(applause)
- Alright, so yeah, what we are here to do today
at the second talk of the Game UX Summit is
Warframe, real world lessons from five years
of Community-Driven user experience.
So that's the story we're telling today,
and I'm telling the community half of it.
I'm so excited to do that 'cause our communities
been with us and really helping us with this game.
And I am Rebecca Ford, the live operations
and community producer at Digital Extremes.
- And I am Dorian Stewart,
I am the studio UI Art lead, as Rebecca mentioned
for a wonderful studio named Digital Extremes.
- [Rebecca] Yes, so Digital Extremes if you don't know,
this is like a quick history,
was founded in 1993 by James Schmalz who was watching
me try not to embarrass him or myself,
but it's a game that's had over 20 years of development
history, and the story we're telling today is the past
5 years of Digital Extremes.
It's Warframe.
- Yeah, so, we're actually headquartered in London.
Not the accent you expected, eh?
That's actually because we're from London, Ontario,
(audience laughs)
hold on, hold on. - Don't laugh!
Is no laughing matter, it's generally regarded as
the 2nd best London in the world.
(audience laughs)
- And I think we've rehearsed this part to try and point
to where London actually is from here,
but now that we're on the stage we've
lost our orientation.
- I can't see the sun, so--
- So as far as we're concerned,
it's two hours in a direction that might be that way.
Oh that way, there, thank you, thank you!
It's that way.
- So in addition to our London studio,
we're actually very excited to announce that
we are opening a studio in this beautiful city.
And in addition to that--
(audience applause)
we also have a west coast office in California.
- Yeah, we've never had more offices, so,
you're seeing us at peak office, so this is uh...
- And this expansion has really been
all thanks to one thing.
- Yes, so we're gonna ask the same question from before.
How many of you have heard of Warframe?
(light cheers)
I didn't know what the answer would be, so that's great.
So maybe I don't need to explain it too much,
but if you don't know it's a free-to-play game.
This is a free-to-play cooperative game as a service.
We launched on the PC Steam Open Beta in March of 2013.
We were a launch title on the Playstation 4
in September of 2013, and then we quickly jumped
onto the Xbox One in the following year, in September.
And this is sort of a game that started as
Left 4 Dead in space,
and as Heather said we're kind of going open world late.
So how did we do that, what's our story,
what do we think we've learned from that process
is what we're gonna talk to you about today.
- So I'd love to start with a bit of a difficult statement,
perhaps, so we've been around for 5 years,
we've seen remarkable growth.
We don't have a UX designer.
- Oh shit.
- Oh my god, audible gasps from everyone in the audience.
So, why are we here, right?
And how did we achieve this growth that we've seen?
- So, we think we suppose we present today
that we have used the community as sort of a surrogate
for a user experience design,
because the nature of our game as a service title,
what we had to do to get Warframe out there for the company,
for what we wanna do, is kinda do it in partnership
with our community.
The people that have given us feedback,
given us their time to make Warframe a 5 years
and counting game that's now somehow adding open world late.
So that's the story here today,
but of course with all presentations you probably
want an agenda so you know the chapters.
- So we're gonna first in point one,
look at essentially our business philosophy,
our development philosophy, and how we arrived there
thanks to some really helpful analytics.
Next, we're gonna take a look at what we as developers
can do in conjunction with the community team
to really manage this real time feedback.
You know, games as a service is always running.
How can we manage this, and how can we interact with the
players in the best way possible
to essentially have them drive the user experience?
We're gonna look then at the solar map,
which is one of the core features in our game.
Some mistakes that we've made with this feature,
and how we've been able to use the community
to essentially rectify our ways
and proceed forward in a positive direction.
Rebecca is then gonna take you on a little ride
talking about fair free-to-play, so,
that should be quite exciting.
And then we're gonna look at what we have done
to really leverage the co-operative user experience
in our game, and finally we're gonna share with you
what we have been doing and hopefully what you guys
can take home to replicate the magic
that we've encountered with Warframe.
So, without further ado.
- Yes, and this is the part of the presentation
where we remind you we're not business people,
we just certainly have a reality that drives
Warframe's 5 year rapid update cycle.
