Product Teardown 05 — Clash of Clan

A few months ago, I did a high level product evaluation on Clash of Clan, focusing on core loop, social mechanics, and so on. Now I’d like to do a deep dive into the product design of Clan of Clans, particularly focusing on retention, monetization and social elments.

Core Loop

Core loop serves two purposes: first, clearly describe users’ behavior for game designer so that he/she could design game element around that; second, engaging users into game content and helping them create goals in game, as a result, users treat the game as a service.

Clash of Clans has three loops. loop 1 helps users create short.mid term goals, and loop 2&3 create long term goals for users.

Retention

session length

Retention in CoC is carefully designed by controlled session length, crafting queues, and rewarding experience of each session.

Session lengths are categorized into three tiers. Tier1 ensures that users(especially new users) can spend a few minutes in the game withou any frition. Tier2 sessions ensure that users come back several times per day so that they can play multiple session a day. For new users, this is important because you want them to form a habit of playing. Tier3 is similar to tier 2.

To make sure users can come back the next day, Clash of Clans uses craft queue/ building queue, a FIFO structure- first in first out. For example, if you want to make 3 dragons, that’s 30'*3 = 90 mins. If you want to make 5 spells, that 40*5 = 200 mins. These long session drive users to come back to take their troops to battle. As a personal experience, I usually fill out the queue before I go to bed and can immediately enter a batter when I wake up the next morning.

Any battle session rewards users with loot( gold, exlixir, and exp points), so users feel they make progress.

The last piece of these controlled session is every battle session requires some amount of user control but don’t require too much attention. Users can feel they make meanning choices in the game, but won’t feel too much pressure that they have to 100% concentrate on games. However, most endless runner games, such as Temple Run and Looney Tunes, although packaged in a casual avartars, but really require users’ 100% attention during the game session. Because of that, those games usually don’t fit for every playable time, such as waiting for your next bus or coffee.

Progression

In the end, you want your users to stay long with your game. To do that, users have to feel they make progress in the game.

The mid term progression in Clash of Clans are about upgrading buildings and weapons, unlocking new content, and experiencing visual transformation as progressing. The long term progression is all about climbing ranks in clans or in leagues.

These goals may sound stretching, but CoC breaks down the goals very well. For example, if you want to unlock some new content, you have to upgrade your townhall first, to upgrade townhall, you have to acculate gold and elixir, and upgrading your inventory, to do that, you have to enter into several batters to get enough exp points. A goal that needs 20 days to get is broke dwon into several small goals that require 1~2 days efforts. In this way, CoC manages user progression very well.

Social

The game doesn’t have any in-game social media channels, but it integrates social element very well.

collaboration

troop donation, clan wars, communication channel among clan members

competition

clan wars, clan leadboard, individual play leadboard

In summary, CoC makes sure that playing with other players is fun, benefiting both parties, and playing against other players is fun, giving you enough incentives to compete

Monetization

Below is the economy flow in Clash of Clans. Users put into $ and time, get progress in terms of new content, new game play.

We can think of monetization as

Revenue = DAU * Pay Rate * ARPPU

DAU is payload — how many users you can hit

Pay Rate is conversion rate- how many users actually pay

ARPPU is size of wallet * frequency — how frequency they pay and how much they pay each time.

To increase conversion and frequency, Generally Clash of Clans monetizes in two ways

(1) One time monetization — customization, additional builders

(2)Over time monetization —

protect shield, insufficient resources, time gate(pay to skip/advance)

To increase size of wallet, CoC focuses on whale, using a non-linear pricing strategy. The higher level you are, the more expensive you have to pay to upgrade.

Putting Together

This game does a great job on core loop designing, retention management, social element integration and monetization.