Casual Connect 2013: D180 is the Mark of Quality

by Aaron Loeb, VP, EA Mobile

·         Summary: The most important metric is day 180 retention, so build long-term engagement with your players. The Simpsons Tapped Out  achieved this by following the core values laid out by the Simpsons franchise, putting the player first and delivering high quality.

·         EA worked with Gracie Films to make The Simpsons Tapped Out. The four core values of the franchise are that creative leads business, treat everyone the same, make it great or don’t do it, and remain true to the show. Translations of these values to a game development team were worrying. Does it mean to give stuff away, not run A/B tests, and release “perfect” features without later iterations on them?

·         Creative leads business. Content for The Simpsons Tapped Out was planned 12 months in advance and the team worked on content 6 months ahead. All the content went through multiple passes with the show writers. There were very few sales and merchandising was muted. They followed a fun-driven design and ensured that the game lived up to Simpsons quality.

·         Long-term retention enables community. The game team took over the Facebook page and regularly engages with the players.

·         Non-paying users were not treated as freeloaders and the game never bugged them to purchase.

·         Lessons – build long-term engagement with players, listen and know what matters to customers, quantify services and be ready to respond, build a system that tracks and graphs out where people are complaining about, get the whole team involved, little mistakes can have big impacts (ie. a 6-second increase in load time caused hundreds of thousands of players to drop).

·         When the team knows the data, they will give you their brains.

·         It’s monstrously expensive to get into the top free charts, so make friends with Apple and get editorial placement.

Casual Connect 2013: The 5 Most Common Mistakes in Free-to-Play and How to Avoid Them

by Chris Williams, VP/GM, Big Fish

·         Abstract: This talk covers the 5 common mistakes made in terms of development, engagement, monetization, analytics, and notifications, as well as the best practices to avoid them.

·         Development mistake – Plan 2-3 weeks of live beta before launch, and update every 4-6 weeks.

o    Best practice – perform a 3 month live beta with server functionality for rapid pre-launch iteration.

o    Do rapid updates to logic, difficulty, economy (payouts, daily bonuses, starting balances), and tournaments. Do hundreds of server changes with minimal client updates.

o    Operate your game as a host of your users and their friends at an event. Communicate and moderate the game on a daily basis. It’s not a monthly cadence.

·         Engagement mistake – Design your game content for users who are playing 2-3 times per day.

o    Best practice – Be prepared for your most active users to play much more frequently.

o    Dedicated users will be playing between 20 to 30 times a day. Include enough content and evergreen mechanics that will survive content burn. Always have an evergreen loop, which does not have to be the primary loop.

·         Monetization mistake – Add virtual currency and virtual items and expect users to spend money.

o    Fairway Solitaire is the world’s leading F2P iOS solitaire game. It has virtual currency and sells customized cards, and made a total of $0.

o    Best practice – Clearly communicate the gameplay value of the virtual item to the player. Users need to find an emotional value in their in-app purchases.

o    From most practical to most emotion, the types of items you can sell are…

§  Return on investment

§  Time and convenience

§  Pride and status

§  Luck and probability

§  Rare and scarce

·         Analytics mistake – Focus on just a few standard high level metrics to measure game performance, such as average revenue per user and daily active users.

o    Best practice – establish custom metrics that accurately reflect the health of your game. Pay attention to things like number of boosts used per game.

·         Notifications mistake – Be cautious with how often you message your users to avoid irritating them.

o    Best practice – Message your users daily with exciting, relevant, and targeted information. If they turn off notifications, the next time they log in, remind them of the things they’ve missed while away so that they will want to turn back their notifications on.

Casual Connect 2013: Community Building in Free-to-Play Games: Beyond Whale Hunting

moderated by Mike Thompson, Creative Writer, 5^th Planet Games

·         Summary: Constantly talk to your users and give them a platform to talk to each other, run creative contests to engage fans who aren’t the hardcore gamers, and be careful about talking about future content.

·         Panelists include Robert Winkler (CEO, 5^th Planet Games), Mike Sego (Gaming Entrepeneur), Ken Seto (CEO & Founder, Massive Damage), Josh Nilson (COO & Co-founder, East Side Games), and Bryan Mashinter (Producer, Backflip Studios).

·         Build the community by incentivizing posting and engaging fans so that they feel like they’re building the game with you. Talk to your users and give them a platform to talk to each other, such as a forum or a live chat. Let the ragers and haters know there is someone else on the other side, and they’ll usually act more polite.

