Love or Hate: anything else is mediocre
Creating passionate users is NOT about finding ways to make everyone like you. It’s about finding ways to use your own passion to inspire passion in others.
via The Creating Passionate Users blog
Applies just as much with games as anything else.
Zynga has some massive MAU and DAU numbers, but I think you have to be pretty “middle ground” to be that main stream. I also think that’s why social games have a lower ARPU than “core” MMOs and the like.
It’s the hardcore players that will pay. You can certainly get some revenue out of the rest with ads, but I think it would be interesting to try to aim squarely at a specific audience and ignore the allure of being able to state that you have a zillion monthly active users. I’d love to know the ARPPU on that “mediocre” audience versus a passionate audience of 500,000.
January 14th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
The same business principles apply to social games as traditional businesses. If you can develop a loyal customer base, you develop more profitable customers.
We all tend to focus on the big guys like Zynga, with millions of users but the reality is that there are a lot of smaller companies, with limited resources that make a decent living by developing a loyal following.
Doing the same things that govern customer loyality in traditional businesses will help anyone grow their gaming business. Listen to players, build community and give reasons to support your company.