Breaking down the excellent live service and engagement tools of Modern Warfare, 2019
Note: This piece was written back in 2020 and was never finished, please excuse the shortcomings.
This image breaks down the entire progression system of Modern Warfare, 2019. Considering how simple it is, it’s astonishing how they managed to create such an engaging loop.
TLDR Summary
Games as a service or Live Services (GAAS) have become more and more prevalent in modern video games. As this happens, thinking about AERM (Acquisition, Engagement, Retention and Monetization) and how to use it is therefore extremely important to have a healthy user base. The implications of where you chose to invest resources will have different outcomes in the behaviour of your player base.
Engagement is in many ways key to unlocking a healthy user base. It’s not just about the systems and mechanics we create, it’s about the mindset and approach we have to our player base. Creating good engagement and retention systems is about providing automated mechanics to the player that will keep them occupied with our game over a long period of time without us having to spend a lot of resources on creating new content.
Modern Warfare (MW) has demonstrated a near perfect approach in handling AERM and respecting the players intellect. The principle of achieving this is simple, prioritising engagement and retention over monetization is key to a healthy user base.
Introduction
We have come a long way since the release of the original Modern Warfare (MW), released in November 2007. The game industry has undergone several changes across a multitude of disciplines, some obvious such game design and graphics but also player engagement, time value and monetization. With AAA games costing more to make but still sold at $60, Games as a Service (GAAS or Live Services) have become more and more prevalent and important for companies. As any other industry, undergoing change is a process and the ugly part of that process is thankfully over.
A lot of other changes in the industry have revolved around business models. A heated subject that is constantly under the microscope. Since the original MW, we went from standalone DLCs to season passes to loot boxes and at some point, we had a hybrid season pass - lootbox model. We finally ended up with Battlepasses, made popular by Fortnite in 2017. In combination with direct purchases, the Battlepass is currently the most popular live service model on the market in new games. Now, all these business models are created to increase sales and make up for lost revenue from free content such as new maps, weapons, experiences etc. But where many failed to understand, is the need to balance monetization and respect player intelligence.
In today’s gaming landscape, even single players games such as Mario Odyssey have some live service elements to them post launch. The battle for precious player time is currently not just fought between games or gaming platforms, today we as an industry are also fighting other entertainment services such as Netflix, HBO and even YouTube and Twitch.
Engagement is King
To break down live services, it is important to point out what is important for the desired customer behaviour we are looking for. We all want players to come back and play our game every day. The principles of operating live services consist of acquisition, engagement, retention and monetization. In acquisition, you are either reaching out to players to ask them to try your game or they are seeking you organically due to factors such as history or desirability. Engagement refers to people interacting with your product, in this case we are referring to people who login to play or engage with the game in other ways. Retention is about creating systems that will allow players to continue to engage with the product. Finally, monetization is about offering additional services to the players post the original release.
(Please note! Researching this subject may result in you finding incomplete models such as the ARM Funnel, which leaves out engagement. Engagement is not necessarily a gaming exclusive term, but traditional or non-entertainment business might either ignore this part completely or fold it under retention. In gaming, retention mechanics are different from engagement mechanics. For example, a base progression system might fall under engagement mechanics, but a leaderboard system might fall under retention mechanics. It all depends on your data and the drivers behind them, same mechanics in two different games can have varied outcomes.)
(insert AERM image)
The philosophy of which principle precedes which is another heated topic in live services, you as a game developer or publisher have goals you are trying to meet, and it simply comes down to priorities. Unfortunately and in many cases, economics get the better of us and that is when bad or short-sighted business decisions take place.
Now why is engagement so important in all of this? Engagement is about providing mechanics that allow the player to continue interacting with the product. If the customer is not engaged, then down the line, there will be no one to monetize on. It is that simple. Now MW employees a very comprehensive collection of engagement systems in the base game. If we take out important but expensive engagement drivers such as the release of new content (maps, modes, weapons etc.), the underlying systems that is carrying the player forward in MW are both vast and deep. To make the most bang for your buck, investing in engagement systems is going to be a key driver in maintaining a healthy player base.
