Like every year, Diane and I will be in San Francisco for the Game Developer Conference from the 9th to the 13th of March. We’ll be there the whole week, so please contact us if you’d like to meet up.

Jen will be at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX from the 12th to the 16th of March, so you can talk to us there, too!

Towards a more bespoke customer relationship in online games?

Online games companies are all about e-business, and yet the level of CRM initiatives is still surprisingly low. Most MMO newsletters I receive are not customized for me, but they could easily use my character’s data in interesting ways to motivate me. They could show me what my friends have accomplished in-game, point me to wiki articles with tailored tips about how to conquer areas where my character keeps dying, and even tempt me to buy the last piece of a matching cosmetic outfit set I have already bought.

To be fair, a few of them did: I remember an Age of Conan newsletter using my character’s level, name and class to address me and highlight what I could do in-game in the area where I logged off, Aeria Games sent me a nice “get back in-game with a free XP stone” Shaiya promotion after I hadn’t logged in in a while, and most subscription games now have veteran rewards of some kind. However, these efforts are still fairly rare, and are still far from realising the potential of the ton of available data that these companies have amassed about customers.

It is possible to combine game and business data and detect retention issues even before they appear. For instance, welcome emails to new players can include particular things to do in-game just after they register (or at day +3, day+7, etc), outline solutions to issues that players frequently encounter at those stages, contact players with offers when they start logging in less, or make use of “social CRM” to keep them incentivised if their friends stop playing (perhaps by suggesting group incentives, or directing them to a “people you may know” friends-of-friends feature). Virtual worlds seem more familiar with these techniques than online games; for instance Gaia Online and IMVU immediately point towards things to do in-world in their post-registration emails (probably addressing a churn issue from new registrants not knowing what to do), and Habbo includes a “forgotten your password?” box in the “we miss you” email they send to people who haven’t logged in for a while. Interestingly, certain types of account data that is easy to use is almost never used to incentivise players. I didn’t find many games who would send me a birthday gift for my real-life birthday, give me a special party hat or an emote that I could use only that day and that would tell people in game it’s my birthday.

That’s a wasted opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »