What Really Matters? An Experiment with Hitwicket

Building Retention

Cricket is the second largest sport in the world and Hitwicket is unique in being the only game that combines match play and strategy for it.  The team got in touch with us early on to talk about D1 to D3 retention.  The game is deep and players who stick around tend to spend a long time playing each day, but the drop from D1 to D3 was higher than they’d like.  

This is a perfect challenge for experimentation.

Uncovering Player Preferences

The fundamental goal of experimentation is to find out what really matters to players.  What do they really enjoy about your game?  What makes them open your app in those spare moments each day?  Putting your finger on this makes it much easier to make decisions about what to build and what to cut.  Where to focus your resources.

The Thrill of the Chase

Hitwicket is made up of two distinct parts.  Core gameplay is the “run chase” where the players' goal is to exceed a certain score within a certain amount of attempts.  This is the thrill of a cricket game and Hitwicket recreates the raucous atmosphere of a 20:20 match very well.

The meta is a team builder where the players’ goal is to strengthen their team in order to progress through increasingly challenging opponents.  Taking optimal decisions about where to invest is key to success here.

As a team we felt that core gameplay and specifically “special abilities” were the most fun part of the game.  

During the run-chase each successful shot a player makes earns them mana towards unlocking a special ability.  The special ability either temporarily doubles the runs they make or their chances of getting a high score.  Getting a high score in particular feels great as the voice-over crackles over the crowd “what a powerful hit, it’s out of the ground!” and of course takes the player a big step closer to victory.

Having made this decision, we had two options for testing whether special abilities really matter: increase them significantly or take them away.  

The Experiment Approach:

We decided to both increase and decrease the mana required to unlock special abilities.  If they really drive engagement, retention should decrease with a higher requirement (and therefore lower frequency per match) and increase with a lower requirement (and therefore higher frequency per match).

But this introduced a potential issue: changing the frequency special abilities are unlocked also changes the speed players score runs.  Therefore we also needed to adjust the target players were chasing in each cell to ensure the test was not also about the speed players complete matches.

What's Next?

After a successful AA test, the experiment itself launched in early December and the data is now pouring in.  We are expecting to close field in February and will share results then.

Your Thoughts Matter

What do you think the outcome will be? Will more frequent special abilities keep players coming back for more, or should we be looking somewhere else? Maybe you have an idea that could revolutionise Hitwicket even further? Share your thoughts either on our LinkedIn page or direct with the team.  We’d love to know what you think.