How I got 5x avg session duration in my .io game

The game had launched, we had players, but we wanted more and we wanted them to play for longer.

The first thing I did was put in custom analytics, collecting how many people finished levels, how many putts it took them, how many levels they played. What levels they left on etc.

The results?

The default levels we were making players play sucked, they were too hard for the new player.

We put in better levels and made the first level they load into a really easy one.

Also I noticed a lot of players were not even moving at all when they loaded into the game.

They couldn't figure out how to play! This was a disaster. The instructions were in English, this was useless as most of our players were from non-English speaking countries.

I made a animated gif that explained how to play when they load into the game.

These two changes alone took use from 2m 07s to 5m 57s average session duration. Nearly a 300% increase in average session duration!

This measuring and iterating thing was working. I was hooked. What else could I do to keep them playing for longer.

Well, I could make the game look better, I got the feeling our game looked crappy compared to other 3d .io games. Also, we had no way to interact with our players.

So I set off improving the graphics and added a link to a Discord server for our game.

After I had done this instantly we had players joining the Discord and asking for roles and making suggestions. This was invaluable, direct feedback and interaction with community made a huge difference on what we decided to work on. It was also really nice to talk to players who loved the game. We decided to engage heavily with our Discord community and add many things they asked for.

During this time we added more level creation features, coins, hats, skins, removed features they hated, and gave the game a complete graphics overhaul.

After 2 months of adding community suggestions we achieved an average session duration of 10m 26s. Starting from 2m 07s, we had achieved roughly a 5x increase in session duration.

It was time to start promoting the game more. In the next post I'll go over how we grew the game to over 120k lifetime players and over 5k registered accounts.