What's Up With Hattrick?
Not many people play a single game persistently for a long time, and not all games are meant to be played for long periods of time anyway. I consider myself an outlier in this sense, with my general tendency to stick to few games and play them for very long. In line with this habit of mine, it felt natural to pick a game that I have been continuously playing for a very long time – nine and a half years, to be exact – as the centerpiece of my very first blog post: Hattrick.
Hattrick is an online soccer management game that lets players build their own team with fictitious soccer players, compete with other players' teams in national cup and league competitions, set match tactics and training strategies for their team, buy and sell players on the transfer market, and raise youth players, among many other in-game actions. The game is considered the pioneer of the browser-based multiplayer soccer management game genre. It had its heyday in 2009 when the number of players peaked around a million, and sadly this number went down from then on at a fast pace, especially between 2010 and 2015. The current number of active players is a little more than quarter of a million.
First of all, let's look at what makes Hattrick a good game.
Hattrick appeals to a huge audience - soccer is the most popular sport worldwide. Close to half of the world's population watched the most recent World Cup in 2014. It is among the prevailing conversational topics among males of all ages in countries where soccer is popular. Children around the world idolize their favorite soccer player. Now imagine that you, as a soccer fan, have your very own soccer team, and you are controlling every single aspect of it. Almost.
On top of such a large audience, after a rapid growth phase in early 2000s, Hattrick emerged as the most popular online multiplayer soccer management game. Hattrick had two chief differences compared to existing soccer management games. The first is that Hattrick put a competitive, real-time multiplayer experience at its core as opposed to the single-player-centric nature of other managerial games. This experience is driven through league, cup and friendly matches among teams managed by real people, and supported by the sense of community created through forums, national teams and federations. The second difference is that all teams and players in the game are fictional. Apart from giving developers the advantage of not having to pay for licensing fees, this completely fictional setting helps build a much more personal connection between the team and the manager - the player really feels like they own the team they are managing. These two differences remain as the main pillars of the game's marketing strategies, including its slogan "Everybody deserves their own football team."
Another factor that sets Hattrick apart to this day is that it makes room for players of all engagement levels; that is, it does not disenfranchise players who put less time or money into the game. First of all, the game is free to play. Players do have the option of buying a "Supporter package" which gives them a few perks such as changing names of players, opening a second team, and participating in federations and custom tournaments, however these perks do not give players any advantage in gameplay and are there only to increase the level of enjoyment the game provides. While putting in more time and effort generally correlates with greater success in the game, the gameplay demands very little time to maintain a functional, if not successful team. If a player is in one of the lower or low-to-median divisions of their country, they can have stable finances, an economically viable training strategy, and a team that can maintain its position in the league even if the player is online only half an hour per week. The league structure also allows to separate the small group of very active and successful players from the rest - there is one group in the first division, four groups in the second division, sixteen groups in the third division and so on. For most mid-to-large sized countries in terms of number of players, teams can survive in the fifth division with minimal effort and that still means being ranked average or better in the country.
What Went Wrong?
Graph depicting number of people playing Hattrick in years 2009-2015
As I mentioned in the beginning, Hattrick suffered a near-demise, when it had a net loss of a whopping 600,000 players between mid-2010 and early 2015 after roaming around the 900,000 mark during late 2009 and early 2010. There are a few different theories voiced by the game's developers and players as to why so many players left the game during this time period, and given the lack of concrete data other than survey results made public by the developers which mostly do not go beyond scratching the surface of the issue, it is hard to pick any theory over another. In the rest of this post, I will describe and evaluate two of these theories.
Theory: The Emergence of Competitors
After the success of Hattrick, many similar online soccer management games appeared, the most popular of which countered Hattrick’s simplistic gameplay with giving the player more complex and specific control mechanisms for the team such as greater variety in match tactics or more means of controlling the team’s finances. Goalunited is a particularly popular example, which in August 2009 reached 1,750,000 players* – almost twice as many players as Hattrick had at the time.
A considerable amount of player criticism on Hattrick forums focused on how Hattrick lacked in the level of control provided to the player. From forum discussions, it seems that a number of Hattrick players tried out other browser-based multiplayer soccer management games, and some liked these games and eventually stopped playing Hattrick, but this refers to a small group of users compared to the total loss. In fact, in such discussions, a lot more players adhered to the simplicity school of thought – part of Hattrick’s appeal was, according to these players, its simplicity and allowing players to enjoy the game fully even with a low level of involvement as discussed before.
Developers maintained at the time that the rate of player loss did not change that significantly and the magnitude of the net decrease stemmed from being unable to keep new players in the game for long, and shifted their focus to practices that they hoped would lead to increased new player retention such as more in-depth tutorials and mentoring systems. The lack of new players can be explained by the other soccer management games simply being more appealing than Hattrick if taken from the competition perspective.
There is a major piece of evidence that tells us the competition argument cannot explain the loss alone, or may even be incorrect altogether – during this timeframe, other browser-based soccer management games also suffered losses in number of players! A ranking of the most popular browser games in the world, presumably from Spring 2015 judging from the numbers, gives Goalunited’s number of players as 242,000 while Hattrick appears to have 358,000 players. At the time the list was compiled, Hattrick was the most popular browser-based soccer management game ahead of Comunio (Comunio’s Wikipedia page uses Hattrick to exemplify the notion of a browser-based soccer management game) and OnlineFootballManager. These numbers are perhaps a good starting point to launch onto the next theory on why Hattrick shrunk so much in number of players.
Theory: The Advent of Mobile Gaming
Smart mobile devices keep spreading to larger swaths of population across the globe, and as they do, they affect game design. People now have access to a gaming device everywhere, which means mobile games are very suited for frequent, short breaks. As a result, mobile games are often designed to let players accomplish in-game tasks or attain achievements in short periods, or in other words, quickly reward the player. Some games take this a step further and utilize a pay-to-win scheme, offering instant upgrades or extra resources to the player at a cost of real money.
