Chapter 58 (1/2)

Translated by Coldtaco

Edited by Aelryinth

Were Chinese card games fun?

The ansswer differed from person to person, as everyone had different tastes.

Many said that card games were crude, monotonous, and repetitive, all of which are true.

But… they were quite profitable!

Being profitable meant the players approved of it.

Why did players approve of it? Because they thought it was fun!

This was a very weird phenomena, as players complained while forking money out of their pockets.

Why were card games so profitable? Which part of the game made it fun?

This was an open-ended question. If Chen Mo were to write a thesis on the core of card games, it would probably be tens of thousands of words long.

In simpler words, the pleasure of playing card games came from three distinct areas.

First was the collecting and level-up cards. This was built on the players’ recognition of the character cards.

There was a certain company who made a One Piece-themed I Am MT bootleg. A certain rich person spent a few thousand RMB without question just to draw a Hawk-Eyes card!

There was another nameless Three Kingdoms card game that was still in beta, and another certain rich person added five thousand RMB into his account in anger just so he could draw Zuge Liang. It turned out the game didn’t even have Zuge Liang yet!

The company ended up working overtime to add Zuge Liang into the game!

Similarly in I Am MT, many players would be grinding dungeons daily, collecting purple card shards, or spending heaps of money “Drawing Ten”, all just to get the cards they wanted!

The video game designer would balance the cards’ abilities to match the scenes in the series (or according to the popularity of the character), all just to train the players to recognize the character cards.

With the recognition of players, the cards would become more valuable, which in turn incentivized the players to spend money.

Once the value of a card had been established, it would be differentiated from the other cards. The desire of the players to collect and level up cards would also be satisfied, and they would feel that the money was well spent.

Therefore the key in making a card game profitable was to establish a value system that was recognized by the players. This made it possible to constantly sell the players new cards, just like they were collecting stamps.

After a player got the card they wanted, in order to make it stronger, they would continue to level it up, or improve its abilities. Everytime the card was leveled, it let the players feel like they were growing, which would make it feel like money well spent.

This was also part of the aforementioned “numerical stimulus”.

This was the most important source of joy for card games. This was a very mature, and very repeated model, which is why the mobile card game market was so saturated.

The second core attraction was figuring out the lineups and crafting your own strategies.

The combat system of card games might seem monotonous, but it was actually quite rich. In I Am MT, each card had three attacks: a normal attack, a special attack, and passive attacks. The character creation system was based on the combat system of World of Warcraft, with different characters having different abilities.

There would be several types of AoE spells, such as blizzard types (attacked the whole screen), whirlwind types (three cells in the row in front) and piercing attacks (two cells in front).