In this post I will be attempting to deconstruct the mobile racing genre, looking at recurring themes in how users are retained and monetised by developers. My experiences have led me to test (at least what feels like) hundreds of mobile racing games, and most of my analysis is generalized across those experiences. However, there are a handful of high-grossing games that I have referenced specifically in order to demonstrate particular points.
When we refer to the "mobile racing" genre, we're using somewhat of a catchall term for a category with a huge amount of variation. Games differ wildly based on their playstyle; you can find hardcore simulators as well as arcade titles. You can find variety in vehicles and game worlds, from drift racers to buggies and monster trucks. Even the graphical style is a spectrum; developers have seen success in the genre from extreme realism to pixelated and cartoon visuals.
Despite this variety, there are common themes that run through many of the most popular mobile racing games. Whether that be the principles of the core gameplay loop, how the game economy functions, or how the game creates a sense of progression and achievement, there is enough overlap across successful titles to attempt to extract out these commonalities and use them to understand what makes a great mobile racing game.
The core gameplay loop of a mobile racing game is something approximating the following:
Action (Race) > Achievement & Anticipation (Unlock Reward & Upgrade)
In mobile racing games, the length of the “action” element (the race) is typically shortened to anywhere between 1-3 minutes. This shortening not only brings the game to meet the temporal requirements of the typical user, but it also encourages game consumption as being “little and often”, which is more conducive to habit-forming.
After the race is completed, the user is rewarded, typically with soft currency but also often with additional currencies associated with other gameplay loops. Good game design also increases anticipation of the next achievement and reward by making the next upgrade clear, and desirable. This pulls the user to race again, restarting the core gameplay loop again at the beginning.
Anecdotally, mobile racing games seem to have, in general, a less steep learning curve than their console and desktop counterparts. Unlike racing games that are not based on the free-to-play model, the user is challenged less often from a skill perspective, and when they do reach their first challenge, it tends to be much later into the game.
Instead, user’s progression tends to be challenged from a resource perspective - something extremely common (if not necessary) in F2P game models. An example of this might be running out of fuel (depleted by lots of races in a short time span), or lacking the necessary currency to unlock a vehicle, examples of which I will go into more detail on when analyzing Game Economy.
The user may choose to overcome the challenge of resources by monetising in one of various methods, such as opt-ing in to watch advertising, or making an in-app purchase, which we will explore in the Monetisation section.
Racing games typically have the following currencies as standard:
Currencies that are not quite as ubiquitous, but still fairly common are:
Any sophisticated F2P game economy contains taps, sinks, and pinch points. These are the labels that we use to refer to the in-flows (taps) and out-flows (sinks) of different types of currency within the economy. Pinch points are created by the effect of the relationship between these in and out flows, and forms a large part of the purchasing pressure on users.
The most common taps in mobile racing games come in the form of:
The most common sinks in mobile racing games come in the form of:
We can add these to the core gameplay loop diagram shown earlier to get a more detailed understanding of what the game is doing at each phase:
Progression is one of the key principles that helps to retain a user, and the very best racing games bake many layers of progression throughout the game experience. Examples of these types of progression include:
The wide variety of ways that a user can progress means that even the shortest session, completing 1 race, allows the developer to illustrate progression to the user in various areas. They progress to the next race, they collect XP, they come close to upgrading or unlocking their next car, and they potentially hit a couple of in-game milestones.
As we would expect from a mobile title, progression is logarithmic and while a user makes rapid progress initially, this is gradually throttled over time.
The pinch point in a mobile racing game arrives when the logarithmic progression dictates that the user is:
Common pinch points tend to be:
Depending on the size and sophistication of the game, there may be various sub-game modes alongside the main racing mode that create variations on the core gameplay loop above by changing the first two components, action and achievement.
If we take a Race as being the default game mode, then an example of alternatives could be a Nitro/Drag based race, Rush Hour (introduction of in-race traffic), and Boss Missions. Each game mode alters the experience of the “Action” phase (detailed in Core Gameplay Loop section) for the user slightly.
The “Achievement” phase can also changed by offering different rewards to the main game mode. This additional content creates more variety and novelty and acts to extend average session length and retention metrics for the most enthusiastic users.
How does it do this? Let’s look at Rebel Racing as an example:
The user is presented with various game modes:
Of these game types, the Boss Missions are ultimately the point of the game and the core gameplay loop was designed with this game type in mind. We can consider all other game types in the list above to be supplementary, and orbiting the Boss Missions.
Users are likely to get an instinctual feel that this is the case, especially if they are familiar with mobile gaming or the racing genre. If there are no mechanisms to guide a user through the game, users will naturally gravitate towards these game types, perhaps almost exclusively.
The outcome of that for the developer will be a much shorter user experience on average, with a lot less opportunity to monetise the user. A lower user LTV then translates into a more challenging user acquisition process, with a lower budget to acquire users profitably.
What Hutch Games does well is to indicate that progression in the main game type, Boss Missions, will be “impossible” without adequate engagement with other game types. They do this by providing the user with a perceived difficulty rating that is displayed before starting each game type. They do not only display this for Boss Missions, but for all other game types too, in order to circulate the user as completely as possible through game modes.
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Car upgrades are a commonly used and effective sub-goal, throttling a user’s otherwise very quick progression towards one of their primary goals of unlocking all available cars.
Cars are commonly sorted by HP (horsepower), a shorthand metric for how advanced the car is in relation to other cars in the game. The HP at any given point is a function of the starting ability of the car in its default state, plus the addition of any upgrades, which raise the HP incrementally. Underlying the HP rating are attributes such as top speed, acceleration, handling, etc. Each subsequent upgrade to an attribute, which tends to be in soft currency, becomes more and more expensive to throttle progression.
