Deconstruction Comparison: Farm Heroes Saga vs Mystery Match

Disclaimer

These deconstructions are solely intended for my personal experimentation on game design. It is not requested by or submitted to any of the related companies and I have no connection or affiliation with any of them. So, have fun while reading it and feel free to drop any comments.

I have a broad proficiency on designing game-as-a-product projects, and my experience in game-as-a-service design have started only recently. My main motivation for writing this article was summarizing my early F2P design knowledge and discuss with others what could be researched by just comparing two similar products.

UPDATE: I didn't stopped and decided to create a fake "Feature Proposal" about one of these games. You can check it from here...

Introduction

In this article, I am going to deconstruct and compare two Match-3 games: Farm Heroes Saga and Mystery Match in regard to their economy loops, UI / UX designs, narratives, gameplay, social and retention factors to understand better about their dynamics. Before starting these comparisons, let’s take a look in both games AppAnnie statistics:

Farm Heroes Saga is released by King on March 2013 and currently have 100.000.000 - 500.000.000 downloads on Android and 10.000.000+ monthly active users on Facebook platform.

Mystery Match Farm is released by Outplay on September 2014 and currently have 500.000 - 1.000.000  downloads on Android and 50.000+ monthly active users on Facebook platform.

Comparison Summary

The main design choice difference between Mystery Match and Farm Heros Saga is their approach to use/avoid soft currency:

Lack of soft currency pushes Mystery Match to a minimal economy design, and focus its game design on narrative and core game mechanics. Without a soft currency, there is no ground left for additional meta-game elements (ex: playing old levels to collect bonus for weekly / holiday challenges before starting any new and hard level on Farm Heroes Saga) and this choice leads Mystery Match to a minimalist UI / UX design approach. This choice also encapsulates an earlier grinding requirement on difficulty curve, needed for a the first day retention (call back to action). The only option for first day retention is to get the player stuck in a level with no lives left and call player back for another refreshed set of lives. Difficulty must increase very early to create that condition inside the first session. The narrative plot focused on mystery, (considering that the major target audience for match-3 genre is soccer moms) works also as a nice grabber for first day retention in Mystery Match. But in the long term, Mystery Match tries an impossible mission of writing a mystery script that involves lots of match-3 puzzles and narrating it via just character images with very short dialogues or monologues. Nevertheless, a clear and fluent UI design, detailed art direction and brilliant ludology behind it have the most significant role on its game developer’s (Outplay) success.

Meanwhile, Farm Heroes Saga employs a layered economy loop with both soft and hard currencies involved. That complexity pushes Farm Heroes Saga to expand the core gameplay by integrating its economical variables. With such complexity, Farm Heroes Saga walks on the boundaries of being a “Feature Creep” game and still perfectly avoids falling into it. It also assembles a well managed UI / UX  that becomes a big part of the game. Farm Heroes Saga needs a long time to successfully introduce its elements and converts this phase to a long spanned difficulty curve. This long span has two effects: Good side of the coin is a (possibly) fast finished first session, which gives more reasons for calling the player back to action (other than the energy renewal call), because there are many features left to explore! The bad side of the coin is the latency of the grabber (the “Companions”), since it would not be encountered before the first session and even before the second session. The developers must have sensed the same problem; so they’ve chosen to expose the grabber related UI  before introducing the grabber itself. Even though, game developer (King) successfully constructed the successor of Candy Crush Saga by creating a more detailed match-3 game with a good grabber. In this sense, Farm Heroes Saga illustrates perfectly the casual gamers’ new expectations. That expectation pushing the genre into more mature game designs.

Both Mystery Match and Farm Heroes Saga avoid the “Coercive Monetization” model while both of them still stick to a classic freemium transition from a “Skill Game” to a “Money Game”. Especially for Mystery Match, simplified layerless economy increases VoC (Visibility of Control) and creates a greater TtC (Tolerance to Control) barrier that would cause a lower monetization rate. Farm Heroes Saga’s layered economy creates a more blurry VoC that would directly affect a higher monetization rate.

Core Economy Loop

As I discussed on Comparison Summary section, Mystery Match lacks soft currency, and

even by comparing at the core level, Farm Heroes Saga’s economy loop complexity is higher than Mystery Match. This basic difference leads two games to separate design choices, which will be discussed in further sections.

Economy Loop In Depth

The deconstruction of both games’ economy loops in larger scale demonstrates the complexity difference between Farm Heroes Saga and Mystery Match economies clearer.

Mystery Match’s economy differs from Farm Heroes Saga in two important ways: Lack of a soft currency (that feed player income by each successful basic levels or weekly / holiday challenges, achievements, etc.). And lack of indirect hard currency rewards (free hard currency boosters, etc.) except the start bonus (30 coins), and Facebook connection gift (20 coins). Mystery Match try to keep hard currency as tight as possible and with the help of early grinding, and it has absolutely shorter game sessions than Farm Heroes Saga. It depends on a shorter but easy to analyse first session, while Farm Heroes Saga blasts a long and hard to analyse first session (as I’ll discuss it on Key Factors for Retention section.)

With the availability of soft currency, Farm Heroes Saga introduces a major grabber called “Companions”. In each episode, a companion level is placed and player can earn up to three companions in each episode. Player can choose only one companion booster that consumes a small amount of soft currency at each level and it is automatically activated during the game play. It is slightly different than other boosters which could not be used multiple times in a level and consume a lower amount of soft currency than other boosters. This micro management provides a better non-paying user retention (that is always needed for social/viral impact on freemium casual games) and lower the inflation of soft currency.

Another difference between Mystery Match and Farm Heroes Saga is the episode unlock economy. While both games prefer social unlock requests as a second option, first option greatly differs. Farm Heroes Saga prefers adding another complexity layer by a boss fight level on each episode to unlock the next episode (Next episode is unlocked if the boss fight level has been completed with 2 star rating, and 1 star rating provides the second social option). In contrast with Farm Heroes Saga, Mystery Match prefers to add a long timer (called traveling) between the episodes. Player could just wait for the timer or choose the second social option to unlock the next episode. This is a much simpler method compared to boss fight levels of Farm Heroes Saga.

Last small difference between two games lies behind social/viral economy variables. Both games let the players to send/receive life and to ask help for unlocking the next episode from their Facebook friends. But, while Farm Heroes Saga rewards players with game currency and various boosters for inviting friends over Facebook, Mystery Match avoids/miss this feature.

Economy Parameters