10 Ways To Improve Game Retention

Mobile gaming is competitive, as an industry, it is a tough and dynamic place to be. Our research shows that new players more often quit playing a new game on the same day they install it. With more than 700,000 competitors waiting to take your place, how do you survive? These ten ways to improve your game retention will help your company excel and your game to retain in this competitive environment.

Top Points:

• You must overcome high churn rates and your competition in order to succeed in mobile gaming by using retention mechanics to succeed.
• Most players churn on day one. Immediately grab the player's attention and provide a frictionless experience that delivers on the promise of your game.
• Improve long-term retention and learn what players want from your game, remove friction and dull zones.
• Keep players coming back and offer them real value for the time and money they invest in your game.
• Use notifications and other communications to remind them to come back and keep them playing.
• Add new content, thoughtfully expand the game's offering, encourage community building, and provide a frictionless user interface to boost retention.

Optimise Player Onboarding - Improve Game Retention

Some 75% of mobile app users churn on the first day. Study your onboarding process as it is your player's first experience with your game. Is it engaging and frictionless as possible? Can they jump right into the action without thinking?

Grab your players' attention immediately and deliver what your sales lead or intro to the game promised. Avoid long-winded and fiddly tutorials, remove any friction in the sign-up processes. Ultimately, give players the option to play as guests and to skip the intros and tutorials.

Ensure you get players into the gameplay quickly. Point them toward something interesting. Use in-game messages to provide helpful tips. Avoid asking players to opt in to anything until they have invested quality time.

Understand Your Players

Improving game retention means you need to understand what players want from your game. You can learn this mainly by using data and analytics, analysing how players interact with your game, where they stop playing.

Studying players who play the game for the longest shows certain traits. Studying the churn points shows what kind of ratio of players makes it past obstacles and those who didn't. Are there friction points that have a lower appeal as they are dull, as opposed to friction points that are fun challenges

Understand Acquisition

You can also look at how to attract more players knowing these challenges. If you know the fun challenges, you can make changes to your game and player acquisition strategy that reflect what you learned.

Frame the friction points as an accolade that only a few players are good enough to pass this part of the game, challenge other users to achieve a goal and show off their success. This is all useful marketing material.

Reward Investment

The more time and money players spend on your game, the more likely they will keep playing it. Reward players for their investment.

Ensure a clear sense of progression in the game. Players need to see what the time and money they have put into your game has accomplished.

To improve game retention, provide players with real value for in-app purchases. If players don't feel they are getting their money's worth when they buy something, they will either stop buying or quit playing.

Offer players rewards for accomplishments that match the level of investment required to obtain those rewards. Putting in a lot of effort to achieve something only to receive a disappointing reward can sour a player on your game.

In contrast, if rewards come too easily, players may not be motivated to accomplish more difficult things. Drive engagement by incorporating personalization and customization options that give players a sense of ownership over their characters.

Remind Users To Play Your Game

We spend more than 4.5 hours daily using our phones for activities other than talking. However, social media, streaming platforms, and other games compete for users' attention.

The use of push notifications, alerts, and emails will improve game retention by reminding users to log in to your game. Be sure to make the notifications useful, not SPAM. Tell players when a new event is starting, a sale or promotion is on, new content has been published, it is their turn to play, or someone has beaten their high score.

Personalise The Experience

Personalised notifications get better interaction rather than using the same generic messages for everyone. Remember to use notifications sparingly, too many, and they become noise, balance is usually achieved by asking if the notification serves a purpose for the player or your business.

Player activity will indicate drivers for notifications, the type of events they interact with will give rise to actions you can take and content you can push to them.

Players may learn to ignore them if they are too sales oriented, turn them off even, or even uninstall your game. Offer rewards for responding to notifications when engagement drops to build positive reinforcement.

Provide a Frictionless User Experience

Let players enjoy your game without fighting with the user interface. Make sure your game is easy to understand, bug-free, and loads quickly. Incorporate high-quality sound and a visually appealing design that matches the theme of your game.

Fonts and colours can cause eye strain, be difficult to read, too small on devices or too large on desktops. Check using reliable proven web tools like the developer tools in Chrome such as lighthouse.

Can your game be more accessible by supporting multiple languages? Do you offer different difficulty settings? Have helpful links to videos and tutorials and walkthroughs that aid the player?

Add New Content

Sometimes, keeping players interested is one of the most challenging and important parts of improving game retention. Adding new content, such as new levels, characters, achievements, events, quests, and in-game items is one way to add value and keep interest high amongst the user base.

Optimise your app store listings to reflect the latest content updates. You can ask players what new content they want to see, what they liked and didn't like, even run polls to see what is trending higher. You could use A/B or multivariate testing to determine how changes will perform before you release them to the production version of the game. Closed Beta's and pre-launch candidates are a good way to start.

Encourage Social Interaction

Players who are socially engaged, play longer and spend more money in-game. Encourage community building by creating ways for players to communicate with you and each other, such as forums, in-game chats, and social media channels.

The use of mechanics like social sharing in your games allows players to easily show off their latest accomplishments and invite friends and social media contacts to play the game. Include competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes in your game to help drive interaction as well as retention.

Monetisation Strategies

Strategies for monetisation can improve or harm game retention. In-app purchases that provide real value and enhance the game experience can improve retention while creating the perception of a pay-to-win scenario that can drive players away.

Rewards from ads boost engagement and provide players with value in exchange for their time. Intrusive and irrelevant ads frustrate players and lead to churn. Aim to let users get extended gameplay if they give time to watch an ad, maybe allow a second attempt if they watch a video. All these ideas are exchanging users time for game play time.

Subscriptions can be a good way to build loyalty and encourage commitment to your game. However, they can backfire if players don't feel they are receiving appropriate value for their investment.