Let’s talk about the user growth system of Honor of Kings

As a popular national game, the success of Honor of Kings relies largely on its user growth system. The essence of the user growth system is to set growth rewards to drive user behavior. If you want to build a good user growth system, you need a certain level of gamification thinking.

"User growth system" is a very common term on the Internet. I believe that students who are engaged in product operation-related positions are familiar with it. Now many companies will also recruit PMs to be responsible for the design of user growth system products, such as the titles such as Kunkunshu in Xiaohongshu, Orange V in Dianping, and KG level in Keep. These products all have independent growth system modules.

In addition, some products will launch activities or games from time to time to allow users to participate, such as JD.com's sign-in to receive JD beans, Meituan's tree planting to receive fruits, and Air Travel's flight record sharing. From the construction of a complete system to the design of activities, all of these fall into the category of user growth system.

So what is the user growth system?

Some people define it as a complete growth system that gives users positive incentives (points, medals, growth values, user levels, etc.) through their consumption behaviors or other behaviors that are beneficial to product development, such as signing in, browsing, participating in activities, liking, giving good reviews, posting orders, sharing, feedback, evaluation, games, etc.

Some people also believe that its essence is to set growth rewards and drive user behavior.

These definitions focus on the incentives that the product brings to users, which in turn drives users to generate more positive behaviors within the product. I understand that this means that users may use this product for some need, but the product also needs to give users financial or spiritual incentives to keep them staying and continuing to use the product. But I think this is actually just a part of the growth system. A complete growth system should include four parts: allowing users to enter, guiding users to use, giving users incentives and rewards, and making users willing to spend money on products, which are the triggers, actions, variable rewards, and investment in the addiction model.

Many people say that building a good user growth system requires gamification thinking. Honor of Kings is also a product that has achieved great results in user growth. Let us use Honor of Kings to see how to build a successful user growth system.

1. About King of Glory

Honor of Kings can be said to be a phenomenal product. Last year, its daily active users exceeded 100 million during the Spring Festival. The daily active users data dropped slightly after the Spring Festival, but it has basically stabilized at over 80 million. It is a rare mobile game suitable for both men and women among game products. The key factors that contributed to the success of this game are:

• Honor of Kings has perfectly restored and presented the PC MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game on mobile devices. The earliest MOBAs that are well-known to everyone are DOTA and LOL, which are still very popular multiplayer online tower defense games. Even the official competitions of these games are very popular. However, the rapid development of mobile games has changed the way many players play games, and many people who were not "gamers" have become gamers;
• Compared with the complex operation of PC games, Honor of Kings has simple operation and low threshold, and is more popular among female users. More than 54% of the users of Honor of Kings are female users, while the average proportion of similar games is only 35% or lower. One of the reasons why DOTA players looked down on LOL players was that LOL's operations were simpler and less sophisticated. But this can't stop LOL from taking over the Chinese PC game market. Today's King of Glory is just like League of Legends back then, simpler, faster-paced, with a wider range of usage scenarios, and you can play a game anytime, anywhere;
• Letting users come in is just the first step, letting users stay is more important. The growth system created by Honor of Kings for users has undoubtedly become a hook to retain users, making users willing to spend more time on it.

In the book "Addicted: Four Major Product Logics That Help Users Develop Habits", the author divides the addiction model into four stages: trigger, action, variable rewards, and investment. To summarize in my own words, triggering means letting users enter, that is, letting users download and open the King of Glory; action means that users have usage behavior, that is, users start the game; variable rewards mean that users get incentive rewards from the product, which increases users' enthusiasm, such as level increase in the game and stimulates stronger fighting spirit; investment means that users pay for the product, which is also the ultimate goal of the product. Mapped to the King of Glory, it may be that players continue to recharge points in order to buy skins. What exactly did Honor of Kings do to allow users to complete the entire process from triggering to investment?

2. Trigger: Let the user enter

I remember when I first got into playing Honor of Kings, it was my friends who suggested we team up to play the game together, so we decided to play a game of Honor of Kings right here. In fact, this game was already very popular at that time, but I had not downloaded it for a long time because I was not that interested in the game. However, I saw that my friends were playing it, and they would occasionally play it in groups at the dinner table, so in order to get more involved, I downloaded this mobile game. For me, the motivation for downloading Honor of Kings was actually "socialization", so that I could play games in a group with friends and have common topics.

