How to convert holidays into profit for the developer and joy for the players
Holidays are always a high season for business. Marketers come up with various activities in order not to miss the moment and get maximum profit. For mobile game developers, the holidays also open up a wide field for experimentation.
Profit peaks on Black Friday and the period of Christmas and New Years: for example, in 2019, gamers around the world spent on mobile games $ 277 million for Christmas, and US residents for Black Friday – $ 70 million, breaking the previous year’s record. This income is largely influenced by in-game events and special offers.
But how to keep users in the game during the rest of the year, when there are no such bright and beloved holidays? And how to maintain a balance between the costs of preparing these very events – and profit?
Let’s see how to distribute holiday events by calendar year and attract users to special offers. Inside the article, you will also find a calendar of holidays and tips on what to look for when preparing events.
What are events for?
Events are a great opportunity to attract new users with creative content, as well as bring old users back to the game and increase your profit.
Plus, events are good for testing new ideas and hypotheses. During events, you can try out new functionality, test a new type of content and understand whether to keep such activity on a permanent basis or not.
Also, events are associated with an increase in the average user check. The festive atmosphere encourages users to spend more money and game resources that they have accumulated before the holidays.
For developers, getting ready for serious events can be stressful. Therefore, you need to prepare for the holidays in advance, since the New Year will come anyway, and the events will not prepare themselves.
We advise you to draw up an event plan for six months or a year so that you know what events need to be prepared in advance. Your team must calculate their strength not only for major updates, but also for additional in-game events.
If your players are from different countries around the world, it is important to prepare translations of new content in advance. Since the volume of such texts is usually small, and there can be many languages for translation, it is more convenient to translate them into professional translation service Nitro…
At the same time, you do not need to search for 10-20 translators for each language, but just tick the required languages. Nitro works with single-word translations, and you get finished translations within 24 hours, and sometimes just a couple of hours. Ideal for translating small updates!
What holidays to choose and how to do it?
Obviously, the holidays are not limited to Christmas and Black Friday, and besides, these holidays are most popular with American and European users, and there are still promising audiences in Latin America and Asia.
The simplest thing you can do is to time your in-game events for the popular holidays that are celebrated almost everywhere: Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas / New Year and Chinese New Year.
Halloween attracts developers of mobile games with its understandable symbols: pumpkins, vampires, horror stories. All of this can be organically implemented in October in almost any product.
However, consider the relevance of the event in the context of your application: in a vanilla romance game, Halloween in its classical sense is unlikely to be appropriate. But you can play this theme in the light version: cute pumpkins, cute bats, funny monsters.
It would be most logical to select holidays based on the geography of users. So, in most Asian countries (except Japan) the Lunar New Year is the main holiday of the year. Easter events are popular with European and American users, but would be out of place in the eyes of an Arab audience.
Pay special attention to emerging markets, which are currently growing at a tremendous pace, and experiment with events designed specifically for them. These markets include Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
Users from Arab countries are known for high ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User). During the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which lasts for a month, Arab users leave substantial amounts of money in games – just like English-speaking players on Christmas.
Here’s a little holiday calendar that will give you ideas for new content in the game:
Winter holidays
December 25 – Christmas (Catholic World)
December 31 / January 1 – New Year (almost all countries except Asia)
January-February – Lunar New Year / Spring Festival (China and Southeast Asia, but Japan celebrates New Year on January 1st)
February 14 – Valentine’s Day (almost all countries except Asia)
February-March – China Lantern Festival
February-March – Brazilian Carnival
Spring Holidays
March 17 – St. Patrick’s Day (Ireland and English speaking countries)
March-April – Hanami, Sakura Blossom Festival (Japan)
April-May – Ramadan (Arab countries)
April – Easter (USA, Russia, Europe)
April 29 – May 5 – Golden Week in Japan, long weekends like May holidays in Russia
May-June – Dragon Boat Festival (China)
Summer Holidays
20th June – Midsummer, Midsummer Festival (Sweden and Finland)
Early July – Weekly Festival of Lights (Cuba)
July 7 / August 7 – bright and romantic Tanabata holiday (Japan)
July 20 – Friend’s Day (Latin America)
Autumn holidays
September – Mid-Autumn Day (Asia)
September-October – Oktoberfest (Europe)
October 1 – Day of the People’s Republic of China (China)
October 27 – Diwali Lights Festival (India, Malaysia)
October 31 – Halloween (USA)
November 11 – Bachelor’s Day, Biggest Sale Time (China)
Late November – Thanksgiving & Black Friday Sale Time (USA)
As you can see, many holidays have floating dates, and they can last more than one day. So, Black Friday is usually not limited to one day: sales can begin as early as Thanksgiving (Thursday), and end on Monday, which has already been called Cyber Monday – a special day for online sales. Holidays like Halloween and Christmas can be celebrated in games for several weeks.
