Play Every Day

Even when trying to escape from a bunch of lunatics, those daily items are pretty important.

This is when a game encourages you to play every day.

Many games now feature persistent worlds, ones which are always on — and, in many cases, which cater to people from around the globe, meaning that someone is always playing, always doing activities within the game world, at every hour of the day. This can be looped into a "Play Every Day" system in several ways:

• There are caps on the rewards you can earn per day. You can't do everything all in one marathon session.
• The game has a Freemium Timer. You accumulate turns, adventures, action points — whatever the game calls its Freemium Timer points — over time, but they cap once they reach a certain value, so there's a point in which not playing means wasting an opportunity cost.
• You accumulate resources over time, but these resources can be taken from you whilst you're idle; by allowing them to build up, you're making yourself a juicy target for attack.
• The selection of items on in-game storefronts is both very small and rotates on a regular basis, encouraging frequent check-ins so that you don't miss the specific item you want.
• There are daily and/or weekly objectives such as "Collect 20 Bear Asses", which dish out rewards like bonus currency/experience.
• An ongoing event requires a certain amount of progress before the event ends to attain a larger reward (such as a Cool Plane or Cool Boat), but progress can only be made once per day. If you want the Cool Thing, you'd best keep up with the event!
• Simply logging in gets you a basic reward. The more days you log in consecutively, the greater the rewards get. In some cases missing a day will reset your streak to zero, whilst others are more permissive.
• And, since it's a persistent, always-on world, other people are progressing while you're not.

The psychology behind this is fairly simple: the game wants you to become psychologically addicted to it. Playing the game becomes a habit entwined with a sense of achievement. It can also help players who don't have the time or energy to spend hours grinding away feel like they're still making good progress toward their particular goals. Detractors have no doubt called out on this for making people only play for the sake of finishing the tasks over actual intended playtime like the Freemium Timer, turning playing into a chore.

Compare the non-interactive equivalent: Appointment Television, where you have to watch every episode when it airs or as soon as possible after you've recorded it.

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Examples:

• Afterzoom for DSiWare is all about capturing microscopic bacteria with the built-in camera. The catch is having to feed these creatures with different substances every period of time (which can be very short, as in hours), or else they begin to die.
• Angry Birds Epic gives double EXP in the first five battles fought every day.
• Tom Nook's shop in Animal Crossing restocks every day. He might have that spaceship you want, and if you don't check, who knows when it'll be in stock again? More mundanely, the game rewards loyal players with more loyalty from the local resident animals which manifests in them being less likely to move out and more likely to give the player presents. Miss more than a couple of days, though, and you'll get teased and scolded for being gone so long. Further, the town itself requires a little near-daily maintenance: saplings and flowers need watering, weeds need pulling, etc. And in Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS, you sometimes get a random letter that gives you little tidbits of wisdom, one of which is "avoid boredom by playing an hour a day". Animal Crossing: New Leaf alters this a bit with the "Keep Your Town Beautiful" town ordinance, which makes your town "decay" more slowly when you're not playing...so now it's "play like twice a week or something". It's an optional Anti-Frustration Feature for people who like the game but don't have the time to play every single day. Playing every day also allows a diligent player to keep track of villagers about to move, instead of coming back to town after a week with one of their friends missing.
• Anti-Idle: The Game:
  • The Daily Bonus feature, including Blue Coin bonuses as well as up to 9 otherwise difficult-to-obtain items such as Fertilizers and the Daily Bonus-exclusive Attendance Box. Additionally, the Daily Bonus screen offers a special deal not available anywhere else, and that special deal changes daily.
  • One other feature is the Dragon, who can be fed to increase your Boost. However, each time you feed him, the cost for the next feeding increases. Once midnight hits, the cost to feed him resets back to initial value.
  • There are quests that can be repeated once a day, including an Attendance quest that rewards you for attendance streak.
• In Arknights, there are daily log-in bonuses and daily missions that reward useful items. For the first week of play, there is an additional week-long log-in bonus that awards the operator Cliffheart on the last day. Many mini-events tend to encourage this in general, offering significant incentives for the player to check in each day, such as free sanity potions, headhunting tickets, rare resources, and usually an exclusive operator outfit and article of furniture at the higher tiers.
• Bad Piggies has three new loot crates in random levels every day.
• Battlerite gives you 50 Battlecoins each day for logging in, which can be used to buy Silver Chests or new Champions. You also get a daily quest that awards you with more coins. And upon reaching account level 5, you can choose a sponsor, who will give you even more rewards upon completing enough daily quests.
• Like so much else, this kind of thing is parodied in BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm. At one point, there’s a chef who gives you some free food, then tells you she’ll give you some more if you come back tomorrow… before realizing that the game lacks an internal clock, so she’ll never be able to tell when tomorrow comes.
• Bloons:
  • Bloons TD 5 has a daily reward system, four randomized daily challenges, and one player-created level every day.
  • Bloons TD 6 brings back the daily rewards from 5. It also introduces three player-created daily challenges (a normal one, a super hard one, and a co-op one), and weekly Odyssey and Race events.
• Brain Age gives you a stamp for the first brain-training game you play each day. It also makes the stamp larger if you play three games in a day.
• Clockwords encourages you to use the word of the day on dictionary.com to deal double damage once per level. Of course, the word can turn out to be useless if it has hyphens or other special characters, and even then, it doesn't seem like the feature works these days even if you can type in that word.
• Cozy Grove has Achievements for "playing on multiple days," specifically 7 and 90.
