Why Game Design is Hard

design

market-overview

An analysis of the business and technological challenges of game design which generalizes to other customer-focused businesses.

Author

Kasra Lekan

Published

August 23, 2024

Maplestory was a popular 2D MMO released in 2003.

A Simple Observation

Why are there so few MMO¹ games? Although I rarely played MMOs, the few times I have have been extremely fun because it is a large-scale social experience. At times you’re interacting with 10’s or 100’s of real people in real time.

I posed this question to a gamer/network engineer I know. He asked me to consider the tech stack required to provide a seamless high-player-count experience. That requires a server that is receiving data from ~10-100 clients who have different latency to the server (but are providing input at the same time) and must reconcile all those actions to inform the clients what happened. This is a difficult technical problem that most game engines² can ignore due to their low supported player count. While this was a compelling argument, I also considered how making an MMO is potentially a poor business decision for most developers.

I decided to explore deeper. Jump to the context section for an overview of the industry.

Technical and Business Factors

🚂 Game Engines and Devices

Game distribution today is diverse. While physical copies maintain some presence in the market, most games are distributed through online marketplaces like Steam or mobile app stores. Since distribution is relatively simple, the main barriers to entry for new titles are (1) Game Design / Development Times and (2) Marketing.

flowchart TD

subgraph Z[" "]
direction LR
  A{No-Code or Coding?} --> C{Platform/Device}

  C --> D1[Console]
  C --> D2[Desktop]
  C --> D3[Mobile]
  C --> D4[VR]
end

subgraph ZA[" "]
direction LR
    B{2D or 3D?} --> E{Licensing Agreement}
    
    E-->H1[Open Source/Free]
    E-->H2[Commercial Licensing]
end

Z --> ZA

Figure 2: A sample decision hierarchy for game engine selection.

Game design is part engineering, part art, and part business. Game engines are designed to carry some of the engineering load. While there are many engines, the choice is based on a few key criteria summarized in Figure 2. A few game engines worth pointing out:

Kaplay (formerly Kaboom) - The premier JavaScript-based game library, enabling web-first games but also desktop and mobile games through tools like Electron and Tauri.
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) - an open-source, multi-platform 3D engine originally built for AAA titles³
Godot - another open-source, cross-platform engine; designed for both 2D and 3D.
Unity and Unreal - closed-source but the most popular game engines. Unity has an extremely popular mobile game engine component as well.

🤨 Customer Satisfaction

Simple games have an easier time satisfying the player. When playing classic Mario, there are mechanics, nuance, and plot. Ultimately, however, the player is a lone gamer trying to complete the level. There is a clear objective with no external input.

When more complexity is added, most especially with multi-player support, the game design becomes more difficult. Just like businesses can have different categories of customers, games have different kinds of players. Balancing the game for each of these to make them happy can be difficult. For instance, a common imbalance occurs between “casual” and “hard-core” players. Some players will only devote an hour every once in a while to the game while the hard-core player will quickly reach the “end-game” content. If all of the development energy was placed into the initial progression of the game, the end-game will suffer and hard-core players will leave disappointed.

🆕 Case Study: New World

New World is a massively popular multiplayer online (MMO) game created by Amazon Games and released in September 2021… For players, the game is an extremely immersive experience: they don’t have to wait for screens to load or other interruptions. This is known as “seamlessness,” and it’s a valuable trait for developers to be able to deliver. (Walsh 2022)

New World is the most popular novel MMO I have seen in North America. Owned by Amazon, the game naturally used much of their infrastructure and the now deprecated Lumberyard engine. Walsh (2022) summarize the architecture which supported the game (Figure 3).

Collectively, the Amazon EC2 instances for a single world in Aeternum can simulate more than 7,000 artificial intelligence entities and hundreds of thousands of objects for 2,500 players. Each server set often processes millions of state changes per second, selecting the relevant data to create individual immersive experiences.

While this architecture, it is exciting that cloud computing has made provisioning an infrastructure for such a massive game far easier.

Despite its commercial success, ultimately New World lost most of its player base soon after launch. The game peaked on September 27th, 2021 with just over 900,000 players. By the end of the year, that number dwindled to 117,000 players. One month later - 68,000. Next month - 34,000. The game maintained that player base through the end of 2023 (steamcharts 2024).

Conclusion

Given the technical complexity of supporting a large player base with “seamlessness” and the challenges in satisfying the wide variety of customers, it is unsurprising that few new MMOs are made. Naturally, successful games can bring in strong revenue but the return on invested time may be higher by creating a simpler game. It’s worth noting that many indie developers make games that they would want to play and do not enter the developer with the calculating approach that I took in writing this article.

