I’ve talked a lot about big names in the mobile and live service space: Digital Extremes, Grinding Gear Games, and of course the entire Hoyoverse. But there is one other game that has been one of the longest-lasting in the mobile space, continues to evolve with new content, and brings in millions each year. That is Marvel’s Contest of Champions by Kablam, and it is one of the most unique games in both gameplay and monetization I’ve come across.
A Multiverse of Fighting
Contest of Champions is both one of the first takes of evolving mobile design that we saw during the 2010’s, and one of the early games to capitalize on the Marvel hype train of that time. There have been other Marvel games, and even DC ones as well, but it was the one that has become entrenched in the market.
Our story is that all the Marvel heroes and villains have been brought to the multiversal arena of battleworld by force of the Collector. There, they are compelled to fight each other across time and space, and the player as “the summoner” has their own roster of characters that they are doing battle with. As the story went on, new characters were introduced, most of them betraying the player, and they continue to grow in power.
What separated Contest from the many other games, including the DC and Marvel variants at the time, is the gameplay. This is not a turn-based game, but I believe one of the first examples of the mobile fighting game genre. You’ll fight your opponent in real-time using light, medium, and heavy attacks, along with the ability to block and parry the opponent. Each character has up to three levels of special moves, with the third being a cinematic attack that can’t be stopped. As per mobile RPG rules, characters are assigned different classes, which are strong/weak to another one.
The strength of the game is in the sheer variety of gameplay and styles between characters. (Source: Marvel)
Now if that’s all there was to the game, it wouldn’t be that complicated to play, but there are layers to this game that would put even some of the bigger fighting and RPG games to shame. Every character has one-off passives and abilities unique to them to go with their playstyle. Venom gains randomized buffs every few seconds and can eat the opponent’s buffs for health regen. The Immortal Hulk (yes, every Marvel variant has their own character) can literally become immortal when he’s about to die and keep fighting. And there are a lot more rules, and I do mean A LOT. As the game progresses, battles will be influenced by a wide array of passives that radically change how you are supposed to fight enemies.
When you first start encountering them, the passives are basic — enemy hits harder, enemy has more health. For those doing the high-end challenges, passives become a short novel to read to understand everything that they impact.
Bang for Your Buck
The most unique selling point in terms of gameplay for Contest of Champions is its progression. Most mobile and live service games are about the endless grind — new missions and content simply scale ever higher numbers requiring the player to bring even more numbers to it. And while leveling up is a big part of this game (and part of the grinding), the real focus for players is completing the story.
While the story won’t be winning best narrative awards any time soon, what it does is provide account-wide rewards and progression for players to focus on. Each “milestone” earned through play will upgrade the player’s account — allowing them access to better deals, better rewards in the shop, and even better rewards from Kablam when they have holiday/anniversary events. This is by far one of the best uses of story/account progression tied to rewarding the player I’ve seen in some time. Everything that we’re going to talk about throughout this post is influenced in some capacity by the player’s milestone progress.
This is further tied to progression and going through the different events, in which there are a lot of them.
Continued Contesting
While the game modes focus on a linear set of missions, there are many different events, PvP, guild battles, and more for players to go after. Everything is linked in giving you resources and currency that can be spent on ways of recovering characters, or the multitude of progression items. The developers will also throw limited time hardcore challenges where the gloves really come off to challenge players who think they have their teams figured out.
This ties in with the monetization that I’ll talk about next. Outside of the story missions, events will have difficulty settings based on your account progress. The intent was that whatever overall level someone’s account is, there will be comparable rewards for doing something. If you do an event at the point where you have four-star champions, then you’ll earn rewards for four stars. This also has another effect– if you want to make actual account progress and grow, you’ll need to punch up, and this is where things start to get a bit devious for how monetization works.
Marvel’s Mega Multiverse Monetization
As someone who has examined mobile games for more than seven years and written a book on F2P design, I can say this with absolute certainty — Contest of Champions is one of the greediest live service games I’ve run across, not just in terms of potential money spent, but the number of things that can be purchased using real or in-game premium currency.
