The Sticky Factor: Creating a Benchmark for Social Gaming Success
The concept is straight forward – the more a user comes back and plays, the more engaged they are. And the more engaged they are, from my experience at PowerSoccer.com, the easier it is to monetize them. Why? A user who comes in and plays your game every day is much more likely to get to that point where they open their wallet, compared to someone who visits once or twice a month or plays twice and never comes back.
So while Monthly Active Users (MAU) has been a metric that has been used to identify which games have been strong in getting reach (either virally or through advertising), the Daily Active Users (DAU) is the true base you should be able to monetize, weeding out the users that only come for a quick trial and don’t come back. A step further in this analysis is something I call the Social Game Sticky Factor ™ (DAU/MAU) which allows you to benchmark applications’ ability to retain their users.
If your application has a 33% Social Game Sticky Factor, that means that for every new user you bring in, you have a 33% shot at turning them into a daily user. Compare that to an application with 20% Social Game Sticky Factor, and you can now compare the potential ROI of a Facebook Ad campaign or further development of a game (either to make it stickier or focus your development on another game with a higher Social Game Sticky Factor).
In the past I’ve looked at the top developers and their average sticky factors, but let’s break that down by game and over time to look at game-specific insights:
See the full article including comparative graphs at InsideSocialGames.com
(Posted this over on ISG too, Eric – would be interested in your thoughts.)
Extremely interesting metrics, Eric. I’ve been digging into this a bit too with the wealth of data we have for FB games. For example, looking at the top 25 FB game providers (as of 10/22), there’s an average 25% DAU/MAU ratio — and eyeballing the histogram, there appear to be two tipping points or discontinuities, one around 15% as you note, and another around 30%. I suspect but don’t have hard data to show that monetization may accelerate above 30% as well due to increased network effects.
The real question in all this of course is how to relate DAU (or MAU) to monetization. In the F2P MMOG space, several providers have offered data showing that they have an ARPU (not ARPPU) of about $1.20-$1.40 per MAU per month — which is *far* higher than the vague figures I’ve seen for FB, which seems to be at around 25c-50c per MAU. But it’s hard to say.
Eric, in an earlier post you said that most games appeared to be trying to get to $25K per 1M DAU per day (which, at a 25% Stickiness ratio, works out to a MAU ARPU of $0.19 – seemingly very low).
Can you say more about where the $25K/1M DAU comes from? It would seem to be low given rumored-but-believable revenue figures for Zynga and Playfish — and as I said, very low compared to the web-based MMOGs (which if nothing else may mean we have better numbers to look forward to as designs mature).
Mike –
I definitely like your thought on a second tipping point and will try to look at that some more; been putting something together for next week to look at how to measure the impact of feature releases in terms of the Sticky Factor.
I don’t know that you can really tie DAU or MAU to monetization – that’s a huge leap as there are a lot of variables. For example, I have heard that Game A may be more engaging than Game B, but Game B is where more of the money is being made. A lot of that ties to the way the game was designed to monetize the value points for the player. Hence I think you may find that game genres (like Mafia War-type games) have similar triggers and thus could have comparable revenue rates.
Regarding the $25K per day per 1 million active users per day, that was suggested by Sean Ryan of Loki Partners (see http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/10/01/calcuating-how-playdom-is-making-50m-from-28m-users/#comments) and I don’t have further details; I did have someone who knows the revenues around one of the top 20 games on Facebook use that metric and noted that it was close to what they saw, so it may have validity. But as noted before, I think this varies among games and across platforms (Zynga and Playfish have revenue and users on MySpace and Hi5 as well).
Eric
[...] games were flat or down Thanksgiving week. In addition, for Zynga’s FishVille we’re seeing the social game sticky factor (Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users) declining. At this point, the game looks like it might [...]