Tag Archives: Fish Sim Games

Casual Games

For Fish Sim Games, Does Stealing Make Them Stickier?

Leave a comment

As you might expect with the Thanksgiving holidays, the growth in the top fish sim games appeared to wane as we focused on real-life relationships and turkey dinners:

All the fish sim games remained flat or declined their daily active user numbers over Thanksgiving

Across the board, daily users for each of the fish sim games flat-lined during Thanksgiving (although the reporting tool failed to provide new numbers for Sunday the 29th and Monday the 30th of November, most 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 and it looks like it might settle at a 28-30% Sticky Factor similar to CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium and TallTree Games’s Fish World:

As FishVille's sticky factor comes down to the level of rivals Happy Aquarium and Fish World, My Fishbowl maintains a sticky factor 33% higher than any of them

In this group, 6 Waves’ My Fishbowl continues to have the strongest sticky factor, a good 33% higher than other fish sim games with over 1 million Daily Active Users (DAU). I believe their success is primarily due to the fact that it is the only one of the four top fish sim games natively coded in Chinese, which is allowing it to take advantage of Facebook’s rapid growth in Southeast Asia. In addition, it may also have something to do with the fact that My Fishbowl has a strong game element of “stealing” from your neighbors’ tanks (if your friends are late to collect the treasures produced by their fish, you can go in and steal these treasures for yourself).

Read the rest of the analysis, plus the impact on developers looking to grow into Asia and other fast-growing Facebook regions, at InsideSocialGames.com

Casual Games

FishVille Growth Hitting Stride but Pace is Slower Than Past Zynga Titles

Leave a comment

With the launch of Zynga’s FishVille, I’ve been watching to see if the developer could again eclipse records for user growth. The last Zynga hit, Café World launched a little over a month ago, gaining 1.1 million new users on day two and an additional 1.4 million users on day three, eventually passing rival Playfish’s Restaurant City and reaching more than 5 million daily actives in just a week after launch. In its first week, the numbers for FishVille are strong: 1.6 million daily actives after five days, whereas top rival fish game, CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium took more than two weeks to hit that level. But the growth is not quite as meteoric as Café World.

With all of Zynga’s promotional muscle and ability to cross-promote games across an even larger installed base of players than a month ago, what happened? Are users already mega-engaged with existing titles? Unlike Café World, FishVille is competing with three games and trying to tackle a much more established base: Happy Aquarium, TwoFishes Interactive’s My Fishbowl and TallTree Games’ Fish World collectively have 11.3 million daily active users and over 39.1 million monthly users. In aggregate, these games only trail Zynga’s FarmVille.

In addition, the launch was marred a bit. One of Zynga’s offer providers was running scammy offers, so Facebook took it offline for about 36 hours. With that caveat in mind, I decided to look at the launch trajectories of recent titles by Playfish and Zynga to see if we could discern any trends to benchmark the performance of FishVille:

Read more of the analysis on InsideSocialGames.com

Casual Games, Social Media

The Sticky Factor: Creating a Benchmark for Social Gaming Success

4 Comments

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).

A key for driving the sticky factor, besides great game play, has been the ability of the application to prompt users to reach out to their friends via the Facebook News Feed with stories and pictures. With several changes to the news feed being rolled out on Friday, including going from a real-time to algorithmic listing of top stories and a reduction in the number and size of images, there may be some significant changes in overall sticky factor metrics going forward.

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:

[Edit December 2018 – at this point this post pointed to InsideSocialGames.com where the post first lived (but that domain is no longer alive and the content was snapped up by Ad Week here (but the images are gone).  As you never can tell what will actually live forever on the internet, I’m going to post the rest of the post here for posterity (alas my graph for fish-sim-sticky-factor is gone)]

Zynga

Some highlights looking at the Social Game Sticky Factor for Zynga’s top games over the last 12 months:

  • You can see that all of Zynga’s older games (Mafia Wars, Texas Hold’em and YoVille) have steadily increased their Social Games Sticky Factor over the last year from the mid teens to the mid-to-lower 20s.
  • While Mafia Wars came close to 30% in early July, you can see it begin to drop off once FarmVille is cross promoted. FarmVille has sustained an incredibly high 36% Social Game Sticky Factor so far, which has helped it vault beyond the competition in total DAUs.
  • New games like FarmVille, Roller Coaster Kingdom and Café World often have very high Social Game Sticky Factors in the early weeks before settling to some sort of equilibrium
  • Roller Coaster Kingdom sunk below 15% post launch and then the game mechanic was altered (to a more “appointment gaming” model like FarmVille). When the game appeared to be approaching 20% again, Zynga began cross-promoting in their toolbar across applications, showing a quick spike in the Social Game Sticky Factor reminiscent of what we see when a game is launched.
  • We are still waiting to see where the natural Social Games Sticky Factors will lie for both Café World and Roller Coaster Kingdom, but it looks like they will be 30% and 20% respectively

Playfish

Now let’s take a look at the 2nd largest Facebook game developer, Playfish:

Some key points over the last 12 moths:

  • In contrast to Zynga, Playfish started with high sticky factors in games like Pet Society and Restaurant City, but has actually seen those decline. Not included in this analysis are first generation Playfish games like Word Challenge and Who Has the Biggest Brain? which have Social Game Sticky Factors of 8% and 4% respectively.
  • For a good part of this year, Pet Society saw a Sticky Factor in the low to mid 30% range. Then Restaurant City launched in late March with a more compelling game play with early retention rates in the 40%. Pet Society almost immediately saw a drop of the Sticky Factor to the mid 20% range, which suggests some Pet Society users stopped playing consistently as their attention was focused on the new Restaurant City game. Zynga saw this same “cross-promotion-cannibalization” of its playing base with FarmVille and Mafia Wars.
  • New farm sim game Country Story looks like it’s settling into the 20% range, which is still strong, just a marked difference from the 36% FarmVille is seeing. Likewise, the other new title from Playfish, Crazy Planets, has had a difficult time building an audience (been flat around 250,000 DAU) and has been hovering around an 11% Social Game Sticky Factor.

Fish Sim Genre

fish-sim-sticky-factor

Fish Sim Games have jumped into the top 25 and a great deal of this has to do with the strong Social Game Sticky Factors across the board:

Collectively, Happy Aquarium (by CrowdStar), My Fishbowl (by TwoFishes Interactive) and Fish World (by Tall Tree Games) would be the #2 application on Facebook, with over 8.9 million Daily Active Users. All three games have launched since August and seem to have seen slow sticky-factor declines, except for My Fishbowl. This Chinese developed game has a cross-promotional toolbar (à la Zynga and Playfish) that seems to be shared with the #13 game, 開心農場 (Happy Harvest), that I first noticed around September 30th, when you can see My Fishbowl’s Social Game Sticky Factor stabilized and since has grown.

Is a 15% Social Game Sticky Factor the Tipping Point?

There undoubtedly can be a great deal more analysis, but it would seem that when your game application reaches a 15% Social Game Sticky Factor, you have an application that can maintain sustained growth. Below this, it appears harder for games to grow; when Roller Coaster Kingdom was revamped and finally passed 15%, Zynga appears to have turned on the advertising and cross-promotional muscle to push it into the top 15 by DAUs.

While there is a correlation of stickiness to monetization, I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other factors involved. You can have a game that everyone plays, but if there is no motivation for users to buy items (either through impacting game play or providing personalization), you aren’t going to make money. But I would suggest it’s improbable you’ll make money from a social game that no one continues to play.