Game Stickiness: why engagement is the key to it all (and how to get it right) (2024)

The purpose of this article is threefold: provide an overview of video game analytics, propose a high-level framework to aim for increased stickiness, and offer some practical tips and examples for guidance. You’re in for a long, and hopefully illuminating ride, so buckle in! Also…

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take these!

What is Stickiness?
Sticky Factors
- Core
- Emergent
- Social
An Afterword

Chances are, you’ve probably heard this term being passed around developer or publishing circles a few times. Stickiness refers to a game’s ability to retain players over time. A certain quality that keeps them coming back for more, day after day, month after month. From a metrics standpoint, the way we measure this quality is quite straightforward!

Stickiness = (Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users) x 100

So for example, if you have 1000 monthly active users, out of which 400 interact with the product every day, then the stickiness of your product is 40%.

But while the way you measure stickiness is easy enough, how do you achieve stickiness?

Is this simply a business buzzword, forever relegated to the free-to-play or service games genre? Or is there more than meets the eye here, that should warrant more attention from game creators around the world, both multiplayer and single-player alike? We all want to create games that our players can’t get enough of.

My hope is for this article to help create a clearer picture of the true potential this cheeky little metric holds while proposing a practical high-level framework to help creators achieve maximum stickiness.

So let's start with a quick overview of analytics and key metrics within the games industry.

Crash Course on Game Metrics

According to Magy et al., Game Analytics. Springer, video game metrics fall under three major categories:

1. Process Metrics: related to the monitoring of the game development process itself, to understand current inefficiencies and potential optimizations.
2. Performance Metrics: used to monitor the health of a game build, tracking things like frame rate and bugs as new performance updates and patches are released over time.
3. User Metrics: Arguably the most significant and broad branch of game analytics, it deals with monitoring and analysis of the user’s behavior and activities as they engage with the game. This is done with the dual perspective of treating the user both as a user and a customer.

Customer metrics in particular cover all aspects of the user as a customer, e.g. cost of customer acquisition, retention, and revenue generated. These types of metrics are notably interesting to professionals working with marketing and management of games and game development.

It’s All Connected

Ideally, every creator wants the retention of their game to be and stay high for as long as possible. It is a great indicator of both the merit and popularity of a game.

It is also important to note that there is a lot of interplay between almost all of these categories. For example, a game with poor performance or an unsatisfying gameplay loop won’t retain many players. This may create a negative impression of the game amongst player communities and in turn, affect game sales or revenue.

Player retention directly impacts revenue, especially in live service and free-to-play games that rely on in-game purchases.

The longer a player sticks to a game, the more revenue they are likely to create for the game publishers, making paying players particularly valuable to companies.

But…

Players are more than just their Life Time Value

The metric LTV or Lifetime Value, is an important revenue metric that denotes the total value a player generates for a game over their lifetime, which is the time they spend playing the game.

But while this makes sense for the live service/free-to-play model, what does LTV look like for other types of games?

Naturally, the Lifetime Value of single-player games on average is significantly lower than service-based or free-to-play games. Recent times have seen publishers act on this very insight, with a stronger push being made towards the live-service/FTP model. However, it is important to note that the model itself does not guarantee success.

If a game fails to retain players, it is usually because the fundamental systems at play under the hood are not quite right.

Take, for instance, Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League.

With players reporting a largely uninspiring core gameplay loop, the game’s setting, narrative, and an incredible cast of playable characters were not enough to draw players back to its slated post-launch content, with most fans having already lost interest in the game just a couple of weeks after launch.

High engagement is key to high retention (and as a result, high revenue). This is the secret to stickiness.

But, hey! Listen! These aren’t just the only benefits to reap from a sticky game. Factors like Virality, Peak Concurrent User counts (PCU), and Outbound Messages per User (for social games) each help catapult the game's Lifetime Network Value or LTNV, and either help players stick to a game or help bring in newer users.