• Dandy Dungeon has, true to his wacky nature, Yamada cleaning up his apartment. Not only he will find useful game items in the trash (...just go with it), but he also takes note of it every day with Cleaning Stamps, and every few days of stamps will net him extremely rare items, including some gear that can't be found anywhere else.
• Devil May Cry 5: You can get an item the first time you start the game each day, which includes Gold Orbs.
• Dislyte has several ways to keep you playing daily:
  • There's the daily log-ins that'll give you rewards just for logging into the game.
  • Every two days, the Cube Miracle game mode will reset and be explorable.
  • The Sonic Miracle has a set of bosses needed to gain a specific type of Waves available on different days of the week. Thus if you want to get a certain type of Wave, you'll need to play on a specific day to get them.
  • The Club tasks reset daily, giving you objectives to do to gain rewards.
  • Point War gives out a bonus for the first win of the day.
  • Stamina, Admission Certificates, and Expedition Warrants are replenished over the day.
  • Expeditions refresh every day and there is also special Daily Expedition that grants a good amount of a certain resource (such as a Daily Expedition consisting of gold while another consists of Experimon).
• Disney Magic Kingdoms: Players can log in every day to receive a daily reward and count progress towards a reward streak to receive special rewards, such as Tinker Bell. Note that an Internet connection is required to claim daily rewards.
• Dissidia Final Fantasy will reward you for checking your Mognet every day for 15 days. There's also a reward for getting 200 messages via Mognet. The most you can get is two per day (and you only get the second one if you haven't been playing for more than three days) so checking every day is the best way to do it.
• In Dragon Quest IX, the online store changes its inventory every (real-time) day.
• Duolingo: The game emphasizes the importance of practising every day and encourages it by keeping track of your "streak" — the number of consecutive days you reach your XP goal. Although you get 1 lingot for the 10th day in the streak, 2 for the 20th, etc., the main appeal of maintaining a streak seems to be bragging rights.
• The Earth 2025 browser-based game gives you bonus turns the longer you go without logging in, but after a day or two you'll hit your maximum amount, with diminishing returns in the process, leading to the player playing once a day as the optimum amount.
• Equin: The Lantern gives bonuses on certain days of each month. For example, every day 9 boosts the Thief class and every weekend lets you pick one more starting item.
• Everybody Edits has energy that the player gets every 150 seconds, with the Cap being anywhere from 200 to 400, depending on the player's class.^note Technically, it was possible to get over this cap with the old magic coins and contest rewards, but this feature is now lost. The currency is used to purchase smileys, blocks, potions, and worlds.
• Fallen London gives you twenty actions at a time (forty if you pay for a subscription), which recharge at a rate of one every eight minutes or so^note It varies; it can be as high as ten minutes or as low as five, but eight is typical, capping at twenty (or forty). So it's more like Play Every Three Hours.
• FarmVille: The crops take a few hours to a couple days to grow, and if you don't harvest them in the time that it took for them to grow, they die. The only way to avoid this trope is to (literally) buy time. This is how Zynga makes its money — they call this "Appointment Gaming", and quite a few Facebook games have taken this mechanic and run with it. For example, The Sims Social refilled your energy bar every 45 minutes. Now you can Play Every Hour. (Farmville is the Genre Popularizer and Trope Codifier for the Facebook Casual Game.)
• Discussed and heavily discouraged by the developers of Final Fantasy XIV. Since the game was designed to be played casually (as in you don't need to play every day to get good gear for your characters and the like), there's no pressure in having to play every day. Breaks from the game are encouraged so that players don't get bored with the game and quit playing entirely. That said, there's a daily roulette system where you can get matched with a random party into a random duty within certain categories for bonus rewards of gil, EXP, and tomestones to help keep queues popping, encouraging those in a rush to grind out materials to login and play to amass resources via these roulettes.
• Final Fantasy Record Keeper gives you two items every day. One of them is guaranteed to be 1 Mythril. The other can be either another Mythril, additional Gil, or an item that'll significantly increase any common equipment's stats. (Unlike most other games, these rewards do not reset if you skip a day or two.) In addition, there is a set of dungeons that open every day, with varying rewards that depend on the current weekday.
• Fire Emblem Heroes has various daily login bonuses and daily quests that are easy to complete and offer good rewards, encouraging players to log in and play at least a few battles every day.
• The Forza games have something called Forzathon where every weekend, occasionally at other times to celebrate special events, you will be offered specific challenges with oft times substantial rewards: smash the record on a Surfers event to gain cash and XP, win a race in a Ford to unlock a specially modified version, play an event that ends in a certain location to be gifted a valuable machine you otherwise have to download and pay real money for, play these online events for something from the new car pack, and such.
• Similarly, Fruit Ninja gives x5 EXP in the first five games played every day, whether they be Classic, Arcade or Zen games.
• F-Zero 99:
  • Every day that you log in, you are awarded a free ticket. On weekends, it's three tickets instead, to encourage participating in a Grand Prix (which occur every 30 minutes on weekends as opposed to every 2 hours on weekdays), which costs that many tickets.
  • Your first play of the day will award bonus ticket XP.
• Most of Gameloft's games give a bonus to your currency (and sometimes EXP, depending on the game) every consecutive day, up to a total of five days. If any day is missed in those five days, the rewards reset and they have to play five more consecutive days.
• As one would expect from a mobile game developer, Genshin Impact has plenty of these mechanics. There are daily login bonuses (sort of, anyway, with a bi-weekly set of 7 daily rewards, plus a small amount of battle-pass EXP for logging in), random daily guild commissions with rewards both for each quest and for completing all 4, and a slowly-regenerating supply of "resin" needed to collect certain mission rewards (capped at 160, so ideally you should use it all up every day and let it replenish when you're not playing).
