Zynga’s latest release Cityville is the first social game to hit 100 million MAUs. The speed at which the game reached this milestone is truly breathtaking and further cements the social games industry as a paradigm shift in game play; one in which console and more serious gamers and developers are starting to respect.

From Farmville to Frontierville to Cityville, new mechanics have evolved from Zynga’s succession of hit games. They point to an evolving deeper strategic social gameplay for the user. Now, with ever more competition amongst the social game companies for users, engagement and retention are crucial to that DAU/MAU ‘stickiness’ factor.

Kevin Rose, formerly of Digg, did a great blog post on Cityville. We’re going to re-purpose this analysis and look at how discrete goal funnels would be instrumented and analyzed in our dashboard.

Funnels:

All social games funnel users towards goals. Without goals, there is no incentive to play games. Whether the goals are earned rewards, progression upgrades or adding some value to a community, all social games have goals that developers should measure, test and optimize for. For the purposes of this article, I played Cityville until I reached Level 4, just long enough to build a Town Hall, and found four types of goal funnels.

1. The Viral Funnel: A series of steps designed for the user to spread the game through invites and gifting mechanics.
2. The Engagement Funnel: A series of steps designed to nurture a user’s progression through game play to deepen a user’s commitment to the game.
3. The Retention Funnel: A series of steps designed to get the user to return to the game once they’ve ended a session, including emails and notifications.
4. The Viral Engagement Funnel: Here, a user not only attempts to complete a goal, but also must elicit help from their friends (neighbors) or pay precious virtual credits to complete the goal.

I didn’t include monetization funnels because they can be thought of as a potential revenue event at the end of both engagement and viral/engagement funnels, though a user need never pay a dime for free-to-play games (Zynga would most certainly like you to pay!) We’ll certainly dive into revenue visibility in this series.

In the table below, I’ve broken down each progressive goal funnel in the game up until I reached Level 4. Game mechanics are broken down by Engagement, and Social/Viral mechanics buckets that are persistent throughout the game.

If you’re interested, a full breakdown of my progression with screenshots can be downloaded HERE.

Observations:

• There are more viral goal funnels in the first few levels. Zynga knows that the first 15 minutes of game play are crucial to getting players engaged. Even if they drop-off and never play again, they hope that their first-time players send out viral invites and messages to other potential players.
• There are easier engagement goal funnels in the first few levels. Zynga also knows that players need to feel a sense of progress and easy flow in order to feel engaged. The first few engagement goals are essentially tutorials, but are designed to award goal completion with social mechanics like naming your city, which then solidifies psychological ownership and social investment over your virtual city.
• Viral Engagement Funnels are presented more and more as the game progresses. One inflection point of the game, where players build their City Hall, represents the capstone of the transformation of a player’s city from a small town to something bigger. At this point, players must either recruit neighbors/friends to staff City Hall, or pay City bucks to staff Samantha, the in-game virtual neighbor in all the roles.

This Viral/Engagement Funnel is the most innovative of CityVille’s goal funnels, and represents a smart evolution in their game play. More often than not, presenting a user with both the option to be viral and the option to monetize will result in the player doing both. He/she will send out invites and then monetize to progress because they do not want to wait for their friend’s responses.

Insights:

All of these funnels can be instrumented using Kontagent’s custom event funnels, and analyzed with our subsequent funnel analysis view. Once events have been instrumented, goal funnels can be dynamically created and analyzed on the fly, with results in a matter of seconds.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, where we walk through each goal funnel type and show what kinds of insights an Indie developer with similar game mechanics and user incentives can gain with our dashboard.

Tags: Facebook Game Analytics, Social Analytics, Social Game Analytics, Social Graphs