So that's something that is Dorian's place to talk about.
- So who here came for graphs to this conference?
(light laughter)
Okay, cool, cool.
So I'm just gonna sketch this out really roughly.
(audience laughs)
this is a graph of our daily users,
you can see what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna
superimpose another very rough graph of
our daily revenue.
Now these look pretty closely linked, right?
Now, I'm actually, I know you guys you had a little
bit hard time shouting stuff out,
can anyone shout out to me what they think
the correlation between daily users and daily revenue is?
- Am I allowed to shout?
- You can shout if you want.
- No, it's okay, I know it.
- Any guesses?
(man mumbles)
- Sorry?
(man mumbles)
- I dunno.
- It's 93%.
- Well that's not the right... there you go.
(audience laughs)
- You were correct, you were correct.
So, that's really really closely linked, right?
So what we can do then is we can actually take this graph,
and we're actually gonna permit ourselves to
combine them into a really magical thing
that we refer to as engagement.
And this engagement is not only
daily revenue and daily users,
it represents reasons for players
to come back to the game on a daily basis.
It represents the social ties that bring them into the game.
It represents really their investment as a player
in the long term, and in short term,
to come back to our game and play.
And so, it's really kind of a Nirvana essentially.
A benefit for everyone.
And so we use this a lot of kind of... it's our main metric.
Now what I'm gonna get you to do next is
looking at this graph
would you be able to, for example,
point out where you think our major updates were?
If you say something like this,
you'd be absolutely correct.
So marked by these emojis, these are updates.
And these are not just stuff to buy.
And that's gonna be something that's gonna be very
important as we continue forward.
I mean, these are so much more than that.
- Yeah, I mean, no update is the same really, in Warframe.
The quality of life changes that our community want
are just as impactful as something new.
So, every update is a balance, or it's something
completely unique to the quality.
The change, a complete overhaul of our melee system.
It could be anything.
- Exactly.
And the thing that we're gonna look at next is
Rebecca kind of talked briefly about the import
of frequency of updating the game.
And we're gonna look at what happens
when we fail to do that.
So, the graph goes down, and down.
And engagement plummets and pretty soon we're hanging
out with Dante in a very scary place.
And this really served as a valuable lesson for us.
Looking at this graph that spans many many months,
we can not permit ourselves for the users
to have this happen.
We don't want their engagement going down,
it's bad for everyone as we mentioned before.
And so I mean, we've been really lucky in the sense
that we were able to rebound from that,
and we've essentially since then taken that
as our mantra, our way of developing that we can not
permit ourselves to have that happen again.
And we haven't, and our updates have been continuing
to drive that engagement.
- And you can kind of see on the graph,
we started from nothing.
And that is very true with Warframe.
You know, this is a game that had no updates at first.
And no accounts made.
- So what does this philosophy look like numerically.
Well, it looks like this.
This is again where I said we started from scratch,
it was very scary, very exciting time for us.
Within year one we had actually published 175 updates.
- And that's the key thing about the word update here,
is it's not just something new.
It's something different, it's change.
It's something the community's wanted.
It's commitment to updating that live build.
- So to year two, we had gone up to 325 updates.
At this point we had reached just over 15 million
accounts created.
Year three, 475 updates, over 22 million accounts.
And currently we're sitting near year five,
and that's crazy, 670 updates and we're at over
30 million accounts right now.
So it really shows our commitment to
that essentially respecting the graph that we showed
you earlier, and that is what the players want the most.
And what's gonna drive their investment, their engagement,
their enjoyment especially.
- It's true, and I mean that 670 number is a lot.
And with that many deployments to the live build environment
people have opinions on what you're doing.
They wanna talk about it,
and we invite them to have that conversation.
So, the next part is managing that real-time feedback.
If you've updated your live build that many times,
again you bet people have something to say about it.
So, we have a little bit of a tool set,
it's not... you've probably of all these tools,
so I'll walk you through them clockwise from the top left.
Reddit, of course, you're probably familiar with the
feedback you can get there and how that can
change or allow you to make improvements to your game.
