“My female friend just described Starcraft 2 to her girlfriend like Farmville, but with attack function.” -nihilion_Zero on reddit
I laughed pretty hard at that quote about Starcraft, but this is also a good description of Zynga’s Empires & Allies. They’ve taken Farmville mechanics and added in some basic attack options. The game is a single path to sucess (just keep following the guidance), and most of the battle sequences are determined by a simplistic rock-paper-scissors + hit-points attack approach, but the animations are cute, and winning a battle is gratifying. As a player you have the choice to either help your neighbors (earning resources and red heart kudos), invade your neighbors (earning resources and black heart hatred) and attacking the NPC’s. Interspersed are quests which request the player to either build or harvest certain things, or to decorate things. All the while there are limited resources (fuel/wood/minerals) and limited time resources to perform tasks and go into battles.
I have to say, it’s a fun game. At launch folks picked up this game so quickly, and today AppData.com is showing Farmville at 8.3MM DAU/34MM MAU and E&A at 7MM DAU/44.5MM MAU. (Monthly Active Users = MAU, Daily Active Users = DAU, MM= millions)
I’ve enjoyed playing E&A, but the excessive request stream is starting to grate on me a bit. I did some quick math on direct notifications for a few days in July, and including Independence Day where there was a decline in game activity/notifications, it ended up being 34% of all Facebook notifications with a max of 50% on the first catch-up day after the holiday.
3
That’s quite a bunch of messages! What I didn’t add in was “Game Stories,” all of the indirect game notifications where folks self-posted on their own walls that entered my stream. Add those in, and total notifications likely exceeded 70% of all stream traffic.
The question is why do all social gaming companies need to keep up with players, and the answer is that for a cool new game, the rate of new players joining a game will exceed the rate of old players leaving the game, but for older titles there will be a continuous decline in active players once they either get bored of a game or find something else. Here’s the Farmville graphs from AppData showing a continual decline in Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users. As big games decline, publishers need new games to come in and take over. Every game company has to be looking to create the next big hit.
So why am I writing this post? Zynga yesterday added-in the new Leaderboard to E&A. It’s a way for folks to compare themselves to friends from an absolute battle perspective, and now it’s providing me some interesting data that may match player retention. While I was working at Challenge Games (now Zynga Austin Studios) I had fun working with cohort analysis across all of our game properties. With this E&A Leaderboard, it game me a quick way to read sixty data points to see whether E&A retention was similar.
So the raw data provided on the leaderboard states the relative ranked position of a player, but more importantly the total battles that they have fought. While there are many activities that can be done by a player without progressing in the Battle Map campaigns, some of those campaigns are prerequisites into other upgrades, so anyone who is active in the game must complete the Battle Map.
So what did I find? I took the data, ran a simple formula to group-together clusters of users by battles played (to the highest 25 past 25 battles), and then charted by summed percentages the frequency of those. The graph below was the result, and it did match what I was expecting.
Of my friends, over half of them who “installed” Empires & Allies may have abandoned the game before finishing the first campaign.
Is that a big number? Compared with some games I’ve seen, no! it’s not! Of course I’m also over-counting the retained-percentage since I really have more than sixty friends playing, but these are only guessed based on sample sizes. Yes, it’s not a true cohort analysis by set start-time, but it’s a good quick look into player retention through progression.
Every good game designer should work hard to keep those initial players around through at-least the second stage of the game, and while E&A has a great tutorial storyline, it is possible for players to lose interest before they are fully engaged. The further evidence for lost players is all the farms in E&A that have withered crops even at higher player levels.
For those friends who made it into the 25th battle, there is a continual falling out of players as more time is required to develop resources and structures that will allow game progression. It could mean a further decline of players who stopped at some point due to a roadblock, or it could just mean some folks progress more slowly. The fun part is that if I keep track of this daily, I’ll be able to find some deltas on a player-by-player basis, and that overlayed on this type of a graph would help clarify continued engagement. Well, keeping daily stats for the next month on friends for a game is a bit more work than I want to do in my spare time, but I’ll see if I can get back into the habit of updating my blog more than once every six months. :)