Literally every single service, resource, and game mode, has some scheme to get the player to spend money; maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, but it’s there. The game’s premium currency: units, is a universal: “skip the grind” feature on top of being used to purchase summoning crystals… oh yeah, I didn’t mention the gacha yet.
Meet the arbiter of all the rewards, progression, and options in the game. (Source: Game)
There are currently up to 7-star versions of characters in the game, and keeping with the focus on progression, if someone is going through the game’s story acts, you will start with 2-3 stars, work to unlock 4 stars, and continue to push up. There are multiple summoning crystals that can be bought, or the player can find shards through questing to build one. Basic crystals will offer a range of stars — with the higher rewards having a far lower drop chance. Typically for finishing an act, the player will get a free crystal of either the rank or higher to help them move forward. There are crystals for specific backgrounds of characters, specific years they were introduced, with some of the best crystals in the game are the “nexus” crystals where the player gets three or more randomized choices and can decide on what the reward will be. There are also crystals for acquiring random amounts of resources and free daily crystals based on the player’s story progress.
Unlike other live service games, spending units on summoning is the worst-case scenario for an account, and this gets at one of the sneakier aspects of this game. With spending units to buy crystals, the quality of the crystal has no bearing on the cost per unit — it will cost the same amount to try and go for a five-star summon as it would to try and pull a two-to-four star. The more specific summoning crystals do come with a higher cost of units. As a free player or light spender, it is possible to punch way up in terms of progress, and the game’s progression has been tuned over the years to make the earlier acts both in terms of questing and rewards far better. For example, there are no more class gates in the main quest that require the player to have specific classes to go down those routes.
However, there is a catch, once your progress begins to stall, the game slows to a crawl in a number of ways. The most apparent is with energy, given all the different events, stories, and daily resource grinding, the game barely gives you enough energy, and on top of that, doing higher difficulty challenges and story maps, the amount of energy required to move through it gets progressively higher. When you start, it costs 1 energy a step; eventually, it will go to 2, and some quests will cost 4 energy to take a single step. But wait, there’s a monthly subscription you can buy for 4.99 to get bonus energy or spend units to refill your energy bar.
Let’s say you reach a point where your champions aren’t leveled enough and you need to rank them up for increased stats — starting from 4-star champions, an individual character can be ranked up to 5 times (7 stars go up to 6). For the higher stars, each rank will require three different resources, spread across multiple mission types to grind, on top of gold (the game’s in-game currency) and ISO-8 (the experience resource). The rarest resources for ranking up aren’t even given to the player in whole units, you need to grind multiple times to get enough material that when combined equals 1, but you will often need 4 or more just to afford a rank up. And this is on top of the ever-increasing amount of resources you need to level up someone before you can rank them, which you can skip, of course, by using units.
And there’s another form of character grinding. Once you pull a duplicate of the same character at the same star rating, you “awaken” them which unlocks a character-exclusive perk. For some characters, these perks are just okay, for others, it’s the defining part of their kit that makes them worth using. However, unless you buy or get a reward of a free awakening gem, you must keep pulling to unlock and level up their masteries. There are gems that can also add mastery points but getting them is going to be dependent on completing harder quests and the luck of the gacha.
The summoner’s sigil is one of the most overt P2W options I’ve seen in a mobile game (source: Youtube)
The power progression in the game works that a higher ranked character that is a lower star, is often better stat-wise than the next highest star character who is lower ranked. This is done so that a player can still use their best lower-star characters to some extent for current content.
However, since your character unlocks are going to be completely RNG, it means for many new and free players, what you’ll have access to will be a scattershot of different characters. The power disparity between bad, good, and great characters is very wide. This becomes a factor when you start dealing with fights that have different damage over time (or DOT) attacks. Different champions can resist or outright are immune to effects like bleed, poison, or shock. Without them, your characters will take constant unrecoverable damage during a fight. Then there are conditional fights that actively punish/reward certain strategies. And when characters are koed or you need to heal them, you need to use up your healing potions and revives, grind the content to get more, or spend units. There are also character and account boosts that can be bought with units to provide you with even more ways of helping your characters. Once the stat disparity gets high enough, you can easily lose a character from one full combo from the opposing enemy, sometimes within half a second of loading up the fight.