Again, we're game as a surface here.
We're talking about a game that tries to iterate
weekly with something.
The forums are sort of our library of everything
we've ever said officially on our own forums.
It's all every patch note, every dev workshop.
The panels are a live place for us
to just talk to our player base and see what they're saying.
If you're talking face to face,
how does their opinion change, how does it improve.
Or what can you garner from such an experience.
Social media is its own thing,
so I'm sure I don't need to explain Facebook,
but the middle one is the one that has a little bit
of a story with it.
This is our in game chat system.
By no means did we invent in game chat.
But we use it in a way on the community side
that really helps us to trouble shoot
and enhance the in game community experience.
So, for example, if you are a Warframe player,
so I know you know it but maybe you don't play it,
the word Arcwing.
This is a game mode that isn't particularly popular
with our players, so one week we were doing a sample,
a wordcloud of everything that was being said
in our public chat for that week.
And we did not expect to see the word Arcwing there.
But there it was.
So we saw Arcwing, and we said to ourselves
uh oh, something's wrong.
No one would be talking about it this much.
And it turns out that there was a bug
that was progression stopping that got people so frustrated
they didn't go anywhere else to report it.
So we had to use our in game chat to isolate issues
and we regularly do that just to see that the players
are doing what we expect them to do and talk about.
- And the real value of the in game chats,
particularly a global chat,
so this is essential everyone can go in and talk
in the same spot, is really the lowest friction area
for players to share their experience with the game.
So if you haven't implemented a global chat in your game,
we would really highly recommend,
because we've seen huge dividends pay off from using it
as the way we have essentially.
- Indeed, and the last one is Twitch.
They've really been an up and comer
over the past 5 years or so,
and since 2013 we have been on Twitch streaming.
What have we been streaming? Dev streams.
This is when we sit down on a couch
and have the devs show what they're working on
real-time to our community.
This is the... like if you want opinions on your game,
this is a way to do it.
And this is a way that Dorian joined us
on our 23rd dev stream.
Much less bearded, but none the less he was there
to talk about UI.
And we were presenting to our community
a proposed change to the game.
And that change was--
- So this was a really interesting experience.
Basically, when I arrived at DE,
this is what our heads up display looked like.
And one of the first things that I wanted to do
when I arrived there was really revisit this.
Modernize it, both functionally and aesthetically.
And so we had our opinions,
we had our thoughts on what would make it better.
We did at the start, as you would on any product you have
go with your assumptions, use community feedback
that already exists on the internet
and also working with the community and getting a sense
of what the players want.
And so what we did is we actually brought it
to this first dev stream this proposal
of what it could look like just kind of based
on that work behind the scenes.
And it was a really interesting experience for us,
especially if you are used to kind of the boxed title model
where, I'm sure some of you have done this,
where you're anticipating eagerly for the reviews
to start coming in and you're kind of
sitting behind your computer waiting for
these sites to kind of say what they think about a game.
And even so, it's quite rare for reviewers
to even mention UI in general.
So it's quite interesting to kind of
be sitting on this couch.
And what we have is we actually have a set up where
we're giving our presentation on the stream and we actually
have a monitor with a Twitch chat that shows.
And it's quite daunting if you're not used
to that level of direct contact with your player base.
They're essentially going to be referring to you by name
and saying "I hate what you're doing,
I love what you're doing."
and you have to have a thick skin to really adapt to that,
and kind of continue going on with
continually putting your work out there
for the world to see and to judge, and to critique.
- And with our dev streams,
the feedback doesn't end with the Twitch setting.
We go on to, you know, we have 30 million registered users.
- That's right.
So, this is our total registered...
These are all the total registered users for the game.
And just out of curiosity,
how many of you, by show of hands,
have purchased a game as a consumer in retail,
played it, and then gone and commented on forums
for that game, can you raise your hands if you've done that?
Okay, so not a ton.
I haven't myself.
But our number is actually quite staggering.
What percentage of users participate in the forums?
- [Rebecca] What we see is 10% of our players
actually come to our forums and their account is there.
