Observe your user cycles and design around them (not against them)

After a few years in mobile gaming I've decided to put some of my key learnings and observations in writing in a blog: www.alexandremacmillan.com

I plan to publish new content at regular intervals and I'll keep updating my connections about my new posts. I'm hoping you will find some of the things I post to be interesting and useful, and I'm looking forward to your comments, suggestions and insights.

My first post is about user engagement cycles. Specifically, users tend to play mobile games at regular intervals. And those intervals are pretty much the same, regardless of the game. The summary is below, and you can read the full post on my blog here

Summary

The activity patterns of mobile players is largely independent from the specificities of your particular game. In other words, users' activity patterns share some important similarities, regardless of the game. That means that by observing what those patterns are, you can design your callbacks, appointment mechanisms and live ops in a way that reinforces the natural tendencies of your userbase (instead of trying to get your players to do something they are not naturally inclined to do - which is a much taller order). Some key takeaways from this post are:

1. The hour of day at which users install your game is the hour of day they are most likely to login in the future. Take that into account when designing callbacks or appointment mechanisms
2. Users tend to play your game on a weekly cycle. Try to find a way to reward weekly activity (reward users to give them a reason to login once a week)
3. Games attract more active users on the weekends (Saturday and Sunday). Try to take this into account when designing your live ops