Create your own animal sanctuary on Facebook– start as a petting zoo, and slowly grow into a premier world-class attraction. In the process, you will start programs to breed endangered species and release them back into the wild.

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What works:

Visitor satisfaction scorecards help users achieve success in the game

My Zoo scorecards help guide users toward achieving success in the game, indicating what the user is doing right and what could be better.

As users play with the structure of their zoo (deciding which animals to buy, how much property they need, which facilities, amenities or habitats to build, how many employees to hire, etc.), they can see immediate feedback from their zoo’s “visitors”. Using a scorecard layout, visitors rate in percentages and on four levels of satisfaction various aspects of the user’s zoo: parking, restrooms, cleanliness, food, shopping, animals, value. Based on these ratings, users are able to adjust their zoo appropriately to increase their overall score, which affects the zoo’s “acclaim”, which in turn determines how many visitors the zoo receives each day (more visitors = more daily profit for the zoo).

By providing this feedback to users, gameplay is smoother and encourages users to keep playing, as nothing hooks a user in like the validation of in-game achievements.

A portion of the game’s profits are donated to a related charity

There are two great things about this: First, because the users know that by spending money in this game, they can simultaneously assist in making a charitable donation to a good cause, they become more willing to spend. Second, the game’s developers pick the charity recipients based on a discussion topic in which users can suggest recommendations, which means the users can actually have a say in to whom some of their money goes, resulting in users feeling more involved and, again, being more willing to spend.

There is, however, one enormous problem…

What could improve:

It is staggeringly easy to turn profits in this game, leaving users with no motivation to ever purchase currency

See: upper right corner, compared to that in the previous picture. Three days of being absent from the game earned me over $500,000, most of which I spent in 10 minutes to progress through 4 levels. Two days after that, I opened the game and had over $1 million cash.

In the beginning, assuming a user has set the ticket price appropriately and kept overhead costs as low as possible, profits exist but are minimal– hardly enough to recoup the amounts spent on building the zoo in the first place– and at some point, the user is not going to have enough cash left to build or buy anything else. Luckily, each new user starts with 10 “Benefactor Donations” (unluckily, the user has to take the initiative to explore each tab in the game and discover this only when clicking on the “Patron” tab), which is redeemable for $25,000. Once this is spent, however, the user must either patiently try to make money by accumulating the zoo’s daily profit (with one zoo day taking just under 5 minutes to complete)– or acquire the currency through either direct payment or offer completion.

The idea is that by this point, the user is invested and engaged enough in the game to be willing to buy the currency (or do offers) instead of wait an excruciatingly long time to progress in the game. It’s a standard strategy, in fact, and one which typically works– except in this case, where all a user has to do in order to get ahead in the game is, ironically enough: leave it.

When a user is active in the game, once a zoo day finishes, the user must remain active (e.g., clicking buttons) in order for the next zoo day to begin. This prevents users from leaving the game open in a tab or window and steadily gaining the daily profits without actually playing the game; yet this is exactly what happens once the user closes My Zoo. As soon as the user has left, the clock appears to count through days automatically– so if a user quits when the zoo is making $100 a day in profit, then doesn’t return to the game for 24 hours, that user will be pleasantly surprised to discover a sudden appearance of $32,000 in their cash account (24 hours * 60 minutes / 4.5-minute zoo days * $100). At profits of $6500/zoo day (not difficult to achieve), a user need only log out for 6 hours to make over half a million dollars.

Users, of course, love this effortless source of income, as it removes the number-one limitation to game progress (cash flow) and allows them to level up at a considerable pace, unlocking new items and enabling them to begin participating in the breeding and rehabilitation programs that much sooner. The further along in the game they get, the more hooked they become, returning again and again to be rewarded with more cash and more options.

Yet what all this ultimately culminates in is a worthless currency. When users find they have more cash than they know what to do with, instead of forming strategies as to which selective purchases will result in higher success, they spend blindly, in turn devaluing gameplay and turning it into thoughtless button-clicking. And though they are devoted, active and persistently returning users (what every developer hopes for)– none of them are paying users (what every developer hoping to monetize a game dreads). And why should they be? Where is the appeal of paying for additional currency they clearly don’t need?

What to keep in mind:

Popularity and loyal active users are not necessarily indicators of profit; not every game can or should be monetized

For only being in initial beta, My Zoo’s numbers are impressive– nearly 300,000 MAU and a 4.4/5.0 rating by its users. Unless my Facebook account was an exception to the rule, however, it’s highly unlikely that My Zoo is pulling in a significant amount  of (if any) revenue, making the point that popularity and profitability are not always bedfellows. Creating a popular game and then tacking on a monetization system as an afterthought is not a successful model; if said monetization system cannot be integrated into the gameplay strategy, it’s useless. By way of example, Chain Rxn was ranked the #11 Facebook app for June 2, 2009 with nearly 4 million MAU, but monetization is markedly absent from the game. Why? Because it can’t be applied to the game’s structure.

If you want your users to pay for something, you can give it away for free in small amounts, but don’t throw heaps of it at them to no end

For My Zoo, keeping the currency valuable is simple enough: Only count zoo days while the user has the game open and is active (furthermore, only let the user pass through so many zoo days each actual day in order to encourage more long-term play). Limit the amount of currency users can get without paying, and it will retain a real monetary worth.

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Name: My Zoo (http://apps.facebook.com/myownzoo/)

Monthly active users: 297,512 (Facebook, 6/19/09)

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