Why Daily Bonus Won’t Boost Your Retention
There are several “simple tricks to boost your retention” that go from article to article. They usually vary in complexity from “it’s a good idea to reward player for level-ups” to “create a clan system and shove the player there as soon as possible, maybe he’ll stick to other suckers”, but I want to discuss the “tricks” that have to do with offering in-game resources to the player:
- Daily (or calendar) bonus: every day some reward is handed out to the player. It usually grows in value during some cycle (typically a week or a month), and then the cycle starts anew.
- Delayed reward: the player somehow obtains a chest that will open in X hours.
Those are very simple, very obvious and very attractive ideas. There is only one problem with them: they don’t work on their own. At least in games I’ve created adding one of the things from the list above resulted in nothing.
Why is that? Because you can’t treat game design as cargo cult. No mechanic works on its own; rather, some deeper principles do, and they set game mechanics in motion.
You should treat game design more like voodoo. Voodoo magic only works if the victim believes it does.
In the “retention boosting mechanics” above we offer the player an in-game value if he returns, but we fail to notice a simple fact: in-game values are only valuable to the player if he values them.
Until that value is created you can shower the player in your in-game gold until he has enough to finish your game without paying — and he still won’t return.
Now let’s speculate how you could make it work.
- It should be something emotionally valuable
So let’s pretend you make a battler where you collect heroes for your team, each with unique set of abilities.
It is tempting to offer the player some gold, diamonds and energy if he returns, but all those things carry no emotional weight. In the beginning of the game like that only new heroes do, and if you have some form of rarity system — only visibly rare ones have some interest for the player. Actually, there may be a problem of your game having too many heroes dumped on the player in the beginning, so if you really want this to work on retention — offer the biggest, meanest, coolest looking one.
It may harm monetization in the short term, though.
2. Explain the value beforehand
Even then, there is no point in telling the player “hey, we’re going to give you this cool hero tomorrow” if you hadn’t explained (or rather, showed)
- what do heroes do
- why you should want more
- why that cool hero is definitely cooler than the guys you have
And that takes
a) a really good first session
b) time
So if you still decide to try some form of delayed reward to retain users, you should take into consideration that there is a balance between “too early, the player doesn’t understand value of content yet” and “most players have already churned”.
I think there is no good way to determine that balance point except for a series of a/b tests.
3. Try to hype it up
That’s my personal theory, so take it with a grain of salt.
First, the way that was popular a while ago, but faded with time:
- You give the player a very powerful team/hero/item in the beginning
- The player does a few battles with that
3. Some Ancient Evil ™ kills them or drains power, and then the actual game begins.
So the idea was that the player sees the game at its “full potential”, has an opportunity to use cool-looking abilities, etc. The obvious downside is the moment when the player loses all of it and has to punch mudcrabs with a stick after burning legions with magic fire, so I don’t really consider it to be a good solution. I think RAID is a rare example of that idea in action nowadays, and deservedly so.
Another way is to continiously bring up and hype up something, be it the Sword of Thousand Truths, or some legendary hero, or some mythical location.
One of the ways to do that is to make you fight some cool enemy time and time again, and then let him join your team.
The obvious pitfall here is the moment of “why the hell was this guy almost invincible as an enemy but seems to be made of paper now that he is a friend?!”. So you really should think it through and try to design it in a way that the character you get is as close to the enemy you fought as possible.
I’m really sorry that I can’t remember an example right now, but in our case try to hype up some content and then promise the player to hand it out to him if he returns in X hours.
What if you don’t want to even try to do all that?
If I managed to assure you that delayed reward is not so great of a trick to boost retention, you may ask if there are any.
Actually, there is something in mind I consider a trick, but that calls for a different article.
