Talk about the 8 basic categories of operational activities

The planner pulls together the team to build the house, while the operator shouts at the top of his lungs to sell the house. In addition to all kinds of publicity and false advertising, in order to obtain more profits from consumers and to promote their own products, major developers and channel dealers have put in all their efforts to carry out various activities. Today, I would like to start an introduction to the basic classification of game activities based on the current popular mobile game activities.

1. Purpose of the activity

First of all, designing an activity must have a certain purpose. It’s not that the boss of a department can just do whatever he wants.

The quality of game activity design is directly linked to the game revenue. Don’t organize an activity just for the sake of organizing an activity. That will be meaningless and a waste of time and energy.

Here are a few terms to clarify:

● AU: Periodically Active Users (generally not used)

● DNU: Daily number of newly logged-in users.

● DAU: daily active users.

● APA: number of active paying users.

● ARPU: Average revenue per user, which can be calculated by total revenue/AU.

● ARPPU: Average revenue per paying user, which can be calculated by total revenue/APA.

● PUR: Payment rate ratio, which can be calculated by APA/AU.

● LTV: Lifetime Value, which is the total revenue generated by each user for the game project from the first time they log into the game to the last time they log into the game.

Now that these terms have been clarified, I believe that everyone will have their own ideas when organizing activities. That’s right, the purpose of the activity basically revolves around these nouns. These are the basic purpose and data basis for our design of the activity. After clarifying our thoughts, we can come up with what users need to know.

We need users, so where do they come from? How to find the target user group.

How do we retain users and why should they stay?

How do we get users to spend money and how do we stimulate payment without affecting the life of the game as much as possible?

By utilizing the user needs and research data obtained during the game experience, combined with the user statistics from your own operations background, this information will be enough for you to understand most of the problems currently encountered in game operations . Most of these problems can be solved through operational activities.

2. Classification of basic activities

1. New customer acquisition activities:

Basically, all traffic-generating activities can be counted in this category. Generally speaking, this includes the early soft-text promotion of the game, event topic hype, and any cross-border cooperation. On a smaller scale, there are player surveys, Weibo promotions , and so on. This type of activity is basically just to attract enough attention to the game in the early stages. In today's world where hunger marketing is prevalent, businesses can make a profit and recover their costs in the early stages of the game, and at the same time attract enough attention from players and the media, which can be said to be killing two birds with one stone.

● Basic types

A: Registration activities

Including but not limited to mainstream activities such as pre-registration, gift package reservations, media distribution, etc., common mobile games will have differentiated gift packages to divert traffic to different channels, and common points lottery activities are common ways of doing such activities.

Activities can greatly increase the game's media exposure in a short period of time, create publicity points, attract players' desire to join, and expand community publicity for the game.

B: Solicitation activities

Including but not limited to questionnaires, game strategy and experience collection with prizes, etc. Such activities can provide a deep understanding of the psychological activities of the target player group, making it easier for developers to make corresponding corrections. It is also easy to form a discussion point among players and gather some popularity in a short period of time. If the momentum is huge, it can also be written as a soft article as a way of channel promotion .

However, such activities generally take a long time to collect samples, and are not suitable for all mobile games in today’s fast-paced mobile gaming world. They are only suitable for heavy and high-quality mobile games with a long-term fixed player base.

C: Recharge activities

Including but not limited to first-time deposit benefits, limited-time recharge refunds and other payment-inducing activities. This type of activity can increase game revenue in the short term (at the expense of the game's life cycle), and at the same time improve user stickiness. Players are always willing to pay more attention to the things they spend money on.

The above are several common methods of attracting new customers. You can find their templates on many different mobile games, so I won’t go into details here.

2. Stability maintenance activities:

Stability maintenance activities usually appear in various stages of the game, and will increase sharply in the middle and late stages. The main purpose is to maintain user activity and stable income. This stage is usually responsible for a few dedicated people (either planners, mostly operations). For such activities, merchants will generally make a small amount of concessions (superficially), while attracting old game players to bring in new players, and cultivate the transition from incremental payment to continuous payment.

Incremental paying players: short-term paying players who mainly pay on impulse, attracted by game quality + activities, and prone to churn after the attraction reaches its peak.

Continuous paying players: medium- to long-term players who mainly make stable small payments, have certain personal opinions and development ideas about the game, and are the core user group of the game.

