Many paths can be taken when designing an economy for a character-led product. Often, contemporary mobile games focus on one of two areas:

1) cosmetics and aesthetics or;

2) power and abilities

This choice often reflects the genre and core gameplay of your game. For example, a top-down shooter is unlikely to feature a cosmetics-driven economy as characters take up minimal real estate on the screen and are not in clear view. In contrast, a MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena) would suit this economy well with its close camera angle and plentiful opportunities to showcase. You can find examples of this in Brawl Stars, League of Legends: Wild Rift, and Mobile Legends.

Selecting the right path is critical for your product and can significantly affect an economy’s scalability; this makes it an essential element to be understood fully before committing to something. This article will explore how top-performing strategy games approach character-driven progression. Specifically, we’ll focus on three titles: Brawl Stars, Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus (Tacticus herein), and Arknights.

Why Is It Important?

Characters are a compelling driver for a wide array of player types. They allow players to compete, upgrade, and customize a set of characters that, despite being the same for all, feel different within each experience.

Users are able to personify pre-developed characters with bespoke twists and personalities. This is especially effective in games with pre-existing IPs, such as Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus, that utilize the bonds that were formed between the player and character from previous media.

Similarly, characters can enhance a company’s brand via interoperable consistencies. For example, the signature character style and design present throughout Supercell’s portfolio mean you always can recognize one of its games by its high quality, production value, and distinct style.

Arknights and Brawl Stars are strong examples of character-led economies in the current mobile market, surpassing an impressive $1.87B revenue combined. Tacticus was released a month ago and thus still requires time to validate; however, its release KPIs are already promising — seeing over $2M in revenue with an average LTV of $3.04

All three progression loops revolve around obtaining, upgrading, and gearing up characters to make them stronger. Each game prioritizes each aspect of the loop slightly differently; however, all contain scalable, practical approaches to character-driven products. Let’s dive into some of the similarities and differences between them!

Approach 1 – The Accessibility Approach (Brawl Stars)

Brawl Stars is a massive online battle arena game by European titan Supercell. In Brawl Stars, players collect and improve a range of characters and compete in snackable team-based game modes.

In regard to its economy, Brawl Stars takes the accessibility approach. Brawl Stars has less character depth than the other two games, which, although not optimal from an LTV point of view, makes the game easier to comprehend and with a less complex loop. This accessibility opens the game to a new audience of core gamers with less experience in traditionally hardcore genres such as MOBAs. This mass audience appeal counteracts the LTV gains lost through the shallow economy with large download numbers.

Obtaining Heroes

Players can unlock new characters (referred to as brawlers) through play (Brawl Pass, Trophy Road) or purchase (Brawl Boxes, shop offers). New brawlers are introduced regularly, keeping the game feeling fresh and exciting.

There are currently 60 brawlers in the game. One brawler gets unlocked for free, which means that at an average cost of £4.49 each, it would cost a total of £265 to complete a collection. With brawlers not consistently available at the shop, the player must log in regularly to check if a brawler is available. This may appear like a missed opportunity to accommodate deep spending, but that is covered by the gacha.

The lack of brawler availability within the shop increases the uptake of Brawl Boxes (gacha) for those driven by excitement or impatience. This deepens spending and ultimately makes a completed collection cost much more.

Upgrading Heroes

Brawlers have two associated forms of progression: Rank (a measure used to signify skill) and Power Level (a measure used to represent power).

Rank

Rank is a showcase of skill rather than an immediate performance improvement and is primarily a driver for progression and bragging rights for competitive and socially driven psychographics. Tying Rank to brawlers is a great way to allow players to diversify their rosters without the punishment of losing trophies and, thus, prestige. Practice without penalty drives players to want to collect, explore, and experiment with the game’s characters.

Power Level

Power Level reflects a Brawler’s stats and can be upgraded for a Power Point (PP) and Coin (soft currency) fee. This gets incrementally larger with each sequential level. Upgrading a Brawler’s Power Level increases its stats and unlocks gear and ability slots for further versatility and customization, which expands the sink alongside player engagement.

Armor & Gear

As aforementioned, each brawler has a series of slots you can fill with items to diversify their stats. These are unlocked alongside Power Level, providing a tangible reason to progress and sink currency into brawlers.

