Case Study: RockYou Playdemic’s Gourmet Ranch
At the beginning of 2011, publisher RockYou acquired Gourmet Ranch developer Playdemic. Not too long afterward, the developer released an expansion pack that added a new game mechanic — fishing — the core gameplay experience. As we can see from an AppData chart covering the last eight months, MAU and DAU rose while retention mostly fell during the April and May months when the expansion launched. Throughout June, MAU and DAU fell while retention rose and after three months — in July — the game’s overall retention came out almost 5% higher than the pre-expansion figure.
2011年初期、開発会社RockYouはGourmet Ranchの開発会社Playdemicを買収した。この開発会社は、買収からまもなくして、拡張パックをリリースした。これにより既存ゲームに新たなゲーム機能である「釣り」が追加され、コアなゲーム動画体験が可能となった。拡張パックが発売された4月と5月については、ひと月あたりのアクティブユーザー数と1日あたりのデイリーアクティブユーザー数は上昇しているが、ユーザー数の維持力は低下の傾向にあることがAppData上の過去8ヶ月チャートから分かる。6月はひと月あたりのアクティブユーザー数と1日あたりのデイリーアクティブユーザー数は低下も維持力が上昇、そして3ヵ月後にあたる7月には、このゲームの全体的な維持力は拡張パック発売前と比較して、約5%の上昇となった。
*Note that we see retention falling in the last 30 days on account of RockYou pushing its new ad platform in Gourmet Ranch; this is creating a new influx of MAU and DAU.
What Developers Can Do: Keep it Awesome, Reduce CPI
Social games on Facebook are only just now finding ways to prolong the gameplay experience through expansions and sequels. Early examples of sequels like Playdom’s Mobsters 2 didn’t perform very well, as users seemed reluctant to migrate from an old app to a new one. As RockYou’s Zoo World 2 proves week after week in our rankings, however, developers can get around this complication by running the sequel in the same app ID as the original. Other games, like 6 Waves Lolapps’ Ravenwood Fair, are hoping to find success through franchise extension in new games rather than with direct sequels.
Zynga, meanwhile, continues to explore expansions like the upcoming Pioneer Trail add-on for the 14-month-old FrontierVille.
Aside from introducing new content, developers can also change the evaluation equation by reducing overall CPI. This comes from targeting user acquisition toward only the users they want to have in their game. It may seem like an obvious conclusion that you should only spend money on the users most likely to spend money on you; but we still see some games going after a large, general audiences in their first two months on the market. While this “race to critical mass” approach seems to be working for some games like Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time, most mid-market and small developers struggle to reach this point unless they go through a publisher with a preexisting critical mass.
What Facebook Can Do: Make it Easier to Acquire Users
Facebook scaled back viral channels available to social games last year in an attempt to clamp down on a spam problem. Some of this virality is beginning to return on the platform, now that Facebook feels it has spam under control. Beyond that, though, the platform is working to improve social discovery for games and introduce a better new-user experience. All of this will help developers connect with the kind of users that can support high LTV.
“We focus on greater ability to find the right types of users for a lower cost for your game,” Ryan says. “It’s not just a sunsetting issue — sunsetting in creative fields is life. You move on. [Facebook] focuses on better ways for you to expand, for you to go viral, for you to acquire customers. That should help, whether it’s sunsetting or expansion.”
