After all your sweat and hard work, you have created your dream iOS mobile game. And now, it is time to make it a hit. And like any other consumer product in the market, its success is going to depend on the number of takers. To win a large user base, you should be focusing on two areas: promotion and user engagement. Their boost will automatically lead to more users. And an ideal way to achieve better promotion and better user engagement is to deploy social features.
These attributes tap the possibility of virality and thus, render a cost-effective and consistent line of promotion. And additionally, the features add a social element which invokes more engagement from users. The power of social features has been previously tapped by gaming industries such as Wooga who saw unprecedented growth, mainly by the use of the Facebook sharing feature. Learning from such examples and industry experts, we can conclude a few key takeaways which can help you bring more users:
Let Users Market Your Game On Social Media Channels
The two primary ways in which a social network can be used for promotion are allowing users to send game invitations to their social network friends, and enabling them to share achievements on these platforms. Both attributes allow your existing users to market your product. The most popular social media platforms for the purpose are Facebook and Google Plus. Both platforms can also be used to allow players to put status messages declaring their feats. Other popular mediums for inviting friends includes e-mail and chat messengers like WhatsApp. Using any of these popular mediums to enable sharing requires the integration of relevant backend APIs, a process whose execution requires the expertise of an iPhone Game Developer of India or rest of the world.
Give Players An Incentive To Invite Friends
Many players are too lazy to invite friends. However, they can be incentivized to invite with rewards like a second-life or a grace score. These incentivizing methods have worked well for games such as Nosferatu. An effective way which Candy Crush has used to incentivize users is by giving two choices when a player life’s ends: either pay for the second life or invite a certain number of friends. So, the game either gets more players or more earnings every time a player’s life ends.
Employ Social Attributes Which Serve Distinct Groups Of Players
According to Richard Bartle, a veteran game-researcher, there exists four kinds of players: socializers, explorers, killers, and achievers. Socializers enjoy interacting with other players. Explorers generally like to explore. Killers like the element of competition. Achievers like to gain more points and crack higher levels.
Interestingly, different social features tick with different kinds of players. For socializers, chatting with other players proves to be a useful social feature. For killers and achievers, leader boards showing top players and scores proves to be a relevant attribute. And for explorers, the feature of a news feed is useful as its lets them explore what other users are up to. While employing all of the mentioned attributes may seem tough, an experienced iOS Game Development Company in India can integrate all attributes quite easily.
When we talk about boosting popularity and user engagement for a mobile game, integrating social features can prove to be immensely helpful. According to the key guidelines mentioned above, social features like integration with a social network, incorporating chat and leader boards, and etc. are useful attributes. It is worthy to note that most of these can be deployed in an iOS game by an iOS Game Development Company in Gurgaon or elsewhere.