MW took an extraordinary approach in handling engagement in relationship to the audience. Instead of having a linear curve that everyone must follow, IW chose instead to further open up the funnel to casual players and allow them to feel badass. At the same time, they made sure to not let their core players feel left out by building deep reward mechanic that will keep them engaged for months on end.
Another factor in Engagement that we rarely pay much attention to is the future of the product we are working on. Prioritizing engagement and making sure the player is first and foremost having fun, will eventually breed a healthy player base but also a long-term player base. With every decision we take, we need to ask ourselves, is this decision going to benefit the player in the long term? Will this decision make the player come back next year for our next title? We have all had a bad experience of some sort, both inside and outside of gaming. You as a developer or publisher have the power to decide if you want to have a short- or long-term relationship with your customer.
I have been playing Mario games for +20 years and today my kids are enjoying Mario as well. We must think a bit more about the lifetime value of our customers, but also beyond that. The focus of engagement is at the core of this conversation.
Engagement in MW
Before we dive into the engagement systems of MW, I feel it is important to point out the secret sauce behind Infinity Wards (IW) Live Service. With the original base game offering, the developer delivered solid single player, multiplayer and CO-OP experiences. Post the MW base game release, the title is offering heavy engagement and acquisition drivers such as free updates containing new weapons, maps and modes. The beauty here is that they created a strong marriage between the engagement systems in the game and the post launch content with focus on engagement, not monetization. Nowhere are they being in your face about wanting your money, this is one of the keys points to their current success. They are forcing you to want to give them your money, and this is important to keep in mind. Because ultimately, it comes down to mindset and playing the long game.
The base idea behind everything in MW is simple. How do we make sure that players feel rewarded or have a clear goal in every single session they play without us having to provide new content for every new session?
Here is a list of all MW engagement and monetization systems (again, I am excluding costly engagement drivers such as maps, modes and weapons). Notice the stark difference in the columns between the free vs paid content. Contrary to what people say on the internet about live services, IW has delivered a comprehensive package that will satisfy most of their audience. The original offering is extremely strong and seeing how their seasonal offerings are currently going, they are just adding more and more without putting anything behind paywalls.
Engagement/Retention systems in MW:
- Progression system
o Rank progression unlocks (level 1-55)
o Officer progression (level 56-155)
- Weapon progression system
- Operators unlocks (MP personas)
- Mission System
o Daily Challenges
o Weekly Challenges
o Missions
- CO-OP unlocks
- Battlepass progression system
o Free tier
(Excluding mp maps, co-op missions, modes, weapons, characters etc.)
Monetization systems in MW:
- Battlepass progression system
o Paid tier
- Direct purchases of bundles
Let’s have a look at every one of these systems and see how they work together to bring the player back to the game, day after day.
The progression system
- Progression system
o Rank progression (level 1-55)
In this part of the progression system, players unlock all base equipment that they get to use in battle. All of these items are functional items. Players will unlock:
§ Weapons
§ Gadgets
§ Killstreaks
§ Field upgrades
§ Perks
o Officer progression (level 56-155)
§ With every rank progression beyond level 55, a unique challenge unlocks for the ability to clear a mission and earn prestigious emblems. This rank reset with every new in-game season.
(insert image over progression system)
The progression system in MW is split into two parts. The first part is related to all base equipment players use in-game. Earning this equipment depends on a linear curve and all player go through the same journey as they get more familiar and comfortable with the game. The journey here in this part of the progression system is short and to the point. By keeping this journey short, IW are doing a couple of things.
1. They are incentivising low skilled players to keep playing and deterring them from churning out early.
2. They are teaching the players how to play the game and use new equipment in steps without using tutorials.
3. They are making sure you are not overburdened or exposed to too many things at once.
4. They are also making sure that you get all the tools early, so you don’t feel you are at a disadvantage against other players.
Once you are done with the first part of the progression system (level 1-55), you unlock the second part, called the Officer progression (level 56-155).