● Basic types

A: Competition activities

Usually, individuals, teams, guilds, etc. are used as units, and various types of competitive rankings are carried out according to the needs of the corresponding activity settings. Common types of competitive content include PK rankings (arena competitions), target collection, achievement pursuits, and other competitive content for PVP players. This type of activity will basically be divided into different levels according to the players' consumption capacity and the payment ability of the corresponding player groups to ensure that everyone participates or the target users can participate to the greatest extent possible. At the same time, it will generally cooperate with the update of new versions or new content to stabilize the return of a part of players and attract a small number of new players. Such activities are generally sent in the form of push to the contact information reserved by the players.

Such activities can inspire players to excel, have a sense of honor and existence in the game, etc., and can stimulate the enthusiasm of large consumers to a large extent. At the same time, under the premise of clear grading, small R and non-R players can have something to drink, increase the payment amount of all types of players and enhance their interest in the game.

However, such activities usually favor high-level Super R players (especially ranked competitive activities), resulting in a narrow participation rate and low fairness. Situations that are difficult for ordinary players to participate in. How to divide the gears reasonably is the key point and focus of designing such activities.

B: Limited time activities

Including but not limited to limited-time event BOSS, limited-time sign-in and other activity designs based on time limits.

The main purpose of such activities is to increase players' interest in cultivation, and merchants usually give some discounts or rare items and resources as the final reward. Players’ participation is very high, and such activities are usually related to one of the core gameplays of the game, increasing the gaming experience.

C: Question and answer activities

Usually, players need to answer various questions provided by the system at a designated location or time within the game, and different rewards will be given to players based on the number of correct answers or the accuracy rate.

The threshold for this type of activity is almost zero, and the participation of all types of players is increased through the question-and-answer format. At the same time, the content of the questions is usually related to the game content or game theme, which can deepen the player's sense of involvement.

Another common method is questionnaires. As a kind of stability maintenance activity, questionnaires are more like a kind of return activity. Collecting player opinions in the middle stage of game operation to screen and improve some game content is an important way to improve game quality.

3. Task-based activities:

Including but not limited to daily, weekly, monthly and other tasks. In addition to separate cyclic daily tasks used to stabilize player online rates, different tasks are usually designed in conjunction with other activities or festival types to increase the fun of the game.

As the pursuit goal that players can best understand, tasks have a relatively high execution efficiency in the game. A game's task system is usually related to other activity systems. The author personally believes that no matter what game platform the game is on, the quality of the task system will directly affect the difficulty of setting up the backend for its operational activities.

4. Sign-in activities:

Including but not limited to daily sign-in and other designated game behaviors that need to be completed every day (including daily tasks), or BUFF or reward activities that can be triggered after a certain number of accumulations.

Such activities are usually carried out along with server operations to attract players to log in daily and improve game retention rates . The content of the activities is usually relatively monotonous, and in mobile games different reward levels are often set in combination with functional VIPs.

5. Attraction (return) activities:

Simply put, it is to bring back AFK users to continue playing, and make more money by cooperating with other consumption activities. Including but not limited to emails and advertising push, etc., this type of activity can basically only be seen in some high-quality games in the late stages of operation. However, the effect of such activities is usually not very good and will not be described in detail here.

6. Revenue-increasing activities throughout the game:

This is what we usually call the main source of KPI performance indicators. According to the author's current gaming experience, these types of activities basically take place before major festivals, major game version updates, and new gimmicks (big patches) are released online. Including but not limited to various recharge activities and rebate activities. It should be noted here that I personally believe that promotional activities do not count in this category. Promotional activities are usually launched before the version update to sell items from the previous version and make room for new items.

7. Impulsive consumption guidance:

Including but not limited to various recharge lottery activities and limited-time sales activities.

Such activities are usually used to convert non-paying players or increase game revenue in a short period of time. Specifically, you can configure the type and quantity of event prizes based on the purpose of the event, and use the players' psychology to guide them to pay impulsively. The basic idea is to take advantage of players' desire to get an advantage and win the first prize, and widely guide players to participate in the activities, which also requires detailed tier settings.

8. Consumable payment guidance:

Including but not limited to players' limit-breaking purchases (such as physical strength, energy, etc.), equipment enhancement consumption, material sources, copy keys, etc. However, most of the reward points in this column are the core payment points designed for the game. Generally speaking, this system will not be affected by activities. If you want to generate income in a short period of time, you can open some later content through operational activities (cautious). It should be noted that such activities will greatly shorten the life of the game.

3. Conclusion

The above is the author’s summary of the basic classification of game operation activities. I hope this article can serve as a starting point to draw out more and better opinions from great masters. I also thank all my readers for taking the time to read this article. In short, games are productized things. How to sell one's own products is not just the domain of operations, but also something that our planners need to think more about.

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