It’s About Time

Successful F2P games exist today as constantly evolving entertainment products with new content, features, and regular updates that keep them evergreen, relevant, and engaging for their audiences over many years. They are optimized around play-time invested and hence compete directly not only with other F2P games but also alternate entertainment products and services vying for players’ time.

With Everdale, Supercell has taken on the challenge of building a F2P business model that isn’t optimized around play-time invested but rather maximizing check-ins. It has a unique relationship with time, which leverages unique engagement and monetization systems, and these decisions enable novel player routines. With this lens, the following sections attempt to answer:

• What is Everdale? What makes it a fresh take in its genre?
• Everdale’s curious numbers: what metrics make it an outlier?
• What sets its F2P business model apart? What can it improve?
• And finally: How does Social-Collaboration bring it all together?

It Takes a Village…

Everdale is a casual, social farming simulator built for peaceful cooperation at its core, set in a beautifully illustrated fantasy universe. Ten months prior to the beta launch in August 2021, Supercell published an alpha version of the game, then called Villages & Valleys, under a white label brand Osmium Interactive. This was a first for a Supercell game, and with the focus on friendly collaboration, it was a perfect testbed for learning social dynamics involving actual players at a very early stage.

Everdale begins in a small village settlement where players learn to gather resources, build and upgrade buildings, and complete orders. The primary gameplay revolves around ‘worker placement’ management of villagers who are central to harvesting resources from production areas and crafting items from specialized buildings. Ensuring the villagers are well fed with soup and always working is the key to making progress.

Resources broadly come under three categories: auto-generated, villager-produced, and premium currency resources. The auto-generated resources are produced over time by their source buildings, like Honey from a Beehive or Eggs from the Chicken Coop. Villager-produced resources require a villager to be working at the source building to produce them over time, like gathering Wood from an Evergrove or crafting Pots at a Pottery Workshop. Premium currency resources are bought with real money, like Gems, which are used for purchasing resources or hiring a powerful worker. Deco Gems are used to buy decorations and outfits for customization.

Using resources, players can complete orders to collect Coins and Scrolls. Coins are used for constructing new buildings and upgrading them, which rewards the player with XP. Gathering enough XP will level up the village, giving access to new buildings and upgrades. Scrolls are used at the Study to speed up the unlocking of new buildings, upgrades, resources, and crafting recipes. Once players get the hang of the primary loop of harvesting resources, completing orders, and reassigning villagers, the game opens up its team gameplay feature: the valley.

…To Raise a Valley

The valley is a central hub for up to 10 players’ villages to collaborate and share progress. All the specialized buildings and production areas in the valley are shared by the community of players from the villages in the valley. Similar to the players’ individual goals to grow their own villages, the valley represents a shared goal to develop as a team. The central idea is that individual progress is satisfying, but shared progress is more rewarding.

For most single-player progress systems established in the player village, there is a counterpart for shared progress systems in the valley. Villagers can be assigned production areas in the valley to gather new valley-specific resources like Wheat from Wheat Fields and Wool from Sheep Pastures. Villagers assigned to the valley do not go hungry and work for a set duration that produces a set amount of resources. Building new buildings and upgrading them together with other villages in the valley rewards Valley XP. Gathering enough Valley XP levels up the Valley, which grants access to new buildings and upgrades.

The Harbor in the valley brings Explorers by ships from distant lands. They are social order boards that players complete together. Players use a regenerating resource called Shipping Tickets to take these tasks and complete them using resources from their own inventories. These orders reward the players with Coins and Books, which have similar uses to their village counterpart Scrolls to progress on Research Projects.

Reputation Points are a social resource earned by contributing to tasks and construction projects in the valley. They are used to make individual progress on the Reputation Road, which rewards players with resources and perks that supercharge valley actions like Tickets that let players take on additional valley orders and construction projects. The higher an individual player’s Reputation, the stronger the player’s capability to be a good team player.

Everdale’s Curious Numbers

Everdale is available in soft launch in 14 countries including Canada, Australia, Singapore, and most Scandinavian countries. The game is currently only in English and is available on both iOS and Android platforms. From Aug 2021 to Mar 2022, the game has garnered 355k in total downloads and $730k in total revenue, with Canada and the UK bringing the majority share.

