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Hello, I'm Nicholas Lovell, and these are GAMESbrief Design Rules -
fifteen rules to make successful free-to-play games.
Rule three in the free-to-play design rules is Come for a Minute, Stay for an Hour.
We covered in Rule Two why it's so important to make people
find it easy to come into your game because they can do something meaningful in a very
short period of time,
but that's not enough to make a successful game. You have to then keep them
because they're enjoying what they're doing.
Bejeweled Blitz is a game you can only play for a minute, but the average
session length is forty-three minutes. People come in because they
think they've got a minute to spare,
and then stay because the game is so much fun.
I've been playing a game called Legends of Grimrock, which is a Steam game, a classic
RPG in the style of 80s games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder.
But I came down from putting my kids to bed recently
and I thought to myself, "have I got the time to sit down and get myself back into that game?"
It takes about ten minutes before you've really got the mental map of the game together and you
know what you're doing. I thought, I don't really have time.
I sat down on my bed, pulled out my phone and played Pocket Planes...
for two-and-a-half hours.
Pocket Planes is a game from Nimblebit. It's really good at that "come for a minute" process, but has enough
depth to keep me for an hour. And Grimrock pushed me off
because it failed Rule Two.
Pocket Planes covered Rule Two,
and then also succeeded in keeping me playing for two and a half hours. The secret is not to make your free to play games
light. It's to make them accessible, and then to give them enough to do that they really enjoy staying with you.
Rule Three is Come for a Minute, Stay for an Hour.
If you've enjoyed this video,
download the full eBook from Amazon: Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games,
by Rob Fahey and Nicholas Lovell.