I’ve thought about writing an article about acquisition and conversion for awhile now, and I am pretty sure my guilt of not writing was channeled into my subconscious last weekend when I sat down to watch a movie on the TV while doing whatever on the iPad and exploring the comforting and endless time hole that multi device users cherish.
Star Wars Commander was an obvious download for me as any marketer will know - I’ve spent 30+ years in contact with the brand and plus I was a big fan of the original version of this game without Star Wars branding, Clash of Clans, who’s parent company, SuperCell, was making $1M/day at some point thanks in part to their management strategy which allows them to fail extraordinarily well. So I got Star Wars out of the featured section of the app store and began telling myself that I wouldn’t get involved in another time wasting game about resource management and strategy that was basically an exact copy of the game I had last played.
The on-boarding process of Star Wars Commander is pretty good - over a 2-3 day period I’ll be lead through 100+ prompts filled with Star Wars characters and light saber sound effects that will teach me how to grow into a strong and wise base commander. I really feel good about myself when I win a big battle and can purchase new resources because I lead Han Solo into battle.
The game never ceases to tell me things I can do next - trade credits on the ‘galactic market’ so that I can fund new projects, upgrade my barracks to accommodate more Wookies (they take 5x the room of a regular guy, naturally), or go on a mission that somehow involves Jabba The Hut. I’m a hero/prisoner of the galaxy now. There’s no way that my brain could ever resist all the bright lights, the classic characters, the hand holding through every step of my growth from embryo to hero. How is my poor little base ever going to take on all evil in the galaxy? By following the calls to action. We should all be so lucky to monetize a button that says ‘click here to get paid defeating dark side’. Only the most enlightened people in the world (including George Lucas?) could be so insightful.
After becoming bored with the onboarding process (it continues indefinitely but lessens in importance) I ignore the warning prompt that says if I branch out into the social network of the game I won’t be able to come back to the safe place I’ve been in. It’s a tough decision but if I don’t start battling other players, I’ll never be able to finance that new construction and then I’ll just have a bunch of expensive robots hanging around with nothing to do. I’ll spend minutes (or hours) searching through ‘players’ (yes in quotes) by spending in-app currency and try to steal all their resources.
The more I play the more I notice that some players act kind of funny.. some of them seem to make terrible strategic decisions (ok maybe some of them are the depressed 8 year olds from the movie Rich Hill) and other times act in bizarre ways. Some of this is sure to be the delta between my perception of the galaxy and theirs - on any reasonably good platform users should be able to express themselves uniquely - but I can’t help get the feeling that I’m fighting player-bots who could learn a lot about survival from R2D2 and C3P0. Or maybe people in some disadvantaged country are being paid $.03 per battle to goad me into making in app purchases. Either way you have give it to game publisher LucasArts: I don’t know who I’m battling but I can’t wait until my resources regenerate so I can go again.
I’ve been obsessed with how platforms generate their own initial content since stumbling upon this video from Reddit a year or two ago. The almighty Reddit, with it’s unmatched authenticity, it’s informative, irreverent voice, it’s unmistakable design which seems to capture the aforementioned values so well, was all built by the two founders punching in link after link after link with fake user names until enough people came to the site that they didn’t have to anymore.
The truth is that even in a galaxy far far away, no one wants to feel like they’re alone.
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