Case Studies: How We Helped Casual Game Retain 5x More Users With Smart User Retention Strategies

The story

For new users to understand the complete story, we once again briefly introduce this bubble casual game for you. Just like the game of our user's competitor we saw in the picture above, we can clearly recognize that this is a casual game of bubbles.

About this casual game, a bubble game:

The bubble shooter game be launched in August 2021, available for Android and iOS. Match and pop colorful bubbles in over 2000 captivating levels, and participate in special events for awesome rewards.

The casual game joins the swarming bubble shooting adventure of Angry Birds, full of endless challenges. Players can pick up slingshots, shoot bubbles, drop piglets, rescue cute cubs, and enjoy pleasure. Players can earn special rewards by completing daily challenges, and can also send gifts to friends by sharing.

Click "Learn More" to drive your apps & games business with ASO World app promotion service now.

Challenge

Our user want make its casual game growth with these goals in this case as we mentioned earlier:

• To reach the top 5 when its main potential players searching the industry keywords on the App Store;

• Boost its visibility and organic traffic;

• Optimize its app stickness and user acquirement system.

In the previous case study, we shared the smart strategies in detail about which how to use ASO to improve keyword rankings and increase app visibility. For details, please refer to: How A Mid-level Casual Game Increased Its Rank To Top and Visibility on App Store Within ASO?

Here, we will focus on the final goal, to optimize the app stickness and user acquirement system.

Solution

Based on preliminary research and experience, we found some helpful factors for this game in terms of user retention. As our earlier research has verified, for casual games, there are several features that are very effective in retaining and engage users:

• Social features;

• Interactive & Reward features;

• Challenge & Flow;

• motivation system.

The social features has also been valued by many leading video platforms recently. We can frequently see platforms such as YouTube adding message and sharing features to improve user experience. To ensure players to share gifts with friends will be helpful for the games or apps user acquirement as viral marketing.

Similarly, allowing players to experience challenges during the game can satisfy most people's competitive spirit and sense of superiority. The feature together with "Flow" and "Interactive & Reward features" are conducive to the growth of app stickiness. Our users' games already have these features, and what we do is to make these features more systematic and in-depth planning and consciously promote user habits. At the same time, we introduced another feature, motivation system.

How to motivate game player for better engagement?

The player motivation is really important, this will be what will trigger the player to engage and keep being engaged for long term into your game. The motivation is the action or the process of motivating someone by giving him the reason for doing and keep repeating some actions.

What is a good motivation system in casual games?

A good motivation system for a videogame is the one that will fill the player needs and drive them to engage themself to continue playing the game.

This is often defined as your core gameplay loop or the OCR of your game.

• Objective: Give a clear and identified goal to the player

• Challenge: Create a fun and identifying goal to the player

• Reward: Give rewards to reinforce and reengage the player

How we optimize user's casual game player stickness with motivation system?

We introduced the motivation system in this case for our user, which focus on the short term, medium term and long term motivation. The short term motivation is what motivates the player to complete the current challenge, which a OCR loop should be quick between 0 to 60 seconds. The OCR be repetitive for the player and be integrated into the core gameplay loop.

The midterm motivation loop must be clear and understandable by the player during the FTUE. If you don’t succeed to give to the player a strong understanding and amazing experience of what will make them continue playing the game, there’s a big chance that you will lose that player forever.

The long term retention is what motivates the player to finish and complete the game. What will make the player stay in the game for 30, 60 days? What will make them complete the game? If you don’t have those features for free to play game, you succeed to retain your super fan and you will skip great user conversion opportunity.

If early you succeed give a clear long-term goal to your player and the road to achieving it is a fun and engaging core loop. You have way more chance to have a long-term engagement in your game.

Results

To fuel growth, we also use Flows to understand how players are navigating the game. With targeted campaigns based on user behavior, location, and lifecycle stage, we together engage players on the most effective channels to drive greater conversions and retention. With nearly 2 monthes promotion works, we retain 5x more users for the bubble casual game.

What we do for the bubble casual game's user loyalty marketing?