• Geometry Dash got this in it eleventh update, 2.1, back in 2017. Daily chests drop orbs (shop currency), diamonds (new stat), sometimes keys (for treasure room) and shards (for achievements). Daily levels allow you to get double rewards as well as diamonds. Quests reward diamonds. Update 2.11 added weekly demons that have same completion reward as daily chests (but more). All daily levels and weekly demons were and are, hand picked by Rob Top himself.
  • Basically, in this game, daily content is purely optional since it does not impact on gameplay, only on stats, achievements and cosmetics. In one of 2.2 patches, Rob Top removed diamonds from leaderboards, basically making stats almost independent on the daily rewards.
    • Still, 2.2 added an achievement for beating 365 daily levels. If before then, players could just theoritise how much time it takes to 100% the game, after this update it became at least one year for just the daily level achievements.
• Ghost in the Shell: First Assault Online had a 10-day daily log-in system that rewards steadily increasing XP and GP boosters every day.
• Godus as Freemium game has long wait times for construction and slowly regenerating resources. Of course you can make things go faster if you pay. Oddly this carries over onto the PC version where you don't/can't pay money but instead can pay gems. In both cases. it's best just to wait half a day between hour sessions.
• Granblue Fantasy has an absurd amount of things restricted to daily, weekly, and monthly caps. You get a free item or currency of some kind whenever you open the game once a day; certain quests that are great for farming (like every Maniac difficulty event quest) can only be completed two or three times a day; there are 3 Co-Op missions to be completed each day to win a Blue Sky Crystal (a somewhat rare item used in upgrading); if your account is bound to Twitter, you can only post there once a day to recharge AP and EP; you can draw low-value items for Rupies only 100 times a day; you can only buy Half-Elixirs up to a certain daily cap depending on the currency used or items traded for them; you can win a maximum of 1000 Renown pendants daily and 2000 weekly, alongside a maximum of 500 Prestige pendants weekly. In short, the game really gives you a lot of homework if you try to be efficient at it.
• Guild Wars added a daily bounty system in 2009, rewarding gold and tokens to buy items such as the rare Zaishen key. The War in Kryta sub-story received a similar bounty system while Pre-Searing Ascalon got a daily bounty quest that increased the level of enemies, significantly easing the difficulty of acquiring the title "Legendary Defender of Ascalon".
• Guild Wars 2:
  • World boss loot is significantly reduced after the first kill per day while major chests may only be opened once per day.
  • Ascended crafting is limited by the daily cooldown on crafting items such as Essence of Mithrillium.
  • The player's home instance can be fitted with a variety of gathering nodes that reset daily, granting everything from basic materials to event- and zone-specific material. A bounty board can also be procured to receive daily supplies but they will only be mailed if the player logs on for the day.
  • Daily achievements reward no points but come with a number of rewards such as chests of crafting materials, karma, and a full 2 gold from the Daily Completionist, a notable sum.
  • Log-in bonuses grant the player based on a calendar of rewards that resets each time it is completed. While some of the rewards are unremarkable, others are quite valuable such as an item that permanently increases the amount of gold dropped by enemies.
• Gundam Breaker Mobile encourages players to play every day by awarding basic but useful items (credits and upgrade equipment) for logging in, as well as a free spin on the few free-to-play gacha machines. Players could also complete simple daily objectives to earn a trickle of premium currency.
• Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: Win rewards each day are somewhat front-loaded, spaced out such that your first three wins will average about 45 ore/game, the next six are 25 ore/game, the next twelve are 10 ore/game, and anything beyond that is about 2 ore/game. This is approximate as the rewards randomly include scraps or free cards.
  • A literal daily reward has been added as well. Every day you play grants a reward shown on the screen. Completing seven days improves the rewards. Festivals and other events often have bonus gifts such as reward points added to the daily prizes. Missing days will not reset anything.
• Halo: Reach offers extra credits for completing challenges of varying difficulty each day, and one per week as well.
• Harvest Town offers daily log-in rewards in the form of coins, diamonds, boosts, and the like. The game also has a series of daily quests (e.g. complete orders, give gifts to NPC, mine ores, log trees, kill monsters, etc.) that give additional rewards when completed.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has an interesting variation: Every day whether you log in or not, you are given a random daily quest that you can either complete that day or save it up in your quest log to complete some other time. However, you can only keep up to three quests in your log before you must clear them to receive additional quests. Additionally, you are also given one option per day to reroll one quest that you don't like to get another quest, although this is just as randomized.
  • Heroes of the Storm, being made by the same company, offers the same gimmick, although the option to reroll quest is absent.
• Ingress has the Sojourner medal, which revolves around the player's "Hacking Streak" that is incremented by performing at least one hack every 24-hour period^note The game has a daily check-in which it checks every single player to see if they have hacked at least once since the last check. The player's hacking streak is incremented by one if they've done so, reset back to zero otherwise. This means you don't have to actually hack every 24 hours or less — you could hack once one second after a check, and then wait 47 hours, 59 minutes, and 58 seconds to hack again, and still be in the running — but since the exact time of the check is deliberately hidden from players, you effectively have to just to be safe.. The lowest level of the badge is at 15 days and the highest level is at 360 days (i.e. almost a full year).
• Idolish 7 gives out a log-in bonus every day, and there are special daily lessons as well.
• Many mobile romance games, including Ikemen Sengoku and the Shall We Date? series, operate on a ticket system that gives you free tickets to read the story (usually 5 per day or 1 every 4 hours). Thing is, you can only have a maximum of 5 of these tickets at once, so you'll need to make sure to use them daily to avoid wasting them. These games also usually give you rewards for logging in daily and a free spin every day of a gacha system that can give you items or clothes for your in-game avatar.
