Why are sticker albums taking over? From Royal Match to Mid-Core by Jakub Remiar

Speaker 1 Once you complete it, you literally get this pop-up about the Grand Fall collection, which what it does, it just does different art basically. So the pictures are different.

Speaker 1 Exact same template as usual. Instead of 10k gold, you have 15k gold and 15 boosters instead of 10.
So basically 50% more rewards. But you get a different cosmetic.
And this is the whale cosmetic.

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Speaker 1 Hello, hello, this is two and a half gamers, another solo episode.

Speaker 1 And today, we're gonna talk about one of my favorite mechanics and something that is spreading like the wildfire basically and spilling over even to mid-core which is the collectible album mechanic.

Speaker 1 We talk about it on the podcast lots of times usually during reviews or some kind of game comparisons and stuff like that but never talk specifically.

Speaker 1 So let this be some kind of like TLDR rundown how-to video basically. And I have some interesting timeline numbers now that I want to go through to kind of put this into context.

Speaker 1 So yeah, let's get to it. Okay,

Speaker 1 so what we'll do is we go through this small presentation, and from that point on, I have again some more tabs to kind of look into.

Speaker 1 So, collectible album itself, it's this thing, and this thing specifically, because

Speaker 1 a lot of times, collectible albums are normal mechanics in games, and everybody can say, like, they were here before, like, what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 So, I'm talking specifically about the Scopely implementation that that was done in Monopoly, let's say popularized by Monopolygo because it was there before.

Speaker 1 So Monopolygo releases April 2023 and from that point on, this thing spreads across the whole casual genre.

Speaker 1 So it's this really, really specific one where, as I said, you can look at collectible mechanics and collectible albums across the whole mobile market.

Speaker 1 There will be different mutations, things, but I'm talking about this very, very specific setup where, again if we go to Mono Polygo itself these things are defined by clear templates such as you have these kind of

Speaker 1 album pages basically which all consist of these X amount of cards that have their like star rarity value there's like the overall grand price There's a time frame. This is very important.

Speaker 1 There's like a limited time period when you can do this. There's the duplicate mechanic and there's the trading mechanic.

Speaker 1 So those are like the typical things how to kind of differentiate this specific execution of the collective album. Like let's call it sticker album.
That's the most important part.

Speaker 1 So this thing is just great for these games because it's very easily, I mean like it's a perfect complementary mechanic for their heavy social feature set because a lot of these games they are on giant player volumes and therefore you want to have dynamics such as leaderboard, such as trading, such as

Speaker 1 pretty much users bragging about their cosmetics and stuff like that. Again, cosmetics works mainly on social status.
So it's perfect for this kind of a setup, like Casual.

Speaker 1 Pretty much every single Casual became on the market should have some kind of implementation of this mechanic. The other very good thing is that it's seasonal.
So it resets and you lose everything.

Speaker 1 So it doesn't accumulate stuff. So that's very, very good.
Originally, as I saw it this was first introduced into Yahtzee with buddies which is a different Scoply game.

Speaker 1 Yeah I guess some people are currently screaming at the screen because a lot of times I was told that this was actually invented like I mean the specific implementation by Platika

Speaker 1 somewhere even before in one of their games.

Speaker 1 I don't know if somebody really knows, let me know in the comments please, but Yahtzee with buddies is the one where I literally saw it, I guess, where I was able to track it in a way that I really kind of the one that I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 Why is this mechanic so good?

Speaker 1 Because it adds depth to shallow economies. And this is the most important part about it.

Speaker 1 Because if you look at, let's say, Royal Match or Monopoly Go, both of these casual games, they have very, very shallow economies.

Speaker 1 Shallow economy means that there isn't really that much currencies floating around the economy. There is the soft currency, there is the energy currency, and that's it.

Speaker 1 And that's the only thing you can get in the album, actually. Like you can just get the same type of rewards that you get from any other live ops events or whatever stuff they're currently running.

