About Fun

What does it look like when you love a game?

You try to play it as often as possible. If life allows, you will try to play every single day, maybe even multiple times a day or all day. 

Some games have various features catering to short and long sessions, providing players with myriad ways to satisfy their cravings. 

What does fun look like in the data? 

When it comes to FUN, there isn't just one metric, but let's explore ONE of several that we use to identify if players are having fun. 

Let's look at an example of a returning player login pattern. On the horizontal plane, we see player login days going from day 2 to 30. For every one of these days, we look at the percentage of players who either logged in within 1 day of the previous login day or have spent some time away from the game before returning. We see how, early on, the players may spend a few days away from the game. Still, over time, the time between their logins decreases and approaches close to 100% of users returning every single day. 

GAME 1

Of course, this only tells part of the story because the 30-login-day cohort could be minuscule! The goal is to achieve this pattern on as big a group of players and as close to day 2 as possible. If you still need convincing, let's compare the session durations of the players who log in daily to players who take longer. 

GAME 1 : SESSION DURATIONS

When comparing session durations of what we now assume are highly vs. less engaged players, we see that not only does playtime tend to increase for the super engaged group with every day they spend in the game, but it is also significantly lower for the players who take longer breaks from the game between sessions. We are clearly looking at a super-engaged cohort. 

One could speculate that daily login rewards or similar mechanics rewarding daily returns could create this pattern. Below are two games (Game 2 & Game 3) that appear less fun than the first (Game 1) but provide daily rewards upon logging in and playing.

Both Games 2 & 3 have a group of retained players enjoying their respective games. Still, those players aren't desperately rushing to log back the moment they have a spare minute. The increase isn't as consistent as we saw in the first example in Game 1.

It is probably safe to postulate that login rewards benefit players who intend to play anyway but aren't quite enough to create the same engagement as more naturally engaging games, such as Game 1.

GAME 2

GAME 3

The percentage of players returning to a game daily is a good indicator of engagement. However, it's not just the upward trend that matters, but also the consistency of the increase and the size of the group that keeps playing beyond the first few days.

Most games have a few super-engaged players, so looking at how close you get to 100% returns happening with zero days in between is essential. If the percentage never reaches 80%, it's a red flag that the game isn't meeting its daily interaction targets. 

You may have also noticed that in the early days, a relatively high percentage of players took longer breaks from the game. Many games have players fire up the game, hit an obstacle, and put the game away for a few days (in this case, not forever). When zooming in on the players who have delayed their return, we often discover two groups of players, the weekend warriors and those who experience issues with early user experience, like a sudden difficulty ramp-up. This is why we love looking at this metric for every game we work on and doing some deep dives to understand what contributes to a high engagement rate or lack thereof.

Of course, there are players who have fun but don't play every day, and they should not be overlooked either. However, that perhaps deserves its own deep dive.

Stay tuned!