• In Kingdom Hearts χ, you get rewards for each day you log in, typically in the form of the premium currency of jewels. So not so much play every day as "log in every day." Played more straight with the daily missions added in a late 2017 update, which grant 30 jewels each (a total of 300 if all completed) for fairly simple objectives such as gathering a certain amount of lux or defeating a couple of raid bosses. If you're in a party, there are also weekly challenges that grant 100 jewels each for a possible total of 1,000. Additionally, there are event challenges which tend to change from day to day that can grant various bonuses and perks.
• In Kingdom of Loathing, players automatically receive forty adventures at the start of each day, with a Cap of 200. Players can gain extra adventures by consuming food, booze, and a handful of miscellaneous items. There is a maximum amount of these you can consume each day, and every day you don't fill up is wasted turns. Given that a player with decent resources can obtain around 150 turns in a day after consumption, this means that you can only skip one day (Assuming you log on long enough to eat on the off day) before you start missing out on potential turns.
  • Also, there are many one-per-day, use-it-or-lose-it things, like the 4000-5000 free meat from completing the optional Organic Produce Stand sidequest, or the use of the He-Boulder's yellow ray (One-Hit Kill that leaves all of the things a monster Randomly Drops). A list of more examples can be found here. You find yourself logging in daily just for these things. Note that many of these are offered as rewards for completing a quest, or are unique benefits associated with Mr. Store, the place where real-life money is the standard currency.
  • One of the strongest incentives to log in every day is filthy lucre. You earn filthy lucre by completing bounties, which involves defeating a certain number of a specific monster, usually enough that it would take around 40 adventures to complete. Filthy lucre can be traded in for unique and valuable items, including (non-tradeable) high-end equipment to boost item drops, a familiar that raises combat frequency and boosts item drops more than any other, and a special skill that lets you increase the likelihood of encountering a specific monster. You can only get three assignments per day, and you'd need 345 filthy lucre to collect all five of the rewards, so you'd need to play seriously every day for four months just to be able to get them.
• In Kitty Powers' Matchmaker, Kitty gives you a daily reward of 10 coins when you start up the game, which accumulates by 10 if you check in consecutively until it reaches the cap of 50.
• The webgames created by fifth planet games (Legacy of a Thousand Suns, Legacy of Heroes,...) offer a daily reward on a 7-day basis: for the best reward, you have to play 7 days in a row.
• Downplayed in The Legend of Zelda franchise:
  • The amiibo functionality in Hyrule Warriors: they can be used to receive a random reward each day (rare materials, weapons, or a random amount of Rupees), but there is no real punishment for not bothering.
    • This applies to amiibo usage in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; you can only scan each amiibo you own once per day.
  • Similarly, both The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks have a random selection of ship/train parts in shops, sidequests, and a long and annoying dungeon, reshuffled daily. You can completely ignore it if you simply want to finish the game, but if you want to collect one of each ship/train part...
• League of Legends offers a bonus of 150 influence points for your first win of the day. Winning this sets a 22-hour countdown until it becomes available again.
• Lorwolf: There are daily tasks that reset at rollover which drop currency, including shards that can be crafted into Moonstones, the game's premium currency, and tickets for the weekly events.
• The marketplace in Love & Pies gives you a free gift every day, which gives you some low-tier items. Its stock also refreshes every day, but it can be refreshed instantly with gems or by watching an ad.
• Love Live! School idol festival and Love Live! School Idol Festival ALL STARS:
  • Both offered daily login bonus, daily quests, and rotating features on daily basis, though they instrumented a bit different.
  • You get a reward for every day that you log in, ranging from items(G/Exp/tickets) to Love Gems/Star Gems (the de facto currency). As of March 2020, "School Idol Festival"'s bonus is date-specific (updated on 1st of each month), while "School Idol ALL STARS"'s login bonus depends on your previous bonus you got.
    • Special bonuses, which may or may not be a part of login bonus, are given on specific days in parallel of Love Live! series' events: group member's birthdays, the first airing date of animation's episode, days of live concerts, or celebration of hitting the milestone of number of downloads all fall into this category.
  • Some of the songs are rotating on daily basis.
  • For original "School Idol Festival", you can do two free scouts (one each in µ's and Aqours side) per day. In "School Idol Festival ALL STARS", instead of free scouts, featured a daily discount (80% off for one single scout per day using paid star gems) for most of the rotating scouts.
• Love Nikki - Dress Up Queen runs on this. The "Nikki's Month Sign in" allows the player to claim a new reward every day (ranging from Gold, Diamonds, Stamina, and Starlight Coins to clothing items). Stamina, which is required to play story levels, regenerates over time and eventually caps based on Nikki's Character Level. The Association Commission stages, Pavilion free pulls, and Princess retries also reset each day.
• Mario Party 10: Once per day, any amiibo figures can be used to earn an amiibo Bonus in the menu. amiibo that have Mario Party 10 save data can earn extra bases for use in amiibo Party mode, while any other amiibo can be used to play scratch cards for chances to earn bonus Mario Party Points. If an amiibo has every base unlocked, they will earn scratch cards instead.
• Mass Effect:
  • The DLC Lair Of The Shadow Broker for Mass Effect 2 offers free resources (and sometimes upgrades) every day, encouraging players to go back and accumulate them. It can be tricked by manipulating your system clock and restarting the game.
