User Acquisition Explained

User Acquisition is a major part of game development, and the key to understanding it is to understand the User Funnel.

The User Funnel is adapted from the marketing term Purchase Funnel which has similar functions. Basically, the funnel describes the number of potential/retained users (or in the marketing case, clients or customers), and how it changes with each stage.

As the name implies, the funnel tightens with each step, or, in the case of games, the number of players remaining in the system decreases. This should make sense intuitively - but if you don't understand why the funnel only narrows, feel free to ask.

So what's the start of this funnel? Well, the most concrete number you will have is the number of users who install your game (the marketing team may also look at number of visits to the website and other factors, but we'll talk about advertising a bit later). For the purposes of game design, the number of installs is the critical start point.

From here, there are 2 different types of funnels that are typically looked at.

The first is purely time based, and looks something like this. For illustration purposes, we'll say we start with 100,000 installs for a given cohort.

Installs: 100,000
Day 1: 50,000 (this is the day after the installs)
Day 7: 25,000
Day 30: 12,500
Day 60: 6,000
Day 90: 3,000
Day 120: 1,500

This is all just illustrative, but a pretty good baseline you can think about with this kind of funnel is the 50% rule. At each of these steps, except a drop off of around 50% for an average game. Note that this varies wildly from game to game (and even within a game's own life cycle, which I'll discuss later) and depends on a lot of factors.

For games with large playerbases, this is most often calculated on a per day level. This kind of funnel is great at tracking the game's overall health and retention levels.

The other kind of funnel is very similar, but uses player actions instead.

Installs: 100,000
Tutorial: 75,000
Real Game: 50,000
5 Games: 25,000
Leveled Up: 12,500
And so on

Of course, exactly how this looks depends on your game. One thing to note here is that this funnel has the possibility of not "slimming down" since there are scenarios where a player may skip a step.

This kind of funnel is useful for tracking specific changes to your game. Typically, you would also drill down into each of the larger steps to see where improvements can be made.

For example, tutorial might look like this:

Tutorial Start: 75,000
Tutorial Step 1: 74,500
Tutorial Step 2: 74,000
Tutorial Step 3: 66,000
Tutorial End: 65,000

So in this example, you would know that for whatever reason, a high % of players are getting tripped up at Tutorial Step 2 and not progressing to Step 3 for some reason, despite the rest of it flowing quite smoothly.

I mentioned before these funnels can change within a product's own life cycle. Why is that?

Well, consider the average gamer - there will be games he is very interested in, and games he is less interested in. Games he is interested in will be first on his list to try as soon as they come out, and he'll give them more of a chance than other games. If it's a multiplayer game, his friends might urge him to stick with it even if he isn't feeling it, retaining longer than he might otherwise.

On the other hand, if it's a game he's checking out later in the life cycle, he is likely trying it out because he has nothing else to play. Or he's branching out and trying a different genre. He is less likely to find friends who are also playing.

Additionally, the game might look more dated. The game might be more prone to crashes or other problems as operating systems and drivers update, etc. The game may also have more competition, from newer, shinier games that friends are playing.

All of these factors typically mean that as a product ages, the funnel tightens and people retain less readily - even if nothing else changes.

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Ok, so what about advertising?

Advertising is basically the pre-install funnel, and is very difficult to actually realistically calculate.

There are a few aspects to advertising that should be considered.

The first is Reach. This is the general scope of users your ads will be surfaced to. The more specific you want to target, the lower your potential reach will be. The more broadly you target, the higher your reach, but this will have impacts on the other factors.

The second is Cost. This is how much it costs to advertise. There are many models, but typically you are paying for cost per click. This means that you pay regardless of whether that person becomes a user or customer, as long as they clicked the ad, you pay up. Cost primarily depends on how much you want to target. The more you target, the higher the cost. For example, it costs a significant more amount of money to target iPad users than iOS users because iPad users are much more likely to spend money. At the same time, cost also depends on when you advertise (4th of July weekend is extremely expensive). The cost of advertising has gone down in the last few years, but for gaming demographics in particular it has gone up because of the emergence of mobile gaming and the millions of dollars they throw at ads (e.g. Clash of Clans superbowl ad).

The last is Conversion. Conversion is the actual number of installs you get vs the number of clicks you paid for. Conversion is something personal to your game, but does depends on the other factors as well. Typically, the higher your CPC (Cost per click), the higher the conversion will be (or else why are you paying more). The most important aspect of this is really the targeting. If PoxNora threw ads which include 30something stay at home moms, they are unlikely to convert, but the conversion would be much higher if the ads were only shown to 20-30 males who read reddit, for example.

So your numbers for a day might look something like this:

Reach (or Impressions as they are called in marketing land): 100,000
Clicks: 20,000
Conversions: 5,000

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One factor that I haven't talked about regarding advertising which is directly related to Pox is that your potential market is not limitless - there are only so many potential players. This is why the initial launch period is vitally important - the first time players hear about your game or see your ad may be the ONLY time they click. After that, seeing your ad 5 more times over the next 10 years is much less likely to get them to click again, or they click and remember your game and say "oh, I played this already"... but you have to pay for the click anyway.