So they have made their way to the forums at some point,
and made an account, which means you have 3 million people
that could potentially be giving their voice
to the feedback loop we've invited them to.
So after dev stream, it doesn't just end when
the camera turns off, it continues 'cause you're essentially
iterating live and then post,
and then you have to make it work and you have
to ship something at some point.
So, one of those voices always, you know, typically says--
- Yeah, so I mean as you'd expect,
people have love, people have hate.
I'd love to give you an example of one negative one.
This is by far not the worst that we have received,
but you know, I'll read it to you.
"The pillars of good UI design are shape and color.
The proposed design uses neither.
Please leave Swiss design to 1950's where it belongs."
(audience laughs)
- So, yeah and that's not the worst one.
This is a work conference, we've brought safer work.
- There has been much worse things,
and again, going back to having a thick skin
and kind of it takes a long time coming from
a triple a box title background
to really adapt to kind of taking
this brunt force from players and
the thing in the air has the positive things
are so positive it makes you feel really good,
and gives you a lot of motivation to continue.
But the most interesting thing in terms of
our direction for the game is we'll get comments like this.
Let's say half the comments are like this
for a certain feature, but then we'll actually get
comments like this.
"I like it.
It minimizes UI and maximizes play area,
which is a good thing.
Also, who hates clean and uncluttered?
It's like hating IKEA for god's sake."
(audience laughs)
Right?
So, the tricky thing for us as a UI team and as developers
how do you reconcile both of those differing opinions?
It's like, what do you decide what to do next
when you have people saying opposite things?
And this is where I would encourage all of you
to really leverage your community team as much as you can.
Because they're gonna be the people next to you
that have the tightest connection to the players,
they have the best idea of the general sentiment
in terms of the player base,
in terms of the temperature, what people are feeling,
and they're gonna be able to guide you
towards the right direction.
And so that's exactly what we did, Rebecca,
we worked a lot closer, you and I,
with the community reading all of the comments
that they had on our first iteration.
We basically were able to take the HUD
from something like this
to what is now in game now today,
which looks something like this.
So this is taking into account all the feedback
we got back during the live streams, on the forums,
the work that you guys did on the community side
in terms of keeping us informed all the time.
And that's really where the value of this,
our collaboration today comes from.
Is that we have to work together to access the players
and really make their UX what they expect it to be.
- Indeed.
- Yeah, so, very exciting.
This has been here to this day,
it's been changing, we've made improvements along the way.
But it's really stood the test of time
in a sense of we're very happy with it
and can't thank the community enough
for their time and their generosity in helping us get there.
- Indeed, and there's been one section of the game's UI
that has seen even more change.
- That's right, so, that's the solar map.
- Yes, so if you don't play Warframe,
solar map really quickly is the gateway
to playing missions in Warframe.
It is the solar system in front of you,
you pick what planet, you pick what mission you wanna do,
so it is that gateway to actually engaging
in the shooting gameplay, the powersuits and everything.
But it's changed a lot, and we've made a lot of mistakes.
- So, it started off like this.
Rough, right? I can hear some of you laughing at me.
- [Rebecca] That was 5 years ago, it's fine.
- Honestly, the reason why we're showing this is because
honestly we believe really deeply that it is
totally acceptable, even encouraged,
to put rough content into the game.
This rough, yes.
It's scary, people are gonna rip you apart, absolutely.
But that's gonna allow you to then over time develop
and develop further.
And it's really difficult, I'm not gonna lie,
but you have to do it because it does something
that's so important in terms of your relationship
with the user and it sets expectations
that you are going to continually improve,
and that you are taking them along on a ride
to collaborate with you,
and to co-create what they want the game to be.
And so you see it's gone through quite a few iterations.
And players have stuck around with us through those,
and they really feel like they have a huge input,
and they do, and we hugely value that.
And what's interesting here is that
we had actually just launched on PS4 at this point.
Which is a complete paradigm shift,
going from mouse navigation to a joystick navigation.
And we were very frustrated
with this solar map in particular.
