The Story So Far…

TXG launched twelve weeks ago, how have things been going since?

We've spoken to many studios across the world about their games and how we might be able to help.  The most common goal has been improving D1 to D7 retention; teams can get players into their games, but they don't always stick around in great enough numbers to justify the increases in UA spend required to unlock significant growth.

Over the coming weeks we'll be sharing case studies with the following studios that will shed some light on how we're working on the issue: 

• TapNation (Color Water Sort): does strengthening sort term goals improve D1 to D7 retention?

• Amanotes (DuetCats): does strengthening sort term goals improve D1 to D7 retention?

• Games2win (International Fashion Stylist): does strengthening sort term goals improve D1 to D7 retention?

• IterationOne (Nightclub Tycoon): how important are goals and visual progression to retention?

• Hitwicket (Hitwicket): does core gameplay drives retention?

You may have noticed a theme.  Goals are incredibly important to retention.  It's vital to have a tight loop between goal setting and progression to keep players coming back to your game.  Therefore many of our initial experiments have ended up setting out to understand the extent to which sharpening the UX around existing goals can improve retention. 

And it has been about sharpening UX rather than building new features.  It's also important to move fast and learn quickly,  so we've been working with teams to understand how their players react to tweaks to the existing games, rather than building new features from scratch.

Is this the right path?  Short term goals have consistently been the strongest bet, so whether the experiments come back positive, neutral or negative, this has been the logical first step to discovering what really matters to players.  Once we know how players react we can decide whether to double down or pivot.

Alongside these experiments we're also working with paid clients on more detailed challenges we can't talk about, so safe to say, there’s a lot happening.

If you'd like to talk about how experimentation can help you find growth for your game in this challenging market please get in touch, we'd love to help!