The Officer progression system is all about showing off your dedication and progression in each season. This part of the progression system has two good points to highlight. The first is providing yet another engagement tool for the player. Say you already unlocked all base equipment, IW made ranking up further meaningful by letting you unlock new emblems with missions associated with officer ranks. The other point of the officer progression is that the officer progression is tied to the Battlepass and seasons. With each season the officer progression restarts, and you are presented with a new opportunity to unlock exclusive emblems with a new season. Thus ranking up becomes meaningful for every new season.
The Weapon progression system
- Weapon progression system
Each weapon has a set of attachments and skins the player can unlock by leveling up a desired weapon. Players level up their weapons by playing the game with that specific weapon and performing actions with it. Weapons can be leveled up to 100, but you stop earning rewards at level 70. The weapon progression system helps players unlock:
o Attachments
o Weapon skins (camouflage) and weapon skin missions
o Weapon Sight reticle progression unlocks
(insert image over a weapon in menu)
The weapon progression system let’s player diverge and dive a bit deeper into overall progression by leveling up their weapons and unlocking new attachments. IW has been very smart in this department by making a lot of the weapon unlocks the same across all weapons. As an example, a majority of weapon sights, skins, attachments etc. are present across all weapons. But you will still need to unlock them separately for every single weapon.
What is special about weapons and attachments in Modern Warfare is the Gunsmith system. The Gunsmith system is where players get to customize their weapons, both from a visual perspective but also from a functional. The developers have essentially turned Gunsmith into a mini-game of sorts, allowing players to experiment a lot. Figuring out your playstyle and needs all depends on how you customize a weapon in the Gunsmith. There are many extremes you can pull a weapon towards, completely changing the behaviour of the weapon but also your character. How you customize your weapon isn’t limited to the weapon behaviour, customizing a weapon also changes your characters behaviour, parameters like character movement speed, aim movement speed, speed to aim etc.
The Gunsmith is a huge part of the modern warfare engagement loop, where you are constantly going back and forth between different weapons but also being able to create multiple versions of the same weapon. All behaving differently and giving different results. And to top it off, the game allows you to save your modified creations as “Blueprints”, so that you don’t have to redo your customization every single time you make changes.
The system they built here encourages experimentation. You want to try out different weapons to understand how you can alter their behaviour. And it is thanks to this system that there no ultimate weapon or OP weapons. Everything in the game can be countered in some fashion. You need to be creative when approaching different situations and develop weapons to counter them.
An example of something MW has solved is shotguns, usually shotguns are useless in multiplayer shooters. With Gunsmith however, the developers have managed to make shotguns and single action rifles valid weapons. It’s not just about SMG’s or Assault rifles, you constantly see different weapons being used by different players. This is also the reason why IW gave players 10 slots of loadout customization. Depending on the problems and situations you find yourself into mid-game, you will need to adapt or bring in a new strategy to counter what is going on in a match.
Now moving on to the Weapon skins, for each weapon players can unlock a set of skins. For each skin-family there is a requirement to unlock a particular skin. For example, some skins require a set number of headshots or kills while crouched etc. More on that in the next section.
(insert image of weapon skins menu)
Finally, players can also unlock different weapon sight reticle designs. You do so by equipping the correct reticle type and performing a set action required to unlock the next one in line. Once you unlock the next one in line, you get a different requirement until you unlock all designs for that type of reticle. Reticle designs get unlocked across all weapons, contrary to how skins work.
The Mission system
- Mission system
The mission system in MW consist of three parts, daily and weekly challenges as well as missions. Daily and weekly challenges reward XP, Calling cards, emblems and charms. Missions reward all of the mentioned as well as weapon variation and operator skins.
o Daily Challenges
o Weekly Challenges
o Missions
§ Base game missions
§ Operator based missions
§ Battlepass based missions
(insert image over barracks)
In MW, missions/challenges are one of the most important tools that developers use to engage the players in the core loop of the game. Missions are literally everywhere in the game, and they act as a motivator that continuously propels you forward. There are two ways that MW communications missions to the player, either directly via the mission system or indirectly through thresholds and criteria players need to meet.
