Player retention : Do you track it in a good way?

[Blacklava]

Hi,

wondering who take time to annalyse the stats deeply in order to find out the exact volume of needed incoming traffic to keep your game growing?

An example will be clearer :
If your active players will stay for an average of 1 month on your game it means you will need to feed your game more than what you've got in registration 1 months before if you want to keep growing...

Do you make same math on your end or do you bet on rare very long time players and don't bother about such "live" datas?
I know each game will have its own values but I think the idea is the same for all browser games, hope that makes some sense

[133794m3r]

Hi,

wondering who take time to annalyse the stats deeply in order to find out the exact volume of needed incoming traffic to keep your game growing?

An example will be clearer :
If your active players will stay for an average of 1 month on your game it means you will need to feed your game more than what you've got in registration 1 months before if you want to keep growing...

Do you make same math on your end or do you bet on rare very long time players and don't bother about such "live" datas?
I know each game will have its own values but I think the idea is the same for all browser games, hope that makes some sense

This is nearly impossible to figure out. As the values will always be changing. Players leave and players come. It's mostly all about the randomness of how people come into the game. Basically though what i was going to do was to just see how many people i can keep. Getting new players to come in and also old players leaving is a part of the game. You can create content out of the wazoo but some players will still leave. It's just how they are. So i'm just going to look at the retention rate of players. Basically how many of the x players who sign up stay after 1 month, 2 months etc. Then i'm also going to when they want to leave have the option to say why they were leaving.

Basically that'd just be a little checkbox thing, and also a small form where they can type in it. This would only be accessible to the players who have/had played the game for atleast two weeks. As any time below that and i doubt they've even played enough of the game to understand it.  It's going to be either two weeks or level 30(cap's 120 atm). So i'll know that they will have to at least tried things and played the game.

Also of course, player suggestions is always a good thing to have too.  So of course i'd allow players to suggest things and either say they like it, or hate it etc. But of course each person would be limited on how many votes they coudl give as to make it so that ther'es not just "i hate all ideas except mine" mentality. So i can make sure the game's growing and working better. So that along with the way that i said i was going to do it. I think it's going to be a pretty good plan.

[Harkins]

This is nearly impossible to figure out. As the values will always be changing. Players leave and players come. It's mostly all about the randomness of how people come into the game.

No, it's not. It's possible and important to understand if you want to have a commercially successful game. It's hard to predict individuals, but you can get very good numbers on groups.

For example, on NearbyGamers.com, a very low percentage (<10%) of visitors who find the site via Google sign up, and send few messages (<5) to other players. Visitors who follow a link from any gaming forum - are more than twice as likely to sign up and then are more engaged, they send more messages. So I'm spending almost no time thinking about SEO and a lot of time thinking about how to get gaming forums talking about the site and linking to it.

The longer a player uses a game, the more chances they'll spend money or spur their competition to spend money. It's important to know how long the average person plays to find out which traffic sources are worth more attention - maybe players who find you through Google will play months longer than players from a voting site. So you know which players you want to spend more time getting, and you also know when you should contact your players to try to reinforce their involvement with the game.

I strongly recommend Dave McClure's "Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR" presentations, he explains what numbers are worth thinking about and, high-level, how to start using them well. You can read the slides watch a recent video.