At the Game Developers Conference 2019, we announced a few exciting updates to the Google Play Store, including Google Play Instant-powered playlists, live events, and new discovery surfaces that let players launch your instant game right on the spot. These updates help users better understand your game as they scroll through the store, instead of hiding the good stuff on the store listing pages. Expect to see us highlight more screenshots, videos, and instant games in the near future.

Every day, millions of users come to Google Play to discover new content. Instead of making a beeline for a particular game, we noticed that most people come to browse, which means making a good first impression is critical. A catchy title and memorable icon are important, but it’s your game content that really sets you apart. That’s why we’re making it easier than ever for players to get a feel for your game at a glance.

One big way that you can help with that discoverability is by offering your game as an instant app. Not only will this let you take advantage of these new features, it can even help improve your user acquisition. Since we launched the program last year, we’ve seen games like Galaxy Attack to Marvel Strike Force have tremendous success with their instant apps, and we’ve seen five times the growth in Google Play Instant sessions over the last 6 months.

Interestingly, users in emerging markets seem particularly receptive to instant games. Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, and Turkey constitute over half of instant sessions. If you’re planning to launch or expand your game to any of these markets, it’s a good idea to consider making Google Play Instant part of your strategy.

Want to learn more about creating an instant game? We’ve got you covered. Whether you’re starting from scratch or converting an existing game, start by reading our recommended best practices and browsing the technical FAQs. If you’ve already published your game, check out the how-to on our developer site to make the conversion simple. Make the building process easier with our new Google Play Instant plug-ins for Unity and CocosCreator, and get advice on creating an instant game in five easy steps. While that last post is specific to Unity, it offers a good look at the process of building a production-ready instant game from scratch.

We also recognize that not every developer has the time or resources to build an instant game, particularly when they are preparing for a new launch. If you’re in this situation, don’t worry — partners like AppOnboard, The Knights of Unity, Seepia, Synative, Luna Labs, and CrossInstall are here to help. Many of our partners have worked with these companies (and others) to launch Google Play Instant versions of their games, so if you’re short on time, consider reaching out.

If you’ve already created an instant game, there are still plenty of ways to optimize your game for discoverability:

• Give your game a checkup with Android vitals to keep it running smoothly. Performance on these and other quality metrics affects visibility in Google Play Store discovery algorithms as well as your app’s eligibility for editorial collections.
• Some sections of the Google Play Store show groups of recommended games using screenshots and videos. For your game to be eligible, we recommend you provide a minimum of 3 landscape screenshots and/or landscape videos (16:9). Make sure to turn off monetization for the video to avoid having ads displayed on or before your video.
• If you’ve invested in LiveOps, the new Events section in Google Play is another great way to help users discover your game as well as to re-engage existing users. You can apply for the LiveOps Cards Early Access Program here.

The new Google Play Store features are live now so it’s a great time to get your assets ready and optimize discovery for your game.

What do you think?

Do you have questions or feedback about Google Play Instant? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

Help players discover your game with Google Play Instant was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In-app purchases (IAP) are a popular way of monetizing apps and games. Although IAP has been around for a while and are widely used, it’s not always reaping developers the rewards they deserve.

In this post I’m going to discuss some of the signs and signals in your IAP metrics that might suggest your IAP economy is suboptimal, and how these signals can help you identify opportunities to grow your business.

First, I’d like to start by reviewing the structure of daily revenue and how all the metrics which make up revenue interrelate. To do this I’m going to use what Google Play calls the ‘revenue tree’ or the ‘revenue funnel’.

The revenue tree shows how the core components of revenue fit together and feed upwards to generate daily revenue. Each metric in the tree can be calculated by multiplying the two metrics below it, except for the dotted line boxes where you add the metrics.

The core monetization metrics, those in the red boxes, are divided into two categories: daily buyer percentage and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU).

The daily buyer percentage is, in my view, the primary monetization metric. This is because it’s always better to go for breadth when monetizing users: it’s safer to try to monetize a larger % of your players , versus trying to generate more revenue from your high spenders alone.

In contrast, ARPPU — which is made up of average revenue per paying user, average transaction value, and transactions per buyer — are the secondary monetization metrics. They are important too, however, they measure your ability to get value from users who have already chosen to pay. The potential downside with chasing these metrics is that it’s easy to push players to, for example, lift your average revenue per paying user, but this could be at the expense of decreasing buyer conversion rates.

To help you find the right balance, I’m going to walk you through the revenue tree. As I go, I will introduce some approaches I use to monitor revenue performance that can help you understand how a game is doing. I will then look at buyer percentage and ways to think about increasing returning buyers, especially the frequency at which users are paying. Finally, I’ll discuss the secondary metrics and offer you some food for thought about ways to change your games to improve them.

How to approach topline revenue

One of the common ways of driving top line revenue is LiveOps, which have become an integral part of driving game businesses and stimulating demand. However, LiveOps aren’t monolithic, they can be thought of as supply side sales and demand side events, and the balance between them. Supply side sales are the injection of discounted assets into the game economy; the ways you give users additional value for each dollar they spend. Demand side events are things such as tournaments, weekend challenges, and competitive engagements; ways to get players to use their asset balances. The relation between these two is important to create a balanced and healthy game economy that drives strong revenue.

To show how balance can be created I’m going to use two examples of different ways LiveOps can be approached.

On the left you can see an example of a developer who runs large sales approximately once a month. While the sales are running they generate a significant amount of revenue. This is followed by weekly LiveOps, however, the sale revenue spikes trend down over the month until the next sale. The developer on the right runs LiveOps almost every day. This balances their supply side and their demand side, and creates a much tighter revenue loop. Here the approach is interesting because the developer is trying to ensure that every day is appealing: every day users are perceiving good value in the game, and are willing to open their wallets and pay.

So, what is the best strategy? Well, the short answer is that one isn’t inherently better than the other. The right choice depends on your development team, skill set, game, and audience. How frequently can you create and run LiveOps? Is your audience driven more by supply or demand incentives?

Monitoring revenue with ‘revenue heartbeat’

The best tool for monitoring LiveOps is something I call the revenue heartbeat. To visualize the revenue heartbeat, determine the minimum and the maximum revenue days each month and calculate the average daily revenue for the month. When plotted, you get a visualization similar to this:

The ideal you’re looking for has the maximum and minimum revenue days forming a tight band around the average. As your revenue grows, the difference between the maximum and minimum revenue days is maintained; the band remains a constant width. If you see all these things, you may ascertain that you’re stimulating the right demand on a daily basis, and your players are engaging heavily and consistently.

In contrast to the first revenue heartbeat illustration, the next one shows some examples of suboptimal patterns.

At points A and C the developer ran large sales that created a significant hangover, illustrated by the spike in maximum revenue followed by a drop in the average monthly revenue. So, when running sales it’s important to find ways to minimize the hangover — its duration and depth — to avoid revenue going net negative when compared to pre-sale.

By way of contrast, at point B, the developer was tightening up their economy. They didn’t run as many sales but stimulated demand. That approach was very effective at getting users to drain their asset balance down, to try stimulate a desire to pay.

Revenue heartbeat is a useful way to monitor and understand the performance of your game, get a good sense of the effectiveness of sales, and whether you’re running them too frequently.

Other measures for revenue

There are also more advanced ways to look at revenue. One I particularly like is the coefficient of variation in daily revenue over a month. This is useful for quantifying LiveOps performance because it gives you a measure of the variability or volatility of revenue in a month. It is calculated by determining the standard deviation in your daily revenue over a month, then divide this by the mean.

When looking at this coefficient for games in Google Play, it exhibits a strong correlation with revenue growth. The coefficient can therefore help you understand the potential for your game to grow revenue. It can also hint at the optimizations and value that I recommend you look for.

Looking at the top 250 IAP games on Google Play for January 2017 to January 2018 shows that the majority of games have a coefficient of variation below 39%: there was some slight volatility but it isn’t extreme. An interesting picture emerges when this data is narrowed down to look at the games that had month-over-month growth.

The games with the lowest coefficient of variation were much more likely to see growth: over 55% of games with a coefficient of variation between 10% and 39% saw monthly growth. In contrast, less than half the games with very high volatility saw growth.

Revenue volatility is therefore an important factor to consider: is it at a level that’s healthy for your game? If it isn’t, then you may need to optimize your LiveOps cadence to balance the demand and supply side events to decrease volatility.

If you’re running predictable weekly or monthly sales, it’s easy for users to see the pattern. They may then choose not to spend at other times, stocking up assets from the weekly or monthly sales. Even if they run short of assets, they may hold off on purchasing if they know a sale will start soon. This sale hangover and anticipation can lose you money.

A solution to this is what I refer to as ‘predictable unpredictability’: your players get used to finding that something good is happening when they sign in, but they cannot anticipate what it might be. The important thing is that, because players cannot predict what the “good thing” will be, they’re not going to change their behavior before it occurs. So, ask yourself how predictable your offers and events are, and whether your players can predict what you are doing. If you are predictable, I recommend figuring out how you can shake things up.

Returning buyers

We find that revenue often follows the 80/20 rule: 80% of the revenue comes from the top 20% of payers. This is certainly true when looking across the entire IAP games ecosystem. However, this could be risky for revenue generation and probably isn’t sustainable in the long term. Interestingly, it’s also not what the best performing games are doing.

When we looked at data from the top 25 Google Play IAP games, only six got more than 80% of their revenue from the top 20% of payers. The majority were in the low 70s, three were in the 60s, and two in the 50s. So, most top games are generating revenue from a wider range of payers.

Extending the view to the top 100 games, you can see that the further down the top charts you go, the more reliant games are on their top 20% of payers.

This begs the question: How reliant are you on your top payers? If you are, what can you do to broaden you payer base?

First, you need to understand where your revenue is coming from. To do this, I take monthly ARPPU and the number of unique days users are paying in a month. I then slice these into deciles, or 10 buckets, the top 10% in the first bucket, the next 10% in the second bucket, and so on.

To continue the illustration, the data is emblematic of patterns frequently seen in top performing titles in the Action RPG genre.

In this example, people in the top decile paid the most, on average $579 a month. For the second best decile the average was $120 a month. This follows the 80/20 rule. As the revenue continues to drop off it becomes apparent that the bottom 50% of buyers paid less than $10 each.

Is this an opportunity for growth, or something to accept because revenue from the highest value payers is stong? Personally, because I’m a growth mindset person, I think it’s an opportunity.

Before I discuss how to capitalize on this opportunity, there is another factor to explore: the number of unique days on which the buyers paid.

As you can see, half of the payers only paid on one day. This is a trend across Google Play, with most IAP games having between 40 and 60% of monthly buyers pay on only one day. How easy would it be to get these people to pay on an extra day each month? It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to provide them with a compelling value proposition that incentivizes them to open up their wallets on a second day.

So what’s the opportunity here, what should you be focusing on, and where can you can extract potentially the most value? The answer is to focus on those users who are only paying on one day.

Looking again at the example game, you can see that 80% of the buyers who paid on only one day paid less than $10. This is a huge opportunity because, if your game has 50% of its buyers who paid on only one day and 80% of them paid less than $10, imagine what could be achieved if you could convert half of them to paying an extra $5. This is a huge upside and, more importantly, it’s sustainable. How would you do it? There are several options: targeted offers, sales, and exceptionally compelling value propositions for these users.

Importantly, to improve your game’s performance, think about that value proposition. Consider the following:

• How you’re communicating value for money to users.
• How compelling the ‘value’ is.
• How easy it is for users to understand what they are getting.

Also, think about your sales segmentation and how you’re presenting it to users. Think about the psychology. Would a person who occasionally spends $5 and who then sees a $100 SKU in a big sale get excited about a $5 offer? Alternatively, would they see the significant value proposition being offered to high value spenders, think that their $5 won’t let them compete with the players spending $100, and as a result leave their wallet shut. So, consider how you’re segmenting your users and how you’re presenting the offers. Try to give your players offers that are targeted to their spending patterns and that will appeal to them.

