Adding to that the fact that almost all whales are social and given the opportunity they would gladly spend on forwarding not only their own, but their teammates’ progress as well, it becomes quite clear that Boom Beach’s refusal to introduce meaningful social interaction has been dragging the game’s performance down since launch.
Time spent in the game, ARPU/ARPPU and number of IAPs of social players are commonly reported by developers as being 5 to 20 times higher than the same KPIs across non-social players. As I have already emphasized this heavily in Freemium Mobile Games: Design & Monetization, the truly social players – those who are regularly engaged in global chat or actively attempting to climb the ladder in a clan’s leaderboard, exhibit tremendously better KPIs. While the lack of clans has had some negative impact on the hook phase of Boom Beach ( Clash of Clans’ approach of placing a damaged clan building in the middle of the player’s base can strongly arouse the curiosity of some), there is no doubt that the main negative influence on KPIs is experienced by Boom Beach in its habit and hobby phases. One of the most prominent differences between Boom Beach and Clash of Clans is the fact that in Boom Beach there are no clans and there is no global chat or any other player-to-player communication mean.
Boom beach game guide series#
To spread the content equally between the three parts, I decided to discuss the last and most important ingredient of a great habit phase – the game’s sustainable economy, in the third part of the series where I will conclude the analysis by also looking deeper into the differences in design employed by the hobby phases of the two titles. Then adhering to the key components for creating a great habit phase, I examine additional important design differences and their impact. The dissection begins with the three most obvious and impactful differences that shape the games’ habit phases and mid-game user experiences. In the second part of the series, I continue the deep-dive, juxtaposing analysis by looking at the second key phase in a freemium game – the habit. In the first part of this series, I investigated the finer details of how Supercell tweaked the hook phase in Boom Beach – their latest strategy title, in light of the know-how the company acquired from managing Clash of Clans – its first strategy hit.