Speaker 1 It's like,

Speaker 1 because they cannot add more mechanics really to the game as it would complicate it. And we don't want like complexity with casual audience.
But we want engagement. We want anticipation.

Speaker 1 We want gachas, of course.

Speaker 1 And this is exactly what this album will give us because it introduces these kind of, let's call them temporary currencies, which are the booster packs that you get by opening stuff during the events, getting them as for like during the core loop of the game.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it's a gacha. And again, you get legendary cards, you get not legendary cards as always, so and so on, so forth.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's great and perfect, but still

Speaker 1 it

Speaker 1 re-rolls or pretty much returns back to the original complexity, which is the only thing we give are these two soft currencies which is the exact same setup here in the royal match where again the economy isn't that really deep it's a little bit deeper because

Speaker 1 just by the notion of it we don't have the roles or whatever we have lives of course but we have these power-ups and boosters so as you see here uh here you get again just the soft currency and the

Speaker 1 dice which are the energy here but here you also get boosters, which is a little bit more complex, but just by a little. And that's it, basically.

Speaker 1 Suddenly, you are able to add a gacha system, which is like one of the best progression mechanics ever invented in the game, and put it into a casual game. So that's perfect.

Speaker 1 As I said, it's really important to implement it correctly.

Speaker 1 So you really need the duplicate system because gacha mechanics are only as good as many times you can roll the gacha, which gives you the gacha depth. Therefore, you need to be able to

Speaker 1 be able to absorb duplicates. So once you open these packs and you get duplicates, you have a choice basically.

Speaker 1 So in Monopolygone, what happens is that I can go here and exchange duplicate stickers for stars, which basically gives me either direct rewards like here, which nobody does, or they give me more packs.

Speaker 1 And the usual thing is you want to save for the best pack, because for instance, here here in Royal Match, these packs, you literally have this red pack that if we go here, you are on the website, you see the ratio and all these other things.

Speaker 1 The red pack contains one card that is guaranteed to be missing from your collection, which is immense value for a collection of 135 cards. So, just saying.

Speaker 1 So, again, that's just the way, usually for solo players.

Speaker 1 But, and this is the other very important thing. You can trade these cards.
And this is the big uplift that this mechanic is causing because it's giant player engagement. Because,

Speaker 1 again, here you have an example how you can trade it in Monopoly Go. You have five, you only trade five stickers per day.
And players search actively for trades outside of the game, which is perfect.

Speaker 1 If we go here in Royal Match, what you can see here that if i go here uh into my

Speaker 1 but basically you can trade these things see i can send it i need a duplicate but then i can send it to one of my friends or i can request this in my clan basically see

Speaker 1 so not only now the clans aren't just begging mechanisms for lives which is like yeah that's there but again it gives them much more meaning so suddenly these social groups like teams in royal match have much more potential and again this is just the immediate motion because usually what happens is you go outside of the game into these giant trading groups which is basically this which is the official monopoly group go facebook group with 10 million followers where there are these they even supported themselves and facilitated through these golden blitz events which is just like live ops here it was even done one today

Speaker 1 where you see there are these cards and like search for perfect trade in comments

Speaker 1 800 comments basically every everyone's like anyone have any pumpkin spies and people are pretty much looking for all those cards they add each other into friends list and then they trade between themselves so this creates giant amount of engagement because everybody is going after that top reward of the grand prize which is usually a cosmetic because again you can't really do power-based power-based gameplay impact style items in these scheduled games so what do you do you create cosmetics so that's there so here we have for instance the origins badge on the nice price that is currently running in the royal match here we have the scarf king because of the autumn cozy comforts album in melopoly go and that's it basically so it's super easy and once this thing ends you just reset it everybody loses everything and there's a new role new reward on the block basically So that works very, very well.

Speaker 1 And as I said, this spread like wildfire. I'll get to the list a little bit later.
Just want to finish the setup here.

