For this week’s Critical Play, I played Brawl Stars which is a mobile battle royale game that uses a “live service” business model. The main audience is teens and young adults looking for an easy multiplayer game. It was made by the gaming company Supercell and is available for Android and iOS. I downloaded it for free and played it on my iPhone. It was clear to me that designers obfuscate information to encourage spending, put pressure on players to spend money, and incorporate chance.
When I first opened the app, I was pretty immediately overwhelmed by just how much was going on. There were so many places to tap and I wasn’t quite sure where to go at first. At the same time, I was being bombarded with upgrades and awards (see the image below, where I unlocked a new Brawler after playing a round or two). These two things create a system where you feel like you are constantly “moving up” in the game through rewards but are constantly spending your coins in all the little tabs in the lobby. Constant rewards make it feel like resources are abundant until you run out and are pushed toward buying more with gems (which are usually purchased with money).
As for obfuscating information, the biggest mechanic that contributes to this is the use of these gems. For one, they are abstracted away from real money simply because they are not called money, they’re gems! They also do not have a stable conversion rate. On the Brawl Stars Wiki I was able to find that 30 gems cost $1.99, 80 cost $4.99, and 170 cost $9.99. This encourages spending by rewarding larger purchases and making prices harder to calculate. The changing exchange rate makes it hard to know exactly how much each purchase is worth. This is very similar to the strategy that Fortnite uses for V-Bucks pricing that was discussed in class.
One direct method I saw used to pressure players to spend money is through the tutorial they implement as a new player. As you can see in the image from earlier, there are often tap icons that appear to encourage you to go to a certain screen. After I’d been playing for a while, I was told to update my Brawler by purchasing a new gadget. I clicked where it told me to, and I was told that I didn’t have enough coins to purchase a gadget and should instead “Get Gems.” You can see this in the image below and to the left. This then takes you to a screen where it is revealed that you actually have to spend money to get gems, which you can see below and to the right. This tactic demonstrates both pressure to spend money and obfuscation of information. The fact that it is an intro tutorial guiding you to that spot makes you feel like the game thinks you should have enough money to spend on an upgrade, and you just spent it on other things instead. This creates pressure by making players feel they are missing a key feature.
The last aspect I want to cover is how the game makes use of “random chance.” There are a few rewards systems in the game that make use of “randomness.” Many of these mimic the design of a slot machine. For example, the Starr Drops dramatically cycle through the different levels of rewards from “Rare” to “Legendary” and “Ultra,” with the player tapping the screen at each level (you can see an example in the image below). Note that the sale starts at “Rare,” making you feel like it’s a very special reward to get. In reality, there is a 50% chance of a Starr Drop being Rare according to the Brawl Stars Wiki. This is an example of deceiving players about their odds which is a common tactic used in slot machines and discussed in the Addiction by Design reading. The cycling through and tapping at each level of reward also imitates slot machines slowly clicking through to the final result, making the player feel the anticipation and as though their chances are higher because their tapping could have an effect on it. In reality, the winnings are likely chosen way ahead of time and no amount of player actions can influence them.
Overall, I felt that this game made use of overwhelming the player, obfuscating information, and a facade of random chance to encourage the player to spend more money while playing the game.
Ethics
This game might put people at risk for addiction since it puts pressure on users to log in every day. There are certain rewards that can only be acquired through daily use, and even one day without playing makes it feel like you are missing out on free rewards. You can see the screen promoting daily rewards below. Randomness plays a big role as you are almost always receiving rewards, but the perceived randomness of them makes you want to keep playing to get the rare rewards. I discuss this more in depth in my paragraph above on random chance. This structure is common in mobile games. In the article on Live Service games, it’s explained that this may be because people are willing to spend less on games, but publishers still want to see the same returns. Some games that I’m reminded of are Candy Crush and Gardenscapes. These are both mobile games that are free to download, but regularly encourage players to make in-app purchases to level up or continue playing. It’s permissible to use chance in games when it is fully disclosed what probabilities are ahead of time, there is not no extraction of money, and it is not exploiting vulnerable populations like children or adolescents. This game in particular could be improved by removing the elements of chance, since I think it is unlikely there is a lot of randomness behind the scenes anyway.