Nowadays, most of the time of netizens has been occupied by various apps, especially for office workers, who cannot have a lot of time to concentrate on doing one thing. Therefore, various companies have begun to seize the "fragmented time" of netizens. For example, you can spare a few minutes after lunch to do something, you can spend half an hour on the subway on the way to and from get off work, you can do something while waiting in line, and you can do something before going to bed... A normal game of pushing towers takes 1-2 hours to finish, but in order to seize the fragmented time of users, King of Glory has set the map to be simpler, reduced the cooling time of hero skills, accelerated the refresh of wild area resources, and accelerated the growth of heroes, thereby speeding up the rhythm of the game, and controlling the time to complete a game to about 20 minutes, so that users can complete a game in fragmented time;

Of course, promotion is indispensable for a product in the early stage of its launch. King of Glory also spent a lot of money in the early stage to promote this game product. For example, when it was unknown in the beginning, it used QQ and WeChat, two of Tencent's top traffic products, to promote it. The main selling point at that time was that there was no need to register, and you could open a King of Glory account with a QQ number or WeChat number, which invisibly attracted a lot of traffic for the game. When the server was first launched, there was an activity to give away Q coins for playing games, which attracted many players in a motivating way.

Whether you want to get closer to your friends, kill fragmented time, or see a promotional ad in your circle of friends, ultimately downloading and opening the product means you have completed the “trigger” step. Clear product positioning can help trigger users. For example, by investigating the reasons why people download King of Glory, we can know that the positioning of this product is actually a "social multiplayer tower defense competitive mobile game." Its biggest highlight is that it is the first tower defense mobile game, and the social elements are further strengthened in the game settings.

3. Action: Guide users to use

After the user completes the "trigger" stage, the next stage is "action", which is to let the user actually take the first step and start using the product. If the trigger relies on clear product positioning and appropriate promotion methods, then making users take action relies on simple, direct and interesting product design. "Addicted" believes that the factors that lead to action depend on "motivation, ability, and trigger", that is, B (action) = M (motivation) A (ability) T (trigger).

1. Capabilities

The most taboo thing when designing a product is to take things for granted, assuming that users can understand, operate, and use it frequently. In fact, users are not as smart as we think, so when designing products, we should lower the threshold of use as much as possible and avoid complex and difficult-to-understand structural frameworks. As a gaming product, Honor of Kings has a lot to offer. For most users, understanding the game and the smoothness of the game operation are definitely the main barriers. When we play the game, we often give up halfway because the game is too difficult. Therefore, reducing the difficulty of the game without losing its fun is the first point to consider, which is what "Addicted" said about enabling users to use the product.

1) Newbie guide: immersive tutorial

△ Newbie guide

No one likes the so-called "game tutorial". Most people basically skip this step when playing games because we are too lazy to spend time looking at so many menus and flowcharts, but we cannot understand the rules of the game without watching the tutorial. After all, every game is different. Especially for new users, the first few minutes when opening the game basically determines the player's overall impression of the game. Many users are lost at this step, so the novice guide is particularly important for users to complete the "action" link.

Honor of Kings is relatively friendly to newbies. Its novice guide adopts an immersive experience, cleverly interweaving the novice tutorial with the game process and story. Therefore, we sometimes don’t regard it as an operating guide, but understand it as a part of the game, because after completing the novice guide, you can obtain heroes and upgrade to the corresponding levels, which is consistent with the level changes after the normal game ends.

2) Guide prompts: lightweight and more friendly

△ Skill Description

△ In-game system prompts

△ Text mask prompt

If we observe carefully, we will find that the guidance prompts in Honor of Kings are everywhere, but they are not too heavy to affect the gaming experience, and there are corresponding guidance scenes, they do not appear for no reason. For example, in the game, when we successfully kill the little dragon, a yellow text prompt will appear in the lower left corner of the screen, telling players that killing the little dragon can bring a shield. After the game is over, there is a prompt "Click the screen to continue". The user can click to jump to the results page, but this prompt is masked so that the user can focus on the victory/defeat results of the game. The design is also very delicate.

3) Intelligent function: reducing the cost of understanding the game

△ Automatic simple casting

△ One-click upgrade of inscriptions

Although the physical requirements of mobile games are not high, winning a game certainly requires a certain amount of brainpower, especially for high-level players. They also need to know which heroes can restrain the opponent and know the skills of each hero well. But for novices and ordinary players, as long as they cooperate properly with teammates, develop peacefully, and don't impulsively give away heads, they can basically win the game.

The King of Glory also provides simpler operating functions in the game settings, such as automatic simple casting and intelligent release of skills. Users do not need to judge who to release the skills to and in which direction. Just click to automatically hit the enemies in the corresponding range; in the past, the inscriptions of the King of Glory needed to be manually configured and upgraded, and I was often confused. My friend told me that different types of heroes require different inscription fragments. I thought it was very complicated and did not manually configure and adjust it. However, if you don’t upgrade it, you can’t beat the "enemy" when fighting, which will be very annoyed. However, it didn’t take long for the King of Glory to launch the function of automatic one-click upgrade of inscriptions. Players no longer need to use their brains to configure it, which greatly improves the efficiency of the game; a reasonable lineup is also the key to winning the game, but novice players may not know what type of heroes to cooperate with each line of soldiers. For example, a mage is needed in the middle lane. When choosing a hero, the interface will prompt you which way you should go and what heroes are lacking in your lineup. You can flexibly adjust according to this prompt.

