Top Virality Features To Design In Video Games

To simply put virality in video games, a great way to quickly acquire new users by letting existing users spread the word of mouth and significantly bring down user acquisition costs. But don’t mistake virality for a single feature of forcing users to tap or click on a random sharing button. For result-driven virality features, you need to make virality a design principle and engineer it in a way that naturally triggers users to take actions to spread the good word about your game. Read this blog if you want to build a game that has a high viral coefficient (the K factor) to achieve virality and create success like Angry Birds and Candy Crush did.

Virality: The Best Acquisition Strategy 

through App Discovery

Build a Sharing Mechanism that’s Super Easy to Find

While designing games online for virality, it’s important to make the sharing mechanism part of the core game loop. But, it’s even more important to ensure that users don’t have to make too much effort when they think of inviting their friends and socializing through your game. An easy sharing mechanism increases a user’s tendency to send more invites which in turn increases the chances of more conversions.  Below are a few tips on how you can increase the average number of invites sent by users:

• • Referral program must be easily visible.

• • Don’t hide the invite mechanism in in-game menus or in settings.

• • Provide multiple social media platforms to easily send an invite.

• Offer users something in exchange for sharing your game, and explicitly explain the benefits.

Right placement of the buttons for sharing, referring or inviting is the key to attract users’ attention to share your game with their friends. Have a look at some of the placement examples used by popular games to increase the average number of invites.

In addition to visibility, it’s also important to make the sharing process frictionless. The three popular ways to implement the invite process are:

• • Native sharing

• • Unique codes

• Facebook Game Requests

Time it Right

The success of your referral program heavily relies on how you time it.  You need to provide an awesome experience to users first and then make it natural for them to share your game. The WOW moment is the key here. The right time to ask for a referral is when users have experienced something great about your game, such as having completed a difficulty level, made significant in-game progress or got access to a new character, weapon, etc. Such WOW moments make it natural for users to share the news with their friends and it’s important for you to design your referral program around them. Also, when users are at a high-satisfaction point, it’s the best time to ask them to rate your app, write a review or give feedback. Out of the amazing experience they just had, they would be highly likely to rate your app high and leave positive reviews on app stores which also play a big role in making your app go viral.

For example, Doomsday Clicker asks its players to share in-game progress through a pop up that says “Show the world your chaos”. Before moving to the next level, users see the pop-up and many of them share their achievements with friends and invite them too to compete and socialize with them. 

In-built Mechanism to Identify where to Place Invite Buttons

As every game is different, so is the point of high satisfaction. Having some in-built mechanism or signals that point towards those WOW moments are very helpful to get the placement right for your referral program. When you know which screens users engage the most with, what achievements make them ecstatic,  the levels and in-app merchandise they crave for, etc., you can tie the acquisition of those things to “social”. Having an in-built mechanism that gives you insight into users journeys makes the job much easier for you to find the best places to put the invite or share buttons. If your game has what it takes to get users engaged, you can definitely make the best of virality as users will be very likely to reach a point: “I like it. I think Mike will like it, too. You only need to identify those points with an in-built mechanism and see virality doing the wonders for your game.

Multiple Platforms for Social Sharing

You shouldn’t rely on just one social media platform to make virality work for you. Let your users share and invite friends on their preferred social media channels to maximize your game reach. Using only Facebook's Graph API adds friction as both the sender and the receiver have to be connected on Facebook. You should build some tech or use some turnkey tool that allows users to share interesting content on their preferred social media channel.

Ongoing Optimization

Keep testing your referral marketing campaign to figure out what’s working and what’s not. You can always optimize virality features in your game by keeping a close eye on how your users are interacting with the invite and share button and if they are happy to share in exchange for the reward you’re offering them. Fluff Fairy and Super Evil Megacorp's title Vainglory are good examples that saw a sharp rise in conversion rates after tweaking the game's messages, invites messages and images.

Likewise, you should test and experiment with your referral marketing campaign on an ongoing basis to keep taking it closer to perfection and cut your user acquisition costs by a big margin.

Virality is all about understanding your game audience and incorporating the learnings to take advantage of the natural instinct of users to show the world interesting content when they exactly want to. So, to succeed, you must make your referral marketing campaign part of your core game loop and let users bring new users. 

There are various ways you can achieve virality for your game but if you’re somehow struggling to implement them in the right way, the best recommendation is to hire game designers and developers who know how to build and make virality features work the best for your game. Logic Simplified is happy to work with you on your game be it game development services or fitting the viral hooks for user acquisition. Once you decide to build your game with us, we brainstorm virality features and implement them in your game to facilitate user acquisition at a fast pace without requiring you to invest too much in paid customer acquisition programs. The very first step towards building your game and virality quotient in it is to initiate a discussion by writing to us at enquiry@logicsimplified.com. We promise to get back to you shortly with solutions that would precisely meet your game development requirements and also help you realize the real virality potential of your game to grow by leaps and bounds.