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Clarification on Gambit, Facebook, and offers compliance

In light of recent speculation and sensation that Gambit has been ‘banned’ by Facebook for displaying non-compliant offers, we would like to emphasize that Gambit’s service remains completely uninterrupted for publishers and end users, and will remain both stable and compliant with whatever guidelines our publisher clients ask us to follow.

We’ve outlined some facts below for additional clarification.

The Facts

1. When Facebook announced a more aggressive approach of enforcing their revised Advertising Guidelines, the team here at Gambit took immediate action to ensure our publisher partners on Facebook ran ads that complied with these guidelines. This included pulling thousands of international offers until we had had a chance to review each one individually. Gambit opened a direct channel of communication with Facebook and worked with Facebook employees to weed out all non-compliant offers.

2. While working through our ad inventory directly with Facebook, due to a technical bug, Gambit ended up showing a number of non-compliant offers to a segment of international traffic on the Facebook platform.  As soon as we noticed the bug, we took immediate action to fix it.  Unfortunately, while we were fixing the bug, Facebook sent our game development sister company, Kickflip, Inc., a cease and desist letter.  We understand that Facebook thought we were intentionally running the non-compliant ads which cannot be further from the truth.

3.    In any event, Kickflip, the company targeted by Facebook, does not own or operate Gambit.  Nor does Gambit have any relationship with Facebook, contractually or otherwise.  Gambit is an independent third-party payment and advertising platform for use by app developers, and Facebook cannot shutdown Gambit and its service any more than it can claim to shutdown Paypal or Google.  Moreover, it is our firm belief that Facebook cannot interfere with our publisher clients’ decision on which payments and advertising service provides them the best solution for their applications.

4. What social networking companies like Facebook can do is set guidelines on the types of advertising that can be run, and hold the publishers accountable.  Many of our clients already know that Gambit’s payments and advertising product provides the best solution to guarantee compliance with these guidelines.  While our competitors continue to run non-compliant ads, Gambit is delivering fully compliant advertisements to all of our publishers.  If we can’t deliver, we won’t be in business.

5. Gambit’s service remains completely uninterrupted for publishers and end users, and will remain both stable and compliant with whatever guidelines our publisher clients ask us to follow. Our publishers continue to run Gambit on their Facebook apps today.

6. Gambit continues to work diligently to ensure all ads we run through our clients’ applications on Facebook are compliant with the guidelines. Gambit continues to develop additional tools and educational materials to help our publishers make the best decisions about which monetization options they choose to run on their applications and games.

Q & A

Q: Why did you guys let non-compliant ads through?

A: When Facebook announced a new enforcement strategy for their Advertising Guidelines, Gambit took immediate action to sort and filter the ads we serve. However, ad inventory is vast and changing. Because of a technical error, we ended up serving some ads to non-U.S. traffic that were not in compliance with Facebook’s new guidelines. We did not do this intentionally, and we removed the ads as soon as we found out. We fixed the error, redoubled our efforts to filter out non-compliant ads, and are now serving only compliant ads.

Q: I’m a publisher in the Facebook platform and I use Gambit Payments. Am I at risk of being shut down?

A: No, absolutely not. Gambit Payments is running only compliant ads for developers running their applications on the Facebook platform, so the ads you publish in your app do not violate Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines and pose no risk.

Q: I’m using Gambit. Will my users still have access to payments and offers?

A: YES, your users still have access to payments and offers. Gambit Payments’ monetization services – including direct payments and compliant offers – are, and always have been, up and running without disruption.

Q: Are you guys still in business?

A: Thanks for asking. The answer is a resounding YES! We are definitely still in business and are challenging ourselves (and our competition) to be better than ever at product innovation. We still think the high-quality offers-based monetization of social applications is a fundamentally sound business model, but end user experience must be deeply integrated into the development process. We also think there are a lot more lot more innovation methods beyond traditional offers to monetize online communities on social networks and beyond, and we’re looking forward to rolling those out in the near future.

We hope this dispels some of the confusion and sensation surrounding Gambit’s business on Facebook, and we invite your questions at team@getgambit.com

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By Susan

Facebook changes, ‘Scamville,’ & fact vs fiction in the offers debate

It’s been an exciting few days of mudslinging around offers where every provider has said “Not it!” faster than you’d drop a flaming (double) bag of the brown stuff.

Recognize this? hi5's hilarious Flaming Bag of Poo virtual gift

Today, we want to go over 2 major things:

1: Facebook’s updates and revised commitment to their Advertising Guidelines.

Talk, speculation, and position statements are plentiful but not so helpful when Facebook’s compliance police crack down.

2: The fictions and real facts on offers, based on our experience and research as a top 3 payments and offers provider.

Note: for the purposes of this article, ‘higher risk offers’ will be defined as those that don’t fully comply with Facebook’s revised Advertising Guidelines.

…

1: Facebook’s new Advertising Guidelines

If you’re a Gambit publisher, then you’ve seen our email about Facebook’s changes to their Advertising Guidelines, what actions Gambit has already taken, and what publishers can do to stay happy. If you’re not one of our publishers, then you may have heard elsewhere about Facebook’s new initiative to clean up ads on their platform.

Although this announcement may mean changes for the offers you’re using, we’re actually really excited about better ads, and we commend Facebook for taking the lead. If you’re a Gambit publisher on Facebook, be aware that we’ve manually checked and filtered all offers based Facebook’s newly published criteria, so your app will not be at risk for running non-compliant ads.

Here at Gambit, we’ve provided a wide variety of ads to suite our numerous diverse publishers, but we’ve also recognized that not all ads are created equal. That’s exactly why we made Gambit Ratings, our ratings system that tells you how healthy any given offer is for your business, since the very first day we launched Gambit.

We’ve previously recognized user issues with offers, and if you’re interested in checking out our recommendations for how to keep your users happy and your business healthy, see the full article here.

We’ve been in close communication with our contacts at Facebook, and you can count on us to pass any news right on to you. To make sure you get this, please make sure no-reply@getgambit.com is going to your inbox, not your spambox.

We see this as a positive development that will spark innovation in our industry – both in payments and offers, and in the development of the apps themselves. If you have any questions, we’re right here at team@getgambit.com

Now that we know what’s up with Facebook, let’s bust some myths about offers and ‘Scamville.’

…

2: FACT or FICTION?

The offers that pay out best are the ones that scam users, while legitimate offers like Netflix are few and far between.

FICTION

FACT: The offers that pay out best are the ones that bring in quality leads that actually convert.

