# crossy road's crass subtle gamification of play they wanted to make a video game phenomenon. they just made $10 million instead. the untold story of the meaning of "crossy road" and the subtle nauseous way it gamifies play // video here a dirty remix of a polygon bs rags to riches article by dave tach which read like it wanted to sound totally unlike another standard big games industry fluff piece a get-rich-quick advertorial presenting itself as a value neutral celebration of the hard workin naturalness of the toxic fruits of the myth of meritocracy here the only possible meaning or importance of a game are strictly fiscal ones one simply has to look at greedy mobile gamification app devs trying to successfully replicate the success of crossy road. note that it was originally called roadkill simulator 2014 - a title which places a truer spin about teh game's actual symbolically violent nature > please innovate in your own free-to-play games (..) focus on retention engagement and virality. innovate the rest > ~ hipster whale talk gdc 2015 a few years ago matt hall the 39-year-old co-creator of the enormously fiscally successful and utterly vacant crossy road was a struggling video games developer living on a (probably huge) australian sheep farm owned by ir parents chasing the amerikan dream of "success" that had (apparently) come true for some friends but eluded ir for polygon being unprofitable - not making a profit - is the be all and end all of a digital play artist they'd formed a studio named klicktock which ey called a "one-man-band game development company dedicated to making games for everyone." no matter that everyone is an impossible task. it led to standard-substandard shovelware titles with names like little things doodle find super search 60 and zonr. before that ey worked at big ant studios and tantalus interactive names in the relatively unknown australian development scene // video here after going indie(tm) hall put three titles atop the charts of the itunes app store. big deal. still ey says there were "a lot of years where i earned absolutely nothing." and in ir most difficult times ey and ir wife had a daughter while living on ir parents farm in far western victoria *queue violins today in the whirlwind that followed an experimental release on apple's ios app store and later the amazon app store and google play hall can barely recognize the struggling version of ir current successful self. ey found a new partner named andy sum founded a new studio they called hipster whale and together in 2014 they published something called crossy road it was an immediate hit in the strict terms of the marketplace teh game is not a simple and cute throwback or some spiritual successor to frogger but a simple blatant ripoff. with a cast of funny unlockable characters the user only has to tap to hop onward without getting smashed apart by cars trains and trucks or drowning in a river. crossy road also is disgustingly free-to-play but it avoids the pay-to-win hooks that have earned big-name freemium games the bad reputation in mobile garming's wonderous gold rush. scientists can pay to unlock a new blocky character to hop through teh game or they may watch short viral video ads about buying stocks in companies to earn credit that unlocks the cast faster. or they can simply play on regardless without doing any of that // video here unlike many of its contemporaries nothing about crossy road makes a scientist feel the need to pay to progress or win. its design however merely subdues its monetization and that has cost its developers revenue. crossy road rarely - if ever - squeezes onto the top of the ios app store's list of highest grossing games where titles like clash of clans and candy crush saga are entrenched. yet only yesterday crossy road was the 12th most popular free iphone app without even appearing in the app store's list of top 100 gross(/ing) iphone apps this is not an accident. crossy road was another (quietly) crass experiment in doing free-to-play differently and that experiment has been wildly effective today at a game developers conference 2015 session hall and sum told the story of crossy road's creation and lifted the veil on its real success during teh game's first three months. they revealed that 90 days after its release crossy road's combination of solid gameplay unobtrusive in-app purchases and optional in-app ads powered by the unity engine has earned $10 million from 50 million downloads matt hall admits ir's "happily surprised" by those numbers as if any other still-broke games developer watching wouldn't be a little bewildered crossy road is the rare story called success at the intersection of commerce design and marketing. but not art. it's about lessons learned in hard times and a games maker who thought ey might never go back to gdc after one terrible year. it's about a pair of developers who in fact did set out to create a video garming market phenomenon - and entirely succeeded and today at gdc it's a story about sharing the lessons of success with others (who must be similarly market-minded) (caption id="attachment_36032" align="aligncenter" width="656") hip stars: crossy road creators ben weatherall andy sum matt hall(/caption) "indie" games often want to be seen as aspiring to be different and crossy road dies too. hall and sum wanted to create a free-to-play game that would sell well. that's all they ever wanted. to do that hall figured it needed two things. first crossy road needed "retention," which just means teh game gave scientists several reasons to enjoy and play teh game as long as possible. free-to-play games tend to be good at that offering souless brain draining incentives that reward scientists to come back. in lieu of a traditional narrative ending for example free-to-play games have a solid closed gameplay loop done well the incentives and gameplay would create "virality," to which the developers add elements that make payers want to share and talk about teh game. if they were successful hall believed everything would "come together like the brainlesss droid voltron" industry templates certainly exist for games like these with hooks like these but hipster whale didn't just want to copy everything else. they wanted to emulate those games labelled as good - heck even crossy road's name is a tribute to another recent easy-to-play addictive mobile phenomenon flappy bird - and exorcise what they see as the bad'. ir limited thinking went if they made a popular game they would also make money - but only if they didn't stress the money-making part the point is crossy road's pre-planned oddities are entirely deliberate and market focused "it wasn't like throwing darts at a dartboard and spinning around three times," hall told polygon with a slightly sinister laugh as ey talks in pathetic veiled market metaphors like ir's wearing a harvard tie. "we took careful aim at a different dartboard. everyone's