Speaker 1 But yeah, every single big casual game basically implemented this exact same setup. This is just the casual games.
Like you can see it.

Speaker 1 It's sometimes a little bit different based on the seasonality of the collection and number of cards. For instance, here we have 126 cards.
Here we have Intervalta 162 cards.

Speaker 1 Royal Match has their own template of one hundred thirty five cards, which they always run. It's it's the same all the time, one hundred thirty five cards for two months.

Speaker 1 Currently, I think Monopolygo is doing, yeah, even more because it's running nearly two hundred cards basically.

Speaker 1 That's there, I guess maybe they're experimenting with a little bit more cards collection.

Speaker 1 The other very interesting thing that I want to mention is that I think maybe some games also have it with this implementation, but at least the one that I know has it, which is this double bottom setup, which means that their album is basically doubled.

Speaker 1 So when you complete the main collectible album, let's call it the fall collection, and it was there, you get this leaf and the price is here, of course.

Speaker 1 So you complete it, and once you complete it, you literally get this pop-up about the grand fall collection.

Speaker 1 which then pretty much starts, which what it does, it just does different arc basically. So the pictures are different.

Speaker 1 exact same template as usual 135 cards a little bit more rewards so instead of 10k gold you have 15k gold and 15 boosters instead of 10 so basically 50 more rewards but you get a different cosmetic and this is the whale cosmetic i would name and call it basically because if we go here

Speaker 1 and we check for instance players you see that the previous collection the one with this gold thing

Speaker 1 you see how many whales completed bold albums actually and you need to do that during the same time so it's 60 days for bold albums it doesn't reset the time of course so you see how it goes pretty much and there are a lot of players already the collection here is what

Speaker 1 51 days so it's nine days in basically and there's the top players already kind of having the collection fully collected there on the second one basically so you see how how they go i'm guessing maybe this guy, the first player in the world, is currently like this is the cosmetic for the second album, the grand album.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing, I don't know. Maybe, maybe.
But I guess that's my guess here because you see how this whole list will basically change into this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's perfect. Everybody is pretty much implementing it from left to right because it's very easy to maintain.
And it's just art. You can use AI for this, literally.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing half of the implementations are done with AI anyway. And again, it doesn't add any more complexity into the game.

Speaker 1 The kind of important part is the trading, especially with other players, which I guess is a little bit of a back-end exercise.

Speaker 1 It's not that easy, but still, it's just giant uplift, I think, regarding engagement and what players can do within your game. As I said, these groups are just filled with players trading.

Speaker 1 So MonopolyGo has a 10 million group. Same goes from Royal Match, but I don't think so.

Speaker 1 They directly facilitate through one of their like facebook live ops events or maybe i didn't saw it but they definitely like you see they announced the collection so it's not that that that different so yeah so if you look into the timeline let's zoom in a little bit so monopoly go i put a timeline thank you game refinery for being able to kind of create this timeline even

Speaker 1 where I put the release date of global launch of MonopolyGo as the start of the timeline, which is April 2023.

Speaker 1 And from that point on, you see how this thing spreads into basically the whole casual genre. So we have immediately being followed by Solitaire Grain Harvest, which, as I said, because

Speaker 1 Platika probably did it even before, I guess they were preparing it before them,

Speaker 1 or maybe following them during the soft launch, I don't know. So they implemented it right after them.

Speaker 1 Then we have stuff like Tilebuster, Matchmasters, the big PvP, Match 3 game, Family Island, Moon Active,

Speaker 1 Board Kings, Match Matchmasters, I can

Speaker 1 two times, sorry for that. Blitzbusters, Dice Dreams, Coin Master, Travel Town, Ghosty Harbor, Royal Match is April 2023, so Royal Match implemented it in a year.

Speaker 1 Project Makeover, Seaside Escape, Twisted Tangle, Trackstar, Animals and Coins, Merch Mansion. Domino Dreams will at the end of 2024.

