Robot Sea Monster Improved User Retention of Top Action Game 300%

Ninja Revinja

Robot Sea Monster Improved User Retention Of Top Action Game 300%

The Challenge

Sizzle Entertainment had a hit in Ninja Revinja, their endless runner mobile game. It ranked in the App Store’s Top 10 in 7 countries and pulled in over 2 million downloads, frequently getting 70,000 free downloads in a day. The crowd had spoken and what the crowd wanted was Ninja Revinja.

But even with all that attention, they weren’t able to monetize or keep their users. After months of working with the original development team, Sizzle Entertainment finally reached out to Robot Sea Monster Games for help. Our challenge was to step in and take the pre-existing code from a dev team that had never made an action game before this and try to optimize their codebase. How could we help Sizzle Entertainment improve user retention and monetize their otherwise successful mobile game?

Our Actions

Integrating Google Analytics was our first priority. We needed to see the per-page user actions and the player’s progress through the levels, so that we could better inform and focus our redesign efforts. Analytics provided this data. We were able to improve the first-time user experience by starting players in a tutorial level rather than on a menu screen, giving them an easy, step-by-step walkthrough of the game’s mechanics. As an additional incentive to keep playing, we reworked the initial races to be less demanding for beginners, giving them time to learn and grow their skills. Now that new players were successfully completing a level post tutorial, we turned our attention to the level and difficulty ramp.

We needed to fine-tune the player’s moment-to-moment inputs, but we found that the original code did not easily support these adjustments. As a result, we modified the player progression and power-up economy instead, allowing players to gain more advantages the longer they played. We also changed the end-game power-ups to create more player-to-player interactions for the multiplayer mode while also ensuring those interactions were made clearer to each player.

The Results

We increased monetization of the average lifetime user by 300% and Ninja Revinja shot to #1 of the Top 10 ranking games in the App Store.

However, when we realized that Ninja Revinja’s existing code base would not support improvement regarding the moment-to-moment interactions, we launched a cost-benefit analysis exercise. We took our results to Sizzle Entertainment and recommended that they shift focus to the creation of a new title, developed from scratch with the needed support properly incorporated. Sizzle Entertainment was so pleased with our performance, they gave us the reins to develop their next title, PopQuest.