Another useful tactic is daily deals, something that has become quite popular. The way the top games implement them involves good communication of the deal’s value, scarcity, and aspirational goals for making the purchase.

Finally, I’d like to mention an idea about repeat buyers bonuses. For example, after a user has made their first purchase in a month, you could offer them a 10% bonus if they make a second purchase within 7 days. This is a great way of encouraging players into a weekly purchasing habit.

Optimizing secondary metrics

Across the top 250 IAP games on Google Play, each day purchasing users make between 1.5 and 1.9 transactions, with an average transaction value of between $8.50 and $25. This results in an average revenue per paying users, depending on the game, of somewhere between $13.70 and $44.50.

These are significant amounts, but often they come from a very small set of users. It is therefore important to consider what the relationship is between these metrics and what opportunities exist for improvement.

There is a positive linear relationship between average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) and the average transaction value (ATV): if you can get users to pay at a higher price point, you’re likely to get more revenue from them. Also, given that the transactions per buyer on a daily basis are only 1.5 to 1.9, the primary driver for average revenue per paying user is the average transaction value.

In contrast, the plot of average revenue per paying user against transactions per buyer is just noise. Attempts at cluster analysis, curve fitting, and other similar analysis found no reliable pattern. So, this metric is probably tied to a game’s design and core economy, which means we might be able to leverage game design to bring more order to the chaos seen here.

If your game falls below the 25th percentile, you should ask the following questions:

• How many assets do you sell in your game?
• Do you sell only one asset (gems or coins or credits)?
• What price points are you selling at?
• If you have a low number of transactions per buyer, and your IAP sells at very high price points, what is the velocity of money?
• Have you created a scenario where users are incentivized to buy the largest pack possible because of bonuses you offer on top of them, resulting in users riding those assets for as long as possible? You know that they will spend them eventually, so there’s no urgency to buy multiple times.

At the other end , if you’re above the 75th percentile, you may want to ask the following:

• How many assets are you selling?
• If you’re selling two or more asset types, you’re in a very healthy range. If you’re only selling one kind of asset, what kind of impulse buying decision making are you creating in your game?
• Have you created a scenario where users are incentivized to make a large number of very small transactions each day?

If the answer to the last question is yes, then there’s the risk that you’re leaving money on the table because, every time a user has to decide about making a purchase there’s a chance that they’ll stop. To address this, look for opportunities to upsell to your users. Instead of showing them X gems for $2, show them a $2 and $5 offer and see if they are interested in the higher offer .

There are opportunities to optimize and improve here, but the right optimization and improvements are likely to be game specific. Finding the right approach depends on asking your development team the right questions:

• What is your velocity of money?
• How many impulse purchases do players make each day?
• Does your game incentivize asset hoarding?
• How is your game economy designed?
• Is it a capital expenditure economy where users are primarily purchasing assets, such as gems, and spending them to get permanent upgrades?
• Or, is the economy more focused on purchasing consumable assets, such as coins or credits, and players spending them as part of their daily play?

Closing thoughts

Looking for the signs and signals of suboptimal monetization is an effective way of driving revenue growth.

The top games on Google Play show that the lower the daily revenue volatility, the more likely games are to see revenue growth. So, assess volatility and ways to minimize it: look to see if your LiveOps are balancing supply and demand side events.

The top 25 games on Google Play rely less on their high value users compared to games lower down the top chart. Find out how closely your revenue follows the 80/20 rule and whether there is an opportunity to broaden and diversify your payer base. Look for ways to get users who spend once per month to spend a second time.

There is a strong linear correlation between average transaction value and average revenue per paying users, however the relationship does not exist between transactions per buyer and average revenue per paying user. The optimizations here are likely to be very game specific and an opportunity to exercise your creativity.

Addressing these three areas may help you improve your game revenue growth strategy and will hopefully lead to tangible results.

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on these approaches to optimizing game revenue? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

Signs and signals of sub-optimal monetization was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

New monetization trends to diversify your games revenue — post 2 of 5

This is the second post in our series looking at the importance of diversifying revenue streams in games and exploring the practical approaches you can take to implement a diverse monetization strategy.

My colleague Adi Haddad has already provided an overview of the landscape in the first article in this series. In this post, I’ll deep-dive into the use of subscriptions in your diversification strategy, with the contribution of Fay Griffin from N3TWORK.

Subscriptions are not a foreign concept in games. From PC to console, many have used subscriptions as a content pass. However, instead of treating subscriptions as bundles of items, I’d like to encourage you to think outside of the box and imagine a different kind of subscription model, one in which you layer subscriptions on top of IAP to create tiers of premium experiences for your players. The most similar industry analogy is an airline loyalty program.

Benefits of in-game subscriptions

The momentum of subscriptions in mobile games has accelerated in recent years. On Google Play, we’ve seen global growth in game subscriptions of 70% year-over-year.

There are three main reasons why subscriptions are growing:

1. Developers who have implemented in-game subscriptions have seen an increase in retention

“Subscribed users play about 20% more daily compared to before they subscribed to Monster Strike’s MonPass, implying an increase in user engagement,” — ©XFLAG (Mixi)

2. These developers have also seen an increase in revenue

“Due to the retention associated with monthly subscriptions, the ARPU curves for subscribers are steeper than those of non-subscribers leading to much higher overall LTVs for these players.” — Scopely

3. The ability of subscriptions to defuse feelings of regret. This may be a surprise to some so let me explain: gamers sometimes binge on IAP and then feel regret. Subscriptions can be used to structure consumption smoothing, for example, instead of eating all their cake in one day, players eat one slice each day, over a longer time with potentially a less likelihood of regret.

How to design in-game subscriptions

Three design principles

The best-in-class subscriptions design is a multiplier of overall revenue (including IAP) and engagement. However, unlike in-app purchases, designing subscriptions requires a shift in mindset.

#1: Design “access”

The main difference between IAP and subscriptions design is that while IAP is about ownership, where players keep what they buy, subscriptions is about access: access to different tiers of premium experiences, access that you can gain and lose.

In the airline loyalty program analogy, a member with status will get exclusive access to the airport VIP lounges, which provides a more premium experience with more comfortable seats, and offer food and beverages.

In mobile games, subscriptions access is centered around content. Some games offer subscribers exclusive tournaments, items, events or early access to a major new content update, such as new levels, maps or characters.

#2: Define an engagement loop to “earn”

While IAP lets the user gain benefits directly with a purchase, the most effective subscriptions mandate that subscribers must earn these unlocked benefits with their time, progression, and skills. Think of a subscription as a license to earn additional exclusive awards. Thus, subscriptions create an engagement loop, encouraging players to increase time spent in-game, and offering a reason to return day after day.

In my airline program analogy, members level up their status by flying more or buying more expensive tickets, such as business class. The “earn” criteria here — flying and/or spending — is precisely the desired customer actions that the airlines want to reinforce.

In mobile games’ subscriptions design, some offer a booster or bonus points, to reinforce the action of “play.” Some create a durable good, such as a permanent building or character, that levels up as a player remains a subscriber for a longer period of time. In these cases, the desired action is “continue to subscribe.” In other cases, subscribers get bonus premium items, currency or points to reinforce the action of “in-app purchases.”

#3: Create benefits that “evolve” over time

While the IAP items remain static, we can design subscriptions as a program, such that the benefits and experience evolve over time. As the players invest more in the game, whether it’s with their time, skills, or other IAP, the subscription benefit also compounds.

In any airline loyalty program, there are multiple layers of premier statuses, with the higher membership status offering more benefits (complimentary tickets, free checked luggage) and better experience (priority boarding, upgrades).

In games, some in-game subscriptions designs tie benefits’ value to the players’ in-game levels, either through points system, a separate VIP point system, or tiered rewards program. In these cases, a level 100 reward is significantly more valuable than level 10. In other games, some developers offer a milestone reward. For example, if a player has been a subscriber for 3 months continuously, they will unlock a valuable one-time reward in game.

Some mobile game subscriptions have one or two of the design principles, but the most effective ones have all three. I encourage you to examine and assess your existing in-game subscriptions designs using this framework.

Two target user segments

As with in-app purchases design, subscriptions offers are more effective at offering targeted values to the specific customer segments.

#1 Convert new buyers

A good deal often motivates new buyers. Scopely’s game Wheel of Fortune frames its subscriptions offer as an all-access pass. These subscriptions feature exclusive rewards that a potential buyer would want in addition to a sales discount. Surfaced right after the first-time user experience (FTUE), with benefits such as “more energy” , this subscription aims to increase these new buyers’ in-game engagement, and cultivate a habit of playing regularly and investing in their future gameplay.

#2 Celebrate high value users

For loyalty programs, you want to target high-value users, as airlines do with frequent flyer programs. These players are motivated by the ability to access a premium experience, prestige, and rewards for their commitment to your game. Ludia’s game Jurassic World: the Game offers their VIP subscribers extra currency, exclusive tournaments, early access to new content, and, as with subscriptions for new buyers, access to special durables that may even strengthen over time.

The obvious concern is that subscriptions could cannibalize IAP, but with careful and smart design that is not the case, as the case study from N3TWORK shows.

Some games also offer multiple subscriptions targeted at different segments simultaneously, such that one would be more valuable to new players, and one would be more valuable to older players or those who spent a lot of IAP by design. Players then opt-in and choose whichever subscriptions offer, or both, as they like.

N3TWORK case study

N3TWORK, the developers of Legendary: Game of Heroes, employs 90 people in offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santiago. Legendary: Game of Heroes was launched in August 2016. It’s a puzzle card battle game that invites players to go on quests, join guilds, collect powerful cards, and more. It also offers weekly events and fresh new content to engage and delight players. Monetization is primarily achieved through IAP and, to a lesser but meaningful degree, through VIP subscriptions.

The business model is built around the reality that most players don’t pay. The game team’s focus is to delight all players and get them to come back everyday, for years to come, with the goal of ensuring that all of the payers have an obvious reason to return. When N3TWORK thought about subscriptions, they saw an opportunity to be generous: they’d happily give away $100 in value every month if it meant a player was going to show up regularly.

N3TWORK’s subscriptions philosophy is that VIP subscriptions are a loyalty program which provides premium access. For them, subscriptions equal access and highly retentive, long term access to content.

Legendary: Game of Heroes’s subscriptions offer:

• Convenience to the players. In a special VIP store, players are offered items they may otherwise have to perform multiple steps to buy. Players should be allowed free progression in the game without having to watch a video ad. After having experienced the game as a subscriber, the player cannot imagine playing the game without a subscription.
• Early access to content. VIPs that have subscribed for a certain period of time get tokens that give them a head start to fight higher level bosses before other players.
• Lifetime rewards. In addition to daily rewards the VIPs get lifetime rewards. The lifetime rewards are more valuable than daily rewards. This helps increase loss aversion.
• Increase value of in-app purchases. Subscribers receive loyalty or mileage points per purchase. The more points a player collects, the higher the VIP level, the better the daily and lifetime rewards.
• Create predictability for players. Offer something that subscribers can do every day, such as a daily reward that they can expect. This ultimately can provide players with rewards that reinforce the points above.
• Allow non-subscribers to also accumulate lifetime tokens. In Legendary, non-subscribers also build up their VIPlevels. Higher VIPlevels provide better values; so, when they reach a sufficiently high VIPlevel, it would become an obvious next step for them to convert into subscribers.
• Dedicated customer support for VIP’s

Looking at the design, Legendary actually uses all three of the “Access”, “Earn” and “Evolve” framework referenced above:

And they reported phenomenal results:

• N3TWORK offers the VIP subscription in Legendary at $29.99 USD per month.
• They have 30k active subscribers, which amounts to a small but growing portion of the game’s revenue.
• Their VIP subscriptions have achieved D425 retention of ~20% and players with the VIP subscription have a 95% daily log-in rate.
• Cannibalization of IAP is not a factor.
• Cost Per Player (CPP) is coverable by VIP subscriptions.

