Every evening, after a long day at work, Reggie F.*, 50, tries to forget about stubborn controller tablets and whips out his iPod Touch to play some of the latest gaming jewels the Apple platform brings to light every day.
Today, he is excited to try Tiny Tower, developed by a classic “garage developer”, Nimblebit in San Diego. Finding and installing the game takes less time than the PS3 “System Upgrade required” dialog box to pop up and soon he has built several floors in his new Tiny Tower, on track to catch up with his friends.
But after fifteen minutes into the game, he has exhausted his virtual currency to a point where he can’t extend his building anymore and all his shops are busy with restocking or selling. So he shifts his role from Tower CEO to Elevator Attendant, bringing visitors to the different floors, waiting for VIP’s to boost his income so he can afford to build the next level. This gets tedious after a while and he puts the iPod away, just to get back into the game minutes later after receiving a notification that his Parlor ran out of Vanilla ice cream.
!(Freemium == Freemium)
A lot of the mechanics of Freemium games and IAP sales have been explored and I’m assuming my readers are familiar with the difference between consumables and extensions (level packs, ad-free play, customization features, etc). I wanted to highlight an aspect of consumables that I wasn’t giving too much thought before I had an in depth discussion with Gavin Bowman and Craig Sharpe from Retrodreamer about it:
When you look at the different approaches on the market, it is fascinating what a wide range of “waiting play” can be found. I think this is worthwhile exploring, as it has quite some impact on early game design.
Main Play vs Waiting Play
Main Play is the core gameplay component of any given Freemium game. In Farmville, Cityville, Tiny Tower it is about building up as well as cashing in on earlier investments (harvesting). In Flower Garden it is watering and fertilizing your garden. In Eliminate Pro and High Noon it is the shooter game.
When you run out of an artificial source, the way the game can be played changes. Those artificial sources either refill after a certain time or you can buy more with real cash. What the game offers the player during that waiting time I’d like to call Waiting Play.
Everything goes
What I found is a fascinating variation. Some games essentially close down the gaming experience 100%. You either pony up real money or you wait some hours before you are allowed to play again. Eliminate Pro, but also classic Farmville and its many clones typically worked that way. You run out of virtual money, you are done, there is nothing meaningful you can do anymore.
Some games drastically reduce the gameplay, but don’t throw out the players completely. In Flower Garden, you can still create bouquets and send them per email.
Nimblebit’s games are fascinating in that respect, as they not only offer a somewhat meaningful** engagement during the waiting periods, those mini games have the potential to shortcut the waiting time. When you run elevators in Tiny Tower, you can get lucky and earn a substantial amount of virtual currency when placing a visiting VIP strategically. It is not as rewarding as opening the game again after a couple of hours, when you can do all types of activity with the collected virtual money, but it is satisfying enough to keep some players actively engaged with the game for a longer time.
The other extreme I found thanks to Gavin was Mega Jump, which doesn’t limit the Main Play at all. In fact, you can keep playing and earning virtual money as long as you want. The key element there seems to be a rather large gap between the amount that you can earn by playing versus the amount you need to buy something meaningful. And if you switch the game off, your “investments” don’t work for you similar to what they do in Tiny Tower and Farmville.
Summary
Lot’s going on and devs are trying a lot of approaches. This thing is tricky to balance and probably worthwhile doing early while designing the game. Also, any decision there comes with ethical consequences you want to clear out before, like, do you really want to shut the door into your player’s face when they have done everything meaningful that is there to do.
Big thanks goes to Gavin and Craig for diving into this discussion. And to #idevblogaday collecting all sorts of posts from developers like me.
Let us know in the comments if you know freemium games/approaches that do things differently in that aspect and what you like as the perfect balance.
* name has been changed
** make no mistake. “Meaningful” as in progresses the game, not “meaningful” as in cool gameplay. I would apologize to the Nimblebits for this statement but I have hosted too many elevator rides in my Tiny Tower to really feel like I want to 
Maybe it’s just me living in Vegas but I liken the “Elevator Game” to sitting at a slot machine and pulling the lever. Most of the time it’s going to be a waste of time (and money, but then time is money), but occasionally you’ll be lucky and get Tower Bux for delivering a passenger, or you’ll bring a new tenant to an unoccupied apartment slot, and that’s like hitting a small win on the one armed bandit. Then, when you’re really lucky, a VIP shows up and that’s where Tiny Tower gets really interesting. When you’re playing a slot machine, you’re mostly working to get those jackpots, or in the case of video slots, those bonus games. They can come at any time which keeps you pulling the lever, and when they come they engage you on a deeper lever (if the game is well designed) and the payouts are potentially huge. In Tiny Tower, the Big Spender is obviously the best VIP: in my tower, I sometimes earn 25,000+ coins from a single Big Spender visit (thanks to my fully dream-job staffed racquetball shop). But that Big Spender could also be a bust if I haven’t planned for his arrival. So I have fun between significant events by setting up my tower to always be prepared to cash in on the arrival of a VIP. I also play my own mini-game by dressing every worker at a particular shop in matching outfits so that I can quickly find them whenever the President needs saving or someone’s long lost brother arrives. Quickly and constantly tapping the “new outfit” option and then having the ability to stop hitting it once they randomly get put into the desired outfit (usually a particular hat, or a specific shirt color) has become a mini-game of it’s own for me. Kind of like Match Panic, except with a more useful (and therefore more fun) outcome.
Anyway, this comment got a little rambly, but I mostly just wanted to compliment Nimble Bit on their execution of Tiny Tower and the way the game can still be fun to play while you’re waiting for significant events to occur. That said, I should also point out that I personally have no incentive to ever spend real money on the game, which is a shame. I feel like buying bux is like entering a cheat code, and that would completely ruin my enjoyment of the game. [This is why I keep begging Ian on Twitter to add some fun cosmetic upgrades for real money to the game!]