Struan Robertson is NaturalMotion's product director. This article is based on a talk he gave at the F2P summit.

I'm going to tell it to you straight; the free-to-play space on mobile is the hardest and most competitive market in games right now.

As more and more developers embrace this business model, studios will have to find new ways of standing out from the crowd and new ways of ensuring that their game is sticky.

Being sticky, whilst undesirable in many aspects of life, is especially important in F2P.

Think about it - creating a game that keeps people playing is crucial whatever market you're in, but when the friction of getting bored with one game and downloading another is basically zero, it's the whole ball game.

In My Horse, we at NaturalMotion Games tried to create something that is both standout and sticky and we believe it points at an exciting new horizon for freemium games.

It's been well-received by end users and in reviews, has been downloaded over 10 million times and has over 500,000 daily active users (DAUs).

This article briefly talks through some of the components we think we got right with My Horse and how this has in turn influenced our thinking when designing new games.

Standing out

So problem number one: how do you stand out?

Well perhaps this sounds a little obvious but if you want to get noticed, then it's time to be unique. There are enough zoo and match-3 games out there now; go and do something that is literally new and noteworthy and get people talking about your game.

Unique is great, but a word of warning: don't take this to mean you should go out and do something niche.

I mean sure, whatever, by all means go and be quirky if you want - I'm all for playing your quirky games - but if you want to stand out in the mass market, you have to be unique in a way that resonates with a broader audience.

You can do this in any number of ways - slick presentation, highly polished gameplay etc. - but the way we did it with My Horse was to try and create something that was visually stunning - we basically put a real horse on your iPhone.

Not only was this key to building the experience of nurturing, it was also key to ensuring our game looked different on the App Store.

We received great support on the App Store, garnered a lot of positive press attention, but crucially, got a significant word-of-mouth bump as people showed their beloved horses to their friends. Being unique was incredibly important to getting people through the door.

Sticky situation

Getting people in was only the first battle for us though, once they were there, how were we going to get them to hang around?

We did this by adhering to a few basic product design principles, the first one being that we understood who we were selling the game to and how they like to play their games.

Depending on the amount of time they have and the type of gaming they want, users can choose to play My Horse in a variety of ways.

They can tend to their horse pretty easily with one eye still on the TV, they can concentrate on getting high scores in competitions for a more focused gaming experience or they can set a bunch of appointment timers up and come back intermittently if that's all the time they have.

We knew that giving people lots of different ways to play was a great way of ensuring that when someone gets their phone out to kill any amount of time, they would fire up our app.

Monetisation

What's this? A free-to-play article that hasn't mentioned monetisation in the first 700 words?

Well yes, partly because there were other things to say but also because there's an awful lot of info out there on the internet about this already.

I'm not going to duplicate that here (energy, consumables, progress, convenience, decorative, competitive - you know the list), but I'm going to offer two pieces of fundamental advice.

The first thing is to invest some time learning how to sell things to people. There's no great art form to it; lay your stuff out nicely and package it up in a nice box.

Make it easy to spend money and make people feel good when they do. It's not about tricking people into parting with their cash (this is a terrible idea), it's about creating something that is a good value proposition and then saying thank you.

The other bit of advice I'll give you is to ensure that you understand your game's carrots.

What are the things that you use to keep users playing and coming back for more? If you understand those, you'll have plenty of ways of finding points in your core loop to monetise.

Carrots

In fact, understanding your carrots is pretty much it. What are you selling? Are they shiny enough to stand out? Are they so shiny that some people will pay you money to have more of them or get them faster?

If you know all of that then you're laughing because whilst F2P is complex in many ways, really it's about standing out and making something that people really want to play.
You can find out more about My Horse at www.naturalmotion.com or follow Struan on Twitter at @strumanchu