Missions that aren’t communicated directly
Missions that aren’t communicated to the player directly tend to be mostly targeted against veteran players. The missions usually take longer time to complete and requires players to spend time in the game. MW is filed with these missions, everything from unlocking new weapon skins, to operators to new sight reticles. All these items require a specific action that you need to fulfil to be able to unlock. These missions are described on each section of the player menu, but you have no way of tracking them while playing the game. So checking progress is a continues effort on the players part to back to the menu to check progress. This might have been a deliberate choice by the developers, so to not confuse or overflow the player with information.
Most often these missions are fulfilled automatically by playing the game. For a start, players will start earning weapon skins, or operators randomly, but as soon you start diving into the different sections of the game, you will notice that there are requirements to unlock these items.
(show image of non communicated mission)
The system that was built here will often force the player to play in a different way and that is not a bad thing. If the player gets to comfortable doing the same thing repeatedly, eventually they will get bored and churn. But if the game is constantly asking you to do things outside of your comfort zone, you will automatically find new reasons to continue playing. This is why these missions would be classed as something targeted at a veteran audience.
The communicated mission/challenge system
With season two of MW, the development team introduced Weekly Challenges. Prior to this, players had access to Daily Challenges and Missions. Generally speaking, mission systems are standard engagement tools that developers use to get players to have a purpose during their play session. In MW missions and challenges always yields a reward, either in the form of XP or a visual reward such as an emblem, charm or calling card.
(show image of mission mission area)
Mission and challenge systems play a vital role in engaging and retaining players by giving them purpose in every play session as well as reason to come back the next day for a new session. Different parts of this system have different goals in terms of retaining and engaging players. An important thing to point out for building engagement systems like this is the running cost. Fortunately for us, the return on investment here is very high. We only need to build this system once and after that it’s going to be virtually free to create endless amounts of challenges for the player. The only other input we need to add is the reward.
To explain how these missions/challenges work. The daily challenges are self-explanatory really, players login and there is a set of three daily challenges players need to meet. Usually in MW, these challenges ask the player to use a new set of equipment or weapon type that they don’t normally play with. Weekly challenges work more or less the same way as daily challenges, only key difference here is that it’s a big set of challenges and they refresh on a weekly basis.
The mission system is a bit different from the daily and weekly challenges. In the mission system, developers have given this part of the game multiple purposes. Acting as a tutorial, training ground as well as unlock mechanism for important or expensive items. The mission system is a manual mission system where players have a choice from a list of missions. The player can only have a single mission active and each mission is devised into a set amount of challenges, each one with a unique reward. Upon completing a mission, the player is rewarded with the ultimate reward for that specific mission.
A cool thing to add in relation the mission system is that a lot of these missions require the player to do other actions to be able to start/complete the mission. In many cases, players are asked to equip certain weapons, gadgets etc., but in other cases some even ask the player to equip a certain operator. Now all operators in the game behave the same, there are no operator perks. But by asking the player to change operator, you are forcing the player to engage with operators, but also with the Battlepass and seasonal system that IW built.
Battlepass progression
- Battlepass progression unlocks
The Battlepass helps players unlock weapon variations, new operators, watches, emblems, calling cards, XP tokens, XP and operator skins.
o Free tier
o Paid tier
(show image of Battlepass)
With the first season of MW, IW introduced Battlepass to the players. As we know, Battlepasses are a monetization and engagement system aimed at rewarding players for playing the game over a period of time. A Battlepass is divided into tiers with the player unlocking a new tier as they progress in the game.
Now unlike Fortnite or PUBG, the Battlepass system in MW is much smarter. Instead of demanding skill (XP) from the player for unlocking Battlepass tiers, IW decided to widen the player funnel significantly by making the MW Battlepass based on time spent in the game and not skill. This meant that anyone, regardless of their skill level have the chance to progress, engage and enjoy the Battlepass. Without having the feeling of missing out or being less worthy that others to earn the final reward, MW’s Battlepass allows all of its players to feel included.
