Do mobile leader-boards and achievements help?

Comments

• dislekcia

  12:17pm 23 Mar 2015 edited 12:18pm 23 Mar 2015

  It depends entirely on the game.
  
  Some games are about high scores, if players are already trying to beat their own previous scores, then maybe a leaderboard will help emphasise that competition element. Trials HD (and all its subsequent sequels) do this wonderfully.
  
  Other games will only be hindered by high scores or leaderboards. What would the point of a leaderboard in Journey or Bioshock be? If you don't already have players suggesting leaderboard-like things in their own communities, or worse, if you don't have players spontaneously setting up communities to talk about your game, then a leaderboard is probably not worth implementing.
  
  Achievements are different, add those once you've finished building the entire game and you want to reward your existing players for doing cool things or to hint towards secrets or other ways to play. Don't just add achievements for the sake of having them to be able to say so in marketing copy, nobody cares.
  
  Chances are if your previous games weren't helped by leaderboards, then your current one won't be either... I'd only worry about social stuff after something started actually being propagated in social channels on its own merits.
  
  TL,DR: Usually not worth the effort unless you're super experienced at marketing. If a game needs them after it's done, great, make them then.

  Thanked by 1dammit
• dammit

  12:52pm 23 Mar 2015

  Please do not add leaderboards or achievements to games just because. It can end up hurting the player's experience more than promoting their enjoyment of the game. Also, what Danny said.
• MutantPigeon24

  1:59pm 23 Mar 2015

  dammit said:

  Please do not add leaderboards or achievements to games just because. It can end up hurting the player's experience more than promoting their enjoyment of the game. Also, what Danny said.

  I completely agree with this.
  I was really keen on adding Leaderboards to my game, using Google Play Services, but was disappointed to find that they REQUIRE you to add a minimum of 5 Achievements to use their game services.
  We implemented both, but that was definitely not the initial plan.
  
  https://developers.google.com/games/services/checklist#2_achievements
• DavidHecker

  2:36pm 23 Mar 2015

  We do put achievements in for all of our mobile games, but have only put leaderboards in for some of them. Based on the feedback we have from our target market (young kids) achievements are cool but leaderboards, not so much. Reason being, they know they can get the achievements and it's an easy thing to show your friends your collection of badges. For the leaderboards, we've often found the metric that kids respond to the best is 'level achieved' as opposed to 'hi-score'. We've seen it consistently with our play test groups across a variety of games and it's informed the way we do things now. Getting to the top of the hi-score table is impossible for everyone if you're not cheating on Game Centre anyway, so it makes no sense for us to do it as there's no credibility.

  Thanked by 4AngryMoose garethf dammit Chippit
• Crocopede

  6:27am 24 Mar 2015

  Cool thank you everyone.
  I like this thing about kids responding better to achievements than leaderboards. Something i can relate to :p
  
• sudoktris

  5:06pm 25 Mar 2015

  @Crocopede I think it depends a lot on your game type as well as your monetisation model. If your game has a competitive nature a user might just buy a power up to be able to beat his/her friend's high score. Also on IOS, Game Center helps a lot with the social media aspect and challenging high score of friends.