In Shattered Galaxy (Nexon, 2001), which I worked on for 2 years, we had a mechanic where all players would automatically reset to L1 (50 was max) after the end of every 3 month season. It was a very powerful engagement driver. The down side was that it was such a powerful engagement mechanic that players played the game for 40+ seasons (10 years) and got extremely overpowered by stacking these buffs 40 times. We didn't charge for this, the game was on subscription.
I'm so fond of this progression mechanic that some variant of it is in 2 of the 3 games I've designed that did NOT make it to market (yet). But I don't charge for this. They generally pay for a subscription, though my subscriptions tend to be more exotic than what you see in the wild currently since I don't rely on microtransactions.
It should be safe to say subscription works also in general as a business model for many of these, where you can focus on having these as retention-reward mechanisms. Thanks for reminding/pointing this out!
In Shattered Galaxy (Nexon, 2001), which I worked on for 2 years, we had a mechanic where all players would automatically reset to L1 (50 was max) after the end of every 3 month season. It was a very powerful engagement driver. The down side was that it was such a powerful engagement mechanic that players played the game for 40+ seasons (10 years) and got extremely overpowered by stacking these buffs 40 times. We didn't charge for this, the game was on subscription.
I'm so fond of this progression mechanic that some variant of it is in 2 of the 3 games I've designed that did NOT make it to market (yet). But I don't charge for this. They generally pay for a subscription, though my subscriptions tend to be more exotic than what you see in the wild currently since I don't rely on microtransactions.
It should be safe to say subscription works also in general as a business model for many of these, where you can focus on having these as retention-reward mechanisms. Thanks for reminding/pointing this out!