Review: Question of the Day

This #VoiceGame is a classic trivia quiz game — But it’s implemented so well that it is one of the three most popoular game Skills overall, and the most popular one in its sub-category. In my opinion, it is also the one that is most thoroughly designed for retention, and a fine example for In-Skill Purchasing… But let’s dive in and see what the game is about!

Alright — So, what is the game about?

As mention in the introduction, ‘Question of the Day’ (henceforth abbreviated as ‘QotD’) is a trivia quiz game, in which you get a question and have to pick the right one among four different answers. In my personal map of voice games, I’d describe this sub-category of game (along with popular variants like ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’) as a ‘closed’ trivia quiz game, because it has a closed set of answers — In contrast with ‘open’ trivia quiz games like Jeopardy or ‘Song Quiz’, where you have to name the answer un-aidedly from an open set of possible solutions.
In this sub-category, which is at the core of the trivia quiz landscape, ‘QotD’ is in fact the Alexa Skill with the most customer reviews and an excellent average rating, which definitely makes it worth taking a closer look!

Whereas most closed trivia quiz games do not limit the number of rounds you can play, ‘QutD’ offers only a single question per day, plus a bonus question that you can unlock by answering the main question correctly.

Wait, what? But that allows for a maximum of one session with three interactions per day. How can you possibly build engagement here?

Great question — The game is not intended and designed to be immersive in the same way as interactive stories or multiplayer games.
Even though it’s hard to draw a clear line between retention and engagement factors, there are two ‘hooks’ that belong more to the latter group:

• Interesting questions
  The questions come in different categories like history, sports and general knowledge, and I would say their difficulty level is at roughly the $ 8,000 level of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’, with most (~80%)questions within the ‘reasonably certain’ certain range — But still challenging enough to make you feel smart if you solved them correctly.
• Informative resolution
  Whether or not you guessed correctly, you receive one or two sentences of information about the right answer, and thereby improve your general knowledge.
• Ratio of correct guesses
  Irrespective of whether you answered correctly, the game informs you about the percentage of users that got the respective answer right — This is a powerful form of feedback, as we’ve also seen in ‘Would You Rather…? For Family’, and for me personally the most interesting piece of information (it seems the US audience has a surprisingly good grasp of modern European history and culture, but less so for classical and ancient times).
• Chance to receive the bonus question
  Since the bonus question makes 100% difference in the amount of questions you get, the stakes are quite high for the main question, and you care more about getting it right.
  Hm, I need to update this before I even published this review: Right now, I received the bonus question despite not having answered the first question correctly. So: An optional bonus question is no engagement factor that the game currently uses, but I’m reasonably sure that it did at some point, and I really like the idea.

Well, that’s quite a number of factors for a game that’s ‘not designed for engagement’. Should I dare and ask about retention factors, then?

Yes, please! Let’s get right to the point:

• Collecting points
  Each question is worth one to ten points, according to how difficult it is, and you accumulate these points over time. Some days are ‘double point days’, where a correct answer is worth twice its original points. I’m not actually sure if ‘double point days’ are the same for everyone, since an individual timing would make an excellent mechanism for encouraging occasional or disengaging users to play more consistently.
  The points have only a ‘trophy’ value, and are not useful in the game. Makes me wonder if it would increase retention if users could use points to ‘buy’ extra questions or a joker (like eliminating one of the four possible answers)…?
• Badges
  For each correct answer, you earn a badge in the questions’s category — For example, answering a general knowledge question correctly prompts a text ‘Congratulations! You’ve earned your third general knowledge badge!’.
  Currently, there’s no way to view your badges… The next level for this retention factor would be to offer a website (like with Panda Rescue) where you can view your points and badges , and actually have a global highscore of points.
• Streaks
  If you answer a number of consecutive questions correctly, the game will gladly inform you about it, and encourages you to keep going. It’s certainly not much of a factor when you have below ten points, but once you have a streak of, say, 20, you might feel compelled to go back and push your personal record a bit further. In other words: It’s a smart way to build long-term motivation, especially for players that have more points and badges than they might care about.

We’re slowly leaving the realm of retention factors that are built into the game, and enter the ones built around it.

• Social media presence
  At some points, ‘QotD’ tells you to find and like it on facebook (where it has an impressive 3.5K followership), and to follow its Twitter account (which has 340 followers to date). This is a smart move, in so far as people check their favorite social media several times per day, and thus receive an external trigger to play the game.
  Of course, how effective this factor is depends on the quality of the content that is pushed into this channels, but it looks pretty good to me.
• Habit forming
  The game checks whether you’re playing in the morning or in the evening, and accordingly suggests to ‘stimulate your brain every day’ by incorporating ‘QotD’ into your daily routine. It’s just a sentence that Alexa says during the game, but it got me thinking that this should be something every game developer (for voice or other modalities) should strive for: To accompany the player through at least some days of their lifes, and to continuously provide value (including diversion and entertainment).
  ‘QutD’ makes a solid effort on this, and my impression is that this effort is received well and rewarded by the users.

Speaking of ‘rewarding’ — You mentioned that the game has In-Skill Purchases. Can you tell us more about that?

Absolutely! The game has a premium version called the ‘Genius Edition’, which unlocks three more questions per day, and a new ‘genius’ badge that you get for answering all five questions of the day correctly.
(Remember that I wondered above why since recently, the bonus question comes for free and doesn’t need to be earned by answering the main question correctly? It makes a lot of sense with the genius edition, where you pay for additional bonus questions. Imagine the churn if people pay for extra questions and then can’t access them!)

The game not pushy about making you go premium — As far as I could tell, it offers the upgrade only a single time in a regular session, and then whenever you’re invoking the game after you’ve already used up your daily question: ‘Want to keep playing? Now you can receive 3 bonus questions ad additional content every day by subscribing to the Question of the Day Genius Edition. Would you like to learn more?’
If you answer with ‘Yes’, Alexa will tell you that the subscription costs USD 1.23, ending with another yes-no-prompt.

Nice! Alright, any closing remarks?

Why not? As I’ve said before, I’m personally not much of a fan of the trivia/guessing game category of #VoiceGames, but it’s fascinating to see how differently the basic concept of a quiz can be implemented as a game. ‘QotD’ is built for the ‘less is more’ use case of a habit-forming brain exercise, and fills that niche very well. With a full spectrum of retention factors, it offers quite some inspiration for all kinds of voice games.

What’s your take on ‘Question of the Day’? What do you particularly like about the game, or where do you think it could be even better? Is there any point on which you disagree with my analysis? Looking forward to discussing things here or on Twitter!