The Three Pillars of a Successful Social Game

If you search the App Store or Google Play you will find many free fun games that capture your attention for an hour or so. Most of them will have been downloaded only a handful of times. The lucky few that have chart success will do so only fleetingly and will vanish from sight within days or weeks.

These are well designed and implemented games, often with original ideas and carefully crafted user experiences. So why do they fail to achieve long term success?

How do you go about creating a game that will go beyond being a flash in the pan or worse still, never be downloaded by anyone outside of your circle of friends and family?

The mantra of the successful game creator is three simple words:

ACQUISITION - RETENTION - MONETISATION

These concepts must be borne in mind throughout the entire process of designing and creating the game, they must be baked into the game, not added as an afterthought.

What do they mean? Here is a very brief overview of these core concepts:

Acquisition - Acquiring new (first time) users

So you've asked your friends to play your game and pass on the word. You might get some of their friends to try it too. And that is where it ends.

There are two main options for going beyond personally begging each new player to try your masterpiece:

Paid Acquisition

Buying players through various advertising routes is valid, but increasingly expensive. It is absolutely vital that the other pillars are very strong, so that the value you get from a user is at least as much as you paid for them in the first place.

Organic Acquisition

Go beyond asking your friends to spread the word for you - make them want to.  A 'share this' button is fine, but how many people spontaneously decide to click on it? If they love your game they will just want to carry on playing, if they don't then they wouldn't share it anyway. 

You need a more compelling reason for players to recruit new blood into your game.

Multi-player - challenge friends to play with you (or against you) as a core element of the game.

Reward invites - give the player in-app items for recruiting their friends.

Retention - Keeping users coming back

You've acquired a user. They play the game until they get stuck, dinner's ready or their favourite TV program comes on. Then they never come back.

How do you retain a user past their first play of your game?

User investment - each game session adds to a player's investment through collecting or building in app items, or progressing through levels.

Re-engagement - bring users back to the game with push notifications that tell them about daily bonuses or their friend's activity in the game.

Monetisation - We all need to eat

Unless you are filthy rich or a hobbyist, then you are making a game for financial gain. There are different options here too. Beware though, that monetising will adversely affect both acquisition and retention. This needs careful balancing and tuning.

Paid Apps

Each user pays their 99 cents to download your game. It's simple, and the user has the peace of mind that they won't be pestered by adverts or In-App Purchases. (If you really want to kill retention, you could put ads or IAPs into your paid app and watch all the 1 star reviews flooding in...)

However, a user needs to know that your game is worth paying before ahead of downloading it. Unless you're writing FIFA or Minecraft then this is likely to be a poor choice.

In-App Purchases (IAPs)

Offer your user something within the game for a small payment. This removes the barrier to downloading the game of having to part with money up front. 

Advertising

Put ads in your game - just not too many. Prior to being taken down, Flappy Bird allegedly made $50k per day from advertising alone.

I will explore each of these concepts in more depth in future posts.

Dave Walker is a director at Oak Games Ltd and creator of Odd Socks on Facebook and mobile.