Retention, Part 32: Too Much Too Soon Affects Retention

By Sanya Weathers

During the initial design stage, you need to think about human nature. Knowing how people behave, how people react in different situations, and what makes people more likely to become long term customers is great for the health of the community (which requires critical mass) and for your own bottom line. You can hire a behavioral psychologist, of course… or you can hire a community professional, who can accomplish the same stuff and go on to handle your media relationships, customer support, live events, and marketing. It doesn’t sound as fancy as hiring a doctor, but it’s a heck of a lot more cost-effective.

Here’s one of the things even the greenest community manager can tell you: Too much too soon kills your shot at retaining an audience. A CM with twenty screenshots in his hand doesn’t post them in a gallery all at once. He posts them two at a time over ten weeks, for multiple reasons.

–    One, he probably needs the content to last for ten weeks, unless he has permission to take the screenshots himself. (Protip: Please give your community people permission to take the screenshots. Either you trust their judgment or you don’t, and a community manager whose judgment cannot be trusted is useless.)

–    Two, human beings are not wired to look at twenty screenshots of unfamiliar material and do any processing, unless the screenshots are all but identical.

–    Three, if he is trying to generate excitement and discussion in your social channels, he needs to focus the conversation. Thirty people talking about one screenshot is a lot more likely to be retweeted and score a good Google rank than thirty people talking about twenty screenshots.

–    Four, the traffic pattern for twenty shots in one day versus spreading the shots out is instructive. The first, you get a huge spike and a dramatic falloff. The second, your trend line is going up.

The exact same principle applies to your game. There is quite a lot of evidence that too much choice paralyzes people.

– If you’re introducing them to a new product, offering them hundreds of choices is a good way to make people decide it’s too much trouble.

– Forcing people to make choices before they understand the implications of those choices (with no “undo” or “redo”) is a recipe for frustration and a loss of retention.

– Allowing people too many choices up front (or the option to buy all of the choices in a cash shop) gives you the big spike in traffic and the dramatic drop off.

Always give a player something to look forward to, and the guarantee that there will always be something to look forward to no matter how much time he spends with your product. Your community manager knows this on a fundamental level, and as such can contribute to your product’s design.