2. Motivation

After talking about ability, let’s talk about another important factor that affects users’ completion of the “action” link - motivation. There are many users who download a product and use it the first time, but never open it again or open it very rarely. These are what we often call low-frequency users and silent users. We often try every means to motivate them to increase the overall frequency of user usage, but perhaps they have no motivation to use it. In that case, we should create motivation and create more itch points based on satisfying their pain points.

Although I got into playing King of Glory because of my friends, later even if no friends invited me to play, I would still open it and play a few games when I had free time, or when I was in a bad mood. This is my motivation: King of Glory can help me relieve my anxiety. But there are also some people who downloaded King of Glory for the same reason, but never opened it again. They also became the permanent silent user of this product because they no longer have the motivation.

Some very successful products retain users because they create more motivations, such as NetEase Cloud Music. It satisfies the pain point of users, which is listening to music online instead of offline CDs. After becoming a member, users can listen to a large amount of music. However, this pain point alone is far from enough. Other products such as QQ Music and Kugou Music can also meet such needs of users, so why don't users go to other platforms to listen to music? NetEase Cloud Music has thus overturned the tradition of music apps, strengthening the social attributes of users with an organizational method centered on playlists, and adding a comment function, aiming to build a music community rather than just a music supplier. One marketing campaign that left a deep impression on me was when NetEase Cloud Music imprinted thousands of highly praised comments from users on the Hangzhou subway, which made many people burst into tears. Later, many users opened NetEase Cloud Music not to listen to music, but to read everyone's comments late at night and resonate with the audience.

Let’s talk about Honor of Kings again. Apart from the game itself, Honor of Kings is also a product with strong social attributes. Some people may download Honor of Kings to experience the game at first, but it gradually evolved into consolidating social relationships. Honor of Kings has a special social module where you can set up your own friendship cards, upload photos, and establish close relationships with game friends (when the intimacy with the other party reaches a certain score, you can choose to become besties, lovers, gay friends, etc.), become an apprentice, etc. Some users play games not for the sake of playing games, but to build some kind of close relationship with their friends and continue to play with each other.

Intimate Relationship

A user may download a product for external reasons, but what really makes this user stay is the internal motivation. Having pain points is far from enough. We need to create more itch points so that when there are so many similar products to choose from, he can only think of you.

4. Variable rewards: motivate and reward users

Variable rewards are a very core part of the growth system of Honor of Kings, focusing on the feedback the product gives to users. Users come and use it, and we cannot let them go empty-handed. We must give them corresponding incentives and rewards so that they come again next time and form a virtuous circle. This part is also the focus of other articles about the growth system. Some authors even believe that this is also the essence of user growth.

The user incentive system includes user level system, points system, membership system, task system, medal system, etc. Some products will cover several of these categories. The most common ones are levels, points, and membership. They are also interconnected. For example, you can be promoted to a new level by reaching a certain number of points. For example, there will be different levels after becoming a member. The more obvious ones in Honor of Kings are the user level system, points system, task system, and medal system, which are explained one by one below.

1) User level system

△ User Level

User level is the most obvious feedback that users can feel in Honor of Kings, such as the rank levels we often talk about (gold, platinum, diamond, etc.). The higher the rank means stronger strength. Reaching the king rank is usually the ultimate goal of players. Continuously improving one's rank is a process of continuously receiving rewards. There are also honorary titles. When the proficiency of a hero is very high, you can get the title. For example, "The Tenth Liu Chan in Changping District, Beijing" means that the hero Liu Chan you play ranks tenth in this area. This is also a kind of incentive, which brings users a very high sense of accomplishment.

Set up incentive policies at different levels to attract users to upgrade, and differentiate privileges, that is, different levels can unlock specific functions and enjoy a high-level product experience. For example, players at diamond level and above can ban-pick before the game starts, but other players at lower levels cannot experience this gaming experience.

2) Points system

△ Gold Coins

The points system is a virtual currency within the product, and is a disguised operating strategy designed to stimulate certain user behaviors. Generally speaking, points can be exchanged for corresponding rights and interests. For example, points in Honor of Kings are actually gold coins. Accumulated gold coins can be used to purchase heroes, and the main way to obtain gold coins is through fighting and completing daily tasks. Intuitively, the gold coin system is set up to encourage users to purchase heroes for free. The actual purpose is to allow users to fight more and increase the cost of users leaving.