  • Mass Effect 3: In the single-player campaign, your task is to accumulate War Asset points which represent the sum of galactic armies. However, their effective number is multiplied by the Galactic Readiness level, which defaults to 50% (so you only get to use half of what you earn). Winning multiplayer matches raises the Galactic Readiness but it becomes gradually reduced by a small amount every day (down to 50% again) unless you play again (and you can't go over 100%). The game also encourages players to play every weekend for challenges that award a few extra goodies for your multiplayer loadout, most notably a series of N7 weapons that can only be found and upgraded this way.
• Mega Man 9 has the "Daily Dose" achievement, for completing the game once per day for three days in a row.
• Miitomo encourages you to check in each day in a variety of ways, like login bonuses, rotating shop stock, and daily missions to earn My Nintendo Platinum Points.
• Moco Moco Friends has you gain free items from Neko every day that you play. In addition, the game has a changing roster of bonus dungeons that is different every time you play, and the secret Glittery versions of the five box-art Plushkins can be fought once a day.
• Mortal Kombat X has various daily challenges that players can complete as well as living towers that change hourly, daily, and weekly with a few event towers cropping up every now and then.
• MouseHunt gives out a daily bonus. Returning on successive days gives an increasingly better bonus on days 2-5, after which the bonus resets. The hunting horn (chance to catch a mouse and get gold or points) usually sounds automatically once an hour, but it will slow down significantly after 24 hours idle.
• Murder in the Alps operates entirely around a Freemium Timer. It takes energy points to progress in any way, and it takes 24 hours for your energy meter to refill. In addition, your energy meter caps at 200, just over 24 hours of inactivity, encouraging you to play daily so as not to waste it. It also includes bonus hidden objects scenes that unlock daily.
• The smartphone visual novel Mystic Messenger operates in real-time and basically requires you to play every day so you can read the chats and in turn, follow a certain route. The NPCs WILL send messages during midnight. You can pay to read (and partake in) conversations you didn't get to see before, but that costs "hourglasses" and to get more, you are charged in actual cash. There are also "phone calls" you have to listen to and e-mails to respond. You don't necessarily have to participate in all conversations, but there is a minimum threshold (at least 50%). As you can see, it takes a lot of time and dedication to finish the story, especially if you want to see all the endings and CGs.
• Neko Atsume has a daily codeword that will get you a bonus of fish. Filling the sheet with five passwords nets you a can of Ritzy Bitz free of charge and gives you a new sheet to fill.
• Playing Nekomew's Nightmares every day gives you a bonus of 250 musical notes and a daily challenge for you to beat.
• Neopets has a lot of freebies that are given only once per day, ranging from the savings interest^note yes, the site doesn't credit your interest directly to your virtual bank account; you must log in and collect the interest manually., freebies found in certain locations in-game, allowing you to earn Neopoints^note in-game money from games three times a day per game, etc. Trudy's Surprise gives you a certain amount of Neopoints each day, gradually increasing the amount over a 25-day period to culminate with a prize of 100,000 Neopoints on the 25th day, after which it starts over. If at any point you skip a day, you have to start over at day 1 with the smallest amount.
• Neverwinter has the Ardent/Celestial Coin system. Ardent coins can be gotten one every day by praying in specific locations and can be used to buy a number of special things. Celstial coins work and are gotten the same way (with different things that can be bought)... except that the ones you've already gotten disappear if you don't pray again within a day.
• NIER uses this with the 'cultivation' section — though it isn't really very obvious about it, so it might take you a bit of time to even realize it. ^note Basically, you can plant various crops on a field next to your home, but unlike everything else in the game, these crops grow in 'real time', which means that the best way to get a quick harvest is to plant, go to sleep, and return to your field the next day. On the other hand, if you leave your crops standing for more than a day or two, they'll wither — causing you to lose whatever seeds and fertilizer you put into the project, without any harvest to show for it. ...on the bright side, this means that you can greatly accelerate any cultivation project you might have by moving the console's clock forward in steps. You can even use it to make fast money... and, if you DO end up leaving your crops around long enough to wither, you can turn back time and harvest them anyway.
• Downplayed example in Ninjala: The game provides endless, randomized goals that provide Tier Points when reached, which unlock customization options at certain quantities. However, once a particular time has passed, depending on the time zone, the next five goals given to you will provide many more Tier Points when reached. This amount is usually 5 to 6 times higher, but Ninjala Pass Matsuri events can push them as far as 40 times higher.
• Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds has a number of quests and activities that refresh every day, as well as daily rewards. Some of the quests will roll over the next day a certain number of times if you're not able to log in on a particular day, but others you just miss out.
• The Nintendo 3DS rewards you for walking by giving you 1 Play Coin per 100 steps registered with the 3DS's accelerometer, up to 10 Play Coins for 1,000 steps in one day. This is the only way to earn Play Coins, which can be used in a number of games for many different features. The full stock of 300 Play Coins requires walking 1,000 steps per day for 30 days. (Or, you could, you know, shake it to game the accelerometer that tracks your steps...)
• Nintendo Badge Arcade has this with its practice crane. Once per day, you can play it to gather practice badges that can earn you free plays at the real machines.
• Onmyoji plays this differently from most. While you do get rewards for logging in multiple days (logging in for a whole first year gives you a free SSR and a shiny icon embellishment), skipping will not reset the counter. Additionally, being absent for extended periods of time gives you welcome-back gifts!
• Overwatch awards an XP bonus for your first victory of the day.
• Paladins used to have a Daily Reward system that granted players bonus gold and crystals for logging in. The rewards were moved to the Battle Pass to increase player engagement.
• Path of Exile gave daily Master missions each day, which was important back when Master levels were required to unlock new crafting recipes. It was replaced with Atlas missions for each Master which are given out by just logging in once per day, downplaying this trope.
