Social games. Start and Promotion

Short review

Games are an industry that is dynamically and rapidly developing, because the basic needs of people in developed countries are more or less satisfied. And people have more and more time for fun. And if you add here the mass distribution and improvement of mobile phones or tablets, you can understand that the time for entertainment becomes too much for a person. And oddly enough, the human brain sounds overworked and requires unloading - killing time. It is not designed for the loads that he has to withstand while living in the current furious rhythm. And here we go on stage with our games, which help the brain to relax and kill the excess time.



Games about which we will continue to say this social games, but almost everything is true for other games or applications. Social games have one distinguishing feature - they are not surprisingly social. This means that your users, playing games, do not just want to kill time, but also somehow express themselves in society and thus both justify their killing in front of themselves, and engage in another attribute of the basic need - interaction with society. After all, with all the amount of communication that is now, people because of the rhythm of life, for the most part become lonely and they are extremely short of society.
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PS Please, all spelling and punctuation errors in private, thank you very much!
PPS The article does not claim to be absolute truth, because all situations are unique, or to the depth (yeah, i'm rock & roll nerd), it is only intended to reflect on some things and, if possible, save them from stupid mistakes. All observations and conclusions are only my humble opinion.

Why is it difficult to start now?

It would seem that the market is not shrinking, people have more money, why are more and more undertakings failing? After all, now the revenues of games amount to millions of dollars, and such monsters as Clash of Clans hundreds of millions or even billions? It would seem that you need to repeat only 1% of success and you are a millionaire. With such a business plan, many start-ups open up. But in these arguments a fatal error crept in. Making a project similar is not so difficult (although not really easy, and without certain skills it’s not possible at all, but about that another time), but to attract users, there is one underwater pebble, about which all the dreamer's ships and the name of this stone - ARPU

ARPU your death sentence

ARPU (Average revenue per user) - the average earnings per user. Now everything is focused on the fact that this indicator was as high as possible, because it is worth losing a little here, and you will fly out of business. Why? Well, let Zinga receive $ 6 from the user, according to our plan, the first percent, that is, 6 cents, is enough for us. But even a very bad application can collect so much. Then why not all millionaires around, but only a few? It’s trite because companies like Zinga, having $ 6 from a user, can afford to buy a user attraction for $ 5-6, or even higher, and you don’t. You can't even buy for 10 cents. This means that there will be no users in your application, you will play it yourself. Yes, of course, then you will try to promote some non-standard types of advertising yourself on the forums, but believe me, if you don’t have a mega hit or a highly specialized subject of the game, this will lead to nothing. You are bankrupt.

What to do to improve it?
To raise the ARPU you need to think about it right away and understand that immediately you will not be able to raise it to such heights as the market leaders, because they are investing millions of dollars in it, but you don’t have them, and most importantly they are already spinning in this topic not one year, working in this direction and trying all sorts of methods and strategies. Now I want to describe certain parameters that affect the achievement of the desired result, and if at least one of them is not worked out for you, you can not even run your application, only if you are a fan of trying your luck. Only, believe me, the chances here are the same as entering the ring against a professional boxer and hope for luck.

Hold

Retention is a measure of the return of users to your application. This is one of the most important metrics in the social application. After all, if your user has logged in, played and never returned to you, he not only brought you money, but also ate them at the expense of maintaining servers and attracting costs. Retention is usually divided into two types: short-term and long-term.

Long term
Long-term retention - what percentage of people return to your application at least once a month (two weeks, depending on the features of the application). This indicator allows you to understand what percentage of people are generally interested in your application. This is the user segment you can work with. The higher this indicator, the greater the girth of your audience and the more accurately you choose your audience. For example, if you started buying advertising from one source, and it does not give particularly active users, but the long term rethenshin is good, it means that you just need to interest these users, these are hot clients. Find them how to sell your app. Even if now they do not bring you money, you have the opportunity to change everything, when they enter in a week or two, do not miss such clients.

Short term
Short-term retention - what percentage of people returns to the application every day or two. This metric shows the percentage of people actively using your application. It is very important to keep this percentage high, it will allow you to receive quick feedback from your actions and work with your audience. To do this, have their own tools, the main now choose daily tasks with some significant reward motivating to go every day. This is a very good method, but at the same time, because of this, you cannot rely only on this metric. Imagine a situation that you have a short term retensch at the level of 80% which is breathtaking, but at the same time you have a small ARPU. You think that you have something wrong with monetization and start playing with it, spinning the user's nuts. But in the end, all indicators are falling. What is wrong? And everything is very simple, the users didn’t like your game much, but they were in limbo and only called for the daily bonuses. Because of this, the retention area was large, but as soon as you screwed the nuts, their state turned from a suspended one into a negative one, and not only did you not receive additional money, but you also lost users.

