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The Business of Social Games and Casino

How to succeed in the mobile game space by Lloyd Melnick

Tag: features

How to add features that your customers actually want

How to add features that your customers actually want

One of the challenges successful game developers face is what features to add to the product. With a successful game, you are not in panic mode but you also must deal with the reality that in a free-to-play product you need to keep players engaged or you will become the next Trivia Crack. The fundamental issue is adding features that are useful and fun for your existing players, that enhances their enjoyment of your game.

Keys to adding successful features

There is an excellent post by Casey Winters that highlights three keys to building features that enhance a successful product:

Slide1

  1. The new feature must retain players. The feature itself retains the player and you do not have to drive players artificially to it from other parts of the game. For example, if you add Blackjack to your social slots application, it works if players engage with Blackjack and then come back to play it regularly. You can use the same retention metrics (D1, D7, D30 and CURR) to assess if a feature is working as you do to look at an app.
  2. The feature can drive its own use at scale, you do not need to create a plan to build adaption. To use the Blackjack example, if you integrate it in your lobby players will try it without forcing you to run specific campaigns.
  3. The feature must improve KPIs of your core product. To use the blackjack example, it needs to improve either your overall retention or monetization.

The last point is critical to success. I used to be at a game company where product managers regularly presented analysis of their features and bragged about the great performance of the feature. Overall, though, the company’s games continued to lose players (DAU) and monetization per player (ARPDAU) was also decreasing. While the features appeared to perform great in a Powerpoint, they actually were costing the company money because they drove lower overall performance.

How to add features that improve LTV

While you may infer from the previous sections that you should only integrate features that appeal to everyone, the opportunity is to segment your players and build features to appeal to target segments. If you limit yourself to only adding features that are accretive to everyone, you have a small pool to pull from.

Given you already have a successful game, by definition your players are already enjoying your product. While there may be opportunities to add features everyone enjoys, you have a bigger set to choose from if you also identify features that may appeal to a subset of your players. This is particularly powerful because this feature can appeal to a segment that is likely to churn and keep them engaged or a segment that does not monetize and prompts them to spend. Conversely, it could only appeal to the ½ of 1 percent that are VIPs but given how much they spend could have a great impact on revenue

If you are building a feature that appeals to a specific segment, then you must be careful not to violate the third key to creating a successful feature, you do not want it to impact negatively overall KPIs. The way to achieve this balance is by positioning or displaying the feature only to the target audience. This can be done as an AB test, where you only surface the feature to specific players. It can be achieved through targeted CRM (in-game banners, push notifications, email, etc.) that is only sent to players in the target group. Surfacing a different UIUX to players who you want to engage with the feature can also accomplish the same goal. The key is maximizing how much the target audience uses the feature and minimizes how much other players see it.

Using the blackjack example yet again, we can illustrate how it could help a social casino game. Overall, slots monetizes much better than blackjack. It is a faster game and many blackjack players will play in a way so they lose very few chips. If you added blackjack to a successful slots game and promoted it across your player base, you probably would get great engagement as a lot of people love blackjack. It would, however, drive some players from your slots to blackjack where they are likely to monetize at a lower rate. If you were looking at how it would impact overall performance, then, you would say blackjack is a failure.

If, however, the blackjack game was not in the main lobby but embedded deeper in the game and you then drove players who were likely to churn (maybe you have a nice machine learning algorithm that can identify these players) to blackjack, it would engage some of these players. They would then come back regularly to play and rather than churn some would monetize. Thus, you would have a successful feature that helps the overall product.

Add features that help your game

Although it sounds obvious, when building your product roadmap you need to dive deeply into each potential feature and identify how it will improve KPIs of a target segment. Effectively, how will it solve a problem for you or your player (user churning, user not spending, etc.). The bigger the problem, the higher the priority.

Key takeaways

  • The key to adding new features to a successful product is ensure the feature itself retains players, can generate its own use and helps the overall KPIs of your game.
  • You must avoid features that seem to perform well when reviewed in a vacuum but actually hurt the KPIs of the game.
  • You can achieve launching a successful feature by targeting your players and then only showing or promoting the feature to players who will benefit from it.

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on May 29, 2018May 27, 2018Categories General Social Games Business, Growth, Social CasinoTags features, monetization, Product design, product management, retentionLeave a comment on How to add features that your customers actually want

Maybe your competitors are not that smart after all

Maybe your competitors are not that smart after all

Key takeaways

  • While it is important not to underestimate your competitors, you also should not consider them perfect.
  • Industry leaders often maintain their position due to certain core factors and their other initiatives can be flawed, do not assume everything they do is right.
  • Simply because a competitor decided to pass on an apparent opportunity does not mean they made the correct decision, they may have misjudged the opportunity and left an opening for you.

Maybe your competitors are not that smart after all

I have repeatedly said and written to not underestimate your competition (most recently here), but experience has shown me that you also should not overestimate them.