Context

The video game industry is a dynamic sector, characterized by a diverse customer base, a wide array of developers, dominant geographies, various distribution systems and devices, multiple business models, and a plethora of game genres.

🌏 Market Overview

Here I’m focused on a small subset of the overall game market in terms of both revenue and player count. However, some data on the industry overall will be useful in contextualizing the information presented here.

Code

from plotly.subplots import make_subplots
import plotly.graph_objects as go

labels_sector = ["Mobile", "Console", "PC"]
values_sector = [90.4, 53.2, 40.3]

fig_sector = go.Figure(data=[go.Pie(labels=labels_sector, values=values_sector, hole=.3)])

fig_sector.update_traces(
    textinfo="label+text+percent", 
    texttemplate="%{label}<br>$%{value} billion<br>(%{percent})"
)

fig_sector.update_layout(
    title_text="2023 Global Games Market Revenue, by Sector",
    dragmode="pan",
    plot_bgcolor='#2C2F33',
    paper_bgcolor='#23272A',
    font_color='#FFFFFF',
    title_font_color='#FFFFFF',
    legend_title_font_color='#FFFFFF',
    legend_font_color='#FFFFFF',
    xaxis=dict(
        title_font=dict(color='#FFFFFF'),
        tickfont=dict(color='#FFFFFF')
    ),
    yaxis=dict(
        title_font=dict(color='#FFFFFF'),
        tickfont=dict(color='#FFFFFF')
    ),
    margin=dict(l=50, r=50, t=50, b=50)
)

fig_sector.show(config={"displaylogo": False})

Figure 4: A breakdown of 2023 global game revenue by platform.

In 2023, the global video game market was valued at $184 billion with ~22% related to PC games Figure 4. Here I focus on this portion of games since they are most germane to my questions of interest.

Code

from plotly.subplots import make_subplots
import plotly.graph_objects as go

# Data for the pie charts
labels_market_share = ["Asia-Pacific", "North America", "Europe", "Latin America", "Middle East/Africa"]
values_market_share = [84.1, 50.6, 33.6, 8.7, 7.1]

labels_player_share = ["Asia-Pacific", "Middle East/Africa", "Europe", "Latin America", "North America"]
values_player_share = [1800, 574, 447, 335, 237]

# Creating a subplot with two rows and one column, vertically aligned
fig_combined = make_subplots(
    rows=2, cols=1,
    row_heights=[0.5, 0.5],
    vertical_spacing=0.1,
    subplot_titles=("2023 Global Games Market Share ($ billions), by Region", "2023 Global Games Player Count (millions), by Region"),
    specs=[[{"type": "pie"}], [{"type": "pie"}]]
)

# Adding the Market Share pie chart to the first row
fig_combined.add_trace(
    go.Pie(labels=labels_market_share, values=values_market_share, hole=.3, hoverinfo='label+percent+value'),
    row=1, col=1
)

# Adding the Player Share pie chart to the second row
fig_combined.add_trace(
    go.Pie(labels=labels_player_share, values=values_player_share, hole=.3, hoverinfo='label+percent+value'),
    row=2, col=1
)

fig_combined.update_layout(
    dragmode="pan",
    plot_bgcolor='#2C2F33',
    paper_bgcolor='#23272A',
    font_color='#FFFFFF',
    title_font_color='#FFFFFF',
    legend_title_font_color='#FFFFFF',
    legend_font_color='#FFFFFF',
    xaxis=dict(
        title_font=dict(color='#FFFFFF'),
        tickfont=dict(color='#FFFFFF')
    ),
    yaxis=dict(
        title_font=dict(color='#FFFFFF'),
        tickfont=dict(color='#FFFFFF')
    ),
    margin=dict(l=50, r=50, t=50, b=50)
)

fig_combined.show(config={"displaylogo": False})

Figure 5: A breakdown of 2023 global game revenue and player counts by region.

North America represents ~7% of the 3.3 billion players of games globally, however, it is responsible for nearly 30% of the revenue Figure 5. I will focus mainly on the North American market due to my familiarity with it. The phenomena I discuss will generalize to some extent globally but may not map precisely to other geographies.

To learn more, I recommend reading my sources in full:

Visualized US data based on a 2023 YouGov poll (ESA 2024).
⭐ For comprehensive, global perspective on video games in 2024 with case studies (Eriksen 2024).