It is perhaps shortsighted to think of customers as merely the content of their wallets. Vocal supporters of a game help to spread it, socially active “mavens” help increase virality, and active multiplayer communities can nurture new users (Magy et al., Game Analytics. Springer). All of these types of non-monetary value, added to the Lifetime Value of a user is their Lifetime Network Value.

And while it may be slightly harder to calculate given its more amorphous nature, there is no arguing as to how significant it is.

So let’s look at how to make this happen.

What is Stickiness?
Sticky Factors
- Core
- Emergent
- Social
An Afterword

Research into these factors draws from a wide range of sources, including academic papers, popular articles, and player community insights, covering both single and multiplayer games. One of the first things I realized was the need for a standard, overarching framework that could house these incredibly insightful recommendations.

The patterns that began to emerge eventually distilled themselves into the following framework:

For now let’s call it the Content-to-Context framework, named after Squire, K.’s 2006 Article. This initiative aims to equip developers with a versatile framework for understanding and enhancing game stickiness and to think of games not just as packaged content, but through the lens of the larger emotional and social context in which they are played and experienced by their audience. Its three levels are:

1. Core: Focus on ease of use and intuitive design to prevent early player churn and build a solid foundation for engagement.
2. Emergent: Leverage interconnected mechanics to create dynamic and memorable experiences that resonate with player motivations.
3. Social: Harness community interaction, both in-game and through external channels like social media and streaming, to build lasting connections and enhance game longevity.

The configuration is intentionally built to highlight the outward rippling effects of each level on the next.

This effort is in no way comprehensive, and I urge creators to retrofit it with their own insight as they use it. I hope is for this framework provides a high-level context for any game that aims to be sticky, alongside some actionable recommendations for implementation.

Let’s dive into each level one by one!

What is Stickiness?
Sticky Factors
- Core
- Emergent
- Social
An Afterword

Starting with Core, we begin with the fundamental systems and mechanics that make up the core game experience. For ease of understanding, we are further splitting the Core factors into three distinct categories: gameplay, aesthetic, and ease of use.

Gameplay factors address key aspects of Game and System Design to boost player engagement and retention.

1. Challenge

When players discuss “challenge” in games, they refer to tasks that are gratifying to finish and demand just the right effort to foster a sense of achievement and pleasure.

Challenge however, can be individualized to a person’s ability (children vs teens vs older adults), or be dynamic, i.e. adjusting as the game progresses and the player becomes more skillful, to always keep your game interesting.

As game genres, challenges can manifest themselves in many forms, like combat, racing, puzzle, strategy, and resource management. It is important to know your audience and their playstyles in order to properly understand what they consider to be challenging (in a way they find fun and achievable, of course).

The right balance of skill required and the challenge posed is what helps induce states of flow within your players, and can be instrumental in avoiding player drop-off.

2. Feedback

Any sensory stimuli created by a system in response to a player's action can be categorized as feedback. When the objectives of the game are clear to the player then feedback, whether positive or negative, becomes an essential component that helps keep players on task. Here is how positive and negative feedback, when applied correctly, increase user retention.

• Negative: When a clear objective or goal is in sight, indicators of failure are seldom frustrating and unwanted. Rather, they can be powerful tools that help player reassess their strategies and push forward. Some games also provide a small hint during loading screens (usually after a Game Over screen) that makes that push a bit more compelling.

• Positive: Rewarding players for succeeding feels like an obvious recommendation, but withholding serotonin for too long may cause players to abandon games entirely. Feelings of accomplishment created by completing smaller achievements are a great way to create positive feedback loops that keep players coming back for more. This is the reason side objectives and grinding for experience feel so satisfying. This is because even if they don’t directly affect the final objective, the positive feedback helps you feel like you are on track.

3. Completion

To my fellow completionists out there, your feelings are valid. Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Model considers completion to be a major motivator among different player types. In fact, completion for its own sake is a powerful drawing factor in games. This drive can be easily leveraged through achievement trophies and progress trackers.

