Ask HN: What makes users want to share a game?

Former f2p game designer. The industry term for what you're scratching at is virality or k-factor.

There's no static playbook here, you're trying to play society like an instrument.

Figure out why a player would be motivated to share and then make that action as obvious and easy as possible. For example players share Wordle results as if to start a conversation with ppl they already engage with: "I bet you can't beat my performance". Or, "look at my proud performance." Wordle optimizes this impulse in two ways: it fits the request into a tweet, and it uses a novel presentation to compete with all the other content posted to Twitter.

Novelty is a huge component in that last bit. Once twenty games are spamming Twitter with emoji posts, they'll all suffer. Think Facebook in 2011 when Zynga had everyone's feed stuffed with nails and wood boards and goats.

I would start thinking about the intrinsic rewards your game offers. If it makes players feel smart, they may be tempted to share to humblebrag. That's half the equation (and why focusing on sharing isn't enough) because now you need what they shared to be as enticing a click as the other content on the platform.

Makes sense to me why leaderboards didn't work. Nobody cares to compete with total strangers and even friend leaderboards are extrinsic motivation. It will only speak to competitive player types. Plus if you have any level of success, hackers will ruin your board by submitting unreachable scores.

The "zen" of virality is that attempts to over-engineer or design k-factor, often result in stunted organic growth ;)

I don't think one can really consider the explosion of Wordle to be a "pure" game hit, as it was somewhat tied into Twitter's meme distribution engine.

I think a more illuminating case study would be something like that bygone summer everyone was suddenly consumed with conquering Desktop Tower Defense. And the "kernel" of consumption was the shared novelty: "hey has anyone figured out a strategy to defeat the final wave of mega-flyers in level 20?"

I agree that good k-factor emerges, but you can still fertilize the soil, pick a sunny location, etc to increase the odds. It's hard to do this with a finished game in hand. I really think you need a holistic approach so that your desired playstyle (in this case ppl sharing outcomes with one another) is encouraged intrinsically by the design.

So I would offer that as another solution. Congratulations to OP on shipping your first game and learning a ton. What would a sequel or spiritual successor look like? This thought exercise gives you the freedom to question mechanics you already shipped which may be holding back your other design goals.

I haven't heard of Desktop Tower Defense despite considering myself a hardcore gamer. Everyone I knew was playing Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Halo 3 in 2007.

I'd be interested to hear where these conversation were happening for you.

As an example from my past, a lot of games grew on GameFaqs (pre-social media) for that exact reason. The more a community engaged, the higher that game would rank, so more users would be exposed to games that grew organically driven by difficulty, high customization, or skill.

I was in a college research experiences for undergraduates program in 2007, and Tower Defense games were incredibly popular among my peer group. I'd compare it to Angry Birds or perhaps Flappy Bird in terms of how it was seemingly everywhere for a time.

An interesting contrast was Flappy Bird popularity seemed to come out of nowhere, and was rationalized in retrospect, whereas the Tower Defense genre was the opposite. Its intrinsic interestingness seemed obvious at the time, but in retrospect I can't understand it.

It's always nice when people respond to what you've written, but this comment really brought back a surge of memories for me! Do you also recall, around the same era, there was a precursor to Angry Birds called "Crush the Castle" that similarly spawned obsessive level creation. With DTD it was A* pathfinding. With Castles it was 2D physics. Simple engine mechanics engenders repeat playability ;)

This is great feedback. I'm going to take this and go back to the drawing board. Thank you.

UX advice: I skipped the instructions and have no idea how to play it. I refreshed and it HTTP 405'ed.

Disable any visual feedback if the user clicks and drags over the grid.

Find a way to 'pulse' the color which is in the top left, so the user knows where the buttons apply to AND that the buttons are active and apply to the selection.

Grey out the buttons which do nothing.

Remove the 3,2,1 in practice mode

The colors need work, I'm not color blind, but I struggle with Orange/Red/Yellow here when they're adjacent

Display the effect a button will have when you hover over it on PC, (maybe) when long-pressed on mobile

Space out the initial 'mode selection' buttons a bit more

"I'm colorblind" needs to be bigger, and clicking on the text should affect the state of the checkbox. 48dp touch targets minimum

(maybe) Change "I'm colorblind" checkbox to a 'Colorblind mode' toggle.

(analytics) the game feels is slightly too long. A/B test to see what works. Intuition tells me you'll want 12 moves and a smaller grid, rather than 16.

(analytics) Look into the relation between win rate and retention AND how users interact with the app if they lose their first game. You might want to make the first game easier (in practice mode).

----

(more serious investment). Show don't tell. Remove the rules. Turn it into a card-view or similar with animations. I shouldn't need to be able to read to play the game. This has the advantage of making it open to any internet user in the world of any age.

----

Leaderboard: I don't care about the leaderboard or points because the points are meaningless and not explained well. I'd cut it.

I'd experiment with "X% solved this in 16 tries" (obviously with handling for the first user)

----

(maybe) consider slightly dimming the colors which aren't adjacent to the current 'blob'

This are great ideas. Thank you.