Netflix is a good example, and it’s not the only one. While some offers providers scramble for their share of Netflix-quality offers inventory, we’re spending our time building out something called Gambit Exclusives – high-quality offers that you won’t see on any other offers networks – so that Netflix and Blockbuster aren’t your users’ only options.

…

FACT or FICTION?

Every offer ever published has always been compliant with Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines.

FICTION

FACT: Prior to Facebook’s recent guidelines update, all offers providers were occasionally serving higher risk ads like mobile offers or the now infamous Video Professor offer to meet demand.

Yes, that’s right. ALL offers providers, even Gambit, made limited quantity of these offers available as long as demand from publishers was present – which it was.

An offer from Offerpal on Farmville
The fine print says “Farm Cash awarded after submission of a valid mobile number and PIN confirmation.”

Making higher risk offers available does not mean that all publishers using Gambit or another payments company were by default serving these ads to end users. To the contrary, we at Gambit, like any offers provider worth its salt, have always strongly encouraged our publishers to get in to their offers panel and get granular with understanding – and filtering -  offers.

Gambit Ratings is our ratings system and range of filtering tools that enables publishers to monitor offer performance, screen and investigate user inquiries, and get rid of any offer that seems suspect, ’scammy’ or that’s just underperforming. These tools were in place when we right after we first launched Gambit, and they’re still going strong today.

Why even serve these risky offers?

If these offers are so shady and worthless in the long term, why do payments providers like Gambit even bother to make them available to developers?

The answer is simple – to supply to a demand from some of their developer clients. While some developers have publicly rejected risky offers – or offers altogether – others have chosen them as a way to grow revenues.

In the past, Gambit has encouraged developers to be aware of how offers affect their users’ experience, but has ultimately put this choice entirely in developers’ hands. Developers have access to an array of tools and data to review and eliminate offers individually or by category, but the reality is that not everyone does.

Disable or enable any offers you want.

…

FACT or FICTION?

Offers providers never receive user complaints about unclear or seemingly ’scammy’ offers.

FICTION

We published a post over a month and a half ago about what to do about user complaints on offers.

FACT: Every offers provider – Gambit included – has fielded their fair share of user complaints.

Even the highest rated offers can be confusing, which is why we have our own customer support staff dedicated to handling customer inquiries – and complaints – about the payment and offers experience. We all hire sizable teams to take on customer support  because we know it can be a point of major confusion for end users.

At Gambit, we work extra hard not to offload the responsibility of offers-related customer support onto publishers because we’re the ones with all the superfine transaction data, we’re the ones with the advertiser relationships, and we’re the ones who are best able to solve the problem.

A tip for publishers: your offers and payments provider should always offer full payments-related customer support as a best practice for precisely this reason. And remember, real support staff are always better than autoresponders.

…

FACT or FICTION?

You’ll lose the revenue game without higher risk offers.

FICTION

After Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines announcement, we spent the weekend manually combing through every single offer in our inventory and running some calculations on what share of total revenue they represent.

We found that higher risk offers could impact up to 14% of developer revenue.

FACT: While 14% of your revenue is important, 4 potential long-term costs may add up to even more that that:

  • Pissed-off users who never want to transact again
  • Increased churn rates when users decide they’ve just had enough of the game altogether
  • Increased customer service costs. How many tickets do the risky offers generate, and how much time and resources are being devoted to resolving those issues?
  • Plummeting brand value in an industry that’s inherently social and reputation-based

Facebook is a social destination where reputation and trust play an even bigger role than in most other online media. It’s also a communication platform where people easily spread messages about their experiences with thousands – or even millions – of other users via their networks and community forums, magnifying the importance of reputation.

Including risky offers can bring on major liabilities that hurt both the short- and long-term value of the business, and end up costing a lot more money than they bring in.

…

FACT or FICTION?

<defeated sigh> But lead-gen offers are the only alternative to direct payments, and the only way I can monetize a larger percentage of my users. </defeated sigh>

FICTION

Two weeks ago, we launched Gambit Tasks – a totally new way to monetize by giving them the chance to complete small 10-minute bundles of click-based, crowdsourcing tasks in order to earn virtual currency.

Gambit Tasks on myFarm on Facebook

FACT: Gambit Tasks means no lead-gen, no delayed billing, no silent subscriptions. Your user tags some photos with keywords for better data sorting, and is rewarded for his or her time with virtual currency. We’re the ONLY offers and payments provider who has come out with product innovation that’s an alternative to offers, and we’ve got lots more coming down the pipeline.

It’s too early to spill all the beans, but if you want to know about more cool – totally different – stuff we’re working on, email us at team@getgambit.com

Don’t be defeated. Be excited. It’s a good time to be building a virtual economy.

…

Just the FACTS

  • Offers and ‘product bundling’ aren’t an inherently bad model, but some offers have not been clear to users about the true costs associated with participation. We’ve called these out as ‘higher risk offers.’
  • We’ve manually combed examined, categorized and removed all offers that pose a Facebook compliance risk, and we’ve also made sure that our publishers understand what’s going on.
  • Higher risk offers represent 14% of potential revenue decline across our publishers on Facebook.
  • As an offers provider, Gambit has always had tools and ratings data available to help publishers screen offers.

Now that Facebook has announced specific and enforced consequences to for non-compliant advertising, it’s time for everyone – publishers, payments companies, and advertisers – to get informed and take action.

…

CALL to ACTION for developers

This week’s debates and the data presented above bring us to 3 Calls to Action that we think all publishers and payments companies must heed:

1. Understand where your money is coming from. Who’s writing you those checks, and for what kinds of leads or actions? What’s the life-cycle of that revenue stream, and what does its growth or decay trajectory look like?

2. Measure the money you’re getting from offers against your long-term business objectives. This is obvious to say, but difficult to implement when competitors are using – and temporarily thriving on – revenue models that may damage the long-term objectives of your business. When Facebook cracks down, however, everyone will be accountable to the same rules.

3. Use tools to moderate or clean up when necessary. Widely available tools include offers ratings, ability to reject offers by category or by individual offers, and open communication with your payments provider about the offers in question.

If you’re a developer, this is your business, so you get to choose what risks you’re willing to take to achieve your objectives. That’s the fun of being a grown-up. Just don’t make those choices without the necessary information, and don’t make choices that will get your business into major trouble or shut down.

If you’re an ad network, then transparency both to your advertisers and to your offers platform and developer partners will be key in building a business that brings real value to both sides.

If you’re a payments provider, there’s major work to be done. It’s time to clean up offers or start looking to product innovations that provide a payments alternative while creating a payments experience that the user not only tolerates but enjoys.

