There are two kinds of browser game, and you can tell them apart in the first twenty minutes. One hands you something to lose. The other hands you a menu and a currency you have not earned yet. Everything below follows from that one difference.
What the first twenty minutes should do
A game that respects a browser tab knows the tab can be closed. It puts something on the screen worth coming back to before it asks for an account, a name, or a decision about a class you know nothing about.
- Something built, owned or lost inside ten minutes.
- No launcher, no patcher, no forty-second logo sequence.
- A reason to open the tab again tomorrow that is not a daily reward.
That third one is the test most games fail. A daily reward is a reason to open a tab; it is not a reason to play. The games that last give you something unfinished: a fleet halfway to somewhere, a hero one level from a breakpoint, a wall that you now know how to get past.
What usually goes wrong
The games that do not survive a second session tend to share the same four habits. None of them is a scandal, and all four are visible before you have spent anything.
- A tutorial that cannot be failed. Guided clicking is not teaching. If the first real decision is still ahead of you after half an hour, the game is delaying rather than starting.
- An account before anything is shown. An email address is a price like any other, and paying it before the demonstration is the wrong way round.
- A very long timer in the first session. Timers are normal in this genre. One measured in half a day, on day one, tells you what the rest of the month looks like.
- One answer to every wall. When the only route past every obstacle runs through the shop, the game has stopped being free to play in any useful sense.
How to spend an evening rather than lose one
Pick two games, give each three sessions rather than one, and buy nothing in the first week. Three sessions is the number that matters because every game in this category is generous in the first and honest in the third. The opening is designed, and what the game actually is shows up once that design has been spent.
Join the guild, clan or alliance on the first day in whichever you keep. In most games of this kind it is the steadiest source of everything worth having, and in some of them it is the difference between a game and a queue.