Looking at the worldwide performance of Simulation Farming games for Q1 2022 (unified), the top grossing charts show a balanced distribution of new and old games:

#1. Township: 8 years, 6 months (launched Oct 2013)

#2. Family Island: 2 years, 5 months (launched Nov 2019)

#3. Hay Day: 9 years, 10 months (launched Jun 2012)

#4. Klondike Adventures: 4 years (launched Apr 2018)

#5. Family Farm Adventure: 1 year, 2 months (launched Feb 2021)

#6. FarmVille 3: 1 year, 4 months (launched Dec 2020)

In terms of revenue per download (considering Canada as the closest Tier 1 benchmark where Everdale was launched in beta, Q1, 2022, Unified), Everdale falls short in its category, coming in at $5.18 per download when compared to the best $48.70 for Klondike Adventures, $18.44 for Township, and a newcomer like Family Island at $13.01. Unlike the others in the category, Everdale is still in beta, which gives it a lot more room to tinker and experiment in order to perform better.

One curious place where Everdale dominates the category is in average sessions per user. The average player had 77.56 sessions in Q1, a 55% increase from the top-grossing game in the category, Township, which is at 50.29. Everdale players are more likely to frequently clock more sessions than their fellow counterparts in other Simulator Farming games.

Looking at average session duration, Everdale boasts the shortest sessions of only 157 seconds. Though closer in average session counts, Everdale and Hay Day show a vast difference in average session duration, with Hay Day’s sessions being twice as long as Everdale’s. The top grossing game in the category, Township, clocks in at 348 seconds (+122% Everdale), similar to other top games (by average session duration) which are also about twice as long as Everdale.

This uniqueness of maximizing average sessions per user while minimizing the average session duration is at the heart of the experience Everdale is optimized for - check-ins, not play-time - and it sheds light on the unique relationship Everdale has with Time.

A Note on Time-Altering Nectar

Nectar is a resource that boosts villagers’ working speed by 300%. When active, villagers’ walking, construction, and gathering speed is affected, and 1 Nectar lasts for a duration of 1 minute. For example, consider a building that would normally take 4 hours to build; if the nectar boost was active for its entire duration of building, it would take 1 hour instead. Since the nectar boost affects working speed, it can never reduce working time to zero, and at maximum it only cuts it to ¼ the time. The nectar boost does not apply to the villagers sent to work in the valley; only villagers working in the village get affected by it.

The Nectar Fountain in a player’s village produces 1 Nectar every 4 hours, with a maximum capacity of 5. This means, if left unharvested, the Nectar Fountain is full every 20 hours, with the surplus not having room for production. It's one of the first buildings to unlock in the village and currently has no upgrades. Nectar can be purchased in the store and is also available as rewards from chests.

No Time to Skip

Everdale stands apart from almost all F2P games in the way it approaches the player’s ability to skip time — there isn’t any. Most time-consuming actions in farming simulator games, like growing, crafting, or building usually have prorated costs in the game’s premium currency to skip the work time entirely. F2P games with energy mechanics that constitute a wait time generally have a premium currency cost to skip the wait, buy more energy, and continue playing.

Supercell’s own Hay Day, another farming simulator game, allows Diamonds (the game’s premium currency) to be used to skip waiting times for growing crops, constructing buildings, crafting items, and the like. Timers have a dual role of being appointment mechanics that bring players back and also monetization mechanics driving the game’s revenue. Everdale is equally abundant in timers as Hay Day and its other farming simulator counterparts, but it does not give players the ability to skip any of them.

There are a few exceptions: first, the nectar boost, as explained above, that at maximum can reduce villager’s working time by ¼ (though never skip the time entirely), and second, when researching at the village Study, scrolls can be used to reduce 1 minute of research time per scroll. These time-reducing resources, Nectar and Scrolls, are sold in the game’s shop, but there is a daily max limit of how many can be obtained. Players can also hire a temporary super worker for 2 days, Franz the Fixer, who excels at village tasks by +50%.

With no way to skip waiting times, players have no agency to extend their sessions. Every session, once actions like harvesting resources, completing orders, and reassigning villagers are completed, players have no choice but to drop out and check-in when one of their timers is complete. This explains why the game scores so low on average session duration compared to other games in its category. This experience is bite-sized and leaves no room for players to extend it.

