Returners and Retention - How to Win Back Lapsed Players

[Music] good morning everyone thanks for coming along well done for making it here for the first session of the day I'm very impressed my name is Phil I'm here to talk about improving player retention in your game by winning back lapsed players before we start I've been asked to remind you to please put your devices on silent please remember to fill out the survey that we sent around at the end it's a really good feedback for me as well as the conference organizers and remember the slide from the talk would be on the GDC volt and if you want them a bit quicker you can email me as well the details would be on there at the end as well my talk today is going to try and answer these questions what is a returner why they important how can you get more of them back to your game and then increase your chances or keeping them I've written this talk mainly for game designers working on live games but I hope it'll be useful for people in

similar roles like producers or product managers now fair warning there is a little bit of marketing woven in there as well and this is because I wanted to make sure I covered the full journey of a returning player I also thought it could be useful for smaller or indie Studios you have to do a bit of everything themselves so a few words about myself I'm the head of the runescape studio at Jagex and we were online games developer and publisher based in Cambridge in England and I don't really get to do much hands-on design these days but I've worked in design roles for about 17 years started as a design assistant at bullfrog progressed to be a lead while at Sony and then at jagex I've become executive producer and then later studio head I've always loved playing online games especially RPGs so it's been really fantastic to be able to lead a large MMO like runescape in doing this I've needed to learn a lot about running online games and games as a service and I hope I can share some of what I've learned with you guys here today I'm going to be using runescape as the case study

throughout the talk so give a bit of a breakdown of what it's all about we enscape is a traditional fantasy MMORPG it's quite different from other games in the genre but it mixes a sandbox the open world with a lot of storytelling and quests oops there we go the original version was launched all the way back in 2001 and we've updated it pretty much weekly ever since that's to add new content improved the graphics and even update the technology behind the game it was one of the first free-to-play games around and the business model has always been evolving it's a bit of a hybrid now the game the basic game is free there's an optional subscription if you want access to tons more content and there's optional microtransactions for cosmetic items and boosts we've got 160 development and publishing staff working on the game but in addition to the main runescape game we have other products in the franchise there's a retro server

that we call old school runescape we have a mobile companion app currently developing a CCG they called Chronicle runescape Legends and we're also starting to work on a new runescape MMO so if we quickly cover our players most of them are male aged between 16 and 26 and although we have a number of localized versions of the game around the world it's the English one that's the most popular retention is our speciality because over half of our current active players have been playing for over six years and they're really dedicated as well with an average session length of over 90 minutes and about half of our players play every day we're also really blessed to have a very active fan community especially in video and live streaming and the game is regularly in the top ten on Twitch I'm always fascinated by stats from other people's games so I thought I'd return the favor and share some of our commercial metrics in terms of lifetime

revenues we're now very close to ticking over there three-quarters of a billion dollar mark our daily active user count is between five and six hundred thousand four depending on the day of the week our monthly active users is just over two million we have over six hundred thousand subscribers it's 600 19,000 as of this morning and that's been gradually growing for the last couple of years our average concurrent users is around 60,000 and that Peaks to 90,000 in the evenings or at the weekends and when we run special events it can go up to about 120 130 thousand players online at once I hope these are pretty healthy stats and I think it shows that along with games like World of Warcraft you've also been growing their subscriptions in recent years the MMOs can have really really long tails almost becoming evergreen games but to achieve that a games retention has got to be really good and not just focusing on keeping players but finding ways to get lapsed players to return so what is a returner

this is my definition it's someone who comes back to your game after a sustained lapse from regular play and I say regular play because I'm not including those who've only briefly tried the game and bounced straight off I think as you'll see they're not going to be relevant for your attention for runescape we determine if a player has elapsed based on a duration of three months and we base that off with they've been out of the membership subscription now this is different from what most games will do it's because I'll games a bit different it's quite a long form experience and the subscription for us ultimately is the most important thing and that's why in this case we use it as the measure of engagement the more standard approach that makes sense for most people is a lapsed duration of over a month and that's based on the player being inactive during that time that's what I recommend for most people so why should you even bother trying to attract returners well compared to a new player a returner is going to be easier to acquire that's

