It is interesting how many people have good ideas that are similar. One of my personal favorites comes out of a product that I really wanted to make for a long time. I went so far as to prototype and pitch it to a number of mid-tier game publishers. The thing that fascinated me about the game pitch was that the vast majority of people who I spoke with, who were the decision makers for their portfolios, said “I would absolutely love to play this game!” They immediately followed that with “But we would not publish this here.” The game was a product fit with their portfolio and would be a customer fit for the people they wish to market to. There was probably one thing in the game pitch that was really off-putting to publishers and I should have removed it once, just to see if it would generate a different reaction.
I want to talk about the off-putting part of the game pitch because it is one of the big reasons that Fortnite is the success it is today. No I am not Al Gore and no I did not invent the internet. As I said, many people have good ideas that are similar.
I believe that Fortnite clearly demonstrated something that I wanted to prove for many years now.
It is better to create dolphins than to find whales.
I suppose that statement makes more sense if you were up to your elbows in mobile game publishing, or spent three years in the trenches sending facebook invites to mitigate the costs of your social game customer acquisitions.
There is a taxonomy of game spenders that is generally applied to free-to-play games. Yes. Free-to-play games are not-always-free-to-play. Download a top-performing game on your phone if you have no idea what I am talking about and enjoy the free education you can get until the game itself wants you to spend 19.99 (most popular!) to remove some sort of negative emotional experience like loss or waiting one hour.
The taxonomy is as follows:
A grinder is someone who plays a game for free. As an aside, I generally try to play many popular games as a free player as long as possible. I look for the point at which the game becomes nearly unplayable without paying. I refer to this part of the game as “the grindwall”.
A minnow is someone who buys one or two things, generally from one dollar to ten dollars.
A dolphin is someone who buys more than one or two things and generally spends twenty to eighty or even one hundred dollars.
A whale is someone who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars in a game.
I am not going to attack the whaling strategy of game companies here. People have done the calculation on running a mostly free game and know how much they can spend on acquiring one hundred random customers to find one whale. Collecting revenue from whales in games is reasonably well understood by many people with tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in marketing budgets to keep that segment engaged.
I will point out that I do not have tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in marketing budgets. Should I apologize for being poor? Maybe if more of you clicked an affiliate link I would have tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars with which to market things (Site disclosure: if you click that link and buy something Johnny gets paid a fee). I forgive you for not doing so. Even Amazon itself has pointed out that I am really bad at affiliate marketing.
So what can you do without a massive customer acquisition budget? I wrestled with this for a while and tried to figure out a strategy which would give me a first mover advantage or possibly even a sustainable competitive advantage. Something something MBA amirite?
If everyone is spending all kinds of money looking for high value customers (the whales), it probably does not make sense to spend money to try to find medium value customers. You will not be able to “spend differently” in most channels; your efforts will simply be lost in the noise.
Perhaps the right thing to do is to market to players who are not known to be spenders and entice them to spend a modest amount.
This wound up in my game pitch.
After being declined for more than one or two years, it is interesting to see that this is the pattern that makes Fortnite such an amazing success.
There are a lot of people out there who claim to understand the success of Fortnite. I think that most of them are wrong. Fortnite is not successful because it is an amazing battle royale game. Fortnite is not successful because it has an amazing aesthetic.
Fortnite is successful because when you see someone else owning something that you like, it is really easy to spend five or ten dollars to buy that thing.
Most people cannot wrap their heads around the spending patterns of Fortnite players.
It is fun to bust a move in the lobby with three people who have the same moves you do.
It is fun to put on an outfit inspired by your favorite game or movie that just partnered with Epic.
It is also fun to pull out a pickaxe that looks like a giant christmas ham and beat someone to death with it—if you are a better player than they are.
All of these experiences grant you no additional power in the game. They are all also relatively inexpensive and tremendously pleasurable.
Epic Games has taken a decent amount of money from my household. We had a few years of big fun as a family running in Battle Royale. None of us would contemplate spending a single penny in one hundred percent of all other battle royale games.
Epic Games took people who otherwise did not want to spend money in a category and made it fun to do so.
They created dolphins.
I would argue that Riot Games does a similar thing with League of Legends. The stuff you buy in League of Legends is reasonably specific, does not cost thousands of dollars, and lets you have great fun in a game that only has two shitty levels. Maybe I am not a League of Legends fan. That is not the point.
I think that most new genres are spawned by companies who are successful at creating dolphins. Even if they did not spawn the genre, I also think that a good slice of top performing games in really healthy product categories get there by the same means. I would argue that Minecraft, Terraria, and even the Diablo franchise fall under one of these two categories.
The audience reaction varies when someone takes existing franchises that are beloved by dolphins and attempts to convert the IP into a whale-centric model. After all, we all have phones. I think that there are a lot of people who feel that whale-centric distribution models require too much dark pattern maintenance to be good products. I also think there are a lot of people who accept it because they have hobbies that have a similar sized budget that they feel is comparable. I acknowledge the debate and just get more popcorn.
The next time you find me working on a game I will probably come back to this article. I hope that the thesis described here will withstand the test of time. I will also write some more about my thoughts on Diablo, Minecraft, and Terraria. Each of these games has done amazing things that I would like to articulate.
You might also find them inspiring some of the systems I will be putting into future products.
Thank you again for reading. I have a few posts queued up here on game design as well as some posts on mentorship. I am also putting the finishing touches on my “tedious creativity” application for dungeon masters. You will hear more about all of these things in the coming weeks and months!
