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I have an online game. It's been running for almost three years. Users repeatedly acclaim the game as a very good one. We've had some users sign up on the opening day who still play the game today.

Recently I ran an advertising campaign using this advertisement banner, and we got the following results:

  • 6,392,350 hits
  • 3,482,550 unique viewers
  • 6,747 clicks (0.11% CTR)
  • 6,162 unique clickers (0.18% unique CTR)
  • 387 new registered users (6.28% of unique clickers, 0.0111% of unique viewers)

In fact, over the game's lifetime, we've accumulated 132,301 users... that's about 124 new users per day on average. About 5,000 of them are still active, and between 300 and 800 of them at any given time.

But, with the user's encouragement, I feel that our game is capable of so much more. All around me I see other games getting much more attention than mine.

I'm in a dilemma: Almost everyone who plays my game loves it, but almost everyone else hasn't even heard of it.

I guess my question is: what does it take to be recognised? Why are other games, even terrible games, getting more users than me? How can I improve our appeal? What am I doing wrong that's stopping users from hearing about and joining the site?

Any advice on this matter would be much appreciated, since it's hard getting a budget together anymore... I made this company to run our games, and I'm having trouble keeping it up...

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

As a general point - looking at the numbers over the lifetime of the site isn't very useful in understanding what's happening and how to improve. For example:

In fact, over the game's lifetime, we've accumulated 132,301 users... that's about 124 new users per day on average. About 5,000 of them are still active, and between 300 and 800 of them at any given time.

Doesn't give us many useful bits of information like:

  • When did we gain/lose users?
  • Are we getting better at keeping users on the system?
  • Are we getting better at converting new users?
  • ... and so on...

What I'd be recommending that you do is look at doing a cohort analysis where you compare like groups over time. I'd highly recommend that you take a look at the presentation Startup Metrics for Pirates (slides, video) so called because of the AARRR acronymn:

  • Acquisition
  • Activation
  • Retention
  • Referral
  • Revenue

Once you have stats for these you can start focusing on the piece of your system that's causing the largest problems in growth. If I had to guess from a brief look at the site I'd say retention is probably the biggest issue (you need to get more new users to stay, which will increase referrals (and acquisition/activation) and hence revenue) but without numbers it's hard to say.

Once you have numbers and know where to focus your resources for improvement, set up a framework for A/B testing so you can validate that you are actually moving the dial when you put improvements in place).

There's some great advice in the other answers here - but unless you are looking at the right numbers then you could well optimise the wrong thing at the wrong time (e.g. it's useless to get more people coming to the site if most of them are immediately going away and saying bad things about it).

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up vote 2 down vote
  1. Your company website, marketing an game UI is inferior to the top games. People like to interact with things that ar beautiful. Even though a MUD can be a great game, it's a lot harder to attract users to that type of game versus a game with a fun user interface. Your aesthetics need to be improved.
  2. You need to get people to sign up and authenticate with Facebook or Twitter and encourage them to share their achievements or automatically post things (with permission) to their feed. This will start to get their friends involved.
  3. Even if your application becomes a huge success aren't you setting yourself up for a potential lawsuit? Are you licensing the Pokemon name, imagery, brand, copyright, trademarks etc.?
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up vote 1 down vote

Thing is your game's subject matter is fairly complicated and requires learning about the Pokemon.

Most people playing games especially mobile games want them to be a distraction rather then a full virtual world involvement, so your target crowd would be Pokemon lovers and so you should place your ads accordingly.

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Hmm... well I did try to avoid requiring too much pre-requisite knowledge by providing all the info in an accessible manner in-game, and I've even had a couple users tell me that they only got into Pokémon because of my game, but I can see how that can be an obstacle to others. I guess I should try to work on a game that doesn't use existing characters, right? I mean, feedback from users tells me that I'm a decent game maker, so I just need something original. Is that it? – Kolink Nov 26 '12 at 21:24
@Kolink Original yes. Simple definitely and not preferably not tied to an existing established character set like Pokemon. – Karlson Nov 26 '12 at 21:28
up vote 1 down vote

If you want to hear my honest and sincere feedback, I think you should show your site to a few designers and rework the color palette and layout. Use rounded corners, add noise to your background gradient... You can stay within the greens because that's your theme and given your data you should obviously keep the functionalities and gameplay but I think you need to hear a professional opinion on the visual aspect.

I think the UI might be keeping people from talking about it. Also, there's no social sharing (Facebook, Twitter) buttons; if you're targeting a young audience, I think you should add these. You could also try putting a video on the homepage to demo the game for newcomers as the main click-to-action. People need to know what it's like playing the game before they sign-up; or they need a friend to tell them "it's cool".

Karlson's right about the fact that you're requiring users to fully immerse into the pokemon world; that limits you. May be you could do another site that keeps everything as is as far as the gameplay goes but changes the branding and removes the pokemon positioning altogether. That's just a suggestion and I know that programming-wise it's no small thing to create and maintain 2 sites.

Overall, if you have the gameplay right, then you have a very good foundation!

Good luck.

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Thanks for the feedback. We are actually working on a version of the game that will be a Facebook app, which will centre much more on the social aspects of it. Hopefully that will get more interest. – Kolink Nov 26 '12 at 22:22
Ok, a Facebook app sounds like a good idea. Why the downvote thought? – frenchie Nov 27 '12 at 0:58
I thought Frenchie's answer was helpful so I upvoted. Don't know why it was downvoted, all good online multiplayer games have a video showing off the game it's a tried and tested method of luring new players. – DigitalSea Nov 27 '12 at 1:16
Wasn't my downvote... – Kolink Nov 27 '12 at 1:17
@Kolink: I recognized your username from stack; you've helped me quite a few times! – frenchie Nov 27 '12 at 1:28

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