Jakarta, Indonesia - 16 January 2019

How to Boost your Player Retention

Customer retention can be considered as one of the indicators of a successful business. In the gaming industry, retaining player retention means getting players to return to your game and playing it more than once. As a game developer, you obviously want your players to play your games as many sessions as possible.

So, how do you keep your players to stay and play? Lucky for you, here we have a few simple tips you can follow to boost your player retention. Check them out and you can keep your players coming back to you!

1. Make a Great First Impression

You know what they say: first impression matters. You need to give a good and pleasing impression for first-time players. If your gameplay is short and simple, you have to keep your players engaged from the get-go. If you have a more complex gameplay, don't leave them clueless on what they should do. Give them a concise, yet clear tutorial. Remember not to make them sit through a long-winded tutorial, because surely no one would like that.

2. Adjust Your Session Length

You need to adjust the length of your game and make it appropriate according to your genre and target audience. It's simple, really. Are you making a casual game? Then make sure you have a shorter amount of time per session. Your casual game will lose its appeal if players need to spend a lot of time on it. On the contrary, if you are making an action or RPG game, your game needs to be longer and players need to spend more time to complete it.

3. Give Daily Rewards

Giving daily rewards is a plausible method to keep players coming back to play your game every single day. Give rewards that are useful and will help them in the game. If the rewards are compelling enough, your players will stick around and come back daily to claim their rewards just so they can be better at playing your game.

4. Send Push Notifications

Send push notifications to let your players know that your game is still there and ready to be played. Push notification is also a great way to communicate with your players. Let them know if you've added new updates and features that might interest them. However, do remember not to bombard your players with too much notification. An alternative to that is to provide an option for players to turn off push notifications as it may get annoying for some people and might turn them away instead.

5. Release Regular Updates and Add new Features

Update your game and add new features regularly to let players know there's still someone working on the game. You should also add new levels regularly. Inform them that there will be more levels coming soon, so players will always look forward to new levels instead of uninstalling your game once they've completed all the available levels.

There you have it! Those are a few simple tips on how you can boost your player retention. We hope you will find them useful.

If you are just getting started in developing your game and are interested in making 2D games, you can start by using MelonJS, a lightweight HTML5-based game engine perfect for 2D game creations. It is the perfect engine for you who are new to game developing. Go to http://melonjs.org now to try it out!