because they feel a lot less of the friction that a new player will experience when they come into a game for the first time former players will know roughly what's on or what's on offer so their expectations are going to match they will understand the fundamentals of the game already should have already invested a good amount of time in it hopefully remember enjoying it and they may already be past that all-important first payment barrier as well this should all mean that the cost to reacquire elapsed player should be lower than that of a brand new player when we average all of RuneScape's user acquisition spend last year the cost per paying user for lapsed players was three dollars and for new players it was three dollars 80 which for us makes the reacquisition route around 25% less expensive for a similar lifetime value returners are going to become more relevant to you over time as the game gets older getting new players in is going to become tougher but the number of laps players you'll have of course is going to be increasing so there'll be a shift in

their relative importance and in this chart you can see how this has happened for runescape with the proportion of incoming returning members which is shown in red increasing from half to two-thirds over four years so it's gradual but it's significant it's true that the longer a player has been away the harder it will be to win them back but I still say that long term lapses are still really viable for you and here's a bit of proof this chart shows RuneScape's incoming members for all of last year broken down by the amount of time they've been away the largest group you can see once at the bottom they've been away for over a year now our game is a bit of an extreme case because it's been around for a very long time but you should still get the sense of the potential you can have from long term lapse players we still get people returning to the game with absences of over 10 years we escaped owes a lot to

returning players the majority of our current active players have at some point elapsed for at least three months so two thirds almost two thirds of our players are already counted as returners so you can see how important they can be deep into a games lifecycle I believe that returners are the key to against longevity because if you're not going to be able to retain absolutely everyone and the rate of new players you can get is going to slowly decrease your long-term prospects would be dependent on your ability to attract returners so hopefully you'd agree that there is value in putting attention into returning players but how you're going to go about doing that I'll step through the major challenges and you'll see that they represent the returning players journey back into the game first you need to find a way to communicate to lapse players because they're not going to be proactively checking in on your game having reached

them you need to grab their interest and motivate them to return this is tough because you've got to overcome whatever reluctance made them laps in the first place and if you can get them to come back you have to help them get reacquainted with your game this is well sorry they may have been away for only a month and just need a refresher they may have been away for years and need a lot more assistance and that variability is an extra challenge hopefully you can get them back and into the swing of things and now you need to engage their interest for the longer term so you can you know prevent them from easily turning straight away again and then looking further ahead the challenge is to develop a design mindset as you make the game which embraces returners and considers their specific needs so you can build on these benefits well into the future these points are going to be the chapters I'll cover through the rest of the talk and I'll dive into each in a bit more detail in turn that starts with communication and the first challenge is finding ways to

reach out and get a message to lapse players this will be difficult because they won't be loading your app or visiting your website email is probably the most obvious channel for wind back messages but it does have its limitations this is because engagement rates tend to be low and getting marketing emails from games you don't play anymore can be annoying so there's a friction problem there as well and there's a whole bunch of technical risks to deal with especially if you want to use email at volume so we found using email to contact lapse players has only modest success rates you can see here that on runescape our wind back emails have around a 16 percent open rate and under two percent click-through rate but that's actually not too different from the success rates we see in marketing emails for other games or when sending to active players it's just it's just the way it works but if email isn't enough what are your other options I recommend embracing social media and

this concept of passive communication by this I mean you're not act we pushing messages directly at people you're putting them out there but you're not forcing them down people's throats you're allowing people to stay in touch with you but on their own terms to specifically target returners I recommend building a particular social media channel around their needs here you're gonna want less quantity but higher interest higher quality less of that day-to-day community chatter community trivia and a focus on the really big and important game updates or events we found that Facebook and YouTube work particularly well for this because people don't expect you to be filling them with lots of different stuff every day Twitter on the other hand much more fast-moving more conversational I don't think would work as well from this perspective here you can see a comparison of traffic to our game from different sources and these are visitors who aren't active players you can see how the visitors generated by our marketing emails which is second

