The Psychology Behind Ultimate Team's Success

In the summer of 2007, two roads diverged, on the path to developing a new fantasy team mode in sports videogames.

One track, named UEFA Champions League 2006–2007, sent gamers on a card-collecting quest, with the goal of building a five-star team of superstar soccer players.



The other trail, titled All-Pro Football 2K8, felt more like a recess game of football, where two talented captains picked their supporting casts from a lineup of flawed role players, each inhibited by multiple shortcomings, but blessed with one or two specialized skills.



The videogame business, naturally, took the road more easily monetized -- spawning fantasy team modes like Ultimate Team, My Team and Diamond Dynasty, which were not primarily designed to be fun, but instead, to test gamers' purchasing patience and spending self-control.



Consumers today, possessing low levels of each attribute, have enabled titles like FIFA 13 to tally more than $300 million in digital revenue. Microtransaction profits continue to multiply in 2014, as first quarter sales for Electronic Arts' Ultimate Team services are up 50 percent for NHL Ultimate Team, 80 percent for FIFA Ultimate Team and 350 percent for Madden Ultimate Team, compared to the first fiscal quarter of 2013.



Kevin Spacey's character in the 1995 film, The Usual Suspects, believed that "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." If Spacey, who will be a voice actor in this holiday's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, was to rewrite those lines some 19 years later, they might now include, "convincing millions of people to contribute dozens of dollars and devote hundreds of hours towards the pursuit of 'dream team' lineups that could have been built at no additional cost, in less than ten minutes, by simply backing out to the main menu, and instead, clicking on the 'roster edit' option."



This Is Your Brain On Ultimate Team

When sports gamers decried the lack of a multi-year management mode in All-Pro Football 2K8, they were merely expressing their brains' natural attraction towards goal-oriented game design. While All-Pro Football 2K8 was easily the best-playing football game that season, and remains one of the fairest, most competitively balanced sports titles ever released, few people cared in 2007, since its main modes of play provided little sense of progression.



From Microsoft's "achievements" to Sony's "trophies" to sports gaming's universal currency rewards, contemporary game design has shown an increasing concern with maintaining the appearance -- cynics might say, the illusion -- of player progress. Developers realize that today's gamers are likely to quit playing if they begin to feel like their in-game efforts aren't being duly acknowledged, properly rewarded, or at the minimum, bringing them noticeably closer to completing some grand goal -- a phenomenon psychologists call the endowed progress effect.



Whereas the objectives in traditional multi-season modes are often too single-minded (win a championship) or too far off in the distance (make the hall of fame) to maintain the limited attentions of modern players, Ultimate Team and its offshoots are built to overwhelm gamers' brains with a multitude of short-term and long-term progress bars.



Whether exploiting the "Gotta' catch 'em all!" compulsion to complete unfinished card collections, or encouraging people to keep chasing after that tantalizing promotion to the next online ranking tier, Ultimate Team contains a near-endless supply of motivations it can dangle in front of gamers' faces to keep them emotionally engaged. Ultimate Team regularly sends positive reinforcement to its players -- even when they lose -- by awarding adjustable portions of Monopoly money, which can help suppress the discouragement and mental fatigue that franchise mode fans might feel after losing a series of games where nothing of (perceived) value was gained.



Ultimate Team's randomized card packs implement what scientists believe to be the most powerful type of positive reinforcement, a variable ratio reward schedule. This method ensures that players can never know what will be inside a card pack, or when they will finally receive the exact card(s) that they desire. As players inevitably open packs full of duds, it just makes them more likely to purchase "one more pack" immediately afterward, as a means of recouping their losses. A sort of gambler's fallacy then kicks in, where gamers will think, “I just had three unlucky packs, so this next one has to be good!” In reality, the chances of receiving a rare item in these modes are based on constant percentages that never change, regardless of how much players are spending. Companies employ this highly addictive reward system, knowing how easy it is for gamers to lose their sense of logic once they are frustrated and their emotions are “on tilt,” as gamblers like to say.