What this means is that over time, it becomes less and less effective to advertise because while your theoretical reach diminishes dramatically. This is especially true if cost to advertise is going up for other reasons.

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Ok, so obviously, lots of information there... I didn't really get much in about PoxNora specifically as I'd like, but I am tired now and I think people can figure out stuff based on that.

Feel free to ask questions, I'll try and explain more

 

It depends on the game.

For a game on MOBILE, you have what is known as a UNIQUE DEVICE ID that is used to identify you. So it doesn't matter how many times you install - of course, if you install one on your phone, then your iPad, you count as 2.

As for PC, you typically count accounts as installs, rather than downloads. Some players will make multiple accounts, and there are ways to weed those out such as IP address or payment information, but this is usually a very small % of users so it's not a big deal either way.

And yea, I don't know any game development studio that wouldn't track these kinds of numbers, it'd be like running ANY business and not knowing how many people are buying your stuff or walking into your store. Even if you don't have an exact count, you should have some kind of estimate.

 

The problem is you are still looking at it like a snapshot.

Yes, you'd be right if the game launched 10 years ago, and then no one in the "new generation" ever heard of it, and now, 10 years ago, they are all suddenly ready to play.

The reality is that that "new generation" was constantly growing up, and was coming in slowly each year.

It's more like this:

Launch Reach: 10 million
Year 1 New Generation: 100,000
Year 1 New Generation reached in Year 1: 75,000 (25,000 remaining)
Year 2 New Generation: 100,000
Year 1 New Generation reached in Year 2: 5,000 (20,000 remaining)
Year 2 New Generation reached in Year 2: 75,000 (25,000 remaining)

etc.

 

This is actually part of Senshu's job.

That said, like with many things in the "viral generation", the problem with social media is that it is a MOMENTUM based platform. If Pox was a new game, that effort would be much stronger and more successful, but it's difficult to gain traction for that kind of stuff on a 10 year old game with a small userbase that's been covered a lot over the years.

 

Except that's exactly what happened.

In the first 3 or 4 years of Pox's life, it was heavily advertised on various sites such as Penny Arcade. SomethingAwful's forum had a huge PoxNora presence back then and was a great source of organic advertising (which, honestly, is just as important as actual ads, and you don't really get organic beyond the initial launch period, but that's another topic). Yes, advertising slowed later on after year 5 or so, but as I mentioned, once you get past the initial launch period, the kind of users you reach diminishes - the ones who are REALLY interested in the kind of game you are making will generally hear of it sooner than everyone else, so the quality of any remaining users will be low.

You can't take an old game and just "advertise" and get a bunch of users, it really doesn't work that way. This isn't a Pox thing, it's a general thing.

Yes, it's not going to reach every potential player, it'd be silly to expect that we have reached every potential player, but the fact that you weren't reached (or you and some other people) is just anecdotal evidence and doesn't indicate some large hidden pool of players who haven't reached for whatever reason in the last 10 years. What we have to go on is how much it costs to advertise and how many players we actually get out of it.

The bottom line is that advertising becomes less effective for a product over time as a general rule. Even big brands, if they want their marketing to continue to be effective, have to do really huge spends and do things like "re-brand" or re-shape their image. It's not something you can just throw money at and win - otherwise, everyone would just do it... and well, that doesn't really work either (it's part of the reason why the mobile landscape is so dominated by a few big players, because they just built an arms race of advertising spend - it's not really sustainable, but that's another topic).

Anyway, I am not saying there aren't players out there, I am just saying the reality is that as time goes on, the pool of available players diminishes over time, and the value of advertising also diminishes. There's a reason why the initial launch is SO important for a game, you really don't get a second chance most of the time.

 

That said, something like the PS4 launch has elements which MAY help:

1. It is on a new platform
   • While some PC players do have Consoles, and vice versa, many gamers are one or the other
2. This is also a kind of game that is not typically on Consoles
   • Which may be good or bad, but it does mean that it's quite possible to reach players who may not have realized games like this exist
3. The launch also features a new client on PC
   • Which may draw returning users back, as well as make hopefully make the game look more modern to some extent
4. The launch will also bring a lot of press - putting PoxNora back in the media spotlight for a brief time

 

Also, there are untapped pools such as the Asian market (particularly China). Pox has tried, in the past, to partner with publishers in China (you basically can't do business in China without partnering with someone there), but it's been difficult, especially since Pox is "past its prime" so to speak. The framework for translation is also in place already actually, but with how much text PoxNora has, it'll also cost a boatload of money to translate.

 

My immediate short-term plan is to continue to improve upon the core of the game and maintain it. I don't have a lot of control over dramatically changing its direction, but I want to do what I can to keep the ship on course.

I think most players don't realize how much internal improvements have happened over the years. One of these things is our POXML scripting language, which now houses MOST of the runes in this game. Whenever we update a run or fix a bug, it is often done via recoding it in this scripting language. What this means is that things are vastly more consistent when it is done in the new language (because with raw code you can do things one of many ways, while with the scripting language the options are more specific/limited). Another thing it means is that changes/updates are much faster.

