Balancing, solved!
How Machinations helped Funday Factory save time, improve progression & optimise revenue for Bullet League
Emil Kjær
Product Manager, Funday Factory
“Machinations allowed for a much closer and faster iterative collaboration between the design, product management and analytics teams to check and balance our parameters.”
Challenge
Funday Factory set out to develop their first independent IP, venturing into an exciting, yet new genre: battle royale. Normally, production is filled with untested assumptions, but moving into a new genre and monetisation model amps them tenfold. The team focused on creating an explosive experience that “combines the classic simplicity of a good 2D platformer with an epic Battle Royale for mobile”.
Highly successful and hugely competitive (no need to mention Fortnite), this genre has a straightforward monetisation driver: a VIP (in this case, Bullet) Pass. Being free-to-win, the progression and monetisation only come from cosmetics. Balancing this type of an economy is all about player journeys: paying versus non-paying.
“We had a sense something was wrong…”
Solution
After mapping the whole meta in Machinations and running a few simulations, the team realised there was too little variance between players who paid for Bullet Passes versus those who didn’t. This prompted the game systems designer and creative lead to discuss what was the desired outcome. Their data analyst then designed the formulas for that outcome, and tested it in action, using Machinations. Beyond facilitating balancing, Machinations spurred some interesting conversations within the team, around player journeys.
Emil Kjær
Product Manager
“Starting out with building a model [in Machinations] based on your assumptions on player behaviour, and then adjusting it along the way based on real-world data, provided us with a great tool to understand what’s happening between the core
loop and the game-economy.”
Claimed Rewards
Saved Weeks of Work
Machinations saved the team 40 hours of creating spreadsheets and weeks of waiting for data in soft-launch.
“We were able to get sample data for purchasing users in a few hours, compared to the weeks it would have taken us to collect enough data in soft launch.”
Maja From Andersen
Optimised Revenue Early
Machinations showed a lack of variance that made Bullet League’s monetisation unappealing.
“It’s also great for spotting issues like we did where we saw too little variance between players who paid for a Bullet Pass and those who didn’t.”
Emil Kjær
Improved Progression Easier
Simulating individual user journeys and variance, instead of relying on averages.
“Gives an overview of how the experience would be for an individual player, which is hard to do in Excel.”
Maja From Andersen
Bullet League in Machinations
Hint: You can do a simple run in the diagram from the widget above, or add it to your Machinations account and run your own simulations on it.
The diagram took 8 hours to build. In its current form, the diagram maps the whole meta-economy, and computes ARPPU, generating the complete scenario for 3 gameplays instantly, with Quick Run, or for 33 days of gameplay in a few seconds, with Multiple Run.
Using Machinations, Funday Factory ran thousands of simulations, each modeling 33 days worth of gameplay. All this, in a few minutes. Based on those simulations, they were able to get to a balance between the XP progression of players with VIP passes and those without.
Maja From Andersen
Data Analyst, Funday Factory
Machinations is a place for all the real-life data points to land and verify our assumptions and/or change the model.