Cosmetics

Although not a focal point of this article, it’d be a disservice not to mention Brawl Stars’ plentiful cosmetics.

Cosmetics add breadth and depth to itemization, fleshing out the gacha with items of value while creating a persistent offering for cosmetically driven players, competitive players with an upcoming tournament, or social players looking to impress on the battlefield. Brawl Stars’ cosmetic costs are high; however, Supercell reduces that slightly with community-led initiatives.

Supercell encourages its community to create cosmetics in-game with its Supercell MAKE initiative. Having the community be involved in a hero’s development is a great way to reduce design work and build a strong bond between you, the community, and its favorite heroes.

Key Findings

Brawl Stars is an excellent example of adapting a complex progression system to a midcore audience that otherwise might not have been used to this level of agency over how it plays.

Brawl Stars is a considerably polished and refined product. To achieve a similar result, teams must maintain an equivalent level of refinement, cadence, and variety—a cost (of both time and money) that you must not lightly consider.

• Clear UX: Brawl Stars understands the meaning and value of upgrading through clear UX flows and approachable guidance.
• Simple Progression Loop: Character progression feels intrinsic to the core game, making it a no-brainer investment for casual and hardcore players.
• Few Meaningful Choices: The few choices available make each option feel impactful. Each change is felt and, thus, feels essential enough to improve.

Approach 2 – The Diversity Approach (Arknights)

Arknights is a modern squad-based tower defense game by Chinese developer Hypergryph. Arknights’ gameplay is highly strategic, and one significant factor is how its characters, referred to in the game as operators, work.

Obtaining Heroes

Like in Brawl Stars, Arknights’ characters (operators) are primarily obtained in gacha or IAP bundles. Unlike the other two games discussed today, Arknights’ characters (and cosmetics) are in 2D. This is a significant difference: although 2D assets are quicker and cheaper to develop, they often have less perceived value from players, harming scalability.

Upgrading Heroes

Operators are given skills for use in combat, which are split into Auto, Manual, or Passive. Auto and Passive skills occur automatically at the start of the game (or when available), while Manual skills need input. This is one of the aspects of an operator that can be strengthened via level-ups and unlocked during promotions.

Five upgradeable elements are associated with each operator, which signifies a focus on statistical over itemized progression. While this focus comes at a cheaper development cost, the lack of consumables required to upgrade (as is conventional in Tacticus and Brawl Stars) fails to provide solid reasons for players looking to progress or collect to push towards gacha.

Armor & Gear

Another significant difference is that Arknights doesn’t feature equipment but instead relies on numeric forms of progression (i.e., potential, trust, etc.) and associated itemization (i.e., XP boosters). Although consumable boosters are a great way to sink items out of the game and create consumables and currencies of recurring value, Arknights misses an opportunity for persistent rewards within its monetization.

Cosmetics

Similar to Brawl Stars, Arknights features a set of cosmetics it calls costumes. As they’re in 2D, these likely have a lesser impact on revenue compared to Brawl Stars, though, given their lower development cost, they are likely to create a positive ROI.

Key Findings

Despite its attempts, including collaborations with western brands, Arknights never seemed to crack the West. The US contributes to an underwhelming 9% of its total downloads and 7% of its total revenue (compared to China’s 35% and 31% respectively).

Arknights’ true strength is in the diversity of its offerings. It has a robust set of items to collect and progression systems that reinforce each operator and make them feel customized for each player’s needs.

Arknights falls short compared to the others in regard to perceived user value. Although there are plenty of characters and costumes to collect, Arknights misses an opportunity to deepen its itemization by systematically making all the upgradeable elements of a character. For gacha to persist as a valuable offering, it must present a depth and variety of content to drive spending regularly and deeply.

• Scalable Economy: Arknights’ character progression, customization, and collectible items come at a lower cost than the other games listed here today. This makes it a lot more achievable for smaller teams.
• Lack of Mass Market Appeal: Arknights has failed to have the same impact on the West as it has on the East. This is likely due to its aesthetic to an extent.
• Missed Opportunities: There are several missed opportunities in Arknights (i.e., armor and gear) which are likely harming revenue gains.