Monetization in MW
Monetization systems in MW:
- BP progression system
o Unlocking non-free items in the Battlepass (roughly 90% of all rewards)
o Battlepass shortcut, unlocks 20 tiers
- Direct purchases of item bundles
o Bundles with predefined content that might contain, weapon variations, operator skins, new operators, emblems, calling cards, charms etc.
(show image of Store)
Another aspect of MW which is really good is that it made away with any confusing currency systems. There are only two things players need to think about, 1) XP, you earn XP by playing the game, some of this XP is action/item dependable, but overall you as a player will not be confused about this part as it acts automatically towards your rank and weapon progression. 2) COD Points, you purchase these through the store or earn them through the Battlepass. That is it. These two currencies govern all systems in MW where you need to interact to unlock something that is behind a requirement or criteria.
Lack of pay to win
Up until today, MW has made sure not to alienate the player base in any form. There are no pay to win mechanics, everything you buy is purely visual. Players can buy weapon variations and unlock attachments without leveling up their weapons, but we can simply see these as shortcuts and not power. If you decide to buy every single item in the store before you level up your account, all you will be getting is a very short head start into some weapon attachments. Because we know the game is balanced and rewarding when played, this does not matter much. The same attachment that you might get with a weapon variation, you can earn by playing a full session with that same weapon (1-2h).
The store
The store is very simple in its structure and with season two IW have updated the look of it. There are three types of items you can buy with COD points, the Battlepass, Battlepass shortcuts and bundles of items. The Battlepass is self-explanatory, purchasing the Battlepass will basically allow you to earn every single item in it. The shortcuts are divided into two, either you buy single tiers, or you buy the Battlepass upgrade which includes 20 tiers.
The item bundles in MW are all themed after something different, things such as animals, sports or gaming. A bundle usually contains a minimum of three items ranging from weapon skins, charms, calling cards, emblems, sprays, weapon variations and character skins or new operators altogether. These bundles are straight forward and easy to understand as they lay out and explain all the contents to the player.
Summarizing the core game loop
Now that we have figured out the engagement mechanics and systems IW have built, let’s break down the core game loop. The core game loop is divided in several loops all integrated in the larger system. These game loops work in tandem or complement each other to hit different notes, needs and purposes for the player.
(create images of the core loop)
Main Progression loop
Play MP games -> unlock new equipment -> experiment with new equipment -> reach rank 56 -> unlock officer progression missions -> unlock seasonal emblems -> play MP games -> New season progression
Weapon loop
Play with weapon -> unlock weapon specific attachments -> experiment with new weapon attachments -> unlock weapon specific attachments -> equip new weapon
Weapon skin loop
Play with weapon -> Level up weapon -> unlock new skins -> unlock all skin types -> unlock ultimate reward -> equip new weapon
Weapon reticle loop
Equip scope type -> play and fulfil criteria for next unlock -> unlock new reticle -> unlock all reticles -> equip new scope type
Daily challenge loop
Login on day-> play MP games -> collect rewards -> return next day
Weekly challenge loop
Login on week -> play MP games -> collect rewards -> return next week
Mission system loop
Go to barracks and select mission -> play MP games -> collect reward -> Go to barracks and select new mission
Battlepass loop
Play MP Games -> Collect reward -> Play MP Games
The principle of MW’s engagement system
With the understanding of the core game loops as well as the detailed explanations of each mechanic, it is clear the extent that IW has taken to provide systems which would entertain players for years to come. MW has taught us the importance of prioritising engagement over revenue and as we design and model our version of AERM (Acquisition, Engagement, Retention and Monetization), we can look at IW and say they did it right with MW.
Now every game is unique, and one size does not fit all, but the core principle is the same. Engagement should take priority over other systems as you build your game. As we have stated, there is no point in monetizing a dead or empty game. If we can make sure our players are entertained first, then we can start thinking about how to monetize them.
(insert image of operator pointing to player)
