Despite being released in 2015, the first mobile game of the Fallout franchise had more than 170 million downloads by June 2020, with a wide global audience of both existing Fallout fans and new players. Since its mobile release, the game has also been released on PC on Steam, Xbox One, PS4, Switch, and even in Teslas.
The game’s premise is explained in one of the first sentences of the game’s introduction: “As Overseer, your job is to expand and maintain the Vault, while keeping your Dwellers safe and happy.” The player must balance food, water, and power while fighting off invaders and expanding their vault to accommodate more dwellers.
Player Progression
The tutorial goes over basic concepts and mechanics, such as assigning dwellers to rooms and resource management.
As the player progresses through early game, they encounter new challenges such as attacking raiders and radroach infestations which allow them to advance slowly by learning through experience rather than being spoonfed instructions through lengthy tutorial slides. Enemies and incidents begin as easy tasks, but become progressively more difficult as the player accumulates more dwellers. This is great for maintaining excitement early in the game as new challenges continue to arise, and also ensures better knowledge retention. A small challenge which arises due to this teaching model is that it leaves players a bit in the dark about what other features the game has to offer without having to look up gameplay information online. Overall I think this model of instruction is well done — the player is able to jump straight into gameplay without too much overhead.
Beginners continue through the pattern of playing a bit and improving their vault as they reach the mid-game stage, which mainly plays off of the addictive aspect of improvement. At this point, the player understands most of what the game has to offer, from disaster incidents to quests and exploration outside the vault. Every tenth dweller adds a new threat, and notable threats continue to be introduced until about 60 dwellers. This progressive introduction allows players to warm up and build up their base while preparing for the next threat.
But during late game, the excitement of discovery and improving your vault comes to a slow halt. New rooms are unlockable up until the ultimate Nuka-Cola Bottler room as players reach 100 dwellers. Beyond this, the game becomes quite repetitive as new content runs dry, and the player goes through a seemingly endless cycle. There is a cap on the difficulty of enemies and the level advancement of rooms, so the game becomes progressively more monotonous and rote once you can consistently face these with ease. This causes an issue for long-term retention of dedicated players, those who have made it to late game have little reason to stay since there’s not much more for them to do. I’ll touch a bit more on this in the Retention section, as this is one of the main factors which impedes long term player retention.
Design Choices
At its core, the style of the game parallels that of the Fallout game series, with different dwellers, the SPECIAL stats, weapons, enemies, and more. Of course, it heavily simplifies these elements to accommodate a mobile platform. For example, other than the 21 iconic characters from the main game series, most of the characters/dwellers in Fallout Shelter are roughly the same with minor SPECIAL stat differences.
Many design elements capitalize on the nostalgia and familiarity carried from other Fallout games. Though the usage of bright green might seem strange to some, the retro-inspired interface will appear much more familiar to fans of the franchise as they recognize its similarity to the Pip-Boy 3000 computer from other Fallout games.
For new players however, this green-only user interface might make it difficult to visually separate elements. There is no secondary color, with the only noticeable highlight color being a bright red which appears in a few situations such as to indicate in the resource meters that resources are critically low. Though this color scheme is simple and not distracting, it makes certain text passages a bit difficult to read.
Fallout Shelter’s unique layout design provides a cross-sectional view of the world you create, providing a refreshing new perspective in the genre in contrast to other isometrically designed games like Clash of Clans or The Simpsons: Tapped Out. I think this design choice excels in its simplicity and clarity; players are able to quickly browse through their entire vault with ease by scrolling up and down. However, this ease of browsing is hindered by the poor contrast between certain rooms, namely the Power Station, Water Treatment Station, and Medbay (pictured below). Though it does become clear later on as you upgrade these rooms with clearer lighting and more distinguishable decor, earlier in the game it might confuse new players. Additionally there is a lack of creativity in designing the world itself — rooms serve purely practical purposes rather than aesthetic ones, and little room is left to customize a vault.
Visually, I have few criticisms about the design. A couple things that stood out to me were the iconography in the top left of the screen. The gear icon contains the number of dwellers who you currently oversee. Upon clicking it, it brings up a menu containing the statuses of all of your dwellers, which is a bit confusing to me since the gear icon typically serves as an indicator for settings; a much better choice of icons might be the silhouette of a character’s body or head.
Another user experience related criticism I had was related to the Help popup, which was extremely confusing for me to navigate. There are two possible axes to swipe through (up/down, left/right) but it wasn’t clear that the next slide was accessible by swiping right on ONLY the blue areas. The “1/29” at the top left indicated that there was more to see, but the only call to action the screen was the down arrow in the yellow text box. Furthermore, this section is poorly organized — if a player is confused about a specific mechanic, there’s no way for them to browse through these guides to find what they need. Instead, they have to slide through all of them in hopes of seeing what they need. A suggestion I have would be to add a menu to the left containing all of the slide titles that the user can scroll through, reduce the size of the images, and add the hint to the bottom of the yellow box to save horizontal space.