While still a beta product, Gambit Tasks lets users complete small bundles of Mechanical-Turk-esque tasks in exchange for virtual currency. As the virtual goods industry surpasses its billion-dollar mark, more and more will be at stake.

Developers should expect (and ask for) the product developments and product integrity that will grow this industry into something every player can be proud of.

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By Susan

All NEW Way To Engage Users, Grow Revenues: Say Hello to Gambit Tasks

Woohoo! Today, we’re ecstatic to announce a totally new way to engage users and grow your revenues that’s exclusive to Gambit Payments.

Say hello to Gambit Tasks:

Gambit Tasks myFarm on Facebook

Hello, Gambit Tasks.

WHAT IT IS

Look for Gambit Tasks in the Offers Panel, alongside the traditional promo offers you already know so well. Like offers, users can earn virtual currency for your game without direct payment, making this a superb way to engage younger users, or international users in emerging markets.

Instead of completing surveys or signing up for promotions, users can now complete a set of quick, easy, but non-automatable tasks. These are tasks that are hard for software to master, but extremely easy for humans – especially social game-playing, Internet-savvy humans who are incentivized by the prospect of earning your virtual currency.

Here’s how it works:

  1. A company that’s a Crowdflower client has thousands of online images that need to be checked for copyright issues
  2. The company submits this set of tasks to CrowdFlower
  3. CrowdFlower places the tasks in the Gambit payments platform, where it’s accessible to millions of users
  4. A social game user wants to buy virtual goods in a game using Gambit, sees the offer to earn currency by doing a bit of work, and starts checking pictures for copyright issues
  5. Once the user is done, the user is paid in virtual currency that can be used to buy goods back in the game.

Tasks would include:

  • Tagging images or video clips with keywords to make them more searchable in a database
  • Classifying text or other content under specific categories
  • Reviewing content for copyright violations or other classifications

For those developers out there with lots of younger or international users who have more time than money, this represents a HUGE opportunity to increase your revenue. Yes, be excited.

WHY WE DID THIS

In our world, we’re always thinking through new ways to turn cash into virtual cash and then virtual cash back into cash for developers. So, when we got word of what the team over at CrowdFlower was up to — bringing big customers with simple tasks in connection with a massive online workforce who are more than happy to do a few tasks for cash, we started putting it all together.

Social gaming is exploding in popularity, and every day more people are buying virtual currency with real money, that they make from doing real work. Why couldn’t they just do the work and get their virtual currency right away?

Gambit Payment’s online payment system makes the earning opportunities CrowdFlower brings to the online workforce available in virtual economies for the first time in the history of social games.

The coolest part, we think, is that this gives all of our developer partners an excellent way to widen the transaction funnel.

Remember when we said that a user who has completed just 1 offer is 3 times more likely to transact again (often in direct payment)? With Gambit Tasks, the entrance to this transaction funnel is even wider because of how easy, accessible, and low-risk Tasks are.

The second coolest part is that your users can continue their in-game experience while earning virtual currency by doing game-like Tasks that are actually real work for real companies.

Crowdflower recognized that a partnership with Gambit would give them access to millions of capable users who were already among the web’s most fluent in web-based actions, and we recognized that the partnership would mean tons more engagement and revenue opportunity for developers.

We also like to try out new stuff. A lot. New stuff = exciting = reason for living.

We already know that this year’s revenue projections for the social game industry are tracking to surpass 1 billion dollars for developers on Facebook and MySpace, and we think Tasks is going to be a major enhancement to an already booming sector.

We’re really proud to be able to offer you guys product innovations like this, or even just feature improvements that you’ve requested, and we want to let you know to look for lots more stuff like this to come.

If you’re into this idea, have new ones for us, or just have questions, leave us your comments below.

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By Susan

Ignore Cougars, Follow the Money: 3 social gaming tips for monetizing younger users

Older users mean higher average revenues per paying user, but what if your entire userbase consists of your CTO’s mom and dad? Younger users flock to your community in hordes, many of them willing to try out their first offer in order to earn your virtual currency, but their limited incomes mean they’ll never whip out their VISA platinum and start buying up your currency left and right.

Previously, we published  an article looking at average revenues per paying user by age clusters with blogger and entrepreneur Andrew Chen.

It’s always good fun to look at data, but given these revenue discrepancies between older and younger users, what’s a developer to do?

This week, we followed up with 3 tips for monetizing social game users.

From the full article:

Get Them Young: 3 tips to monetize younger users

1. Think volume. Look for the users who are transacting the most, and then make sure you understand exactly who they are (and how they might be changing). For example, today your revenue may be driven by a massive group of teenagers, but what will happen when those teens become 20-somethings? In this series, we explored this question by age, but you’ll also want to think about geography, language, and gender. ‘Think volume’ means:

  • Mind your game. If your product is subpar, you shouldn’t expect amazing volumes or revenues, no matter how much you…
  • Focus on growing traffic through virality. How can you make your game even more social, more addictive, and more spreadable?
  • Get users to complete. Users are 3 times as likely to make additonal payments if they’ve completed at least one offer.

2. Hold on to your users. People of all ages get tired of games easily. The last thing you need is a poor user experience to push users over the edge and straight into the database of a competitor. Do certain offers just rankle your userbase (leading to poor conversions, bountiful complaints, and churn)? While your payments solution’s algorithms will help you find the best offers for your users, there are always going to be a couple that just don’t perform. ‘Hold on to your users’ means:

  • Pick out and remove underperforming offers, either individually or by offer category, and address customer complaints. For example, ‘adult’ offers may not work well if your game’s users are primarily 13-17 year olds.
  • Diversify your product(s). How can you enrich a single game to be more complex and engaging? How can you offer more complementary games so when a user defects, she defects to another game in your suite?

3. Keep your eye on empty spaces. Yes, Facebook is huge. Yes, Zynga is dominating. But, growth potential is everywhere still. As more users of all ages sign up for their first Facebook accounts, more people pour into the virtual economy. As Facebook grows in locales outside the U.S., so do the games and apps that inhabit its ecosystem. As users get tired of specific games, they’ll start looking for other places to spend their time and money. They’ll probably invite their friends, too. ‘Keep your eye on empty spaces’ means:

  • Don’t make a play just because someone else is making bank off of it (for now). Today’s leaders got there because they kept their eyes on empty spaces and filled them, quickly.
  • Look for under-monetized user groups. How well is your game doing with young males? Can you work in a way for more of these users to complete their first offer (and open the door to additional payments)?

