Building successful games with a players first approach
How Jagex took their Old School and Runescape game franchises to mobile — part of the Apps, Games, & Insights podcast
Listen to Google’s Apps, Games, & Insights podcast to hear Ben Clarke talk more about finding success for your games business.
As the Senior Global Marketing Director at Jagex, I oversee the User Acquisition, Product Marketing, and Creative Services teams. I’ve been working in mobile gaming for over 12 years and have worked on some of the biggest franchises in gaming.
Over their 19-year history, Old School RuneScape and Runescape have been played by over 270 million people. This created both opportunities and challenges when we started the journey to mobile: we would have no shortage of potential players but great expectations to fulfill.
In this post I’ll share some of the approaches we used to launch Old School RuneScape on mobile.
Launching on mobile
Our first step, after announcing that we were bringing Old School Runescape to mobile, was to get prototypes into players’ hands as soon as possible. We wanted to validate the core gameplay experience quickly and discover what players enjoyed doing on-device and what they didn’t enjoy. That way, we could fix any issues with the experience, with the goal of giving players something that feels no different from playing on a PC.
We already had a close relationship with our players, constantly talking with them and involving the community in assessing new gameplay concepts. So this early research into mobile was just an extension of that.
We ran the early prototypes as a closed beta for close to 9 months, to help define our minimum viable product (MVP) for mobile. During the process, we sought feedback with questionnaires and an onsite research group. This was followed by an open beta that we ran for about 6 months, followed by 6 months in soft launch.
Switching monetization to mobile
Old School for PC is monetized through subscriptions. In addition to purchasing subscriptions with hard currency, players can enable subscriptions using the in-game currency — called Bonds. Bonds is normally used to buy and trade items within the game.
For Runescape, we have a mix of subscriptions and microtransactions.
Subscriptions are becoming more prominent on mobile, but not necessarily in games. Therefore, the key to making subscriptions work on mobile is communicating the value proposition and consumer benefits of the subscription up front. Our focus is on driving first-time payer conversion. To get this right, we ran many different tests on mobile to find the best way to communicate with players.
One difference between PC and mobile is how, on mobile, we front-load with free trials and introductory pricing, using those as a way to help people understand the value of paid subscription.
Focus on retention
The mobile games space is very competitive. The big players have large marketing budgets and will easily outbid you. This makes acquisition a challenge. Therefore our main focus is on retaining players.
We look for ways we can optimize the funnel to keep people in the game and communicate what a great experience they will have. So, for example, we might look at people who have played for 10 hours but haven’t gone past a certain point in the game. Then we send them a message with tips about how to proceed or, perhaps, information that we are running a tournament this weekend.
When players get to around 20 hours in the game we look at using personas and segmentation, because by that time we can identify the different ways someone is playing the game. By understanding their playstyle and engagement, and assigning players to one of our four personas, we can ensure that they receive the relevant type of communications.
Retaining veteran players is more about loyalty: highlighting things that they haven’t completed in-game yet and the content they can experience if, for example, they go to a different part of the in-game map they can play our latest Darkmeyer update.
We’ve also found video is a particularly effective communication tool. We have weekly developer live streams where we talk about the cool stuff that’s launching in the future and distribute on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. We focus a lot on social channels and community and also utilize the in-game Lobby to update players on new content and events. Consumers aren’t always time rich and they are playing multiple games, so effectively surfacing your liveops and the value proposition is key.
Involve players on gaming decisions
For us, an important part of player retention is ensuring they feel involved in the games. One way we do this in Old School RuneScape, is through the player poll voting system within the games. When there is a significant new feature or piece of content we want to add to the game, we put that to the player poll — players actually go to a polling booth in the game. If 75 percent of the players vote for the feature or content, we add it to the game.
What’s really interesting about this voting system is that we see how much the players are invested in our game and really care about the product while giving the feeling like it’s their game. We think that’s the unique selling proposition (USP) for Jagex, showing how player-focused we are and that we can create a better game collectively with our players. We also see that this has an impact on retention as well.