Side note: I find pay-to-win a nasty monetization approach in most cases as it exploits players' addiction to gratification and disenfranchises players who do not want to pay by putting them at a disadvantage in the game. I would be better off discussing this topic in another post though.
The quick reward scheme has gained a large audience throughout the world. It changed people’s gaming habits – many people previously interested in slow but long-term progress prefer quick reward more now, their previous interest perhaps being explained simply by the scarcity of quick reward games. Slow-paced browser games do not fit into this new realm of gaming, and player progress in Hattrick is extremely slow. There are only four events in the game in which any major progress occurs, these being league matches, cup matches (for those who are lucky to advance multiple rounds), player skill updates and player transfers. Players who have a youth academy enjoy three additional in-game progress events: youth player skill updates, addition of new players into the youth squad, and promotion of youth players to the main squad. All of the listed events have one thing in common – they happen only once per week except transfers, which the player is free to make any time as long as team finances allow, and promotion of youth players, which happens once every few weeks depending on the number of good youth players on the team that are old enough.
The only way quick reward fans can be satisfied in Hattrick is through daytrading, meaning profiting through buying players and selling them in a short span. To the remorse of quick reward fans, Hattrick developers have increasingly restricted daytrading opportunities throughout the course of the game’s history by implementing various measures such as instating transfer commission fees, requiring a player to play a minimum number of matches before being put on the transfer list, and adding player loyalty as a skill boost. Developers openly dislike players who engage in daytrading because it is an unrealistic practice that goes against the spirit of managing a soccer team and annoys some of the other players, along with rendering play time more valuable than it should be, risking losing the interest of players who do not spend as much time playing the game and form a significant portion of the player base. It just seems that quick reward practices are in direct conflict with Hattrick’s gameplay and values, and given the shrinking audience for slow-paced games, there is not much that can be done to get the number of players to rise again without changing the game from the core and somehow convincing the existing player base to keep playing the game.
Many browser games which are slow-paced by default, such as Tribal Wars and Ogame, employ a common tactic to broaden their audience to include quick reward-lovers: speed rounds and worlds. Speed worlds can be described as versions of the game in which everything happens faster with minimal alteration of gameplay otherwise, and speed rounds are simply speed worlds that have a fixed start and end time. In games that utilize speed rounds, the rounds usually take place in parallel with regular gameplay as a separate competition, meaning that participating in these rounds will not give the player any advantage in regular gameplay. This practice prevents disenfranchising players who enjoy the game's default slow pace. In the case of games that completely decouple the speed round from the rest of the game by having all participants start in equal conditions as opposed to using their existing in-game data, speed rounds also give players who feel that they are not doing well in regular gameplay a chance to start fresh.
Hattrick was somewhat late in getting on the speed round/world bandwagon; only in 2011 it unveiled a new website named Hattrick Open in which players – including players that do not play Hattrick – could arrange tournaments with each other and schedule their matches as often as they want. Hattrick players also had the freedom to choose between using their team in Hattrick or starting with a brand new team in order to level the field for all tournament participants. While Hattrick Open sounds like a good idea judging from these facts, it had problems as well. One problem was that it was not a speed world in the strictest sense as it lacked some key components of the regular gameplay such as training, economy, player transfers and team personnel. The developers had essentially created a new game that only emphasized the match tactics component of the original Hattrick. It could be argued that this was a good way to appeal to new players, especially those interested in being quickly rewarded, however that argument would only hold true if it were not for the foremost flaw in Hattrick Open – you had to pay to play. Despite developers repeatedly describing Hattrick Open as a game catered to players who liked a faster pace and telling players that this would hopefully broaden Hattrick’s audience, the developers completely shut out a majority of their intended audience with the pay-per-play approach. Hattrick Open not only failed to take off, but also frustrated many Hattrick players since all the development effort and funds channeled into creating Hattrick Open would have been put to better use by improving the main game instead. Hattrick Open is now remembered by players as one of the biggest flops in Hattrick history. The developers eventually gave up on this side quest of theirs and conceptually incorporated it into the main game as a feature allowing paying users to arrange their own tournaments.
Hattrick suffers from a drawback that is not caused by its gameplay as well – it has lagged behind in terms of mobile-friendliness for a long time. Similar to the change in people’s gaming habits, people now go on the internet on their mobile devices for frequent yet short periods throughout the day when they do not have a computer in front of them. Even with a computer nearby, people increasingly prefer going on the internet using their mobile devices for mobile-friendly tasks if they have to wait for the computer to turn on. As a result, good user experience design for mobile platforms has been a major requirement for success for many web services in recent years.
The web analytics company StatCounter reported that internet usage on mobile devices and tablets surpassed that of desktop devices for the first time in October 2016. A vast majority of Hattrick players reside in wealthy European countries, where mobile internet usage would have presumably been even higher throughout the timeframe depicted on the graph compared to the worldwide usage.
Hattrick’s developers did not respond to this evolution in our use of technology in a timely manner; they released a mobile app – rather lacking in functionality – for the first time in early 2012, and they did not add some of the essential features into the app until they released a remodelled version of it in late 2014. Hattrick’s mobile website and application still do not provide the same level of functionality and comfort as the browser version does, though recent updates have brought them close to that level and developers are continuing to improve the mobile experience.
Ever since the developers have started their major rework on the mobile interface of Hattrick, the net player loss rate has decreased to minimal amounts. Whether there is a causal relationship between these two events is something to be questioned.
Additional source: https://www.hattrick.org/Help/History.aspx
