The Sad State of Player Retention

 I've been playing Jak and Daxter over again recently, and I noticed something peculiar about the trophies for that game. Because some trophies track progress by percent, and the percentage of those who get the trophy, I was able to make a graph of the number of players who made it to different points in the game over time. I knew that players would drop off over time, but the actual data for this random game example was shocking.

50% of all players, people who purchased the game for PS4, have never made it past the first 7-ish power cells out of 101! Getting 7 power cells is as simple as completing the tutorial (first 4 of them), talking to someone twice, and walking around the nearby beach until you found 2 more. For the average person, that would take about 25 minutes. I think this initial spike of people "noping" out of the game has many reasons. First, there are the players who quickly realize they made a mistake buying the game and that it isn't for them. These people are the type who get a refund after buying your game within the same day. Next are the shallow people who only bought the game because they wanted to, for a quick moment, be reminded of their childhood. That to them is all the game needed to do, and so they put it down forever. They already beat the game, so they don't bother me. Those are probably most of that cliff. Next are people who probably tested the game out, said to themselves they would come back and finish it one day when they made time for it (then never did). A tiny handful of people are making their way through this part of the game these days.

Notice that difficulty is not a reason for the dropoff; the game was quite easy right around that point in that you only need to walk around avoid slow-moving crabs, not to mention jumping on a rare occasion. Many people stayed just a little longer, and probably found a challenge they didn't like or just needed a little more time to consider quitting. People who beat the first section of the game (The Green Sage's domain) were incredibly motivated to keep playing for a couple more power cells, which meant that the excitement of exploring new locations kept leaving players at bay. I phrase it like that because after exploring this new area, a horde of people left before beating the local boss and moving on to Section 3. After that, very few people left, but by now, the damage is done: only one-third of the people who own the game get this far. The game becomes harder from this point on, and I think that is the only reason most of the people who kept leaving left. At this point, the game becoming a bit brutal isn't stopping people from leaving because they came to win, and maybe be guessing that the end is near.

80% of people who beat the game were completionists who collected everything they could. How many of those people loved the game, and how many of them felt the need to beat the game compulsively is unknown, but what this means is that about 10% or less of the players decided to beat the game with flying colors for reasons other than an abnormal need that is true for all videogames they play. Imagine you're selling a novel you wrote and you ask all who buy your book to call you on the phone when they finish reading. Imagine selling 100 books but only getting 10 phone calls in your lifetime. That's devastating: years of work for only a tiny fraction of eyes to see. Sure, this is a bad example game to use since it is the second re-release, but all the same, if you look at any traditional videogame (most of which are way longer than Jak and Daxter), the player retention is still abysmal.

The painful thing for developers like me to accept is that this is just a fact of life, and complaining about it won't help, and people shouldn't be accommodated for quitting your game either. Unless you are making a short game that practically plays itself (Telltale Games), the majority of players will not finish the game. I think this is the genius secret to Telltales, that their games are designed around high player retention, but an episodic casual game will not sell in most genres like it will for adventure games. When people buy an RPG, they violently demand it to be an absurd length (90+ hours in most cases, which is a little shorter than a Pokemon game). This is natural in that RPGs are about feeling apart of an expansive world, rather than just a visitor. You want to be surrounded by an RPG, and I get that. What I don't understand, and what I despise, is how dishonest players are with themselves when they vocally ask for longer RPGs but only play the first few hours and quit, regardless. In truth, those aren't the same people, but the watch guards of RPG length are the vocal minority, while most players listen and agree with those people on game length but will never last long enough for it to matter. What I'm saying is that the echo chamber of "Yeah, your right, it is a bad thing that this RPG
is short." among people who don't make it far into their games, really have no business allowing that to influence whether to skip a game.

This creates an interesting dilemma: Do we put a lopsided effort towards the front of the game, or do we keep the quality equal to reward the "true" fans? If we focus on the start, players have a better experience, and so we get better user reviews. The reverse is true: equal quality means maybe a better score from critics, and a much happier core, small fanbase. Either way, with Paper-Soul Theater, we'll have to tread lightly and do our best to draw people in at the start of the game to avoid that common huge falloff at the start of the experience.