These should be your main considerations:

Growth
What does the growth trajectory look like for young users? How many of these users are already playing games, and how many more aren’t? The online casual games industry is still young and has plenty of room for growth.

Facebook boasts 300 million active users, with almost a third of these in the U.S. Since the entire population of the United States is just over 300 million, that means approximately half of all U.S. internet users, or a third of the entire U.S. population, are on Facebook.* Facebook counts 70% of users as having ‘engaged with a Platform application,’ meaning that most users have loaded an app of some sort at some point in their Facebook time. Judging by the impressive monthly active uniques the biggest developers are enjoying (51MM for Zynga’s Farmville alone), it seems that games have already taken off on the network. With all this, is there still room to grow?

Yes. Here’s why:

  • Facebook has saturated the U.S. market, but that doesn’t mean every Facebook user is playing a game. Yet.
  • The U.S. isn’t the only country in the world, either. In terms of Facebook traffic growth rates, the U.S. doesn’t even make it into the top 10. As other economies (real and virtual) catch up, markets around the world should start looking more and more promising for developers looking to monetize.
  • People get tired of games. One developer’s churn is another developer’s new user.

As mentioned above, younger users contribute the lion’s share of total revenue for virtual transactions – for now. However, Facebook reports that the 35 and up group is their fastest growing demographic, so will we see this shift reflected in game usage and monetization too? Probably. But until the older users reach critical mass on the network, would you rather be competing hard for the same handful of housewives or slyly going for the many younger users at lower ARPPUs and massively higher transaction volumes?

Changing ARPPUs
Do ARPPUs change as users get older? Will your 15 year old user be worth more after she turns 18, gets a better job, and starts opting for direct payment over offers? We know that the typical 18 year old makes you more money than the typical 15 year old, so from this we might guess that it will pay off to hold onto that user as she ages.

Age     ARPPU
15     $2.65
18     $2.92
22     $2.82
25     $2.99
29     $3.33

Older users
Should you try to grow your older userbase? As just mentioned, Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic is the 35 and up set. While actively trying to acquire these users (over others) may divert your resources in ways you can’t afford, it’s likely that your game will indirectly absorb the benefits of Facebook’s demographic growth anyway. If everyone else is focusing on winning the middle-aged housewife segment, would you be better off stealthily (and expertly) acquiring the forgotten younger users? Try it. Measure it. Report back.

Conclusion

In parting, don’t buy into a ‘must do’ (eg. housewives) just because it’s popular today. Popularity doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it does probably mean that lots of other developers are out there thinking the same thing as you. Instead, look at the data and focus your work where the greatest opportunity currently blossoms. Right now, that’s users who are in their teens and mid-20s.

If you’ve been targeting and you’re seeing interesting results, please share in the comments. What’s worked for you, and what would you do if you were a new developer just entering the marketing today?

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By Susan

Age (and ARPPU) ain’t nothing but a number: Data on how impacts social gaming monetization

We recently posted some surprising data looking at age and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) on social game blogger Andrew Chen’s site.

ARPPUs rose dramatically as users got older, with the oldest user groups achieving an ARPPU that was 3x that of the youngest groups.

This shouldn’t be news:

  • older users have more disposable income, the youngest users often have none
  • older users have access to payment methods that pay out better across the board: direct credit card payments, PayPal accounts, and mobile accounts that they’re in control of
  • because they have money and credit cards, older users are probably already familiar with online purchasing, making it more likely that they’ll have the comfort to follow through with your transaction

What was surprising was that, despite ARPPUs upwards of $7, older users’ share of total revenue stayed under 8%.

Yes, you heard that right. Users aged 29 and younger collectively account for over 92% of total revenue across all Gambit publishers.

Massive transaction volumes for younger users mean that low ARPPUs still yield high total revenues for our developers. Users aged 29 and under together make up 94% of our network’s total transactions. Younger users pay less, but they play a whole lot more.

For the full post with charts and tables, check out Andrew’s blog.

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By Susan

F-ck your offers! Game-ending user complaints & 3 developer solutions

“F-ck your offers!”

You’re a game developer and you want to make money online. The most obvious solution? Develop a game that utilizes virtual currency and set up online payments, which come in two flavors– traditional (PayPal, credit cards) and alternative (mobile, offers). You’re especially excited about alternative payments, because you’ve heard (being a savvy industry-hot-topic follower) that offers can generate 50% of your game’s revenue.

Everything goes live, and within a few hours, your numbers are looking sweet. Offers performance is strong and your revenue is steadily rising. You don’t have to do a single thing other than focus on your game. Who knew it could be this easy to work with online payments?

And then suddenly, you see this user ticket:

User offer complaint

immediately followed by this user ticket:

User offer complaint: not receiving payment

3 Game-Ending User Complaints

At Gambit, we handle thousands of active offers, with more being added every day — that’s a lot. Subsequently, we also see a high volume of user complaints.

Around 80% of these complaints fall into 3 categories:

1. “I did your offer but didn’t get my points. FIX IT!”
2. “I did your offer even though it took forever and now I’m getting spammed. FIX IT!”
3. “I did this free offer and now I’m being charged all this money. FIX IT!”

There are several reasons for these game-ending user complaints:

1. “I did your offer but didn’t get my points.”

Culprit 1: Third-party cookie blocker, anti-virus, or ad blocker software.

If a user’s browser doesn’t allow for third-party cookies, that can interfere with the conversion process; similarly, anti-virus/ad blocker software can also prevent a completed offer from converting properly.

Culprit 2: Multiple offers from the same advertiser.

Often, “free” promotional or quiz offers that require a user to enter personal data– the offer, in other words, pays the user for giving up that data– actually belong to the same advertiser. Because the advertiser has only the one database, duplicate info is worthless and therefore gets scrubbed. Because of this, users can legitimately fill out multiple offers, but if they all belong to a single advertiser, they’ll only get credited for the first offer completed.

Culprit 3: Advertiser-side technology.

Technology on the advertiser’s side isn’t always up to par, and when dealing with a flawed system, conversions don’t get posted back to us, which means our system can’t know to credit the users (and thus won’t).

2. “I completed this offer even though it took forever and now I’m getting spammed.”

Culprit 1: Didn’t read the Ts & Cs.

As mentioned above, “free” offers operate under a transaction of virtual currency for user information. Unfortunately, most users fail to read Terms & Conditions before submitting their data, and so remain unaware that they have now opted in to newsletters and promotional e-mails (i.e., spam) from all of the offer’s associated ad sites.

Culprit 2: Filling out more offers than they thought.

