How The Simpsons - Tapped Out is making money

Recent news about EA’s new The Simpsons – Tapped Out game shows that tablet-optimized social game earned more than $23 million during Q3 2012.

So what makes Tapped Out so engaging gaming experience that it a) retains users and b) monetizes them so that it makes so big numbers for EA? Let’s check it out!

The back-story of the game is that Homer accidentally was so engaged into playing the tablet game of Tapped Out that he forgot to watch out nuclear plant meters which of course caused plant to explode and blow away whole Springfield. Player’s goal is to help Homer to rebuild Springfield and invite the old inhabitants back to Springfield.

Look and feel of the game is genuine Simpson-style. Game uses same graphical style, character voices and the humor which people has used to experience when watching The Simpsons on TV. The controls of game itself are well optimized for touch devices; touch controls are quick and accurate and user interface logic suits well for mobile devices with large screens.

Game has two in-game currencies, namely the usual soft currency which in this case is cash and the hard currency which is branded in the Simpson-style as donuts. Soft currency is the primary currency of the game and player can buy most of the items with soft currency except some special buildings and items. Player can earn only small amounts of hard currency in the game by leveling up or inviting friends. Hard currency is mainly used for speeding up and to buy some premium items.

Core Loop

The game features one dimensional core loop. The loop consists of building more building to player’s own town and collecting most well-known characters of the franchise by that. Constructing the buildings take time and money, but earns experience to the player. Collecting different characters compels to humans primal “hunt & gather” instinct which is why these kinds of loops are very successful in games.

The more buildings player can construct to town, the more taxes (cash + XP) he can collect from them. Different buildings have different waiting times which player has to wait (or pay) in order to collect taxes. Also, different buildings have different amounts of taxes which can be collected from them.

Another element to the core loop is managing the life of the inhabitants. Every character in the town has his / hers own little “yellowish” chores to do in the game. In general the chores  do not affect the appearance or core-loop of the game, but are more like busywork; keeping players busy and adding another monetization layer to the game but at the same time, creating emotional bonds to the characters and creating feeling of “my town”. In my opinion busy-work don't add the value of the game but still they are quite widely used throughout social games.

Lisa's chore-list = busywork

In addition to basic core loop, the game features also mechanic called “Conform-o-meter”. Conform-o-meter measures how well player can grow town so that special meters fill up. These meters include e.g. Consumerism, Vanity and Socialism among others and they measure how well the inhabitants can go to shopping, how well decorated the town is and how well player has made friends and visited their towns. Game rewards the player for reaching the meters with added money and XP.

Visit my town! a.k.a the Virality

Some would want to know how the social aspects show up in the game because – after all – this is social game. So let’s dive and see how social this game truly is.

Game includes popular social hooks / invites. This means that player can invite friends to join as his neighbors by using channels such as EA’s own Origin -network, Facebook, Google Mail or iOS device’s contacts. Everyone has to join to Origin in order to use social features, but luckily the registration process in-game is fairly easy to do.

View from the neighbourhood

Tapped Out’s only social feature inside the game is the ability to visit player’s friends’ towns. In current version of Tapped Out, players visit their friends’ towns in order to send Valentine’s Day cards to the friends and thus helping friends and themselves. Cards are sent by clicking (maximum three times a day per town) the buildings in the town. By clicking buildings players gain more experience, cash and hearts for themselves and for their friends.  Hearts are special kind of in-game currency which players can use to purchase special Valentine’s Day items (limited time around Valentine’s Day). Sending Valentine’s Day cards to friends is easy and rewarding way to integrate the social aspect in the game since it compels users to invite their friends to the game as well.

Sadly this is as far as the game gets in the social mechanics. It’s sad because social mechanic doesn't really affect any other part of the game than the player receiving more experience and in-game currency. Secondly the only feature which the game includes in terms of social aspects is exactly the same thing what e.g.  Zynga did back in the days with their first Facebook games including FarmVille.

It would have not taken much effort to introduce little bit evolved social mechanic to the game where users could help their friends by integrating the help features more into the core loop of the game. 

The Monetization

It’s interesting to see the level of of the cheapest currency-pack goes up and up when the platforms and games evolve. Before iPhone was launched back in the days, Travian, Farmville and bunch of other social games started at 0,49€ currency packs. Now the usual starting price seems to be something like 4 to 5 euros.

In Tapped Out, the minimum price for currency pack is 1,79€ which is mystery for me why that is so low. 

In Tapped Out, player pays for speeding up the progress (constructions and chores) of the game as well as by paying from some special items and buildings. And there’s a LOT of items you can buy only with hard currency. From most expensive item the player has to pay 250 donuts and all the premium stuff together is worth of 2743 donuts. With a maximum one-time IAP of 2400 donuts wih 89,99€

Because the game is so well optimized for DAU (as I explain later), the game could monetize better the players who doesn't want to wait. Now all the waiting is tied to the max 24-hour cycle which decreases the conversion rate from players to payers. 

Engagement

Biggest element for high engagement and thus retention rates are well balanced core-loop and compelling, tablet-optimized gameplay. Core loop is designed to keep DAU high because every task of the characters, building & tax income times of the buildings doesn’t exceed 24h. In addition, the way the rewards of the tasks of the characters, finished buildings and send / received Valentine’s Day cards are showed to the player is very compelling. It’s very rewarding to come back in the next day and tap & see how the rewards fly to oneself on the screen of iPad.

Scratch-R tickets. Can you scratch the itch?

In addition to core loop, Tapped Out includes basic engagement features. First, there are the daily rewards which reward players with money for coming back daily. The cash rewards increases daily for a week and in the last day there is special lottery prize available for player.  After one week the reward loops starts again from the beginning.

Another engagement feature is Daily “Scratch-R” scratching tickets which players can buy with soft currency once per day and if they want buy more, they have to pay hard currency. These kinds of luck-elements are especially popular in Asian countries (according author’s own references) and may monetize very well there.

1st gen social game in 3rd gen platform

I think that Tapped Out is the iteration of 1^st gen social game which means that the social aspects of the game doesn't really add value to the core game mechanics but rather just rewards  the player for visiting their friends town with in-game currency.

I think the game has very good retention rates and it monetizes mainly from players who would like to buy the premium stuff or the Asian players for scratching those tickets. It could do better if the game’s progression would be designed to slow down (= longer waiting) after some while from beginning of the game to create primed to spend moments.

The retention rates could be quite easily pulled even higher by enabling players to upgrade their buildings or create ad-hoc relationships between the character of their town. Now the game doesn't give any visual feedback on the progression other than giving and showing piles of in-game currency to players which they can buy more buildings.

Apart from the monetization and retention – or in conjunction with them – the game could do a hell of a lot better with integrating social aspects into the game. The first thing would have been to think easy and creative ways to collaborate and integrate fabulous Simpson characters into it. What could have been funnier than to find and catch (read: tap) “the lost cats of Crazy Cat Lady” and send them back to a friend from whose Crazy Cat’s are they? Or how about enabling players to create their own baseball league championships after they have managed to build the stadium and invite their friends to take part in it? There’s a tons of more good and easily implementable ideas from the franchise which could have been integrated into the game to create more social game.

Apart from the social aspects, I think EA is quite pleased with the numbers what the game has done but I sincerely hope that EA has some ideas waiting to get implemented so that the players would get more value from this social game. Now it just seems that EA has went easy but hollow way of creating social game by copying the basic design principles from early Zynga games which creates good numbers for EA due to high discoverability of The Simpsons franchise, heavy user acquisitions and 24h optimized (but still hollow) progression loop. Simply put it's fist gen social game on a third gen platform.