them into existing games with established core loops. They felt tacked on and lacked the relevance they have in games designed with them at the center from the outset. Random elements were always present in our reward
systems, but never in the core progression of our quite linear games. However, the market trend was going in the opposite direction, so we challenged ourselves to design a city-building game with a higher variance: HoH. As designers, we give up a lot of control if we allow some players to randomly obtain a super-powerful hero early in the game. That was a bit scary at first, especially coming from the more controlled core loops of games like FoE and RoC. Ultimately, though, we tried to embrace that uncertainty and turn it into one of our strengths by building other systems around it. All of our games are generally free to play. We also
aim never to sell “good usability” for money – it should be an integral part of the game. What you can get in our games for money is the ability to progress faster than non-payers and access more content in less time. Due to the large variance in HoH, even non-payers can obtain the most valuable and powerful hero in their first session if they are lucky. I’ve also seen non-payers perform exceptionally well in PvP. If PvP is not your thing, you can mostly ignore it in HoH. Nevertheless, we want to offer highly competitive content to players who enjoy it, and often players who enjoy the game also decide to support us financially to help us develop it further. It’s also great to see that our event cities generate a
lot of revenue for us. They offer a lot of gameplay and really stand out as a fun feature. Players seem to enjoy building new cities regularly, and spending money gives them a head start. Ultimately, I think that’s the most important thing.
If your game isn’t fun to play, people won’t be willing to spend money on it. Likewise, it’s always a bad sign if
players who don’t spend money quickly leave the game, because they perceive it as “pay-to-win”. I think with HoH we’ve struck the perfect balance: it’s a game that’s fun for everyone, regardless of how much they’re willing to spend.
Unlike most premium games, your live service games aim to keep the audience in the ecosystem for as long as possible and encourage them to make microtransactions. Typically, so-called whales generate the majority of revenue in such games. If that’s the case, what design tricks are particularly effective at catching whales? I find the term “whales” very problematic. We’re not trying to trick anyone into buying something in our game; we’re not hunting anyone down. I’m not a Captain Ahab, frantically plotting my next big catch. Instead, my job is to create a fun gaming experience for our players while ensuring that our business model works for us. However, I always have great respect for the players, which I feel is lacking in this sort of wording. Anyway – let’s get back to the question. For us, it’s
important to design features with a certain spending depth in mind. As I mentioned, in previous games I worked on, we often struggled to find something valuable to sell to our players other than city buildings, which take up limited space. Ultimately, that limits the spending depth. In HoH, we ensure that every new hero we create is
useful in at least one area of the game. This way, we can ensure that everything we do appeals to a large group of players. Heroes are complex game pieces with many “vectors”, or areas that can be scaled in power by the
36 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2026
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