Review: Song Quiz
With currently more than 9.2K positive reviews, ‘Song Quiz’ is the most popular #VoiceGame for Alexa by a large margin (fun fact: it has more non-5-star-reviews than the 8th most popular game Skill has reviews in total). It’s about time to give this game a thorough review!
Really, ‘Song Quiz’ is the most popular voice game? Give us some context!
Well, it’s true — No other voice game is even close with its number of reviews: ‘Question of the Day’ and ‘Would You Rather For Family’, the second and third most popular ones, have about 3.5K and 3.2K reviews, respectively.
Why this remarkable, to me at least, is that it is far from obvious that a music-themed quiz is at the very top. What else I would have guessed to be on the top? Naively, I might have said something that is closer to the most popular mobile and video games in either mechanics or theme:
- Puzzles like the ‘Candy Crush’ or ‘Angry Birds’ series
- Economy simulations like ‘Farmville’
- Action games like ‘Clash Royale’, ‘Flappy Bird’ or ‘Temple Run’
- Augmented reality games like ‘Pokemon GO’
Of course, the assumption that what works well on mobile works well on voice is flawed (except sometimes it actually does, as in the case of podcasts), but it’s remarkable nevertheless.
Let’s make sense of this by taking a deep dive in!
What’s the concept and mechanics of the game?
The game is round-based, with each round dedicated to a chosen musical decade (starting at the 60’s and ending in the 2010’s). Within each round, there are 7 turns, in each of which Alexa plays a sample of a song from the chosen decade, and you have to answer with either the artist or the song title to get points.
‘Song Quiz’ has a very clever multi-player mode that is worth investigating deeper! First of all, it can be played with up to eight players!
With two or more players, the mechanics is pretty straightforward: Each player has their own turn to guess a song — In this case, one round with eight players would take 56 rounds! One might argue that this is not the most dynamic approach to a multi-player game (in contrast to ‘Guess My Name’ for example, where the fastest player interrupts Alexa to say their answer), but it does make sure that every player gets a fair chance.
In case of one player, the game switches to an online player-versus-player-mode! It asks you for your name and where you come from, and then pairs you up with another player from somewhere else. From there on, you simultaneously hear the song samples and make your guesses, and get the live score of your opponent’s game. Really nice!
Wow, nice! How is that possible? Do you have to wait if your opponent wants to get their song repeated?
Alright, this is one of these moments where I get to lift the curtain to reveal the magician’s trick: There is no other player! Let’s hear it from the Wizard of Oz himself, Max Child of Volley, in episode 36 (at about15:30) of Bret Kinsella’s Voicebot Podcast:
According to this, you DO play against the past session of another human player. From a game development perspective, I wonder how much of a benefit you have with taking real game profiles over just completely faking it, i.e. having a bot opponent that makes their guess based on the average success rate for a given song.
Here are two observations that indicate that this is indeed the case with ‘Song Quiz’: First, if I say an unintelligible name and location, the game doesn’t ask for clarification, so it seems like it doesn’t store and reuse these data (they might only use names and locations they understand, though). Second, you can get bonus points if you name both a song’s title and artist (more on that later), and my opponents never seem to get these bonus points even for very popular songs.
Let’s move on! What makes this game engaging?
There are a couple of factors, so let’s switch to bullet points:
- Extensive content
As I mentioned, the game has music from six decades, and for each decade there are at least dozens of songs — This is a very impressive database! A good part of the effort of producing this game must have been the process of getting a license to use all these song samples! - Right length of the songs
There’s a tradeoff between making the songs long, which helps recognition (especially if most of the song’s refrain is covered), and making the songs short, which makes the game more dynamic. ‘Song Quiz’ settles for about 6 seconds as a solid middle ground. - Scoring system
A naive approach to scoring would be to give one point for each correct answer, but here the seven questions are worth 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 and 100 points, of which the seventh one is announced as a bonus question.
The advantage to this kind of scoring is that it delays the point at which one player has irrevocably lost — For example, if you lost the first four turns (i.e. you were wrong but your opponent wasn’t), you can still win by answering two or three of the remaining questions correctly (assuming that your opponent is wrong on all three). - Competition
We covered the mechanics of the two multiplayer modes earlier, but let’s be clear that this is a very strong engagement factor, in contrast to playing alone: You compete with an opponent, get updated on their score, and finally either win or lose (I’ve never had a draw, though!).
The illusion of playing against a real human creates way stronger immersion than playing against Alexa or a statistical average.
- Gratification
This is a minor engagement factor, but whenever you answer with both the artist and the song title, you get bonus points and a statement that only a few percent of all players got this song correctly. It’s a little way to make players feel special. - Display support
This is also neither a major engagement factor, nor does it make the game deeply multi-modal, but it adds some nice decoration to the game. Also, the fact that it displays both details from the current game and allows input (you can select your musical decade from a list, as depicted on the upper right of the image) makes it a solidly screen-assisted voice game according to my scheme from the last post.
Alright! So far, there’s nothing crazy that explains why this game is so immensely popular. Let’s get to the retention factors!
Interestingly, there’s not much to say about retention factors. As with most good games, good content and engagement grants some retention, as it is certainly the case here. But apart from that, there’s neither daily changing content, nor a highscore, nor badges, nor streaks, nor a facebook group or Twitter account. Nothing!
Really? But how did they get so many reviews then?
There’s one very clever mechanism to facilitate reviews here! It is common practice for Skills to ask for ‘a 5-star-review in the Alexa Store to help improve the game’. ‘Song Quiz’ does the same, but it gives you some help with that: It tells you to go the the website reviewsongquiz.com . Let’s look to the left to see what’s happening there.
When you click on the button, you get directed straight to the Amazon site where you can leave a review for this Skill.
This is a genius move, because quite a number of people might actually be inclined to review a Skill favorably, but going to the store and finding where to give a review is just a lot of friction. This website reduces all of that friction in between and makes it as easy as humanly possible to actually leave the review. So… Maybe ‘Song Quiz’ is not three times more popular than ‘Question of the Day’ or ‘Would You Rather For Family’, but just much better in converting users to reviewers.
Are you saying that this website is the secret of ‘Song Quiz’’ success?
I don’t know since when it has that website, and it certainly plays a role, but it is by far not the only factor. Let’s take a step back from magnifying glass and think about users playing this game:
- Voice games are usually played on smart speakers, which in turn are mostly used to play music. One could say that a quiz about music is kind of a home game.
- Music is a strong way to arouse emotions, so delivering songs from users’ favorite musical decade builds a bit of emotional connection to the game.
- It’s very social — You can play it alone and get the illusion of having company, but others in your household can easily join in and get engaged by the music, and then you can switch to live multi-player mode.
- It’s accommodating to all generations: Seniors can play it among themselves with sixties and seventies, and teens can play it with their contemporary music. If you play in a group with people from different generations, you can switch decades and shift the advantage.
With all of these puzzle pieces gathered, it does make a lot of sense that ‘Song Quiz’ is indeed the most popular voice game so far (and has spawned some spin-offs like ‘Holiday Song Quiz’ and ‘Country Song Quiz’, that are rather popular themselves). Maybe it is even the mythical ‘Angry Birds for voice’, since so many aspects of it are particularly well suited to the voice platform.
How do you personally like ‘Song Quiz’? What aspects of it are particularly remarkable? Are there aspects of its success that I over- or underrated? I look forward to continuing the conversation here or on Twitter. Thanks for reading! :)
