Tag Archives: Roller Coaster Kingdom

Social Media, Uncategorized

Developers Revamp Viral Marketing Tactics to Comply with Changes to Facebook Policies

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As originally posted on InsideSocialGames.com

While we recently attributed some of the across-the-board declines in daily active user numbers for Facebook games to seasonality, it’s becoming clearer that recent policy changes by Facebook may be contributing to these declines as well, forcing developers to completely revamp their viral activities. Here are three viral practices that have been reined in and examples of how developers are attempting to cope with the changes.

Pre-Game Gifting Interstitial Screens are Gone

The policy:”You must not prompt users to send invitations, requests, generate notifications, or use other Facebook communication channels immediately after a user allows access or returns to your application.”

How developers are coping: This was viral-marketing 101 for nearly every Facebook game: every time you went to the application, you first had to go through a “gifting” screen before you could actually play the game. Only Playfish refrained from this practice in the past. Now that it’s been taken out of the arsenal, developers like Zynga and CrowdStar are trying different ways of getting users to get back in the gifting habit. Most games have opted to add an icon on top of the game play area, specifically prompting users to send gifts, like in CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium and Zynga’s Roller Coaster Kingdom:

Zynga’s PetVille has incorporated the gift icon into the basic navigation on the screen, with little balloons that highlight an action they want users to take:

Zynga’s Mafia Wars is more aggressively integrating prompts and banners into the page:

And still, some games still have the gift interstitial, but they are generally smaller games, like Hive7’s Youtopia, which Facebook might not have gotten to yet:

Pop-Ups to Prompt Users to Share Achievements…Revamped

The policy: “You must not display a Feed form unless a user has explicitly indicated an intention to share that content, by clicking a button or checking a box that clearly explains their content will be shared.”

How developers are coping: Instead of the standard Facebook news feed form windows popping up, each game is experimenting with different in-game prompts that users need to activate to show their intent to publish to their wall. PetVille prompts users by having a new icon show up in the bottom right, with a balloon prompting users to share:

Playfish’s Pet Society has a somewhat confusing choice between a sharing icon and a green check mark icon (used to close the in-game pop-up and NOT share), whereas Farm Town by SlashKey prompts with a simple binary choice of either sharing (green check icon) or not (red X icon):

CrowdStar’s Happy Pets uses the check-box approach – although the prompt is by default pre-checked to share so the user must un-check it before clicking on the green check mark icon:

Gating Content Based on Number of Friends…Not Enforced?

The policy: “You must not provide users with rewards or gate content from users based on their number of friends who use your application.”

How developers are coping: This common developer practice often prompted users to request perfect strangers to “Add Me” so that they could unlock levels or items in the game without having to pay for them, thus running amok of Facebook’s intent to keep your social graph strictly to your direct friends (we recently offered up an alternative). In response to the policy being enforced, Treasure Madness by zSlide no longer requires you to have a number of friends to dig under certain heavy rocks. Instead, they now make users pay for “contractors” at 150 in-game gold pieces per contractor. So a rock that would have required 10 friends to lift, now requires 1500 gold pieces:

Yet it’s still a question as to how intense Facebook plans to enforce this policy. For example, Zynga’s Roller Coaster Kingdom still appears to be gating items based on the number of friends, gating the options for booking guests, upgrading park attractions and for expanding the amusement park area:

We fully expect these policy changes to have an impact on growth and retention rates as developers adjust their viral marketing tactics to comply. But with the seasonal impact of people getting away from their computers to celebrate the holidays, plus developers quickly reacting and optimizing new tactics, it may take several weeks to fully understand just how severe the impact of these changes will be on growth and retention rates.

Casual Games

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

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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.

Casual Games

Is Appointment Gaming Where the Money Is?

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When 36% of American households have a DVR, the age of “appointment television” – being home at an appointed hour to watch a show live – is clearly waning. Yet with recent changes to Roller Coaster Kingdom and the launch of Café World in the last week, Zynga appears to be doubling down on the “Appointment Gaming” mechanism of FarmVille.

Roller Coaster Kingdom – a sim game where you run an amusement park somewhat similar to Rollercoaster Tycoon although without the fun of building the coasters yourself – came out July 31st in beta, went through a great deal of fixes, and then on September 23rd rolled out a change to the basic game mechanic. Instead of guests coming to users’ amusement parks randomly based on park popularity, they had to “book tours,” wait for the buses to arrive, and greet them at the park or, according to the post by the developers, “If you do not meet and greet your guests in a timely fashion, they will become crabby and leave.”

Similarly, with the release of Café World just last week, you have to select dishes to serve to your restaurant patrons, prepare it and wait (anywhere from five minutes to two days) for it to be cooked. If you don’t serve it in a timely fashion, the food spoils (the 5 minute to make bacon cheeseburger lasts about 5 minutes before it goes rotten; the hour-to-make Tikka Masal Kabobs last about an hour and 15 minutes).

This is not hugely different from the game mechanic of FarmVille, where crops spoil if not harvested in time. So while it’s hard to argue with the success of FarmVille, it’s also hard to ignore the response from the users of Roller Coaster Kingdom since the game was modified:

  • “I think the whole booking a tour bus is stupid.. now you want me to plan my life around a game… I gotta be here at certain times just so i can keep playing…”
  • “I get bored waiting for the tours to get to my park because I didnt schedule them correctly. Needs to be a way of getting guests while you are waiting for tours.”
  • “Its no longer fun now that you have to book things. What made it fun was getting more people to come to the best park”

This takes the game from a more casual play, to a much more involved one. On TV, users see what is on and if nothing good is on, they go to their DVRs to find something to watch; Using Facebook is somewhat similar, where users see what their friends are up to, and then might dive into a quick game. For the most part, the social games offer that release, but with these sim games, you are forced to check in within a certain time.

In addition there doesn’t appear to be anything to do in between waiting for things. While you wait for dishes to cook, customers come in and leave in Café World; in Roller Coaster Kingdom the amusement park just sits their empty, with no one riding or walking through the park. Compare this to Zynga’s other big hit, Mafia Wars, where you may have to wait a couple minutes to get more stamina to fight, or for energy to rebuild, but you can pretty much count on being able to do something if you happen to log in every 3 or 4 hours. Even in FarmTown there are often trees to harvest or animals to collect things from while you wait for crops to grow.

If appointment TV is dying, why is Zynga putting marketing muscle behind two games that require this scheduling? Both games got placed in the Zynga toolbar atop FarmVille and Mafia Wars over the weekend, driving huge increases in traffic: Roller Coaster Kingdom jumped from 860K to 1.67 million daily active users in a day while Café World (with a healthy helping of Facebook ads) jumped from 250K daily users to over 2.7 million and into the top ten applications on Facebook in just two days.

I can only guess that when Zynga compared the monetization metrics of a more free-flow Roller Coaster Kingdom experience to those of the more scheduling-based game play of FarmVille, the users who ended up really investing time in scheduling were the ones that Zynga could better monetize. While an engaged user is in most cases easier to monetize, I think it’s equally important to ensure there is some joy there whenever the user can spare 15 minutes to go check on the game – otherwise you may only end up monetizing a small niche of users and hurt your opportunity to reach the masses.