High-level success factors for voice games

Before we get into the question of what makes a voice game successful, we should first get a common idea of what success means.
For example, you might define success as publishing a voice game at all, creating an app that you yourself enjoy, getting 100 users in the first 30 days after release to get the full Amazon dev swag, or getting paid by Amazon. Each of these are legitimate goals (for me just as well), but for the sake of this article, let’s define success as usage, and usage as the number of utterances per unit of time. You’ll see in a minute why using the number of unique users or sessions instead would introduce a bias.

Given this definition, everything that contributes to your voice game’s usage is a success factor. So let’s analyze where usage comes from:

• New users discovering your game and giving it a try. Let’s call this Discoverability.
• Users are currently playing your game and are compelled to do one more round/turn/try. This is Engagement.
• Users have played your game before, and come back to play it again. That’s Retention.

So, to make a successful game, you need to make it easily discoverable, engaging and ‘sticky’.
Alright, so far this article has maybe been mildly insightful, but not helpful to you. What you hoped for was learning about how to maximize each of these? Right, please read on!

Building Discoverability of your voice game happens mainly outside of the actual game, and is not so much of my personal focus. There’s a nice article on the Alexa Developer blog on how to promote your Alexa Skill, which I’m not going to summarize here. From my perspective, your biggest levers are

• A compelling theme. It’s great if your game is built around something that your audience loves (or at least has positive associations with), and very difficult if you have competitor games using the same theme. Trivia quiz and fact games for specific series and movies are good examples for this, but broader themes like Kevin Marshall’s Football Mania can also work.
• A catchy icon. Even in the #VoiceFirst world, users are guided by visual impressions. A nice example of an Alexa Skill whose delightful icon certainly contributed to its success is Alexey Vidanov’s Little Red Riding Hood
• Positive reviews. While it’s obvious that positive reviews provide an attractive social proof, you can’t do too much in this regard. Amazon’s review policy prohibits reviewing the content of your friends and relatives — You might try your luck, but you risk getting your game blocked. Asking users for positive reviews is a common practice in all voice apps, but the conversion rate is very low.
• Promoting via your social network. The efficiency of this directly correlates to your reach. Typically, campaigning your game in your social network will get you some temporary uplift, but nothing sustainable. This might be most useful when you actually release your voice game, to give you a push in the ‘featured’ ranking. If you’re ambitious, you can try to build a fanbase/commnity around your game, like ‘The Magic Door’.

Engagement and retention are closely related — Both are about providing value to your customer, and everything that makes a game engaging automatically contributes to its ability to retain its users. However, there are some retention-specific factors that I’ll cover below. Here are some ideas about what you can do to keep customers engaged once they’re playing your game:

• Pique curiosity. Make your users interested in exploring different options you have in the game. This is the basic concept of both interactive stories like Katie Ernst’s Select a Story and quiz games like Would You Rather
• Reward progress. That’s the ‘stickyness’ formula: Let the user continually build something valuable to them. This could be points, badges, or their own castle like in jjaquinta’s Six Swords.
• Appeal to ambition. Make your users want to find the solution, beat that opponent (or their old record), or rise in the leaderboard.
• Reduce friction. This should be your first priority, because a frustrating user experience devaluates all other game features and gets you in danger of getting negative reviews. I won’t go into details here, but optimizing voice UX will be a big part of this blog in general.
• Delight and surprise. This is all about details that make your game experience stand out, for example sound effects, speechcons, praise and burns from the voice assistant, custom voices, visual content and so on. You should think of such elements like a spice: Too much of it will make the overall experience irritating.

As noted above,engaging games automatically have a high degree of retention — Except when the content is quickly depleted or fully explored. Here are some options of how to increase the retention of an engaging game:

• Build a habit. This is the domain of entertainment and utility voice apps, but there’s no reason not to try: Encourage your users to play your game in a recurring situation, like during TV advertisements or after dinner with the family.
• Provide fresh content on a daily basis. This only makes sense for certain types of games, especially trivia quiz games like Joel Wilson’s Question of the Day.
• Reward retention. This sounds blunt, but can be done nicely. Provide badges, points, perks or simply praise for streaks or re-activation.

I hope this article has given you some ideas how to optimize your voice game for maximum usage. Is there something I forgot, or a creative way to increase usage that you encountered? I look forward to your comments! :)