What the NIKKE DON incident taught me about a well-made game

NIKKE is a more enjoyable game than people expect. The design is a very simple vertical layout, and the combat actually runs even if you press nothing. But reaching your ceiling takes skills.

There are certainly techniques the developer does not endorse, but set those aside and look at the build-up, at using skills on the right beat, at the order you kill things in.

Beyond gameplay and feel, I think the story, the events and the mini-games make it a genuinely appealing and well-made game, not just a solid core. Speaking for myself, even when I am not playing I still go looking for the story.

Then the cheating scandal hit

A cheating scandal broke out this time. It blew up inside Solo Raid, a competitive mode, which is what made it big, (a competitive mode people spend serious money on, so of course it is big) and honestly the studio’s response had real problems of its own. I think if they had simply handled the first hours well, it might never have burned the way it is burning now. (The central figure behind this was DON. Though the root of it is the studio, of course.)

And yet it did not look fatal

Usually when something this big happens, a flock of people show up saying the game is finished. I looked at it and thought the same thing for a moment — is this it?

But NIKKE did not look like it was going to die. Because seeing that scandal did not make me feel like quitting. Maybe that is because I am an ordinary player whose ranking cheating cannot push down? My guess is that even among players in the top three percent or so, not many will quit over this. (The top-rank rewards require you to be inside that three percent.)

Appeal spread across several places

My read is that the appeal and the fun are spread out, and that each of those categories was built well enough to stand on its own. In my case I play NIKKE for the story, so the whole thing barely touched me. There are players who are there for the visuals, players who are there for the mini-games, plenty of different groups. (Lately there seem to be players who show up only for the rhythm-game mini-mode.) Diversifying a game’s appeal, done badly, just makes the game harder and more complicated. It can become the very reason people leave. On that count I think NIKKE is a case of holding each individual part steady and building it properly.

I cannot sum up in one line what makes a game well made, but I think NIKKE is a well-made game. I would not read that backwards and claim that building it this way guarantees a good game — still, I expect more and more games will aim to be built the way NIKKE was.

Not leaving and opening your wallet are different things

Having said all that, I think even if few players leave, the number who spend will drop a lot. Especially in the short term. NIKKE’s main monetization is selling skins, of course (swimsuits? maids? that sort of thing?), but even so, the revenue produced by competitive content — money you pay endlessly rather than once — has to be enormous. Which is to say a crack can open in a part of the pie that is quite large.

I called NIKKE a well-made game, but it was not that way from the start, and I think that quality, and the way it is sustained, are only possible because revenue stays above a certain line. Seen that way, a drop in revenue from this incident is obviously a factor that can affect the quality of the game.

Because people are the ones doing it

From what I can see so far, even after something this big, the share of players walking away looks extraordinarily small relative to the size of it. That is remarkable, and since everything is done by people, it struck me as worth thinking about in any field where things can go wrong.