There is no Hockey Stick
Marketing departments (all of them) love to tinker with “optimizing acquisition funnels” and creating programs to “bring new groups of gamers to your game” after launch. They like to imagine that a game’s revenue graph can suddenly begin to look like a hockey stick, rising up suddenly into the stratosphere.
The result? A complete and utter waste of time unless you’re fine-tuning the knobs on an already huge success..
Gamers are some of the most well-read and intelligent people on the planet, especially when it comes to matters pertaining to their hobby. If you made any successful noise about your game at launch, then all the gamers that cared about it heard about it at that time.
They looked at it. Maybe they played it, but they definitely judged you. And once they move on, they are not coming back. Your chance to gain the mind share of these gamers was AT LAUNCH…not after.
You might get word-of-mouth growth later on (just about the only major success in this regard is Eve Online) and you might make a business change that’s so drastic it gets people to look (as with the F2P conversions a few years ago that worked so well for EQ & EQII), but those are aberrations, not models to follow.
In general, your game isn’t going to transform and you’re not going to get a bunch of new people to come try it. So stop wasting your time that way.
You Can’t Win with Vanilla
It’s not just devs that are passionate in this industry. Every member of the participating audience is also just as passionate. Gaming is an industry of emotion in all aspects.
And gamers don’t want vanilla. (Side note: I’m curious how many tweets that comment will generate.)
But if you’re running an online gaming project, there are definitely a few things you can do to win:
- Live within your means. Do the ROI thing and make sure you’re spending less than you’re bringing in. Craft a flexible, motivated dev team to work within that existing framework.
- Update your players as often as you can. Keeping players always looking forward to the next great thing is an art. Practice it.
- Don’t screw up your core game play, but DO find ways to make it “taste unique”. If players can’t get your flavor elsewhere, then they won’t wander. Conversely, if your taste is not unique, you will be replaced by the next new thing.
- Everything you do should support your core gameplay. I don’t care how good your ideas are, if they don’t support the core gameplay then you’re making a mistake adding in those ideas. This includes microtransaction ideas, btw.
- Make it easy for players to learn about the features in your game and make them as intuitive as possible, but avoid too much feature “streamlining” to “save time for gamers”. Making your game too easy to play can easily destroy its challenges, thus destroying the reason to play the game in the first place.
- Create rechewable yet still entertaining content. “Play Once” content is not your friend and neither is “no variability”.
Ultimately, you’re a Street Performer
When free-to-play became the norm for MMOs, we all essentially became Shareware street performers. We put on our shows for free (no up-front costs), and we ask our audience to throw coins if they like the show (microtransactions). Memberships that remained after F2P conversion are usually like a service announcing perks and special access events that is available to all, but not required.
That means that any Live team worth its salt is working hard to create a schedule of entertainment events throughout the year because if players aren’t constantly entertained and if they’re not always looking forward to the next great thing, then you shouldn’t be surprised when your audience wanders off in sheer boredom.
How often you sing and dance is definitely up for debate and largely depends on the game. But annually is clearly not frequently enough (lots of data supports that) and weekly is too rough on the dev team. Monthly or quarterly seems to be best, with small monthly updates and big quarterly ones seeming to be a solid rhythm that works for dev and players alike.
The key is that you have to be entertaining at all times and that means a lot more now than it used to back in the old “box product” days. We’re in a 24/7 world now.
The Power of Players
If you’re still reading, then you probably generally agree with the idea that it’s a dev’s job to entertain on a regular basis. You may have even had the thought that a cadence of monthly/quarterly new content is not frequent enough to keep up a solid level of entertainment.
You’re correct. It’s not. Players need to see more activity than that, but the dev team can’t reliably move at a faster pace.
So what do we do instead?
Play the game with your players. Talk to them and discuss ideas. Encourage UGC. Do AMAs and Reddit discussions. In other words, do everything you can to keep them engaged between releases.
Why? Because they are every bit as passionate about this game as you (the dev) are, and they want to talk about it 24/7…just like you get paid to do every day. Regardless of how you feel about your job, there are hundreds or thousands of gamers at any given moment that would drop everything to be in your place.
They want to see you enjoy the position you have because many of them are tremendously envious of the chance you’ve been given. They want to live vicariously through the highs and lows of it all and see their game become better after giving you their feedback.
It’s your job to give that to them. You’re an entertainer. So get off your butt and do it. This is quite literally a case of “everybody wins”.