Tag Archives: Game Mechanics

Different game play mechanisms

Kicking Pay Walls Further Down the Road

evcinnyc_jolly_jam_match_mechanic
Jolly Jam innovates with a new matching mechanic, but the interesting thing is how much content is available to a new user

Rovio Stars’ new app Jolly Jam has been getting attention – and rightly so – for a new match three mechanic: instead of dragging or swapping tiles to match three objects or more in a row, users select a rectangle where the two corners must be the same character and everything within that rectangle that matches those characters is removed from the board. 

It’s great to see innovation in match 3 puzzles. But the other thing that I noticed when I played through it last week was how much game play I was able to run through before getting hit with a gate – I easily played over 30 levels over an hour and a half.  That’s a lot of play time right out of the gate.  And games like Best Fiends by Seriously (a studio by previous Rovio execs) had a similar very easy early on ramp.  So what’s going on?

Getting You Hooked

This is a general trend I’m seeing with a lot of casual free to play (F2P) games: we’re giving players access to more unencumbered content to get them hooked and engaged.  When a user spends an hour playing your game, they are making a hefty investment of time.

Maps like this one in Jolly Jam are now in 20% of the top games, reminding users the amount of time they've invested in the game
Maps like this one in Jolly Jam are now in 20% of the top games, reminding users the amount of time they’ve invested in the game

In conjunction with this, we’re seeing more casual puzzle game adopt a visual map of progress.  (The success of Candy Crush bred a lot of adotpion). Besides providing a light leaderboard showing where you are versus other players, it also provides a strong reminder of just how much time a player has invested in a game.

I haven’t combed through the top app charts, but according to the speakers at the Year in F2P Games at GDC this week, over 20% of mobile games in the top charts now employ some sort of map overview that shows the user’s progress (and more importantly investment or time) in the game.

Time Investment and Monetization

I think that it’s pretty clear that showing a player’s investment in the game can definitely help retention, but can it also help monetization?

One of the biggest money drivers in these puzzle games is when a player is just 2-3 moves short of completing a level, they are prompted to spend currency to get an additional pack of moves (echoing classic arcade games prompting you to put in another quarter to continue your game). 

Can the "pay another quarter to continue your game" mechanic be further impacted by the time invested in the round?
Can the “pay another quarter to continue your game” mechanic be further impacted by the time invested in the round?

I’d argue the time spent in playing a round (some of the later rounds in Candy Crush can take over 15 minutes) is also a psychological driver (do I want to spend another 15 minutes and try again?)  in getting players to fork over that extra quarter.  I don’t have data behind this, but it definitely bears testing.

Raising the Stakes (and the Value)

Bottom line, the top developers are creating a lot more content for players in order to get them hooked, getting users deeper into the game and hoping the investment of time ends up driving users to stay (and pay) longer.  This increases users expectations (and I’d argue in a good way) that upon downloading a free to play game, there is not just five minutes of play and a pay wall, but a deeper initial experience to enjoy.  Monetization only really begins to be a conversation (an exchange worth considering) after players have fully realized the value from the game.

Happy New Year! What Will 2010 Bring?

hapy-new-year-2010I hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve celebration. While 2009 saw the amazing growth of social games, looking ahead, I wonder whether 2010 will be the year where:

  • More complex game mechanics catch on?
  • Facebook changes continue to take away the institutional learnings from leaders like Zynga, helping to level the playing field?
  • A synchronous game other than Poker finds a sizable base within the Facebook platform?
  • That none of the big games reach their previous peaks?
  • EA succeeds in creating a cross over game to the social platform?
  • A social game company behemoth rises out of the Northeast (or anywhere outside of San Francisco)?
  • Facebook credits completely revamps the payment structure of social games?
  • Users tire of “appointment gaming”
  • Facebook growth slows down and developers begin to tackle niches and localization to maintain growth trends?

