4 Steps Every Successful Game and VR Experience Needs to Go

Through
Posted on October 13, 2017 by New York Film Academy
By Felipe Lara – Instructor, New York Film Academy Game Design

What is a successful game?

Defining game success in terms of profits is the easiest and

simplest route: we can easily say that if game profits are higher
than our investment, the game is successful. However, this view
does not help us understand how to make a successful game,
what ingredients to use and what processes to follow.
Profitability depends on your game’s business model, which
can vary widely from a free-to-play casual game to a premium
VR experience. And in some cases, success might not even be
about profit, but about teaching something or about creating a
change in behavior — like in the case of many educational games.

If you are trying to make a “successful” game it is much more useful to define success in terms of player engagement. In
most cases, there is a strong correlation between player long-term engagement and profitability. But if you understand
more clearly how player engagement works, you can map the engagement sequence to the ingredients you need to add to
your game and the decisions you need to make during game development.

What Does a Successful Game Look Like In Terms of Player Engagement?

A successful game needs to do 4 things in a sequential order:

• STAND OUT: First, the game needs to stand out. If

nobody is aware of your game, nobody will play it. Standing
out is about the first impression. The challenge is finding a
balance between familiarity and novelty, offering something
the player understands but that is different enough from all the
other apps to stand out.
• CONNECT: Second, the game needs to connect with
players and make them interested in finding out more. Somebody yelling in the middle of the street will get
noticed, but the act of yelling itself won’t get people interested; people will only respond if they connect or
resonate with what they hear. The same happens with games that get your attention in the app store or in the first
couple of minutes of free-to-play game.
• ENGAGE: Third, the game needs to engage players and keep them playing for a while. In most cases, the
longer players stick around the more profitable the game is: this gives you more chances to monetize, more
chances to get subscriptions, more chances to get recommended to friends, etc.
• GROW: Finally, the game needs to find a way to scale or grow its player base. The best way to do that is by
keeping your existing players, and adding features that make them want to invite their friends and promote your
game.

Knowing that you need your game to go through the sequence above will help you choose the right ingredients to fulfill
each of the steps. For example, one of the best ingredients for standing out in the crowd is having unique art; and one of
the best ingredients for growing your game organically is by adding social mechanics that form a community around
your game. There are in fact a few key ingredients that can be combined to fulfill the sequence above and create long-
term engagement.
But First Clarify the Why and the Who:

Your Goals

Of course, none of the previous stuff matters if you are not reaching the goals
you were trying to achieve with your game in the first place. You might be
attracting players and keeping them around, but if you are trying to make an
educational game and your game fails to educate, you are not succeeding even
if you have tons of players sticking around. The same goes about monetization:
if you have hundreds of thousands of players but you are not monetizing or
reaching the profit you were looking to make, you are failing. You need to make sure that as your game connects and
engages it is also teaching and/or monetizing. That is a big part of the trick, but for now let’s stick to the basics: you need
to have a very clear idea of what your goals are and make sure that everything revolves around that.

Your Target Players

Just as important is to have a clear idea of your target player. The things that I need to do to stand out and connect to kids
are very different from the things I need to do to stand out and connect to young adults. One of the main mistakes I’ve
seen in my years developing games is trying to make something that is appealing to everybody, or to a very wide range
of people. Trying to please all usually ends with not really pleasing or connecting with anyone.

Conclusion

A good first step towards creating a successful game or a successful VR

experience is defining how it looks in terms of player engagement. Player
engagement usually follows a specific path with specific steps: stand out and
be noticed by your target audience, connect with them, engage them to
continue playing for a while, and finally make them want to share your game
with their friends so they stick around and help you grow.
Once you have a clear idea of what the game needs to do, you can look for
the right combination of ingredients — art, game mechanics, story, and community building — that can take the players
through the engagement sequence.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ARTICLE: (Answer them according to the ideas given in the article)

1) What is the easiest way of defining the success of a game?

2) Which way would be a better way of defining the success of a game?
3) Which things does a game need to do to be successful?
4) Do they have to follow that order?
5) What do they mean by “stand out”? What would be a good thing to have in order to stand out?
6) If you go to the street and start shouting the name of a game, will it create a connection to the players?
7) How could you get more subscriptions of players?
8) When they say “(…) Clarify the Why and the Who”: Who is the WHY they refer to? And the WHO?
9) When they talk about “monetizing”, what do they want to say?
10) According to the article, is it better to have a specific target or is it better of have a wide range target?