Common challenges

As they approached the introduction of the VIP subscriptions, N3TWORK thought about ways to solve some common challenges:

Intuitive Messaging Through Outstanding UX

How to communicate VIP benefits in a clear and concise way? One of the first things they did was differentiate between standard and VIP subscribers’ features with the use of color. Each VIP benefit would be purple versus the standard blue color. If the players switch off the VIP option, the game looks very different to them. The idea behind this was to build the benefit in the core loop of the game. Players can readily see the benefits, which become even more apparent when the benefit is switched off.

Mindful Upsell Moment

Be thoughtful of the best timing to offer a subscription. For example, the value of subscriptions can be made more apparent right before a big event.

Shared Account Prevention

It might have been possible for multiple players with different game accounts to share a single Google subscriptions account, and thereby gain an unfair advantage in competitive games using the subscription benefits. In such cases, associate the subscription purchase token with the gamer account that purchased it using linkedPurchaseToken, and enforce a 1–1 mapping between gamer accounts and purchase tokens.

High Caliber Customer Support

How do you ensure your VIPs feel valued? For N3TWORK, the key goal is that subscribers must feel that they belong to a community that is appreciated by the game maker. To do this, they designed benefits to maintain VIP subscriber engagement: VIP events, VIP offers, and ‘white glove’ customer support. They created a dedicated and properly equipped customer support channel to provide high caliber and dedicated customer support where VIPs can provide their feedback directly to the team.

Learnings

N3TWORK believes that it’s important to move away from the mindset that subscriptions are just an auto-renewal mechanism for discounted IAP. Instead, subscriptions need to be thought of as offering highly-retentive long-term access to content, rather than the one-time situational purchase of content offered by IAP.

Subscriptions have helped underwrite N3TWORK’s revenue and improve player retention. Retention has been driven further by the ability to personalize the IAP store based on the player’s subscriber tier, which has further boosted the IAP economy by increasing the perceived value of products to subscribers. And, it has been at no cost to other IAP offers or products, in other words they haven’t experienced any cannibalization of other IAP offers.

Looking back at the implementation of VIP subscriptions, N3TWORK believes the impact may have been even better if they had considered:

• Free trials to help with subscriber conversion
• Auto-renew trials and deals through introductory pricing, for example, 3 months at a discounted price.
• Time cards to provide an alternative IAP to gain temporary access to a subscription, similar to the 3 month Xbox Live card.

3 key take-aways the N3TWORK team learned from the process:

• Prioritize subscriptions offers: given its high retention, the VIP subscription should be the #1 thing people are encouraged to buy.
• Framing is everything: celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. Create VIP events, talk outside the game.
• Build fast but flexible: build fast but maintain the ability to test and iterate.

Closing thoughts

If you’re considering testing subscriptions in your game, here is a framework to get you started:

1. Select your target audience

Are you creating the subscription to convert new buyers or offering a loyalty program for high-value users?

2. Customize your value propositions

For each of your key audience segments, what is your main value proposition? What would be valuable to a new user? A tenured player? A high-value payer?

3. Design “access”

Can you give your subscribers access to something special? Something above and beyond a free or even IAP-based experience, so that they’ll return to your game regularly and spend more time? What does “losing access” look like?

4. Define the actions that “earn”

After subscribers gained access, what actions do you want the subscribers to perform to earn their new benefits? How can you create an engagement loop to reinforce these actions?

5. Create the key benefits that “evolve”

For subscriptions benefits, what can you offer players that grows with time-spent, in-game progress, IAP purchases, and alike?

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on monetization with subscriptions? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

Grow your games’ revenue with subscriptions was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rethinking your game monetization strategy

New monetization trends to diversify your games revenue — Post 1 of 5

As a Games Business Development Manager at Google Play, I work closely with developers in Israel & Turkey, and speak to many developers at events, workshops and partners I work directly with to try to help their games businesses on our platform. Almost every game developer I talk to wants to know how to make more money, because the more money they make, the more they can invest in their passion for developing mobile games.

Over a series of several Medium posts, in which I’m going to be joined by my colleagues, Moonlit Bashimov, Serena Shih and Daniel Trocoli, we are going to look into a rising strategy for growing a mobile gaming business — revenue diversification.

In this first post, I’m going to introduce you to the idea of revenue diversification and provide an overview of three key monetization approaches that are emerging as part of diversification strategies adopted by games developers around the world such as Gram Games, Kongregate, Tapps Games, N3TWORK and more.

The game genre approach

The mobile gaming industry has historically been driven by a model where game genre has been the primary determiner of a game’s monetization strategy. Where engagement and play skill levels are usually low, like in the hyper-casual genre, monetization is focused on ads. As the level of engagement and skill grows, such as in the simulation and casual genres, often a hybrid monetization strategy of ads and in-app purchases (IAP) implemented together is used. When higher levels of engagement and skills are involved, such as in role-playing and strategy games, the focus is mainly on monetization through IAP.

But, is this approach built on sound assumptions or should we rethink it? Does it make sense to focus on one monetization strategy?

Why diversification?

Diversification in business and investment isn’t a new idea. More than 400 years ago, in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” the character Antonio, talking about his fortune, says: “I thank my fortune for it — my ventures are not in one bottom trusted, nor to one place, nor is my whole estate upon the fortune of this present year.”

Centuries later, Nobel Prize winning economist Harry Markowitz said he “would never be 100% in stocks or 100% in bonds or cash.” His work on Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) offers a contemporary view on diversification — the main idea of MPT is that owning diverse financial assets is less risky than owning only one financial asset type.

Based on this idea, revenue diversification in mobile games can reduce the exposure to one monetization type. It can help limit, for example, the negative effect of a regulatory or unexpected change related to one monetization type on the whole business. Moreover, using different monetization strategies in order to diversify revenue streams can unlock new ways to monetize a larger portion of your user base. This ultimately offers users a wider range of ‘ways to pay’ in a game.

The importance of monetizing a larger portion of the audience is also very clear from our own data at Google Play. The team at Google Play is constantly exploring the metrics to see what insights they offer into the business of apps and games.

Just recently, our team discovered something interesting when they were looking at buyer reactivation rates (the rate at which churned buyers could be enticed to return) compared to the percentage of revenue a game made from its top 5% buyers.

What our data shows is a clear correlation between the two things. At the bottom right corner, there are games that generate a higher proportion of their revenue from their top spenders but these games are less likely to get their churned buyers back; while at the top left corner (star sign) — games that are reactivating more churned buyers are less dependent on their top spenders.

This correlation shows that $1 each out of 100 players is more sustainable than trying to earn $100 from one high-value user. Thus, unlocking new ways to monetize more users is crucial for the sustainability of a game.

New ways of playing the (monetization) game

So, what are the tools available to diversify revenue in your game? I am going to introduce three monetization trends to drive diversification, each of which will be discussed in more detail over the course of the next three posts.

1. Subscriptions

In the games world subscriptions have traditionally been the domain of PC and console games, while on mobile they have been used primarily for content and tools based apps. But in the past two years we see an increasing number of game developers who are experimenting with subscriptions and are using this strategy on top of their in-app purchases, to offer a premium experience for users. With more than 70% year-on-year growth of subscribers in games on Google Play, players are reacting positively to subscriptions.

Developers who are already using subscriptions have reported different benefits. XFLAG (Mixi) reports that subscribed users in their game, Monster Strike, play 20% more on a daily basis, compared to before they subscribed. Scopely reports that due to the retention associated with monthly subscriptions, subscribers have much steeper Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) curves than non-subscribers, which leads to a much higher overall LTVs for these players.

While this approach can lead to an uplift in engagement and monetization metrics, it also guides the users for a more sustainable consumption pattern and healthier long-term behaviors. With subscriptions game developers can help players control impulses that may cause buyer’s remorse (sense of regret after having made a purchase), which can lead to churn. Through this process of smoothing consumption, it is possible to keep buyers engaged and continue to derive value from the game over a longer period of time.

We will dig deeper into subscriptions in gaming in the second post of the series with a case study from N3TWORK.

2. Rewarded ads

While rewarded ads have been around for several years, internal research by the Google AdMob team discovered that developers who have previously relied heavily on in-app purchases, with little or no reliance on ads, are starting to rethink their monetization strategy and are implementing rewarded ads. The result is that more hybrid games, with both in-app purchases and rewarded ads, have been emerging in the industry in the past year.

There are several reasons for using rewarded ads:

• It can help monetize non-paying users by giving users the option to choose the currency they would like to pay with: either their time (watching a rewarded ad) or their money (by paying for an in-app purchase).
• They can also help boost user retention and playtime of payers and non-payers by encouraging users to come back to the game more frequently and play longer sessions.
• They are a strong predictor of in-app purchase conversion.

This last point may seem somewhat surprising, however, this is something that Kongregate discovered recently in their games and shared with us. New users, who watch a rewarded ad in their first ever session in the game, are more likely to make an in-app purchase. In fact, Kongregate reported an impressive increase of between 250%-500% for in-app purchase conversion from these players.

“Rewarded video engagement is a clear signal that a player understands the value of virtual goods. Ad views, then, are a correlate with IAP conversion”. Tammy Levy, VP of Insights and Analytics Kongregate

3. In-app purchases

As with rewarded ads, in-app purchases is not a new monetization strategy per se. However, in the past two years we’ve seen an increasing number of developers across regions who are shifting their focus from an ads only monetization strategy to include also in-app purchases (IAP). These developers are experimenting with in-app purchases in their titles or developing new IAP based games for the first time.

For example, Tapps Games, a Brazilian company who is known for hyper-casual games, decided to focus on IAP in their title Bid Wars, an auction strategy game. In less than 2 years they reported an increase of more than 200% in in-app purchase revenue.

“Working with the Google Play team on IAP has been extremely beneficial for our business. IAP is now an integral part of our monetization strategy.” Felipe Hayashida, CMO, Tapps Games

As with the previous two trends, developers are looking to diversify revenue streams by focusing on in-app purchases for several reasons:

• IAP based games can be developed by small teams and require a simple operations infrastructure. I’ve seen teams as small as 10 people who are responsible for multi-million dollar IAP titles.
• Generating revenue from IAP relies less on a massive number of installs, and emphasizes game operations and engagement over new game launches. This offers a focus on more sustainable long-term business KPIs.
• Diversifying with IAP enables developers to take control of their revenue, making them less dependent on other companies (such as ad networks) for revenue. Therefore, with the right tools in place, developers have the flexibility to test and optimize their IAP.

Definitely not the final word!

The monetization landscape for games is changing. It’s no longer the case that the type of game dictates the type of monetization; the game is now about diversification. By exploring other options for revenue generation, developers can have steeper revenue curves while also achieving greater stability in their revenue streams. I challenge you to have a deep discussion with your team and ask this simple question: is the current status quo you have in your company the best strategy?

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on revenue diversification? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from@GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

New monetization trends to diversify your games revenue was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since Google Play Instant was first announced in March 2018, game developers have been able to create incredible experiences that instantly immerse players in a game. With a number of ways to discover and access instant games, from the TRY NOW button on Google Play to a simple link shared between two people, it’s easier to engage new players and showcase your games. Within this blog post we will show you how to build a production-ready instant game from scratch using Unity, as well as some benefits to having an instant game.

With Google Play Instant, you can bring your game to the next level by:

1. Increasing discoverability

Google Play Instant makes it easier for players to discover and test your game. With just a single click, they can launch your game from the Google Play Store, where a TRY NOW button will appear aside the Install button, or by tapping a web banner that links directly to your instant game from a mobile site.

