deep marsh
About Me: I am a longtime fan of LTD (since the Warcraft 3 mod days!) and was delighted to rediscover it on Steam as LTD2. I play pretty frequently and have multiple accounts ranked in top 200. I am a tech entrepreneur - building a software startup atm – so I love taking on challenging problems and I want to be more involved in the LTD community. I think this game occupies a strong niche as a highly strategic Tower Defense/Auto Chess genre game with really unique type of gameplay and that it has huge potential to grow.
In my first improvement proposal, I focused on gameplay elements to make LTD2 more fun, exciting, and competitive in order to appeal to more players and grow the player base. In this proposal, I want to bring up something entirely different: Monetization strategy.
Context/Reasoning for this LIP: While I have not been able to find data on in-game purchases and ecommerce numbers, from what I’ve heard in the community and anecdotally for myself, I think consistent in-game monetization is largely a weakness here. So what can we do to address it?
I think part of the problem is the existing customization options, e.g. unit and merc skins, are not guaranteed to be used in a given game… and when you do use them (as the case for mercs) they only last a short period of time and you may not even see them (e.g. if you’re focused on another lane).
I followed closely the post about map skins – I think that is a great idea and the right line of thinking, it is something you would see on every game – unfortunately it ran into technology/infrastructure limitations. I am not very knowledgeable about the tech stack being used here (or gaming tech stacks in general tbh), but I think/hope that this idea should be possible on the current tech stack.
Proposal: Along the same thinking as map skins, what if we introduced a new dimension of skin/cosmetic customization that players WOULD get to see and experience in every game, every time. Borrowing once again from the very successful TFT (by Riot Games, the undisputed master of freemium gaming monetization), what if we introduced the concept of PLAYER SPRITES, and by natural extension, SKINS & CUSTOMIZATION FOR PLAYER SPRITES.
Consider this:
In TFT, player sprites do functionally nothing (at least in the standard game flow, I realize sprites are used during carousel rounds or for the encounter voting, when they had it). They do not impact the game at all, and (unlike mercs/fighters) have very little bearing on game elements (though they could, more on that later).
The central purpose of the player sprite in TFT is to give you some persona to latch onto as you play: i.e., “This is ME, this sprite pertains to my playing style in some way and the makes me more engaged and the game more personal”. In truth, I cannot find actual $ numbers to back up how successful this is, or isn’t, for TFT. They do not make those financials available anywhere I can find. However, we can assume it’s far above zero… and for the reasons mentioned above I think they could be far more successful for us than existing angles on fighters/mercs.
(Continued in next post)... ->
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