I'm going to implement a few of these.

Firstly, you're seeing some survivor bias here. As per this infamous quote - https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/febbie-dow... - most people don't recommend things randomly.

Secondly, there's another quote (that I can't find the source of) "when I share something, it is because I love my friends; not because I love your brand."

What does sharing my score of your game do to improve the lives of my friends?

Thirdly, you need large anchors. Most things which go viral are because someone "influential" started sharing it. More often than not that's a paid placement. Sometimes it is just asking your friends to share. Very rarely is it organic.

Finally, there's no science to this. If there was, large game studios would be consistently churning this stuff out.

The only way to be in the right place at the right time is to spend a lot of time in the wrong places.

So I tried this and think that one of the issues that stops people from sharing is that you don't really make it easy and inviting.

I tried the practice runs: Why is there no "share practice run results"?

I played a real game: Why can't I share results from the first run if I don't want to play further?

Finished 3 tries: The share results button has no feedback - I clicked it, why is there no "results are in your clipboard now" text? Why no platform specific buttons with a ready Tweet / fb post? (you can embed the contents of the message in the link)

What's stopping you? Why is the last game you shared on Twitter from March if you want to make it more popular?

You're right, I should make it easier for users to share the game.

I have a very small audience in twitter, and don't tweet that often, so sharing it that way wasn't really making a difference.

Here's what I'd suggest if you wanted to try to grow or monetize this game:

- Add more eye candy (juice)

- Find a theme that resonates but doesn't get in the way. Household chores (wall painting? retiling the tub?) might be a good theme, for example. Use the theme to explain the game better and give a more friendly FTUE

- Add some simple, skippable monetization (e.g. optionally watch a video ad to get your 2 daily retrys)

- Advertise the game on a lot of channels (facebook, google ads, whatever). Use small ad buys and keep track of where it works and where it doesn't.

- Don't add any sharing features (yet). As you grow your users, watch how they share organically. Do they post screenshots of the finished level? Do they ask for tips? When you notice patterns, build in game features to automate these behaviors.

- Port to mobile, and use mobile ad networks to further grow the game.

- Profit?? maybe? get cloned by somebody in three days? Get bogged down in rewriting for a different engine? Who knows? game dev is fun like that.

Unless lightning strikes, you're not really going to see much impact from sharing features and viral stuff until you hit a critical mass of players (like around 10k DAU maybe?) so focus on making the experience better for the core players at first. A whole lot of the "viral" stuff you see these days are seeded with paid promotion and ad spend at first.

Thank you for all the ideas!

Fun little game. I bet if you make the board a bit smaller and people could finish it in 45 seconds or so and made the restart even faster you could get some more daily visitors.

And make the ux pretty.

I'ma send this to my brother who likes little games and doesnt care about ux. If I send it to my wife she wont touch it because it doesnt look nice.

Oh. Maybe make the boxes bigger too. I played on desktop but having larger boxes might make it feel better.

At least in this case, there's no "trick" to Wordle's virality. It was just a good game.

Have you played wordle? Did you share your results? In my case, I shared my results in Wordle when I had particularly rewarding solves: perhaps I puzzled over a particular combination of greens and yellows for 5 minutes or so before finally, triumphantly going AHA!, and typing in the answer instantly. (It's also amplified by it being very do-or-die sometimes - you very obviously only have 6 guesses, so if you don't get it right, you very well might lose.) This moment is exhilarating. It's a large piece of why people share Wordle results: they're still coasting on that feeling. These moments are hallmarks of good games (or, at least, sharable ones).

Another, less important reason people shared Wordle results is because they had a moment that they thought other people could relate to. A classic is having 4 letters right, but being stuck on the last letter for multiple guesses. I'd share that out, because my friends would get it (even though they wouldn't know my exact sequence of guesses).

With your game, I don't see any of these two cases. While it's fun to click the colors in fast flood, I don't have any exhilarating AHA! moment. Perhaps I could sit down for 5 minutes and puzzle out which sequence of colors I could press, but it feels neither do-or-die nor particularly rewarding to do so. It's more of a rational "oh, I see, if I click red-blue, I expand to this area faster", etc.

Second of all, there's nothing worth sharing, in the same way that it's sometimes rewarding to share the second case I wrote about Wordle - there's nothing other people could resonate with or be interested about. In fast flood, I just share my times and color counts. There's no story or interest there, not in the same way as the second case that I illustrated in Wordle.

I understand what you mean. Gonna think this more thoroughly. Thanks for the feedback.

I'm a very casual gamer, but I do spend a non trivial amount of time on phone games and for me I share in two ways : 1. Once or maybe twice on social media or group chat when a game goes viral, ie. pasting wordle results 2 or 3 times before completely forgetting the game ever existed 2. Playing the game in front of people I know and them realizing I'm ignoring them because of Bloonz or Two Dots.

I will be sharing your game via the second method immediately, this is exactly what I want in a casual game.

Maybe to make the game more shareable in a viral way, do some kind of data driven way to set up blocks, like the tiles are based on happy news stories pictures instead of colors, with a link and the headline under the selection for each item and you accidentally read six headlines a day, while getting to play a fun puzzle? Not a game designer here, but that seems pretty fun in my head.