Lots of diagonal lines that are not the most easy
to navigate with a controller and so we said okay,
let's go back, start from the drawing board,
we're gonna do something that's awesome.
And we came up with this.
And we were so hyped internally.
Maybe a little bit too much,
and that's what we're gonna look at next.
We didn't really, honestly, do our due diligence
with presenting this to the community that we should
and we put it in game, and what happened?
- So, with this particular iteration of the solar map,
people liked it, a lot hated it, and no one really loved it.
It posed problems of no real progression.
How do I know what node leads to what?
And it really created a bad experience,
and the single gateway for people choosing
what they're gonna do, they didn't know what they were doing
and they didn't really know why they were doing it.
So it was a big problem.
- So, it took time for us to kind of,
because again we were so excited about this,
we really thought that it was gonna be the
be all end all and it was gonna be fantastic.
And so it took us time, it took us really seeing that
community user experience feedback that essentially
thousands of tears later as Kelsey in the crowd
can attest, thank you for all your work on this.
- Thanks Kelsey.
- We essentially arrived at something like this.
And this is really, it's a throwback to the segment system
that we had before that the players had been clamoring for,
and we've really seen engagement improved
since we've brought this back.
- It's true, we presented it on a dev stream,
what I would like to say a little more properly
because we invited people early on in its process
for the change, the background was actually originally white
and people didn't like that,
and we found out pretty quickly so we were able to rapidly
iterate and then release something that is really
a throwback to that original linear map of progression
and all these things that kind of guide people
through all the planets.
- So the big lesson from this is
you're gonna make mistakes, don't be afraid to take it
in a completely different direction if you're not
feeling that the community is liking it.
And especially don't be afraid to go back to something
that was working so well previously.
And this is, again, this is a very difficult thing to do.
Because you're basically, you have to put yourself into
question a lot and kind of put your pride aside
and really focus on what the community
drives you to do.
So, speaking of the next thing, this is gonna be a very
exciting section I think.
- He passes it over to me, because this is where my non
UI artist art enters the presentation.
So, it's all on me, if you don't like that.
But, this is the fair free-to-play portion of the talk.
It's really a lesson only a handful of slides.
And I think sometimes fair free-to-play is a little bit
of a paradox, and oxymoron, and we get that 'cause we
actually made mistakes early on,
which I'm gonna show you.
This was very very early Warframe,
and that beautiful red arrow, it's not Dorian's, it's mine,
that is pointing to a gold shaped item.
Our community lovingly calls it a potato.
And what that represents in Warframe's gameplay
is you can purchase power.
You can use money to become more powerful
than your co-operative squad mate.
Because again, we're talking co-operative gameplay here.
And people hated that.
Not only did the people that wouldn't spend money hate it,
as you'd expect, the people that were buying it and
supporting us said "I don't like this, it's unfair.
I don't want to be more powerful than someone
I'm playing my mission with."
so what did we do?
Well, we allowed you to build it.
We put a system in that if you were in the game
you could learn how to acquire these items
if you're on at the right time.
And over time we've actually added more ways
to earn these items to give you a free path.
We've put up long duration events
in game for you to get them.
And that's been great, it's been a lesson for us to remember
that this is actually the most important thing of all
if you want free-to-play to really be taken seriously,
I think, and we've continued that.
That's a lesson we've added to one of the more
controversial places I suppose, which is the market.
This is where you enter Warframe, it's free,
you go to the market and ta-da,
you can buy things in Warframe.
But we iterated on that interface a lot.
And what we did quite relatively recently in the 5 years
is we actually added a build tab to that marketplace,
again that red arrow is pointing to it.
And it's showing a player that may be about to
make a purchase that they don't have to.
They can build this, they can read the crafting requirements
and come up with a plan to earn it,
as opposed to paying for it.
And a player that does that is a huge,
they're just wonderful for the community 'cause
they've learned something, they are now a source
of information for a player who's engaged in Warframe,
but maybe can't afford it.
They wanna play it for free because that's what they can do
and someone that knows how to do the free-to-play path
to things can teach other players that.
- And it's something that seems really counter intuitive,
especially in a place like the market.