• Phantasy Star Online 2 has several levels of rewarding daily play. Simply logging in nets you some minor rewards, with milestone rewards every few days. Logging in every day without missing any increases those rewards slightly. Finally, there are daily client orders that net you extra experience and money. You only have a day to accept them before they change over to a new set, though the game is kind enough to give you unlimited time to complete them and turn them in once accepted, so it is possible to log in, grab the ones you want, and complete them during a longer binge of gameplay when you have the time to play properly.
• Pikmin Bloom offers players one free Detector and a chance to earn up to 60 coins every day, as well as a chance to clear three Mushroom Challenges.
• PlanetSide 2 gave players a free certification point (used to unlock weapons and upgrades) every two hours whether they were actively playing or not. You can only backlog twelve certs (24 hours' worth) before they stop accumulating, so you want to get on at least once a day if only to collect your passives. Later became a part of the Membership subscription program, with Members accumulating 48 certs per day.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has multiple incentives to play every day:
  • New Travel Log quests are added, encouraging you to play special levels, play the Battlez game mode, or watch ads.
  • Daily Pinata Party events have you playing a special level in order to get rewards. Winning five Pinata Parties in a row gives you a bonus prize.
  • New items, such as plant costumes and seed packet pinatas, are added to the shop every day.
  • The Zen Garden is dependent on real-life time; check in every day to see your plants grow, water them, or plant new ones.
• In Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes, a new daily challenge is playable every day. Beating this gives you tickets towards a weekly event plant, and the more daily challenges you complete for that week, the more tickets you'll earn.
• Pokémon has been doing this since Pokémon Gold and Silver, which debuted the Real Time Game Clock. The clock affects berry growth, when lottery numbers are drawn, and other special events. Different Pokemon also come out at different times of day and, in Pokémon Black and White different (real-world) months.
  • A later update to Pokémon GO introduced daily streak bonuses, in which your first Pokéstop visit and first catch of the day will net you an additional 500 XP, 500 additional Stardust from the Pokémon caught, and additional items from the Pokéstop. If you maintain the streak for seven days, the seventh day will increase the bonus XP/Stardust to 2000 and the items from the Pokéstop will be greatly increased (including at least one evolution-related item, which are otherwise extremely rare). The cycle repeats after that. Missing a day resets the cycle. This encourages players to at least visit one Pokéstop and catch at least one Pokémon daily.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield has a daily reset when the Switch clock reads midnight. This refills all berry trees and Wild Zone random items; changes weather in the Wild Zone, impacting what Pokémon spawn there; changes the items sold by certain vendors and traders; spawns a new set of Raid battles; and replaces the non-respawning wander Pokémon.
  • In Pokémon Unite, daily missions such as partaking in three battles and winning a battle provide a small amount of currency.
  • Downplayed with the demo versions of Pokémon OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire (the remakes of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire) and Pokémon Sun and Moon, which came with rewards that could be transferred to the full versions. Unlocking the maximum rewards involved playing the demos every day from when they could first be downloaded to when the full versions came out; once the rewards were transferred, the demos were no longer necessary.
  • In Pokémon Sleep, the General Store has a daily gift, which is a random item.
• The music-based browser game Popmundo, being a persistent world, requires you to log in at least once a week to take care of business. You set an activity (e.g. record a music video) and after a while, the game will get updated and the action will get completed. You can busk on the streets but that is not recommended since it can make your character ill if they do it long enough. It is also possible to rest too much but that isn't as detrimental. If you neglect your character they will get sick and their mood will drop, and they will eventually die. You can have a premature death as a 16-year-old teenager for no reason other than not logging in regularly. You age every in-game year, by the way, something that takes a few real-life months to pass. There are hospitals in case you get a disease like chlamydia. (Yes, that exists). What if you go on a vacation and don't have Internet? Best you can do is leave your character at a safe place (like their own apartment) and let them rest until you're back home.
  • You can now choose your starting age, meaning if you'd rather die at age 30, that's available right off the bat without any waiting. The oldest you can get ever is about 55 and you do eventually die of old age. The oldest characters are usually veterans who have played for a long time. For some odd reason, it is possible for a 20-year-old to adopt a 50-year-old.
    • The incentive to log in every day is working hard to reach the charts and turn into one of the top music acts in-game. Since you can have relationships with other players and even get pregnant, there is also a caring potential and roleplaying aspect.
  • There's a spin-off called The Great Heist, which operates on the same basis... although there is less content and players than Popmundo, which has been running since 2003. It's also slower due to the reconnaissance you have to do. This means it's a bit less demanding. You can also get taken to jail so you'll have to wait a while (or, if you're impatient, there's an option to plan an escape, but there are high chances of failure). In both games, there is an option to have multiple characters to manage and that is quite stressful.
• In Potion Punch, you can complete a daily task for a reward, which resets every 24 hours. If you can complete the daily tasks for 30 days in a row, you'll receive a special prize.
• Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy gives you trophies for solving daily downloadable puzzles for 5, 10, 20, and 50 days in a row. (However, they don't have to be the puzzles released on those days, nor do they even have to be ones you haven't already solved.)
• Progressbar 95: Playing at least one level for 7 days in a row lets you unlock versions of Progressbar you can't unlock by just progressing (3.14, 2, and 1).
• Puzzle Craft 2 gives you free coins, influence or runes every day you log into the game and logging in 30 days in a row unlocks a special cattle type that can't be unlocked in any other manner.
• Punishing: Gray Raven encourages consistent play for those aiming to spend as little as possible. The daily and weekly quests are major sources of Black Cards that can be used for Gacha, and include playing the War Zone and Phantom Pain Cage modes that give rewards based on current player rankings, giving incentive to not fall behind.