What shows retenshen and why it is important
But if, you can not rely on him what to do with it and why is it needed? Everything is very simple, with the help of it you can distinguish two segments (more) - those who are interested in playing (short term retention) and those who are potentially interested (long term retention). Using the segment of interested users, you can calculate how much they are involved in your game. Like that we will talk in the next paragraph.

Involvement

Engagement is a metric that shows how much a player likes your application and how immersed it is in it. If you have a game designer, ask him what it is and how to count it. If he does not know, you can safely dismiss him.

After all, involvement is the pulse of your game. What kind of doctor who did not hear about the pulse and can not measure it? Charlatan. How to count it? There is no universal formula, because each application is unique, there are common factors, such as retention, arp, the average time in the game, the number of sessions, and so on. And the more experienced a game designer is, the more accurately he can choose a formula for your application, and the more accurately he selects it, the more chances to achieve success, because this is a direct indicator of how your users accepted this or that change, how they like the dynamics of the game. And without it, you can release features that your user needs for your opinion and they will pay you more for them, but in fact everything can be exactly the opposite. Or, due to small miscalculations in the balance of the feature, in order to introduce a positive mood, it causes annoyance or disappointment among users. In general, if you do not consider an enhancement - you do not count your money.

Analytics

This is the heart of your application. The bottom of the iceberg, the foundation, and if this foundation is not strong, everything above will be blown away. All companies in the world now pay hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to get more and more information about users. Today's technology has evolved to the point that stores already before we know a pregnant buyer or not. Already in America there are even claims for this reason. That is, you imagine that with the help of the analysis of the check from the store, you can now tell whether the customer is pregnant or not. Here it is. And we usually do not measure a couple of indicators. But even elementary tracking can save millions of dollars. I'll tell you a little story from the life. We made a game for Playdom (Disney) and launched in production. But they noticed that the short-term retention was extremely low, they got deeper - it turned out that only 20% of people are undergoing training. Really so bad have made game, we were horrified at the beginning. But as soon as we analyze at what step the users were lost, everything became clear. The training was done on the principle of the railway, that is, you could not turn out of the way or do something not according to plan until you complete all the steps of training. And here one step taught people to go full screen. But this categorically did not want to do 60% of the people (most likely played at work and did not want the heads to see) and simply closed the application. If we didn’t have analytics for everyone, we wouldn’t have guessed it in life and would have lost a lot of money. Therefore, my advice to you, analyze everything that moves, lies, stands or simply exists.

Ab testing

AB testing or split testing is when you select several focus groups and test those or your guesses on them. All marketing or design ideas need to be tested through split testing, because the results may shock you. What seems 100% logical to you may not be so in reality. But this is still half the trouble, but how to find out which of similar solutions should be applied in the project? For example, you have 3 start screen savers in the game, you divide your users into 3 equal groups and each show different pictures and then see how many percent of people wait for the download. Where there is a better percentage and choose the option for the first show, you can alternate the other two, but do not show when you first download applications!

Also AB testing is very useful for determining how new feature is useful in your project. For example, you decided to add a system of achivok, you can take a small group of people from 10 percent of your audience and only show them this new functionality. According to the results of the week two, to see how it affected the players, if they had their arp. on existing ones, not to exert influence, but on new ones to have a negative effect Also a mandatory thing is the split testing of the tutorial, it depends on him a lot and not choose the best solution here - it can be a fatal mistake. Play with the steps, their number, the form of presentation, believe it is where the rush is out of place.

You may argue that all this can be tested in series, not in parallel. Yes, theoretically you can, but in practice, no. After all, the minimum piece of testing is a week and testing even three variants will take three weeks already. And even more so, these three weeks can be different, on one holiday, the other falls on the period of holidays, etc. And the results immediately become not representative. And most importantly, you do not have these three weeks, if you are so slow your users and competitors will not forgive you.