What’s more, “free” offers almost always require the user to go through a co-reg path before it converts to a lead. The length of a co-reg path varies by offer– some can take up to 20 minutes to click through– but the purpose is always the same: to get a user to fill out more offers. Users aren’t required to complete any of these additional offers in order to reach the end of the path, but users unaware of this will complete a few, again not reading the T&C, again opting in to more promotional e-mail.

3. “I completed this free offer and now I’m being charged all this money.”

Culprit 1: Didn’t read the Ts & Cs about the ‘trial period.’

Generally, this is another case of not reading the T&C or the fine print. Many offers welcome new users with “trial” products or memberships; the item is touted as free, and all the user has to pay for is shipping or processing. Some services, like movie rentals or credit monitoring, don’t require the user to pay anything in order to sign up. Once the trial period is over, however, the user gets billed the full, standard amount if they haven’t yet canceled their account.

Culprit 2: Advertiser’s mistake.

There are also a few instances where it’s simply an error on the advertiser’s side, and users will suddenly find numerous, erroneous charges on the credit card they used to sign up.

There’s one last explanation behind user complaints that may be more common than you think: they’re flat-out lying. Misreporting about the offer experience is a problem that’s gaining traction. This Facebook  group dedicated to scamming Super Rewards shows that users aren’t shy either.

Why it matters: Offers affecting users affecting offers

Okay, so a few users are unhappy about offers. You already know that users will complain about anything, so why should this matter to you?

It matters because your users are having a bad experience with an aspect of your game– and not just any aspect, but one that’s supposed to be making you money.

Crappy offers can ruin the user experience and in turn ruin conversions (i.e., your revenue):

Offers affecting users affecting offers

Yes, we drew this. We're thinking 2010 t-shirts.

A user who has a terrible experience with offers the first time they try alternative payments will be heavily inclined to never try them again. Usually, the users who are attracted to offers are the ones who already have no interest in directly paying for the virtual currency, so by losing their interest in offer completion, you’ve now lost a potential paying user.

People talk. Unhappy people talk a lot. People who seek justification for their unhappiness by talking to other unhappy people (via forums) also find justification for their resolution to never complete offers again.

In other words,

[ users avoiding offers of their own accord ] + [ users convincing others that they should definitely avoid offers ] = [ fewer users completing offers ] = [ offer conversion drops like a lead balloon ]

Finally, remember that if a user completes an offer, has a good experience, then uses the points they earn to have more fun in their beloved game, they’ll be more likely to pay directly moving forward.

What to do about it

Since we’re the publisher of these offers, we at Gambit take several steps to make alternative payments easy and headache-free for users (and the developers who monetize them):

  • We review offers actively to make sure they’re safe and accurate.
  • We provide a detailed FAQ about offer completion right in our offer panel.
  • We have our customer support team respond quickly to user complaints in order to resolve issues.
  • We also publish offers with particular conditions to minimize later confusion on the user’s behalf.

That last step is all about prevention, which is our biggest priority (we don’t want to stay up all night reading venomous user mail either!).

To make sure we can sleep at night, we take these additional preventive measures:

  • Regardless of whether the advertiser is claiming a “free” product, we only label offers as “free” if there is absolutely zero cost to the user to complete the offer and receive points.
    For mobile offers, we make it clear that users are subscribing to or registering for a service once they confirm their PIN
  • For offers that belong to a single advertiser, we have a grouping system in place that prevents a user from being able to complete any of that advertiser’s subsequent offers once an initial offer has been converted.

As the developer, it’s important for you to take action as well.

If you know that certain offers are causing your users a significant amount of distress and irritation, remove those offers, even if it means a loss in revenue right now. By doing nothing, you’re telling your users that you care more about making a few quick bucks off them than you do about keeping their loyalty and trust– and no user wants to feel, well, used.

3 things you can do right now

1. Get the underperformers out!

To help developers look out for their users and cull the underperforming offers, Gambit also provides an offer ranking method that balances revenue against complaints. Specifically, the rank takes into consideration how much revenue a game is making from a particular offer versus how many complaints that offer is generating for that game’s users– the higher the ratio of complaints to conversions, the lower the ranking. Developers are then able to log into their account and manually remove low-ranking offers from their panel, making it faster and easier to filter out offers that could discourage users from alternative payments. When we were on the game developer side, this was a feature we would’ve loved to have, and we’re hoping it’s saving some of you precious time and users.

2. Go in there and complete some offers.

On a more intense level of involvement, you could also go through some of the offers yourself to understand what your users are experiencing; you wouldn’t push a new game feature live without testing it first, right? Online payments may not be an inherent component of your game, but they become a part of your game by association. By understanding the offer experience first-hand, you avoid being blindsided by users turning on you with complaint after complaint.

3. A warning.

We’ve seen some developers respond to these complaints in a way that we think you should avoid. It’s the quick-fix of simply awarding points to every user who complains. All this will do is encourage users to complain even more (again, through forums, users will inform others that they can quickly get free points just by filing a complaint, legitimate or not). What’s worse, your game will become flooded with currency, reducing its value and cheating you out of profit. Don’t do it!

Bottom line: Pay attention to user complaints – don’t allow those pesky messages to be carelessly dismissed. Invalidating your users’ concerns will only drive those users away (either from offers or from your game, or both), and without users, you wouldn’t be making any money at all.

Keep users happy, make more money.

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By Lora L. Abe

Enchanted Island review: users need more incentives to stick around and return

On Enchanted Island, learn magic spells to grow magical plants, travel to new towns, and start a magic circle with friends!

What works:

Display of locked items motivates continuation of play

The full array of wands available in the game are always displayed, but each wand requires a certain play level to be unlocked.

Unlocking items for users as they level up in a game is a great way to keep the game interesting and new. While some games opt to not display the newly-available items until they’re unlocked, it’s more advantageous to show them from the beginning and indicate that a higher level is required to obtain them. For one thing, hiding locked items prevents a user from knowing of their existence, leading users to assume that the minimal array of goods they see in the beginning is all there is. For another, letting users know what’s to come entices them to keep playing– a sort of carrot-before-the-donkey– and makes them want to level up that much faster, which can drive up revenue if there are premium goods for sale that will enable such.

Essential goods can only be purchased with basic currency

Falling back on the premise that basic currency needs to remain valuable in its own way, progression in Enchanted Island relies on casting spells to grow plants and selling said plants. Casting spells requires a wand and growing plants requires seeds and pots; all three supplies (of which there are several variations) are only for sale using silver coins, which are only awarded through plant sales. In other words, advancement cannot be bought, it must be earned through activity.