And because of the resource grind, spending time, energy, and money trying to fully rank up a few 4-stars is not good for progression when you have access to 5 and 6-stars. The game tries to get around this by having yet another daily grind in the form of coop maps and arenas, in which the characters used have to “rest” for 24 hours before you can use them again…unless you spend units to speed that up. And said game modes have their own currencies that can be earned to purchase things, on top of specific purchases only available for doing guild (or “alliances” in Contest) work.
You may be thinking that must be all the ways of spending money, right? But we’re not done yet. The game will generate limited-time offers based on your progress or what you’ve done. If you pull a four-star character, the game will immediately give you a one-hour promotional deal for 5-star summoning shards. Funny enough, the cost per unit for this deal decreases as your milestone rank improves. Reaching certain milestones, it may throw you a mega-deal that costs a lot of units but will get access to one of the better characters in the game along with additional summoning. And while getting a really good high-star character is great, it begs repeating again that getting one but not having the means of upgrading them will limit your ability to use them.
But wait, there’s more. There is now a $24.99 season pass to buy, multiple daily, weekly, and seasonal deals, and there are two more purchases I haven’t mentioned yet. The monthly subscriptions that provide you with more energy and gold per month, there is also the biggest and most important subscription– the summoner’s sigil. For 9.99 a month (with it going up after the first month), you get access to special daily quests to get better resources, faster energy recharge, a fancy title, and the biggest pay-to-win aspect of the game — the black ISO market. A shop exclusive to people who buy the sigil, it has easier access to resources and unique offers that you cannot find anywhere else — that’s not hyperbole either. Certain special events are also only available if you have the sigil while they are going on.
And you may be thinking that all these purchases are just there as an optional deal, but I still have one more monetization angle to bring up. As you level up, you’ll gain mastery points that allow you to unlock perks. These perks range from meh, to game-required, such as the ability to get an i-frame on back dashing to avoid attacks. If you want to invest more, you will require different varieties of another resource that can only be bought using units to unlock those nodes (there are a fixed number of them as rewards for the side content), and then spend additional units per level mastery of them.
Until your account is secured enough in terms of mastery and story progression, you don’t want to be spending units on rolls. Given the nature of the game and the reward system, it is often best to play heavily during major events and holidays to get the best daily rewards and free resources.
You will feel like Wolverine here when you run out of resources (source: Marvel)
The entire monetization of Contest of Champions is intertwined with the progression of the player’s account, and the game goes out of its way to get the player to spend units. As you move further up in terms of story missions, the frequency and amount of units earned gets smaller, as the number of things you can spend them on goes up. Running out of units is like running out of gas in your car, and if that happens to you and there are no more missions to do to get more, your options to get enough to keep going will be reduced. And on top of that, every promotional deal and shop purchase is further influenced by what milestone rating the player is on. If you are a lower story rank, sales on the shop will give you fewer resources compared to being at a higher rank, but still charge the player the same amount.
For people who know how the game works, you can do a lot without spending units or spending them smartly. For new players and those who don’t know, it is very easy to ruin your account by purchasing the wrong things. There will never be a point for most players that the grinding is done, as even the luckiest players in the world will still need to spend weeks and months (or money) to properly rank up and awaken their characters.
And this takes me to the dichotomy of this game and why it’s still going strong after 10 years of development.
The Skill Threshold
If Contest of Champions was just a simple game to play, none of the extensive monetization I discussed would matter, as most people would not play it. But what makes it so intriguing is that there is a lot of depth to this game in terms of character progression, building teams, and the advanced challenges are some of the most difficult and complex you will find for this kind of genre. Every character feels different to use, despite the simplified control scheme of playing on mobile. The developers continue to add in new forms of progression and challenge on top of everything else you can do in it. A new feature that was added since the last time I played it are relics which provide you with further customization and a new additional attack that can be triggered during combat.