Once session actions are complete, the in-game to-do list nudges players to take a break while their villagers continue to work on their tasks. This single nudge alone is F2P-business-breaking: generally more time spent in a session equates to more avenues for monetization and aligns with more stickiness for retention. On a side note, some AAA Nintendo games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and Earthbound have been known to nudge players with a ‘You’ve been playing for a while. Why not take a break?’ notification if players continue their sessions for (what the developers consider) too long.

With its bite-sized gameplay, Everdale is near perfect for (quickly) checking-in when a notification triggers players that an action (timer) is complete. One of the notifications even calls out ‘What do you want us to do while you’re away?’. This is a simple yet powerful nudge to remind players, ‘Hey, you could have a quick Everdale session to progress while you’re busy, it’d only take a minute!’, signaling that playing Everdale is an activity that can fit into the busiest of daily schedules.

Optimizing the game for check-ins and strictly bite-sized gameplay also ensures Everdale doesn’t compete with conflicting activities. Netflix infamously quoted that it competes with Fortnite for consumer screen time, which highlights what the businesses are optimized (and competing) for: watch-time for Netflix and play-time for Fortnite. Everdale, with its optimization for maximizing check-ins, attempts to be a player’s game for when they're busy playing other games, consuming other entertainment, or simply busy in life.

The Everdale Shop

Supercell has been an industry leader in crafting great shop experiences with robust and dynamic offer systems. Gone are the days of static premium currency options, now relegated to the bottom of shop scrolls. Across its various games, the shop's structure exhibits an experience akin to walk-in retail stores, with new offers and limited time items available on sale, and at the very top, every day.

The Everdale Shop opens with Special Offers granting personalized offers as per the player’s progress, like level-specific bundles and ingredient packs for unlocked recipes available for direct purchases. This is followed by a daily roulette of limited resources, again, personalized to the player’s progress and needs, for premium currency. This daily section features a free pack of consumables or currency to be claimed for free, ensuring at least a shop visit once a day.

This is followed by the shop’s penultimate section: customization items. Players can spend Deco Gems, a customization currency, on new decorations for their valley like flowers and tiles, pets to liven the village and play with villagers, plus outfits and skins for their villagers and buildings. This brings players to the end of the shop, where the static packs of Gems are available for direct purchases.

Having massively successful games with large, broad audiences has given Supercell a rich testbed to master in-game shops’ player experiences. Iterating on them over time has led to a lot of common patterns emerging across their games, and Everdale’s in-game shop and hierarchy of items looks to be built based on those strong learnings. Assuming players play as intended, the shop experience is complementary to the game’s resource pinches, proposing offers to players they can’t refuse at the most opportune times.

A Note on UX

The valley and its villages aspect of Everdale is delivered perfectly by a seamless transition from a player’s village to a bird’s eye view of the valley they inhabit by a simple pinch-to-zoom gesture. This highlights the game’s cinematic feel, with the locations of the player and community feeling grounded and real. The world feels vast and infinite, and the villages are small, architecting the perfect play space that nudges players to rely on each other.

Everdale is a rare game that runs in different orientations depending on the hardware: the game plays in portrait mode on mobile phones and landscape mode on tablets. Since it is an invest-and-express game style with an open, interactive world, it's best suited for the cinematic wide view of landscape mode. On mobile phones it loses some of its presentation in favor of usability to support its short sessions.

The worker management system is clearly inspired from ‘worker placement’ board games (like Agricola, Village, and Stone Age), with the worker status being represented as different colored paws. Yet the game falls short in delivering the experience of picking workers from the game board and dropping them on buildings to assign them to tasks. Almost all worker management is handled through menus and buttons without needing to directly interact with the workers at all.

World Events 

Everdale is set in a beautiful fantasy world with hints of folklore in spirits that linger on from a forgotten land. From the opening, the game presents a soft, relaxing, and peaceful environment with whispers of enchantment. The world is alive and responds to every touch; every action feels real, with villagers chopping down a tree, carrying a tree trunk, and then tossing the one piece of wood into the open storage where it stacks neatly and wood inventory goes up by one, making the world and materials feel tangible.

