Tabarak Paracha
Is your game performing well with day 1 to day 3 retention but struggling with long-term retention? With over a decade of experience in the mobile gaming industry, Michal Tomcany offers some simple, yet effective solutions you can start implementing immediately.
In free-to-play games, retention is a key metric for long-term success. It’s important to keep players engaged and eventually encourage them to spend money.
Michal explains that in these games, user acquisition (UA) managers focus heavily on retention but often overlook churn. Retention refers to players who continue to play the game, while churn refers to those who leave. It’s common to spend a lot of time analyzing retention and finding ways to improve or maintain it at high levels. However, understanding and addressing churn is just as important as focusing on retention.
Michal believes in considering both aspects of the player experience to retain them: what keeps players in the game (retention) and what drives them away (churn). For retention, it’s important to think about things like motivation, rewards, gameplay, and progression. These include features and methods that help understand why players stay.
For churn, consider factors like friction points, cognitive load, install size, complexity, and application non-responsiveness (ANR).
When trying to improve retention, it’s important to address both the positive elements that keep players engaged and the negative ones that cause them to leave.
Retention Strategy
The absence of the red dots on the plane, in the image above, demonstrates that we don’t have data on what happened to these users. The absence of this illustrates that the plane either crashed or never returned – but we don’t know exactly what happened.
The planes that returned would have red dots in these areas.
Analyzing Retention
One of the critical tools in understanding player retention is usually a funnel analysis. However, Michal cautions against relying on overly simplistic funnels, such as the one above, that only measure player progression from one level to the next. Instead, he advocates for a more granular analysis that delves deeper into why they churned, or why they were retained.
By breaking down the player journey into a series of specific events that encapsulate everything a player can do in the game, and measuring the time spent on each of these events, you can gain valuable insights into where exactly players are encountering friction or losing motivation and then try to understand why. According to Michal, a lot of people don’t take into account a very important component, which is time. He wants to know how quickly the player consumes the content, and how quickly the player is progressing through the content.
In the image above, Michal has plotted the time players spend on various levels (4-6) of a game. The game designer intended for players to finish each level within 60 minutes, which is marked by the red line. The chart shows that most players complete levels 4 and 5 within the 60-minute limit, but level 6 takes nearly 2 hours for many players. This suggests that level 6 is significantly more complex than the earlier levels. Therefore this analysis shows us what is happening at which part of the game. Where as in the previous funnel graph you can tell that you have 94% retention but can’t tell if it’s same day, next day, etc.
Addressing Friction Points and Black Holes
Another critical aspect of retention is identifying and mitigating friction points and “black holes” in the player experience. Michal’s approach to uncovering these issues involves a deep dive into the player’s perspective, using screenshots and time-stamped data to understand the user’s experience at a granular level. By analyzing the player’s actions and the time spent on various in-game activities, you can pinpoint the areas where the player’s mental model of the game diverges from the designer’s intent.
By addressing these black holes, you can streamline the player experience. Michal called this the perfect marriage of qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Designing Cohesive Gameplay Loops
At the heart of long-term player retention lies the design of cohesive gameplay loops. Michal explains that the key is to ensure that your players’ mental model of the game aligns with the designer’s intent. This involves creating a clear feedback loop where the player’s actions are met with meaningful responses from the game, allowing them to refine their understanding and progress throughout the game.
The idea is the following:
When players start your game, they have certain expectations or a mental model of what the game will be like. As they take actions in the game, they receive feedback. If this feedback is clear and understandable, players can adjust their mental model to better match the game designer’s intentions. This helps them refine their understanding of the game.
According to Michal, it’s crucial that the feedback is clear enough for players to adjust their mental model effectively. It’s the game designer’s responsibility to ensure this feedback loop works well.
Watch the full video above for a more in-depth understanding of the topic.
