“From the Devs”: Bringing Players Back To Your Game, by HeadlessHorror

The most popular games on Roblox are just that- popular! That means they have players returning and consistently engaging in their game. You can achieve this through trial and error or take time to look at what other successful developers have used and take inspiration for your own games.

Free Items:

One known method that I’m looking into is offering free items, in-game currency, or timed boosts such as increased winnings. For a personal project, I’m planning to offer time-based VIP (e.g. purchase VIP for 7 days) and through this method, I could offer 30 minutes of free VIP to players that have returned every day for 7 days. This will not only reward your player base for returning but give them a look into the benefits VIP gets, potentially encouraging them to buy or try VIP.

Daily rewards:
Games often offer rewards for returning to the game, such as awarding bonuses to a player depending on how loyal they’ve been to your game. Because you actively want to bring players back to your game on a daily basis, using daily rewards can often encourage a player base to return as long as they’re awarded something for it. Many games such as Bee Swarm Simulator and Mining Simulator have dispensers or collection points where every set amount of hours you can collect. “Miner’s Haven” by Berezaa https://www.roblox.com/games/258258996/Miners-Haven has a very unique and awesome method of daily rewards; you receive a ‘gift’ upon returning and it rolls through a list of rewards. The more money you have, the better the items are that you will you receive, which is far more rewarding than a set amount every time for a semi-tycoon styled game.

Time-based enemies spawning (PvE games):
A popular game, “Bee Swarm Simulator” by Onett https://www.roblox.com/games/1537690962/Bee-Swarm-Simulator, uses daily rewards effectively; the tunnel bear & beetle king have individual timers (18–24 hours) that begin to count down once they’ve been killed. When the timer is up, the nemesis will respawn, giving the user an incentive to rejoin the next day to return and defeat the boss. For each defeat, users can gain awesome goodies instead of it instantly respawning and allowing for an easy grind.

Quests based around visiting at certain times:
An interesting area worth considering is to bringing players back to complete quests at specific times. An example of this is in Egg Hunt a few years ago; there was a large totem/statue where you had to prompt a quest and return a specified number of hours later to collect your egg. If you missed your quest, you had to wait another few hours until it respawned for the player. This gave the player not only an incentive to replay your game, but also to plan ahead and set themselves a real-life schedule so that they could return and not miss their chance of snatching up the egg.

There are many other ways that you can offer special advantages for playing games at a certain time. For example, in-game shops could rotate items on-sale every hour. Another feature worth considering is a ‘traveling merchant’ who has pre-set items that can appear at random times on-sale, or an in-game shop where items in the story update automatically every few days. With these features, the player would be more inclined to return every few hours to see if the item they want is on sale. Berezaa did this well with his game “Miner’s Haven”. At different times, the game has pre-set items which appear on-sale and users can purchase them, giving players benefits. There are even more awesome items on-sale during a seasonal event such as Christmas where you can decorative items which won’t be available any other time of the year.

However you choose to attract players back to your game, just remember, it’s not always a simple formula- it takes a lot of patience, trial and error! These are just a few examples of tactics that have worked in other games on Roblox. Once you’ve found what works for you, be sure to keep your content fresh and, if you’re willing, share your story so that others can also learn.

That’s it for this edition of “From the Devs”! Thanks to HeadlessHorror for his insight into player retention. If you want to learn more about his games or about Lowpoly Studio, check out his Roblox profile or Twitter page.

We’ll be back next week with another article on retention!