What could be better:

Leveling requirements and pricing are unreasonable

In Enchanted Island, users have capacity for 4 energy units, and it costs 2 energy units to cast a spell, which may or may not result in successfully growing a magic plant. When energy is depleted (so, after 2 casts), the user either must wait 15 minutes before energy is restored or may use a dragon potion to instantaneously refill energy.

Enchanted Castle - how gameplay works

Leveling up relies on how many spells are cast, regardless of whether a plant is produced. To complete Level 1, a user needs to cast 8 spells. New users are equipped with a basic wand, enough silver to keep purchasing seeds (one packet only contains 5 seeds) and enough pots to stay in supply, and they also are given 4 dragon potions, which means users can complete Level 1 without having to wait, and upon level completion they are awarded 16 gold coins, the premium currency that can only be obtained by leveling up and through direct payment transactions.

To complete Level 2, however, a user has to make 42 casts. At 2 casts a go, this translates to 21 intervals of 15-minute waits, or a minimum of 5 hours and 15 minutes of being logged into the game. Dragon potions have to be bought using gold coins, which makes sense because they are premium goods which are meant to enhance gameplay by allowing users to complete tasks more quickly.

True, users by this point have $16 in gold to play with– but the cheapest items in the store cost $100 gold, and none of them are dragon potions, which cost $200 gold each or $1100 gold for a bundle of 6. Thus, if an impatient user wanted to get through Level 2 as quickly as possible– and this is only Level 2– the cheapest it could cost would be $3900 gold. At the game’s currency exchange rate of 0.01 USD to 100 gold coins, Level 2’s wait-free pricetag is thus nearly $40. Put another way, a user would have to spend $2 USD to progress barely 5% in the level.

Furthermore, the cast requirement goes up to 70 for Level 3, reducing a dragon potion’s effectiveness to less than 3% at the same cost.

Lack of social elements leads to minimal player activity

The reason dragon potions– the cost aside– hold so much appeal is because the 15-minute wait intervals are near-unbearable. Why? Because there’s nothing else to do during that time except wait. Despite Enchanted Island’s purported ability for users to “travel to new towns and start a magic circle with friends”, in its current stage of development, there aren’t even hints of such features. There are no scoreboards to see how others who play the game are doing, no list of friends and subsequently no way to visit, or even message, others in the game.

For the non-paying user, then, gameplay quickly amounts to opening the game (15 seconds), casting 2 spells (10 seconds), and closing the game to do something else, perhaps or perhaps not remembering to return in 15 minutes. (occasionally purchasing or selling items only tacks on 30 more seconds of user activity).

Enchanted Island - dragon potionAs detailed above, the benefits of using a dragon potion are hardly worth the cost, so motivation to become a paying user is lost, and without social features to keep users busy during the wait times and encourage returns, motivation to stay active in the game drops off. Because there are absolutely no differences to the game whether users come back every 15 minutes or every 15 weeks, users must individually motivate themselves to want to return, and in an industry where competition for a user’s attention is fierce, putting 100% of the burden to remember to return on the user is not a winning strategy.

What to keep in mind:

  • If users will be able to unlock new items as they progress through your game, make sure they’re aware of this ability and strongly consider giving them sneak previews of these items so they know what they’re striving for. Keeping the items hidden suggests that they aren’t worth the effort required to get them, in which case, you need to redesign them so that they are.
  • Set premium items at prices that reflect their overall value in contribution to gameplay. In the simplest of terms, items that don’t do much shouldn’t cost much, and items that are priced high ought to provide a high amount of value.
  • Implement features into your game that keeps your users active and wanting to return. Making it so that your users only play for 1 minute per session is not a sustainable game design; neither is one that encourages indifference as to whether or not the users return. If the game isn’t designed to make users care about coming back, they generally won’t.

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Name: Enchanted Island (http://apps.facebook.com/enchantedisland)
Monthly active users: 17,586 (Facebook, 7/17/09)

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By Lora L. Abe

Free vs. Cost: why basic currency is just as important to a game’s success as premium currency

One of the biggest benefits to implementing a system of dual-currency in a game is the ability to encourage users to spend money by offering virtual goods that can only be purchased in the game with the premium, or paid, currency.

One of the drawbacks to this system, however, is that as developers focus on how to make that high-level tier of virtual goods and its correlative currency as desirable to the users as possible, the basic, or free, currency often gets ignored or forgotten.

The most common way in which basic currency becomes worthless is irrelevance: When all the virtual goods that hold value to a user are only purchasable using premium currency, the basic currency becomes irrelevant to the user. In Habbo.com, for example, pixels (the basic currency) can only be spent on a disappointing fraction of the virtual goods available in the game, and even of those, most pixel purchases required a co-payment of coins (the premium currency). Pixels alone are subsequently worth next to nothing in Habbo– an unfortunate consequence of putting premium currency on a pedestal.

For a developer who wants to maximize numbers of paying users, it seems logical. Why should a game be designed to allow the basic currency to retain value when users get it for free? The premium currency, which (in the absence of a subscription model) is the sole provider of profit for the developer, should be favored and exalted, because the more worth it holds in the game, the more users will want and pay for it.

The error in this logic, however, is the failure to remember the age-old adage: Time is money. Users may not be spending money in order to get basic currency, but in most games, they pay for it with time: time spent completing challenges or tasks, time spent signing into the game and visiting other players– time spent, in other words, simply playing the game.

In Dog World, users receive basic currency just for logging in.

In DogWorld, users can earn basic currency just by logging in.

Basic currency is a reward for user activity, and when that currency can be exchanged for virtual goods that have purpose, users will continue to desire that currency and, likewise, will continue to be active. And any successful social game or community developer can assure you that retention of a loyal, active and interested player is worth far more than a one-time $19.99 purchase of premium currency.

In other words, as a developer, you shouldn’t overlook what your basic currency can do for your game just because it isn’t a direct transaction into real profit. In the long run, its indirect ability to retain and engage your users will benefit your game as a whole– including revenue– so long as you allow it to stay valuable in comparison to your premium currency.

One easy suggestion? Don’t limit the virtual goods payable by basic currency to the lower tiers. Just as exclusive goods can encourage users to spend money in pursuit of the status symbol, so can they encourage gameplay for that same reason. Providing valuable virtual goods that must be obtained with basic currency means users cannot simply buy their way through the game, but instead must put in the hours.

Remember: successful free-to-play games don’t require a user to spend money in order to enjoy it, either on a short-term or long-term basis; spending money should only enhance an already-solid user experience.

