While you can spend a lot of money on getting users into your app, in today’s mobile marketing game it’s about quality over quantity. According to Swrve’s 2015 Monetisation report only 2.3% of players monetized in January 2015 (and that’s an improvement from 1.5% in 2014!). Fact is, the vast majority of players don’t pay. And while non-payers are indeed valuable, it’s the payers you need alongside them to keep the bottom line healthy.
Successful monetisation in mobile gaming can often feel little more than whale watching. If you’re lucky enough to get some big spenders engaging, you should see some dollars roll in. But not everyone is lucky. And to be frank, your success shouldn’t be based on luck, right? So if you are a F2P developer who wants to create a profitable game all players will enjoy, what’s the answer? What are those elusive ingredients for a profitable app business? That’s the $30bn question (literally).
Community is a core element to games and is the essence of Palringo, which brings together communities to chat and play games within groups while also acting as a central social hub for native games that we publish. We found that the addition of a social element drove engagement and fun. It is this fun that players are willing to pay to enhance. Sure, there are a lot of games that leverage social networks to drive ‘engagement’. We all know the feeling of getting another notification on Facebook from that ‘friend’ who wants you to play Candy-Ville Wars so they can unlock the next level. Shame that most of their friends don’t actually play…or care. But it starts to make more sense when you’re connected to a global group of people who already love games and want to play.
The design of the game is equally important. Many ‘Free to Play’ games could probably be described as ‘Pay to Win’ games. But with an added community element, winning, and therefore paying, can take different forms. Of course there is always the ‘top of the leaderboard’ type of winning, but in this social context, the focus is not solely on boosting your own position but that of others as well as your group as a whole. And in fact, this is where non-payers have added value as they make the community active and vibrant increasing the fun of the group game experience.
Therefore micro-transactions within the app are centered on social engagement and leverage the community element with the group dynamic enhancing the game experience. For example, our popular fishing game allows you to buy extra casts for everyone in your game or to chum the waters so that the group has a better chance of catching bigger and more rare fish and you compete as a group against others. It’s about increasing the fun and engagement around games, which inevitably brings the (paying) user back.
Tying in the community element to native games also creates an effective way to engage and therefore monetize players. It can make single player games a multiplayer experience and can enhance games that already have a multiplayer concept. The social context adds an extra competitive layer, with a pool of people to challenge, play with and against, and to try and beat. The more people involved in the game, the more is at stake and the more people are likely to invest in the game.
So a game experience built around a community creates an interesting dynamic. It helps developers extract value from non-paying users and stimulates spending from those who are inclined to spend to enhance their fun and the enjoyment of others.
But in much the same way that building a working and profitable game is a black art, building a thriving community is very much an art form in itself. In fact, communities are not built. They form themselves. But when they’ve formed, and thrive, the potential is magic. Encouraging a few gamers to spend is a trivial task compared to facilitating the formation of a thriving and engaged community.
Magnus Alm is head of external games at Newcastle’s Palringo