We are on the hunt for a secret formula – a mystical alchemic concoction of metric goodness that will guarantee us an ongoing flow of new players and, of course, monetization.

We’re searching for the secret of turning lead into gold. So we’re talking player acquisition. I’m focusing on mobile games, but it extrapolates to Facebook games, online and elsewhere. So let’s look at our component ingredients – starting with the players.

Monkey King is a videogame consultancy and development studio dedicated to merging the creative power of the imagination with the analytic muscle of data-driven design. The company specializes in overall process review and analysis at the corporate, team and game level. Have a problem? Let us monkey with it.

This one is for the Designers. The title of this talk is not “The Dark Arts of User Acquisition." We’re talking Players – not Users. The practice of referring to our customers as Users is costing us money. Sports has fans, supporters, boosters. Film has an audience. Theatre has patrons. We have users. That distances us from them. It reduces them down to a quantifiable binary – converting or non-converting. It’s cold. It’s removes them from the game design equation. And that’s a mistake.

We’re selling games to Users. But the games aren’t what they’re buying. They’re buying the experience of playing the games. That’s not just semantics. The thing that makes games unique is the active participation of the player. We are an active, lean-forward medium. The transactional agreement we have with the players is when they come to us and play, an intangible thing is created in the space between them and the game. It can be exciting, thrilling, funny, surprising, scary. It’s the experience of play, it’s enjoyment. It’s fun.

So Players – not Users. Leave Users to the Analytics platforms, the hard data number crunchers. For them players needs must be reduced to 1s and 0s. For the designers, they must be more.

So we have Players - let's acquire them. Which brings me to this point - acquisition is not evil. There may be some witchcraft and alchemy involved, but the use of the metric loop to power the creativity of games is not inherently evil.

Discovery, Acquisition, Retention, Monetization, Engagement, Virality – back to Discovery. It's a tool. So why, when I sit down with designers and dive into metrics and data - do I get this look:

Designers are suspicious. They see the business guys come in and they get nervous. They’re afraid that on our quest for the secret formula we will tinker and tamper until we ultimately destroy the game - the fun.

They’re afraid we’ll make them monetize the core game loop with nagware and nickel & dime the players until every ounce of fun is dead. This is how they us:

They see corporate robots who live and die by balance sheets. They see game design sacrificed on the altar of analytics. They see number crunchers selling games to “Users.”

And, in return, this is how the business guys often see the designers:

They see them as relatively clueless that the games they design have to actually make money. These are obviously gross generalizations and we all know that sometimes the designer and the business guy is the same person. But the argument is real.

At GDC this year Brenda Romero gave a talk on “Free-to-Play: The Morning After” about her experiences designing and working with freemium games. She described sitting around a table discussing game design and timing how long it took anyone in the room to use the word “fun”. Hint - It took a very long time. And that’s a problem.

When we keep our eyes on the ground trying to quantify the magic of play with metrics we tend to stop looking up at the player. When we lose sight of the player, we lose that experience of play.
If we take Fun out of the equation, we lose the key thing we have to sell – the key reason players play.

You’re all smart people. You all know the ins and outs of the accepted pillars of acquisition: Social Media, Cross Promotion and Advertising.

You all have access to the same tools. You’ve all got great ad networks and cross-promotion platforms. If you don’t, there are a dozen providers in the room. All of them rock. Find one.

But if all the answers were to be found solely in metrics, every game you put out would succeed. We would be failure proof. A simple equation could guarantee success:

(Social Media + Cross Promotion) Advertising = Acquisition

We could turn lead into gold every single time. But we’re not failure proof. Games crash and burn – good games and bad. Why?

A May 5 article in the NY Times profiled the Worldwide Motion Pictures Group [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/media/solving-equation-of-a-hit-...]

For $20K they’ll compare your script to everything that’s been done before and tell you how much money different choices will make. Set it on a boat or a train. Cast a blonde or brunette. Feature a divorced hero or a widowed one. They advise never including a bowling scene because many films with bowling scenes have flopped.

The problem is its all correlation rather than causation. It might just be cheap to shoot in bowling alleys in the Greater Los Angeles area so a lot of really cheap, bad movies have had bowling scenes. This type of analysis only looks backward. It tries to quantify what made this or that title a success. It can succeed in making B-grade crap less crappy. But it can’t make a breakout hit. And in our industry “mediocre” doesn’t cut it.

Copying a game doesn’t guarantee copying its success. And planning to be just better than average is a guarantee of failure.
Consider the past. Be inspired by the past. But use data to look to the future.

And looking to the future. We have problems on the horizon.

Returning to the top of our Metric Loop, let’s look at Discovery. The App Stores have a bit of an overcrowding problem.