These modes continue to find new ways of staying at the forefront of gamers' minds, even while players are sitting at work or stuck in traffic. NBA 2K14 now promotes a free cell phone application that awards virtual currency for daily check-ins. NHL 14 also tries to ensure that players never go more than 24 hours without logging in, by bribing them with virtual currency bonuses. FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25 and NHL 14 all feature a website or a mobile companion where gamers can go to manage their lineups and monitor the card marketplace away from home. These eBay-esque card markets are particularly sinister in how they can motivate people to keep playing well past the witching hour, as the best buys will commonly occur in the middle of the night, when the fewest competing bidders are logged on. The obvious goal of all these technologies is to make sure that, whenever people are awake, they never stop thinking about their Ultimate Team.



The ubiquitous presence of Ultimate Team now extends to social media, where corporate marketers (a.k.a. "community managers") relentlessly promote upcoming virtual currency sales, new card releases and free redemption codes. These “generous” digital giveaways, which cost game companies absolutely nothing, only serve the selfish purpose of generating public goodwill and planting seeds of reciprocity in players' minds. Our brains, whenever they perceive that someone has done something nice for us, subconsciously push us towards doing something nice in return. In this instance, Electronic Arts and Visual Concepts are hoping that players will spare a few extra dollars on microtransactions to reward the company's "kind" act.



Regardless of how much real money gamers choose to spend, modes like My Team, Ultimate Team and Diamond Dynasty are designed to make players feel rich, by utilizing fake, inflated currencies. Just as tourists in foreign countries are more likely to overspend when they aren't familiar with the local exchange rates, companies realize that their players are more likely to part with 20,000 VC as opposed to spending $5 outright. Overspending can also be forced to occur in situations where gamers cannot buy the exact amount of virtual currency that they want, as most versions of Ultimate Team only let players purchase coins at set values ($5, $10, $20, etc.). While a few dollars here and there might not matter to Joe or Jane Gamer, it certainly matters to companies' bottom lines, where those added expenses are getting multiplied by millions.



Timed sales and limited-release cards are another key strategy in influencing gamers' purchasing habits. Our brains hate to lose out on what we perceive to be a good deal. And whether it's NBA 2K14's VC sale events or Ultimate Team's old Season Ticket discount program, these promotions do an excellent job of pushing people to pull out their credit cards. Rotating "Team of the Week" and "Man of the Match" collections capitalize on humans' natural attraction to rare items; they also fulfill buyers' innate desires to proudly display their hard-to-obtain cards to the rest of the world. Despite the fact that this scarcity is being artificially created by the game's designers, pursuing "rare" super cards -- such as an in-form Lionel Messi or a diamond edition Michael Jordan -- has become hugely popular on social hubs like Twitter, Twitch and YouTube, where players seem to compete more fiercely for retweets and video views than they do in these games' fields and arenas.



A mode like NBA 2K14's The Park provides a perfect illustration of a related concept, invidious consumption, which is the act of making purchases to keep up with one's peers or provoke their envy. As gamers walk through The Park, noticing all the expensive clothing items, elaborate dunk packages, custom celebrations and gold nameplates of highly rated players, they can't help but be reminded, if only subconsciously, of how everything in sight can be purchased with microtransactions. Fighting through an unorganized queue and waiting upwards of 20 minutes just for a chance to play a quick pickup game clearly isn't good game design, unless the underlying goal is to inspire jealousy-fueled spending sprees immediately after players exit The Park. Your friends, if they're anything like mine, will certainly give you a hard time if you show up to The Park as a low-rated scrub donning the default green and brown "barf" outfit.



What Is A Fair Monetization Model?





Popular PC titles like Dota 2 (the most-played STEAM game) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (the second most-played STEAM game) have managed to create huge microtransaction profits and become global esports sensations, all while limiting users' purchasing power to cosmetic "vanity items" that have no affect on gameplay.



In a talk at this year's STEAM Dev Days, Valve's Kyle Davis explained, “When we think of the common customer complaints against 'pay-to-win' games, the problem isn't fundamentally that users can pay for power, the problem is that everyone except the guy who actually paid, everyone else's experiences get worsened when somebody does this. So we like to focus on the opposite: what are systems that we can come up with where you as a customer are happy when the customers that you're playing with decide to [spend money]?”



Whereas modes like Ultimate Team, My Team and Diamond Dynasty essentially allow high-rollers to play all their chess matches with a board full of queens, titles like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive only let players restyle and recolor the default chess pieces with a new paint job.



