6 Growth Hacks You Can Learn From Crossy Road

Published in

Megacool Blog

4 min readSep 22, 2015

Crossy Road has been such an inspiration to startups and mobile game developers across the globe. Since the release of Crossy Road in November 2014, the retro graphic game has passed 100M downloads and proven that you don’t need a large marketing budget to touch millions of people. Along the team’s journey, they have even managed to melt the heart of Apple by winning the Apple Design Award at WWDC15 and getting the chance to present during the Apple Special Event.

Crossy Road has been a viral success, but what features have been put into the game to help spread the word? And most importantly what can you learn from it? We took a closer look at the game to understand and identify the in-game growth aspects implemented to increase the k-factor, as well as suggesting a few of our own. Grab some coffee, lean back and follow us through a dissection of Crossy Road:

Dissection of Crossy Road

Mobile version: http://www.slideshare.net/bemegacool/6-growth-hacks-you-can-learn-from-crossy-road

Full screen is recommended

What You Can Learn from Crossy Road

After playing Crossy Road for a while, there are six clear takeaways we want to emphasize on for other game developers to learn from:

Make it easy to share: Having this subtle button on almost all scenes is a great way to easily let the players share their experience during the game.
Use pre-defined text: If you have to think of something to write when sharing, it becomes an extra unnecessary step. By providing pre-defined text, the number of steps to share is reduced and the likelihood of sharing increases.
Images say more than words: When being killed by car or winning a new character, Crossy Road lets you share images of those moments. Players are more likely to share their experience with visuals than just text.
Share on multiple platforms: Facebook used to be the way to share (like Soda Saga and Angry Birds 2 still seems to believe), but today we are communicating on multiple platforms. It’s, therefore, important to let the players choose where to spread the word depending on who he/she wants to reach.
Include links: When creating sharing functionality, always include a call-to-action so the recipients easily can learn more about the game and eventually download it.
Use hashtag: Teach your players to communicate about your game using a predefined hashtag. This will help your players find information and discussions related to your game. The chance of trending on Twitter increases with the more players communicating with the same phrase or hashtag, like we experienced with Fun Run.

Suggestions for Further Growth

No doubt, with its enormous success, Crossy Road has done a lot of things right. But there are a few things that we believe can increase k-factor and growth from within the game further:

Share GIFs: Let players share GIFs instead of images of characters crashing with traffic. GIFs are very popular and give recipients a better understanding of the game than from an image.
Have a pool of pre-defined funny texts: Be creative with pre-defined text for social sharing. By having a pool of pre-defined text suggestions, players are more likely to share it.
ALWAYS track links: Use parameters to see which platforms are most popular so you can A/B test and optimize the onboarding route for new players.
Responsive website: To optimizing your web page for mobile should be a no brainer. Make the experience personal and show the right app store depending on the device. Have a clear call-to-action of where the players should go next.
Player onboarding: Use deep Linking whenever it’s possible to make the onboarding process tailored to each player.
Incentivize Invites: Let players recommend the game to their friends by rewarding both of them with gifts, like coins, free items or even exclusive characters.

Other Dissections

If you enjoyed this dissection and want to see more or give feedback, please suggest other mobile games to be dissected on Twitter: @Megacool_co or in the comments below.

Thanks for reading! Stay Megacool and recommend this post if you found it helpful so others can find it too :)

About Megacool

Megacool is helping app developers to boost their organic growth with GIFs and incentivized referrals. Sign-up here. Prior to founding Megacool, we successfully launched the Fun Run games with over 100 million organic players as part of the amazing Dirtybit team.