Erik Larsen, studio manager of Electronic Arts subsidiary Capital Games, says he wants the studio’s flagship title Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes to last for 37 years.
Why 37? “I honestly have no idea,” he admitted. “Something about it being a prime number?” He said someone tossed out the number in the early days of developing Galaxy of Heroes, and the team at Capital Games has maintained it as a target lifespan for the Star Wars-themed mobile role-playing game.
Given that the oldest still-running online games are around 28-29 years old (a casual search says Furcadia may be the oldest one?) that’s an ambitious timeline to set, especially in the world of online mobile games. Galaxy of Heroes is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month, meaning it’s outlived a number of other EA-published Star Wars free-to-play games and seen the release of five films, seven live-action series, and about six animated shows. The Star Wars name isn’t always enough to attract players. So what has Capital Games done to survive for so long?
Larsen of course gushed about the Galaxy of Heroes player community and their loyalty for sticking with the game for so long—but if you want some practical takeaways for your live service team, you’ll want to follow him back to 2018, when we were all reeling from backlash to the objectively best (editor’s note: this is not objective but Bryant insisted we keep this) film in the series: Star Wars Episode VII: The Last Jedi…
Capital Games used new game modes to make Galaxy of Heroes development more sustainable
The Last Jedi actually has very little to do with this story—neither does Solo: A Star Wars Story, the other major film release of 2018. According to Larsen, 2018 was instead the year that high-ranking guilds began messaging Capital Games that they were feeling the effects of slowing player growth. “We’re not getting enough new players coming in and progressing fast enough to backfill players that are leaving,” Larsen recalled them saying.
At the same time, Capital Games was feeling the strain of making new content with four-year-old tools. Around this time, the studio determined that the way it worked was “too heavy and manual,” requiring developers to hand-author all aspects of new content—content that could be consumed quickly and leave players spinning their wheel bikes. This was when the team conceived of the “Conquest” and “Galactic Challenges” game modes.
“As much as they were modes, they were [also] attempts to force ourselves to evolve the way that we operate and create some new procedurally generated content,” he said. “I think we were kind of frustrated as a team that in having to go fast and try to get more track in front of the team that we weren’t making some of those investments in early years.”
Releasing these modes and making a number of other changes opened up space for the Capital Games team to plan further ahead, a challenge that’s particularly tricky with a license like Star Wars. Disney’s infamous secrecy with upcoming projects means some companies like EA aren’t privy to plot points or characters from upcoming projects—making it challenging to plan for content that can be timed to new Star Wars stories. Larsen said he personally learned this in the run-up to the 2016 release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. “I think it sensitized me to that movie development to be a fluid process,” he said. “Cuts can get made on the editing floor.”
So what do you do when you’re missing key information most other studios would be able to make themselves? Larsen nodded to the upcoming Ryan Gosling vehicle Star Wars: Starfighter as an example of how the studio is “planning ahead” while working with limited information. “We’re thinking how ships are probably going to be really notable in there. What can we pull off? How can we start getting ahead of that?” Galaxy of Heroes already has spaceship-friendly systems, but just knowing those basic details can let the studio begin planning technical and high-level design concepts to have content ready when the movie comes out.
Then there’s the “season” format (one used by many live games now) that lets the developers shape meatier content from the new films months or years after their release.
But let’s double back to Larsen’s comment about speaking with player guilds. They played a key role in helping Capital Games update its development strategy. What can we learn from the kinds of players who stick around for the 10-year run of an online RPG?
Some early Galaxy of Heroes players are now raising kids of their own
Larsen said he officially realized he was working on a “generational” game when he saw some players describe how they’d started playing Galaxy of Heroes in high school and are now introducing it to their own kids. For some back-of-napkin math, if a 17-year-old began playing in 2015 and had a child at age 22, their five-year-old might be old enough to watch the films…or at least ask their parents if they have games on their phone.
Some of these players were early adopters who dipped from the game in the years after launch, only to return later and find a veritable feast of play modes available on their return. Even though the game is called a “role-playing game,” Larsen said its most dedicated players find the most fun in on resource management. “It’s about expressing [their] intelligence,” he said. Marketing director Fabien-Pierre Nicolas-Kim said this has made the game popular in France and Germany, two regions with strong affinity for tabletop and digital strategy games (among other regions of course—he namechecked India, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe as regions with strong playerbases).
That means these players aren’t so concerned about “role-playing” Star Wars characters per se, they’re interested in collecting the various characters, upgrading them, and mixing/matching them to win battles and head up the leaderboards.
10 years of development has meant there are a lot of characters to choose from (Larsen’s personal favorites include Knights of the Old Republic fan favorites Darth Revan and Darth Treya) Larsen said the 37-year battle plan involves making sure these players feel like their investment in the game—be it time or money—is “respected,” and that new content can still be challenging without rendering older parts of their collection invalid.
The pair did say they work hard to ensure low-spending (or zero-spending) players are as rewarded for their time in Galaxy of Heroes as possible. Larsen said since his early days on the team, he’s watched his coworkers prioritize what he referred to as “the right decisions for players,” even if it meant “leaving money on the table” or “not extracting value.” He mentioned the team doesn’t always “get it right,” but did say there’s always been a desire to center those investments even when they’ve missed the mark.
How can mobile RPGs evolve over time?
Galaxy of Heroes is one of many free-to-play mobile RPGs where players collect characters to power them up and upgrade their power levels. It’d be fair to say the format’s a little calcified, and unlike their competitors, Capital Games can’t easily tap into the “collaboration” market that lets them mix-and-match characters from other franchises. With 27 years left on the clock, where can the series go from here?
Larsen played it coy here, but he said the trend he’s followed since his earliest days at EA have been the efforts to make it possible for players to play games wherever they want, on whatever platform they want. He recalled an experiment where EA’s social team making Facebook games had been “embedded” with the Dead Space 3 team to try and make a multiplatform experience. The game got canceled, but he said the trends of the years after, where players can play games across mobile, console, and PC platforms, makes him think they were onto something. “It was like Betamax,” he said. “We’re always looking for what’s new—where we go find fandom and bring the ability imagine your own Star Wars experience, wherever it is that you want to be playing.” The team is, interestingly enough, apparently experimenting with controller-friendly game modes.
“We’ve got versions of the game that are wrapped to controllers and we’ve created synchronous PvP modes that we haven’t released yet where it actually works quite well,” he said. “I don’t know that that moment lasts forever, but I think there’s something there for us to be exploring currently.”
EA’s made multiple statements about wanting to get out of the licensed games business, so it’s not impossible that in 27 years, Galaxy of Heroes will be the last game standing at the now partly-Saudi-owned publisher. It’d be a testament to Capital Games if they make it through what will surely be another two-plus decades of game development chaos.
But you know what they say. “Always in motion, the future is.”