There is a colorful cast of characters who engage with players in the valley, mainly through short story events that take the shape of charming little adventures. Events usually occur every 3 days with a timed 3-day duration and need to be accepted by village Elders to start them. They have a short intro blurb setting context and usually ask for specific resources or assign villagers for fixed periods from the valley community. Completing orders and stages usually provides a bit more context to the characters, their personalities and backgrounds, and their places in the larger fantasy world.

With this minimal structure, the world events are open to collaborative story-digging, where players come across bits of fiction and try piecing it together. While they collectively work on fulfilling requests, there is potential for emergent gameplay leading to personal stories between players. Players in the valley use Event Tokens to participate in ongoing events, and since these are capped to a max of 3 per player, collaboration is key to progressing in them.

On completing Events, the valley wins a reward specific to the event, ranging from powerful valley building boosts for a limited period of time, progress on valley research, or a grand spell of no-hunger to maximize villagers’ productivity. Instead of being managed from a server calendar, events in Everdale are picked from eligible ones and put into a cooldown before being picked again.

Hence, the events in Everdale have a unique cadence that’s personalized to the progress of the valley and villages, as well as the engagement of the valley members. Their opt-in nature brings out a quality of the group sharing goals with intent together. With healthy valleys playing with a shared purpose among their village players, this event framework is simple and effective at driving collaborative action when active.

Valley Management

All big valley decisions are made through a voting process involving all members. An Elder is a special role that has the power to perform certain valley actions like starting new constructions, upgrades, research, or events. Members can take on the role of an Elder based on a majority vote, and a valley can have as many Elders as there are members. A Founder is a role similar to an Elder granted to the player who created the valley.

A valley might take actions to expel a player from the valley, either due to inactivity or lacking in cooperation on progress, which initiates a kick vote. Members of the valley have 24 hours to decide on whether the kicked player can explain themselves in the group chat or collect their resources from the valley and prepare for parting with the group. When new members join a valley, they don’t have this 24-hour protection for the first two days.

The challenge of satisfying players’ motivations to collaborate is ensuring players have the best experience and effective tools to manage their progress towards shared goals. If players feel dissatisfied with their chances of victory or achieving goals by being in another player’s hand, it affects the shared experience of the entire group. Everdale balances this by aligning most shared progress vectors with individual progress vectors: for every shared order completed and progress made in the valley, players are rewarded with individual resources that give them progress in their villages.

Harbor and Trade

The Harbor in the valley is where ships from trading partners arrive for a fixed period of time and a limited number of shared orders. If players complete all the orders or the time runs out, the ship leaves and is replaced by a new trading partner after a cooldown period. This is a collaborative take on similar shared order board systems used by other games for competition, like the Derby race between teams in Hay Day or the Regatta race in Township.

Everdale currently has 4 different trade partners, each with their unique tasks and specialized rewards:

• Trading with the Glimmering Dales rewards Coins,
• The Highland Academy rewards Books for valley research,
• The Iceberg Isles rewards Iron Ore, a new resource, and
• The Summery Woods rewards Potion Ingredients.

Once a valley has researched Trade Relations, Elders from the valley can choose from the trade partners which two to summon at the two docks in the Valley Harbor. A third premium position called the Grand Dock is open for all members to summon a more powerful version of the trading partners, with increased rewards and extended time for premium currency, giving the valley members extra orders to complete.

Trade Relations also have their own progress track similar to the player’s Reputation progress track. Each task completed rewards 1 point of progress to that order’s Trade Partner. Progressing in Trade Relations unlocks perks and new research opportunities in the valley and villages. Characters representing trade partners from the lands beyond bring short micro-fiction in building the world of Everdale.

Shared order boards and team task systems work extremely well in games where they are used under competitive scenarios and a small portion of players in large teams of 50 or more complete most of the orders and carry their teams to victory. This fulfills player needs on both ends of the spectrum: the superfans are left feeling super powerful, being the MVPs of their respective teams, and the other less active members benefit from their shared progress.

Everdale’s collaborative system is based on winning together or failing together. The motivation to engage stems not from wanting to be a rockstar player of the team but from wanting the group to progress and succeed. This system running on collaboration is a much harder goal to achieve, with fewer examples to draw inspiration from than the many industry examples of this system running successfully on competition.

Where’s the Player-to-Player Trading?

