Ngmoco's Eliminate energy recharge tweak boosts player numbers
Also seems to be reflected in in-app purchases
It was only yesterday that I was totted up the impressive weekend player figures from ngmoco's iPhone online shooter Eliminate.
Last night however, the company did something clever and tweaked the recharge rate of players' energy.
Energy is the key resource in Eliminate. You automatically get a bit of energy every four hours but this is used up every time you go into battle.
If you don't have any energy, you can still play the game as per usual, but you aren't awarded any credits - the game's levelling up mechanism. If you want to keep playing and gain credits, you have to buy extra energy.
Last night, ngmoco speeded up the four hour recycle to an hour, meaning players could get more levelling up done for free.
Equally neatly it highlighted this in terms of an in-app pop up marketing message which said the change was to encourage players to make the most of their time inbetween playing console game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which was released on 10th November to general adulation.
The result was Tuesday saw a boost in concurrent player numbers.
Tracking these using the in-app ticker on a regular basis, I recorded a peak of over 4,700 player around 3am GMT or 10pm EST. In comparison, over the weekend, the peak was around 4,500.
People also played for longer with the drop off curve shifted by around an hour compared to Sunday and Monday's decline.
Of course, this isn't that surprising. Provide more reward and people will play more.
What is significant though is this player peak seemed to be mirrored by Eliminate's rise up the US Top Grossing chart, peaking at #6 during the period of heaviest play.
So the good news for ngmoco is the experiment of giving players some free energy - which would have cost a marginal amount in terms of server bandwidth - encouraged them to buy more energy.
A win-win situation then.
