Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 195 - Donut Principle

Chapter 195: Donut Principle

They basically snatched it out of Chen Mo’s hands in order to install the game onto their PCs.

“Wow! Co-op?”

“Incredible, I thought it was a pure single player game!”

“I heard there’s only up to four players. Guess it’ll be us four in a group, you guys make your own groups.”

“I’m playing Barbarian! What about you?”

“I’ll play Wizard then.”

“This is exciting, though I’m still sad that we can play with more players.”

“I’m done installing. I’ll wait for you guys at New Tristram.”

“I’m done too. Huh, it really resembles that RPG map from Warcraft, like a official remastered version!”

“Yeah, I was just about to comment on how familiar this felt.”

“But how can you compare this to an RPG map?”

“Of course, this is the manager’s own work!”

“I thought there wasn’t anything fun about third person games, but it turns out to be quite fun!”

Diablo was now the new trend in the experience store. The players that were here for other games stopped what they planned and pivoted to playing Diablo instead.

Diablo’s online mode wasn’t like other games, nor was there a synergy between different classes.

It resembled a LAN game like Diablo 2, more suited for a small number of players. The game would change its difficulty based on the number of players to prevent the loss of a challenge with more players.

Relatively speaking, co-op modes reduce the difficulty of the game as noobs could depend on better players to beat bosses. Moreover, a combination of various classes also helped with clearing levels.

However, when taking the preference of multiplayer games, new player experience, and prevention of cheats into consideration, an online mode was inevitable.

It didn’t take long before the players were immersed into the dark world of Diablo.

Chen Mo breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing this, as the first phase of the Diablo ‘donut principle’ was in effect.

There was a lot of debate whether or not Diablo 3 was successful. But based on the sales and feedback, even if Diablo 3 didn’t reach the levels of Diablo 2, it was still a successful game.

The ‘donut principle’ referred to how the players would eat the donut from the outside in when playing diablo.

The outer parts were new players, deeper into the donut were mid-core players, and the hardcore players would be deeper still.

When they reach the centre of the donut, the players will realise that there’s only a hole to leave.

The new players are drawn into the game by its art style, high quality gameplay, and exciting combat and story.

Mid-score players are attracted by the different combinations of abilities, equipment attributes, differences between classes, ranked ladder, and professional mode for greater challenges.

And when they become hardcore players, they will keep grinding everyday just to find ebtter equipment, experiment again and again for the best build, and would aim for the top every season as they relentlessly aim to be the best.

But after the hardcore players were done experiencing that, managed to find the best equipment, done climbing the ladder, or were just tired of the game, they would find the exit and leave the game.

Of course, there were players leaving before they become hardcore players.

But an important point of this ‘donut principle’ was to not worry about players leaving.

Many online games try their best in order to retain players, integrating daily or seasonal events just to hope that their players continue playing.

Although this worked, it could also create the opposite effect, affecting the ratings of the game. The players would find the game incredibly boring, leaving the game never to return.

This was where the ‘donut principle’ came in. New players could leave the game after experiencing the story, and hardcore players could leave the game after getting sick of climbing the ranked ladder. The game wouldn’t use various tactics to try and retain players.

This meant that all the players would have played everything they wanted to play before they left. Dragging out a month’s content into three months wasn’t what Diablo was about.

The players would naturally return when the game received updates like new in game story shards, new classes, or new content.

Therefore the ‘donut principle’ suited Diablo’s profit model and its playstyle.

So far Diablo’s first steps seemed to have gone well. Chen Mo’s idea of the art style and atmosphere seemed to be right judging from how focused players were on the game. It wasn’t a game that had a niche audience, turning its unique art style into a selling point.

—

Diablo was ready to be sold in two weeks as the follow-up work progressed steadily.

In this time, many playtesting videos were leaked onto the internet as topics like ‘Chen Mo’s new game’ and ‘Diablo’ were gaining more and more buzz.

“There seemed to be some leaks on the cinematics and gameplay of Diablo, have you seen it?”

“Isn’t that some ancient RPG? What’s so special about it.”

“It really isn’t, the graphics look amazing, and the cinematics seem to be higher quality than Warcraft.”

“Really? Is he stupid? It’s a singleplayer game. Even if he sells five hundred thousand copies at ninety-nine RMB each, that’s just fifty million RMB gross, about thirty million net. That’s not even enough for the cinematics right?”

“Yeah, the cinematics surely cost more than fifty million? Is he trading money for fame?”

“It’s hard to tell, the game does seem quite fun. You guys should take a look at the gameplay, it seemed quite high quality.”

“So what if it’s high quality. Just the words ‘third person’ is enough to give the game a death sentence. There’s no way the game gains popularity.”

“But I think the game is so high quality that Chen Mo could’ve made it a first person game.”

“Then... Then Chen Mo is just digging his own grave, there’s not much else to say. I don’t believe that it’s possible for a third person game to gain popularity anyways, I’ll eat my keyboard if it does.”