Motivate Gamers to Buy Your Products Using the Fogg Behavior Model

The Fogg Behavior Model is one of many models designed to understand exactly what motivates specific behaviors in individuals and groups. This simple yet powerful model can reveal strategies for motivating behavior in almost any context, whether it be changing behavior within a workplace, working with your kids, or motivating consumers to buy products. Of course, we are chiefly interested in how this model can apply to motivating video-game consumers to try a product or service, which can include games, peripherals, platforms or virtually any other product in our industry.

Stated simply, the model presents behavior as the result of a combination of ability, motivation and triggers:

Behavior = Ability + Motivation + Triggers

This simple model can reveal tactics for:

- Increasing the number of microtransactions in a f2p game
- Influencing people to try product demos
- Gaining and maintaining subscriptions
- Increasing retail purchases
- Influencing platform decsions (hardware or software)
- Motivating employees in gaming companies (developers, publishers, retail, etc.)
- Motivating potential investors (traditional or crowdfunded)

Let's go through the three components of the model one at a time, and explore ways that your company can gain leverage in each area.

Ability
The ability component relates to the ease (or possibility) of performing a desired behavior. The key to leveraging this component is to make your products as easy as possible to find, try, and purchase. Using the traditional example of retail, if your game is not on the shelf, customers have no ability to buy it.

The retail model has obviously changed in the last 10 years, as digital distribution continues to gain ground over traditional outlets. Still, making your games available online is not as simple as hosting a download link on your website. How easy is it to actually find your download link? Does the link always work? Is there an annoying registration process or other gateway slowing people down as they look for your game? Is the download fast enough (direct download vs. download client vs. torrent, etc.). All of these considerations come into play for this component.

Motivation
The key question here is, "why should anyone want your product?" What have you done to motivate people to search for your game in the first place? The first, most important, and most often overlooked factor in building motivation is the quality of your product. If you release another genre stereotype, all the marketing in the world won't do much to motivate people to seek out your game. If you've created something unique and compelling, on the other hand, a little marketing spending will go a long way.

Marketing is still very important, even with a game that spawns viral word-of-mouth advertising just by being epic. Carefully craft all of your marketing messages throughout the campaign with the goal of building motivation in mind. Don't just let players know about your

upcoming release; make them want it so bad they need it! What are you doing to drive people crazy over wanting your game?

Triggers
The trigger component can be the most elusive, but it is no less important than the others. A trigger is something that ties motivation and ability together, and acts as the catalyst that puts behavior into motion. Consider, for example, that your pre-launch marketing campaign has people drooling over your game before it comes out, and that you have set up a solid digital distribution platform. What is going to tell your customers that it is time to satiate their desire and make a purchase? The answer to that question is the trigger. A trigger could be an email blast that tells pre-launch subscribers that a new update is ready to play, or it could be one final push in your advertising schedule that lets people know the game is on store shelves.

Whatever you do in this area, just do something! Do not think that your pre-launch announcements of release dates will be enough to move massive amounts of product on day one. Be just as active in the first few weeks after launch as you were in the weeks prior, letting people know that they now have the ability to satisfy their motivation.

Putting It All Together
I've focused on publishers in the above examples, but I hope this quick summary gets you thinking about ways that you can influence motivation, ability and triggers to achieve desired behaviors in whatever industry segment you may operate, and with whatever target groups you may seek to influence.

For more information on the Fogg Behavior Model, see the whitepaper below:

A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design, BJ Fogg

Photo Credit: freedigitalphotos.net: imagerymajestic

Video Review: John Lasseter - A Day in a Life

Last night I watched a very inspirational short documentary that follows Pixar/Walt Disney Animation Studio director and chief creator John Lasseter through a typical day in his life. Specifically, the video shows John making numerous directorial decisions regarding the movie Cars 2.