to the right I walked by most of the social media channels and you can see how red it really brings us a lot of traffic so I take a slight diversion and talk about reddit quickly these are some screen grabs I took on a day last month now that's right from the runescape subreddit this isn't something we run its administrated by player volunteers but we do try and actively support it as you can see red it seems to attract a lot of players who are just generally curious about games and interested in returning I kind of want more information or reason to do so in our subreddit that came to the point where the admins had to add specific materials for returning players to the subreddit sidebar because they were getting so much interest in questions on this front so if you're not really working or we'd read it definitely do so I think that as developers we can really benefit from fronting our own games in social media we found that having lots of staff out there talking to players it gets more

followers it generates more buyers and it helps build trust and it shows that you're real people you're not just a brand and it invites place to talk with you so it's a great venue to talk about what you're doing and to get feedback and then this helps you stay in touch with players when they lapse from your game having lots of devs available means there's collectively more followers for your game and lapsing players may stay following an individual developer they have a personal interest in players are a fantastic asset when it comes to reaching out to those who have lapsed if you can build features that help players share content from your game you're going to cultivate more player advocates and more content creators and that will give your game a bigger reach out to the wider space of gamers and this means all do sorry press 1 and this means laps players are more likely to encounter media shared from your game so there's more chances for it to trigger people's

interest in your game and in returning the obvious stuff to do is to create a function in your game that posts the players latest achievement to Twitter or Facebook and those things do work but to be most effective you should be looking to provide players with a toolset to create their own personal content something that's unique to them and something they can feel really proud of we built a few features that have worked well for this so I'll give you some examples the first is called the orb of oculus it's nothing to do it obvious rift just yet unfortunately it's a feature that puts the game camera into an object that players can control it essentially decouples the game camera from their player character allows it to be moved independently you can hide the game UI position everything in the scene so players can set up pose screenshots for you know stuff they want to share or allows them to record video clips for their machinima you can see some examples of some nice posed shots players have created on the screen the

next example is from our best tree this is a feature on our website where players can look up the stats of monsters and pose them look at their animations and for almost no extra effort we've put in this green screen mode which allows players to much more easily cut out the characters and then bring them out of the background so they can use them in their own memes on social media or their fan art so something you know tiny tiny thing that was really useful for players my last example was a bit more involved and this was a full integration we did with twitch and it allowed players to stream and broadcast straight from the game without needing to install any other software or get confused with all the configuration and it acted as a stepping stone that encouraged players to try out live-streaming for minimal effort you can support your content craters in broader ways as well we find that a lot of laps players still regularly watch the YouTube videos or the broadcasts of

their favorite famous players and if you give your players the tools the support and the confidence to share content from your game they'll help you in reaching out to those who've lapsed you can offer a bunch of things to help them with this a big one is exposure as a developer you can push a lot of traffic their way and this isn't just a community management job either you can design it into the game in the twitch integration I just showed there's a directory of current streamers for players to click and go and watch by giving your content crater's previews of game features before they released they can have something special to show off we occasionally do private testing of new game features before full release and we invite video makers to take part in these tests and for us it generates a bit more awareness and for them it gets exclusive content to put in their videos for them to drive interest themselves if you're feeling really brave you can give certain players some of your admin tools so obviously limited versions of what you might give your community management or game masters made safe obviously so

for example we've given some of our live streamers function where they can spawn a very limited number of rare items to give away in competitions on their stream and that goes down really well they're really popular and it's like a mutually beneficial thing overall though the best thing your content creators want is gameplay this is fun to watch as it is to play we'll see this is a massive subject and worthy of a whole separate talk and there are a few on that GDC this week so if you're interested definitely look into that stuff because the more viewers your content creators and broadcasters have the more people that can keep in touch with your game he when they're not actively playing themselves okay so on to the next chapter now we've got ways to reach out to lapse players what are we going to do to draw them back and when's the best time to do it I've really come to believe that it's possible to design game features that specifically talk to lapse players the challenge is to find features that are going to pique their

interest and a great way to do this is to focus on iconic and well-known content so even if a lapse player has been away for a while it's something they'll still remember and a concept they'll still get excited about I recommend using characters locations or game features that players have strong attachments to and are likely to still care about another approach is to address their reasons for leaving you can obviously solve problems like boredom and frustration by adding new features and content and if some players have left because of a problem in your game you can of course fix the thing this caused them to leave we found it really helpful to get inspiration for such features by using analytics and surveys you can look at historical data and try and find clusters of levers who have similar characteristics maybe there's a certain level banding where a disproportionate amount of players have left and you can dive in see what's going on and try and address that survey still laps players are also really useful to get a clearer understanding of why they've left and