And it doesn’t stop there. Users can also try your instant game from links you share across Google Search, social media, messaging, emails, and many other platforms.

2. Driving installs

Since players don’t need to commit to “installing” your game before trying it out, it is easier for them to test your game out. With instant games, users don’t need to wait for the game to download, or decide whether the game experience will justify the storage space on their device. Instead, they can try out the best of your game, then you can give them a chance to install the full version without ever having to leave the experience.

3. Improving retention

By offering players a taste of your game, Google Play Instant helps players feel more confident that your game is worth installing. This could lead to less players uninstalling your app right after download. The users who download your game are more likely to enjoy it, too, which can help you increase the number of players who then download your game.

Game developers have already seen the difference instant games can make to their existing installed games:

• Hothead Games saw a 19%+ increase in user acquisition with their game Mighty Battles.
• King saw an increase in user acquisition with their game Bubble Witch 3 Saga.
• Jam City was able to find high-quality players with Panda Pop.
• Playtika found new players and increased user retention and revenue.

And that’s just the start. Check out other developers who also found success with Google Play Instant.

How easy is it to integrate Google Play Instant with your Unity game?

You can build an instant game and publish it to the internal test track within a matter of hours. There, you can test and showcase your instant game internally if it exceeds the 13.5 MB limit for games built with Unity. You’ll also see the TRY NOW button on the Play Store. After publishing on the internal track, we have seen developers also focus on the following:

• Defining what their instant game should look like.
• Reducing their instant game size to under 13.5 MB (the limit for instant games built with Unity).
• Running their instant game through tests and QA to ensure that it gracefully manages sandbox requirements and permissions that respect user safety. (We recommend testing on different versions of the Android OS — at least Nougat and Oreo)

How long it takes will depend on the implementation details and complexity of your game.

What comes next?

Create your own instant game in five steps.

Step 1: Setup your work environment

Before you start creating your instant game, walk through the checklist to make sure you have everything you need.

• Unity 5.6 or later (we recommend at least release 2017.4)
• Google Play Instant Plugin for Unity (asset store) (source)
• An Android device (physical or virtual) running Android 5.0 (Lollipop) or higher with Developer Mode turned on and USB Debugging enabled
• Access to your company’s APK source code to build debug and release versions.
• Set up internal test track in Google Play Console
• Sign up for the Unity Development Beta (mandatory for production)

Step 2: Building & testing your instant game

Next, you’ll convert your existing game to an instant game. Don’t worry about reducing size or building out the instant journey yet — this just gives you an example of what the process looks like.

1. Select PlayInstant → Build Settings

2. In the build settings pop-up, set Android Build Type to Instant.

• Unless you have already configured a Digital Asset Link, keep the Instant Apps URL field blank.
• If needed, you can specify alternative scenes you want to use in the Override Scene field.
• If you are using Asset Bundles, specify the appropriate manifest file in the AssetBundle Manifest field.
• Click Save when finished.

3. Select PlayInstant → Player Settings. In the player settings pop-up:

• Click the Update button next to items in the Required changes list to fix any settings before running the instant app.
• We also recommend updating the settings within the Recommended changes, which primarily focuses on reducing size.
• Close the pop-up when you’re done.

4. Now that the instant app is configured, select PlayInstant → Build and Run to launch it on your connected device.

Step 3: Upload to the internal test track

Now take the instant game you created in the last step and upload it to an internal test track, which will allow up to 100 selected internal users test your instant game from the Play Store. Remember, your instant game does not need to be under the 13.5 MB limit to upload to the internal test track.

1. Select PlayInstant → Build for Play Console
2. Navigate to the Google Play Console, make sure the appropriate app is selected, and navigate to the Android Instant Apps tab.
3. Choose Instant app internal test, and follow the instructions on that page to upload the file you created in step 1. For more information, read the guide about releasing an instant app.

Note: Make sure you have properly configured the list of internal app testers so that the app is accessible. You can modify these settings at App releases → Instant app internal test → Manage Testers.

Step 4: Reduce size to meet the 13.5 MB limit

Now that you’re familiar with the technical aspects of building an instant game, it’s now time to start conceptualizing how that might look and to reduce the size. Don’t worry if your game is large — developers with games over 350MB have still been able to launch instant games. Here are some techniques to help reduce the size below 13.5 MB:

Optimize Player Settings

As we saw earlier, PlayInstant → Player Settings offers a number of recommended changes to reduce game size. Make the following updates to reduce your game’s size:

• Mono builds should use code stripping
• Graphics API should be OpenGLES2 only
• IL2CPP builds should enable engine stripping

Simplify Game Content

Don’t try to fit your whole game into the instant app. Your instant game should just give players a taste of the full experience, such as a tutorial or a few exciting levels. Remove unneeded content such as textures, models, images, or audio clips that isn’t core to gameplay.

Finally, compress assets to further reduce the size by reducing:

• The resolution of your textures
• The number of polygons in your 3D model
• Audio quality

Read more about instant game UX best practices.

Use Asset Bundles

Asset Bundles allow you to load assets dynamically while the instant game is running. If the assets aren’t downloaded until runtime, they won’t count against the 13.5 MB limit. This is a common way for game developers to reduce the size of their instant games. The three main components you’ll need are:

1. An Asset Bundle created from the scene(s) of your instant game
2. A user-friendly loading screen that keeps the user informed while the Asset Bundle is being fetched in the background
3. A web server or content delivery network (CDN) to host the Asset Bundle

Next, we’ll show you the fastest way to leverage the power of Asset Bundles by using the Quick Deploy tool included with the Google Play Instant Unity Plugin. This will take care of the first component by creating an Asset Bundle, and the second component by creating a loading screen that will fetch your Asset Bundle. For the third component, you can host your Asset Bundle anywhere that supports HTTPS and publicly serves files — this could be your own server, Google Cloud Storage, or another 3rd-party CDN.

Note: While you can use as many Asset Bundles as you like, each Asset Bundle must be less than 15 MB in size.

1. Select PlayInstant → Quick Deploy

2. Select the Bundle Creation tab, and choose which scenes you want to serve dynamically. Once finished, select Build AssetBundle at the bottom, and upload the resulting file to your web server or CDN.

3. Select the Loading Screen tab and configure the URL associated with your Asset Bundle, as well as any background textures you want to use for the loading screen. (The default one is fine.) When you’re finished, select Create Loading Scene..

Now you should have a loading screen that will load your Asset Bundle. You can find the custom script that Unity auto-generated within the new loading screen scene if you want to see how this is done or to customize it.

Step 5: Convert your user from instant to installed

Finally, you will need to build a way for your player to convert from your instant game to the full game. If you need to, you can transfer player data over during the conversion using the Cookie API included with the Google Play Instant Plugin for Unity.

Upgrade from an instant app to an installed app

Your instant game should offer a way for the player to install the full game, like a prompt or a button that doesn’t get in the way of the experience. Once the player is ready to install your full game, call the ShowInstallPrompt method provided by the Play Instant Plugin to hand off the install journey to Google Play:

using GooglePlayInstant;

…

public void install() {

    InstallLauncher.ShowInstallPrompt();

}

Persist data when upgrading to installed (optional)

In some situations, you may need to carry some information over about your players’ instant experience when they convert to your installed app. For example:

• When players buy in-game items, levels up, or customizes their character
• If the instant game is similar to the tutorial in your installed app, the player can skip the tutorial after they install the full version
• To reward players for converting from the instant game to the installed game

You can use the Cookie API packaged with the Google Play Instant plugin, which will allow you to easily write and read strings of data before and after install, respectively:

1. Call CookieApi.SetInstantAppCookie to store a string of data within your instant game.

using GooglePlayInstant;

…

public void StoreData(string data) {

    CookieApi.SetInstantAppCookie(data);

}

2. Call CookieApi.GetInstantAppCookie within your Installed game to retrieve the string of data

using GooglePlayInstant;

…

var data = CookieApi.GetInstantAppCookie(data);

These steps should help you navigate the process of creating a game with Google Play Instant. If you need more help, you can check out more resources and documentation on Instant Games, browse frequently asked questions, or read more about instant apps here.

Creating an instant game with Google Play Instant and Unity was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover insights and hear how other developers have optimized engagement to successfully retain users in the long-term.

Most app developers aim to have an engaged user base who find their app valuable and return to it on a regular basis. Also, anyone who’s ever bothered to hit the ‘install’ button hopes that the app delivers on it’s promise to fulfill a need, or solve a problem!

Blindly optimizing engagement metrics for their own sake isn’t consistent with reaching long-term business goals, and the goals of people using your product. Trying to successfully retain existing users over trying to acquire new ones makes monetary sense, as poor retention leads to higher acquisition costs.

In this article I will recommend ten ways to optimize for a successful, engaging app, which includes some insights shared at the Google Play, Sustainable Engagement Day in 2018, and Playtime 2018. You can also watch the full event session below.

Tip 1 — Meaningful features and analytics

Health app Lifesum asked themselves: “how do you know if you’re improving your product?”. Retention and conversion metrics are great ways to measure whether feature usage is improving, but these ‘vanity’ metrics don’t always take into account how users actually experience your product. According to Lifesum’s ex-senior designer Rafael Coimbra, improving features does not necessarily translate into making your user base more successful.

At Lifesum, it was clear there were lost signals between the in-app behaviors of users, and their reasons and motivations. Rafael created a generative worksheet to better measure meaningful behaviors and identify driving reasons and values of its customers. You can check the Meaningful Analytics worksheet here.

Similarly, a core user action for dating apps is typically the number of conversations users initiate and the amount of messages they send each other. Badoo product manager, Timur Garifzyanov, explained at Playtime (see video above), how they experimented and saw an increase in the number of chats started in their app by adding a feature whereby people could send hearts to each other to start a conversation.

This feature resulted in a positive 20% increase in the number of messages sent, but the reply rate was very low (at -6% for males), and the retention for female users decreased to 1%, as reported by Badoo.

It became clear that meaningless conversation starters did not help people achieve what they expected from the app. To fix this, Badoo introduced a new feature called the ‘bad opener blocker’ which made it actually harder to send meaningless messages. This resulted in less messaging overall, but more meaningful conversations between users, and a better reply rate.

Tip 2: Data can tell you where the problem is…

How do you measure the efficiency of your app based on what your users want to achieve with it? The language-learning app ABA English believes data can only tell you where the problem is but not what is about. That’s why they decided to identify and leverage qualitative data coming directly from people using their app. This led them to add an additional step in their onboarding process and subsequently achieve 2x increase in user activations.

How? During the onboarding ABA users were asked to select their language level before starting with the content. ABA’s quantitative data showed no major drops at this stage.

However, customers interviews showed that users didn’t know how to really assess their language knowledge. This led to churn later in the funnel and low engagement if the wrong level was picked. ABA then took the potentially counterintuitive decision to make their onboarding longer and by including the additional level test their users activations doubled up!

Discover more from ABA English in the Playtime event recording above.

Tip 3 — The ‘ultimate’ way to communicate with your users

The team at Ultimate Guitar foster a culture with human-to-human communication at its core that’s not the sole reserve of the customer support team.

They created a human to human “H2H” board where the entire team can see all mentions of Ultimate Guitar on social media. At 10am everyday, there’s a strict “no code, no design, no meetings” rule, and the team, from designers to developers to analysts, communicate directly with real customers.

Ultimate Guitar’s COO Mikhail Trutnev believes that implementing this human-to-human approach helped ensure that “product teams started to empathize with our users. And this, in turn, had led to the team protecting product users from overly aggressive marketing campaigns even if they were deemed effective”. The team does not even consider some monetization ideas and only comes up with experiments that go in accord with H2H principles, thanks to this empathetic approach. As a result of this, Ultimate Guitar has reported an increase in revenue and decrease in negative feedback simultaneously.