3) Mission system

Mission

The task system is a way to abstract and systematize the operations of obtaining points in the point system and experience points in the level system. The task system of Honor of Kings is very complete, including daily morning, noon and evening login benefits, gift packages and diamonds; irregular activities such as Valentine's Day and Lantern Festival activities, giving away hero fragments, skin fragments, inscription fragments, and various props; daily task rewards, such as the Master's Advanced Trial, etc.; growth tasks, each level reached will receive different amounts of gold coins, and there will also be corresponding gold coin rewards for sharing the results of the battle. I often participate in the irregular activities of King of Glory, such as the puzzle-winning hero event during the Spring Festival. King of Glory basically holds different activities during every festival. As long as you complete the tasks during the event, you can get new heroes.

4) Medal system

△ Achievements

The badge system is more like a display of the user's image, just like the red flowers that teachers rewarded us when we were in school. The more red flowers we get, the more active our performance is in class, and it is easier for us to get praise from our parents when we go home. This is the way of motivation that we have been instilled with since childhood. Many workplaces now also use this method to motivate employees, such as awarding an award or honor, which represents the contribution to the company and the image of the employee's hard work. The honor achievements in King of Glory are also a kind of motivation. The more achievements you get, the more it means that your abilities are recognized.

Honor of Kings gives users instant gratification and the pleasure of winning a game, but the game settings should provide more long-term incentives and rewards. For example, novice players cannot participate in the ranking mode right away. They must accumulate a certain number of points through the ordinary battle mode before they can unlock the ranking mode and start the rank upgrade journey. The purpose of this setting is to let users feel the fun of the game in the early stage, and when users become tired, begin to cultivate their competitive ambitions, and in this way cultivate user habits.

Variable rewards are a powerful tool for products to attract users. Just like in an intimate relationship, the investment of one party alone is far from enough. The other party also needs to give sufficient feedback. Only when a positive interactive relationship is formed between users and products can the product continue to develop and users can be stuck for a long time.

But this does not mean that all users can be acquired or retained through incentives. We still need to be reminded that we cannot blindly set up reward links and cannot fall into the misunderstanding of only pursuing incentives for users without pursuing iterative polishing of products. Therefore, I believe that incentives and rewards are only part of user growth. Only when users complete the "trigger" and "action" and truly understand the value of the product, will incentives have a multiplier effect.

5. Investment: Make users willing to spend money on the product

The last step in the addiction model is investment, which is extremely important for user habit formation. This stage encourages users to invest in something valuable. To put it bluntly, it means that they are willing to spend money and pay for the product.

Once users reach the investment stage, the product can achieve commercial monetization. In King of Glory, users' investment is mainly manifested in recharging points to purchase skins. We often say that there is a type of player in the game called "RMB players". In fact, it is a mockery of those players who are not capable enough but love to spend money to buy skins and equipment. However, these people are the real users who have been successfully cultivated by the product, because they have invested value, while we have only invested energy and time. How do games make money? Mainly by users making payment transactions on the platform.

△ Mall

To give another example, not every hero in Honor of Kings can be played. There are many heroes in the game, and new heroes are released every once in a while. There are many ways to obtain heroes, such as gifts from the platform, exchange with hero fragments, purchase with gold coins, obtain by completing tasks, etc., but the fastest way is to buy them with money. Many players will spend money to buy them in order to experience more heroes, especially limited edition heroes and new heroes.

In fact, users invest in order to obtain another kind of reward, which is the recognition of others. When you have bright and beautiful skin different from others, you will also have a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. To put it bluntly, it is "showing off". The reason why users need such rewards is also because King of Glory has obvious social attributes. So in order to satisfy this psychology of users, King of Glory has also made special designs in the game. When users purchase skins, the release of various skills in the game, including returning to the city, are all accompanied by skin attributes. The hero selection page and loading page before the start of the game also give users who purchase skins the opportunity to show off.

VI. Summary

Finally, let’s use a picture to review how King of Glory builds a user growth system and how it helps users complete each step:

We can think about the main stage of the products we are currently operating. If the product has a small number of users and is in the stage of starting from scratch, then we should consider whether the product positioning is clear and explicit; if the product has entered the promotion stage, but lost users are the main component of users, then we should further consider whether the design of the product itself is concise and easy to understand, and how it is usable and practical; if low-frequency users and silent users make up the majority of the user base, then we should create more motivations for users to use the product; if users are already relatively stable, but are seeking breakthroughs in increasing frequency and activating activity, we can consider giving users more incentives and rewards; the last thing to consider is the monetization link, so that users can make valuable investments.

Author: Li Li Zhou

Source: Li Li Congee