The Moneymakers For Social Games Aren't The Big Spenders

If you pay attention to online gaming, especially in the free to play space, where a game download is free, but extras of all sorts cost money, youll see stories about people spending ridiculous amounts of money in a game far more than a typical $60 disc. For example, theres a report today about a Belgian teenager who spent nearly $50,000 in a single game.

If youre a creator of a free to play game, stories like that might warm your heart. You probably dont want players this extreme its kinda bad publicity but you want to find the kind of players who are willing to spend far more than the price of a typical video game, right?

Wrong.

As it turns out, when you analyze the data for social gaming, the biggest sources of revenue arent the biggest spenders, but rather the most social players even players who dont themselves spend any money at all. Thats been one of the key findings of Ninja Metrics, an analytics firm that explores the data about how players interact with each other in the social gaming space. That interaction, it turns out, is key to predicting how a game will do and what players companies should focus on.

Some influencers spend no money but generate hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ninja Metrics CEO Dmitri Williams told me. That also applies to game time, as well.

The more a game incentivizes players to play together, the stronger this effect is, he continued. For example, the company has used its analytics engine to observe interaction in the game Imperia Online. For that game, the company determined that about 75% of play time is driven by social interaction. That is, Imperia players want to play with their friends far more than they want to play alone.

Using this data, the company can help game developers focus on those social players, rather than the whales, in order to gain new users and retain those influencers.

We can now find out where the influencers came from to find the game and so acquire more users, Williams told me. This helps a game retain the right people and gets them to spend more money when it has them.

This data can also be used to predict churn the likelihood that a player will grow tired of the game and stop playing. So, for example, if theres a player who brings in a lot of revenue through his friends coming in to play the game, you can target that person for different kinds of promotions and see what keeps her playing. But more importantly, a company can test to see what kind of promotion keeps both her and her friends playing the game.

Businesses want to think I have a relationship with my customer, said Williams. But they often forget about the relationships their customers have with each other. But until now, its been hard to see those relationships. That means that promotions and marketing can be less about squeezing particular targets and more about what ensures people have a fun time playing.

More here:
The Moneymakers For Social Games Aren't The Big Spenders