These are the number of apps currently active in the respective stores. Android is expected to hit 1,000,000 this summer.

ABI Research estimated mobile customers will download 70 billion apps in 2013 – 58 billion to smartphones and 14 billion to tablets. That’s a lot of noise. How do you stand out?

Stats: [http://www.abiresearch.com/press/android-will-account-for-58-of-smartphone-...]

[http://www.pureoxygenmobile.com/how-many-apps-in-each-app-store/]

Getting featured on the app store is fantastic. That can solve your Discovery issues right off the bat. But it is not a business plan. Buy a lottery ticket.

And lets move to Acquisition itself. Ad costs are rising. In the first half of last year the average CPI of mobile apps increased by 70 percent on Android and by 56 percent on iOS.

Average CPI for iOS hit $0.92 in Jun of last year. So for iOS developers, selling an app at a single $0.99 purchase price now means you’re loosing money.

According to Fiksu, Acquisition costs rose 21% just from Nov to Dec of 2012. Their Cost Per Loyal “User” Index stands at $1.36 USD.
Asian companies like GREE are entering the US market and bidding up acquisition costs – up to 3.50 per install in their Chartboost deal.
The CPM of Facebook’s Mobile App Install Ads - hit $6 in March. Costs are going through the roof.

Stats: [http://www.leadbolt.com/blog/tag/user-acquisition-cost/]

[http://adparlor.com/blog/]

[http://www.fiksu.com/resources/fiksu-indexes]

[http://kiosk.chartboost.com/gree]

Then there’s the effect of legalized real-money gambling operators entering new territories. They will pay a huge bounty for new players, because their players monetize at such a high rate. Open your Facebook app in the UK and see whose ads are playing. Big sharks are coming out to play. Acquisition costs are not going down.

Then we have out acquisition networks. And we face a bit of a problem here too. The players being sold are worth more for the seller to sell than to keep. And the buyer is magically assuming that math will change upon purchase. I sell non-converting players. Not the paying ones. Or I have a free app that I only monetize by selling players. Best of luck with them. Are my free players likely to convert for you? Who knows? I don’t and neither do you.

Paying for players who drop the game within moments is a waste of money. This kind of paid acquisition benefits the largest players who control major market share and the eyeballs. It’s a sellers market. They know the users they are selling. You don’t know who you’re buying. The bigger the operator, the more data they have to work with. Buying and selling millions of users gives them a huge data advantage over smaller operators.

We are in the midst of an escalating player acquisition arms race that benefits a few major operators and for the rest of us it’s Mutually Assured Destruction.

So what do we do about it? We’re not giving up and going home. So we fight back.

Heading back to the top of the metric loop, let's look at Discovery. How do players find your game amidst the screaming ocean of competition?

First off, when you are promoting the game, tell a story. Tell the story of emergent play, the player’s experience. What am I going to tell my best friend about this game ten years from now? What will I experience when I play the game? That’s what I want to know. That’s what I buy. We don’t just need the story of the game – the new features, the awesome gun. We need the story of play the game evokes.

The jury is still out on this one, but Everyplay, TwitchTV, Facebook and others are making a big push into this space and I think it will become an ever-more powerful tool. It allows you to share the story of emergent play with major impact. Microsoft is building a TV studio in Los Angeles right now to create new video content like a live action Halo series produced in partnership with Steven Spielberg.

[http://kotaku.com/steven-spielberg-is-making-a-halo-tv-series-for-xbox-on-5...]

Players love getting stuff. Virtual goods, swag, money, it can all work. But be careful. Rewards can work to drive both discovery and acquisition via incentivized peer-to-peer sharing, but it’s a delicate balance. The spam line falls at a different place for every player. Done poorly, it can hurt you. If in doubt, aim these efforts at retention and engagement first. The players you already have are your most valuable resource. Focus on them.

Optimize mobile search. If I’ve heard about you, don’t be hard to find.

Content Curation looms as a huge factor in Discovery. He who controls the eyeballs controls the world. What should I play? Who can tell me?

Peer-to-Peer recommendation trumps all else. You can spend a million dollars on your Superbowl or World Cup ads, but if my buddy on the couch next to me says that game was awful, you’re done.

The reverse is also true. Metacritic may destroy you, but if my friend loved the game, I’m playing it. Peer-to-peer is unwieldy, hard to control, hard to predict, but if you can find the right tools and path to use it, it is enormously powerful. Peer-to-peer recommendation the David vs. Goliath weapon.

Starbucks curates music, and now games, within their corporate app. More will follow. Best Buy, Walmart, anyone with eyeballs is a candidate.


[http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57578443-94/starbucks-mobilizes-pick-of-th...]