Revenue Model
Despite being released in 2015 and having an entirely free-to-play model, the game reached $100 million in total revenue in 2019. The monetary success of this game is largely due to its subtle yet time-saving monetization strategies. The revenue model of Fallout Shelter ultimately revolves around time, and the entirety of the game is playable with the investment of either time, money, or both.
The first thing in the Shop screen is the Vault-Tec Starter Pack, which offers a great deal on several different items for a low price of $4.99. Starting users off with an enticing purchase like this and anchoring it on a low-medium range of five dollars makes future purchases more likely. Purchasable items span in price from 99 cents to $99, accommodating for a wide range of spenders.
The main avenue of monetization within Fallout Shelter revolves around “Nuka-Cola Bottles” which reduce wait times on progressive tasks; one bottle reduces the wait time by one hour, which means a player can progress through the entire game without spending a penny given enough patience. While good for the player since it can be entirely free-to-play, this form of monetization probably limits Fallout Shelter’s overall revenue as players can choose between playing free, spending a little money for an admittedly underwhelming benefit, or playing a different game entirely. Furthermore, bottles can be received as rewards for quests and challenges, so players can simply accumulate enough free bottles to speed up events, albeit far less often than they could had they invested real money. There are also options to speed tasks up by watching an ad. However, this comes with a cooldown of two hours, which pushes players more towards purchasing Nuka-Colas.
Another purchasable item is the Lunchbox, which is Fallout Shelter’s version of a loot box/gachapon mechanic. One Lunchbox contains five different cards, one of which is guaranteed to be at least rare. Having to reveal five different cards from a singular Lunchbox makes opening each one more satisfying and rewarding. One criticism of the Lunchbox is that the cards often contain things like resources, which isn’t always useful if you’re not in need of resources at the moment. This makes opening several Lunchboxes at once more inefficient for players, and newer players who are in need of resources might be more inclined to use them at a slower pace.
Overall, Fallout Shelter’s monetization strategy excels by integrating luck-based mechanics such as the Lunchboxes and providing a great range of prices for time-saving items in a tasteful, non-aggressive manner. Everything is completely optional given you have the patience for it, allowing the player to feel fully in control of their purchases.
Retention
This is a game that keeps you coming back daily, much like checking notifications on a social media platform. I find myself coming back to check on my dwellers whenever I have downtime in higher frequency per day than other mobile games, but in small session lengths. During recent times in particular, I’ve found myself opening these types of games more frequently in between waiting for messages and emails. The length of activities you can perform in Fallout Shelter have cooldowns ranging anywhere from minutes to days. There are daily challenges with desirable rewards, as well as a streak system which also documents the player’s personal progress. These features keep the player coming back at regular intervals, albeit for short periods each time. This kind of regularity ensures that players maintain a habit of opening the game, rather than leaving it up to whenever they feel like playing.
As discussed in the context of player progression, the game is very easy to get into but progressively becomes repetitive and reduces the long-term player retention. Though the enemies do get more difficult and room types more advanced, the main idea of enemies and rooms does not vary dramatically. After reaching 100 dwellers (roughly halfway through the game’s complete progression), the vast majority of the game’s content has likely been experienced, with only minor adjustments made in an attempt to keep things fresh.
As the excitement of novelty and challenge disappear, late game players have little reason to continue with the same level of effort they had contributed so far. The quests follow almost the same structure as each other, with minor differences in dialogue that are only relevant to individuals nostalgic of the Fallout series. The game is very easy to get into but progressively becomes repetitive and provides little to reward veterans of the game, who are more inclined to spend money and time.
Additionally, much of the gameplay is passive. The player can watch as their dwellers engage in combat, but can’t contribute to their performance past equipping them with different weapons and tapping a healing item when needed. The lack of skill-based gameplay outside of management skills is good in that it’s beginner-friendly, but doesn’t provide any skills for more experienced players to improve upon. One recommendation is adding optional skill-based minigames to speed up certain tasks.
Another suggestion that’s featured in other city-building type games is creating more options for customization, such as cosmetics and room decorations. This way, a vault will never really be “perfect” since there’s always something to switch up and improve upon, even if the difficulty of enemies reaches a cap.
Overall, Fallout Shelter is a solid mobile game which allows players to explore the city-builder genre and served as a successful mobile game addition to the Fallout franchise. Much of its appeal comes from its attachment to the large fanbase of the existing franchise, and the appeal of the free-to-play model. The low maintenance structure of the game allows players to make dramatic progress with as little as five minutes in a day, but also limits how long a user would even play in the first place. Though it passes the time, the game ultimately struggles to maintain long-term appeal as players have fewer reasons to come back the more they play. Much of it is due to the passive nature of the game — there are no tangible skills the player can invest in and come back to improve upon unlike other skill-based mobile games like Fortnite or Hearthstone. Releasing a well-made free-to-play mobile game several months before the release of Fallout 4 made the Fallout franchise one of the most mentioned names in the gaming community. With the overall success of Fallout Shelter and the recent release of Fallout Shelter Online in Asia, it’s clear that Bethesda recognizes the potential of the mobile game market — I’m excited to see how they tackle the existing issues with Fallout Shelter in Fallout Shelter Online.
