Leaderboards and achievements as promotion means

Hi,

What is your experience with using leaderboards and achievements but I mean - downloads-wise? Do they really help or doesn’t matter?

I was wondering about a move like this: I have got a car driving game making around 2000 downloads a day. I thought about marketing a second (different) game by allowing users to unlock, say, a new set of cars in the first game if they would unlock an achievement in this new game.
What do you think?

@piotr
My POV is that it is just too many steps from a player perspective. If I play your car racing game, I’d have to be really engaged in it to:

  • download yet another game
  • invest some time to unlock an achievement in the new game
    to get a reward in car racing game. It would only be possible if the new content in the car racing game would be super-hiper-fantastic, 3D dancing unicorn-Porsches or something like that :slight_smile:

If you have 2,000 downloads a day, you are looking probably, correct me if I’m wrong, at around 8-10k DAU max. Let’s say your conversion ratio from this activity would be below 1%. So you’d get around 100 downloads of a new title / day. Think about the effort required to create new content and all the coding work. I might be wrong but I think you might be looking at negative ROI here. Plus it would be extremely difficult for you to A/B test your suggested approach.

Try something simpler, like nicely targeted interstatials pushing players from car racing game to the new title. Easy to implement, fast, can be A/B tested, less steps from players perspective .

Just my 2 cents :slight_smile:

@tom_dataspin.io Thank you for your thoughts. Well in fact you have just backed up what one of my two inner voices was telling me. This was the less optimistic but rather realistic one. I have noticed that the guys who made the Racing Fever game offered users a sum of 1000 (or so) in game coins for downloading their other game. And although Racing Fever has been featured by Google it seems that it has not helped this other game (kafa1500) too much.

Anyway I have just published my game Cubic Cars on GP, Windows Phone and iOS and for the first time since 2012 the results are best not on Android but on iOS. Not many downloads anyway, but at least the game ranks for the keywords that I wanted and when you type its name in the search it shows in 1 position… This is not the case with any of the Android games that I made lately.

@piotr
Racing Fever was a bit different, it was a simple transaction “download the other game and get coins”. So if this didn’t actually work, more complicated scenarios are even more likely to fail.
Re Cubic Cars, a very nice game! Hope it will grow nicely :slight_smile:
Tom
PS. Do you really live on this fantastic Scottish island?

@tom_dataspin.io
Thank you for kind words! I just learned though, that probably it would be better to somehow put the possibility of unlocking new cars right in front of players eyes right from the beginning. Users do not get high scores within this game, so they also do not unlock cars. I think that Crossy Roads is a very good example how it should be done.
Piotr

PS. :slight_smile: Yes, I do live on Isle of Luing - I moved there for two years from Poland but these years will end in August. It is a fabulous place - the only disadvantage is not so good broadband :slight_smile: They call the place “Argyll’s best kept secret”.

@piotr
Yes, Crossy Roads is the example of how many things should be done :slight_smile:
Re the island, I’ll PM you in a sec.