Brendan Sinclair for Gamesindustry.biz:
Audience management firm Playnomics has released a report on user engagement for social games it tracks, and the findings show that players aren’t exactly patient in giving free-to-play titles time to hook them. The group found that from July through September, roughly 85 percent of new players in the US never went back to their games after the first day. And of those who joined in the first part of that stretch, 95 percent had become inactive by the end of September.
Unfortunately, most of the time with free-to-play games, you get what you pay for.
Absolutely! With free-to-play games, long term engagement is the key. Gotta figure a way to keep gamers coming back to the game. And naturally, free games don’t garner that type of investment. It’s more about the in-app purchases compared to the gaming experience in my opinion.
Weird. I was addicted to free Angry Birds for a while. My son loves Granny Smith and several others.
I guess you and your son are in the 5 to 15%? Or the percentage of players not continuing to play the other games that are not as interesting, seriously skewed the games that are popular.
Yeah.
The Men in Black movie tie-in game could have been great as a $5 full-featured game. As a freemium game requiring you to “buy” time or wait interminably long for tasks to complete, it was awful.
This is about social games, I don’t see anything about free-to-play. Even so, it’s meaningless unless compared to a similar study for games you pay for.
I bet the vast majority of those 85% happen when players hit the inevitable paywall. Most of the casual freemium games have timer mechanics that effectively lock you out of the game unless you pay. If you force players to leave the game, I bet a large proportion of them will never return to it.
And I bet the other 10% is down to how boring and repetitive the gameplay normally becomes with extended play.
There’re a few good FTP games, but not many. I tend to avoid them, because many games of the freemium kind give you the feeling that you’re missing out on what the game has to offer, if you don’t buy add-ons or in game credits.
I’d much rather pay for a game good game and then pay more for additional content. Best example? Galaxy on Fire 2 HD.