Michael Gugel

4 Reasons Why People Play Games

Posted on31. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

Why do people play games?  According to a 2004 XEODesign study, there are 4 key elements that make people play: hard fun, easy fun, altered states, and the people factor.
Hard Fun
Gamers want to be in flow.  That means giving them skill-based challenges that aren’t too easy or too hard.  Failing 80% of the time (and [...]

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Top 6 Stats for a Social App

Posted on27. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

A few months ago, I was in San Francisco and was walking home from work with a friend.  When we were about halfway there, he made a startling claim:
If it can’t be measured, then it’s not worth doing.
Whether or not you agree, there’s no excuse for failing to keep track of these basic social gaming stats:
DAU
Daily [...]

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Game Mechanics Satisfying Human Needs

Posted on21. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

Catherine Aurelio gave an interesting talk about gamification at TED Santa Cruz.  The golden nugget from her presentation was the chart that mapped game mechanics to human needs:
The human needs she outlined are really high on Maslow’s hierarchy, but they’ll still probably hit a good chunk of your userbase.

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How We Interact With Other People Online

Posted on20. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

This mindblowing 244-page deck was put together by Paul Adams. Paul was a former researcher at Google, but now works at Facebook.  His work laid the foundation for Google+ and has some truly profound insights on how we interact with other people online.
This is a MUST read.
The Real Life Social Network v2
View more [...]

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Gaming Industry Size & Stats

Posted on13. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

EA officially announced that they acquired Popcap today.  EA and Popcap combined have 10M DAU on Facebook according to AppData.  They’re still second to Zynga (who has 53.6M DAU), but now they’re far ahead of the wooga, the third place contender with 4.5M DAU.
The SEC report that EA filed today had some really interesting tidbits [...]

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Freemium Mobile Apps > Paid Apps?

Posted on09. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

Here’s a pop quiz.
Is it better to charge for a mobile app OR to distribute it for free and have users buy virtual goods?
A study by Flurry suggests that the freemium model is the way to go.  They compared the top 100 grossing apps in the App Store in January and June of 2011 .
Freemium [...]

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Civ World Review

Posted on08. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

When I first heard about Sid Meier’s Civilization app on Facebook, I thought it might give Cityville a run for its money.  Sid’s previous Civilization games had deep gameplay and required skill, strategy and tactics.
Sid stayed true to the original Civilization games with Civ World.  The game does have strategy and depth.  The only problem [...]

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iOS + Android Gaming Stats

Posted on07. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

Nielson just released some awesome stats about the habits of mobile gamers.

Games are the most popular app category. 64% of  mobile users played a game in the last 30 days.
93% of mobile users are willing to pay for a game.
An iOS users spends 14.7 hours per month playing games on their phone.  An Android user [...]

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Kurt Vonnegut Explains How Stories Work

Posted on06. Jul, 2011 by Michael Gugel.

A post on Gamasutra linked to an interesting video of Kurt Vonnegut explaining how stories work:

This doesn’t just apply to books. Stories can be extremely powerful drivers in marketing and games.

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