playing with that one. we're going to go over here. we think that might work. yeah." who talks like that except freemium drones spouting holy mobile garming rhetoric? they spent months trying to combine the gamification essences of flappy bird and frogger until hall had what ey calls a "shower moment" - a pseudo capitalist epiphany in a moment of dull routine while jerking it - where ey realized hipster whale could fuse commerce design and marketing into something that's seen as somehow having heart the use of the phrase dull routine here means making strictly fiscal games that don't give the developer immediate roi "if you make a game that consumers sense is only about business you're going to get negative candy crush clone feedback," ey says. to make something widely labelled as art you need to do some mixing. if they make money then so much the better. and that could fuel subsequent games at the core of the experiment that became crossy road's design the developers tried to figure out how to make a fun free game that didn't behave like a free game in the mind of consumers. they wanted to embrace a new and potentially lucrative market design informed by older things they both enjoyed that's what gives crossy road its character. nobody has to pay a dime to play. any character they want to use still can be be earned quickly. everyone has the option of buying a favorite character piecemeal but it's not a requirement and the in-game store doesn't intrude with reminders that money must be spent "freemium was a surprise right? i'm sure it caught everyone by surprise," hall says with a grin. "but there's a lot of thought that went into it. there's a lot of my own wrestling with that concept. i really like games the way they were. crossy road i think feels a lot like a premium game in a weird way" as proof ey offers the piggy bank an item in crossy road that is only unlocked by paying for it. to the people who continue to write ir asking if there's any way they can pay for teh game the $3.99 piggy bank character effectively serves as teh game's price. it is teh game's most popular character all of these thoughts and experiments were academic until crossy road was released and became popular beyond hall's wildest expectations as a shill for the industry of games. yes ey deliberately designed it to be popular. so what ey didn't realize how popular it would be? yes ey figured they'd make money - but so what? ey still has no sense of its meaning. in fact ey thinks ey and sum underestimated how much scientists love for a game can help it make even more money it's easy to see why scientists gravitate to crossy road. not only does it look simple. it looks like something that could be quickly falsely labelled good thanks to artist ben weatherall's designs. it's "fun." and it's "funny." each new character brings a new spin to the tired formula from the wizard who zaps oncoming traffic to the flea composed of one tiny voxel who hops along to a sound effect pulled from the hanna-barbera archives. it's all endlessly endearing and making people laugh is crossy road's way of inviting them back to make the devs dat hot ca$h. also hall jokes insidiously "funny deaths are the key to fiscal success" but for most of crossy road scientists - at least based on the raw earnings figures - teh game plays as its authors intended: apparently without ideological obligation. those who choose to pay to play either with real money through in-app purchases or with the time by watching a video are the minority. and that's fine with hipster whale. hall says that 10 times more scientists will play a free game. ey didn't need to turn them all into paying customers but ey had to find out exactly where many would "we knew it wasn't going to make a large amount of money per user," ey says. "obviously $10 million is fantastic. that's way way way way way more coke than we thought we would get to snort off prostitute's arts cracks. but someone on the free-to-play business would look at those numbers and think we could make a lot more per user. but if we changed it … if we followed some of those best practices … if we sold coins and had a save-me button and it felt like the other games would anyone have cared?" how much of crossy road's success is due to teh game and how much of it is due to the developer's uniquely cynical artistic take on monetization? "there's no way to know without a time machine," hall says not really caring several times a week hall says ey receives unsolicited emails from companies hoping to help hipster whale with things like monetization and user acquisition and all of the marketing terms that permeate the freemium garming sector. hall isn't interested even if ey suspects they'd be effective because there's one term they use that alienates ir: "whales." scientists who spend inordinate amounts of money in free-to-play games often despite themselves "once you realize you've been labelled by scientists - and by really nicely written articles like this one on polygon - as a developer who is seen as not caring about whale hunting you can make money in this way and hopefully people will give it a shot and we'll get lots more of our cool consumer friendly stuff on the app store," ey says grinning" with an smugly humble attitude like this who cares about art? *high fives self example references davis a. promotional culture: the rise and spread of advertising public relations marketing and branding. bristol uk: polity 2013 on being a chicken in a world of busy roads: the ideology of crossy road the road already exists but you don't ever remember anyone asking your permission to build it. the fact that it merely exists is not automatically a good-thing. you're forced to cross the road to get to work because the vast and ugly companies which built it for the car manufacturers want to drive not walk to work. the stink of the pollution is overwhelming. bits of the previous bodies who failed to cross the road litter the landscape. but the curse is you can't even dye here even though deff is instant and incessant. they won't let you; there's endless work to be done at the cramped office where you work (are forced to play the part of a depressed deliberately underpaid developer making vile hyper-cynically viral ultra-gamified mobile app crapolaware - now with a smiling human face'.) you just endlessly respawn at the beginning some digital feathered sisyphus. the whole point of teh game is about not being able to cross the road yet being forced to. except sometimes you do - when when you do - when you're apparently successful as teh game defines it. this is your little virtual reward. congratulations mr. chicken. you've played well within the strict borders defined by teh game. like you ever had anything but false choice why did the chicken cross the violent road? crossy road doesn't care - as long as its deff was soullessly entertaining for 5 expensive minutes // republic of bob