what you could do to motivate them to return I'll I'll give you some examples from runescape that have worked successfully over the last few years the first approach is content that resolves a big cliffhanger so you should go back to something in your game where players will be curious to see what happens next we did this in real estate last year with by finishing a ten year long quest series which ended in the opening of a massive lost city and this was a city that players had seen the outside walls and seen the gates but never been able to get in the update was built around this iconic content most players would have played at some point in the past and in addition to its narrative significance it also added a lot of content so when people did come back they had lots of stuff to do another approach is to fix a problem in the game that you think has caused players to leave a few years ago we made major changes to the game's combat system and this alienated a portion of

players at the time so last year we added a legacy mode that a legacy combat mode that sat alongside the newer one so those that preferred the traditional combat gameplay and interfaces could go back to using those it meant that they didn't have to learn completely new systems and in doing so it opened the door to a large number of returning players this is a topic I'll come back to a bit later in the presentation another approach is to go big do something that's really attention-grabbing something that's significant in the context of your game has something fresh and interesting and new about it we did this with some big world events inside runescape back in 2013 these were large scale but time limited events that all players across all servers could join in and their actions decided the fate of a massive God versus clawed battle that took place across the iconic cities of the game world and it also included a new type of gameplay for inscape freeform open world PvP with territory capture and it was

this scale and the interest of the new gameplay concepts that enticed lapped players back to check it out in quite large volumes my last example is about playing on the nostalgia factor tapping into fond memories and offering those experiences to players again in early 2013 we did a poll to gauge players interest in having a retro server of runescape a much older build of the game and for many players this was their formative experience of online games and they considered this period in the game's history to be like a golden age it was a time when things were much simpler much sparser and much more difficult this brought back many hundreds of thousands of players and even a few years later it continues to be a small but really dedicated part of our community we found that the timing of game updates can be just as important as their content by understanding the activity trends of returners you can choose the optimal point to publish your

game updates when lapse players are most likely to listen and respond this chart shows an annual view of the average return rates for runescape across the last five years and you can see clearly there's really big surges in June and July and then again in September sorry in December and this is because many of our players are college students and they have more free time during the seasonal holidays and we really see these noticeable differences in early summer and Christmas we now purposefully attempt to time the release of wind back features to coincide with these expected lifts in seasonal returners and moonscape has quite pronounced seasonality across the year but we also find similar patterns on smaller scales as well so if we zoom in these charts show the average return rate across a week and this time we've split it so you can see the different patterns between offseason and the peak holiday period so on the left you can see on the offseason it's the weekend that has the most returners

but for the peak season during holidays it's actually Friday's that gets the most from a marketing perspective these day-to-day patterns are useful when choosing when you want to announce staff or when you want to pulse advertising but they're also useful from a design perspective it really helps decide when's the best times to start and finish or in-game events so for instance you're not going to want to end an event just at the time lots of returning people are coming back to the game so seasonality and activity trends for returners are going to be different for every game of course so I recommend you dig into your data find out when you naturally have more returning players and build that into your plans and you don't just have to do big content or feature updates to motivate them on a smaller scale we found that holiday and seasonal events like Halloween and Easter are also consistently good at encouraging inactive players to revisit the game but for what it's worth the things smaller stuff like Valentine's and rye the fourth while they're good

for in-game events for active players we've not found them significant enough to bring back more returners okay so next chapter at this point we've encouraged lapse player to return to the game they now need to get reacquainted with how to play and this is particularly challenging because the player remembers they had a mastery of the game but they don't remember all the details they can feel like a newbie in veterans clothing so you've got to help me overcome this and shortcut them back to becoming this expert and it's made more difficult by the fact that each returner is different the longer they've been away the more they'd forgotten but also the more changes they'll have missed during their absence so I definitely recommend providing some sort of catch-up learning features targeted or built for returning players it could be as simple as prompting them to replay a cut-down tutorial or turning on some sort of contextual help system we tried a range of things on runescape and I'll show you a bad example and then a better one in