If you were to ask any veterans of the game if spending money replaces skill, they would say no. Once you get to the higher challenges in the game, the power disparity between the highest your characters can reach will not even come close to what the enemy can do; I’m talking 8 to 10 times higher in terms of power rating. If you don’t learn how to build a team or deal with the AI, no amount of money will save you. If you are good at this game, it is possible to do content that would take an average player weeks to achieve in a few days.
And it’s all that taken into account I’m sure if this article gets out there, that fans will come to argue my points about the game being pay-to-win. However, pay-to-win is not a binary option, it is how different aspects of a game are tuned to either gently nudge or demand that someone spends money to keep proceeding. With that said, Contest of Champions is heavily tuned to get money out of its player base.
It’s common in mobile games to discuss a game as a main game or side games in terms of the amount of dedication daily needed to play them, and Contest of Champions is definitely a main game if you want to experience everything– the story, limited events, arena play, alliance maps, battlegrounds, excursions, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something. This means if you are only going to play one or two mobile games and nothing else, you are set. For me, on top of the other games, all the indie games, and writing and making design videos, there just isn’t enough time to invest any more in daily.
And that means I will be handicapped in terms of resources to help me…unless I spend money or units to get around that. At the moment, there is just a wide gap between those who can spend and those who can’t. You might not feel it at the start, but once you reach that point where your resources start to run out, you’ll feel it, trust me. As I’m typing this, I’m in an awkward position in terms of power. I have six-star characters who are all ready to rank up, but I’m half an act away from reaching the rank of caviler, which is the next bump in terms of power and unlocking the resource I need to farm to rank up. If I rank up five-star units, I’m burning through energy and resources that will eventually reach a cap in terms of what I can do with them. So, I need to complete three quests using under-stat characters where the bosses of each could just sneeze on my characters to finish them off.
Contest of Champions is a great example of a game fully using the platform and monetization system to its best, but also just how far a game can go with monetization design to squeeze as much money as possible out of it. I’m hard-pressed whether or not to recommend you check this one out, as it will be coming to steam soon. In terms of recommendations, I think the game needs to start improving the daily play for mid-level accounts: which begins around act 5. There should be better ways to keep up with the resource spend and grind that doesn’t involve arena and coop modes. And I do think there needs to be some kind of trimming of the monetization, especially around healing and retrying content. For someone who knows what they’re doing, they’re not going to feel the burn of wasting resources, but these systems are in place to punish lesser-skilled players by forcing them to waste resources that aren’t easily recoverable. While the beginning of the game has been made far better, the jump from early to mid-progression still feels terrible if you don’t get lucky with good champions.
Part of the problem is that once you get into the mid-ish game (act 5 and beyond) the passives start to become more specific in terms of their solutions. For example: an enemy who is immune to all debuffs, heals every few seconds, and the only way to actually beat him is to do enough damage to burn him down. But if you don’t have a champion who meets that criterion, there is nothing you can do. In a way, it reminds me of some of the worst examples of RPG design where enemies are designed to explicitly counter certain builds, but here, you don’t have the luxury of being able to just get a new character at any time.
It’s funny looking at the monetization of Contest of Champions compared to more recent entries, like the as-for-mentioned HoYoverse. Eastern-based mobile games are far more designed around their gacha/characters being the primary driver for money and tend to downplay the spending on other aspects of the design. You are supposed to be able to show off your cool, new characters whenever you can. Here, while characters are important, it’s more vital for a player to have a “healthy” account of champions upgraded and have enough units to keep going. There needs to be a way for a free player, or an unlucky one, to be able to gradually earn enough resources to rank up their characters once you hit the five/six-star requirements. Contest of Champions is a game that offers a lot of content, but the paywall is the size of Mt. Everest or *insert Marvel reference here*.
For more on monetization design, you can check out my book on it and the entire Deep Dive Series.