Before Dota 2's creation and Counter-Strike's monetization makeover, Valve showed their commitment to game balance when (in 2010) they added an in-game store to what is currently the third most-played STEAM game, Team Fortress 2. With its "Mann-Conomy Update," Valve allowed gameplay-altering weapons to be bought with real money; each new device, however, had to pass the company's rigorous internal testing before going on sale. Speaking at the 2012 Game Developers Conference, Valve's Joe Ludwig stressed the importance of “mak[ing] items involve [statistical] tradeoffs, so there's no clear winner between two items.” Team Fortress 2's diverse arsenal of over 100 different weapons could easily be compared to the 200-plus athletes of varying talents in All-Pro Football 2K8 -- a game that, had it not been left for dead by Visual Concepts, could have potentially drawn a few more dollars from its audience by selling additional on-field weapons like Terry Bradshaw, Dan Fouts, Lynn Swann, Andre Rison, et al. as paid DLC. Maybe something similar was planned at some point, as all of those legends' names, plus many more, are mysteriously listed in the hexadecimal code of All-Pro Football 2K8's roster file.

Another core tenet of Valve's microtransaction strategy is eliminating virtual currencies, as Joe Ludwig saw that "players actually object pretty strongly to the idea that they'll have to take their money and buy a block of some virtual currency, when they only want to spend a fraction of that on the item they want."



Valve learned this lesson the hard way, via Team Fortress 2's widely disliked loot crates. Like Ultimate Team's card packs, crates give players a random chance (about 1 in 100) of obtaining an ultra rare in-game item. Originally, Valve found that these item boxes “generated more negative feedback than any other feature when we launched the Team Fortress 2 store.” Kyle Davis' Dev Days presentation also pointed out how "[the community] thought that we were attempting to capitalize on poor player judgment [...] that we were trying to, in the short term, maximize the revenue extraction from every individual user as we burned them out on the system.“



Such a burnout has yet to occur in sports games' Ultimate Team modes, but a drop-off seems inevitable, if Electronic Arts' and Visual Concepts' monetization strategies do not start becoming more consumer friendly.



In Valve's situation, they realized that the intent of loot crates shouldn't be “to put users in a position where they were gambling, [but rather,] to put them in a position where they had random chances.” Thus the algorithms governing item drops were tweaked, such that gamers could no longer receive items whose marketplace value was less than the original $2.50 cost to open the crate. This change eliminated any chance of a financial loss (Goodbye, gambling!), and overnight, Valve began noticing significantly fewer complaints from people regretting their in-game purchases, since users could now make back their money by selling any unwanted items on the marketplace.





If it seems like such a model would be inherently less profitable than one that offers “pay-to-win” options, consider that Valve's overall revenue for Team Fortress 2 tripled, after the game became entirely free-to-play, and the only way for Valve to make money was by selling stockpiles of hats, weapons and crate keys. Reports suggest that Team Fortress 2 made around $139 million in microtransaction sales during 2013, while Dota 2, which officially released on July 9 (making it available for only half the year), earned about $80 million.



While both of the abovementioned free-to-play titles still employ the psychological strategies of reciprocity and invidious consumption, it is much easier to tolerate these manipulative attempts when the initial cost to play these games is $0, not the $60 that yearly sports releases charge.



Valve's Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson summarized their company's approach to in-game purchases in a 2011 interview with Gamasutra: “Our focus is really much on building something that's cool, and then we'll worry about monetization. So we're not going to worry about that until later. Premature monetization is the root of all evil. I think not sucking is way more of an important thing to pay attention to first. I mean look at Minecraft, right? Notch wasn't thinking through his incredibly precise monetization strategy. [We] do the hardest stuff first, and make the game fun; making a game fun is so hard. It takes so much time. Figuring out how to make […] some money out of it, that's not nearly as difficult."



Looking at imbalanced, treadmill modes like NBA 2K14's My Team, it is difficult to believe that anyone at Visual Concepts was instructed to place fun before profitability. Kyle Davis' Dev Days discussion could have just as easily applied to NBA 2K14 when it noted:



"Putting artificial barriers in your game and then charging users to remove then -- when it's clear that those exist only to generate revenue for you, and provide no service to the customer; using things like virtual currencies to obfuscate pricing or trap user [money] inside the system; all of these things, they lead to [customer] regret. And regret leads to effectively training your customers to stop buying things from you, which is incredibly damaging long-term. We view any system that generates revenue at a cost of customer happiness as a broken system that we need to fix [...] We reject the premise that microtransaction systems must come at a cost of user happiness. This is a space where everyone can win."