In this post, I’m not going to create a giant rant about p2win type of games or features. The thing about Boom Beach is that you can play without paying a single dime. In truth, it’s one of the better freemium games that I’ve tried in this genre. That said, I think it does suffer from that stigma of requiring some sort of monetary investment in order to be fun. Even before that issue arises, there’s a bigger issue at stake: the low level grind.
I think a huge problem with Boom Beach is that it appears too similar to Supercell’s other game Clash of Clans. I have other friends who play both games. The ones who did a cross over always pushed further into Clash of Clans as opposed to Boom Beach. My guess is that once they saw similarities between both games, they pretty much put in minimal effort.
But there are numerous games that are the same. Strategy/resource games all share similar characteristics. There’s always some derivative of a Starcraft, Warcraft, Command and Conquer type of base game. And in those cases, they were retail box games with a far higher cost associated to them. So why would people be willing to fork out $60+ for a retail box game of a similar nature but not put in time for a freemium mobile game?
The issue boils down to the perception of a very long term grind and the low level grind experience. In the case of Boom Beach (and other similar games of this nature), the game progresses extremely slowly. You pretty much don’t see much for quite a while without rushing your base with Diamonds. And much of the more interesting tactics come out once you hit around HQ14-15. But I feel that most players don’t make it beyond HQ10 at best.
The low level aspects can be very boring and frustrating. You’re limited by the small amount of resources early on as well as the wait times. You might even have the resources but cannot rush buildings due to how you can only have a single worker at a time (without the subscription builder added). But why would someone spend money early on without knowing if they will want to stick it out?
Also, the game can be very frustrating to new players. The ideas of how Victory Points operates along with your map are not intuitive. In fact, they’re very counter-intuitive. As you destroy your opponents, you get more difficult bases at rapid rates, until you finally hit a wall. Likewise, other far superior opponents will squash you and take your resources. So how can that be fun?
See that’s where the gotcha in the game is. It’s easy to get demoralized and just uninstall a non-intuitive game where your progress partly involves regression. Yet it’s far harder to become invested in something like this without someone guiding you.
In my case, I found that the game started to become far more interesting roughly around HQ14-15. Once the offensive strategy became known to me and I switched over to a T-Med load out (and eventually Grank-Med), the game changed in my view. I started having a lot more fun and felt far more invested.
But a lot of that also had to do with my attitude towards this game. Although I’m still a casual gamer overall, I do my research just to see if there’s a way to improve. Not everyone shares this attitude. A game like this really is geared for casual play, despite having its own set of leaderboards. Nonetheless, the education portion is really lacking, even though they’ve done more to promote blogs through the news items in the UI.
Even with all that, the perception has to change for this game. The game needs to do more to improve low level game play by increasing the speed at those levels, educate players on offensive strategies early on and mend the VP management portion. I do think a patch a little while back was supposed to correct the VP match making aspect, but I’m not privileged to see how it feels at the moment. The Builder won’t mend the current issues except for people who actually know what they’re doing.
At any rate, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to correct these aspects. I don’t that reducing the low level build times will harm the game. If anything, they need to speed the lower level game up and have people push harder to engage people. Again, I think that people simply don’t get a chance to feel how the game can operate because of those barriers to entry. If they can get past the lower levels, there’s a far better chance that people might get hooked and try to venture further.