It seems counterintuitive until you think back to the graph
that we showed you at the very start,
where engagement is the most important thing.
So, the fact that people are invested in the game.
Everything else is positive in the world
is gonna happen as a result of engagement.
So it's not really about selling things, you know, dirtily.
We want players to have a good time,
and everything good will come as a result of that.
And we take that very seriously.
- It's true, and we propose that the Warframe
user experience for a player is made up of
these two things.
That the immersive experience, of course,
someone who's casting their powers with their warframe,
they're seeing someone dressed in gold looking really cool
in the game, that's a pretty cool sci-fi experience.
But there's also the social experience, pardon me,
this is when someone knows how to build something
in Warframe, this is when someone knows that DE
four years ago said they were never gonna do something,
and they remember that.
And the community becomes involved in this sort of
alive product that is this game as a service of Warframe.
- So onto the next section.
We're gonna talk a little bit more about that.
Is leveraging the corporate of user experience.
And I'd love to before passing this onto Rebecca
to kind of preface this with this notion that we had
very early on that complexity is a death sentence.
It's not the case, not in what we found.
Yes, it depends on where you place that complexity,
it depends on where you put the learning curves.
But there are actually lots of positives that come from
integrating a bit of complexity into your game.
For us, for example, players conquering difficulty in
the right place begets a huge sense of ownership.
It begets a sense of accomplishment for the user.
And secondly, in actually in terms of players socializing
together there's a positive on two fronts.
First of all, there are the people who are helping others,
whether they are hanging out in the global chat,
whether they are curating our Wikia page.
Which is actually one of the biggest
Wikia pages for games at the moment.
And something we were actually very against at first,
but we realized that hey,
we give these players a sense of ownership,
we make them feel like they're really actively
commuting to the community,
and we're gonna see huge dividends from their engagement
and their enjoyment and especially
passing that joy onto others.
And that's the second part of it.
Is people who are being helped by these awesome
community members they feel like they've entered
a really warm and welcoming community.
And that's gonna make them
feel really good about themselves.
- It's true, and in the same way that they teach other
players things they teach us a lot too
about what are the strongest reasons
for someone to play Warframe, why do they stay,
why do they like it?
And there's one system in our game that is
an explicit social system,
and that is the clan system.
So this is a clan screenshot of the Raw Steel clan,
they're a very popular clan, they're a great group of people
and they participate in this clan system.
This is an area that you can kind of build,
a space tree fort, and really it's...
what we see is the sooner you're in a clan,
the better things are in Warframe for you.
You stay longer, you play longer, you engage more.
- Great, so to finish things off, replicating the magic.
So we're in a very fortunate position
where we are actually, we have a very exciting new title
right now called The Amazing Eternals.
And this is a squad based, free-to-play first person shooter
set in a, as you can see, a really charming
pulp art style.
And we don't necessary believe in formulizing,
in the sense that you know when you're dealing with
such a long lifespan, you wanna keep things different,
you wanna keep things having character, you want novelty.
But there are a couple things that we have repeated
from our lessons on Warframe.
And one of those is obviously
our openness with the community.
So we've actually had our first dev stream already,
but stuff like this where we'll essentially
go onto the forums and do developer workshops.
And what I'd like to precise with this
is that this is not a process workshop,
this is not showing the community hey,
we've put this together, we're gonna show you what we did,
how we did it, et cetera, no.
It's not also just a marketing thing.
Yes, that's a part of it,
we want players to get excited about what's coming next.
But what this really is you can't see under the fold
but there is open conversation happening under there,
and it's really that's the most important thing
to consider about that is that this is an invitation
to the players to co-create the product
that they will have ownership of in the future.
- Alright, so we do need to wrap things up here on stage,
but so we're quickly gonna wrap up sort of
three things that we think
are take aways from this presentation.
But first is frequency over perfection.
We really like to iterate our game a lot.
670 updates speaks to that.
The second one is you know, we like to create citizens,
not fans, we kind of don't call our players fans
around the office 'cause to us they really
have much more of a stake than that.
Our stakeholders are out community,
and the last thing of course is nothing is ever final.
