Two games that I want to talk about in respect to gambling and designer pressure for financial purpose include Clash Royale and Balatro.
I have long played many of the mainline Supercell games including Clash of Clans (CoC), Clash Royale, Boom Beach, and Brawl Stars. This has been a hobby since I was an 11 year old with Clash Of Clans on my iPad, likely peaked around high school where I maintained several max-level accounts on Royale, CoC, and Brawl Stars. Through the years, I think I have put in over a thousand hours and around 500 dollars into these live service, RTS, basebuilder / deckbuilder / action games. With so much firsthand experience in these time-sucks, I want to talk about their dark design patterns that keep people itching for more.
Comparing the original launch versions of Clash of Clans (2012) to Clash Royale (2016) and Brawl Stars (2018), it’s easy to see which one is designed from the ground up to use random chance as a metric for progression. I am eventually going to make the point that the modern version of both of these suffer from these dark patterns, but first I want to illustrate how much randomness feeds into the resource acquisition methods in their later games. In Clash of Clans, progression is mostly linear; you accrue resources from passive buildings and as reward for attacking other players. Build times are linear and scale up for how progressed you are. You can spend money to get resources or finish upgrades, which was often necessary to be at the top. Later version introduce multiple types of battle passes that users can buy to greatly increase the speed at which they can gain these resources. There is plenty to say on the ways this business model can still be harmful, but it’s core monetization isn’t really related to gambling in my opinion. To truly see where gambling is implemented in Supercell games, one should instead look at the formulas for Brawl Stars and Clash Royale. From the earliest betas of each of these games, there are different ‘rarities’ of cards or characters that exist, and one must open up a random chance box to accrue resources and get the chance to unlock a card/brawler of higher rarity. These elusive cards often are unbalanced, so users are incentivized to spend money to acquire and upgrade these characters to use in battle. Often, they are purposefully released as overpowered, so users that spend enough money to get a chance at unlocking them out of the gate are rewarded by being able to dominate in online matches. These dark patterns are then further amplified through a practice (that notably, China has outright banned in their games), which is showing you a bunch of “free” rewards that you first need to spend money on one thing to unlock more of the “free” other rewards. Many aspects of the UI normalize and basically beg the player to spend money in order to win and enjoy playing the game.
I wanted to mention Balatro in this post as well given that it was also listed under ‘games of chance’, but I felt the urge to mention that Balatro is a one-time purchase game that pretty openly satirizes gambling and subscription models. The ‘Rental Sticker’ mechanic is one where instead of paying like $5 (in monopoly money) to own a certain collectible card, you instead can pay $1 upfront and then $3 per round. Since there are 24 rounds to win the game, it very clearly makes the point that you are paying much more whenever having these recurring payments. Also worth mentioning that the creator, LocalThunk, refused all offers from real Casinos to license the likeness of Balatro for their own profit. Despite current YouTube algorithms flagging Balatro content as gambling content (due to the presence of strong poker themes), I don’t see the reason this is discussed in the same vein as the likes of Online Poker or Genshin Impact, but I understand that some with previous gambling addictions might be negatively impacted by ‘winning’ in a game that is somewhat reminiscent of gambling.