mid-2013 we did a bit of a relaunch of the game under the badge of runescape 3 and we added a bunch of new features content graphics and new UI system and we created this helper feature that popped up when a returning player logged in it had 11 pages that summarized a whole bunch of changes and you can probably guess that most players closed it immediately it didn't grab their attention and I didn't want to read and memorize all this generic information so last year we tried to learn from this and improve on several fronts we created this learning hub before returning players it had dynamic elements that looked at the character's level and recommended certain content based on that it looked at how long the player had been away and it showed them different catch-up information and we created a gear guide that recommended the appropriate equipment for the players level we also created a range of short but fun

catch-up videos that covered a three to 18-month period of content updates which we worked out was the sweet spot for most of our returning players this all worked much better we saw it in our commercial performance and we had a lot of good feedback from returning players about it so I recommend you try and use the information you've got about each player especially the length of time they've been away to personalize their relearning process if you can't do that always try and make it as relevant as we jool and as entertaining as possible and depending on the type of game you've got it might be worth considering what you can do to lower the barrier for payment for returning players several MMOs including runescape have got tradable premium currency items every enscape version is called bonds World of Warcraft announced they're adding this a few days ago these items where players can buy them from you for real money they can trade them between each other and then redeem the item for one of your

paid services in our case that's mainly the membership subscription effectively it means that your high spenders are subsidizing other players and time rich players can pay for everything using their in-game wealth and this is especially relevant for returners because they're likely to be coming back to your game with an account that already has wealth on it and in our case they can use this wealth to buy a bond from our auction house or from another player redeem it for membership or one of our other premium currencies without needing to pay any real money we introduced this in late 2013 and saw a really significant increase in the number of returning players getting membership subscription because they could effectively buy it using the wealth on their old account I think this mechanic is really great for certain types of games especially MMOs with open market economies now there are lots of complexities and challenges here of course at least of all increased fraud risk so if it's relevant to you definitely investigate

it feel free to email me for more information because if it's right for your game it can be really really helpful okay so next chapter now we want to get players to stay for the longer term and find ways to deepen their engagement with the game events have a range of benefits that help here they focus players into certain areas of the game world so they feel more lively and busy time limited events create a sense of urgency to participate which also helps engagement and these events are a talking point within the player base so they create a reason to chat and the reason to socialize these benefits are great for all types of players but especially beneficial for returners because these are the players that are the less resilient they're yet to fully engage with your game and that means they're more vulnerable to churning out so to be really effective what you want to do is design events by considering

the specific needs of returning players I've got two types of these events the first one I call enrichment events these are when you're trying to deepen the engagement of returners who have lots of time available these event should give players more stuff to do encourage them to be social provide more variety to stop them getting bored we run these sort of events when the players free time is higher which as I mentioned was holidays around the summer and the winter the second type are upkeep events and this is when you're trying to reduce the disengagement of players who have limited time available so it's the opposite situation these events should require minimal time investment from players and offer a lot of value for participating and ideally encourage players to log in every day even if only briefly we do these sorts of events in the leaner months of May in September when some of our players are busy with exams or starting a new school year and it allows them to keep their connection with the game alive without needing to

invest lots of time to feel like they're achieving something I'll give you a couple of examples of these the first is an enrichment event we ran in runescape for Christmas 2013 it was called up to snow good and players had to complete simple minigames like snowball fights and reindeer herding and they did this to score points that they could trade in for seasonal festive rewards it was seasonally themed like way social and if players work together they could get their all faster so encouraged them gently to team up and make friends we found that participation in this event increased the likelihood of retaining a returning player after three months by 9% so really quite significant and as a holiday event we knew that players free time would be higher and was so we designed it to help returning players get deeper back into the game an example of an upkeep event is the September raffle that we ran last