Or providing players time to tie up any loose ends after the main story is complete and access to post-game content.

4. Discovery / Experimentation

A sense of discovery provides players with the thrill of uncovering secrets, navigating unknown territories, and engaging with immersive environments. These aspects enrich gameplay by offering players the freedom to experiment, the joy of uncovering the unknown, and a sense of personal achievement.

One way to enable discovery and exploration is to instill the game world with enough side quests and easter eggs that allow for natural exploration. Utilizing fog-of-war in open-world maps is also extremely effective in provoking exploration since it also triggers their drive to completion.

Also, consider the multiplicative gameplay made possible by Breath of The Wild’s interconnected physics and chemistry engine. This enables players to experiment and approach the same problem using different creative solutions.

5. Investment

Systems that create a sense of investment within their players can be powerful motivators for retention. Some common examples of systems that leverage this are character creation and progression systems or city builders and simulators common to RTS and casual games.

However, while these systems can be wonderful mediums for players to express their creativity and identity, understanding how easily they can be exploited to reinforce the sunk cost fallacy, is important. An effort should be made to create closed or balanced systems.

Aesthetic factors extend beyond mere visual elements to include the game’s comprehensive emotional ambiance. Players who resonate with this emotional aesthetic are more likely to revisit the game.

6. Narrative

The dramatic elements of a game encompass things like the premise, setting, characters, and overall dramatic arc or story. Dramatic elements usually give context to the more formal gameplay elements, creating a deeper sense of connection for the players and enriching their experience.

And while narrative-rich games are popular by demand, adding narrative elements to otherwise mechanics-focused games can lead to interesting effects!

7. Visuals

The visuals or art direction of a game can play a huge part in the emotional weight it holds and can enrich the player experience. Games without a unified art direction at best look unpolished and boring and at worst can be frustrating to play if it affects usability (more on this later).

A great example of a game with fantastic art direction is the hyperreal open world of Red Dead Redemption 2 which allows the player to be steeped in turn-of-the-century American culture and landscape. Or the comic book-like cell-shaded art style of Telltale’s The Walking Dead that complements its narrative-heavy episodic structure.

8. Juiciness

This is a rather hard quality to define as it depends almost entirely on the context of the game in which it is applied. An apt definition proposed by game designer Jesse Schell is:

“When a system shows second-order motion that a player can control, which gives rise to feelings of delight, we call it a juicy system.”

This quality can manifest in a game’s interface or controls and is characterized by accompanying audiovisuals to reinforce player actions. Some common ways to achieve juiciness are sound effects, tweening, and camera and particle effects. Depending on the tone of the game, these can help make things feel bright, action-packed, or even somber and delibrate.

Ease of Use is crucial for player engagement; games must feel intuitive to prevent player drop-off. This category of core recommendations is essential, as poor usability drives players away quickly.

When it comes to Games UX, this is a really vast topic but I’ve done my best to provide a quick overview of retention-boosting insights and references for deeper dives.

9. Onboarding

One of the first things a player will experience when they start a game is its onboarding experience which comprises elements like feature introductions, tutorials, and objective setting, This process plays a vital role in helping players understand the game mechanics, story, and objective and if done ineffectively can be a major cause for players abandoning the game. Some good practices when it comes to player onboarding are:

• Contextual and Well-Paced Tutorial: It is important to not overwhelm the user with a lot of information that they are expected to retain in a short amount of time. Moreover, it is always better to teach players new mechanics by doing, rather than just textual information (which is harder to retain). One of the best examples of a game with great onboarding is Portal and the way it seamlessly combines contextual tutorials with the game’s objectives and narrative.

10. Clarity

Signs in games are feedback mechanisms (audio, visual, or haptic) that inform the user about the current state of the game or alert them of things that need their attention. They fall under two major categories:

• Informative signs may include HUD elements that indicate the player's health, stamina, and ammo count. These signs should be unobtrusive to the primary game experience unless they need to communicate something that requires the player's immediate attention. Breath of the Wild’s HUD makes an interesting departure from the norm here, by making the stamina wheel visible only when required, pinned right next to Link’s head. This is exactly when players require this information to be and they no longer have to flit their eyes across the screen while performing critical maneuvers.

