Altti Heinonen and Wilhelm Voutilainen presented this webinar for GameRefinery on how to use social features to keep your players engaged. We’ve outlined the key points and takeaways (complete with timestamps) from this really informative webinar for you below. The webinar can be found here. Enjoy!
Summary/Main points
- PvP is a major trending social feature right now
- Guild mechanics are a strong foundation and powerful resource to implement that can lead to better social connections, retention, and engagement and can ultimately be tied into monetization
- Explore the possible synergies between elements like battle passes and guilds
- Consider adding a guild community gift to the battle pass plans
Webinar Overview
- Focus on most trending features within Competition & PVP and Social Interaction in top grossing 100 games in past 12 months
US Market (1:07)
- Synchronous-PvP coming to more and more games
- 34% of Top 100 Grossing games in US have some sort of Synchronous-PvP mode
- This is across all the different genres
- 34% of Top 100 Grossing games in US have some sort of Synchronous-PvP mode
- Currently, PvPs are the biggest social trend across different categories
- 25% of Top 100 Grossing games in US have 5+ PvP modes
- Guild mechanics
- Huge trend for the last few years and is continuing to trend
- Almost 70% of Top 100 grossing have a Guild Mechanic
- Nearly a must-have in your game, players expect it to be there
- This trend is even higher in casual games
Examples of Graphs and Data
Chinese Market (3:42)
- Most trending feature is the Friendly Match Possibility
- Over 50% of Top 100 Grossing games in China have a Friendly Match Possibility
- Applicable across all genres
- Over 50% of Top 100 Grossing games in China have a Friendly Match Possibility
- Non-competitive co-op tasks
- Over 50% Top 100 Grossing games in China have it
- Other major features
- Spectator modes
- Stealing from other players
Japanese Market (4:45)
- Trend is not as focused on the PVP side, but it is definitely still there
- Non-competitive co-op tasks focused
- Guild-related competitions are also trending
- 40% of Top Grossing games in Japan have Synchronous-PVP
Basically, a lot of PVP related features are trending at the moment (5:40)
Digging Deeper into the Games (6:00)
- Top 200 Grossing games in the US that have 2+ PVP modes
- Most of these are 4x strategy games
- 23 4x games in the Top 200 are using 2+ PVP modes
- Seems to be a must-have feature if you want to have a successful 4x game
Other Social Features in Top Segment (7:30)
- Top 200 Grossing US Games Features Data
Guild mechanics (8:05)
- One of the most popular social features
Guild communal gifts (8:35)
- One of the newer feature trends in the market
- This is when all guild members get some kind of reward when a guild member makes a purchase
- The utilization of the feature are not as high yet
- 20% of the 200 Top Grossing games have it
- Games that utilize guild communal gifts are across different genres, like 4x Strategy games, Match 3 games, and Slot games
Example: Rise of Kingdoms (9:58)
- Players are rewarded from purchases that their guild members make
- This can incentivize players to look at what others are purchasing and check out if the offer is good or not for themselves
Example: Homescapes (11:58)
- Usually games start with guild mechanics and add guild features on top of those
- Started out simple, like chat/messages and social interaction rewards
- Then added more features like guild-related communal tasks and competitive co-op
- Added a battle pass plan where all members of the guild will get a small reward when a guild mate purchases the battle pass (Guild Communal Gifts)
Example: Royal Match (14:50)
- Also added a battle pass plan that has Guild Communal Gifts
Recap (16:00)
- Guilds are the foundation
- You can build features around guilds to help with monetization
- Can build social elements that improve retention and engagement
- Synergize the social elements with monetization
We hope you found this recap helpful. What data point stands out to you the most? Tell us in the comments!
Learn more about the GamerSpeak method and how it can increase your game’s revenue and retention up to 30% in 6 months or less here: https://www.gamerspeak.io/the-gamerspeak-method/