Monetization

Now there are two most common monetization models: fritupley and one-time purchase. There is a mixture of these two models, but it is not so common.
A one-time purchase is a monetization model, when only one thing makes a profit for you - a one-time purchase of an application. As you understand it in social applications it does not work, because you need to support it, develop it, and all this requires money. And what is the motivation to do anything further, if it does not bring you anything. So only one monetization model is acceptable for us:

Free to play is a type of monetization, when a player can download your application for free and play it, while paying for additional preferences in the game. Preferences are different and most importantly to get to your audience, for example, additional content for money does not attract hardcore players, and in turn the sword of a thousand truths available only for money will scare off casuals. Here you need to clearly understand what kind of audience you are working with, and not with your head and flair, but with analysis and split testing. Regardless of which audience you plan to work with, try not to create a feeling for the user that everything in this game can be bought for money, and in no case sell the most powerful things for money. Otherwise, you will scare away all but a certain small group of people. Let the coolest things be bought only for game currency, but things for real money, which are worse than the best, but stronger than those that the user has at the moment, will help people quickly earn the best. My opinion is that good monetization should be based on three basic principles: faster, easier, more. But no more.

In the FreeTuPlay model the important thing is the first purchase. Your main task should be to make one cent pay. This removes the psychological barrier to shopping for money and adds credibility to your application. To do this, use different techniques, such as the first trial free purchase, which completely simulates the process of putting money into the game except for the withdrawal itself or the bonus to the first purchase.

After you remove the psychological barrier from the user, your task is to hook him up so that he systematically brings money to the application, but this amount did not frighten him. If the application will take too much money, you will lose a constant flow of money, so in this case, greed is not your strong point. And with every cent you will develop a dependence on the user, because he has already left your money with you and if he leaves, he will simply lose this money.

Significance of learning

The first impression of your application is the most important, to spoil it easily, but not much to improve. One of the most important tools for gaining trust and positive emotions among your users is the learning mechanism. It helps the user to feel the spirit of your application and understand the variety of opportunities that you provide him. It is very important to ensure that the user is not immediately overwhelmed with an abundance of opportunities, this will confuse him and not cause positive emotions. Calculate so that the user has time to get comfortable and enjoy the available functionality and only then a new one is added to it. Even if you limit the appearance of the functional, so that it will gradually be shown to the user, but not giving him time to get used to the existing one, this can push aside, because it will be necessary to make efforts to put all this in my head, and for many people this is not so easy and quickly, and instead of feeling distracted and relaxed, they will feel tense as when working. Accordingly, this will affect their perception in not the best way.

You have to fight for each player at this stage, do a lot of training options, both railroad and hint style, play with time, number of steps, speed of immersion, etc. (Recall the split testing and segmentation). Up to the fact that you can show different tutorials for different groups of people - shorter for the younger part of users who are not used to waiting and figure out everything themselves, and any waiting or hint will cause rejection, and very detailed for those who are older and do not want strain, and just wants to relax. You have to understand that different people have different types of characters and the more accurately you select the tutorial for their style of play, the more likely you are not to lose them at the very beginning, when they have not yet understood whether they want to play or not.

Another important nuance I would like to cancel the moment that many miss the addition of new functionality in the learning process. And often after a long period of application life, a ton of all sorts of features and game content immediately leaps onto the newbie. This is not correct, it will confuse and as we said, it will scare away new users. Often, it is because of this that old applications die, although the creators think that it is simply outdated. No, it is not obsolete, but simply overgrown with moss, which must be monitored.

Audience definition

Each application needs its own audience, and the more accurately you can identify it, the more accurately you can work with it. We must understand that even if you have a very narrow area, your audience is not homogeneous and is divided into certain segments. Proper segmentation can provide you with a more flexible work with your audience, because if you show different tasks, texts, tips, etc. This can increase both involvement and monetization. Segmentation is possible both for some physical indicators, such as age, gender, country, and psychological, for example, in the style of play as a person plays - aggressively, exploring everything or relaxing. In fact, with the help of segmentation and tuning of the game, you can turn one game into many different games that satisfy the needs of almost everyone.

And of course the most important thing is to initially understand what kind of audience you are counting on, and in many respects this determines the genre of the game. If you make HOGs, then obviously you should not aim at the male audience (although it is about 30 percent for this genre) and vice versa when creating a 3D shooter, forget about the female audience. You should immediately understand and work with your audience, do not make compromises and add beautiful unicorns to the honnor-action game (hello diablo3). But when you decide on your audience, it will become easier for you to work with it and determine what is expected of you and how you help your user, not an abstract horse. When discussing game design, always refer to your audience and ask: “Will our users like it? Does he need it? "