• Inviting signs guide the players to perform certain actions, like talking to an NPC or climbing a certain ledge. Since they need to draw the player's attention, they need to have enough contrasts to as to stand out against everything else.

11. Flexibility / Accessibility

Features like customizable controls, difficulty adjustments, visual aids, and audio cues allow players with different needs and preferences to tailor the gameplay experience to their requirements, making the game more inclusive for different player types and abilities. Some great accessibility guidelines for reference are the Game Accessibility Guidelines and Includification (by the Able Gamers Charity).

One of the best examples of this in practice is The Last of Part II’s accessibility options that cater to a wide range of visual, auditory, and cognitive needs. This is what earned it the first-ever innovation and accessibility award at The Game Awards.

PlayStation has also introduced Game Help, a system-level feature that developers can opt into using, providing short walkthroughs for the players to follow and complete their current objective.

What is Stickiness?
Sticky Factors
- Core Level
- Emergent Level
- Social Level
An Afterword

Emergent gameplay arises when complex scenarios develop naturally from the interplay of simple, interconnected game mechanics.

These experiences usually speak to our core drives as players and are important goals to achieve when setting out to make a game as they transform them from passive, uniform content into mediums capable of generating unique stories and memorable experiences.

Once a game’s foundation is set, creators should evaluate their core mechanics to understand how they can enhance and support emergent gameplay.

Here are some kinds of emergent experiences, and how some games achieve them:

1. Sense of Play

Play can be thought of as a sense of movement and freedom that can be created within the more rigid structure of game rules. Play can be directed towards a specific objective, or completely undirected and spontaneous. In either case, it should provide some intrinsic value to the players.

• Movement / Combat: A good example of this can be the ability to put together mind-bending combos in Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Or chaining together attacks and dodges freeform in Spider-Man PS4.

• The cooking mini-game in Legend of Zelda BOTW also instills a sense of play that pushes users towards experimentation. The basic mechanics of the game implore players to mix different ingredients together to create dishes. This effectively sets up the players for exploration, with a juicy(sometimes literally) animation and reward awaiting them at the end of each experiment!

There are close to 120 unique recipes in BOTW, each with its unique art. The effort required to create a system like this may be high, but the results are definitely delightful!

2. Novelty / Variety

Systems that intrinsically introduce variety are extremely effective because they create emergent gameplay and increase replayability.

There are a few great examples of games achieving this quality, although through vastly different systems.

Branching Storylines: Consider the structure of Detroit: Become Human. The game boasts upwards of 85 unique endings based on your choices for the game’s 3 protagonists. The game also cleverly shows a map of all the possible decisions at the end of each chapter, highlighting the path you took and displaying locked branches for all other decisions.

One great example of player communities leveraging this system to create more emergent experiences is the Nuzlocke Challenge for the Pokemon games. Here, players are only allowed to catch the first Pokemon they encounter on any route, nickname them, and retire the Pokemon if it ever faints in battle.

These seemingly arbitrary conditions take advantage of the randomness of encountering Pokemon in the wild and raise the stakes so that players are more emotionally invested in their pokes, and create their own narrative while playing.

And speaking of narrative…

3. Storyliving / Storytelling

James Paul Gee’s concept of The Projective Stance is a great exploration of the human perspectives on taking on the identities of video game characters. They fall into two categories:

1. Real-world players inhabit the goals of the virtual character, where the game world is attuned to achieving these goals.
2. The virtual character enables the goals of the real-world players, and the game world is designed to invite some of these goals.

Gee argues that this double-sided projective nature of video game characters is one of the central sources of the profound pleasures video games offer humans. Let’s look at a few ways to facilitate both!