🧟 Game Genres

There is a great variety of games. Below is a list of common genres and related games:

Action Adventure (e.g., Assassins Creed, God of War, Legend of Zelda)
- Hack and Slash RPG (e.g., Hades, Children of Morta, Moonlighter)
- Single-player RPG (e.g., Skyrim, Final Fantasy VII, Mass Effect)
MOBA (e.g., League of Legends, Dota 2, Arena of Valor, Wild Rift)
MMORPG (e.g., World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, EVE Online, Black Desert Mobile)
Shooter (e.g., Overwatch, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, VALORANT)
- Battle Royale (e.g., Fortnite Battle Royale, PUBG, Call of Duty Warzone)
2D Platformer (e.g., Mario, Metroid, Castlevania, Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Cuphead, Blasphemous, Celeste)
Auto-Battler (e.g., Teamfight Tactics, Dota Auto Chess)
Fighting Games (e.g., Street Fighter, Super Smash Bros, Tekken)
Lifestyle Role-playing / Simulation Games (e.g., Animal Crossing, The Sims, Stardew Valley)
Collector (e.g., Genshin Impact, AFK Arena, Marvel Contest of Champions)
Collectible Card Games (e.g., Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering Online, Legends of Runeterra)
Endless Runner (e.g., Subway Surfers, Temple Run, Crash Bandicoot: On the Run, Jetpack Joyride)
Tower Defense (e.g., Plants vs. Zombies, Bloons TD, Kingdom Rush)
Adventure/Puzzle (e.g., The Outer Wilds, Firewatch, The Talos Principle, Journey)

Naturally, some genres tend to be more popular such as Action-RPGs and Shooters on PC/Console and Puzzle on mobile.

2023 Top Grossing Games
Rank	Top Grossing Console & PC Full Game	Genre	Top Grossing Mobile Game	Genre
1	Hogwarts Legacy	Action RPG	MONOPOLY GO!	Board Game
2	Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3	First-Person Shooter	Candy Crush Saga	Puzzle
3	Madden NFL 24	Sports	Roblox	Sandbox/Adventure
4	Marvel’s Spider-Man 2	Action-Adventure	Royal Match	Puzzle
5	The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom	Action-Adventure	Coin Master	Casual/Card
6	Diablo IV	Action RPG	Pokémon GO	Augmented Reality/Adventure
7	Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2	First-Person Shooter	Gardenscapes	Puzzle
8	Mortal Kombat 1	Fighting	Jackpot Party – Casino Slots	Casino
9	Star Wars: Jedi Survivor	Action-Adventure	Township	Simulation/City-Building
10	EA Sports FC 24	Sports	Evony	Strategy

Figure 6: ESA (2024) lists the highest-grossing games in the United States in 2023. The highest frequency genre is bolded.

🛖 Developers

The video game industry consists of a mix of large, established companies and smaller independent developers:

Large Developers: Companies like Riot Games, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft dominate the market with high-budget, AAA titles.
Independent Developers: Indie developers are significant, producing games that often gain substantial followings.

Naturally, success looks different for a bootstrapped or low-budget indie developer than for a large, well-funded developer. Think startup versus Google. For a startup, releasing a product with several million dollars in revenue is a massive success while Google has killed many products that have millions of users.

💵 Business Models

The video game industry employs various business models to generate revenue:

Premium Sales: One-time purchase of games.
Free-to-Play (F2P): Games are free to download, but revenue is generated through in-game purchases and microtransactions for virtual goods, skins, etc. While many such transactions are cosmetic, others are a “time-for-money” tradeoff allowing players to achieve the same ends through lots of playtime or spending money.
Subscription Models: Some games have subscriptions but there are also services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Now that offer access to a library of games for a monthly fee.
Advertising: Especially prevalent in mobile games, where ads are shown to players.

References

Eriksen, Kaare. 2024. “The State of the Video Games Industry: A Special Report.” Variety. https://variety.com/vip-special-reports/state-of-video-games-a-special-report-1235884124/.

ESA. 2024. “2024 Essential Facts About the U.S. Video Game Industry.” https://www.theesa.com/resources/essential-facts-about-the-us-video-game-industry/2024-data/.

steamcharts. 2024. “New World - Steam Charts.” https://steamcharts.com/app/1063730#All.

Walsh, Nicholas. 2022. “The Unique Architecture Behind Amazon Games’ Seamless MMO New World AWS for Games Blog.” https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/the-unique-architecture-behind-amazon-games-seamless-mmo-new-world/.

Footnotes

Massively Multiplayer Online games, Wikipedia Entry.↩︎
Unity and Unreal are the most popular engines. For more on game engines, see Wikipedia Entry.↩︎
See Amazon Lumberyard. O3DE was announced as Lumberyard’s Apache-licensed successor in 2021.↩︎

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Lekan, Kasra. 2024. “Why Game Design Is Hard.” August 23, 2024. https://blog.kasralekan.com/ideas/game-design/.