I own over a thousand games. Or rather, as a lawyer would tell me, I own limited licenses which allow me to play those thousand games I bought on different platforms. Plus there are thousands and thousands of games I could play for free or little money if I wanted. Supply definitively isn't the problem. The problem is having a real life which limits the time per day I can spend playing. The problem is coming home tired from work and not wanting to deal with anything too complex any more that day. The problem is learning curves of games, especially if you wanted to flit from one genre to another for more variety.

All these reasons result in that there is a high probability that the game I play on day N is the same game I played on day N-1. That usually requires the least mental effort, and it is likely that when I closed down the game yesterday there were still things I wanted to do in it. So let's play it again, Sam!

Game companies know that. And because they know that, they add "daily" features to their games. That isn't some new-fangled invention of the Free2Play age, already Ultima Online gave you double progress in the first hour you played every day. World of Warcraft introduced daily quests, daily crafting cooldowns, and in this expansion a bunch of stuff in your garrison which is on a daily timer. Of course Free2Play games also use that sort of feature a lot, you usually get some bonus for login in every day, and the longer the chain of daily logins gets, the more rewards you receive for that.

The idea is to form a habit with players login in every day. As long as players login every day, they are more likely to be willing to pay subscription fees or whatever is on offer in the item store. If you don't play, you're less willing to pay. But like all features the "daily" features have a risk of being overused and showing their downsides: At some point the daily login becomes a chore, which hardly isn't the way to endear the game to you. Miss a day, and it will feel like a punishment to have broken the reward chain or at least missed out on a day of easy to get rewards.

But as Zubon reports, there is a new trend to make daily quests a bit less of a chore: Accumulating daily quests. Magic Duels gives you a new quest only every second day, and the previous ones are stored on a list which can hold 3 quests. Thus if you only play Magic Duels every weekend, you still haven't missed any "daily". Apparently Heroes of the Storm also has a way to accumulate quests (I'm not currently playing that, although I logged in today to get a free Diablo hero). Even World of Warcraft has introduced weekend events with a very wide definition of weekend to accommodate people who are on a slower schedule than daily.

You might see that as yet another brick in the wall of the ongoing casualisation of games, but I do think that accumulating daily quests and having weekly stuff as well is a good idea. Personally I'm getting sick and tired of the daily garrison maintenance in WoW, even if that pays for my subscription.