well here players could login every day and they get a raffle ticket they could then use these tickets to enter prize draws throughout the month to win highly desirable items and there was a bit of a deeper strategy where the players could decide to go all-in on that specific prize they wanted or they could use their tickets more tactically to go in to spread their bets go into less popular draws so they'd be more likely of getting a prize overall we found that participation in this event increased the likelihood of retaining a returning player after three months by eleven percent so even more effective by running an upkeep event in September we're increasing the amount of our summer returners we retain as we go into the leaner months so it's quite a strategic use of content these sort of events are great but you do need to be cautious not to over saturate the game with them we found that a one-month in free ratio works quite well when we are events last a month and this provides enough event coverage but without

burning out your regular players because these sort of events can be quite draining for the people that are playing all of the time obviously this is very dependent on the type of game the nature of your community even the platform I see a lot of mobile games with weekly or fortnightly events so they've obviously worked out that's optimal for them okay so final chapter now so far I proposed a range of quite specific features or techniques so in this section I wanted to talk more about general principles about considering the needs of returning players managing the rate of change in online games is really difficult because it's impossible not to want to improve and modernize especially if your game starts to show its age the challenge is to balance two competing forces the benefits you'd get from modernizing the game but also the benefits you're getting from keeping it familiar and comfortable for players the risk is that if you change the game too much you can a lien eight players who liked it how it was and that's both for existing and

returning players in my experience the biggest risk is trying to modernize the core systems of the game rather than adding more content and I really learned this lesson we dreamscapes 2012 evolution of combat update we felt we needed to overhaul a core gameplay system to keep the game relevant and to continue to attract new players and there was data to support this because our survey results and onboarding metrics pointed to the somewhat simple low intensity combat system as a bit of a weak point but we overlooked the impact it would have on returning players we failed in two ways the firstly the system itself was too radical a change all at once and secondly it was introduced poorly after the new combat system launched two players were greeted by this pop-up when they logged in messy UI to paragraphs a solid text no useful visuals only a small call-to-action button and if you did click that you were led to a tutorial that lasted 30 minutes that honestly was more

functional than fun and worst of all because some of the item and gear requirements had changed players who had all of their items unequipped and I had to fumble around with their gear before they could continue so really not good and you can tell that returning players weren't a big consideration for us here and we felt the consequences of that you can see on this chart that the return rate after the launch of the combat the new combat system doesn't get the normal seasonal rise there's a difference between the red and the blue there for some returners the change was simply too great all at once and they simply stopped coming back and we were fortunate we were able to recover this with the legacy combat mode I mentioned earlier but honestly if we'd made better decisions it wouldn't have been needed and we could have put that effort into other things by contrast in early 2012 we launched a feature that could have been similarly disruptive it was called the squeal of Fortune it was a mystery box style minigame where you could spin

a prize wheel get things like in-game resources XP boosts or currency it was a daily lovely incentives where players were given a couple of free spins every day but they could also buy additional spins as a micro transaction option and this is the first time to that point in the game's 10-year history when payments beyond the subscription could you any sort of benefit and it did cause quite a stir and there were some complaints but it actually had zero impact on either our existing or our returning player numbers and I believe this was because it fundamentally didn't change the core of the game while some players didn't like it in principle it was in reality a very mild implementation of an MT X feature and it didn't change the way people played so of course you can make changes you can make big changes even deep into a products lifecycle but I think caution is needed so my recommendations for managing change are to alter core gameplay at your peril undermining the

players mastery devaluing their achievements or altering how they fundamentally approach the game can be disastrous if not handled really carefully when you're considering a big change do thorough research and testing across all types of players not just those you're targeting with a specific feature give yourself enough time to test and iterate before launch and give yourself the option to change course if you're seeing warning signals also be on the lookout for cumulative change again runescape is on the extreme end because we update pretty much every week but it's something you should keep an eye on even if you've got a lower update cadence I recommend not just looking at the change per release but looking at how it's adding up over a longer period and if you are making a big change consider whether you can add some sort of backwards compatibility I mentioned earlier how we re added RuneScape's old combat and UI in alternate legacy mode and I wish we'd included that in the first place