Tip 4 — Start where your users start

By watching replays, tracking a leakage map, and identifying that their paywall was often interruptive to the learning experience, language-learning app Busuu realized that they had a problem with their first-time user experience.

Their hypothesis was that there was a lack of consistency starting with the Google Play Store assets. By focusing too narrowly on granular changes to copy and styling with metrics that were detached from their outcomes further down the funnel, the value proposition was hard to understand and so they had to fix it.

Following Samuel Hulick’s recommendations and referencing his Useronboard.com onboarding checklist, they created their own first-time user experience principles:

1. Consistent imagery & recurring themes (starting at the Google Play Store)
2. Showcasing the Premium option early (coupled with a free trial)
3. Removing distractions (progressive disclosure)
4. Celebrating progress
5. Unlocking more content based upon activity
6. Setting expectations and getting commitment

Several experiments later, they have been able to make incremental gains to key metrics such as download > registration rate and friends added/accepted increased. Throughout this iterative process, the team regularly watches videos, runs tests, and ideates/hypothesizes to ensure they’re constantly evaluating the first-time experiences of real users.

OneFootball also understood that successful activation is critical for optimizing their retention rates. A key activation metric is ‘users with a favorite team set’, as users who have a favorite team have higher 7/14/30D retention rates than those who don’t.

OneFootball’s main takeaway is that activation factors should only be measured based on the impact they have on short and long-term retention.

Tip 5 — Give your users a head start

Especially true of the early stages of the user experience, typically there’s a set of core tasks users must complete in order to derive value from your app. Last year, Antony Ribot spoke at Google Play Playtime event about how to integrate behavioral thinking into your app design process.

One key concept he referenced was the “endowed progress effect”, which provides people with a feeling that they’ve made a great start already. This is inspired by findings from a study (The Endowed Progress Effect: How Artificial Advancement Increases Effort, by Nunes and Drèze in the Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 32, №4, in March 2006), which tested how prefilling car-wash loyalty cards with two stamps affected card completion by comparing a card with eight stamps (and zero pre-marked) to one with ten stamps (with two pre-marked).

The two pre-marked stamps on the 10-stamp card conveyed certain steps of a task as already complete, reframing the task as one that is in progress but incomplete, rather than not yet begun. This in turn increases the likelihood of task completion and can also decrease completion time.

To apply this principle to your product, consider visually denoting progress as a partially completed list of ticks, even if the tasks users have completed are as simple as opening the app and signing up!

Tip 6 — Personalize push

One of the core goals of the shopping list app Bring! is to help users stay organized. So how did they go about this?

1. They created a session model.
2. This learns the typical behavior of their users.
3. Then, if the session model detects an anomaly (e.g. someone didn’t fill out their shopping list at a predicted time), a personalized push reminds the user “here are some ideas for your shopping list”.

Tip 7 — Identify additional app use cases

To make their app as useful and as engaging as possible, Hostelworld wanted to go beyond the booking (the app’s core transactional use case). To identify additional use cases and rethink the customer journey, they made use of Think with Google’s research on travel micro-moments.

One of the core features they created based on this approach was the new Hostel Noticeboard. Hostels are able to add local events through the Hostelworld inbox, and in turn this information is used to enhance the customer journey through being surfaced in the app using an Events API, as well as yielding more personalized push notifications and the ability to integrate with the customer’s calendar to ensure they don’t miss out!

In addition, Hostelworld knew that many of their users were solo backpackers. To create more meaningful experiences for their customers, Hostelworld used the Google Cloud Translate API to create the “Speak the World” translation feature which enabled travellers to speak 43 global languages. The feature garnered success, sparking 3.5 million conversations since launch as reported by Hostelworld.

Tip 8 — Implement LiveOps for apps

Game developers have been successfully re-engaging their users in the form of LiveOps. Put simply, LiveOps involve running “games-as-a-service”. This means the game becomes a dynamic product that is constantly changing, giving players new experiences each day. The goals of LiveOps are to augment engagement, stimulate monetization, and to reduce player churn. We see three key components to LiveOps: content, sales and events, and this combination has proved to be very successful.

For example, the innovative language learning app Memrise ran a back-to-school offer to motivate users at the start of the new school year. They released beginner and advanced courses for new language combinations and ran a global campaign offering a discount for their annual subscription, which led to additional engagement and a reported 32% increase in revenue.

Tip 9 — Community and comparison

Runtastic’s goal is to help every individual live a more aware and active lifestyle. One of the core services they provide within Runtastic Running is community and comparison via their Groups feature.

This feature not only creates a sense of community within the product itself, but allows users to engage in friendly competition through the Group Leaderboard feature. The team found that users in a group are more likely to be regularly active and significantly less prone to churn.

To implement leaderboards within your app successfully, consider the following:

• Position the user in the middle of the leaderboard where possible (so they see the user/player above and below them).
• Keep leaderboard results fresh by considering the right cadence of updates
• Comparison features are most meaningful when players are on the cusp of beating others, or at the brink of losing!
• The N-effect suggests that increasing the number of competitors can decrease competitive motivation, so limit group size by time/location, or both, or create micro-leaderboards (e.g. users’ friends or similar people).

Tip 10 — Don’t forget about the basics

Ultimately, people using your product do not care about engagement statistics, but about what value your app brings to their lives.

At the 2018 Playtime event, communication app Truecaller explained how they achieved an impressive 30% increase in DAU/MAU thanks to a mix of new features launches like messaging, notifications, and improved launch speed.

While doing so they also learnt a few important lessons:

• Don’t forget about key Android Vitals stats when adding new features, for example crash rate and wake locks could bring more uninstalls and lower ratings.
• Think carefully about how you’re educating your users about new features via notifications as people don’t want to feel overwhelmed by them.

I hope these tips from a wide range of app developers have conjured up potential improvements you can make to your own app. To read more tips on how to sustain longer-lasting relationships with your users, don’t forget to check out my earlier posts The Promise of Persuasive Apps and The Right App Rewards to Boost Motivation.

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on optimizing for app engagement? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

10 tips to optimize app engagement was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s every game developer’s dream to have a long lasting title that continues to receive thousands of downloads years after its launch…or perhaps this may not always be the case. For example, the developer may wish to promote a newer and more profitable game instead. In any case, very often these first successes age in unexpected ways for developers, for better or worse. While we may expect old games to suffer from technical issues such as difficulty to maintain updates, it is perhaps less predictable that old games continue to receive a significant amount of downloads and have very engaged communities after so many years.

The goal of this article is to understand how older titles are performing on Google Play and the different routes developers are taking to deal with these first successes. We will also share key lessons learned by developers who experienced this, and the best practices they gained along the way. Before we dive in, I would like to give special thanks to Anette Ståløy, VP Business & Marketing of Dirtybit and Erik Pöntiskoski, CEO of Dodreams, for sharing such detail and insights about their experiences with us.

What is an ‘old’ game?

Before jumping into the performance of these games, let’s take a step back and look at the definition and what we mean by an ‘old’ game.

One of the first and most obvious factors to start with is the publishing date on Google Play. However this might be misleading for a few reasons:

• Games as a service model: Mobile games are often regularly updated after their launch date. Some of these updates might dramatically affect the game mechanics, business model, or meta game, transforming it into a whole new experience. This is particularly critical in evergreen titles, which continue to drive the majority of the revenue for the developer even after several years.

• Games coming from other platforms: As mobile devices continue to become more powerful, many titles from other platforms like PC or console are being ported to mobile. In many occasions these titles were published a long time ago, and therefore have classic graphics despite the fact they have only recently been published on mobile.

• Soft versus hard launch date : As part of the launch process, many game developers decide to publish their games in open beta and iterate with real players. While this pre-launch stage is common, we have seen on several occasions that this pre-launch stage may be extended for many months, or even years. These games can include all key elements, such as progression or full monetization, therefore making it difficult to define the official launch date.

How are old games performing?

Taking into consideration the above factors, when trying to analyze how old games are performing, we will first make two assumptions to define what they are.

1. The game was published 4 years ago, or more;
2. It does not generate more than 50% of the developer’s total revenue

Now that we’ve established (for these purposes) what an old game is, let’s see how these games perform on Google Play. Perhaps surprisingly, these games are still very much alive, with new and engaged players, and are generating substantial revenues for developers.

When looking at all the top games in the Google Play Store, the old titles group represents 17% of them. Similarly, the number of downloads in the first half of the year (H1 2018) accounted for 17.5% of the total.

From an engagement perspective, the average number of daily active users (DAU) is 59% higher in old games, than newer games. This may be due to the games having survived over the years, and therefore having players that are committed for the longer term. If we look at the time spent, we observe that old games have on average 29% less minutes per DAU, which might suggest that they were designed for shorter game sessions, or that there is less content to consume.

What about monetization? In this case, old games have 18% less average revenue per daily active users (ARPDAU) generated via in-app purchases. This could be explained by either a bigger reliance on alternative monetization models, advertising, legacy game design (less monetisation opportunities by design), or again less content (lack of LiveOps, sales).

Lastly, when looking at the technical performance of these games and more specifically their Android Vitals, we see that on average they have a 50% higher crash rate (CR) and a 20% higher App Not responding (ANR) ratio. This implies that there is scope for improvement when it comes to technical stability.

What strategy should you take with old games?

The question to consider for developers of such games is: whether this is an opportunity — should we revamp the game and assign new resources to it? Or whether it is a burden — should we divest and consider redirecting the traffic or even unpublishing the game?

After speaking to several developers and finding out more about their strategy around old games, we have seen that the majority of them tend to follow a third route: the back catalogue or long tail, which falls somewhere in between the two other options.

The back catalogue route: Keeping the status quo

In this option, the developer will keep the game alive but try to reduce costs to the minimum. As a consequence, we generally see that resources such as game developers or designers, as well as marketing budgets are reassigned to other projects. Some of the most common reasons will be:

• The impact of new content or LiveOps in retention and monetization is very small.
• Return On Investment (ROI) of their advertising campaigns is smaller since the Cost Per Install (CPI) continues to increase and catches up with the Lifetime Value (LTV) of the players.
• Overall revenues for the portfolio decrease and there are signs of cannibalization between games.
• Other external factors such as new game genres, new games from competitors, or new technologies that accelerate players churn from the game.

Although generally these are not positive indicators for developers, it does not mean that the game is dead.

Anatoly Ropotov, CEO of Game Insights, commented that there are two main reasons to keep their old games alive:

“At Game Insight we believe the community is critical to maintaining the brand perception and reputation of our studio and thus we continue to update our old games in-house. Although back catalogue games only generate 14% of our total revenues, profitability is 50% higher than the overall portfolio thanks to the community and we still have a flow of new organic users.”

Some of the most common challenges to consider when operating the back catalogue are:

1. Spaghetti code: Supporting the game from a technical perspective can be more cumbersome due to legacy code, old engine versions and SDKs. In some instances we see that developers outsource the technical support since they do not have the in-house skills anymore.
2. Monetization: Ensuring that the game works correctly either via ads (updating the mediation platform and advertising SDKs), or in-app purchases (automatizing customer support based on common queries and issues).

Automatizing the LiveOps can also help to keep the game fresh, according to Martial Valery, CEO of OhBiBi Games:

“Since we have seasonal content and time limited quests produced from past years, we automatically push these events to players. As a result, new players will still get the sense of playing a live game.”

1. Team: Maintaining designers’ and developers’ motivation to keep working on supporting these games can be difficult.
2. New users flow: Making sure that the store listing continues to be updated and players continue to find the game.

To summarize, the back catalogue option is one of the most popular ways amongst old titles, since they continue to add value to both players and developers, despite the issues mentioned above. However, there may be instances where it is interesting to take a different, and maybe a more radical approach — as we will see in the next section.