Japan has Girls ‘Day (March 3) and Boys’ Day (May 5), as well as Russia – March 8 and February 23. But beware of similar holidays in Western countries, where some radical users may take a “boy’s holiday” negatively.
Many holidays have their own specific symbols and can be used in holiday skins: colorful lanterns (Ramadan), cherry blossoms, Easter bunnies and chocolate eggs (in Western culture), etc. Also, holidays can serve as an informational reason for sales.
Be careful with the translation of texts when introducing new characters for holiday events. So, the Narcade team decided for St. Valentina “give” the hero of the game-cat a girlfriend. The cat couple in love were named Tia and Mia. It is not clear by the names which of them is a cat and who is a cat, but this is important when translating into languages such as Italian, Spanish, Russian … It’s good that the guys from Narcade did not forget to leave a comment for the translator on their order in Nitro, that Tia is a cat, and Mia is a cat.
How can you celebrate holidays inside the game?
Holidays can be celebrated in different ways: from decorating an icon (usually means that something new has appeared in the game) and themed skins to holiday quests, new levels and items in the game.
World of Warcraft holds an annual Hallow’s End… Hallow’s End is the in-game version of Halloween and is celebrated from October 18th to November 1st. At this time, new characters appear in the game, pumpkin sweets, costumes, and so on.
It is worth noting the delicate moment of the festive events. The goal of mobile game developers is to entertain players with interesting, fresh content, while still gaining more from it than spending on development. As a rule, companies usually plan a maximum of 2-3 large events per year, since they take a long time to prepare and are expensive.
However, players expect new entertainment at least once a month. Therefore, you can use minor holidays or even come up with your own. For example, it could be the birthday of the game, Solstice Day, International Pirate Day, etc.
Small parties like this can be added to the game using Live-Ops. Live ops Are changes in a project that you make without a separate release of a new version or update. It turns out that the new functionality was laid earlier and simply became available to players at a certain point in time by timer. Plus, you do not need to wait for the store’s approval and worry that your event will not have time to appear in the game by a specific date.
Examples of events from games
- Dota 2 and Overwatch have New Year’s modes designed specifically for the winter season: Coldness and Yeti Hunt.
- In World of Warcraft for Oktoberfest, the game appeared in Brewfest. Also in this game, events were created for the International Pirate Day.
- World of Warcraft has a love rush based on a real holiday – Valentine’s Day.
- In World of Tanks the action “Kupala Night” is taking place, based on the night on Ivan Kupala. The flower opens the locks to all the treasuries.
- Mad GunZ has winter weapons that users can only purchase during the winter break.
- In Magic Jigsaw Puzzles, they came up with the Winter Story event. The bottom line is to collect holiday currency, move the team towards Santa and collect prizes.
How to attract users to events?
Making an event is half the battle. Once created, it’s important to engage users to make in-app purchases and participate in your activity.
Here are a couple of ideas on how to do this:
1) Push notifications. Send existing players a push to let them know about the upcoming event. Add emoji to push notifications: Pixonic experimenting found outthat push notifications with emoji are more effective.
Here are some examples of push notifications that can give you creative ideas for your app:
SUMMER SALE Summer is the best time of year! Don’t miss the best summer offer: everything is 50% off!
The hottest offer these warm summer days: get twice as much stuff for the same price!
HARVEST FESTIVAL The end of summer is the most abundant season. It’s time to harvest – everything is 50% off!
HALLOWEEN brings scary good prices: everything is 50% off! Price Crash!
BLACK FRIDAY Don’t miss a very good deal: you get twice as much stuff for the same price!
2) Social network. Share your special offer / event on social media, run contests timed to coincide with the festive event to attract an even larger audience.
3) What’s New. Do not forget to colorfully describe the new features in the What’s New text. This will bring old users back into the game and attract new ones.
Duck Rockets are promoting new content on social media for Bon voyage
Instead of conclusions
Events in games today are an absolute must-have in order to generate additional profit and keep users’ interest as long as possible. Mini-events or specials are another way to remind players of yourself and keep players interested.
Holidays-rich autumn and winter are just around the corner, so start thinking about events right now. And so that you can quickly and conveniently translate texts for events and special offers, we give you $ 20 bonus coupon at Nitro professional translation service… Create an account by this link, and you will have $ 20 in your account. Don’t put it off: on 09/30/2020 the coupon will turn into a pumpkin.
about the author
Article written in Alconost…
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