Iteration is everything.
I don't think we can say content is final in our game.
- No, this presentation however is,
so thank you so much for joining us--
- I don't know if we have time for questions,
but thank you everyone.
(audience applause)
I think we have time, we can do questions?
Okay, yeah, so if anyone--
- [Woman] A couple questions, yeah.
- A couple questions, great, so if anyone has any I think
the mics have not moved so that's good,
'cause that means I can point and it's true.
- [Woman] So, I'd love to know if you've ever been
in a situation where you've designed a feature
or a mechanic that maybe worked well in terms of usability,
but the community feedback wasn't great.
Have you ever run into that, and how did you react?
- For usability in the sense that like it felt good to do,
it was cool in the game?
- [Woman] Yeah, it was simpler interactions or maybe
visually something was easier to process.
- I mean this isn't UI,
but I feel like PvE vs PvP is a great example of that.
You know, I think that our PvE feature set is
really fun to play and some people really enjoy it,
but the user experience of our game,
their expectations, their expectations of a PvE game.
So I think that would be my example.
- And one other thing we did was we the solar map,
going back to that, we actually put...
They have resources on them, and we put them in
a different area that made the screen more clear
and you actually had to hover to see what was there,
so that actually still creates a bit of controversy
in the community, they kind of want it back to
everything on the screen at once,
when we're trying to simplify, so there's... yeah.
- [Woman] Thanks.
- Thank you. Hi.
- [Man] So, going back to what you guys were saying
about the free-to-play model,
is that you mentioned that engagement allows
a better incentive to purchase, or not to purchase.
So, what do you think are the other baby steps
in terms of developing a free to play game
that allows more engagement,
other than what you just mentioned?
- That's a good question.
- We've experimented a lot.
I think for us, when a player plays Warframe
and they love it, they love their Warframe,
and we added a really robust cosmetic system into the game
about a year into development.
So we started with sort of just color palettes,
that you can change your color customization.
And people love that, and we realized oh my goodness,
they really want to customize the way they look.
Free-to-play does this quite frequently,
maybe we should take a shot at it
and then we added what now I think is just kind of
pretty crazy customization system in Warframe,
so just looking to your peers
for examples of what's done, what's fair,
because of course for us it's all about fairness
and we've gone as far as to add in game currency trading,
so what you pay for on the currency side of things
you can actually trade for a free player.
So everything truly can be earned in game
if you have the trade economy to support it.
- I think that might also add that make sure players
are having a good time and they have a reason
to enjoy coming back every day.
And as I mentioned before,
everything good comes from that fact.
And that's really, you gotta start there in my opinion.
Make sure the player's having a good time,
and you'll see the benefits of that in many ways.
- [Man] Okay, thanks for your opinion guys.
- [Dorian] Thank you.
- [Rebecca] Howdy.
- [Man] Hi, thanks for a really interesting talk.
I just had a question, when you were iterating on the
solar map I was wondering if you had
members of the community come in and try and use it
and if so what you learned from that process?
- We didn't have anyone come in from the community
for that segment.
- And that's where we failed, I think, to be honest.
Are you talking about the console one?
- The rings?
- Yeah and that's honestly where a lot of our failure
came from is that we didn't do our due diligence there
and we certainly paid the price.
- Like it worked, it was functional,
so you know it was just a flavor thing.
And then an ultimate thing that we had to completely change.
- [Man] Cool, I actually asked because I was actually
one of those players that joined when you launched on PS4
and I just had some feedback,
I found the text too difficult to read because
it was so small from sitting in front of a television.
And just going forward, it might be something to consider
is bringing people into the studio to play the game
prior to release, prior to updates,
just because you'll find a lot of those sort of things
that people might not comment on in the forums,
but definitely affect the player experience.
- We did start a private test cluster
very soon after that to never make that mistake again.
So while the tile solar map didn't get focus tested,
we now have something set up.
So we learned very dramatically
from that particular experience to try
and set something up for that so yeah,
if you wanna talk after I can give you details on that.
- [Man] Cool, thanks very much.
- [Dorian] Fantastic, thank you.
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