How can online games keep players engaged without requiring payment?

Once the game is released, maintaining a player retention policy is vital for game studios to keep the game for the long run. These games could retain players by letting them feel a sense of accomplishment and joy from the game by captivating the gameplay alone. Social chat features such as guilds and leaderboards can help in multiplayer games. Ensure you get enough player appreciation and feedback to add new features, hold online events, and deepen engagement. Player satisfaction and a thriving community are essential; updating the version with free updates could keep players in the game.

Offering meaningful choices gives players a sense of ownership over their actions and the outcomes. In game developement, I've found that when players feel their choices genuinely matter, it deepens their investment in the game world and enhances their connection to the narrative and characters. This level of engagement helps to build a loyal community and encourages sustained participation, all without the need for monetary transactions. Providing a rich tapestry of choices ensures that the game remains captivating and rewarding, driving engagement through the intrinsic value of the gameplay experience itself.

Having rotational activities, quests, missions, or challenges that alternate out on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis that rewards players with meaningful items, experience points, in-game currency, etc. You also want a variety of rotational activities so the player continues to be engaged and not bored from performing the same mundane actions. Depending on the type of game you are making, these activities can be tied into the main objective/story, PvP challenges, or other activities that players can complete by themselves or with others in multiplayer. The point here is to keep players coming back during the time between significant updates/releases for your game.

A game can let players customize their characters, choose different paths or outcomes, or influence the world or other players. However, choices should not be too overwhelming, arbitrary, or unfair, and they should not create a pay-to-win scenario where paying players have a significant advantage over non-paying players. To offer them meaningful choices that affect the game play, the story, or the aesthetics. Choices can create a sense of agency, personalization, and replay ability, as well as encourage social interaction and feedback.

Start by offering cosmetic choices that don't impact gameplay, like character customisation. This builds player agency safely. Present narrative or progression choices at natural story/gameplay junctures, not randomly. Choices must feel impactful yet fitting given the context.

A game without feedback isn't a game, this advice is meaningless. A game with additional (not core to the game-design) feedback is 100% there to "create a pressure or addiction to play" - the article is descring an impossible outcome: if you adopt the (research-led, known) features of "design-for-addiction" then you are creating an addiction to play; if you are not "creating pressure" then your efforts will have no impact.

In my experience having instant feedback can interact with players that they feel the game has soul and intelligence. But if there are not relevant feedback to the way of playing by player in the flow of the game, the player will lost his sense to do more in the gameplay. In case of positive instant feedbacks, the players brain will produce dopamine which lead to make addiction of playing with more engagement.

Games are immersive and nonetheless magical experiences that are crafted for players. These experiences stir up various feelings inside players, from happiness to competitiveness or even fear. The trick is to provide frequent feedback to evoke these emotions effectively. By setting goals and offering fresh challenges regularly, games keep players hooked. Instant feedback adds to the game's appeal, making players feel like it has personality and smarts. When feedback is relevant and positive, it triggers dopamine in the brain, making players want to keep playing.

Giving the player goals to achieve keeps them coming back. Whether that's in the form of regular events or daily quests/challenges. It's important (particularly when talking about live-ops) to mke sure that there is always fresh content for a player to come back and enjoy.

Offer frequent positive mini-feedback like scores, and combos alongside major level ups/achievements to continuously motivate. Vary feedback methods - visual, audio, social - to keep it fresh. But avoid jarring intrusions respecting player pace/immersion.

I have a 8 years son that loves to play one of our Online Battle Arena mobile games, when I asked him what is the most interesting feature in this game that motivates you to play more? He mentioned that "making team", "join the friends community", "online and offline chat". It was so exciting and cheerfull that he sent me "Happy Birthday message" in the game, and also connected to many of his classmates through the community feature of the game to set appointment of the time of play.

Community is key for any online game. Making sure that you're constantly receiving feedback from your players can keep your development roadmap in line with what your paying customers expect and hope for.