• RuneScape is so bad for doing this, players refer to it as 'Dailyscape'. Treasure Hunter keys regenerate each day, daily rewards reset at midnight game time, and there are daily challenges that reward XP and TH Keys upon completion. Add to this the weekly and monthly rewards, and there are plenty of things to get done each day before you even start contemplating what you actually want to do that day.
• Shadowverse: Achievements aside, the player's main source of rupie income is via daily missions and login bonuses. There can be up to three daily missions active at a time, and new ones (along with the ability to reroll one of them) come in every 21 hours.
• Slime Forest Adventure, seeing as how it is an edutainment game, encourages good study habits by taking your gold if you wait too long between games and limiting your health refills if you play too long.
• Solforge has three normal daily rewards and one special that you can only obtain daily; One is obtained when you log in, another when you win a match, and another when you win three matches that day. In addition, winning your first PvP match of the day gives you an event ticket, which you can spend for tournament entries; subsequent PvP wins of the day only give you Silvers (in-game currency).
• The Sonic Gems Collection unlocks demos of Sonic's various Genesis games in the "museum" if you play every day for X days... Of course, before you can do that, you have to unlock the museum page they appear on.
• Spiral Knights likes this trope:
  • Everything important you can do in Spiral Knights is linked to Energy. Crystal Energy is bought (from players using in-game currency or with real-world cash), while Mist Energy slowly recharges itself over time; both are interchangeable and the game will prioritize the use of Mist Energy when it's available. Your Mist Energy takes twenty-two hours to recharge fully, and is capped at 100, so if you don't play every day that free energy goes to waste.
  • Further encouraging frequent play is the fact that the dungeons are semi-randomly generated according to player actions, and the seven dungeon gates rotate every two days, with the one at the bottom of the queue disappearing to make room for a new gate. If one dungeon gate leads to a stratum you're particularly fond of, you've got a maximum of two weeks to reap as many rewards from it as possible.
  • There are several shops in town and between dungeons with rotating inventories, refreshed daily. Though several low-level items will always be available to you, higher-level items are only available randomly and in limited quantity.
• While Splatoon doesn't try to punish you for not playing, it does have several incentives to check in regularly. For example, the shops will restock daily with different items, and Spyke or Murch can order one piece of gear per day; Salmon Run shifts offer an exclusive gear item that rotates out every day or two; and Splatoon 3 gives you a large experience bonus for your first victory of the day, allowing you to increase both your character and catalog level quickly.
• Splitgate: There's a daily reward just for logging in, which increases until the seventh day and resets, as well as an experience bonus per match which increases for every day in a row you actually complete matches in.
• Squaredle encourages you to play every day, as there is a different puzzle every day. It also keeps track of your solve streak — how many days in a row you have completed the daily puzzle.
• Star Trek Online: A regular stream of events uses this kind of system, by giving players an objective to achieve such as 'run this particular mission 10 times', but progress only counts every 20 hours so you can't just bang out ten completions back to back on day one. The time limit is then generally around 1.5x the 'goal' time (so, to continue the previous example, the total time is around 15 days) so that players have plenty of time to complete it. Those who do stick it out and get extra completions after the initial reward will typically gain bonus dilithium ore and continue gaining progress on the meta-event if the current event is part of one.
• This is Tamagotchi's main shtick, as not attending to the creature's needs on a daily basis will eventually result in its death.
• Tekken Revolution is set up with this in mind and even advises it; players get daily bonuses each day they sign in.
• Terra Battle:
  • You earn an automated gift for every day that you log in. The more consecutive days you log in, the better the reward.
  • The Hunting Zone quests rotate daily in a weekly cycle, in order to encourage this trope.
• In Tomodachi Life all the island is dynamic, from new clothes/hats daily on the shops (although not always), to events that only open at a specific time of the day (Example: A BBQ at 14:00). In addition, your islanders will donate money every day. Changing the console's clock will cancel all events until the next day.
• Toontown: Corporate Clash:
  • Different days of the week increase the amount of experience or rewards you earn in certain departments. For example, you earn extra currency on Wednesdays and more battle experience on Fridays.
  • Every day, you are given a new Daily Task you can complete for Premium Currency.
  • Each boss has a Sweetener that gives you bonus rewards when you beat them. Sweeteners reset every day, to unincentivize you from grinding the same boss over and over again. There's also a weekly limit to how many Sweetener rewards you can earn.
• Trickster Online has several quests that are only available one per day. The vast majority of these give TM (skill) experience. Others have a chance of giving the coveted Star Card Pack Number 5, which is guaranteed to give you one of three items that can increase your drop rate.
• Virtual Villagers. The game is real good at having your villagers starve to death if you don't check in on them every day.
• One of Wajas games invokes selecting 1 of 3 blacked-out pears (It Makes Sense in Context, sorta). You receive a money reward regardless of which one you pick, but the amount varies depending on the one you pick, and the reward starts low and stacks for each consecutive day you play the game. Play it long enough, and the reward can get very high, which makes it annoying when the streak is finally broken.
• Warframe gives players a random reward (credits, real money currency discounts, etc; formerly a couple thousand XP) every day they log in. Before Update 18 the rewards scaled up 'til the the player has continuously logged in for a week. Nowadays the rewards run on two tables, common and rare, with special rewards at 50 day intervals — and no penalty for missing a day besides having your 50 day special reward postponed by one day. Players also get a doubled credit reward on the first completed mission of the day.
• War Thunder gives players a random box of loot every day they log in, generally containing small single-use boosters for XP, research, or money. The rewards get larger the more you play.
• Webkinz is heavily reliant on players logging in every day.
