Hi, One month after its launch, this is that i can read in itunes about my game's rentention "Lucco". I know retention is very hard stuff for ios games. And it's much much much better than my two first games, but i can't figure out what that really means. Is it good? Is it bad? So what about you guys? What's your retention games? And what we can execpt as retention for ios game? cheers Nathan
Your D1-D7 numbers look fairly solid compared to the "average" game. Beyond D7 your numbers drop off or are otherwise all over the place. This tends to happen a little if you don't have a critical mass of downloads on a daily basis to have a smooth curve (am guessing the contributing numbers on a daily basis are in the 30-60 users range). If that's the case, then your retention is probably still "okay", you just need more users through to see what the actual tail end retention is. If you are getting "hundreds" of downloads a day contributing to each line, then that might be more indicative of a problem more explicitly from D8 onwards. For the type of game Lucco is though, I think your retention is pretty expected. It can be hard to keep somebody's attention for longer than a week for arcade and skills based games. Still, if you want to impact D8+, you might like to consider features that promote longer term engagement like a non activity 7-day re-engagement local push notification, cumulative achievements the player has to chip away at over time, daily/weekly return rewards/unlocks/skins, weekly tournaments/competitions, friends list connectivity and related high score notifications etc. Some of those might be prohibitively expensive to build so you'll have to consider each option carefully as well as working out whether they are a good fit for your players and game.
Thanks pikpok, your answer are always very precise. You are right, my download daily basis is very low (this first month average is 100, and this last week average is more around 10). I didn't manage for the moment to have press coverage and all stuff like that. It's funny in a way to see that my game with the best retention, is the one with the less downloads and press visibility. My second game got more downloads in one day than Lucco in one month. What a hard video game world! Anyway I'm happy to see that I managed to do a game that is more interesting for players than previous one. And to increase again retention, I just release a new version with 9 more challenging levels to unlock. And push notification implemented. Let's see. Thanks pikpok.
To some degree that is expected. When you get featuring or high visibility, you are likely to get a lot more casual users downloading and "kicking the tires" on the app given Apple and reviewers have "told" them they might like it, and that sort of player is likely to churn out faster. If you aren't getting featured, then you are more likely to be getting through users that are actively seeking the game (or that sort of game/genre) out more explicitly, and those users are more likely to stick around. Happens on our stuff all the time. When something gets featured, you can visibly see the retention go down.
For sure. So developers have to choose between very few players with good retention, or more players with good retention. I made my choice.
As already stated, really focus on the competitive aspects of the game. I remember a big reason why I played Temple Run so much was so I could have the highest score amongst my friends. Encourage sharing your high-score on social media or a way to text the players' friends their high scores.