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By Lora L. Abe

Teus Louwerens, CEO of Webgamic: “offer a free game and leave the choice to pay to the people who actually play it”

Torpia is a browser-based MMO strategy game that went live earlier this year in February and is available in Dutch, English, Spanish and Romanian languages. The goal of the game is to build up your small medieval village and interact with other users and their villages with the ultimate goal of conquering the world. If the concept bears a striking resemblance to Travian, another browser-based MMO that has been steadily gaining global popularity, it’s hardly surprising– Webgamic, the company behind Torpia, also manages Travian (which is license-based) in the Netherlands and Belgium in the Dutch language.

Torpia - building options

Gambit recently had the opportunity to talk with the owner, founder and CEO of Webgamic, Teus Louwerens, who discussed Torpia’s development and shared his thoughts on the difficulties of viral growth in Holland, the need for aesthetics in online payment systems and how user value in the Netherlands is overlooked.

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How many monthly active users does Torpia have right now?

At the moment, we have about 55,000 internationally: 45,000 in the Netherlands, and then 5,000 in Romania and Argentina because they just started.

How did you choose to launch in Romania?

We just happened to have a reliable partner there who was easy to launch the game with. Besides that, the eastern Europe countries are very interesting for us because there’s not such a big [offering of games in that country] yet, but there’s a big market.

How are you growing your user base for Torpia? Is there a typical growth model?

At first, you have to buy them, you have to get the game on the market. We also get a lot of what we call “mouth-to-mouth advertising”, where people just tell their friends, hey, this is a cool game to play. And we see that that kind of advertising is growing, but besides that, we are still using traditional advertising that we have to pay for in order to get our players.

Have you ever thought about offering something within the game that would encourage users to invite friends to join and play?

We have, but there are some problems to that, because in Holland, and also in several other countries, it’s forbidden because of spam regulations. It’s not allowed to tell users anything like, we’ll give you 10 credits when you invite a friend of yours.

It’s not allowed? How do they expect you to grow?

Well, they mostly look out for the customer, for the normal person that is totally fed up with all the spam they get, and that’s why this regulation comes about. But I guess they just think, you can get your users through regular advertising or through free will without having to push them.

What percent are you able to convert to paying users within the actual experience of the game?

Around 10%.

Is that pretty standard for these kinds of strategy games?

As far as I know, for a game where it’s optional, you’re not obliged as a player to buy credits, it’s a pretty common percentage.

Torpia - premium features

In the process of building Torpia, did you focus first on getting the game right and then figure out how to monetize it, or did you have an idea of how you wanted to monetize the game from the very start?

We had the idea of how we generally wanted to monetize the game– with the option of credits, that’s something we wanted from the start because we feel that’s the best way to go, to offer a free game and leave the choice to pay to the people who actually play it; but we didn’t have any idea about how we actually wanted to do it, which premium features we wanted to implement. So we first focused on the game itself and we are now working on implementing the features that we need to monetize

When you talk about improving the game or changing features or adding new things, how do you take that into consideration? Do you look at user feedback, or do you take surveys, or do you look at certain metrics to determine where you take the game next?

All of the above, actually. We try to look a lot to our players; in the forums, we look at what players like. We also do surveys, mostly specific surveys– if we have a thing that we think needs improvement, we do a survey on that and with the results, we try to get the best feature out of it. And we think of things that could be better, and we ask the community how they’d feel about it, our new idea or feature.

We have several team members here who just work on communication and management of the communities, and besides that we work with a lot of volunteers who are just excited to play and manage the forums or the IRC channels. So we have a lot of people looking into the community.

What kind of people play these games? Do you still play Torpia?

Not for fun, because it’s the game I built myself and I know everything about it so that makes it not so much fun anymore. But we have a broad range of players. Ages 11 to 40, male and female– really broad– but the major part would be the younger players, maybe 14 to 24.

Does Torpia have anything to do with Travian at all, or is a completely different experience for your users?

Well, it has something to do with Travian in the sense that it is a strategy game as well, so you are building villages, you are attacking other players, but there are some major differences– you have to choose between Good and Evil sides, not three tribes like in Travian, and with that choice comes totally different gameplay. Good focuses on building, producing and trading, and Evil focuses on training of troops and attacking and conquering other players.

The idea is that the Good and Evil players work together to get to the higher goal, and that is winning the world. And that makes the game totally different than Travian, where all players have all the same features, and just the tribes are a bit different in their abilities and the configuration of the troops and buildings.

Torpia: Good or Evil?

Does Travian mind that you’re starting your own game?

No, we have a really good relationship with Travian. We just talked about it with them and it’s not a problem.

How do people pay in countries like the Netherlands and Belgium for online games and in general– what are the biggest forms?

60% is iDeal. It’s just available in the Netherlands, and it’s direct bank-to-bank transfer. It’s really easy for customers to use, it’s a system where, when you choose to pay, you select your own bank and you pay through the normal bank interface. So it’s really easy and comfortable and safe.

Isn’t that like the major payment method for Germany?

In Germany, the major method of payment is direct debit. You give permission for the company to deduct the amount of money from your bank account, but the problem for companies is, users can also cancel it. Especially for banks, it’s really annoying because what often happens is there’s a lot of fraud with it. So people give permission to deduct the amount  of money from their accounts to get the credits they’re paying for, but then just two days later after they’ve spent all their credits, they tell the bank that they never wanted to buy this, and they get their money back from the company– you have to pay it back, and you end up with nothing.

With iDeal on the other hand, users actually pay. They don’t give permission, but they do a direct bank transfer, so it’s different. There’s no possibility for any refunds. iDeal has no chargebacks.

On your payments page, you have something called e-Remittal. What is that?

e-Remittal

e-Remittal is the system we built ourselves. It combines all the payment solutions we are using. We did it because at that time– because this is three or four years ago we built this– we didn’t feel there were any good payment solutions online that stood up to our standards: easy to pay, looks good for the player, and offers the payment methods we wanted. That’s why we built it ourselves, and from there we just expanded the system.

What was it about other payments that you didn’t like?

A lot of companies, I think, have a really bad payment interface, where even I, when I get to those payment interfaces– I don’t want to pay anymore because it just looks terrible. And also the way they present the possibilities, the payment solutions, to the customer, is just not user-friendly at all. They just put all the things on the [sidebar] and that’s it. So we were looking for a user-friendly, good-looking solution and that’s what we tried to build, and our users are really comfortable with the system.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Travian took over their own payments again because they took on a strategy which involved getting the payments back to the company itself, so they went back to another payments system, and we got a lot of feedback from the players saying, “Too bad we don’t have your payments system anymore because it was so clear for us.”

