For today’s social game developer, virality is key to driving user growth and lowering customer acquisition costs. Here’s a look at five elements that boost the virality of social games:
1. Publishing updates about the game through users
Every game developer should allow users to publish their top scores or milestones on their news feeds and Twitter streams. By doing so, their games will be promoted to all of their users’ friends and likely attract new players. For example, Zynga’s Texas Hold‘Em Poker lets its players announce to all of their friends when they get Three of a Kind, a Flush or another great hand.
2. Embedding social interaction into the game
Game developers can boost virality by promoting direct user interaction—which transforms the gaming experience into a chance for players to spend time with (and recruit) their real-life friends. A few good examples include Playfish’s Restaurant City, which lets players hire their own friends to work in their restaurants, and Lexulous (pictured below), which requires players to choose their own friends as opponents.
3. Building fan bases outside of the game
Fan pages and forums are great ways for social game developers to increase awareness of their games, develop more affinity in their players and make users more willing to promote their games. Game developers can drive even more traffic to their fan pages or forums by promoting it within their games. By making it a part of the in-game mechanics, it will seem less like an advertisement and encourage more users to become fans.
4. Creating incentives for inviting friends
Users are wiling to invite their friends, and game developers should make it compelling and easy for them to do so. In a recent analysis, Siqi Chen of Serious Business showed that users tend to invite 16 friends at a time—the same number that Facebook allows on its friend selector widget. Game developers can make even better use of this tactic by offering incentives to recruit other users. For example, Green Planet encourages its users to recruit their friends by letting users earn more money by having a bigger “Green Team.” And they even recommend friends that the user should add, as pictured below.
5. Designing a game that is naturally fun to play
Virality is an essential element for user growth, but unless the game is worth sharing, viral tactics won’t do any good. If a game isn’t fun to play, users won’t play. And they certainly won’t promote it to their friends. As Sebastien de Halleux, COO of Playfish, said at the Social Gaming Summit 2009, the key metric for a successful game is fun. At Playfish, they know a game is ready to launch when the entire company can’t stop playing it.
