Do mobile leader-boards and achievements help?

Crocopede

Hi.

I know thats a pretty vague question. But do they help in any form? Be it player retention, word of mouth by seeing online friends playing a game, or simply having a desire to beat the high score?

What do you guys think.
I have 3 games with all of those implemented. But polishing off the 4th one im wondering if its worth it.

dislekcia

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.

dammit

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

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

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.

Crocopede

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

sudoktris

@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.