A new team of ex-<FamousCompany> wants to “create games worth sharing, with two core pillars – socially engaging games with a word-of-mouth-worthy brand.“
This reminds me of a study I did with two colleagues when I was working at Digital Chocolate. A study on a made-up and also widely abused word: virality.
Virality is a term that doesn’t exist in any dictionary, but two words compose it:
- Virulence: the strength of the thing’s ability to cause disease
- Infectiousness: the capability of a thing to spread rapidly to others.
Most of the efforts towards this dream concept, virality, focus only on infectiousness. Invite friends, guild systems, and leaderboards. There are many best practices around that topic and it’s easier to find experts to help you.
You need to focus on virulence to create something innovative. If it were up to me, I would add a weekly internal playtest and a monthly external one. Clear heuristics to measure progress from an engagement perspective.
Again, SDT is the way.
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