Why is cityville so popular

It's filled with hooks to bring in your friends, and it entices you to spend real cash for credits. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.

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It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. The object of CityVille is to build a great town. When I first get started, CityVille character and "friend" Samantha guides me through the game.

I think I'll name my town Pegtown! Building my first house! They are obsessed with retention, a commonly-used term to describe whether players return to a game or bounce from it, and the period of weeks or months that the average retained customer spends in the game before boredom finally sets in.

Understanding retention is essential to achieving sustainable growth and revenue in a social game like CityVille. In order to understand what's really going on with a game, you need to look at the daily active users DAU as well as the monthly active users MAU. Tracking services like Appdata provide useful summaries of these statistics, as well as a calculation of one over the other. The percentage for CityVille started off extremely high.

That's not unusual in the first week of a game's launch however, because everything is new, users are only discovering it for the first time, and the MAU figure has not had a full month to build up. A more stable example is FarmVille :. FarmVille has long been a standard-bearer for engagement on big games. Quizzes: The reason why Crowdstar in particular has a low percentage is because one of their most popular apps is a quiz engine. This often gives a skewed impression of how important a company might actually be in the social game space.

Visibility Strategy: This is a bit of a repeat from the first part of the article, but the prevalence of publishing options in particular creates more hooks for lapsed players to return to a game. The Facebook economy works geometrically and exponentially, and that applies to retention as well as initial interest. Game Activity: How Zynga structures its games, particularly with respect to time- and click-based dynamics, encourages players to remember to come back and play some more.

That's what I'm going to talk about mostly in this article. Late last year, Playfish released two games that they probably shouldn't have. One was Poker Rivals and the other was Gangster City.

Each was, in its own way, a better execution of the incumbents in their genre, Zynga's Texas Hold'Em and Mafia Wars , and yet each has proved to be a failure.

The lesson is not that you can't fight Zynga. Crowdstar faced off a challenge from Zynga trying to eat its Happy Aquarium market with FishVille , and while both are well past their heyday, FishVille proved to be the loser. A hidden, but determining, factor for retention is whether this is the first time that players have encountered that game type.

It's therefore important to be the first one of that type that the average user sees. Interestingly, this may have significant consequences for CityVille. After all, social city-building games have now been around for a while, and although CityVille is doing some things differently, the game may end up falling into the same trap as FishVille or Gangster City. It's far too early to tell. The core game dynamic of CityVille is click-to-do.

Click to build, click to collect, click to plant, click to harvest, click to deliver supplies. So much clicking is oddly compelling. My current city in CityVille is only a couple of streets in size, but when I do expand it out significantly, I think I might find the extent of such manual maintenance becomes boring. Timers prevent endless clicking. As I described in the previous post , social games like CityVille employ two kinds of timer: Specific timers on buildings or crops, and general timers in the form of energy.

Timers are deliberately staggered. Planting strawberries takes 5 minutes for them to grow, a cottage generates coins once per hour, and corn takes 24 hours to grow. So you can see why these activities encourage repeated visits. With FarmVille which uses the same system there are many apocryphal stories of players getting up in the middle of the night to harvest their virtual beetroot.

In fact this sort of timed game dynamic goes at least as far back as the Excel-in-space game Planetarion.

Energy works another way. It is a limit on the amount of click actions that you can take in a short space of time. Some clicks, but not all, dock the player a point of energy.

Constructing a building docks energy, but clearing dead crops is free. Energy is resupplied on its own timer at a rate of one point every five minutes, or replenished if the player attains a level. Timers used in this dual fashion are incredibly effective. What they do is to deliberately set up a conflict whereby players have to wait to do everything they want, but in the mean time can do some of the things that they want.

Rather than use one global timer, as Planetarion did, the use of multiple timers creates the sensation that there is always something to do while waiting. The mix of the two is highly compelling. While players enjoy the click activity see above , timers essentially introduce delayed gratification, and then CityVille offers premium ways to circumvent some but not all of that delay.

One of the foundations of monetisation in CityVille is buying more energy, for example. This gets you more activity and more clicks. The sheer number of rewards in CityVille is intriguing. Pellets are basically any object that appears on the ground when you collect from a building or harvest from your crops. They include:. The trick with pellets seems to be that the fundamentals required for the game economy to function coins, experience and goods in CityVille need to be constantly available.

The game might occasionally reward an extra drop of one of these pellets as a part of a regular click action, but the player expects a baseline for their hard work. Otherwise the game feels unfair.

The other kinds of pellet thus become delights. A delight is a reward of happy circumstance and the perception of luck. In a TED talk by Tom Chatfield , he describes seven ways that games reward the brain, and he talks about how the perception of randomness and actual randomness are two different things.

Often when players are close to completing a set, for example, they start to feel as though the game is denying them the last piece unfairly. So games perhaps CityVille is one of them increase the likelihood that the last couple of items in the set will drop.

Friends who play CityVille do not automatically become a neighbor but must be invited and must accept to be included in the social circle. The social aspect of CityVille is also seen in the sending of free gifts to one another. Players can send gifts to their friends, whether they play Cityville or not. Some gifts are decorative, while others are essential for the completion of buildings.

Some gifts, such as Energy and Building Permits, assist in advancing in the game. As a building simulation game, it can be used as a tool to teach decision-making and simple economics -- which trade route or crop brings you the best yield, or which business is the most profitable if franchised, for example.

Interaction with another city can reward the player with coins, experience points, reputation points, energy, and resources.

Energy is the most important item in the game as most click actions require energy, including building anything, collecting rents, and even harvesting crops. You gain energy over time and can earn it by visiting neighbors, having it be gifted, or buying it with real money.

In the early stages of the game, where a player might have only 10 buildings and farm plots to interact with, this is hardly an issue, but as the player's city grows, the need for energy becomes more urgent. Players will either have to create a large circle of neighbors or purchase energy in order to advance in the game -- the former can create privacy problems if players "friend" strangers.

Families can talk about online privacy and staying safe while online. Why do you want to add so many friends when you don't know these people?

Can the game be played without 50 other friends? Families can also talk about the privacy features on Facebook that can be used to prevent strangers from reading their posts and seeing their photographs. Player might want to create a separate list, adding people onto it that are barred from seeing photographs, and setting the chat function to offline to prevent unwanted contact.

Families can also discuss actual city planning. Is it a good idea to build a Tavern and Pool Hall next to the elementary school and playground? Why is it a good idea to have greenspace in a city? Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

See how we rate. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization, earns a small affiliate fee from Amazon or iTunes when you use our links to make a purchase. Thank you for your support.

Our ratings are based on child development best practices. We display the minimum age for which content is developmentally appropriate. The star rating reflects overall quality and learning potential. Learn how we rate. Zynga lists houses, post offices, fire departments, schools, restaurants and shops with the goal of making money. They don't mention crime or wretched subway service, so it's not clear what the CityVille equivalent of dying crops or FrontierVille varmints will be.

Civil unrest, perhaps? The darkest event Zynga warns against in a press release today is the "stomach rumbling" of hungry citizens. Food is key, a carry-over from FarmVille and FrontierVille. You can have a farm, plant crops or import "goods" food? The game's creators are pushing a few changes to the FarmVille formula.