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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🗒 DieNo Games’ strategy for identifying underserved audiences and matching them with proven game mechanics.

📈 The company conducted A/B tests to compare traditional car game mechanics with merge mechanics, revealing a surprising preference for the merge variant.

🔐 Data from Sensor Tower guided the decision to focus on the car fantasy, identifying a market without dominant players.

✂️ DieNo Games used Solsthen to compare merge and car audiences, gaining insights into preferences, pain points, and spending habits.

🔍 Insights were documented and continuously used to guide feature development and modifications, ensuring alignment with the target audience’s preferences.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

In today’s episode, I’ll talk about finding an underserved yet reachable audience with tried and proven game mechanics. Often, developers think that their players want certain mechanics and without those mechanics, players will not stick around.

While that is the case for some players, most of the players want an experience that fulfills certain fantasies. I’m sure some fantasies require certain mechanics, and some fantasies can only be about certain mechanics. For example, a player who wants to experience racing will most likely require a game mechanic where they can drive a car. There’s no way around that. But an audience that is after cars does not necessarily expect racing. For that audience, we obviously must include cars, but we can pair it with proven mechanics like Match-3 or Merge.

At DieNo Games, we approach this problem by reaching out to audiences that want certain fantasies and try to see how well they tolerate merge mechanics. The reason we went with the merge mechanic is that that’s what we have a lot of experience with at DieNo Games. So, we started the process by picking a certain fantasy, in this case, cars, and digging through all the data that Sensor Tower provides us. What we learned was that there are a lot of companies making car games and most importantly, unlike some other fantasies, there are no big players dominating this market. If that were the case, we would have to compete with them, and that’s not really sustainable or even realistic for a company of our size. Once we decided that a car game was what we wanted to proceed with, we had to find out if people were into cars and if they also tolerated cars with puzzle mechanics.

Around this time, I think Chrome Valley Customs from SpaceApe was starting to show promise. So, that was a good indicator for us, but we had to make sure that merge mechanics would be received just as positively by the car people because Chrome Valley Customs uses a match-3 mechanic. To get an answer to that question, we set up an A/B test. In this A/B test, we tried to mimic reference games as closely as possible with our screenshots. We had variant A, which was our control variant that showcased car fantasy and traditional car game mechanics. Then, we had a variant B that was otherwise identical to variant A, with the only exception of the first screenshot showing a merge mechanic instead of a traditional mechanic those games are known for. The idea was to see how well each variant converts users. We started with the assumption that the merged variant would obviously have a lower CVR than our control variant. But we were curious and wanted to measure by how much worse the merged variant would perform.

Once the A/B tests were live, we set up a Facebook campaign that used a single static image as a creative, making sure that the image captured the car fantasy as well as possible without implying any kind of puzzle mechanics. This Facebook campaign forwarded the traffic to the Geeklab campaign, which randomly showed each player either variant A or variant B and tracked the install rate for each. To our surprise, the winner ended up being the merged variant with 36% CVR versus the 34% CVR of the control variant.

For all the other fantasies we tested, the merged variant always came second. This was a good sign. It meant that there was an audience out there willing to play a puzzle merge game with cars in it, even if they didn’t get to drive the cars or race other players. This was shortly proven by Chrome Valley Customs as well. Now that we knew there was an audience that likes cars and doesn’t mind merge mechanics, we had to figure out how big this audience was. We also needed to understand this audience better.

At this point, we knew we were making a car restoration game with merge mechanics, but we didn’t really know what the audience liked or expected from the game. Like, what are their pain points? What kind of games do they play, and what are their spending habits? To get answers to these questions, we turned to Solsthen, which was previously called 12Trades. Using Solsthen and their Navigator tool, we reached two audiences: a merge audience and a car audience. We extensively compared these two audiences to find overlaps. It was a lengthy process, but we ended up finding an audience that was big enough, spent enough money on mobile games, and fit our idea of a car plus merge audience.

Using the Solstenn findings, we created an internal document describing our target player. This document included their age, gender, what kind of features/mechanics they liked most, what they liked least, how often they played games, how they played games, and so on. We used this document to come up with an initial feature set for the game. We kept using it anytime we added something to the game or modified something existing because this document tells us who our player is. Since we’re making the game for them, it’s important that we don’t forget that.

We believe this is the right approach for finding a product-market fit, and the KPIs of our game, Chop Chop Customs, show that at least we aren’t completely wrong. From my experience, I know that when players’ fantasies are fulfilled, they are much more likely to stick around, even if the game mechanics are not exactly what they wanted. Having done this approach, I don’t think I can ever go back to the mentality of “let’s make a good game, and players will come.”