Month: January 2018

Stay with us; this will make sense I swear. (credit: MDickie.com / TommyWiseau.com)

Recently, Mat Dickie boarded a train out of London and came across a kid, face-down in a smartphone game, sitting in Dickie's ticketed seat. As the furious tapping played out in front of him, Dickie contemplated whether he should hassle this transit gamer or just find an empty spot elsewhere. The solution ultimately revealed itself when the developer got close enough to catch a glimpse of the boy's screen: Wrestling Revolution 3D.

By now, the sports simulator gaming genre is as tried and true as sports itself. The Football Manager franchise has been delighting international audiences for 25 years-plus, nudging even stateside developers to take notice within the last decade (how else do you explain Madden spin-off, NFL Head Coach, sneaking into a release cycle full of familiar 2K titles?). But Wrestling Revolution 3D holds an unusual position within this landscape—it's the genre's most unexpected yet successful mobile title.

In 2017, Wrestling Revolution 3D became the first sports sim to surpass 50 million downloads. Today, the Google Play Store lists it in the "50,000,000 to 100,000,000" download category. Officially licensed games from the UFC and WWE, for comparison, stall at around 10 million downloads. Dickie knows all this because he's not only a fan—he's a long-time independent developer better known as MDickie. Wrestling Revolution 3D is his most successful game to date.

Enlarge / Recently discovered EA research aims to keep players "engaged" with its single-player and multiplayer products. The methods explored in published papers are a little subtler than the above illustration. (credit: EA / Aurich)

The practice of incorporating microtransactions and loot boxes into video games has grown from sporadic to omnipresent in recent years. 2017 saw the loot box trend explode and even bleed over from a "cosmetic" model to one that affects gameplay. But in-game items like loot boxes—which commonly appear in multiplayer games—are worthless to publishers if players don't engage with them.

Game publisher Activision has already patented a way to drive in-game purchases by manipulating "matchmaking," or how players are paired up with strangers in online multiplayer games. This week, eagle-eyed YouTuber YongYea deserves credit for discovering a similar, though not identical, matchmaking-manipulation scheme being researched and promoted by researchers at game publisher EA.

The discovered papers emphasize ways to keep players "engaged" with different types of games, as opposed to quitting them early, by manipulating their difficulty without necessarily telling players. These papers were published as part of a conference in April 2017, and they indicate that EA’s difficulty- and matchmaking-manipulation efforts may have already been tested in live games, may be tested in future games, and are officially described as a means to fulfill the "objective function" of, among other things, getting players to "spend" money in games.