You cannot build community, this is a waste of time: if your game is good, a community will form irrespective of your efforts. If the game is bad no community building will work (it will always collapse/implode/fade away). All you can do is support and facilitate the community that is self-forming. However historically this has been rarely worth doing until/unless your game achieves 'hit' status - until then, players are better off adopting existing community tools and venues (e.g. Discord, e.g. Twitch, even Facebook) - and your team's time is better spent on customer support, design improvement, player-testing of new features, etc.

Liveops Liveops Liveops Liveops "Live operations" is the philosophy by which most service based game developers approach content, updates, audience growth and more. It's not just "release DLC", it's continuous releasing and updating of content (sometimes daily) in order to give an audience engaged. It's also not cheap. Many game developers like the idea of building their game for liveops, but don't operationally plan well for it (again thinking it's basically DLC-plus). If you do want to build a liveops game, it's all about team planning and building specific competencies in the team (especially workflows, build flow, analytics processes and product management).

Content is king, if your game can't stay fresh, it will soon lose to the endless options your players have besides your game. Modern always online games use a mix of cosmetics, gameplay and limited times items/event to keep players engaged, with updates as frequent as once every two weeks.

Daily, weekly and even monthly, quest, login rewards or other winbacks are great draws for players. The flipside is that these cannot work alone, as players will begin to resent a grind just for the sake of it. Beyond these simple mechanics, the developers need to be working on fresh content to keep the game from becoming stagnant.

One option is "energized events". Players have some "energy" as resource, and we create an event aimed primarily at the "old players" who have a lot of this "energy". Event design is first of all analytics with the definition of goals for distribution of reward lines to different cohorts of users. While maintaining the balance of value of rewards and making players happy to exchange energy reserves for rewards without breaking the balance. Well and energy events, for example, can be unique in a board game format with reward tickets for spending energy in loot boxes. Which might create a lot of design problems for middles. And content and PvP events target different CA and often require different engagement mechanics and incentives.

There are two approaches: the 'make more money' version (Candy Crush Saga, all King.com games, etc) and the "make players happy" version. The money-first version uses techniques from the Gambling industry: content is daily (or hourly), time-limited, 'flash sales', and undermines/nerfs existing content (e.g. new equipment that is better than the best existing equipment in every way). These rely on FOMO and Skinner-box addiction to extract maximum cash from players. The player-first version extends the content with "new but NOT more powerful" content - e.g. CCG expansions which don't powercreep the existing cards. This is harder work for the design team, and is more morally definsible but lacks the addictive features of gambling.

We know that 80% of our revenue, comes from only 20% of our players, which are our loyal players, beside the strategies we use to encourage the other 80% to engage with different aspects of our game, we have to keep our loyal players engages with different new offerings, serving them for their loyalty. This strategy itself can gather attention of other players and encourage them into benefits of loyalty and yield them to become a loyal player, like what is happening in big titles like COD mobile. About a month ago, COD Warzone mobile was released and my brother who is a big fan and a real good player of COD mobile, couldn't wait to be one of the first players, I realized the reason was big surprises which game offers to old loyal players!

Plan the roadmap of missions, quests, milestones: When we plan a roadmap for users to do something, they can take the game designer's support and guide in the progress of the game to play more advanced and pro to reach more success based on the scores in the game. With hourely, daily, weekly and even monthly missions, we can make hooks in the mind of player from one point to the next point like a chain! If game designer designs couple of parallel chains in the progress of the game, the cohort of level design can lead to more engagement and retention.

The single most important thing is missing from this article: elder-game content. Nothing else matters by comparison. Your players who like the game most will get through all the content, and reach a moment of "now what?". These people have to be targetted with neverending reasons to keep playing - otherwise they will simply get bored and move on to the next game, so that your community is always noobs, and has no longevity. Elder-game content has to be either procedurally generated, or PvP - can be soft PvP (no consequences) or hard (consequences to losing) - but it needs something that keeps the content dynamic and always 'fresh'.

Surface helpful failure feedback. Learning from mistakes should feel rewarding rather than punishing. Consider calming feedback modes/breaks for relaxation. Well-paced changes engage wider audiences sustainably.