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Ion Hazzikostas on Engagement Metrics' Impact on Development
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由
Archimtiros
发表于
2020/11/19，13:08
During the recent round of interviews, World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas took a question from Polygon regarding player engagement metrics and how those numbers drive developers. HIs answer was surprisingly nuanced, touching on how misleading raw numbers can be - such as how a lot of players spending a lot of time doing one activity doesn't necessarily mean that activity is fun, so much as more rewarding than everything else.
Wowhead's Exclusive interview with Ion Hazzikostas - Class Balance, Covenants, Season 1
Wowhead's Shadowlands Interview with Ion Hazzikostas
Group interview (Different than Wowhead's Interview)
Classes and the MetaOnly 3 Torghast Layers Available at LaunchNo Flight Master WhistleNo Legendary Transmog at Launch
Storytelling and LoreShadowlands Delays and Working From HomeEngagement Metrics
Art
Concept Art for Covenants and Zones
Interview Summaries and Discussions
3 Pieces of Loot From Mythic Raid BossesGreat Vault Loot Doesn't Include Final Bosses Until Defeated Once
Ion Hazzikostas
I'm quite aware of the sense that people listen to an earnings call, hear engagement metrics, and assume that is the thing which drives us as developers. Those metrics are shared to the investment community because they're a way to make comparisons across multiple games and franchises. How do you come up with a single number that encapsulates the success of Candy Crush, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and so forth? You don't, you boil it down to hours or daily active users.
At the end of the day, our commercial interests and player interests are completely aligned. We want to make a game that is fun to play. We want to make a game that we look forward to logging into, and yeah, that means making a game you think is worth a monthly subscription. And if we get you to log in X more hours per week, but you're burning yourself out and you're miserable, that's in no one's interest. The thing that is most gratifying to any game developer is going out into social media, watching streams, reading Reddit, talking to friends and reading praise and seeing people having fun with the work we have poured our hearts into. Hearing that someone spent eight hours doing the thing and hated it the whole time...that is not rewarding in any way, shape, or form. And it's not rewarding for the company financially.
We do look at metrics like those, but they're more leading indicators of where people are spending their time. If people are logging in less and playing less, that may be an indicator that there's nothing for them to do, that they're getting less value from their subscription. But it certainly doesn't follow conversely that just because people are spending all their time doing an activity, that's what they love.
We've joked for years about what we used to call the Mechanar problem - back in Burning Crusade, was the most popular dungeon in the game. If we followed metrics, we should have made every dungeon like ; it was the shortest and easiest dungeon that had the best badges to hour ratio so everyone did it... but just because people ran Island Expeditions to grind AP for weeks doesn't tell us that Island Expeditions were a success. We know that there's a lot to improve there.
At the end of the day, we want to make a game that is fun and enjoyable with a variety of activities for all playstyles that players find satisfying.
There are a few interesting takeaways here. We are one of the many sites which cover these earnings calls, and he's completely right in that a single number isn't really a great indicator or explanation of success across multiple varied franchises, but it is one of the most easily digestible ways of quickly getting a point across. Many of these things depend more on comparative context than the raw number, which is why year-to-date is such a commonly used term during these meetings. Even then, there are a lot of reasons engagement numbers can go up or down between quarters or years, such as a large release early in one quarter having high engagement which tapers off during the next - Blizzard Entertainment had 30 million monthly active users (MAU) during
Quarter Three 2020
, down 9% from
33 MAU in Q3 2019
... which might seem like a failing until you remember that 2019 also saw the launch of WoW Classic, which drove the biggest quarterly subscription increase in the history of WoW. We know 2020 had nothing to compete with that, and Blizzard not having any kind of cyclic schedule to ensure there's a release during the same quarter of every year is going to lead to that kind of inconsistency, yet each quarter exceeded expectations by leaps and bounds in spite of smaller numbers, so it's important to understand why those variances occur aside from assuming the games simply became more or less popular during that period.
Following up, the game director goes on to talk about the metrics they care most about as developers - where players are spending their time, and he raises a very good point regarding
Battle for Azeroth
Island Expeditions. Players certainly spent a ton of time in them, particularly at the high end, but that doesn't mean it was because they were necessarily fun or even successful. In a game as heavily driven by rewards as WoW is, seeing where players are spending their time is an important consideration - particularly when it's concentrated within an activity that players are simultaneously complaining about. Clearly the design worked in terms of engagement, as players spent an inordinate amount of time in islands, but it doesn't mean it was successful, as "forcing" players to spend so much time in an activity they dislike is sure to lead to burn out and general disagreement with the game, which will likely do more harm than good in the long run.
As he concludes, the goal is to make something enjoyable that players want to come back to, as doing that will naturally lead to higher engagement and more subscriptions more so than than inventing a system that demands players grind the same activity for hours upon hours each day. There needs to be a balance - the game needs enough rewarding content that players remain interested and encouraged to log on, but not content which is so oppressive that those players become burned out to the point of
not wanting
to log on in the first place. The true goal of any developer is simply creating a product that they can be proud of and players will enjoy, successfully doing so will bring in more players than any nefarious scheme to inflate monthly users or raw time spent in game.
Wowhead's Exclusive interview with Ion Hazzikostas - Class Balance, Covenants, Season 1
Wowhead's Shadowlands Interview with Ion Hazzikostas
Group interview (Different than Wowhead's Interview)
Classes and the MetaOnly 3 Torghast Layers Available at LaunchNo Flight Master WhistleNo Legendary Transmog at Launch
Storytelling and LoreShadowlands Delays and Working From HomeEngagement Metrics
Art
Concept Art for Covenants and Zones
Interview Summaries and Discussions
3 Pieces of Loot From Mythic Raid BossesGreat Vault Loot Doesn't Include Final Bosses Until Defeated Once
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