Season Pass but with a Twist

Miniclip's latest game "Baseball Clash" has been released globally after a long Soft Launch period and currently climbing the Sports Genre top charts, as expected. They are known for their expertise in sports games and they like to carry their core design approaches to upcoming titles, which is the safest and mostly the best way. In Baseball Clash, we see it all over the place. But I want to point out their Season Pass progression design, which is really interesting.

In traditional Season Pass structures, the progression is fairly simple: Earn Season Pass Points > Level Up > Claim Rewards > Repeat. It is also supported by season-focused missions/quests and there is always a Premium version of the progress. All seems the same in Baseball Clash besides one part.

The Season Pass here works like a combination of "Play N number of games to open a chest" kind of events and typical pass elements. Which is: Play games to earn "ball" currency > Collect total 7 balls > Open the Score Chest & Unlock the Next One > Repeat. Each score gives you 1 ball so the better you play, the faster you will climb the ladders.

This design choice helps a lot actually.

• It may seem like each level of the pass requires the same amount of effort (7 points). But as the player reaches higher levels, it gets harder (as the player competes against better players). So naturally, the game slows down the player progression and that explains why the season length is 1 month.
• There is a natural bond between earning and leveling up the pass. As a player, you feel like you achieved something and you made it by playing well. You didn't receive magical season pass experience points from a quest that you didn't even know that existed.
• It is simple and easy to explain to players. There are no special missions, no daily quests to complete just to gain pass points. You just win and move forward.
• Because players earn points based on the number of scores (not wins), you may gain more points even if you lose. (Imagine that you lose 3-4 and gained 3 points but you can easily win 2-0 too). Yes, the level length becomes longer but the outcome is much better.

I don't know if there are any other games that follow this trend (please share if you know any) but I really liked it and I'm sure we will see more games that will use the same approach. Congratz to the guys and Neowiz and Miniclip again.

Thanks for reading.