Character: The player character is the vehicle through which the drama of the game story unfolds. Player characters should compel players to want to step into their shoes and identify with their goals (or enact their own). This can be achieved through interesting backstories, personality, or maybe just cool abilities!

Avatar: That isn’t to say player-created characters typical to RPGs have to be blank slates when it comes to these qualities. A good role-playing character creator, like Baldur’s Gate 3, will allow you to create a robust character with control over appearance, abilities, backstory, and choices.

Playstyle Flexibility: A game world’s flexibility in allowing players to approach a problem in different ways is what creates the space for players to bring in their own motivations and tell their stories.

The concept of challenge runs stems from this idea. Games like Undertale and Dishonored allow you to apply different tactics to overcome challenges, such as showing mercy or choosing violence, which in turn play into the multiple possible endings you can achieve in the game. Combining this with additional community-created challenge runs may play a huge role in boosting a game’s replayability.

Guilds / Factions or Finding Your Calling: In games, guilds or clans are associations of players or characters with similar interests, such as exploration, crafting, role-playing, or combat. They are a great way for players to create strong bonds with like-minded people and ideas they align with. They can be completely player-created like guilds in WoW.

Or entrenched in the game world’s narrative, like the various in-game guilds and factions that are a staple of Bethesda games.

Or somewhere in the middle, created by the developers to promote healthy rivalries between its player community, like in Pokemon Go.

Self-expression: Another way games allow players to tell their own stories is to introduce systems that allow self-expression. Some of the best ways for games to achieve this is through

• World / Environment Building: This allows for players to design, create, modify, and destroy entire game environments and worlds to their liking. Simulation games like Civilization or Casual Games like Stardew Valley are a great example of this.

However, introducing this system on a smaller scale within games of other genres, like action-adventure or RPGs can also be effective!

• Music and Art Creation: Systems that allow the creation of music and art within games are an effective way for players to express themselves creatively (understanding that the creation of such systems may be far from straightforward). Animal Crossing allows you to bring in or create your own artwork to deck up your island with custom flags and t-shirts!

The Last of Us 2 introduces the beloved guitar mini-game as a separate mode for players to create the guitar covers of their dreams.

4. Relationships

Building in-game relationships involves creating systems and mechanics that allow players to form meaningful connections with Non-Player Characters (NPCs) or other players. These systems should be designed to offer depth, variety, and authenticity in interactions, fostering emotional engagement and investment in the game world.

Affection / Trust Mechanics: Using visible or hidden meters to track affection, trust, or other relationship metrics that evolve based on player actions. These metrics should have long-term effects on the outcome of the game story in order to feel genuine. The system can also be a natural antecedent to romance systems, like in Mass Effect.

Companion Quests: Develop personal stories or quests for NPCs that reveal their backgrounds, struggles, and aspirations. You can also potentially introduce conflicts or disagreements that can test relationships, allowing for resolution and growth.

Leader / Squad Management: These systems provide players with complex, interactive tools to manage their team’s composition, skills, and resources. These systems can create unpredictable and dynamic scenarios, making each playthrough unique and engaging.

5. Learning

This category of emergent experience stems primarily from two integral core elements of games: challenge and feedback.

Video games can be seen as a collection of challenging problems that a player must learn to solve, by essentially learning from their failure through feedback provided by the game.

But unless you are Dark Souls, being slapped with a simple GAME OVER screen over and over without indicating scope for improvement may cause your players to feel frustrated and drop the game entirely.

Thankfully, there are ways to elevate failure and streamline learning within your games to make them feel more natural and emergent.

Failure as a reward: The roguelike genre is most well-known for using this approach, and it is perhaps best exemplified in Supergiant’s Hades. Each death sees the player respawning back into the House of Hades, a central hub for some of the game’s major NPCs and stations for leveling up. This seamlessly ties each playthrough with both story and character progression.

Quick Respawns: Games that respawn players immediately back into games reduce the punishment of failure and encourage a mindset that promotes quick reassessment.