Speaker 1 Then there's Hexasword.

Speaker 1 Candy Curse Saga implements it this year's march which is in my opinion quite late compared to all the other ones which already implemented it a lot of time i think real much maybe even sooner than april last year i would guess so i don't know i need to double check that whiteout survival this is quite interesting so i was looking into it as i said let's use game refinery for it So whiteout survival has this very specific implementation where you can see that it's not the same one, it's just a little bit different, but it's there.

Speaker 1 You see it. That my screenshot, it's just a mutation of it, which is again a mid-core game, like a very, very, very mid-core game.
So yeah, this is spinning over to mid-core. And we have Block Jam.

Speaker 1 Tasty Travels, a Canada Century games game, Holmes Games, Guardians Games implements it this September. Acecraft, which is the big

Speaker 1 shooter game with the Dinti's animation style stuff. Basically, they're currently running what the promotion with Bugs Bunny and

Speaker 1 where was it? Yeah, Bugs Bunny and Duffy Duck. Yeah, so that's their new setup here.
But again, they have the collectible album. Their collectible album is a little bit different.
It's 36 guys.

Speaker 1 I think last time it was 40, now they cut it even lower. But it's the exact same setup.
A little bit different modification here.

Speaker 1 But you can trade, you can do these other things, you get stuff for it, you get the summonings basically, and then you have this one cosmetic. So, yeah, it's there.

Speaker 1 We saw it also in the Hantopia game, which is the idle RPG. It was an event, not really like a permanent addition to the feature set.
So, let's see.

Speaker 1 But again, as I said, because I see it in Whiteout Survival, I'm guessing we'll see it more and more in mid-core later down the line. Then we have Screwdom, this the Magic Match and Magic Sword.

Speaker 1 So yeah, this was just this month. So yeah, lots of games are implementing it still.
And I guess all the casual B games will implement it eventually.

Speaker 1 The big question for me regarding this whole mechanic is which is the best setup? How many cards? How many kind of double bottoms?

Speaker 1 The biggest iteration will be coming in mid-core once some kind of mid-core game properly figures it out.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing these are more experiments, or like Acecraft is the most stable one, or I would say the most

Speaker 1 the one that literally doubles down on it because it's part of the main feature set.

Speaker 1 But as you saw there with Whiteout Survival, as you saw with Antopia, it will take some time until mid-core figures it out properly.

Speaker 1 But then, once it figures it out, I guess it will become like a stable, pretty much mid-core feature that we'll see all over the place. I guess once hubby implements it in the setup, we'll maybe know.

Speaker 1 And then, yeah, the question is how it will mutate in casual.

Speaker 1 Because my guess is what will happen, and we saw it already a little bit with Coinmaster, because Coinmaster is running a little bit of a much shorter modification of this album, similar maybe to this one that we have in Acecraft, is how that thing will go on.

Speaker 1 Because, of course, we have these long 30, 60 day albums. But the question is if this can be done also on a little bit shorter basis, which could again pump up the revenue.
Let's see.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it's quite interesting. For those that have a casual game or are thinking of implementing it in their casual game, definitely do it.
It's just it

Speaker 1 have so many advantages and the mechanic is just so easy to maintain once you kind of hop on onto it and just go by the template. So that's there.

Speaker 1 We'll be watching very closely how different games implement it, where do we see it popping out in midcore, and if we see any other modifications of it in casual, because currently, like 80% of the games are running the monopoly template, I guess, the sticker one.

Speaker 1 So, again, it's a question if it morphs into something bigger. But, yeah, let's see.
Anyway, really short one, just an informative one. Thanks for listening.
Yeah, we'll see how this one goes.

Speaker 1 If you have any questions or anybody knows that this game, this mechanic was done by Plateaca Sooner, or in which specific game, let me know in the comments.

Speaker 1 Join us, like, subscribe, and see you next time. Ciao.