Success does not equal omniscience

One mistake we often make is to think industry leaders are perfect. Several years ago I worked for a top-5 social game company (okay it was Playdom as most of you have access to LinkedIn). We were very envious of the leading game company at that time, Zynga. Everything they seemed to do, from new products to new features to marketing, worked. Almost always when we identified an initiative at Zynga it inspired a similar initiative. In fact, when I wanted to pursue something, I found it was best to wait for Zynga to try it and I could then easily get internal support (conversely, if Zynga was not doing it, it was usually a non-starter).

Fast forward a few years and Zynga acquired Spooky Cool Labs, where I was Chief Growth Officer. Although the bloom was off the rose at that point, I did have a chance to speak with some Zynga veterans who were there when I was at Playdom. What I learned was that many of the initiatives that “inspired” us were considered disappointments at Zynga. There were several key drivers for their success but not everything worked well, or even worked at all. Sometimes the success factors overshadowed the failures and other times they did not even initially realize the initiatives were net-negatives.

While I have had the fortune to work at both the hunter and the hunted, I have also seen many companies over-estimate the market leaders in various industries. Most automakers copied GM until they saw that GM was on the verge of bankruptcy. Foreign airlines copied US ones’ yield management pricing until the US airlines needed government aid. The list is almost endless of industry leaders leading the competition off a cliff.

Don’t assume they know more

A recent experience highlighted another mistake of over-estimating the competition. A few weeks ago we launched a new feature in one of our products. The offering was not unique; it was largely common sense for any social casino. We actually knew that our two largest competitors had considered the feature and it would have been quite easy for them to implement.

Although our feature was not a huge effort, we delayed it and spent a great deal of time looking at possible downside because our competitors had not tried it earlier. We believed they clearly knew the market and obviously wanted to optimize revenue. Finally, we decided that we might as well try it, it seemed like to good an opportunity to pass on.

When we launched the feature, we saw a 21 percent increase in revenue (through an AB test). The uplift has settled in the 10-15 percent category but given the limited effort we consider it one of our greatest successes of the year.

We still do not understand why our competitors have never launched a comparable feature (even after talking to a person who worked on a comparable feature at one that was never launched). More importantly, we now know we should not place too much credence in a competitor’s decision not to try something (feature, new product, etc). We are still conscious if a competitor scales back something they have launched as that decision is probably based on the traction that they have witnessed but we are also conscious that they are no more omniscient than we are.

Moving forward

While it is never good to underestimate your competitors – they have many smart people trying hard to succeed – you also should not assume they are perfect. Even the most successful are probably doing some things wrong, and their success may cover up the mistakes. And while they have also looked at the market and talked to customer, they do not always come to the right conclusions on the best way to move forward. It’s why competition always leads to better products and companies. Look at the competition, but also make decisions on all the information you have available.

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on December 7, 2016December 5, 2016Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech BusinessTags competition, features, playdom, product management, zynga1 Comment on Maybe your competitors are not that smart after all

Why your next feature probably won’t make an impact

I have been around many games and products that had poor results but the game teams kept thinking that everything would be fixed with the new features they had on the roadmap. It never worked. A recent post by Andrew Chen, “The Next Feature Fallacy,” shows the metrics of why adding product does not turnaround an unsuccessful one.

New features won’t change the key metrics

Chen leads off his post with the sobering metrics that for a typical web app (mobile apps see similar numbers) that get, 20 percent of visitors sign up, 80 percent finish on-boarding, 40 percent return the next day, 20 percent return the next week and 10 percent return after 30 days. Thus, for every 1,000 visitors, you still have 20 after 30 days (and this is not even a poorly performing app). Chen’s graph below highlights this funnel:

Andrew Chen's tragic curve

Chen points out that most features will not impact this curve for two reasons:

  1. Too few people will use the feature. Most features target retained users, but as the above shows that if it is a feature post-D7 (day 7) it will only touch 20 out of 1,000 users, and if it is D7 it only impacts 40.
  2. The other key failing is that the feature will make a small impact when users to engage. This is often the case when key functions are displayed like optional actions outside of the onboarding process.

This problem of focusing on features that will not fix your game are a result of focusing on users/players already deeply engagement and trying to make their experience better. Continue reading “Why your next feature probably won’t make an impact”

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on June 11, 2015January 4, 2016Categories Analytics, General Social Games Business, General Tech BusinessTags analytics, features, product management1 Comment on Why your next feature probably won’t make an impact

Get my book on LTV

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Lloyd Melnick

This is Lloyd Melnick’s personal blog.  All views and opinions expressed on this website are mine alone and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity.

I am a serial builder of businesses (senior leadership on three exits worth over $700 million), successful in big (Disney, Stars Group/PokerStars, Zynga) and small companies (Merscom, Spooky Cool Labs) with over 20 years experience in the gaming and casino space.  Currently, I am on the Board of Directors of Murka and GM of VGW’s Chumba Casino

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