Those of us of a certain age will remember the old commercials for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It’s an easy-to-understand idea – a candy that combines two flavors to produce something entirely new and tasty.
Never mind that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (love them or hate them) don’t taste much like an actual chocolate bar dipped in peanut butter. The commercial is still great marketing, clever shorthand to show what the candy is all about. It gets the audience imagining those two flavors and primes them for quirky deliciousness.
but we ate all the good candy from Halloween.
Here’s the stale leftovers instead.
Entertainingly enough, this kind of marketing pitch works just as well for games. Whether pitching to potential publishers or trying to attract customers directly, many developers have found a lot of success marketing their game as “a cross between x and y” – “it’s Starcraft meets Doom!” “It’s Minecraft, but an RPG!” “It’s Animal Crossing, but in space!”
This shorthand method of game pitching is a viable strategy for designers looking to straddle the line between “innovative” and “low risk.” It’s not a pitch that says “our game is an entirely new game never before seen, and who knows how the audience will respond?” At the same time, it’s not a pitch that shrugs and says “we’re just another first-person shooter, but BETTER.”
Instead, it’s a comforting mix of two familiar things that (if presented properly) will seem fresh and new to the audience while at the same time leveraging well-understood mechanics.
When it works, it works well – but as a product strategy, it’s not without its pitfalls.
Tactics Meets… Soccer?
First, let’s talk about a success case.
The game I’m going to talk about – Football, Tactics & Glory – is not a runaway commercial hit. Peak concurrent users are a tiny fraction of Football Manager, the juggernaut soccer management game. The developers, Creoteam, are a small Ukrainian team with very limited resources (and also currently living through an active war in their country).
However, I’d argue that it’s a perfect success as a design. Its vision pitch, right there as the first line of its description on the Steam store, is “XCom meets Football Manager.”
Great shorthand, right? Like “chocolate and peanut butter.” It’s an odd pitch, sure, but you immediately understand what the game is aiming for – and it delivers on the promise.
Like Football Manager, the game places you in the role of fully managing a soccer team – building it up over time, handling the finances and contracts, designing the lineups, and controlling the matches.
This is WAY more fun than it looks.
The XCom influence is apparent. Your players all have special abilities and stats, and level up. You get attached to them, in the same way that you do your XCom soldiers. You can rename them, and customize their faces. When you have to trade a star player you can no longer afford, it’s as devastating as when your favorite sniper dies to an alien horde.
The tactical matches last about ten minutes and are played out as bite-sized tactical turn-based gameplay on a ten-by-seven field of squares. Each turn consists of three actions – though this can be increased with special abilities – before the other side gets a crack.
(In fact, the core mechanics of the game remind me less of XCom and more of Hero Academy, a mobile tactics game I helped make. Hero Academy had a smaller team size, five actions per turn instead of three, and a nine-by-five grid instead of ten-by-seven – but the ebb and flow of the individual matches are surprisingly close.)
If this all sounds wacky – well, it kind of is. Yet it works surprisingly well. I’ve found Football, Tactics & Glory a consistently engaging title with a “one more match” addictive quality (and it plays very well on the Steam deck).
From my perspective, the game deserves more success than it’s found. It’s polished, bug-free, engaging, and thought-provoking. From my soccer novice’s view, its brief turn-based matches capture the feel of a match as well as any other game.
Yet I also know my taste in games is pretty far outside the mainstream. I like sports management games and I like XCom games.
And therein lies the first big pitfall of a hybrid game pitch – who’s the audience?
Basic Math
In the early days of my career, a very smart boss I had said something insightful. His wisdom applies to a lot of pitches, but at the time, he was specifically talking about World Cup Monopoly – a reskinned version of an existing Monopoly title with a World Cup Soccer theme.
“The mistake is thinking that game’s going to capture the union of the two sets of soccer fans and Monopoly fans,” he said, “when really, it’s more likely to capture the intersection.”
The point is you wanna grab everyone,
not just the shared sliver in the middle.
If I were to speculate, I think that’s why Football, Tactics & Glory hasn’t found the audience I think it deserves. Mixed-genre games, regardless of how good they are, can easily fail to reach the right people – or there might not be enough of the right people. Out of the gate, they’re a hard sell; pity the poor marketing folks used to peddling games that fit neatly into particular buckets when they’re trying to calculate reliable sales projection numbers.
Another risk for a game that fuses genres is failing to meet the expectations created by the original “x meets y” pitch. For example, Football, Tactics & Glory has less meat on the management side of the game than in Football Manager. Players who enjoy tinkering with budget minutiae might end up disappointed, even if they like the core idea.
Similarly, Football, Tactics & Glory does a good job with its tactical gameplay, but it doesn’t reach (or aspire to reach) XCom’s level of complexity. In the process, they likely lost a few players who were hoping for more complexity based on the original pitch.
It was a smart choice on the part of the team to pare the tactical elements down to the essentials. There simply wouldn’t have been room in a player’s mental bandwidth to include every beloved feature from both games. But it shows the risk in the “XCom meets Football Manager” shorthand – depending on what players most loved about those titles, they might not find it here.
Contract extensions, training, and level-up choices are
all tweakable for the micromanagers out there.
Two Great Tastes
I love games that successfully fuse two genres. When that type of design is done right, it leads to player experiences that feel genuinely fresh and new.
It’s also a great exercise for a designer to sit down and think about which combinations work and which don’t. Can a strategy game like Civilization work with robust tactical combat? (The answer is yes – see Age of Wonders 4.) Is it possible to merge a story-focused RPG with a punishing survival game? (Yes again – see Pathologic 2.)
So if you’ve got a clever idea for how to fuse a couple of existing genres, don’t let the risks I’ve mentioned keep you from pursuing it. Just keep that audience Venn diagram in mind, and take time to fully understand the core appeal and key design elements of the genres that inspire you.
My hope for the future is that clever developers keep jamming their chocolate straight into my jar of peanut butter.
The Scree Games blog will be on a brief break next week. We’ll return on January 2. Enjoy the holidays!