My shadows of hope

Now that the thunderous applesauce (not a typo) from my previous article has died down, I thought I should also write about the other end of the spectrum which is, how does one evaluate the performance of a game. I've seen the numbers and the only thing that comes to mind is the intro spiel from the Six Million $ man which goes something like " Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man." All jokes aside, I do feel like taking a successful game apart with my bare hands just to see what it is, that makes a good slot machine tick and make changes to it to see what reactions different changes provoke from the user base. For ex: Uproar from the userbase forced IGT to redo cosmetic changes to their venerable Cleopatra game. Not changes to the paytable, the reels or the maths, but just changes to the graphics had fans of the games going Planet of the apes on IGT. I am of course digressing into what M...

Now, the title of this article may just be presumptuous and I am new at this. So let me begin with a slight tweak and you promise to be gentle. These here are the possible factors which just may contribute to making a game successful. Ambiguous enough? Great! Lets begin. The first thing to do, is to break down the user lifecycle for a game into pre-contact, the contact phase and post-contact. Pre-contact is the phase when the user has heard of you, your brand and your content. During this phase, the idea is to draw in as many users as possible. Therefore, the first factor I consider important is Curiosity . Curiosity is the pull the user feels towards your game. It is a natural extension of their expectations. You are expressly advertising an experience that is either completely new or a rehash of an existing experience that promises something new. Hence, a user is drawn towards you because of many, many smaller factors like the IP of the game, the advertising, the company behind ...