Four common practices for increasing engagement in f2p mobile games

I thought I would share some effective practices for increasing engagement in f2p mobile games which are not tightly coupled to any particular type of game. With goal of reducing misunderstandings, these of course are not effective if the itself game is bad.

Some of them are very  generally used in games, but not very well implemented in some of them. Here, I will depict my my own thoughts what you should think about before hurrying up with the actual implementation.

Facebook / Social integration

All the time Facebook brings more and more valuable services to mobile game developers for free which greatly increase the engagement of players when they can play against and with each other, compete, brag and send gifts and also compare the progress of their game play to each other. Here's some best practices for integrating Facebook to your game.

Allow players to see each others' progress in a same view where they see their own - Candy Crush Saga does this exceptionally well with its world map and progression line where users can see their own and friends' progress in one shot.

Your own progress and your friends' progress in a one view

Boom Beach allows players to see each others in the map view of the game, but doesn't make any effort to enable players show off with their progression. Small changes either to icons of the players and/or to pictures of bases could add significant ego-boost value to user.

If possible, allow players to challenge each other - Highly effective way of increasing engagement. When you - as a player - has been challenged by other human being, or even better, someone you know, it creates different kind of motivation to show your superiority to other player. If this methods can coupled with push notifications, it's best way to engage players to your game.

Daily gifts

Daily gift is a common way for most game developers to engage those users who come back to game. However, thought should be exercised when designing the visual looks, user experience and user interaction of the daily gift use case. Below my five cent's on daily gifts.

Daily gift  in Diamond Dash by Wooga is well thought. The user experience is rich, the steps to getting the gift from opening the game is low and the more days the player returns to game in a row, the better the prizes are.

Reward players - Don't be a jack-ass and try to deceive players by giving something which is no use for players - players will notice it. On the other hand,  reward the players with usable items and also make the interaction of getting the gift rich.

Don't dilute your game economy - You should also make a living with your game, don't give excessive amount of premium currency for your free-to-play game.

Add element of luck to it - Luck is an important element of daily lives in the Asian cultures and there are huge amount of people in the western countries as well who like to gamble a bit. Don't miss your luck and implement the luck element to your daily gift procedure.

Motivate players to come back, every day - By rewarding players with better rewards when they come back to your game 7 days in a row if very effective strategy for increasing engagement. It's your own loyal customer program!

Think about user experience - This is something which is very hard for most developers to effectively understand. Supercell does this well in Hay Day in one use case where players can search and tap those special mystery boxes and find some items or money from those. Boxes and the way of getting items from them fits perfectly to the game and to the general user interaction scheme in it.

As a developer, you should reduce the number of steps which are required from the player to get the daily gift, but also the daily gift mechanic should fit to the style of your game and to general interaction scheme so that the players can use it.

Achievements / Missions

Achievements increases engagement for the achievers. The people who always wanted to have a-grades from every test and project. Achievements should be designed in a way that during the first seven days in the game, players could achieve at least one achievement per day to keep him engaged. After the first week, the pace could decrease to one achievement per two days. If you can reward player for getting achievement it naturally increases the engagement.

Also think about rewarding players with permanent decorative items after they have completed the mission/quest/achievement so that they can show off to other players in the game. 

Notifications

Notifications are very commonly used in mobile games because they are easy to implement and (seemingly) are tremendously effective in engaging users.

But looks might be deceiving. Even if the notifications could (remember that user can always opt out of having notifications) appear to user's device's screen it's too usual that the content in the notifications are too trivial, irrelevant or they appear too often so that the user either doesn't care or gets irritated and decides either to turn off notifications or uninstall the game.

Here are some tips for fine-tuning the notifications.

Stay relevant - Think about the player and things which might actually help her to be better in the game and not just throw out a bunch of pre-scheduled notifications reminding player to come back to game. Think about triggering notifications to events in the game which could help the player in the game. For example, notifying player when the castle has been built or when energy has been refilled or when other player has attacked to your village.

Stay short - the more shorter way you can express your message, the better and more understandable it is. Period. (Also, Apple limits push notifications' payload to 256 bytes, damn.)

Be surprising - I still remember how dazzled I was when I was heard Homer Simpson's voice from my iPad when Simpsons - Tapped Out was reminding me that taxes of the residents in my Springfield were due. Damn! That was surprising!

Let players decide - In addition to allow users to turn off notifications it's a good practise to allow user decide what kinds of notifications (local, push, voice, text etc.) they want to receive and how often. If they truly are engaged to your game, they will use it.

So here's short list of commonly used practices to increasing engagement in mobile games with additional hints from me.

But as I'm always hungry to learn more and going deeper I want to know what kinds of strategies for player engagement have you been using or seeing in games? Please share them in the comments!