortresses
Advertising performance has worsened since the rise of App Tracking Transparency (ATT). As a result, major publishers have begun to build "content fortresses" where they may cross-promote their games (ATT does not limit tracking between games owned by the same company).
I want you to think of your community as a content castle — one that may be a little wilder and unregulated, but one that is actually closer to your players' hearts. This is also an area where small indie developers may compete well, often even more effectively than a huge publisher.
From LTV in games to LTV in networks
Traditional wisdom held that if you could get the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) for a game to be less than the Lifetime Value (LTV), you'd be successful.
Economically, the growth of communities and content fortresses means that a customer's lifetime value (LTV) for a single game is no longer the most important business indicator. It is now the total LTVs of all the games (including franchise sequels, such as Delta Rune after Undertale) that a player will buy or spend money on during the length of their relationship with a publisher. That statistic is known as Network LTV.
The Network LTV is a "store of value" that can become a hugely valuable (but typically undervalued, from a balance-sheet standpoint) asset at a game company.
Consequences for Advertising
Publishers with huge content fortresses would frequently finance customer acquisition where an individual game may be a loss-leader but Network LTV still surpasses CAC. This has far-reaching consequences:
It is more difficult to compete for single-game developers who perform in-house publishing and client acquisition (many will never be able to bid on advertising at scale, due to the unit economics)
CACs based on advertising have the potential to climb further in the long run.
There is the potential for shady publishing deals to be made in which a popular game unknowingly funds a publisher's cross-selling network at the expense of the game's developer. Keep an eye on your backs, indie developers.
Although I believe advertising is here to stay — it is frequently the most effective method to scale a game with the appropriate measure – the greatest approach to counteract ad-dependent strategies is to consider community as a more real alternative to the CACLTV treadmill.
From video games to economies
Games have always been a form of attention economy. Being an efficient game designer nowadays frequently necessitates thinking in terms of virtual economies, the worth of virtual products, DLC, and franchise value. Virtual products are expected to produce nearly all of the cash made by games in the coming years:
ARK Invest is the source.
I believe that this tendency understates the total revenue created by economies, because revenue is no longer generated solely by virtual objects within games.
A game's "economy" comprises all of its streaming, esports, community participation, modding, and so on. In other words, the "solo to social" shift I mentioned earlier has an economic component. The Network LTV includes not only direct sales of games and things, but also events and activities, as well as partnership options with modders, streamers, and esports celebrities. Indeed, current data suggest that when these parts of the gaming economy (together with hardware) are considered, the market size roughly doubles when compared to software sales and virtual products alone:
A consistent supply of content combined with events that reengage your community is the "fuel" for these economies. Much of this content is available in-game (new items, new stories, new maps, etc.) You might also consider adding external material (mods, livestreams, social media, etc.)
I mentioned your "network" before as a type of store of value for the game you're developing. Savvy game developers, such as Undertale, recognised that they would gain value in this network even if they invited others to riff on their creations. Axie Infinity discovered that by having a take rate of 5%, they could achieve enormous retention (day 30 of 90%). (i.e., their economy, built around NFTs, recycles almost all of the value between the players and speculators of the game).
Axie Infinity permits 95% of the economy to be recycled among its participants.
Esports, broadcasting, modding, and so on are ways to develop an economy around your game; as you invest in this store of value, you'll gain by releasing additional content, updates, sequels, and so on.
Surprising Discovery
Although it comes as no surprise to those who have studied market disruption: the less control you have and a lower take rate may boost value within the economy of your game.
You may be wondering how you can replicate the success of Axie Infinity or Undertale without the unique community aspects and market timing that these games benefited from. There are various things you can immediately incorporate into your game — whether multiplayer or solitary — to support these player behaviours.
A regular cadence of activities that bring your community together is a fantastic approach to bind it all together. I've grouped this into the Live Games Trinity, a model for high-voltage game operation. Create a "content train" that provides updates to your users on a regular basis, and support it with events that drive players to optimise around specific game features for limited periods of time.
From scientists to artists
According to Unity, the number of artists on a team outnumbers technologists by a factor of two and is approaching a factor of five.
This is due to the fact that we are moving from the engineering era of game creation to the creator era. Traditional "artists" who work in 2D and 3D visual media, as well as storytellers, designers, and world-builders, are among these creators.
This has significant business consequences for anyone developing a game today:
More and more individuals will use no-code/low-code tools and off-the-shelf technology to create market-competitive games and game features (the most evident example of this is the vanquishing of a huge amount of graphics programming due to the advantages of 3D Engines like Unity or Unreal).
Working on truly unique areas of game feature design — items that introduce players to truly innovative experiences — is where engineering teams can add the greatest value.
Teams who cling to outdated technology — whether an in-house 3D engine or a complex live server architecture — will be hindered in their competitiveness. They will not be able to maintain the agility, faster time-to-market, and capital efficiency of smaller, optimised teams.
Aside from the creation of a game, live operations will rely on unblocking artists so that they can participate in the pipeline without the friction generated by brittle processes and unnecessary technical hurdles.
Roblox: The Future Is Here
Roblox is one of the tendencies mentioned above.
Many game developers nowadays believe that Roblox is not suitable for professional game production, despite the fact that many children have become self-made millions in this manner (compare to similar tales on YouTube). Professionals look at the production values, big money take-rates, and creative limits and conclude it isn't for them.
In fact, game studios such as Supersocial and Toya are being founded to create content for the Roblox environment.
Now, I'm not here to tell you that you should create your next game on Roblox. But I'm here to tell you that this form of game creation (and, more broadly, the creation of metaverse experiences) is the way of the future, and you should be aware of it.
What Roblox demonstrates is that combining audience aggregation, a 3D engine, and a low-code live development stack in one place generates huge disruption. It makes game production more accessible. According to their S-1, Roblox has 7 million active content creators.
It is also disruptive since it provides chances to people who previously would not have been able to create a game or real-time experience. The tools and platform are incredibly capital efficient, needing virtually minimal initial expenditure.
Every game developer should expect that their competitors will have this degree of simplicity, agility, and capital efficiency. Those who do not accept this risk their lives. The greatest way to reduce this danger is to ensure that there are no artificial walls or legacies impeding your speed, innovation, and agility.
Conclusion
The solo-to-social, technologist-to-artist, and games-to-economy trends are critical for every game developer to understand, not only because they present opportunities to build better games for the metaverse's diverse communities, but also because they present risks in terms of customer acquisition, agility, and efficiency if ignored. I hope you found it useful.
If you notice any other themes or issues that I should include, please let me know!