At first, I found the video to be a bit shallow -- while it was entertaining to see John's model trains and a bit disgusting to see his collection of nearly 400 shirts, I felt that the video lacked the substance that I was hoping for. However, that all changed when I caught a true gem of inspiration near the end of the video. At it's core, this is a video about a man who truly loves what he does each day. He is truly passionate about what he creates, and he says that every day he is thrilled to go to work and see what new things he can discover. This quick documentary is a must watch for anyone who needs a bit of inspiration and motivation to leave a dead-end job and follow a dream!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HN3-l_f-U&feature=youtu.be

Video Review - "Game Design with Will Wright"

My last video review met with excellent reviews, so I'm going to charge ahead with another! In this post I review "Game Design with Will Wright," from a speech Mr. Wright gave at SD Forum in 2003. Even though the video and examples contained therein are a bit dated, the concepts shared in the video are timeless.

In this lecture, Will goes into detail about what it takes to achieve emergence in game design. Simply put, emergence refers to a paradoxical concept that arises when a system with a simple and straightforward ruleset and constraints can provide seemingly limitless opportunities for unique experiences. Will Wright is the king of emergence, creating franchises like SimCity and the Sims, which can be learned in a single day and yet can continue to surprise players with new experiences after months or years of play. This is a definate must-watch for anyone strategizing on ways to take their gameplay design to a higher level.



http://youtu.be/CdgQyq3hEPo

Video Review: Designing Original Games | Daniel Cook

I would like to try something new with this post. Previously I've shared my reviews on books useful to those in the video game industry, but I find myself watching a great deal more lectures in video than reading books. Starting with this post, I am going to share quick overviews and reviews of informational videos that I find around the web.

This first video review focuses on "Designing Original Games," a speech given by Spry Fox's Daniel Cook at Casual Connect 2012 in Seattle. I ran across this video as an embedded comment on an insightful post on Indiebits.com.

In this video, Daniel Cook shares tips and strategies for breaking genre paradigms and creating enitrely new game mechanics and systems. Daniel shares things that he and Spry Fox have done to train their minds to generate new ideas, rather than leaning on tried-and-true methods of player interaction. This video gave me insight into how to approach game design with an eye toward innovation and creativity from the start, rather than starting with a proven genre and adapting it to stand out.

Notable Byte: If you make a game in a standard genre, there will always be players who prefer your competitors' offerings. If you make something completely unique, every player will have to play your game for that specific experience.




http://youtu.be/f7DFuXDN29M

Zynga (ZNGA) and Facebook (FB) Dive Together

One of the earlier posts in this blog asked readers to consider the possible effects on social gaming companies of the success or failure of Facebook as a public company. My postulation that gaming companies closely linked to the world's most popular social network would find much of their success out of their control seems to have proven correct over the past week, at least in a small way.

I stumbled across an article on DigitalTrends.com that made me start thinking about the future of Zynga -- the phenomenal company that created an entirely new segment of the video game consumer market. The article, linked below, reveals that Zynga plans to enter the world of online gambling next year, starting with a real-money poker game to be launched in legal and regulated markets. It wasn't too long ago that people couldn't get enough of Zynga's stable of games, staring at gradually-growing landmarks for hours while dishing out hundreds of dollars, 50 cents at a time. Why, then, should the company consider serving an entirely new target market?

While considering this interesting turn of events, I saw Jim Cramer on CNBC's Mad Money highlight the fact that both Facebook (FB) and Zynga (ZNGA) stock took a major dive in trading on Thursday (Facebook plummeted even further on Friday). Then I remembered my earlier post, Upcoming Facebook IPO Could Change the Game for Social Games, and everything started to click.

It turns out that the influence over success or failure for gaming companies linked to Facebook runs both ways. I submit that the independent success of both Facebook and Zynga indirectly rallied each other in recent years, and that we're now seeing the opposite effect. As Zynga recently cut its revenue outlook for the coming quarter and Facebook reported it's number of new users leveling off, the detrimental effects of each piece of bad news seem to be shared between the two, in addition to the expected independent effects. What's good for Facebook is good for the gaming companies that rely on it, and the opposite holds true, as well.

My advice to social gaming companies is to do exactly what the social network that went public with a single productive asset did not do -- diversify your outlets. If Zynga games were as tightly entrenched in The Android Market, iPhone App Store, XBOX Live Arcade and other popular outlets, I wonder if Facebook's slowing pace of growth would affect it as much.