managing community sentiment is just as important because player satisfaction has a real impact on returners if the player base are annoyed and outraged there's going to be less positive word-of-mouth reaching Lapps players outside the game and that's going to reduce the number of them likely to return and inside the game negative sentiment turns into toxic chatter and that won't be pleasant for the returners who have made it back into the game and it will harm their reengagement to stay on top of these risks are recommending I recommend finding ways to track from Unity Center to stay aware of how players are feeling and use it to calibrate your design decisions to do things about it and we use a number of methods for this but I'll show you two of the most relevant ones this first one is a weekly community sentiment report that is put together by our community management team it talks about how the players are reacting to that week's new content and events it shows the spirit of opinion from players across their game or forums of

social media and it calls out specific issues and makes recommendations for addressing them this gives us a really good short-term view of the issues the sentiment and allows us to react quickly when we need to the other method is a much longer form customer satisfaction tracker we survey our players every month to see what they think about the game and the service and it allows us to see the importance of each sub area and how much it affects their future behaviors so this type of analysis and allows us to measure the business impact of player sentiment and how it affects things like recommendations and word-of-mouth so maybe it's obvious but this shows empirically keeping your customers happy is good for the bottom line and it will help you getting in getting and keeping more returning players I've gone through quite a lot today so I'll wrap up and recap upon the key points returners are increasingly

important as your game ages so start building them into your design considerations as early as you can utilize social media as a way to communicate with lapse players on their terms don't just rely on email and empower players to get the word out on your behalf try to have some game updates designed specifically around the needs of lapped players and then launch these at the start of seasonal uplifts in returners help returners regain their mastery of the game don't just leave them to get on with it alone and ideally find ways to give them personalised catch up when you've got them playing deepen their engagement with special community events which are designed sympathetically to their available time and manage the rate of change cautiously especially in core gameplay keep track of community sentiment and use it to guide your decisions and always keep players as happy as possible right

that's the end of the talk and thank you so much for coming along today please feel free to email me if you want to get hold of these slides or ask any get some more info on anything and we can now open the floor up to questions if anyone has any there's a mics in all of the aisles you imagined you had a companion app do you use this in any way to re-engage customers does it affect laps customer behavior do you see people who stopped playing runescape but still use the companion app to do any engagement activity so the question was about our companion app from whether it's helped get more returners and not significantly is the answer and the companion apps very much about extending the game experience slightly outside well outside of the venue of the game client and the features are very much only really relevant to very active core players so there might have been some halo effect

from it but not one that we've been able to measure when we've looked at your $3 cost of acquiring the returning users does that include development cost or community management posting on on reddit etc or is that just on now that's just paid so the question was do our costs for user acquisition I showed include anything other than well just the raw finance cost no that is just let's just spend thanks you some specific examples from your slide about how you engaged in the different social platforms versus your email success obviously the reddit and the YouTube and stuff was significantly more successful can you tell us a little bit about the stuff that is successful I'm concerned about reddit in particular but all of it like what's the stuff you do that works well the question was about more information on our social channels and why they work well and that's a really good question I'm not sure that quite the right answer I think there's just natural it's all natural dynamic about each of the social media channels that

makes it more or less relevant to the characteristics of your player base read it's quite discussion orientated and our players definitely are very opinionated and everyone says that but like trust me our guys really are I think it's also a place where people pass through a lot more use a lot of interlinking inside read it and I think that you don't quite get the same thing on something like Facebook you do a bit on Twitter but I'm not sure - it triggers returners in quite the same way yeah I don't have much more than that I'm afraid hey so after you introduced the token system that allowed your returners that had the old wealth that you were talking about purchase subscriptions with their old well did you then find that later them having access to those premium services would give them a taste of what they could get if they paid and then became payers afterwards so the question was about our bond system that allows players to get stuff premium stuff with their gold their in-game currency it's a

bit of a feeder mechanism so outside of returners specifically having a tradable premium currency item is really good just as a taster feeder mechanism for all players so we have seen that it's increased the conversion for players in general I couldn't say specifically about the kind of sub-cohort for returners specifically but we do see that dynamic across the player base I'm just wondering if you have a forum where players can do basically things with you and with each other and do you have that in addition to Reddit and Facebook or did you just pick one or the other yeah now we've got really big forums there was a while a few years ago now where our forums were the like largest one of the largest traffic sources in the UK not quite where it not quite now because there's a lot more spread out but we've always had forums and they've always had tons of activity they still have more activity than reddit but in terms of players flowing in our forms

