The way social games continue to attract players

Article Description: analysis of social games to attract the return of the user's 5 points.

Mainstream Facebook gaming companies are very adept at releasing regularly updated content to retain players and ensure their spending is spent. But these companies are not good at getting new players to keep up with the fast pace of the game.

And a lot of successful MMO has solved the problem. How do you post new content later in the game, both to keep existing players interested in the game and not to hinder the player's understanding of the new content? The MMO solution is to set the player's access to certain content, which requires them to enter the content only when they reach a higher level, and gradually introduce the game content to the player from the early stages of the game so that the content can grow as they grow in the game; Or make sure that all content works for players at any level, regardless of the life cycle they are in.

But if you try to play early successful Facebook games, like "Cafe World" or "FarmVille," you'll find that the game reveals most of the functionality at the outset. Part of the reason these games can be hugely successful is the viral growth of the platform and the features they are easy to learn and master. "FarmVille" is no longer just a game about growing crops, harvesting crops, collecting animals or dressing up farms. If you continue to play this game today, you will find that the game also includes the farmers market, explore, collect, billions of objects that can be created, look for truffles, create your own second farm, animal trough, nursery, cross trees, feed sheep, name them, etc., and there will be more new tasks to come. But for novice gamers, it's hard to keep up with the speed of the game.

FarmVille Countryside

Or suppose you were a big fan of "FrontierVille" 6 months ago, and you logged in again today after a long pause, and the game will pop up a lot of windows to tell you new content. And then you are already far behind the game progress, there may be 300 of content waiting for you to create. It may take you several weeks to complete the falling content, but no matter how you catch up, it's not as fast as the game.

The next thing to consider is how to keep social games in favor and continue to grow. From the flow cycle, each social game has its own flow cycle arc, you can observe when Mau reached the highest value and then slipped. The biggest game (note: The game of Zynga or Ea,playfish,crowdstar) always insists on releasing new content at a certain speed, keeping the player fresh from the game and avoiding undue pressure on them. You can see that while the FarmVille is not developing as it is now, it is still developing at a slower pace (which, of course, is inseparable from Zynga's big-cost marketing campaign) in other words, these games are not just continuing to release new content, but also include new features, And the core game to make a larger adjustment, so as to maintain the game dau and other values.

Here's a list of ways to help social games continue to attract players as they were just released.

* Regular monitoring of the game's daily user retention rate

You have to know how many new registered users will not come back after playing a game. And if you can understand how many players in the first 3, 5, 7 days after the game to return to the game is better. This approach can help you effectively determine whether the published content is positive or negative for the novice tutorial or the new user experience of the game.

* Personally test the new user experience

Create a new Facebook test account and play it as a new player. Instead of just browsing the novice tutorial, you need to actually operate at least the top 10 levels of the game to see if the game is flowing smoothly. If you make a difference in order to influence the game cycle or the economy, then you have to put these changes clearly in the game introduction.

* User testing to see how players interact with the game

User testing is a very effective way to help you verify the effectiveness of the new user experience. You can implement in-house methods or use services such as usertesting.com to get results quickly. Even if your new user experience hasn't changed since the game was released, the existing game space may have changed to make the new user experience different from the average Facebook user experience, prompting the player to understand the new content. Or you may find that some of the features you never imagined will affect the general user experience and thus affect the parameters you established earlier. Anyway, it's a reasonable way to see how players play the game.

* Make a conscious effort to write a manual for a novice

When you write a product requirement file and a feature description, you must specifically consider the new player. At what level can you turn on a feature? How do you communicate information to new players? How do players adapt to existing features before they are exposed to new features? You should not only consider the highest level of terminal gamers when writing a description of the new feature.

* Regular monitoring of retention player/return to player's gaming experience

What does he think of the game for a player who hasn't played a game for 4 months? How many pop-up prompts should you show them? Have their crops withered in the game? Will their games change dramatically without any helpful information? You have to make sure that all players have a good gaming experience, whether they've played a game before, or if they've been back to the game for a while or have been playing games since the first day. You have to make sure that this regression experience is easy and affordable, and that you want to encourage players to return to the game. It is more difficult than finding new users to rediscover the "give up" game (that is, to stop touching the game after a few games). So we should put these back players firmly in the palm of the hand, cherish, and not to punish them when they come back.