Read More:

Zynga to launch real-money online poker in early 2013

Lessons from Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR)

** Read my new post for an update on SWTOR's transition to Free-to-Play ** 

Word is out that the highly anticipated MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic is floundering. As Executive Producer Rich Vogel says goodbye to Bioware and subscription numbers dip, rumors are spreading about an upcoming switch to a free-to-play model.

In this blogger's humble opinion, SWTOR is a great game. I've been a huge SWTOR fan from launch, and i still play almost every day. It boggles my mind why this awesome game is doing so poorly, but there is one 800-pound gorilla in the room, which nobody seems to be talking about, that could explain much of the game's troubles.

SWTOR needed about 10 solid servers at launch, but the game launched with about 40 servers (don't quote me on the exact numbers), some with very nasty performance problems. Most players saw their home servers empty out quickly as players flocked en masse to a select few servers. Players who did not investigate the issue and make a server switch probably had the impression that the game was completely dead, and simply left. When you're on a populated server with good performance, this game is truly epic, and doesn't disappoint in a single way.

Imagine subscribing to an MMO that habitually freezes, crashes and glitches, then imagine 90% of your server population disappearing several months after launch, and you will understand what a large number of launch subscribers experienced with SWTOR. This combination can only lead to player attrition with such a large number of attractice multiplayer titles on the market and the horizon.

I think the main lesson to learn from SWTOR is to err on the side of caution when it comes to the number of servers at launch, and to never settle for laggy, glitchy servers for a AAA MMO. Adding servers is easy, but SWTOR proves that reducing the number servers to compensate for poor planning can alienate players and cripple a game.

Bioware has recently locked all but about 10 servers. Any new subscribers should have a completely different experience from those who subscribed between December 2011 and June 2012. So there is a ray of hope that SWTOR can redeem itself. But with so many gamers making decisions based on word-of-mouth referrals, Bioware is going to be hard pressed to convince new players to try the game. Short of coming right out and saying, "We messed up, but now our server architecture is designed to facilitate robust social play," I'm not sure if MMO fans will truly understand how well-designed this game is.

Read more about the current state of SWTOR in this Gamasutra article:

BioWare 'looking at free-to-play' for Star Wars: The Old Republic

Ouya Impresses Kickstarter Backers with Revolutionary New Console

Ouya has burst onto the gaming scene in a big way recently, making headlines equally attractive to gamers and game developers. The company and product of the same name recently blew their Kickstarter funding goals away by over $2 million in the first several days, hooking backers with promises of a new type of console that they hope will change the face of the console-gaming market.


Built on Android 4.0, Ouya is designed as an open-source console with a price point under $100. Ouya encourages and invites indie developers to enter the world of console gaming as legitimate players, rather than as small voices in a crowded market of secondary importance, as is the case with current console's indie marketplaces. Far from a box for gimmick games, Ouya invites AAA developers and publishers to weight in with their best titles, as well.

Much has been said about the impact that Ouya may have when it hits store shelves in 2013, but I am more interested in the game-changing undertones of this project's very existence. The tug-of-war between AAA players and Indies has not seemed to favor either side in recent years. On one side, we see things like Digital Rights Management evolving to a point where sharing games is no longer an option, for example, while on the other side we see indie developers creating more open-source games with unlimited distribution. As another example, we see platforms like the Playstation 3 becoming more difficult for indie developers to break into, while at the same time publishing on mobile platforms becomes increasingly cost effective for indie (and even basement) developers. Ouya represents a merging of these two worlds and a reconcilliation of the two divergent trends. On a mass-market, open-source platform, AAA titles can exist alongside Indie titles with casual gamers unable to tell the difference between the two.

Whether or not Ouya makes the splash that many expect it to, this company has put an idea out into the world, and their success on Kickstarter shows that gamers and developers are not going to let this trend disappear. Ouya proves that the gaming industry as a whole wants to see Indie developers and AAA publishers on more of an even playing field; this can only be good for gamers and the industry.

For more information, visit Ouya's Kickstarter page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console