Approach 3 – The Depth Approach (Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus)

Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus is a turn-based tactical strategy game set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 Universe. Tacticus is the spiritual successor of Rivengard (by the same developer) and Valiant Heroes (published by King) before it. Released only a month ago, Tacticus is fresh into the market and still has a lot to prove; however, the game is already showing early signs of success, as aforementioned.

Obtaining Heroes

There is a similarity between Brawl Stars and Tacticus in that both feature a piecemeal progression and highlight gacha as the primary way to unlock heroes.

Tacticus splits heroes into nine factions, each containing five characters. Factions create a way to group players, which is utilized through level limitations (i.e., levels locked to a particular faction type). Hero factions are locked into their factions, encouraging players to upgrade multiple heroes—an excellent method of encouraging diversification.

Upgrading Heroes

Tacticus offers a very strong itemization through its piecemeal progression. For every character or item added to the game, XP will be obtainable via gacha or as match rewards to contribute to upgrading it. The item/character can be upgraded when enough XP has been gained. The ever-changing path to improvement gives players consistent goals, which help scale LTV and create collectible items of recurring value.

All character improvements, whether leveling up, promotion, or gear, contribute to a character’s power score. Power score, similar to Item Level in MMOs such as World of Warcraft, calculates a character’s overall strength, creating an at-a-glance impression of a character or opponent.

Armor & Gear

Similar to the other games, Tacticus features a selection of gear slots that the player can fill with items found in the game.

The core way to gain items is through gacha. Hero-led economies lend themselves well to gacha systems, showing their high revenue. Gacha is an excellent method for adding randomness to monetization, creating a deep drive for spending and collecting. Including a gacha system incentivizes diverse play, with players unlocking a mix of heroes from different roles.

With an expansive roster at its disposal, possibilities for different IAP bundles are plentiful. Example bundles include faction bundles, hero bundles, and gear bundles. With fresh offerings happening regularly, players are provided a reason to visit the shop regularly, increasing their exposure to these and other shop offerings. This in turn increases the likelihood of conversion.

Key Findings

Tacticus has a contemporary F2P infrastructure layered above accessible (yet strategical) gameplay. It features an economy deep enough to scale, with rewards (items and heroes) worth investing in.

Although it’s too early to predict, Tacticus has the potential to succeed so long as the team can maintain its strong start. The quality and diversity of the offerings are high enough to compete with the other titles mentioned in this article, though, unlike them, Tacticus is limited by its IP.

• Level Limitations: Factions are a great way to encourage players to diversify their roster and sink into multiple characters.
• Character Shards: Piecemeal progression creates a low-cost way to expand itemization, consistently providing value within gacha. So long as there are new levels to achieve, players will have a reason to engage and spend.
• Deep Customization: There are a lot of opportunities to customize hero stats to fit a particular play style; this creates consistent opportunities (and thus goals) for the player to reach.

Takeaways

All three games contain viable strategies. However, they prove that not one size fits all. The ideal method would aim to appeal to as many player types as possible and strive for a mixture of all three approaches. Several considerations need to be taken when creating an economy for any game. Still, with the ability to change the stats of a player character and in turn the pacing and difficulty of a level, you should take special care when adding power progression.

It is much easier to pivot from a power-driven economy (i.e., Warhammer) to a cosmetic one (i.e., Brawl Stars). When choosing a cosmetic economy like in Brawl Stars, you must consider the development team/cost. Certain games, such as Arknights, reduce this cost by opting for a 2D rather than a 3D game, removing the requirements for a texture artist. However, 2D games are often perceived to have lesser value than 3D, which could harm scalability. That said, if the team cannot maintain a regular 3D content release schedule, this will not be an issue for it.

Similarly, release cadence and development bandwidth are essential considerations. For example, League of Legends used to release heroes every two weeks, then realized that this couldn’t be maintained and swapped to a much more relaxed schedule with months between each release.

Ultimately, the right economy fits your game and audience naturally and helps your product reach its goals. Whether you’re looking for a high ARPDAU or want to create an IP out of the product, heroes are a great avenue to venture in.

A big thanks to Becky Matthew for writing this essay! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.