Better Player Retention Than Any Video Game in History?

Monsarrat could solve one of the biggest problems in video games: player retention. A video game maker has to spend money on advertisements to convince a player to download and try a video game. That’s expensive, so the video game must earn that money back and more. How long the average player stays and spends money is vital to the success of any game.

What a video game maker doesn’t want is to build expensive “content” (game missions, or game levels), to find that each new player burns through it quickly, playing each mission just once and then quitting the game or demanding more. Instead, video game makers succeed when a small amount of content keeps players coming back repeatedly, for a long time. Monsarrat achieves this in two ways.

1. Real World Community. Monsarrat’s founder, Johnny Monsarrat, is already an expert in player retention, having previously pioneered Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs). He was Founder, CEO, and CTO of Turbine, one of the “big three” original MMO game makers, now a division of Warner Bros. MMOs use an online community to increase player retention. If you want to see your friends, you have to keep playing the game. You feel loyalty and belonging by joining a team of players, and the team has weekly goals and needs your help, so you have to keep playing the game.

The more that players entertain each other, the less content you need to build to keep them coming back over and over. When Turbine’s game Asheron’s Call ended after 17 years, it was international news because it still had an active community that wanted to spend time together. Two other Turbine games, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, are still going with active communities more than 18 years later.

Player retention factors based on community-building should be even greater in the real world for Monsarrat’s outdoor video games, because real world friendships are more valuable than online friendships. Monsarrat’s games will act as an icebreaker, a team-building exercise, bonding players together. Just as with sports or an escape room, moving around with someone helps you make new friends. That’s both a good deed and a huge revenue opportunity in the global crisis of loneliness, when people ache to feel connected to their neighborhoods and to others.

2. Physical Activity. Physical activity elevates your body chemistry and makes you happy. That’s why baseball, basketball, and other sports are infinitely repeatable. Sports teams don’t worry about making fresh “content” or new game levels. A football field, baseball field, and basketball court are always the same size and shape, but physical activity drives a mountain of repeat play. Athletes keep playing because they love moving around.

Even Pokémon Go proves this result. Pokémon Go famously has weak player retention, but actually its retention is excellent compared to its gameplay. It’s only a “collecting” game, an uninteresting and unpopular game genre not found anywhere else in video games. Who plays collecting games on PC or console? Players collect all the easy-to-find items first and then struggle to hunt around for the rare items. Collecting games get boring.

Yet somehow Pokémon Go supercharged this weak game type with a little walking around. Relatively speaking, its player retention was actually excellent for its game type.

Monsarrat’s games aren’t based on weak gameplay. Their innovative technology, based on 6 fully granted patents, support continuous game zones outside for the first time, which are required for blockbuster, proven game genres from PC, console, mobile, and VR, like action and roleplaying. Outdoor play accelerated collecting games to new heights. It will accelerate these established game types with strong economics even further. So even with just a little game content, Monsarrat’s games could retain players better than any other video game in history.

See videos and more at monsarrat.com.