{"id":477,"date":"2009-10-28T12:09:27","date_gmt":"2009-10-28T14:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/?p=477"},"modified":"2018-12-08T20:06:53","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T01:06:53","slug":"the-sticky-factor-creating-a-benchmark-for-social-gaming-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/2009\/10\/28\/the-sticky-factor-creating-a-benchmark-for-social-gaming-success\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sticky Factor: Creating a Benchmark for Social Gaming Success"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The concept is straight forward \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t come back. A step further in this analysis is something I call the Social Game Sticky Factor \u2122 (DAU\/MAU) which allows you to benchmark applications\u2019 ability to retain their users.<\/p>\n<p>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).<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.insidefacebook.com\/2009\/10\/23\/facebook-changing-feed-story-image-specs-deprecating-some-feed-apis\/\">several changes to the news feed being rolled out on Friday<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>In the past I\u2019ve looked at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/2009\/08\/04\/benchmarking-your-facebook-application-how-engaging-is-it\/\">top developers and their average sticky factors<\/a>, but let\u2019s break that down by game and over time to look at game-specific insights:<\/p>\n<p><em>[Edit December 2018 &#8211; at this point this post pointed to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.insidesocialgames.com\/2009\/10\/27\/the-sticky-factor-creating-a-benchmark-for-social-gaming-success\/\">InsideSocialGames.com<\/a> where the post first lived (but that domain is no longer alive and the content was snapped up by Ad Week <a href=\"https:\/\/www.adweek.com\/digital\/the-sticky-factor-creating-a-benchmark-for-social-gaming-success\/\">here<\/a>\u00a0(but the images are gone).\u00a0 As you never can tell what will actually live forever on the internet, I&#8217;m going to post the rest of the post here for posterity (alas my graph for fish-sim-sticky-factor is gone)]<\/em><\/p>\n<h3>Zynga<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/zynga-sticky-factor.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-995 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/zynga-sticky-factor.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"352\" data-wp-pid=\"995\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/zynga-sticky-factor.png 500w, http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/zynga-sticky-factor-300x211.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some highlights looking at the Social Game Sticky Factor for Zynga\u2019s top games over the last 12 months:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You can see that all of Zynga\u2019s older games (Mafia Wars, Texas Hold\u2019em and YoVille) have steadily increased their Social Games Sticky Factor over the last year from the mid teens to the mid-to-lower 20s.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>New games like FarmVille, Roller Coaster Kingdom and Caf\u00e9 World often have very high Social Game Sticky Factors in the early weeks before settling to some sort of equilibrium<\/li>\n<li>Roller Coaster Kingdom sunk below 15% post launch and then the game mechanic was altered (to a more\u00a0\u201cappointment gaming\u201d 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.<\/li>\n<li>We are still waiting to see where the natural Social Games Sticky Factors will lie for both Caf\u00e9 World and Roller Coaster Kingdom, but it looks like they will be 30% and 20% respectively<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Playfish<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/eric\/images\/playfish-sticky-factor.jpg\" align=\"center\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Now let\u2019s take a look at the 2nd largest Facebook game developer, Playfish:<\/p>\n<div id=\"page-2\">\n<p>Some key points over the last 12 moths:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>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 \u201ccross-promotion-cannibalization\u201d of its playing base with FarmVille and Mafia Wars.<\/li>\n<li>New farm sim game Country Story looks like it\u2019s 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Fish Sim Genre<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7689 lazyloading\" title=\"fish-sim-sticky-factor\" src=\"http:\/\/www.insidesocialgames.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/fish-sim-sticky-factor.jpg\" alt=\"fish-sim-sticky-factor\" width=\"500\" height=\"413\" data-was-processed=\"true\" \/><\/p>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<p>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 (\u00e0 la Zynga and Playfish) that seems to be shared with the #13 game, \u958b\u5fc3\u8fb2\u5834 (Happy Harvest), that I first noticed around September 30th, when you can see My Fishbowl\u2019s Social Game Sticky Factor stabilized and since has grown.<\/p>\n<h3>Is a 15% Social Game Sticky Factor the Tipping Point?<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>While there is a correlation of stickiness to monetization, I\u2019m not suggesting that there aren\u2019t 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\u2019t going to make money. But I would suggest it\u2019s improbable you\u2019ll make money from a social game that no one continues to play.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"float: left; margin-right: 10px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/share\" class=\"twitter-share-button\" data-count=\"vertical\" data-url=\"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/2009\/10\/28\/the-sticky-factor-creating-a-benchmark-for-social-gaming-success\/\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The concept is straight forward \u2013 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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/2009\/10\/28\/the-sticky-factor-creating-a-benchmark-for-social-gaming-success\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Sticky Factor: Creating a Benchmark for Social Gaming Success<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[94,48,110,47],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1016,"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions\/1016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.voncoelln.com\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}