The game I played this week is Prosper Cities in Jiang-Nan, a management simulation game that guides the player to simulate city construction and management in ancient poetry Chinese vibe. The game is designed by Coconut Island in 2020, available on mobile app stores, for 12+ audience who are interested in ancient Chinese culture and city lives, looking for fun of expression and achievement by organizing the layout of the city and managing it to bring prosperity.
Prosper Cities in Jiang-Nan attracts players, and potentially exposes them to addiction risks, by appealing to their desire for beautiful architecture and aesthetically pleasing layouts. This desire drives players to complete sequential tasks in order to collect the required resources. Beyond this, the game heavily relies on live service and gacha mechanics, both encourage spending. The live service design, with its daily tasks and rewards, trains players to log in regularly, while the gacha system—based on randomness with a guaranteed minimum reward—further feeds into addictive behavior. In short, the game builds user retention through two main paths: either spending more time on repetitive daily tasks, or spending money on gacha draws with randomness, with both offering extraordinary architectural rewards.
Analysis
The first layer of addiction design is the live service structure: daily log-ins and tasks (Figures 2 and 3). The game offers multi-dimensional layers of rewards—daily check-ins, session duration milestones, task completions, and full-month streaks—all of which reinforce user retention and stoke the desire to collect beautiful buildings. Furthermore, players can subscribe to a monthly membership, which provides extra log-in benefits. This membership model encourages both spending and addiction, as players invest not just time, but also money.
You may wonder how the game encourages spending beyond just offering extra resources. The trick is that many tasks require long waiting times, up to 12 hours (Figure 4). While players are eager to complete buildings, obtain resources, or to move forward with construction, the game offers an option to skip the wait—but only by spending game coins, which often needs real spending to get. This design exploits players’ impatience and desire for progress to pressure spending.
The most obvious addictive mechanic is the gacha system. Similar with other gacha games, the rewards include rare, limited-edition buildings and characters (Figure 5). Drawing these rewards is random, and the tickets needed to draw are very limited. Players can either go through many repetitive tasks to earn a few tickets or spend money to obtain them quickly. To further encourage participation, the game promises a guaranteed first tier reward after 200 draws. This mechanic provides hope and also reminds the sunk cost, making players feel compelled to keep spending until they “get their money’s worth.” Gacha systems are classic examples of designing for addiction and chance, closely resembling gambling.
Lastly, the game also provides very frank options to encourage spending through premium visual upgrades. As the players can work hard and wait long to build ordinary architectures, the options of prettier versions of these are available right next to them, with cost of course. (Figure 6). Additionally, discount bundles tempt players with “spend more, save more” psychology (Figure 7). These straightforward, classic yet efficient designs add further pressure and temptation to spending.
All-in-all
In summary, similar with other games that employ live service and gacha systems (Mechanics), Proser Cities in Jiang-Nan employs daily tasks & rewards, time-saving purchase, and embedded randomness in gacha, to increase addiction and pressure spending. However, the game reserves the possibility of getting first-tier buildings without spending at all, though of course that needs very hard working. Moreover, its special aesthetic value of traditional Chinese culture and art also opens up opportunities for seasonal and monthly updates, with time-limited architectural designs themed around conventional holidays and events (Aesthetics). Plus, it encourages collaboration through seasonal events and actively collecting feedback from the community to improve its next update (Dynamics). These are the designs that extinguish Proser Cities in Jiang-Nan from other management simulation games with live service.
Reflection and Ethnics
As discussed in the article on live service games, Prosper Cities in Jiang-Nan also runs the risk of becoming a “living dead” game due to its live service game nature: overly repetitive mechanics and increasing pressure to spending. It already start to suffer from losing players (Figure 8).
Ethnically, the game is based on real history of China and employs real history celebrities as game characters. However, the game sorted the characters into hierarchy that sometimes does not reflect the true impact of their historical contributions. This could mislead younger players or distort their understanding of history. Historically inspired games should consider their responsibility in delivering real historical people and events to the players.