The burden route: Divesting old games

In certain cases, a developer might decide to prioritize a newer title over old ones, and as such ultimately choose to deprioritize their back catalogue. This can be done in multiple ways; such as running in-house campaigns to drive downloads for the new game, limiting the old game content, or ultimately unpublishing old titles from the Store. This was the case with Fun Run 1 and 2, from Dirtybit.

Dirtybit is a Norwegian game developer & publisher based in Bergen. The company focuses on real time multiplayer games within the casual racing vertical, and since its creation has reached over 100M downloads worldwide.

In April 2018, Dirtybit had published three games in the Play Store. As reported by Dirtybit, Fun Run 3 was the top title, representing almost 72% of total revenues, and 52% of downloads. The previous titles, Fun Run 1 and 2, were also significant in terms of both revenues (28%), and in particular, downloads (48%).

If we fast forward four months later (to August 2018), this picture is quite different. Fun Run 3 is now making up the majority of both revenues (92%) and downloads (99%). So what happened here?

A shift in strategy

Until 2017, Dirtybit was mainly focused on growing the user base and, with over 100M organic downloads, this seemed to have paid off. However, from a monetization perspective, things were not that positive, and Dirtybit was well aware that the Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU) was significantly lower than its peers. In 2018. Dirtybit decided to change their focus towards increasing revenue, by implementing the following changes:

1. Focus on an analytical approach: Rely on analytics for decision making and expand the team;
2. Make More Money (MMM) initiatives: Prioritize activities that will impact the topline revenues, without damaging the user experience;
3. App store optimization (ASO): Improve the user acquisition funnel using experiments, such as store listing tests with the app icon and the name of some titles;

Following this shift in strategy, they found that Fun Run 3 was the clear winner:

• Monetization was significantly higher: 2 to 4 times higher ARPDAU
• Long term retention was also better: +46% at D28
• Updated technology: easier to support and with more room for improvement
• Better UX: both in gameplay and First Time User Experience (FTUE)

It became quite obvious to Dirtybit that, in order to drive more revenue, they needed to redirect more users to Fun Run 3.

Before going ahead with this decision, the developer had to resolve some challenges:

1. Visibility: Fun Run 1 and 2 were better positioned organically, which often led to players being confused on which of the three games they should download.

1. Organic growth and virality: While Fun Run 1 and 2 became viral quite soon, this was not the case with Fun Run 3
2. Lack of focus: Having three games was deviating some of the technical resources and the internal focus on the priority project.
3. External competition: Uncertainty about the market and the sustainability of these organic downloads.

Pulling the plug on old games

In June 2017, the developer decided to run a test in Turkey and unpublish Fun Run 1 from the Play Store, with the goal to understand what the overall impact in organic downloads was.

This test was repeated in April 2018, when Fun Run 2 was removed from the Play Store, and Fun Run 3 was the only Dirtybit game left.

Following both tests, Dirtybit saw that most of the downloads were redistributed across the remaining title(s). As such, in May 2018, Dirtybit decided to unpublish both Fun Run 1 and Fun Run 2 from the Google Play Store.

The main considerations in making the decision were:

• Downloads: Dirtybit expected Fun Run 3 to absorb 90% of organic downloads from Fun Run 1 & 2.
• Visibility: Fun Run 3 would be the only “Fun Run” game and therefore this would reduce confusion among players in discovering Fun Run.
• Monetization: Fun Run 3 ARPDAU was 2–4x higher than older titles and thus allows the developer to be more efficient in a highly competitive market.
• Community: Dirtybit released an official statement to be open about the decision and prepare the community of players.

What impact did this have?

Overall Dirtybit saw an increase in overall revenues (+20%), compensating for a decrease in the average active 30D installs (-12%). Here is a summary of the key results:

• Revenues: (IAP+Advertising) Fun Run 3 grew by 57%, and overall revenue by +20%.

• Active 30D installs: Fun Run 3 increased installs on average by 50%, but overall Dirtybit installs declined by -12%.

• Resources: Resources were freed up as it is easier to maintain one game instead of three.

Key learnings

1. Make decisions based on key metrics: Unpublishing the first game is not an easy decision, however, as a company, you need to be ready to let the first game go if the metrics tell you so.
2. Test and make sure the timing is right: In this case, testing in a market with a significant user base, such as Turkey, allowed Dirtybit to get results at scale. Choosing the right time to unpublish is also critical and we would recommend it ideally be done only when the app has strong technical stability, and the team is ready to deal with new users and the community.
3. Plan ahead for both the best and the worst: Dirtybit had both a pre-mortem and a plan B scenario in case the decision was not going in the right direction. While most of the results were positive, the community still wants the old games to be updated.

The opportunity route: Revamping the first success

In some cases, old games can (re)become the biggest opportunity; by re-assigning more developers, game designers, and overall resources to the game, some developers manage to improve the performance of the old game significantly. This was the case for Drive ahead! by Dodreams.

Founded in 2008, Dodreams is a Finish game developer & publisher based in Helsinki. The company focuses on local multiplayer games and their main title is Drive Ahead!, a gladiator car fight. As of 2018, the company has over 100M downloads in the Play Store.

Drive Ahead! was launched in the Google Play store in October 2015. In 2016, the goal of Dodreams was to grow their portfolio of games to increase both Daily Active Users (DAU’s) and revenue. By launching new games, they were also expecting to fix all of the issues identified in the original game. In October 2016, a second title was published, Drive Ahead! Sports, originally a minigame within the main game, that became a standalone game in itself. Dodreams reported the following:

• Revenues: 62% of total revenues came from Drive Ahead!
• Downloads: 54% from Drive Ahead!
• Resources: 60% allocated to Drive Ahead!

Challenges with the portfolio approach

In 2017, Dodreams realized that there were some issues with its portfolio approach. First of all, the developer understood that the audience for Drive Ahead! Sports was more niche than for the first title. The developer came up with the following conclusions on Drive Ahead! Sports:

• The good: From a revenue perspective, 90D ARPDAU was 2.5x higher than the original game.
• The bad: As mentioned, the audience was smaller and DAU was only a fraction (20%) of the original game.
• The ugly: In early 2017, a major UI/UX update and a new saga map nearly killed the game, leading to a drop of 50% in DAU, retention, and revenue.

Dodreams decided to revamp the original title by assigning the majority of their resources (75% of the team versus 60% in 2016), to this title for several reasons:

• Sustainable stream of new users: Approximately 100K downloads per day with high virality through UCG (videos), and local multiplayer design.
• New strategy: Test new Free to Play (F2P) mechanics in Live-Ops events, so as to adopt the most successful ones into the core game mechanic.
• Business model: Capitalize on ad revenues while building the necessary metagame & progression for stronger IAP future.
• Lower risk: as well from an investment perspective compared to starting a completely new game project once again.
• Onboarding new members: using other titles to allow the team to gain experience in managing free-to-play games in a rapid iterative fashion

What happened next?

Since the change in strategy, Dodreams reported that Drive Ahead! 30D active installs have been growing on a yearly basis by +14%, while Drive Ahead! Sports has decreased by 9%. In the first major update, first time user experience (FTUE) improved by 50%, while D0-D3 advertising engagement had similar metrics. In a second major update, LiveOps events have added another 50% improvement to the FTUE and Dodreams is now validating new features or game mechanics for competitive online gaming.

Key learnings

Assess the opportunity in advance:

1. Justify why a game should exist (in the case of Drive ahead! Sports) and what is the position within the portfolio. Make sure new launches are proper stand alone games. Not just the old game re-skinned.
2. Understand what drives revenue and profitability, and aim to grow these in steps, not leaps. Partner used to give the team a target to grow DAU. However later on understood that this metric is an outcome of both daily new users and churn. Since the team cannot influence it directly, when designing sprints, the team will focus on aspects such as virality, social features, progression and providing long-term goals in the game.
3. Use the existing community as much as possible to test and validate features before full rollout. Staged rollout and limited time events help to reduce the risk of alienating existing fans with big updates.

Create a vision:

1. Excite the current team and attract new hires/partners: bring new people on board to help in areas needing development
2. Listen to the team: job satisfaction improves the quality of the game. Data provided from tools such as Firebase and Google Play Console enable self-organized teams and agile methodologies in game development which boosted the team spirit at the studio.

Leverage secondary games to onboard new employees:

1. Drive Ahead! Sports, although not the main priority, is now the starting point for new team members, granting them full ownership to progress and to learn.

Conclusion

First of all, remember that a new player, who has downloaded your game just a few minutes ago, is probably not aware when the game was published. Thus, even if the game is, a priority or a burden, developers have a unique opportunity to still impress the new player arriving to their game.

Additionally, old titles still continue to receive a significant amount of downloads and in fact they have on average more DAUs than newer titles. In some instances, these can be even more profitable than live games.

So assess the opportunity and we recommend the following practices:

• Optimize based on objective metrics and key performance indicators. As we have seen, it is important to detach yourself emotionally from the first success and be ready to let the first project go.
• If you decide to unpublish, consider the community and the potential impact on downloads in the overall portfolio.
• Make sure you have a clear vision and mission that will excite the team when revamping a game.

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on strategies for old game performance? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

Your first success: a burden or a new opportunity? was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Google Play, we are seeing apps and games increasingly incorporate subscriptions as their core monetization model. However, one of the most critical parts of subscription business is converting a non-subscribing user into a subscriber. Many developers are looking for more tools to help increase the conversion rate of subscribers to their app.

As a partner manager at Google Play, I work alongside developers to help build these fantastic subscription businesses. A frequent set of asks I hear from these developers is how they can enable their current subscribers to gift, refer, and subsidize other users’ subscriptions. Currently, Google Play does not natively support these features. However, developers can implement them using Firebase’s Dynamic Links and the Firebase SDK (on Android as well as other platforms).

There are 3 major referral features which are frequently requested by developers, and that can be created using Dynamic Links:

1. Gifting of a subscription to a friend/customer
2. Creating a referral campaign, where the referrer is rewarded with a discount
3. Building a Family Plan

I’ll walk through each of these three use-cases below. Note that this is not intended to be an exhaustive, engineering-focused walkthrough, but instead aimed at giving you the gist of how to implement these features. When it comes time to implement this in your app, it will likely vary slightly according to the app and backend server structure.

1. Gifting of a subscription to a friend

Subscriptions are generally better with friends. Users want to be able to talk to friends about the latest show they binged, keep each other committed to dieting plans, or collaborate on creating playlists. Allowing users to gift their friends a subscription is a great way to leverage a user’s social graph, and is a frequently requested feature by developers, as many have seen success with this feature on the web.

Let’s take a look at a basic structure to implement in-app gifting and redemption of subscriptions:

1. A user, we’ll call him Gifter Gary, buys a 1 year subscription in your app for $100 for themselves.
2. After purchase, Gifter Gary is given the option to buy a friend a 1-year free trial subscription to your service for 50% off the annual price (so $50).
3. Gifter Gary buys a 50% off annual subscription via a 1-time, in-app purchase for $50.
4. After this purchase by Gifter Gary, your app then gives Gifter Gary a uniquely generated URL (via Firebase Dynamic Links), that Gary can send to any friend. Gary chooses to email it to his pal, Receiving Rachel.
5. Receiving Rachel gets the link via email, and is then taken into the app.
6. In the app, Receiving Rachel is shown a subscription SKU that has a 365 free trial attached to it (note that this is a separate SKU, set up specifically to be gifted).
7. Receiving Rachel “buys” this free subscription SKU and gets 1 year of free access, which will auto-renew into the normally priced annual subscription, paid for by Receiving Rachel.

To prevent gifting fraud, you should periodically query Voided Purchases API. When a purchase is refunded, be sure to revoke the Receiver’s access to subscribed content.

Below is an example of the user flow in the app Classy Taxi.

Gifter Gary’s purchase & sharing flow

Receiving Rachel’s redemption flow

And viola! Receiving Rachel is able to use the subscription service, does not pay anything up front, but will auto-renew as a normal subscriber at the end of the 1-year free trial. Gifter Gary is happy that Receiving Rachel is joining him on his subscription journey!