A technique that is widely utilized in the mobile gaming genre, not just racing, is the practice of breaking consumables into fragments. The consumable is not composed of one “whole”, but instead of multiple or many different fragments. A car may not be unlocked in one go, but instead the user may be challenged to collect all fragments of that car, in order to unlock.
Fragmented consumables also facilitate the concept of “micro-rewards”. When a consumable has various fragments instead of one whole, developers are able to reward their users more often without imbalancing the game economy. This additional frequency of reward increases the user’s sense of achievement and progression, while allowing the developer an increased number of opportunities to monetise.
Developers can also raise the monetisation ceiling of their user through micro-rewards. With multiple currencies, and fragmented consumables, there are enough different rewards available that a gacha system can be used.
Progression towards a desired item is much more tangible and direct for the user with micro-rewards. For example, when a user has unlocked 16/20 “blueprints” for a desired car in Asphalt 9, their progress towards their desired outcome is more tangible than would be otherwise, if they were just to amass soft/hard currency.
There are some common monetisation principles running through most F2P racing games that are present regardless of whether their model is based primarily on advertising or IAPs:
After an onboarding period in which users make rapid progression and receive an abundance of reward, players are continually asked to make a choice: either play/grind/wait for a certain amount of time to receive a reward, or pay to get that reward faster.
Before that we can expect the user to want to progress, desire for the reward must be established. Vehicles are almost always the most desirable consumable that a user can progress towards attaining, and there are a few common methods to help establish that:
Shop Volume is a rough way to measure how effective the game’s store is in giving the user different options to spend depending on their preferences. This concept is characterized by both breadth and depth:
Breadth is based upon how many different categories of item there are available for users to buy. Can you just buy cars? Can you buy fractions of cars? Can you buy upgrades as well? What about modifications or materials for those upgrades? And so on.
Depth is based upon the ability for a user to redeem items with multiple currencies available to them. A healthy implementation of a store would allow options for users to make purchases with hard, soft and real currencies.
Layered on top of these core principles, I have encountered three broadly different types of monetisation models, detailed below.
Notable Examples: CSR 2
Games with this model are broadly similar in their monetisation to the one described in Model 2, but without any additional advertising component.
Notable Examples: Rebel Racing, Asphalt 9: Legends, Need for Speed™ No Limits
Titles with this monetisation model have a higher monetisation capacity, and there is a much higher ceiling to the amount that a user can spend before all items can be unlocked.
The main way that this can be achieved is to move the unlocking of cars inside a gacha system, and have users unlock consumables through this mechanism.
Progression in this system is far more winding and indirect than when vehicles are not strictly attached to this system. Instead of being able to earn rewards and forge a direct path to the next vehicle, or the one most desired by a user, instead they are subject to randomized rewards and chance.
Due to the psychology of the gacha system, users don’t necessarily experience this frustration - the system does a great job of associating these chests or pack rewards positively for the user.
All users are placed on a separate progression “track” that exists outside of the reward mechanisms associated with winning races. All users are periodically rewarded with a variety of different currencies and consumables, but are given the opportunity at any time to upgrade to a paid “track” with superior rewards (usually called something like Pro Pass, VIP Pass etc).
This feature allows the developer to continually reward the user, but simultaneously unlock a huge number of further opportunities to present the user with one of their most important IAP offers, as shown below.
Use of advertising in this model is not the main focus. In this model, there are typically no video interstitials, and the rewarded video placement at the end of races that tends to be the primary ad revenue driver for model 2 titles does not commonly appear here.
This makes sense in the context that the core gameplay loops in these titles were shorter, and they are shortened specifically in the Racing/Action element. Whereas a typical race in a title that is advertising focused may be 90-180 seconds per race, I found 30-60 seconds is the standard for these titles.
However, instead rewarded video is typically used to monetise users that are committed to not spending. This can come in the form of increasing fuel to be able to race again, speeding up wait time for upgrades to take effect, and extracting small amounts of soft currency on a daily basis.
The offerwall unit is definitely not a constant in this model, but it does make an appearance in titles like Need For Speed. The entry point tends to be situated in the store, but isn’t pushed at the expense of other IAP options because of the lower monetisation rate associated.
Notable Examples: Nitro Nation, RACE
In this model, ad monetisation plays a much larger role and is usually close to, if not the primary driver of revenue for the developer.
Advertising revenue tends to come predominantly from rewarded video placements that are offered at the end of every race, in exchange for a boosted race reward. This is typically the placement with the highest engagement rate, and brings in the biggest chunk of the total revenue.
What is key for success to developers adopting this model is ensuring that this placement is designed to maximize engagement rate as much as possible.
Additional rewarded video placements are typically situated in either the store or the home screen (or both) that come in the form of a daily bonus (or shorter, e.g. every 4 hours) that give the opportunity to the developer to issue micro-rewards to users for engaging with advertising.
For users that choose not to voluntarily engage with advertising through rewarded video or via IAP, they are usually shown video interstitials periodically. A subset of games in this model are extremely aggressive with their ad implementation, and do not offer a cooldown period on interstitials for users that engage with rewarded video. Early in the user experience a user is bombarded with ads, and repeatedly offered either a subscription package (that contains a no ads feature), or the IAP option to remove ads directly.
An offerwall unit is well suited to this model. The offerwall can be used by the user to redeem currency by interacting with different advertiser offers. This unit tends to appeal to more hardcore users, who are already highly engaged with viewing ads in exchange for currency.
