Retention is the most important metric for a free-to-play mobile game’s long-term business outlook. If you want to understand the link between a player’s lifetime value (how much money they ever spend in the game) and how long they continue to play your game, Emily Greer gave a GDC talk in 2013 absolutely packed with web data. This post will expand on that talk by highlighting some game systems in Kongregate’s mobile publishing portfolio that we’ve seen successfully drive long-term player retention. It will also highlight the core motivations created by each game and discuss how that system ties into that motivation. An excellent resource on the subject is Quantic Foundry's 2017 GDC talk on the anatomy of player motivations. AdVenture Capitalist offers a simple promise that any fan of idle games can appreciate: click more, get more powerful. Quantic Foundry's talk highlighted idle games in particular as incredible motivators for people who are motivated by the accumulation of power and the desire to complete every quest and collect every achievement. There are hundreds of idle

HTML5 has been hailed as the future of gaming in web browsers for years. Back in 2011, however, HTML5 was running into headwinds due to issues with performance and compatibility. There was general optimism about the technology, but few were willing to adopt it for their own games. Things became more urgent recently, though, with the deprecation of NPAPI plugins (i.e. Unity, Java, Silverlight, etc.) and an ominous cloud hanging over the long-term viability of Flash. So where are we now? For context on the following data, Kongregate.com has had 500-1500 games uploaded every month for nearly a decade, with over 100,000 games to date. We’ve often been known as a “Flash” platform because Flash dominated other technologies, but we’ve actually been an open, technology-agnostic web platform since 2007, also supporting Java and Shockwave early on. We were the first platform to officially support Unity, long before it was ubiquitous, starting in 2011, and we also built native support for HTML5 in 2013. All of this puts us in a unique position to have a

Over the last 7 years I’ve worked on a variety of Facebook and mobile games; a handful of them were with different celebrities and intellectual properties (IPs). I've been working on Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards at Kongregate for the past two years. I joined during pre-production, saw it through launch, and continue to support it through live servicing. Animation Throwdown is a card-battling game that incorporates the worlds of 5 animated properties from Fox: Family Guy, American Dad, Futurama, Bob's Burgers, and King of the Hill. Before Kongregate, I was a producer on Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff at TinyCo. Before that, I worked as a designer and producer on a variety of projects with celebrities and brands at Grab Games: Baby and Me (working with Brooke Burke and ModernMom.com), Brad Paisley World for Facebook, and a few other games that were never released. Partnership First of all, these projects are partnerships. You get to work on amazing properties that have a fan base who cares deeply about that property and, if you’re lucky,

This article was written by Lars Doucet and originally posted on Gamasutra back in March. We found it so useful that we're hosting it here, with Lars' permission. For the past five years I've been maintaining Defender's Quest, I've kept telling myself: there's got to be some magical untapped audience I've yet to reach. I've tried every possible trick to find them, and while many have helped, none have been a silver bullet. Support Mac and Linux 5.2% and 1.8% of lifetime revenue, respectively Participate in Humble Bundles (back when they were really good) Sell direct, on GOG, Itch.io, etc. significant chunk, still dwarfed overall by Steam Localize all the things Professional: German, French, Spanish, Japanese Volunteer: Russian, Korean, Italian, Czech Probably worth it? But not crystal clear. Well, I finally found these magical undiscovered players: they're in China. In "Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0," we noted the trend of Chinese players appearing on the global PC gaming radar. For one, Valve mentioned the trend at Dev Days 2016: and I had

This three-part series is intended to break apart my MIGS 2016 slides into what are hopefully detailed but accessible angles on the math and mechanics behind idle and incremental games. The sections draw heavily from a collection of spreadsheet models I built and have opened up for you to play around with. In Part I we looked at some of the standard math behind rapid-growth idle games, primarily at the relationships between exponential and polynomial growth and some methods of checking and adjusting the balance of the various generators over time. In Part II we explored different options for growth outside of the Cookie Clicker exponential model, as well as other options for interactions of generators. Now, in the final part, we will look at prestige loops, including analyzing the design behind real-world examples and how to vary them to keep things interesting for the player. The ability to reset your game with a multiplier to progress, often called a “prestige,” is one of the crucial mechanics behind most modern idle games, originally popularized (and conceived?) by Orteil’s Cookie