[http://www.starbucks.com/]

Same goes with celebrities. They command eyeballs. They can curate content. They can be leveraged to drive discovery. Not just of apps that feature them, but apps they curate for their most loyal fans.

Don’t forget the device manufacturers. If your game comes with the phone, it’s pretty easy to find.

Leverage the discovery tools like APP-o-DAY, FreeAppADay, AppAdvice. But keep in mind the fate of AppGratis – these services exist at the pleasure of Apple.

AppGroves, AppCurious, and on Android, AppUpdate take a different social tack in using social mechanics to drive discovery. Let me see the games my friends are playing.

Platforms like Mobage, PapayaMobile, Scoreloop, and GREE offer additional solutions. A laundry list of new players are jumping into this space every month so do your research.

Turning the wheel to Acquisition. We need to redefine the A in CPA.

CPA should be Cost Per Action. We need to pay for performance. Optimize Lifetime Value over acquisition costs. Define acquisition with an action that indicates an engaged user. Installation vs. Play for 30 days or Kill 50 monsters. Offering a cost-per-action model would be a strong differentiator for any ad network.

Pay for Virality. Bringing me a player that pays is great. But it's not enough moving forward. Bring me a player that promotes. Where is the promotion platform that sells players based on the number of additional players they recruit? Installation vs. Recruit 5 additional players into the game.

Get in the same boat with your partners and your interests align. Right now I just want to shovel players your way and as soon as you have them I want to shovel them somewhere else. I advertise different titles to the same players I sell you. With shared revenue it’s all about Lifetime Value, for me and you. This model is in the market right now. TinyCo.’s Tiny Partners program pays out 50% or more of the Lifetime Value of the player to the provider.

[http://www.tinyco.com/tinyco/tinypartners/]

After Discovery and Acquisition we’ve got the big four that often fall in the designers lap. Retention, Monetization, Engagement, Virality. Retention is the closest thing we have to measuring Fun. If you retain them you can monetize them, keep them engaged and turn them into peer-to-peer recruiters for new players. Easier said than done. But here’s my take on where we need to go to stay alive as the ocean gets redder.

We need to evolve our game design. I’ll call it K+ Design. We know the K Factor and R-zero viral measurements are borrowed from epidemiology. We can debate their exact usage in our industry, but to keep it simple I’ll use K to equal the rate of Social Adoption. K 1 is good.
K+ Design is holistic data-driven design optimized for social adoption and driven by fun.

Reference: [http://framethink.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/the-four-viral-app-objectives-ak...]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-factor_(marketing)]

If we look backwards, instead of burying our heads in data, we can take inspiration from the origins of this industry. Video arcades were inherently social. They offered a communal, social experience. We played with groups of our friends – our community. When games went into the family room and then the basement we left that initial social heyday behind. We need to get it back.

We need to build social adoption into the DNA of our games from day one. Do not tack it on later. It’s not a monetization add on. Make a fun game that’s even more fun to play with more people. If the gameplay is social then virality is the natural result. This is a mindset. It’s a design philosophy. The specifics will look different in every game. Social adoption should be at the front of every designer’s mind from the first brainstorming session on.

Synchronous multiplayer is infused with social adoption. Using various levels of mixed Synchronous/Asynchronous play will be key element of driving player acquisition and highly monetizable games moving forward.

I’m going to show this slide one last time, because the Metric Loop evokes the most powerful example of social adoption and K+ Design ever created.

The football. For my US comrades – the soccer ball. It’s the ultimate example of K+ Design. The round metric loop brought to life in pure, beautiful, simple game design. You can play it single-player and it’s fun, but the urge to kick it to a friend is irresistible. More friends, more kicks, more fun. The greater the rate of social adoption, the greater the fun that’s brought to life in the space between the player and the game. Virality is inherent in its design.

If you want to acquire players and launch breakout titles, this is your target. Aim for it. Beat it if you can.

I’ll leave you with this. For my designer friends. Clash of Clans is not a smash hit because it’s a gorgeous, cutting edge tower attack & defense game with a mixed synchronous and asynchronous design. That’s just the game. This is what they’re selling:

[Clash of Clans image property of Supercell]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQ6335puOc

Play the link above to hear Conan paraphrase Genghis Khan. That’s what they’re selling - in 2 minute increments. In a mere 2 minutes I can crush my enemies and see them driven before me. That’s emotion. That’s engagement. That’s play. And for my business-minded colleagues, if there is a secret alchemic formula to player acquisition, it looks like this:

K+ Design = CPA
Master this and you just might be able to turn lead into gold.

Contact:

Jamison Selby
Director, Monkey King Games
monkeykinggamesllc.com

@jselbyguy
jamison@monkeykinggamesllc.com