In addition to allowing users to gift subscriptions, this structure could also be applied to some other formats, such as gifting customers “6 free months with purchase of x hardware device” or “4 months subscription for $1 based on x activity”.

2. Creating a referral campaign

As I mentioned earlier, an app’s best evangelists are its most engaged users, and enabling these users to be rewarded for their efforts via a referral program is a great way for them to feel invested in your app’s success.

There are a many different referral programs in place across the web. For this example, I will focus on the referrer being granted a number of free days on their existing subscription, which can be granted using Play’s Deferred Billing API. Here is an example of how the basic flow for this program would work:

1. Referrer Rick buys a 1 month subscription in the app for $10, and he loves it!
2. After purchase, Referrer Rick sees the option to “refer a friend and get their next month of subscription free!”
3. Referrer Rick clicks the button, and is prompted to share a unique URL with their friends.
4. Dave get’s Referrer Rick’s shared-out email blast (or Facebook post, etc.), and is intrigued. He clicks the link and gets deep-linked into the app, and is prompted to subscribe to the service (optionally, Dave could get an introductory pricing offer SKU as well as part of this referral program.)
5. Once Dave subscribes, Referrer Rick gets a notification that Dave used their referral URL to start a subscription and Referrer Rick is credited with a successful referral, getting their next subscription bill deferred by X days, using the Deferred Billing API. Note that Google Play will not send the referring user (e.g. Referrer Rick) any email about the deferred payment the user received, so you should ensure you alert the referring user of their referral reward via in-app message, push notification etc.
   Fraud note: to avoid potential fraud abuse by referrers, you likely do not want to offer the users receiving the referrals a free trial, but instead have them pay full price or an introductory price.

Here is what the flow might look like for this referral program:

Referrer Rick

Dave (Referral Receiver)

Referrer Rick again

Referrer Rick, already an evangelist, gets a free month of their subscription in exchange for telling the world about how great the app is. Dave loves the app and its subscription features, but also enjoys that they help Referrer Rick get rewarded, and is fast becoming an evalenglist of the app in their own right.

3. Building a Family Plan

Many users want to share your subscription with their close friends and family members, and do it in a more secure (and less chaotic way) than sharing their user login and password with other individuals. Thus, we commonly hear about developers being interested in building a family plan to allow users to share the benefits (and costs) of a subscription for a slightly higher price.

Below are the steps to implement a Family Plan feature in your app:

1. Family Fran buys a monthly special “Family Plan” subscription in your app for $15 per month (probably 50% more expensive than your normal monthly SKU price for 1 user), and she adores the service! It is clear to her that her whole family should be given access to the service.
2. After purchase, Family Fran sees the option to “Invite your family members to join your family plan (up to 6!)”
3. Family Fran clicks the button, and then shares a unique URL with 5 of her family members.
4. Each of the 5 family members click the URL and get deep-linked into the app, where they then accept the offer to be included in Family Fran’s Family Plan.
5. Your server grants these family members access to the content for free, and uses Family Fran’s subscription status to derive each of the 5 family members’ subscription statuses.
   Fraud note: your server should validate the number subscriptions in the family plan, to ensure there are a maximum of 6 users on the subscription at any given time. It is also a best-practice to set an expiration on the validity of these Dynamic Links, to lower potential for fraud.

Here is what the flow might look like for this family plan:

Family Fran (original family plan subscriber)

Family member being invited

Family Fran just bought a subscription for her whole family, and everyone in the family loves the service and none of them have to worry about payments or subscriptions, as its all tied to Family Fran’s subscription entitlement. They can now all enjoy the content as a family!

Users do not need to worry if the receiving user doesn’t have the app downloaded; Firebase Dynamic Links has a powerful feature where the deep link keeps the user associated with the original click through the app installation process, enabling a seamless experience for first-time users. It also works on both Android and iOS, you just need to set up the appropriate hooks on those platforms.

Summary

As you can see from the above examples, Firebase Dynamic Links allows you to enable various intricate experiences around subscriptions that are not natively possible on Google Play (or other platforms). There are also plenty of additional experiences beyond these as well- and I’d love to hear from you about other implementations!

Additionally, If you looking for suggestions on how to expand your subscription business, check out this Medium post by my colleague George Audi.

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on subscription sharing? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

The season of (subscriptions) gifting was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why your app should be optimized for screens of all sizes

See how Gameloft, Evernote, Slack, and 1Password have optimized for Chrome OS

Since we launched our first Chromebooks in 2011, the growth of Chrome OS has been incredible. Today, Chromebooks range from traditional laptops to convertibles and tablets that are available in over 10,000 stores — thanks to close partnerships with top OEMs, including Samsung, Dell, and HP, among many others — and we’re only going to keep expanding. It’s been an exciting period of growth for us, but even more so for developers.

The evolution of Chrome OS presents an amazing opportunity for developers to boost their reach across a wider variety of devices and screens. By optimizing their apps for wider screens on Chrome OS, dev teams can drive higher engagement and reach even more users with immersive experiences.

Tapping into a wider appeal for wider screens

Much of our growth has been fueled by new ways that people consume and engage with content. A lot of people use more than one type of device every day, and the lines between desktop and mobile experiences are getting blurrier. Today, consumers demand versatility. We’re seeing people shift their focus to devices with larger, wider screens that allow them to easily access the content they want, anywhere and anytime.

Last year, we added our four-in-one, high-performance Chromebook — Google Pixelbook — to the Chrome OS family. This October, we introduced the first-ever premium tablet made by Google to run Chrome OS: Google Pixel Slate. Along with a rich display and performance that’s ideal for using mobile apps, the Pixel Slate also comes with a detachable keyboard that gives users a familiar laptop feel.

Like other devices powered by Chrome OS, both of these devices combine access to millions of mobile apps with a brilliant, large-screen display. Developers can reach even more users by adapting their apps for Chrome OS in different ways:

1. Optimizing designs for wider screens
2. Landscape mode
3. Multi-window management
4. Keyboard, mouse, and stylus input

How leading dev teams have optimized for Chrome OS

Gameloft’s Asphalt 8: Airborne

Asphalt 8: Airborne is a racing game that’s all about extreme speed and complete control. The design team at Gameloft always wants its games to be available on the latest portable hardware, so as soon as the Chromebook hit the market, the team saw a new home for its Asphalt series.

Because Chrome OS treats a physical keyboard just like an external keyboard on an Android phone, Asphalt 8: Airborne could support keyboard controls using APIs from the Android Platform SDK 26. This also enabled the UI to automatically switch between touchscreen and keyboard mode. After making the adjustments, Gameloft was able to run Android application packages at even higher performance levels than native apps, allowing it to maintain the series’ breathtaking graphics and breakneck speeds on Chrome OS. Even better, it only took Gameloft’s developers a few days to completely integrate the new control schemes to the game.

After the optimizations, Asphalt 8 saw a 6X increase in daily active users and a 9X boost in revenue from Chrome users. Now, designing for larger screens is a rule of thumb at Gameloft — the latest edition of the series, Asphalt 9: Legends, is now available on the Chromebook.

Evernote and Slack

One of Evernote’s key features is translating touchscreen handwriting into text, which people tend to use more often on larger screens. To make its app even easier to use across devices and platforms, Evernote’s development team used Google’s low-latency stylus API to quickly implement touchscreen handwriting and enhanced layouts for larger screens. The API allows apps to bypass parts of the OS and draw directly on the display, so Evernote users feel like they’re actually drawing and writing on paper.

Thanks to its new Chrome OS experience, the average Evernote user is spending 3X more time on larger screen devices and 4X more time when using the Google Pixelbook.

Meanwhile, the development team at Slack optimized its popular messaging app for Chrome OS by setting up keyboard shortcuts for its most commonly used functions. When users write a message on a Chromebook, they can simply hit the “Enter” key — just like you would on mobile — rather than taking the extra step to click “Send” with their mouse.

1Password

1Password worked with the Chrome OS team to drastically improve its user experience in just six weeks. To ensure the app made the best use of window space at any screen orientation and size, the development team combined its existing designs for phones and tablets to deliver a responsive layout when users resized the app window. The team also used Chrome OS’s drag-and-drop feature so app users can easily drag content between 1Password and other Android apps on Chrome OS.

Finally, the team enhanced support for keyboard and trackpad input so people can navigate the app without taking their hands off the keyboard. This created a more desktop-like experience on mobile, allowing users to use direction keys and keyboard shortcuts to trigger actions. Since implementing these new improvements, 1Password has seen more than 22.6% more installs on Chrome OS devices.

Deliver the experience your app users demand

In a world where consumers increasingly demand versatility, it’s important for developers to expand their strategies beyond mobile and serve users on a variety of devices. It’s crucial to consider whether your app is set up to deliver the most engaging experiences for every user — no matter their device or screen size. Doing so may mean the difference between driving growth and missing out on a plethora of new customers.

Why your app should be optimized for all screens was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Android App Bundle is a better way to package your app

Read this in العَرَبِيَّة‎‎, Deutsch, español (Latinoamérica), le français, Bahasa Indonesia, Italiano,日本語, 한국어, português do Brasil, русский язы́к, ไทย, Türkçe, tiếng Việt, 中文 (简体) or 中文 (繁體).

Thanks to its openness, Android has seen remarkable growth over its first ten years. There are a huge range of devices to choose from and many apps and games offered by a thriving ecosystem of developers that bring those devices to life. As a developer, you want to ensure that your users have the best experience possible and that your apps run as well as they can on all these devices. You also want to encourage as many users as possible to install your app; you want them to keep using it; and you don’t want them to uninstall for reasons beyond your control. The way Android apps have been published and distributed to date leaves room for improvement in all these areas. I’d like to take a look at some of the challenges developers face and tell you what Google is doing to help.

Android’s first 10 years

For ten years, releasing an app on Android has worked like this:

• Step 1: You write the code for your app in an IDE, such as Android Studio.
• Step 2: When you’re ready to test or release the app, you build it as an APK, Android’s app format. As part of building the APK, you digitally sign it with an app signing key. Signing an app means securely attaching a unique certificate to it. This is a mechanism that ensures you’re the only one who can continue to update installed copies of this app. How does this work? Before updating an app, Android always checks that the unique certificate of the update matches the unique certificate of the app on the device. It will be clear later why I’m spelling this out.
• Step 3: You upload your signed APK to a testing track using the Google Play Console. When you’re ready, you release your app to the production track and to the world.
• Step 4: Google Play distributes your signed APK, precisely as you uploaded it, to each user’s device when they install it.

This has worked pretty well over the years. Indeed, people install over 8 billion apps from Google Play every month! But, as you’ll see, this model presents challenges for developers which are becoming harder to ignore.

The ‘big’ problem

Here’s the problem: apps keep getting bigger and bigger. In fact, since 2012, the average app has grown 5x. This is understandable; you want to add cool features and new content to your app to keep your users coming back and to keep your business growing. Devices keep getting better, and you want to take advantage of the shiny new functions. The device ecosystem has also become more diverse, so you end up duplicating code and resources in your app to make it run just as well on a small screen as it does on a large screen, just as well on one CPU as on another, and so on.

Apps getting bigger wouldn’t matter much if every user had unlimited storage, unlimited data, and ever-present fast connections. Sadly, this isn’t the case (maybe one day!). Looking at the graph below, you can see the size of an app on Google Play is negatively correlated to its install conversion rate. That means that as apps get bigger, their install success rate goes down. This happens for many reasons. Many users don’t have enough free space on their device. This impacts users with entry level devices with modest device storage and users with high end devices who fill their devices with photos, videos, and other media — which all keep getting higher in quality, taking up more space on each device. Users also don’t want to use up expensive data plans and wait on slow connections for larger apps, especially in emerging markets.