are a bit of a bubble whereas read it has a lot of general traffic coming through it so it's a bit more relevant for catching returning players you mentioned the case where you introduced some change that caused a stir and negative response but didn't have an effect on the players have you found any patterns where you know something will cause drama but won't cause a drop in numbers and vice-versa the question was about the difference between features that might cause a stir but don't change like player activity or subscription numbers I mean I'm coming to this stuff retrospectively of course that you probably tell that we didn't have all this wisdom in the first place we I can we just go back to the stuff I was talking about in terms of best practice we do a lot more pre research now when we launched that legacy mode that I talked about we flew about 40 players into our studio took them through the concept of it allowed them to play an early version because we knew it would

be quite controversial not among the people we'd alienated but of the people that were still playing and liked the new thing so I think we're getting a better feel for it but research just communication with your player base being really honest with them that's that's the way we've what we've done to get better at that I'm curious how you prioritize developer time for some of these extra solutions that you come up with for returners versus giving the player the your existing players something new and shiny basically the question was about how we prioritize and divide time between content from regular players versus returners what we try and do is create a fairly sizeable update at each of those returner Peaks so early summer and Christmas and we kind of do events in Halloween is a smaller version of that that's probably I don't know like a fifth or a sixth of our overall resource because we have we've got a

really big team and company so we're very very content driven game so we release something every week so if there's maybe three weeks of the year where we're releasing a fairly big update for returners that still pales in comparison to all of the other content that we're pushing out every week for everyone else so it's still a small minority you mentioned a lot of things ranging from game design to community management where is the line drawn between this is the community management's job for getting returned player this is something we need designed somebody to design an event for how do you differentiate between the different roles or do you have a specific team just for retention and getting returners so the question was about the where the line between community management and development and design Falls we've really benefited from integrating our teams there are separate teams for community management we have a community development team who are kind of a mixture of developers and community and then we have like retention orientated development teams as well we

try and get everyone to mix as much as possible but ultimately it's the and we have loads of our developers on Twitter and things like that but ultimately it's the community managers job official job to do the official communication run events that kind of thing and for our developers it's more of a thing we like to encourage them to do and that they actually really enjoy as well but as was in reality the lines are the ones you'd expect but we have our developers sitting right next to our Community Managers we've done we've really improved things by integrating our publishing and development functions to sit right next to each other and talk a lot and plan a lot together so we try and blur the line but it's also probably where you expect it to be hi how much work do you guys do around the old skool servers in terms of like events that you keep pace with the the normal servers or do you just do small bug fixes and things like that and then how big is the team dedicated to to old school and so

the question was about the attention we put into our retro servers and it's so it's a lot smaller than that of the main game to rededicate so we it's a so we treat it as a sub product and in a way that we have sub retention teams and technology teams it's a legit team of its own that's fully resourced but it's smaller than that of the main team they run all their own events they have their own content theirs it's interesting actually when you do a retro service part of the reason it's there is to provide this old way of playing and this kind of is a natural conservatism about it so we've actually got a like a constitution for our retro servers that says we don't make any change unless the majority of players have voted for it even the smallest thing or seem like bugs and exploits discounted but that means that it's it only moves at the rate of the majority of the players and it means it's a very conservative old-style thing but that's like exactly why it exists but yeah we treat it as a legit service that you know we expected to run for decades more thanks Hey on a

freemium model well it seems hard to define labs at what point did determine that a player being labs and what what worked the best for you which moment did you get feedback from them so at the beginning of the presentation I talked about how we define laps players as people who've been away for over three months they've been out of subscription but most people would be a month of inactivity in terms of reaching out to them in like surveys and stuff we've also collected all of the people have to sign up to our game with an account and they can use social media accounts as well so we always have a point of contact for everyone we will make sure we validate their email address for customer services and payment and stuff like that so when we do surveys to lapse players we are looking at people generally who've been away I mean at least three months but probably deeper than that

into six months because they're more likely to remember just those important things rather than sort of a cacophony of other comments okay great okay I think we're done thank you so much everyone you