Apprenticeships and learning environments: Consider MMORPGs, games that compel their players to develop a variety of skills like class specializing, strategic thinking, communication, and general game knowledge, in order to get better at the game.

This in turn fosters rich player communities of practice where learning is deeply embedded in social interactions. Players engage in shared goals, collaborative problem-solving, and mutual support

- Steinkuehler, et al. 12 Apprenticeship in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Moreover, participation within this social community is a strong drawing factor for high-level players who may have long completed the game’s primary objectives.

This phenomenon isn’t just reserved for MMOs however, any game that provides systems with robust challenge, progression, and exploration is ripe for learning communities and apprenticeships to naturally emerge. This makes the existence of reliable social systems an absolute necessity.

All of this makes the existence of reliable social systems an absolute necessity. Which is a great segue to our final level!

What is Stickiness?
Sticky Factors
- Core
- Emergent
- Social
An Afterword

Social features are crucial to maintaining game retention and longevity and are commonly integrated into most multiplayer and social games. The emergent experiences, both single-player and multiplayer games alike, often create compelling narratives and events that players want to share and discuss.

The human inclination to share experiences is a fundamental drive that fosters community building. This aspect naturally leads to the development of strong user communities around games, thereby increasing late-game user engagement and retention.

Social features fall under two major categories: in-game and out-of-game. While the onus for establishing some of these may not fall upon the creators of the game, it is important to understand where user communities thrive so we may facilitate and encourage their growth.

In-Game Systems

Messaging: Allowing players to communicate within the game can take many forms. The most common of which are text or voice chat. However, these do compel the need for moderation, because while they are means for social engagement, they can enable anti-social behavior like harassment and griefing if not checked.

Special mention goes to From Software’s templated messaging system, introduced in Demon’s Souls and used in all their subsequent games. It lets players leave messages that can be rated by others, providing health boosts for liked messages. The system’s constraints act as built-in moderation, fostering creative community interactions.

Social Hubs: Social hubs are shared spaces where players can interact and build relationships with NPCs or other players. This is the functional equivalent of a lobby within a multiplayer game but can be a fun way to foster a sense of community among players wanting to level up, socialize, or just wait for their squad before jumping into a game.

For instance Call Of Duty: WW2’s social hub featured things like easter eggs, mini-games, live shooting range, 1v1 duel pits, and more!

Out-of-Game Systems

Forums / Discussion Boards: These are online platforms where players, enthusiasts, and developers discuss various aspects of video games. They serve as hubs for community interaction like sharing experiences, seeking help, providing feedback, and building relationships among gamers and developers.

Forums can either be game, platform, genre-specific, or general. Forums are also oftentimes created and maintained by the developers themselves, and are a great way to stay connected with your player audience!

Social Media: Social media is a powerful tool for game developers to increase user retention and engagement by creating dynamic, interactive, and community-oriented experiences.

It is key to boosting game virality by offering updates, behind-the-scenes content, polls, and giveaways. One of the best and most holistic examples of developers engaging with their community has been Arrowhead for their much-celebrated Helldivers 2. The creators regularly provide updates, delivered using the Super-Earth vernacular that the community loves to emulate.

Social Media can also host competitions or compendiums for user-generated content if such expressive systems are established within the games. PlayStation’s #shareoftheweek does a contest of photo-mode entries based on a unique keyphrase every week!

I must highlight video game streaming, which has become a major part of the gaming industry over the past two decades. Audiences range from dedicated players seeking to improve to casual viewers looking for entertainment.

Stream types may include walkthroughs, challenge runs, tips and hints, or lore breakdowns.

What is Stickiness?
Sticky Factors
- Core
- Emergent
- Social
An Afterword

There can never be a one-size-fits-all solution for stickiness. The strategies you will use will always depend on the type of game you are creating, but pushing past the game's core mechanics is the first step to pushing for long-term engagement and retention.

Understand your players’ core motivations. Facilitate a nurturing environment for communities to flourish. And you have yourself a sticky game!