Something Important to Always Remember: You Are Not the Player

Even now, I see that disdain around — for mobile games, casual puzzle mechanics, anything that isn’t ‘hardcore’ enough. The attitude is: ”That’s not a real game. A real game is something I would actually want to play.” I held that view for a while, too. Turns out it’s less of a principled stance and more of a blind spot. If you similarly look down on casual games, you’ve probably never seriously tried to design one. Designing one will humble you fast. That attitude also has a direct design cost: when you decide a whole category of games “doesn’t count”, you quietly lose the ability to design for the players who love them. One of the most common traps in this industry is building a game for a target audience of exactly one: yourself. We all enter the field wanting to make the games we love to play. That’s completely fine for a personal hobby. But if you want to build games that reach a wider audience and pay the bills, you have to accept that your audience is almost certainly not you. As we play more games, our tastes become highly specialized. We start craving complex systems, high difficulty, and subversions of standard conventions. But the casual player isn’t looking to have their expectations subverted, and they might not even know what the standard conventions are. A good designer doesn’t complain about the audience. They meet them where they are. The practical approach to doing that is what I’d call lowest common denominator design , and it doesn’t mean what most people assume. 🧭Lowest Common Denominator Design? What does it actually mean to design for the “lowest common denominator (LCD)”? It’s a phrase that gets a bad reputation. People assume it means dumbing down your core game mechanics or removing any trace of challenge. It’s really just the discipline of removing developer assumptions. When we spend our lives playing games, we internalize a complex language. We know what WASD does. We know that a green bar is health, a gold coin is currency, and a number with “+” next to it is an upgrade. We know how to navigate nested menus and click past tutorial screens. A casual player might know none of this. Even something as standard as a hamburger icon for a menu can be completely foreign to someone who doesn’t game regularly. If your game expects them to understand these conventions right out of the gate, you’ve already lost them. LCD design means starting with a completely blank slate. You assume the player knows absolutely nothing, and you build the early experience to guide them from that point. How far you simplify depends entirely on your genre. If you’re making a premium PC roguelike, your marketing sets the expectations, and your players are willing to read a bit to understand the mechanics. But if you want to cast a wide net — especially in the free-to-play or casual space, your early game needs to be dead simple. ⏱️The Cost of a 2-Second Delay Years ago, when Flash was still the go-to tech for web games, I worked on a tiny obstacle-avoidance game. The player had to move a character at the correct time to dodge moving enemies. Simple concept. But when we checked the analytics, we saw a massive drop-off at the third step of the first level. We were losing a huge chunk of players within the first minute. I couldn’t figure it out. My lead pointed out a tiny animation delay before the enemies appeared on screen. I dismissed it — it was just a couple of seconds, surely players could wait? My lead had a nice “told you so” look on his face after we fixed the delay, and the drop-off numbers immediately recovered. That was a massive reality check. On the web or mobile, the friction cost of bouncing is zero. If players encounter a moment of confusion, a lag in input responsiveness, or an unnecessary wait, they don’t fight the game. They just closed the tab. That tiny delay was a friction point that casual players had no patience for. When a player has no upfront financial investment in your game, their attention span is microscopic. You have to earn every second of their time. This still catches me out, even now. I test something I built, think “this is obviously clear” , then watch someone play it for the first time and get completely stuck somewhere I never expected. That part doesn’t really go away, and it probably shouldn’t. Attention spans and what players will tolerate have also shifted a lot, and if you want to go deeper on how that’s changing casual game design, I wrote about it here: 🕹️Layering the Experience The fix is to manage onboarding. Start with the widest possible funnel. The early experience is incredibly accessible, but as the player progresses, you slowly introduce new mechanics one by one. In puzzle games, this is standard: you start with one action, and hours later, you’re managing a complex web of interacting mechanics. You give the player a reason to look beyond the initial simplicity. To keep veterans from yawning, you make the early levels lightning-fast to pass through. Let them speed past the basics, skip unnecessary pop-up alerts, and get straight into the zone. Look at how the match-3 genre evolved. Candy Crush Saga, Gardenscapes, and Royal Match , three massive hits from different eras of mobile gaming that share a huge audience overlap. They all start with a dead-simple match-3 board, but offer completely different hooks to keep players engaged over the long term. Candy Crush keeps it focused on pure levels and maps, Gardenscapes pulls you into decorating and narrative, and Royal Match zeroes in on raw speed. For example, Royal Match does something clever to feel incredibly responsive: it lets you make your next match while other tiles are still cascading. Older match-3 games locked your input during cascades, which forced players to wait. It builds for a fast, twitchy feel that keeps players in flow from the very first level. It’s a tiny detail, but it shows a real understanding of player patience. The same applies to deeper progression systems. Avoid forcing complex meta-progression, social guilds, or competitive events onto the beginner. If you ask a brand-new player to track three different progression screens and currency types in their first five minutes, your top-of-funnel retention will collapse. Keep the entry brainless, and roll out complex features only for the highly engaged cohort that has already proven they want to stick around. Simple entry for the casuals, deep systems for the power players. 🎯The F2P Trap Nobody Talks About There’s a related mistake worth naming, because I’ve seen it trip up experienced teams. Some games go free-to-play, hoping it will expand their audience — but the game was already built for a niche. The design assumes prior knowledge, uses genre-specific conventions, and layers in complexity from the start. When F2P brings in a broad new audience that doesn’t share those assumptions, the game feels hostile. Early retention collapses, the wider playerbase bounces, and what’s left is a small, highly-engaged niche who would have happily paid upfront for a premium product. From my perspective, this trap is exactly what tripped up recent high-profile releases. Blizzard’s Warcraft Rumble struggled with an IP mismatch, demanding high cognitive load and strategy from a mobile audience that lacked the patience for the complexity of the mechanics. Similarly, Riot’s 2XKO left premium upfront revenue on the table by going free-to-play in the notoriously niche, high-execution fighting game space, only for casuals to hit a brick wall of veteran players and bounce before spending a cent. Going F2P doesn’t automatically make a game accessible. Changing the price tag changes who discovers the friction, not whether it exists. Figure out who your player actually is before you decide how to reach them. If you want to dig further into how player habits differ across platforms, and how retention actually works in the F2P space: 📈The Reality Check Commercial realities are real, and a good designer learns to work with them. That means building a habit of understanding your players and designing around those realities, around what they actually need, not what you personally find satisfying. It’s a constant exercise of testing, looking at the data, and dropping your own ego. Every time the numbers tell you something you didn’t expect, that’s a chance to get sharper — and the best designers I’ve worked with treat it that way, even when it stings. Stop designing for yourself, and start designing games that people actually want to play. That’s a more interesting challenge anyway. 📝TL;DR Drop the Ego : Designing for an audience means accepting that you are not the target player, and your taste is probably a poor guide. Remove Assumptions : Do not assume players understand basic conventions like WASD, health bars, or UI structures. Kill the Friction : On web and mobile, the cost of bouncing is zero. Eliminate every micro-delay or input lag immediately. Layer Complexity : Use progressive disclosure to introduce mechanics one-by-one, giving players a path from simple controls to rich systems. Keep it Snappy : Make early levels fast and responsive, allowing experienced players to speed through to the challenge. F2P Isn’t a Magic Fix : Changing your price doesn’t fix your onboarding. A broader audience just means more people hitting the same wall. Do you have any stories of onboarding friction that surprised you, or a time where real player data completely flipped your assumptions? I’d love to hear from you! And don’t forget to subscribe!