For a game built on teamwork and social collaboration, player-to-player trading is suspiciously missing from Everdale. Since there are no systems that nurture specializations, player villages are identical when it comes to resource production and hence there is no systemic need to trade resources. Yet, trading between players is a strong social experience that would seem to fit Everdale’s focus on collaboration and community like a glove.

A strong trading system is able to create an equal demand of players wanting to buy and sell resources. Tipping the scales in favor of one or the other, players wanting either to mostly buy and hardly sell (or vice versa), can easily spiral the game economy out of control. Another major concern about introducing player-to-player trading is ingenious players running smart bots to hack their way to overflowing in resources.

Everdale already has one of two pillars required for a player-to-player trading system: a limited storage for imperishable goods. An introduction of asymmetrically distributed resources (say, Rock, Paper, Scissor) that work with the core gameplay and are needed in equal sets (say, an upgrade requires Rock x30, Paper x30, Scissor x30) can be used to systematically create the need for players to trade in order to equalize their distribution (say, inventory looks like: Rock x13, Paper x30, Scissor x57). This is akin to Hay Day’s upgrade materials and Township’s construction materials.

Group Villages into Valleys, Group Valleys into...?

Another area to supercharge the collaborative aspect of the game is community events that make groups of valleys work together toward a shared goal. Since 10 villages make a valley, 10 valleys can be match-made to play together during a community event — putting 100 players together to collaborate on achieving a common goal.

Fictionally, the valley is already built on the backs of large fantasy spirits. These spirits could move and collide with each other to trigger collaborative community events that have larger effects outside the boundaries of the valley into the expansive world the trading partners visit from.

Great or Grinding

With a pessimistic lens, it's easy to see Everdale as a by-the-numbers skinner box: players are tasked with farming resources to complete orders to build and upgrade, to farm even more resources to complete even more orders to further build and upgrade, culminating into a near endless progression of satisfaction from watching progress bars fill up. The game does little apart from setting fictional context to its various interconnected ecosystems.

Another issue is the game’s aversion to having any competitive systems, like features that support social comparison between players or teams. High conflict driven by competition in Arenas, Leaderboard Events, and Rankings is what drives the majority of spending in F2P games. Everdale presents its tranquil world as harmonious land with no losses, wars, invasions, or losing progress due to conflict.

Yet, by careful subtraction you further enhance what remains, and what remains in Everdale beyond the tightly controlled loops is a play space that can spark genuine moments of human collaboration. This is the game’s key promise. Decisions to have a game that's mandatorily team-based, with small team sizes limited to 10 players in a valley, seem inspired by a united vision of fostering a shared experience.

It might take a long time and many iterations to more fully understand how team play really works and meaningfully apply it to create, tune, and optimize systems that deliver a consistent, engaging experience for a wide audience of players. It's a challenge whose closest comp is Thatgamecompany’s Sky: Children of Light, a F2P social adventure game (follow-up to the company’s previous premium titles like Journey & Flower). Thatgamecompany took 7 years to develop Sky, a game with pillars of compassion and community, where the economics were designed around altruistic exchanging of gifts with each other rather than spending on yourself for attaining social value.

“Are we building something that could be important?”

In the end, that is the question Supercell attempts to answer as its reason for being.

From a trendsetting perspective, a game making players mandatorily play in groups (teams, clans, valleys) once the group feature is unlocked, with no opt-ins or opt-outs (players can only change groups or create new groups), has been an underutilized design among casual and hardcore games in the F2P space. Scopely’s MARVEL Strike Force does something similar with Alliances, making all players part of an Alliance once the feature is unlocked and only allowing players to switch or create new Alliances.

From a revenue perspective, can a game that doesn’t optimize on time spent actually meet Supercell’s metrics for success, let alone compete with the titans in the genre? With its current low ARPU, it’s easy to say no, at least in the short-term. For the long-term, though, Everdale does benefit from having the opportunity to be a longer life-time game than its competitors by not competing on time spent. Everdale can win by being the go-to game players play when they’re busy playing other new games or consuming alternate entertainment over many, many years. And there’s plenty of time to hone in on what could improve ARPU for a game that works to maximize check-ins.

Making a game that doesn’t compete for time spent with other forms of entertainment but rather short check-ins in-between other activities, all while gratifying human connection between small groups of players sharing a community experience is what makes Supercell Supercell.