Where Most Freemium Games Fail, Kabam Strives to Win!

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A few years ago I downloaded my first freemium game. I played it for awhile and then had an issue. I submitted a ticket on the company's support website. 48 hours later I got a response. By then I had already deleted the game and moved on to another one. So I deleted the email and forgot about the game.

After unconsciously repeating this process seven or eight times, I began to wonder, why could I not stick to one game and why would I not spend time to get deeper into these games?

Through the lens of my support leader's eyes, it became clear. These gaming companies were not engaging me, they were not focused on my behaviors, and therefore I was not invested in their product.

They lost my eyeballs, interest, and my attention.

It then occurred to me. This lack of engagement, care, and sense of urgency is costing these companies tons of potential players and money. And they probably do not even realize it.

To prove out my theory, learn more, and lend my experience, I decided to join one, Kabam.

What is Freemium and why does it matter to gaming?

For folks new to this business concept, here are some additional details. Wikipedia shares the Freemium concept in this way, “Freemium is a pricing strategy by which a product or service (typically a digital offering or application such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods”.

According to a variety of sources this term or larger business approach started circa 2006. Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, was quoted in an article on Business News Daily, which explains clearly the value of the Freemium model. He states, "The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people playing."

In the mobile gaming context, below is the revenue forecast from the Global Games Market report for 2016-2020.

Over the next 4 years the market share of mobile gaming will jump from 29% to 40% of all gaming revenue or $26.3B. This means the more eyeballs you have, the more downloads you get, leads to more opportunities to influence players to play and spend in a Freemium game.

What I Learned at Kabam

Upon joining Kabam, I completed a comprehensive player listening tour across all disciplines. It was very informative and helpful to understand how our talented designers, developers, operations, support, and producers think and operate on a daily basis. I was amazed at the passion and focus each role had for our players and that everyone in the company plays our games everyday.

As I dug deeper into my support and community discipline, I found some compelling challenges that were different than other industries I had worked in.

The first challenge is the word ‘free’ means something different to each player that downloads our game. Often times our players, and us as creators, have a different understanding of what the value of free is. This complexity requires different ways of thinking and engaging our players, as well as how we operate our business. A mapping of how players value themselves and how we value them has been a key differentiator to Kabam’s success.

The second challenge is how gaming board rooms around the world invest in their support and community teams. The trend is to follow the same way they invested with their console games. This antiquated thinking leads to a broad brush business approach to all of their players, even if many are more invested (time+money) in your game than others. Kabam thinks about this differently. We have the ability to clearly identify who our players are and invest in them in kind.

The third challenge is best illuminated by IMPAKTER below:

The world has changed, everything moves faster, people want things now and on their terms, and a gaming company's ability to engage and retain a player’s attention has never been harder. At Kabam, it is not just about answering questions or how fast we respond. It’s about listening, enabling, empowering, and engaging our players. It is about building an ecosystem of players that are ambassadors for us, even when we are not in every conversation on every platform.

What I learned from benchmarking the industry

Upon reviewing these challenges with my team, stakeholders, and partners across the company, we found that certain ways of thinking that were happening in the industry, were legacy and detrimental to long term success.

In general we agreed that we must avoid industry approaches of thinking and talking to players in antiquated ways:

Support is a necessary cost, let’s try to minimize it, after all we don’t need complainers in our game

Let’s deflect all of our players to the knowledge base and hope they get their answers

We had a longer response time on console so it will work for mobile, all players are the same

I don’t need gamers to answer support questions, anyone can do it, with training

I don’t need to invest in tech for support and community, the service experience is not a priority

I don’t need to understand my players, all players are the same

People love our game, it doesn’t matter if we engage them. It is so amazing, they will keep coming

We strongly felt that disruption was the key. Disruption to how we think about, engage with, and treat the players of our games. Disruption in how we invest, disruption to how we prioritise our boardroom conversations, and disruption in how we allow our support and community teams to operate. We decided we must disrupt, think blue sky, and retire legacy thought processes.

How Kabam is Different

To help us drive this disruption, we aligned how to engage our players across the leadership team and all disciplines. We did not merely want to support players, we were going to retain them. And not just for a day or month, but for the life of the game.

We re-wrote and embraced new guiding principles that engage and listen to our players:

The core game mission, once players get into the game, should be to keep them playing, everyday.

Leveraging technology and people in new and innovative ways will be the difference in winning the eyeball game

Every player has value, understanding it, categorizing it, and maximizing it through engagement will be the key

Deeply embedding and measuring this approach in our Support and Community teams, as well as the reinforcing it in the company culture, will be essential to long term success

Support and Community is a means to an end. Investing in the means will derive multiplicative results on the end

The end result is how often our players play our games, how much they play our games, and then in turn how they share their enjoyment by spending and investing in our games

Our ability to disrupt the vision, strategy, purpose, and deployment of the resources and technology that engages our players everyday, has had a profound impact on our player base and our bottom line.

Stepping back into my player mindset. Like many of you, I love mobile video games. I like free things. I will continue to try and test them out. Just as I do in other walks of my life, I will choose to care about and invest in the ones that reciprocate and engage me in kind. It will be an unconscious behavior. I know each of you are the same way.

Where many Freemium companies still operate in legacy and failing ways. Kabam tries to win players affections and loyalty everyday, by finding new and innovative ways to engage our players we enrich their gaming entertainment experience.

Our willingness to disrupt, re-imagine, and adapt how we think and operate has put us in a great position to grab part of the amazing $26.3B opportunity that sits in front of us.