How much is a retaining gamers worth?

I’m considering launching some hosted services that could help game studios retain 20% more of their gamers. Would game studios pay for this and if so, how much? I’m estimating a price of $0.05 for every gamer that gets exposed to the retention service. Would that be compelling?

Or am I asking the wrong question? Are game studios more apt to just buy more installs and live with the same retention rate? If so, why?

Here is my logic behind the pricing:
I assume that if game studios are paying $1CPI and retaining 15% of users 30 days after, then currently, a retained user costs $6.67 ($1/15%).

If my hosted service could drive a 20% relative lift from 15% to 18% then cost of retained gamer drops for $6.67 to $5.56 ($1/18%)…a savings of $1.12 per retained gamer….or $0.168 for every gamer that gets exposed to the retention service. If I only kept 30% of the value then the price would be $0.05/gamer that gets exposed to the retention service.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Not sure how you intend to do this or track this metric ? It seems to me that when a user does not want to play the app, they don’t play it. Having the app send them reminders/etc to play is just going to be annoying.

That would work for developers who deliver purchased (timed) goods or does some sort of impression monetization (or notif ads) … everyone else has a hard time to make any money out a retaining user … sounds hard … :slight_smile:

Thanks for the feedback. So what I’m understanding as your feedback is that different game developers may or may not have their business model tied to retention. This has opened my eyes more because most of what I hear at conferences is about either more getting impressions or getting gamers emotionally invested so that they eventually buy virtual goods. But I can see how some games might not be built like that.
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I don’t believe in annoying users.
With that in mind, is retention something that your game studio budgets for? Or is the preference to buy a bunch of installs or marketing and only work on retention with internal resources?

For me to retain users I try to make the best apps I can. I don’t know any other way to retain a user except on the apps merit. So I don’t know how you could budget for it, other than the time you spend developing.

There are games which explicitly aims for user binding … look at farmville (facebook game). But you have to see, that those games are explicitely built to bind users. merely because the have timed items users can purchase with real money.

A Developer would need quite a bit knowledge of such mechanisms to successfully built such a game which actually works - so if you can fill that gap (which I find very hard) for developers you might have a gold mine and devs will ask you to stop talking and take their money.

Big game studios may invest a lot of money and effort in such things on their own (and have experience with it) so I am not sure if they ask for such services (whatever it is) … also I fear you will not find big game studio developers here in the form xD

My model is to make a game that is SO addictive that users post on forums complaining they are addicted and are being late for work because ‘they had to play JUST ONE MORE GAME’

:slight_smile:

Actually I really got a comment from a user, who played robo miner in the bus and missed his station xD