·         Allow them to play with the game when they’re not playing the game. Extend the content of the game outside the screen. Games should stand on their own and have a community outside of its platform. Give shout outs to fan sites.

·         It’s okay to A/B test even with live chats. People generally don’t chat about how much money they spend so they won’t expose the A/B testing. Even if they do, it’s okay. Be honest with your players and let them know what you’re doing.

·         Have volunteer moderators and allow the forums to be self-policing. Volunteers often become your first-line champions and evangelists.

·         If you have the money, have player councils and fly all these special players out to the office to have group meetings with the team.

·         Sometimes a community is passionate about a game, but it doesn’t mean it transfers to another title the company is making.

·         Don’t speak about upcoming features because people take it as a promise and will get upset if the feature is ever cut later. If you say something is “coming soon,” it should mean that it’s coming in the next 24 hours.

·         Have a thick skin against haters. Embrace your mistakes, apologize, and make up for it. Be creative and turn your failures and bugs into features.

·         There are currently two types of monetization methods – monetize those who want to decorate and monetize those who are impatient. In the future, we will monetize people who want to help other players. We will get smarter about the LTV of non-paying users who are generally great word-of-mouth.

·         Run silly contests like costume contests and singing competitions. This will convert people to your forums and will engage fans who aren’t into leaderboards.

·         Give people virtual currency or achievement for posting in the forums.

Casual Connect 2013: Balancing Fun vs. Monetization: Translating Traditional Game Philosophies into Effective Monetization Strategies

by Gary Gattis, CEO, Spacetime Studios

·         Summary: Don’t use pay walls, go cross-platform, find where purchasing points are and accelerate players to that point, and split your app into a small download and a big patch download on first play.

·         Spacetime Studios currently has 35 employees. Then spent 3 years building a space-themed MMO called Blackstar which was eventually cancelled, then some games for Disney which were also cancelled. The company moved into iOS games, making a lot of small unsuccessful games such as Dreadmill, Shotgun Granny, and Zombie Weatherman. They finally developed Pocket Legends, which was their first hit.

·         Don’t wall off the fun. Pocket Legends initially had pay walls, preventing players from progressing on the map until they purchased an unlock. It was a good source of revenue, but the player numbers dropped off dramatically. They removed the pay wall and the average playtime per player doubled, and revenue of items increased.

·         Expand your horizons. They later launched Star Legends, a reskin of Pocket Legends, and they went cross-platform. They let players play with anyone, anywhere, anytime. They cultivated partnerships with Apple, Google, Verizon, and Sony and were able to increase their acquisition.

·         Manage your funnel. They later launched Dark Legends and focused on retention. Find the money in the fun. People were making purchases on levels 7-13, so they decreased the XP curve to get all players to those levels faster.

·         People are more likely to sit through a patch than a download. Decrease the size of your app and do a first-time patch to complete the download when the players launch the game.

Casual Connect 2013: Adapting Mid-Core Gameplay to Casual Platforms

by Mike Goslin, General Manager, Rebel Entertainment

·         Summary: To make a successful mid-core game, your game needs to support evergreen content (user-generated content, PvP), challenge with stats (leaderboards, player matching), and social features (guilds, forum).

·         Mike started his career bringing casual games to hardcore platforms, but has since been working on the opposite.

·         The three tenets of mid-core gameplay to focus on are…

1.     Time – core gamers play more and faster than a casual gamer, so they’ll chew through game content really quickly. Trying to add new content to keep up will end in a perpetually losing race. Some solutions to this are to add an RPG treadmill (but this may be boring), include user-generated content, and add competitive PvP. In terms of operations, your infrastructure should support persistence, multiplayer, and moderation of user-created content and online multiplayer.

2.     Challenge – challenge is often split between your core and casual players. Core players want difficulty right away, while casual players need easy levels upfront to guide them into the game. The trick is to make your game easy to learn and difficult to master. Include leaderboards (both global and with friends), player matching, and real-time stats.

3.     Community – guilds will extend the lifetime of your game dramatically. You will need strong community management and moderation.

·         Theme matters. Your game has to look like it’s for the audience or they won’t even try it.

·         The major pitfall of core games on mobile is the lack of reach. However, core gamers will eventually move into the space and it’s worth making games for them since they have higher LTV.

·         Cross-platform real-time multiplayer for twitch-based games are tough. If you don’t have the infrastructure, you need to make your game turn-based or not cross-platform.

·         Don’t shove leaderboards into player’s faces because it will turn some casual players off.