Players like to talk about "spaghetti code" and such, and it's true that the core code is quite complex, but that's because the game is complex more than anything. There are a lot of interactions.

Part of the impetus for a lot of the consolidations of abilities and effects are to do with my end goal of streamlining the order of operations in this game and making it behave more consistently. This reduces bugs and sets up proper player expectations. Do I wish I could have designed the game that way from the ground up instead of coming into it halfway through and trying to do it now? Yes, but at the same time, having this foundation to build on is also amazing. In any case, it's a slow process, but it's going.

I would love to see the game grow dramatically, but I am also not naively optimistic. As I have said before, people often overestimate the effects their ideas will have on products (not just PoxNora), and I have learned over the years to tamper my expectations. It doesn't mean I (or we) aren't trying - we love Pox and I would personally be happy working on it for many more years, but we also recognize games don't live forever.

Part of the reason we are doing the PS4 thing is to try and change the trajectory of the game - and we are also taking the opportunity to remove a big issue the game has - the client - which has always made it difficult to make improvements in because of how old it is, as well as the lag and other issues players have with it and I hope it will be a better experience for everyone, and also allow us to make improvements more readily in the future. Hopefully, the launch brings some new blood and allows us to build some momentum we can ride.

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I don't know if players remember when SOE tried to take Pox to Facebook - which turned out to be a disaster. The idea there was to put a lot of resources into a new website, porting it over to a new platform, along with overhauling some of the base issues the game had (excessive calculations via ATK/DEF calculations, etc.). And, to my mind, that turned out to be the single biggest mistake for Pox Nora - because while it had the potential to be big, stalling development on everything in the game, including content, as well as having the game be down for days... ended up costing PoxNora a ton of users and momentum at a time when the game was growing. And honestly, the game has never recovered from that.

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As for future features/plans, these are some of the things I'd like to be able to work on after the PS4 launch, not in any particular order:

• Co-Op Play vs AI
• Bring back Drafts (most likely to be something similar to the HS model)
• "Dungeon Crawl" campaigns with more RPG-like elements

There are other, more "shake up" types of things we have been discussing, but nothing concrete has been decided, but some of these include:

• A new meta game element to replace DOW (DOW is probably going away regardless)
• Alternative game modes
  • This will likely come as part of tournaments/events
• Rune Rotations, so we aren't dealing with thousands of runes at a time in the meta, and there's more of a natural cycle of meta shifts
  • Map Rotations was kind of a test bed for this, and players are starting to catch on that maps change the meta

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We are, also, putting away money and ideas for Pox 2 (whatever that means), so that we can start over fresh with all the knowledge from this game, but that takes a lot of time, money and resources, and we want to do it right. At the same time, we also want to do it in such a way that lets us take all of you with us into the next frontier. Part of that question is... how and when do we do that, and what do we do with Pox when the time comes? But anyway, that's getting off topic, perhaps...

 

This question came from the other thread, but I wanted to address it here:

Markets for games vary greatly from genre to genre - and the particular niche that PoxNora falls into is one of the smaller ones. Pox was never great at selling itself, or teaching players how to play. And when Pox was doing well, the money wasn't spent properly on improving those aspects of the game - instead, it was used to do things like build the Avatar system, and port the game to Facebook.

The market is much larger now than it used to be (and gamers are much more receptive to this genre than ever), but is still relatively small compared to others. Games like Hearthstone and Duelyst are expanding the market (Duelyst has about 10x the players Pox does) but both of those games have much more accessible designs than PoxNora (Blizzard has a great track record of making games accessible to the mass market), but at the same time they are taking a large part of the market share.

Pox isn't easy to play - and was even more complex early. Less runes, but there were a lot of other extra bits and stuff that made it more complicated than it had to be.

The game was also "free to play" always, but early on, that simply meant you got some free decks that were not competitive... unless you paid - the true free to play stuff where you can earn content hadn't really come yet - which also hurt retention.

So the market size, the steep learning curve, the pay wall, etc. all contributed. But the biggest factor is the game itself - the type of game itself, and where it actually sits. It's not the kind of game that's going to appeal to a lot of players - no matter how good or polished we make it. And you know what? That's ok. Pox does what it does well, and it's why it has been able to succeed for so long. I know some players fairly cynical or negative about the game, but the reality is that for a game that started with two guys in a garage in Arizona - it's done remarkably well - and the fact that we are still sitting around not only talking about it, but also still playing it, is a testament to that.

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There are many similar games that have come and gone throughout Pox's lifetime. Some of them were quite good/fun. Some were bad, like Battleforge (whose designers actually made fun of PoxNora for calling our cards "runes"), tho some would argue that's more RTS than TBS. Others, like Scrolls (from the minecraft guys) were well backed (minecraft guys were not short on cash), but still didn't manage to gain traction. Then we have critically acclaimed stuff like Banner Saga that no one plays (if you think no one plays Pox, try getting a multiplayer game on Banner Saga).

The pile of bodies this genre has left behind tells us that this is not an easy market to succeed in.