socialmedian: How Big Social Games Maintain Their Sticky Factors

User-submitted headlines for this story

Clip

How Big Social Games Maintain Their Sticky Factors

Submitted by Frinsen from Google Reader

Nov 04, 2009

Summary

[The following is a guest post by Eric von Coelln, a social game consultant who occasionally contributes articles for Inside Social Games. Last week, he looked at how the number of daily active users correlate with the amount of money that a social game can make. This week, he looks at some ways that big social games try to keep their daily active user rates up.]

One of the more interesting applications of the social game “sticky factor” that I introduced last week is the ability to look at the life cycle of some of the most popular games and identify some of the key feature roll-outs that greatly increased engagement. The sticky factor is simply the daily active users (DAUs) of an application divided by monthly active users (MAUs).

Let’s take a look at two of the largest games on Facebook, by DAUs, that have been around over three months and also have a pretty accessible view of product feature launches: FarmVille and Mafia Wars, both from Zynga.