Engagement Through Great Gameplay is For Suckers

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that engagement comes from making great games. I’m growing quite tired of it since it’s obvious that you’re making a great game anyways. And even the greatest games use engagement tactics to keep gamers playing.

I thought I’d break down the most obvious engagement tactics to make it easy for developers to digest. I mention Kiip in here, but you can do all these natively as well. These are super basic. I recommend checking out Will Luton’s book Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away for a deep dive into these topics and more advanced F2P mechanics.

Rewards

• Daily/Weekly rewards always work well in games. Each subsequent day a user logs into a game the more they earn - giving them an incentive to not miss a day when they play. I just played a round in Chasing Yello just to grab the coins.
• Random spontaneous rewards always work wonders. Doesn’t matter if they’re native, or sponsored, it keeps users playing. When Kiip did its engagement study, we found that users play 131% longer and 31% more often (ha, I didn’t have to look that up #memory). Position it as a bonus reward as a special thank you when they don’t expect it.

I’ve never played this, I swear! but Hello Kitty mixes this up with different currencies.

Competitions

• Weekly events that drive users to compete against other users. We’ve done these at Kiip regularly with different games like Mega Jump and Into the Dead. Set a prize like a free TV, Amazon gift card, or virtual currency and give it to the users who scores the highest in a set amount of time. Players will flock to your game and you’ll see engagement shoot up and sometimes even IAP (depending on the game). Hothead Games’ Big Win series has occasional tournaments in each game that drive a ton of traffic as well.

Big tournaments with big prizes. Just check out Big Win Sports’ Facebook page and see the engagement they get from fans for these: https://www.facebook.com/BigWinSports

• Ongoing Battles with regular rewards. Robot Unicorn Attack 2 does this really well. Users join a team (Team Rainbow FTW!), and compete for the highest score each day. When a game goes viral like RUA2 did, then you have users posting about their teams on Facebook and Twitter.

Robot Unicorn Attack 2 does this well with an on-going compeition and daily rewards to the winning team.

Push Notifications

• Remind users that the game’s waiting for them. Either a friend they’re playing against beat their score, their army is trained and ready to fight, their Tamagatchi is lonely, etc. Obviously, the more relevant the higher the open rate.
• IAP Sales - discounts on IAP can always give users a reason to come back to the game to buy something. This is better used on players who have purchased something already.

New Features

I know this goes back into gameplay, but I always admire how Kiloo goes about getting Subway Surfers’ players really excited about new updates by always churning out new maps and features. They follow the mantra of regular updates every month with new features. Go to the Subway Surfers iTunes page and check out the new features in each update. I’ll let you read it for yourself here, as @simonmoeller says it best himself.

The latest update features Miami. Previous updates have had Rio de Janeiro, Japan, Rome, New York City among others.

Any other big ones I missed?