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Applifier's Oscar Clark: A game's success relies on players loving the brand

Love the key to sustained success

Applifier's Oscar Clark: A game's success relies on players loving the brand
Oscar Clark is Applifier's evangelist for Everyplay, which allows users to record and share their favourite playing moments in mobile games.

Designing games is all about understanding success

Whether it's the completion of a puzzle or the flow achieved by pursuing a compulsion loop, we have to think about the emotional rewards of achievement.

The new dominance of freemium games has forced us to think about a range of new success criteria and I believe we need to think carefully about what this means to us as designers.

Of course, the first thing to consider is money. We now have to design in an entrepreneurial context and we often use the revenue a game achieves as a way of keeping score of our success.

However, as Jon Weinbrun from NFTS recently reminded me, this isn't necessarily the case for films, TV or other forms of entertainment. Instead, these other media often value cultural recognition such as critical review or achieving a cult following just as importantly as the bottom line.

Keep 'em comin'

I've often made the economic argument that freemium games are inherently more likely to succeed because of the effect of price elasticity of demand.

But given we only get a small percentage of players paying (1-3 percent typical for online and 5-10 percent for socialised mobile), the obvious response is to try to find some way to monetise those +90 percent who don't spend or extract as much money as possible from those who do.

While it's all good and proper to focus on how to increase the numbers paying and even to encourage people who love the game to spend more; this is too limited a way of thinking.

I think we have to remind ourselves that we now have a larger number of people playing our games than ever and consider the implications of having a platform that is financed not by sponsors, but by the most engaged of players.

What possibilities does that offer us? What do we have to say to that audience and how do we ensure that they keep coming back to us time and time again?

Judging success

Another key success criterion is the number of new users who join the service each day or month.

Again, this has become something of an obsession with companies trying to drive up their numbers to get into the ranking charts in order to ride the wave that follows such an achievement.

There are a number of companies spending up to $6 per install directly through some well-known games – although, of course, this is an extreme case.

Trying to increase your discovery is an absolutely worthwhile aim, but if Flurry is right that 68 percent of revenues come from outside the top 100 charts is this always the best focus?

There are lots of other key performance indicators to look at: monthly active users, ARPDAU, lifetime value, retention and churn – usually tied to revenue in some way. These help reassure us that it's all about precision and targeted experiences, but I suspect we are losing something in the process.

Don't worry, I haven't turned soft on data, it's still critical to help you understand what's happening, but if these measures become our objective then we will eventually fail.

Instead we should consider how much our players love our game. And not just our game, how much do they love our brand?

Love is all you need

With a few notable exceptions, such as Angry Birds, mobile games don't really focus on brand development, or worse still, they don't link building a brand with creating games.

We are building experiences that are intended to trigger emotions in our players. That is exactly what big companies try to do when they build their fast-moving consumer goods brands; they help us to associate feelings of trust, personal aspiration or 'coolness' with different brands of watches, jackets, sports shoes and even tins of beans.

Why shouldn't we be thinking like this with our games?

I suspect the reason is that these emotional qualities aren't easily measured and they don't directly translate to revenue. But they do correlate with engagement and the feelings of satisfaction our players have as they solve puzzles or complete those compulsion loops.

In fact, I argue that the success of a game is ultimately down to the love players have for the brand.

Perhaps we are in an era of sales-driven games development and as a result our customers look at freemium games as they would an estate agent or car salesman. A necessary evil they have to put up with (apologies to any nice estate agents or car salesmen out there).

Maybe this is the reason why so called 'real gamers' are so antagonistic about freemium (although many will still play and pay).

What's to be done

So what can we do instead? Why not do what successful marketing brands try to do: focus on the customer experience.

Think about the moment you open an iPhone's box, or when you first put on a fresh pair of Nike trainers or sit down to eat at a classy restaurant. These moments can exceed our expectations. They may seem trivial at the time, but they leave a lasting impression.

Our game is our brand – our promise to the player.

We can, arguably, do more than any other type of product or service in any other industry to build emotional connections. We can build experiences that they will want to talk about and share with friends and we can empower users to create their own emergent magical moments.

I'm not suggesting that the revenue or the number of users on your service isn't important, but if we want a sustainable service-led business we have to get back to creating entertainment and delight for your players.

Isn't that why we all got into games in the first place?
To find out more about what Oscar's evangelising, visit the Everyplay website. To find out more about Oscar's minute-by-minute existence, follow him on Twitter.

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