I’m looking forward to the year ahead and watching the innovation that is sure to come. If you want to get a little bit of a crystal ball’s view of these and other social game topics, I highly recommend reading Tadhg Kelly’s inciteful post on Gamasutra and Eric Eldon’s interview with Mark Pincus on InsideSocialGames.com

Top Social Games Take a Hit: Seasonal Declines or Something Bigger?

zynga-roller-coaster-declineAs originally posted on Inside Social Games

Every year around this time, when I was selling casual download games across the Oberon Media distribution platform, we’d see the numbers of games sold begin to decline: disposable income and leisure time tend to dry up as everyone gears up for Christmas.

And so after months of impressive growth, some of the biggest games on Facebook are reflecting what could be a similar seasonal trend on the social platform – virtually every big game has seen a decline in their Daily Active Users (DAU) since their peaks in December:

Game High DAU Date Dec High DAU Dec 21 DAU % Decline
FarmVille 8-Dec 28,168,448 26,240,616 -7%
Café World 4-Dec 10,714,586 9,079,596 -15%
Happy Aquarium 5-Dec 8,169,204 7,070,370 -13%
FishVille 5-Dec 7,459,387 6,644,904 -11%
Mafia Wars 9-Dec 7,021,764 5,574,330 -21%
Zynga Poker 17-Dec 5,013,652 4,773,945 -5%
Pet Society 9-Dec 5,094,052 4,753,688 -7%
Restaurant City 8-Dec 4,680,805 4,113,377 -12%
Farm Town 10-Dec 5,374,337 4,110,261 -24%
YoVille 8-Dec 3,463,083 2,833,933 -18%
Bejeweled Blitz 11-Dec 3,175,528 2,783,245 -12%
Happy Pets 13-Dec 2,977,222 2,768,133 -7%
My Fishbowl 8-Dec 1,956,719 1,911,330 -2%
Roller Coaster 1-Dec 2,323,788 1,474,539 -37%
Lil Farm Life 16-Dec 1,427,667 1,232,698 -14%

Collectively, these games have fallen 12.0% from their monthly highs, dropping from 97.0 million DAU to 5.3 million on December 21. A Facebook platform issue that impacted all applications for 48 hours starting December 9 might also have pushed users to give up the games and focus on their holiday shopping in earnest. In addition, some of these titles have had extenuating circumstances that might have caused the variances. Mafia Wars retooled their infrastructure and put in anti-hacking measurements massively impacting the game’s DAU. In contrast, Pet Society launched a new lottery feature to drive users to return every day and helped improve DAU.

Yet because the decline is pretty consistent across multiple developers and game types, it’s reasonable to attribute these declines to the seasonal trends I’ve experienced in the casual game download space. Still, could it be a bit more ominous signs of a slowing in Facebook’s growth? Or signs that games are maturing and life cycles are declining as more games enter the market?

Are There Other Factors Beyond Seasonal Trends?

There is no question that social games growth has mirrored the massive increase in Facebook subscribers – Facebook has added over 100 million monthly active users (MAU) in the six months that FarmVille has grown to just short of 75 million MAU. Having a continual influx of new users makes it relatively easy to continue growing the game.

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The pace of Facebook monthly active users seems pretty consistent (at least for numbers reported through November). But what is really interesting in the graph above is comparing the relative progressions of each of the most recent Zynga releases.

FarmVille is by far the fastest growing and in general has been able to maintain its growth. The successive titles of Café World, FishVille and PetVille all appear to have smaller initial trajectories and then to plateau at a certain level, each one slightly below the former release.

This is reminiscent of the casual download space, where a developer would release a genre-defining title, like Diner Dash, and then churn out successive titles based on that mechanic. Each one had some initial huge boost in interest and sales, but over time the games held user interest (in terms of spending money to buy the title) for shorter periods of time and typically at a lesser number of units.

It is still early in the social games life cycle and the numbers for these games are still in their early stages and it’s probably too early to say they are on their decline – Café World only Monday released achievements in the game, which based on examples of Mafia Wars and FarmVille helped boost the sticky factors in each game.

If the casual download game space can provide any insight on this trend, it will come the week after Christmas. Once Christmas is passed and users break out new computers or have holiday money to spend, the sales of PC download games usually rebound – and I’d expect the DAU for top games to start their upward swing again.

And if the numbers don’t rebound? We may get some interesting insights into the life cycle of a social game.