Oh, so you’d been using the system you built for Travian?

We built everything that came though the management of Travian, so everything from payments to community management to support to advertising, everything that had to do with the Netherlands and Belgium.

This is more of a side question, but for some reason– we (as Kickflip, Inc.) were actually building a lot of games in America, and it seemed like internationally, Germany and the Netherlands are the two major European game-makers. How did that end up happening?

I’d guess that one of the biggest advantages that countries like Germany and the Netherlands mostly have is the widespread broadband Internet in our countries. We have some of the biggest and best-spread broadband in the world and I’d guess that helps a lot with the development of these browser-based games which are played over the Internet.

One of the most surprising things for us in this business is the Nordic region– Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark– and the Netherlands, where people are spending a lot of money. Is it because you’re just indoors all day?

Because of the bad weather, you mean? [laughs] Especially small countries like the Netherlands and the [Nordic] countries, they’re really underestimated because everybody thinks it’s just like Holland, that it’s just 16 million people who live there. But again, I think the broad range of Internet here– basically, everyone has their own connection in Holland– and I guess the ease for the Dutch people to pay over Internet, and they’re very comfortable, so it just makes it a lot easier to pay, and it makes the decision to pay a lot easier.

Thanks for talking with us, Teus!

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By Lora L. Abe

Vikings, Pirates, Ninjas review: users are heavily engaged, but lack purpose to buy virtual goods

VPN is a character customisation action game where you take control of your very own Viking, Pirate, or Ninja and send them on fun and exciting adventures. Earn money by completing various [quests] to customise your character just the way you want. Challenge your friends to a duel. Work together with your fellow adventurers to conquer new lands. Do you think you have what it takes to become the best?

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What works:

Numerous, varied components of the game maximize user engagement

As with many other games, there comes a point in VPN where your avatar has to take a break in order to recoup some vital quality– here, either energy or health. The impatient user can eliminate this wait time by purchasing items that award replenishment, but for users who can’t afford these items (or who simply don’t want to buy them just yet, or perhaps even aren’t aware of this solution), patience is the key.

The blue box in the lower right hand corner indicates how long it will be before an increment of energy will be gained, which can be anywhere between 3 and 20 minutes.

The blue box in the lower right hand corner indicates how long it will be before an increment of energy will be gained, which can be anywhere between 3 and 20 minutes.

Typically, the user who chooses to wait must find something to do to pass the time. If the time period is short enough and the game designed to encourage such, this can easily be accomplished by visiting other users in the game and interacting with them or their environments (such as in Farm Town or Pet Society). If it’s longer, however, users will often turn to external sites for preoccupation, which leaves open the risk of users failing to come back.

In VPN, however, users are provided with outlets for distraction that keep them firmly within the game, such as:

  • Multiple avatars/adventures: a single user can create up to three avatars (one per character type), and thus can switch effortlessly between adventures at any moment. If a ninja quest looks like it’s going to be on hold for another 15 minutes, the user can start completing viking quests instead.
  • Mini-games that also provide rewards: users can play VPN-themed arcade games that each have their own goals and rewards (e.g., win a special item for achieving a particular high score). By the time a user finishes playing a mini-game or two, their avatar is bound to have regained full vitality.

“Fame” points = reward system for users who help VPN acquire more users

Fame in VPN won't make you live forever, but it will allow you to purchase exclusive items that indicate just how famous you are.

Fame in VPN won't make you live forever, but it will allow you to purchase exclusive items that indicate just how famous you are.

Getting active users to rein in other new users is never an easy feature to work into a game– on the one hand, the developer doesn’t want to make this necessary to play or succeed in the game; on the other hand, this method brings in users who have $0 in acquisition cost.

What VPN did was treat this feature the same way as they did purchasing Meteor credits, VPN’s high-level currency: You don’t have to do it in order to have fun in the game, but if you do, you’ll be rewarded with cool stuff that the other users can’t access.

Fame points are required to purchase certain items, so users swayed by the idea of status and exclusivity will be more prone to encouraging friends to sign up through their invitations. Additionally, users get more Fame points whenever their friends level up (and can even be rewarded with Meteor credits whenever a friend purchases them), giving users incentive to keep their friends active within the game.

What could be better:

Opportunities for social interaction could be more prevalent

The major incentive for a user to buy premium items– clothes or accessories for an avatar, unique hairstyles or avatar features, furniture for an avatar’s home, etc.– is to express identity and status. The motivation to express these things, however, is to stand out from or show off to other users in the game, so if there’s never any (or only highly limited) chance for social interaction, users lose interest in buying premium items and fail to see the appeal of purchasing Meteor credits.

Taverns are graphical chat rooms where users can meet and interact with others... provided others show up, or even know about the Taverns in the first place.

Taverns are graphical chat rooms where users can meet and interact with others... provided others show up, or even know about the Taverns in the first place.

Currently, in VPN, opportunities for social interaction are limited. The only way to make new friends is in the chat room, which is not quickly or easily accessible in the game, and then once you have friends, there’s isn’t much you can do with them. The site (see above introductory description) claims you can “challenge your friends to a duel”, but the only thing you can challenge any other user to do is play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, from which winning garners nothing.

What to keep in mind:

Design the game as best you can to keep users in the game

The Internet fosters and nurtures a short attention span in users that constantly requires stimulation; if users are at a lull in your game and cannot do anything further in their own environment for a considerable amount of time, try to let your game provide them with other things to do that will keep them from automatically switching to a new window– and if it can’t, then make whatever it is they’re waiting for valuable enough that they will be motivated to come back to your game to reap that reward.

Give your current users incentives to both attract and retain new ones

New users who sign up through their friends are worth their weight in silver. New users who then continue to come back to the game and stay active are worth their weight in gold.

If the virtual goods you’re monetizing have only social value, don’t let your game skimp on social features

Users love to show off and customize their avatars and will happily spend the money to do so– as long as there are others around to witness and be impressed by these efforts. Games which want to focus monetization on virtual goods that only enhance identity need to have a solid implementation of community interaction within the game; without a community, who can users hope to impress– and why then should they try? If a tree grows taller in a forest and there’s no one around to notice, the change is hardly remarkable.

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Name: Vikings, Pirates, Ninjas (http://apps.facebook.com/vpnwars/)

Monthly active users: 179,220 (Facebook, 6/26/09)

Developed by: Meteor Games (http://www.meteorgames.com/)

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By Lora L. Abe