An In-Depth Look At Hearthstone’s IAP Model, Or: How To Make A Free-To-Play Game That Doesn’t Suck

Here at Android Police, we’ve made our position on the prevalence of free-to-play mobile games perfectly known, to wit: most of them suck. It often seems like instead of embracing the audience-widening possibilities that the phrase “free game” implies, developers and publishers use it as an excuse to design games around compelling in-app purchases for more and more fleeting rewards. The phenomenon is well-documented, so I won’t bore you with the inherently manipulative methods of most F2P games – you can read here and here if you really need a refresher.

Pictured: not something you want to see in your “free” game.

Considering the current state of mobile gaming, it’s important to do more than just stand on our soapbox and wag fingers at all the developers doing it wrong. (Like Electronic Arts, Gamevil, Glu, um, Gameloft on occasion, whoever made that Kim Kardashian thing… am I missing anyone?) No, we must also applaud when developers wade into the shallow end of the economic pool of gaming and manage to keep their dignity and the respect of their players. Plenty of developers use the free-to-play model and in-app purchases the way they were intended: as ways to charge for truly new game content, or to unlock a full game and make the “free” version a demo, or to remove some optional advertising.

With the Android release of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Blizzard has managed to do something even more difficult. They’ve made a free-to-play game with in-app purchases as a core monetization strategy, and keep the game both fun and balanced. Considering the focus on online multiplayer combat throughout the title, this is worthy of some major praise. Let’s analyze how Hearthstone keeps things both free and fair, for the benefit of gamers and (hopefully) developers attempting to emulate Blizzard’s model.

Hearthstone looks simple, and it is: lay down your varying cards, attack the other player’s cards, try to survive the match. But the sheer variety of monsters, spells, traps, and various modifiers to the Warcraft-themed fantasy world means that it’s almost impossible to play two consecutive games in the same way. Likewise, the randomized nature of the deck system keeps an interesting balance between skill, strategy, and blind luck. Even a player who’s been living and breathing Hearthstone for months and has his or her deck tuned to perfection might lose to someone using a default build with a bunch of lucky draws.

Dedicated Hearthstone players will argue that the game still has its flaws, and it does – some of the more powerful cards are entirely too easy to play with the right combination of prerequisites, and some cards take so long to play that their limited effects render them useless. But Blizzard continues to tweak the game nine months after its initial release, trying to even out the few rough patches that remain (despite the fact that they keep that damn Mind Control card for Priest players that everyone hates, and if you disagree, you are wrong). Generally speaking, there’s no one strategy or combination of cards that’s guaranteed to win, no matter how much time or money you spend playing.

 

Winning three matches against randomized online opponents gets you 10 gold. A new “pack” of five cards in the in-game store costs 100 gold. So, getting a new pack and at least one rare card necessitates 30 wins in multiplayer. That’s a lot of winning – each match takes between five and twenty minutes, depending on your draws. The only way to get new card packs aside from earning in-game gold is to buy them with real money. You can’t buy a single pack with anything but digital gold, but two packs will run you $3, seven packs are $10, fifteen packs are $20, and 40 packs (200 cards in all) are $50.

 

That might seem like it’s entirely too difficult to get new cards without spending real money. Not so. Each day in Hearthstone you’ll get two new “quests,” special conditions that can get you bonus gold. You might need to win two matches as a Druid or play 20 cards that cost five or more manna. By playing with purpose each day you can earn 70-100 gold in a handful of games, sometimes even without winning them, all while simultaneously getting 10 bonus gold for every three victories. It all adds up quickly.

This makes up one of the core concepts supporting Hearthstone’s admirable free-to-play model, and what keeps it from falling into the category of “pay-to-win”: fantastic balance. You can’t pay your way up the ranked board in Hearthstone. While having that legendary 10-manna minion ready to go at the end of the game might beat a few people, someone who adopts a faster strategy with default cards they earned playing against the computer might knock you out in five turns. And even if you crave those legendary cards and nothing else, you can craft them by sacrificing the cards you don’t use.

There aren’t any limits on how much you can play in a day. There is no timer unlocking portions of the game after 24 hours. By tying real purchases with in-game items that are permanent, but keeping those same items available and relatively easy to obtain for free players, Blizzard has managed to have their cake and eat it too. On the PC, I played Hearthstone for weeks without spending a dime. When I returned after a few weeks, I spent $20 in real money on card packs, and never felt cheated. The big bump in my card count gave me a lot more options for custom decks and strategies, but none of them were inherently superior or undefeatable with the cards I had before.

When developers maintain a goal of making a game that’s fun and fair for everyone, regardless of how much real money they do or do not spend, players don’t feel like the game resents them or crush them when they don’t pay. By keeping the perfect balance between difficulty, time, and limits on the ability to buy an advantage, Blizzard is demonstrating respect for its players and the time they spend on their game. 20 million Hearthstone accounts is all the evidence other publishers should need that the Hearthstone approach is worth replicating.

Hearthstone isn’t perfect. It’s a bit of a grind to get to the upper levels of ranked play, you can only hope that the randomized Arena mode gives you cards that fit your strategy, and the single-player Naxxramas expansions are little more than expensive boss battles with a poor payoff. But if you’re making a free-to-play game, you need to take a look at what Blizzard’s done for the model. And if you’re playing a free-to-play game on your Android tablet, it should be this one.