Thank you!

For me it's emotional factor. And what causes good, positive emotions - the combination of all aspects. Visual, sound, gameplay, ux. Unfortunately your game didn't work on my device. To give an un-biased example: there's a great puzzle collection on F-Droid calles just... "Puzzle" (many in one). Lots of classic puzzles there from sudoku to minesweeper but... I'm not inclined to share it.. yet. Because while puzzles are ok by themselves, 1) the graphic design and "eyecandiness" is zero, 2) no catchy sound as well, 3) there's no motivation to play any puzzle again - no even single-player score board. It gets boring after one or two successful matches. On the other end, looking at commercial japanese games make me feel "Wow, this is cute/amazing/beautiful/clever/well put/etc. I want to show this to my friends!". So, human trials are a must if you're not confident as a designer. ) So, any game can be boring or viral totally independently of the gameplay itself. And people don't share boring games, at least to not to look boring themselves =) PS: OK, I should confess I'm somewhat related to game development.

As you've already found out, making the game small is a massive help.

I've recently moved away from bigger games, and onto smaller projects. Let's say you make a mid-size game, it's still an indie project, but it's about a 4 gig download.

Now you're talking about a 10 to 20 minute download, plus getting it to run locally.

I've been having a lot of fun with Godot recently, it looks like it's much easier to make smaller projects with it versus Unity.

Sharing of your own volition is different from suggested sharing. I've always felt it detracts from the purity of the game and attracts the wrong sort of players. You could probably mask that by not advertising a reward and making it random or not affect gameplay, though.

It doesn't feel good to make a game and wonder if the only reason anyone plays it is because you're exploiting their brain's propensity for gambling addiction.

I share games if they are fun. I do not share anything manipulative. I do not share pay-to-play. I do not even complain about them to friends.

On the matter of UX, etc, one of my favorite games is https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Told everyone and anyone about it. Look, I'm doing it again.

Same reason someone shares a movie or a book because it's just that good.

I played it. Fun little game. In practice, I found speed to be more fun than trying to get it in 16 moves.

Couple of things. 1. How are points calculated. 2. Do I want to go for speed or smaller # of moves? 3. There was no share button on the victory screen, that might help people share it, unless this is what you had and have since removed it.

About your game:

My guess is that 6 colors is too much. I can't find long path and combinations to feel smart. Try a version with only 5 or 4 colors.

An idea from a sibling comment is to reduce the size to make the game shorter. It may be good, but I think it will make people happier to discover big blocks using fewer colors.

About Wordle:

One of the underappreciated features of Wordle was that the list of words is highly curated. It's not a bunch of obscure worlds from the dictionary. My guess is that in your game the map is generated randomly. A curated set of games for the daily challenge may be a good idea. Some maps are silly and you only have to click the buttons. Other maps have some interesting part that can be discovered and used to solve it faster. I guess most maps are uninteresting, so it's necesary to manually curate them.

How are you making them share games? In the fb era it was easier to make people share to get likes. Today people are more image conscious and don’t want to come across as nerdy or geeky.

I would suggest going for 2 and adding boosts like halving the board or free turn etc. I found it an interesting game though. All the best.

What makes users want to share a game? Here is all the cases when I ever did:

- I was asking my friends for new games in specific genres

- my friends discovered less known, but excellent games. Never casual games.

That's it. What I observed is that games are so diverse and people have different taste, my friends or family play different games that I am not interested in and they are not interested in what I play. Also I noticed a huge difference versus movies or music: people with similar taste can enjoy playing different games. That makes recommending games very different than recommending a good movie or TV show. Nobody cares if I play Sudoku or not, but I am telling anyone if I discover a new Scifi series that is good and not already famous.

wordle became widely known because it made it easy to share results. Simple text that could fit in a tweet or in a text message. When I finished, it gave me a moves, seconds, and points. There is also the moves made. If you could find a way to combine that into something that is short and sweet that lets me share it out via different venues like wordle, that might help. Especially if it looks nice and can be put into text messages, chat rooms, and other locations.

The other challenge here is that there is no goal on the main game page. There is nothing that pushes me for a better solution. So I can spam through the game and I'll get it. With Wordle, you have only so many opportunities, and that's it.

It would be good if you presented what the goal should be, so the player has something to shoot for. Right now, it's just completing it. You don't know where you stand. Maybe a Gold/Silver/Bronze ranking.

For me, a big part of Wordle’s success was its share text. It shows exactly how you played the game without giving away the puzzle. It also gives a really simple score x/6 which allows you to brag easily supporting your number 3. I also like that there is no link embedded.

I wonder what percentage of Wordle users ever share a game? My bet would be that it’s pretty low but Wordle did have a few very high-value shares on the radio and by journalist.

I know I’ve never shared a game online or off unless somebody asks me what I’m playing.

1. If the game is fun

2. If it'll be even more fun playing together.

3. If teams have an edge over solo play

only works for me in colorblind mode

16 feels too challenging.