  • Mining for gems at the Curio Shop is a daily event, and requires at least a month to get the Crown of Wonder.
  • Every day, you can participate in three classes at the Kinzville Academy. 15 days in a row gets you a free "recess," which is a minigame collection with extra prizes.
  • The Employment Center has small minigames as jobs, and you can play one each day.
  • Certain arcade games, such as Spree, Jumbleberry Fields, Wishing Well 2, and Wheel of Wow can only be played once per day.
  • Exaggerated further in that the game has hourly events, which range from being able to play a unique minigame, a coupon for a store item, a free food item, or bonuses on other daily events.
• Wii Fit's anthropomorphic Balance Board tries to guilt-trip you if you don't do the body test every day.
• Wordle encourages you to guess the daily word, as it constantly changes. The next puzzle is given out at midnight in your local timezone. It also keeps track of your streak — how many days in a row you have solved the puzzle.
• The World Ends with You, at a certain point early in the game, gives you the ability to level up your pins by not playing the game. The PP earned this way starts diminishing after 24 hours, though, so if you really need that SDPP, you'll want to load up your file every day. Also, the food system. 24 bytes per day (sort of)^ExplanationEach food item takes a certain number of "bytes" to digest, with one byte being used up in batle. While the maximum number of bytes per day is 24(for example, you can only eat three 8-byte items or one 13-byte item per day), you will always have at least six bytes. For example, if you have 12 bytes left and eat an 8-byte item, you will have six bytes left rather than four.. Until you get the Hollow Leg, then you can eat as much as you want.
• World of Tanks gives players double experience for the first winning match in each tank every day. There are also daily missions, which rewards players for actions ranging from those as basic as "cause five critical hits" up to challenges such as "be the top scoring player on your team." Incomplete missions simply roll over to the next day (or can be rerolled if the challenge seems daunting). Being on Premium time doubles the number of available missions to six, and any player that succeeds in all those missions in a single day is granted an exclusive final mission with a larger challenge, but correspondingly greater rewards such as a large block of bonus XP, in-game credits, or rare items such as garage slots and Bonds (a highly desirable game currency that unlike Gold can only be earned, not purchased). A dedicated player can therefore receive up to seven bonus rewards for daily play.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The game initially started light on this, with the main daily incentive being high level crafting material which could only be created on a daily cooldown.
  • Burning Crusade introduced daily quests which may only be completed once a day, rewarding gold, reputation, and other rewards based on the zone. For some factions this is the only way to gain reputation or progress an in-game event.
  • With the introduction of the Dungeon Finder, running a random dungeon and heroic dungeon offers bonus loot for players, with an extra bonus on top for the first one run each day.
  • World bosses and raids can be run once per week for a reward. Similarly, the bonus caches for completing a certain difficulty of mythic plus activity is on a weekly rotation.
  • Mists of Pandaria introduced a large number of rare mobs with special rare drops, some of which were linked to achievements. The loot table of the rares resets daily, encouraging players to farm them daily.
  • Warlords of Draenor introduced Garrisons, which allow you to have your Followers perform tasks for you. In many cases, you can queue up several days worth of "work orders", but for the Garrison Supplies you need most, you'll be sending your minions on their own daily missions (usually 8 hours real-time), visiting your Trading Post (which accepts a different resource every day) or collecting "free" supplies (which can hold a maximum of 500 supplies, so if you don't keep it cleared every day, you'll end up wasting potential supplies.)
    • The Garrison also comes equipped with a garden and mine which can be harvested once per day. The amount of money that could be generated just harvesting these materials resulted in a major gold glut in the game and more than a bit of exhaustion from the players.
  • Legion introduced the World Quest and Emissary system. A random selection of World Quests spawn throughout the map while a randomly selected faction will reward the player with extra supplies and reputation for completing four World Quests, with up to three Emissaries active at any given time. The addition of Paragon chests which reward extra gold, supplies, and cosmetic items for reputation earned beyond the current cap just gave players more reason to keep playing.
  • Invasions and Assaults, from Legion and Battle for Azeroth respectively, are a rotating set of events where players must complete World Quests and a final plotted quest to receive bonus loot and reputation. These generally occur once per day at varying times.
  • The Covenants of Shadowlands require massive amounts of anima to unlock all rewards which can only be acquired in limited amounts via daily activities such as world quests. Some of the more lucrative methods, such as anima conductor quests, are limited to once per day.
• Exaggerated to the point of being rather obnoxious in Wurm Online. Crops have to be maintained daily; go more than 24 hours without logging in to tend them and the plot will die. Buildings, particularly the wooden ones that are all you can build without a subscription, will decay completely within a week or so. Having a title deed slows this dramatically, but they also cost money to buy and maintain. And this isn't a game you can play on a tablet either.
• Every game in the Yo-kai Watch series has bonuses for playing every day. The Crank-a-Kai gives you a number of "cranks" each day to earn items and rare Yokai from it, and certain items in the shops come in limited stock that replenishes every real-world day. Certain rare Yokai can also only be fought once each real-world day.
• Browser game Legends of Zork gives a player 30 action points to use for exploring a day. Once they run out, there is nothing else they can do for the day.
• Zombidle:
  • Crafting can be accelerated by 4-8 hours every 4 hours, making playing twice a day a good way to accelerate item crafting.
  • One update added Maurice the giant snail, who gives you bounties (mini-achievements) every 4 hours (sometimes every 2 hours), which eventually turn into a unique item (ranging in usefulness from a bigger storage capacity for ghosts used in crafting to an exponentially multiplying damage/currency bonus) every week or diamonds after the item is obtained. However, there are only four bounties available at any time, for a 16-hour wait for all of them to be back.

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