So we know the install rate goes down for larger apps. Our user research also shows that app size is also a leading motivator in driving uninstalls, which makes app size an increasingly important factor for apps that are focused on retention. Think about your own experience. When you’ve tried to install an app, have you ever seen a warning from Google Play prompting you to uninstall apps you don’t use to free up space? Millions of people see these warnings every day and they’ll often uninstall the biggest apps and games when presented with this choice. Google Photos ran an amusing advertisement showing how widespread this problem is. In a user research survey conducted by Google Play last year, the leading reason why people uninstalled apps and games that they had for at least a month was to free up space.

I should mention that there is a less than adequate solution to the problem I’ve outlined. Today, you can build and version multiple APKs for each device configuration in a single release. This quickly gets out of hand when you want to optimize for screen sizes, CPU architectures, target both 32-bit and 64-bit, and so on. You can end up building hundreds of APKs for each release. It’s a pain, and most developers don’t do it. Many just put everything in a single, ‘fat’ APK, and users end up with unused, duplicated content on their device. And, even if you use multi-APK, you can’t optimize for languages. You have to include all the translated strings for every device in every APK, even if the user only needs one or two languages, which wastes more space.

So your existing options aren’t great: increase the size of your app but risk lower conversion rates and higher uninstalls, make your releases less efficient and more painful with multi-APK, or spend all of your time weighing up this feature versus that feature in an effort to avoid increasing the size of your app.

The ‘small’ solution

Google doesn’t want developers to have to make these compromises, so we’ve been working on a better way. Here’s the big idea: if you upload everything needed to Google Play, then Play can take care of delivering just what’s needed for each user and device. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? This process can decrease the work and effort you need to do to support Android’s diverse ecosystem and make your app much smaller for users. As you’ll discover later in the post, this new model also helps improve the user acquisition journey: from discovery and install, to engaging and retaining users with features and updates.

Smaller installs

To realize the vision, Google introduced a new app publishing format, the Android App Bundle, earlier this year. Here’s how it works in detail:

• Step 1: You write all your code for your app in an IDE such as Android Studio or a games engine such as Unity as you normally would.
• Step 2: Now, when you’re ready to test or release the app, you build it as an Android App Bundle, Android’s new app publishing format. You still sign the app so that Google Play can verify it’s from you.
• Step 3: If you haven’t already, you opt in to app signing by Google Play. If you’re releasing a new app, you can do this in a one-click process when you upload your app. When you opt in, Play designates the first key you used to sign your app bundle as the upload key. This is just for security identification purposes and, if you ever lose it, you can contact Google to verify your identity and reset it. For existing apps, you need to visit the app signing page in the Play Console and securely transfer your app signing key to Google Play. Why do you need to do this? Continue to step 4 to find out.
• Step 4: When you upload your app bundle to Google Play, Play processes it and generates split APKs signed with the app signing key for every possible device configuration and language that you support. Split APKs are an Android platform feature introduced in Android L. As long as each split APK is signed with the same key, the Android platform will treat them as one app. You can think of a split APK as ‘part’ of an APK: to run the app, the device treats all the parts as a single app.
• Step 5: When a user installs the app, Play delivers the base split APK (all the code that’s common for every device), the language split APKs (for the languages the user speaks), and the device configuration split APKs (for the device’s screen size and the CPU architecture). This means the device gets just what it needs without wasted space. For updates to be accepted by the device, every release’s split APKs must be signed with the same app signing key as the original app install.
• (Step 6: Once your app is installed on a device, Play will deliver additional split APKs on demand when, for example, a user changes their device language or when a user wants to use a dynamic feature, I’ll talk about these later in the post.)

This new model results in dramatically smaller apps that take less time to download and less space on a device. You deliver a more efficient app to your users which doesn’t contain code and resources they’re not going to use. It’s also very simple for most developers to switch. Building an app bundle in Android Studio is much the same process as building an APK. Game developers using Unity can also build app bundles in Unity 2018.3, 2017.4, and later. The Android App Bundle is open-source and backwards compatible (for pre-L versions of Android, Play automatically uses multi-APK — that is Play generates an APK for each device configuration, containing all language assets, instead of using split APKs).

We switched to the app bundle and uploaded our first internal release within an hour.

Swiggy ~23% size saving

Thousands of developers of popular apps are using app bundles in production. Developers who are using the Android App Bundle have APK sizes that are on average 35% smaller than releasing a ‘universal APK’ (an APK packed with everything needed to support all device configurations and languages that the Android App Bundle supports). More importantly, for those of you who have to manage each release, the new format means you no longer have to use multi-APK for device configurations. Google Play takes care of this for you and makes your life a little easier. The Play Console will soon start allowing you to upload large app bundles with installed APK sizes of up to 500MB so that, in most cases, you don’t need to use expansion files either.

The app bundle saves us time now that we don’t have to use multi-APK.

redBus ~22% size saving

A benefit of the new model and the new publishing format is that Google Play can introduce optimizations into the APK generation process saving you time and effort. An example is something that has just been announced: support for uncompressed native libraries, a little-used platform feature introduced in Android Marshmallow. Developers using the app bundle get this with no extra work.

Prior to Android M, any native libraries included in your app had to be unzipped from the APK. This meant that there were two copies of the library installed on every device: the compressed copy in the APK and the uncompressed copy. That’s wasted space. From Android M onwards, the library can be read directly from the APK in an uncompressed state, thus saving a copy on the device. Play’s compression of the APK during the download is generally more efficient than compressing the native libraries in the APK, so the overall download size is smaller too. So that you can benefit from this without worrying about the upload size, the Play Console’s size limits are changing so that they’re based on the compressed APK size that users download, not the size of the app you upload to the Play Console. On average, this optimization alone is reducing the download size of apps using native libraries by 8% and the installed size on a device by 16%. That’s an amazing size reduction in addition to what you get when switching to the app bundle!

Including assets for 20+ languages was increasing our app size and noticeably reducing our visit-to-install conversion rate before we started using the Android App Bundle.

Riafy ~37% size saving

As I mentioned, apps must opt in to app signing by Google Play to be able to use the app bundle. App signing keys are a mechanism to ensure updates always come from the same developer after an app is installed. Google doesn’t gain additional access or identifying information about a developer by holding this key. It is used only to sign a split APK for installs and updates. Security is something Google takes very seriously, and Google has a team of engineers and advanced infrastructure protecting developers’ keys using the same secure key storage that Google uses to protect the keys for its apps. In fact, for most developers, opting in to app signing and then using an upload key to sign each release (different to the app signing key held by Google) is more secure than holding the key, which can become lost or compromised. If you’re not opted in and you lose your app signing key, you won’t be able to update your app, and there is unfortunately nothing we can do to help.

Dynamic features

The next important innovation in the Android App Bundle is that it’s modular by design. This means you can add modules to your app containing additional app functionality that can be loaded on demand. This helps with the other big reason for apps getting bigger that I mentioned earlier: feature growth. Now you can add more features and functionality, without increasing the size of your app at the point of install. Dynamic features are a safe way to dynamically load code on Android because dynamic feature modules are scanned and checked in the same way Google Play Protect scans and checks apps themselves.

Any app functionality can be contained in a dynamic feature module and delivered on demand. You code dynamic features in the same way you code your app. The kinds of features that work well include:

• Large features not needed at install: You can load these on demand or tell Google Play to defer installing them, which means installing them in the background. You can load features up to 100MB this way. Advanced features or add-ons that aren’t core to your app experience at launch are good candidates here such as premium features for paying users, personalization options, AR functionality, and so on.
• Features for specific audiences: Instead of including features for every audience using your app, you can carve them out as dynamic features. For example, commerce apps could isolate selling functionality in a dynamic feature module so only the buying functionality gets delivered to every user at the point of install. The small percentage of the audience who need selling functionality can download and access it when they need it. Some developers are also exploring dynamic features as a way to avoid having many variants of an app targeting slightly different audiences. Instead, they can consolidate and offer one app while moving the tailored functionality for each audience into dynamic feature modules.
• Rarely used features: Another good use of dynamic feature modules is for functionality that’s rarely used or used once. For example, if your app has a one-time ID verification or credit card scan, then loading this on demand and uninstalling it immediately after its use is an efficient way to avoid adding to the size of your app at install. It also avoids taking up space for something that’s not being used for the lifetime of your app (remember larger apps are more likely to get uninstalled).

Instant discovery

I’ve talked about how the Android App Bundle is helping you keep your apps small and making highly configurable apps possible with dynamic features. The Android App Bundle also supports instant apps. Google Play Instant lets users try apps and games from the Try Now button on the Play Store, from ads, and from links before installing the full app or game. Instant is now on 1.3B devices and is proving to be a great way to drive discovery and installs, capturing users who may not have otherwise installed an app. Vimeo is one of many partners who have seen success with Google Play Instant, reporting that 15% of their new installs come from their instant experience.

In the past, it hasn’t been easy for some developers to adopt instant apps, because of the independent build and release process. With Android App Bundles, you don’t have to build and maintain a separate instant app anymore. After switching to an app bundle, you can add a module to serve as your instant app’s entry point or, if your app is small enough, you can simply enable your base module to be instant. The size limit for your app’s base module plus the instant app module is 10MB to enable the Try Now button on the Play Store and web banners. Instant apps can only request supported permissions. If your installed app uses other permissions, handle these gracefully in your instant app to ensure a positive experience.

This isn’t to suggest that getting under that 10MB limit is easy for every app. Loading functionality progressively using dynamic feature modules is one of a number of ways to dramatically reduce the size of your app. The size limit only applies when pushing instant-enabled app bundles to production so you can test things out before you’re under the size limit. If you’re able to reduce your base module and instant entry point module even further to under 4MB, you activate more instant surfaces such as Google Search and any web link shared, for example, over email or social media. Building a single app bundle for your instant and installed experience is possible in the Android Studio 3.3 beta release.

Faster updates

The final thing I want to talk about is keeping your users up to date. The last step in engaging and retaining audience is ensuring that they have all your latest features and fixes. While many Google Play users have auto-update turned on, many don’t, and others don’t connect frequently to a strong Wi-Fi connection to keep all of their apps updated. The new Google Play In-app Updates API will let you detect when there’s an update available and integrate a customizable, in-line update flow that looks and feels like part of your app. When an update is detected, you can either notify the user with a prompt asking them to update immediately or show a prompt for a flexible update at a time and in a way of your choosing.

The immediate flow is designed for critical updates, such as security fixes or privacy enhancements, which you want the user to apply as soon as possible. When the user accepts this update in your app, it will be downloaded and applied and the app will be restarted automatically. Some apps implement their own solutions for this today, the new API is an easier, standardized way to do it in your app. Flexible updates are more customizable. When this update is accepted, it will be downloaded in the background. Once it’s downloaded, you can either prompt the user to restart the app or it can be applied when the app goes in the background.

Google Chrome is testing the In-app Updates API today and we’ll be rolling it out to more developers soon. It works for any app so you’ll be able to start using it while you’re still switching to the app bundle. To get a good update rate, it’s best to be clear with the user about the benefit of updating and, when possible, ask them to update after they’ve completed a task, instead of asking when they first open your app. When someone first opens your app, they’re generally doing it for a reason and don’t want to wait around while the app updates.

Smaller, better, faster, fresher

These efforts are about helping you drive more installs and fewer uninstalls with a smaller, more efficient app and a faster, more streamlined release. The Android App Bundle also enables highly configurable apps with dynamic features and instant experiences that can increase conversions. Finally, it’s becoming easier to keep your users’ apps up to date. It’s easy to switch to the Android App Bundle, you can get started at g.co/androidappbundle. Here’s to another 10 years of Android ecosystem growth and developer success.

If you have questions or comments on anything I’ve talked about in the post, tweet at the team using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

A new publishing format for the future of Android was originally published in Google Play Apps & Games on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.