Part of the reason this polling system is so successful is that it builds on our constant interaction with the player community to find out what new features they want in the games.
However, this isn’t to say that we don’t create a product roadmap designed to improve our core metrics. The challenge is finding that sweet spot between being player focused and data-driven. And there’s no science to this, it’s about being diligent and executing in the best way you can.
Winning back lapsed players
We’re always looking at ways to win back our lapsed players — somebody who was previously in paid membership that hasn’t been in paid membership for the last 30 days — through a mix of paid user acquisition, social & community and CRM and using billing offers to incentivize players to come back and play and pay.
When it comes to promotional offers or subscription hooks to encourage people back into paid membership, we’ve tried and tested about 150 different types of billing offers over our 19-year history so have plenty of options to consider for mobile.
However, within Jagex, we say that players never really leave Runescape there just Away From Keyboard (AFK). People stop playing for two years, then come back and play for a year or two before lapsing again. It’s quite unique compared to other games and is driven by the vast amount of content we have in-game and players’ appetite to max their skills levels.
Global monetization
Old School and Runescape are massively multiplayer online games and because of this we don’t localize gameplay mechanics as it would unbalance the game. However, we do monetize slightly differently between territories. But, even then, we like to keep a level playing field so reference indices, such as the Big Mac index, to ensure price points are fair across the different geos.
Our biggest challenge, one we work very hard on with our localization team, is the humor in our games which is quintessentially British. This Monty Pythonesque humor doesn’t always translate well into other languages. So, we are constantly looking for the best solution to ensure we maintain the humorous touches even if sometimes we have to lose the Britishness.
Run effective tests
Effective testing is key to much of what we do and starts with having the right team. Having a great product and marketing team who work together to identify what content and features will help bring new and lapsed players back to our game is key.
Spend time to understand the business problem you want to solve. Then look for at least two ways of solving that problem. Next determine the optimum time period over which to run the test, based on the number of players you need to acquire to get a statistically relevant result.
Work closely with your user acquisition team when running tests, even if you’re not directly testing acquisition. This is because you need to be sure about the quality of players coming into the test to validate a new feature: the quality of the traffic will determine the validity of the results.
It’s critical you understand the economics of your game and can monitor the customer lifetime value against the cost of player acquisition.
And, it’s important to have a brilliant data analyst to guide you along the way.
Learn from your competitors
When we launched Old School Runescape onto mobile we had a huge advantage over most new mobile games: a dedicated and loyal user base from PC. For those of you that don’t have this advantage, I know that it’s becoming harder to find a place in the market as the mobile gaming space consolidates and becomes increasingly competitive.
It is, therefore, important that you have a realistic understanding of the competitive landscape. So, one of your first steps should be to research the competition. What games do you aspire to emulate? What is their day 1, day 7, and day 30 retention? How do they monetize? Can you play on brand affinity? What makes your competitors successful?
Then extrapolate those key learnings and apply them to your own product. Look to progressively roll out features using A/B testing to find the option that delivers a meaningful improvement to the player experience. Above all, be persistent. Some things you try will result in no meaningful change. That can be quite frustrating, especially for passionate creatives and developers. Ultimately, it’s about understanding your product and who your audience is. Define your core product features and monetization and optimize to improve your core KPIs and enable you to invest in user acquisition.
Final thoughts
Success in mobile gaming usually comes through a mix of creativity and innovation combined with science and data. It is an art that’s not easy to do. Some people are better at one than the other, and finding that dynamic mix of the two is key in today’s games industry. I wish you the best of luck.
Find out more
Listen to Ben Clarke speak about strategies for game success in more detail on episode 5 of the Apps, Games, & Insights podcast, also hear more on how to achieve long term success in games here.
What do you think?
Do you have thoughts on a players’ first approach in games? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.
