There’s a profound shift in the current landscape of mobile gaming. As rising costs per install (CPIs) swiftly surpass player lifetime value (LTV), the pressure on publishers to acquire (and retain) high-LTV players only continues to rise.

Within such a competitive space, publishers encounter a pervasive challenge: leaky bucket syndrome. This issue, characterized by the continuous loss of players post-installation, compounds growth hurdles and undermines long-term sustainability.

But holes in your bucket don’t hinge on just one team’s efforts. Addressing these challenges falls on each pillar of mobile game growth flywheel teams – from User Acquisition to LiveOps and Support.

In this article, we’ll cover the essentials of leaky bucket syndrome; its origins, detection, and common causes of player churn, as well as guidelines to start driving more sustainable growth for your mobile game.

Leaky bucket syndrome and the crucial pillars of UA, LiveOps, and Product

Having a leak-proof bucket is a multi-team effort for mobile game publishers. As we discussed in our article on the flywheel model for mobile app growth, the key to successful and sustainable mobile growth is having synergy between the pillars of User Acquisition, LiveOps, and Product, with each responsible for a major part of the player experience.

1. User Acquisition and Marketing are responsible for attracting prospective players to your game by serving positive brand impressions to the right people, and turning them into players through continuous brand touches that introduce them to what your game has to offer.

2. Once a player is in the game, the baton passes to LiveOps and Monetization teams who are responsible for engaging that player with proper onboarding, getting them to the “aha” moment of understanding the value and enjoyment of the game, and offering a well-defined balance between gameplay and monetization (such as through in-app purchases or in-app advertising). This requires continuous content, new campaigns, and activations for spend or ad engagement.

3. Finally, it’s up to the Product teams – including Support – to delight players through engaging gameplay experiences, new features, and updates, such as in-app purchases (IAP) or in-app advertising (IAA), and positive support interactions.

In essence, while User Acquisition teams are in charge of filling the bucket with players, Lifecycle and Product are in charge of keeping them there – but it isn’t as simple as that. Funneling in the right kind of users is just as important to growth as the retention strategies put in place by LiveOps.

“Leaky buckets are the bane of a mobile game dev’s existence, and ultimately the biggest driver of growth is retention. You can have campaigns that deliver incredible top-line installs and registrations at low cost, but if users don’t find value in the product, there’s no form of ‘growth hacking’ that solves for high churn.”

💬 Justin Gerrard, Senior Director of Organic Growth at Mistplay

In any mobile company, the lines between these categories can be blurry, as each team works together to put the player at the center of the experience with the overarching goal to attract, engage, and delight them.

Related reading: Charting ROAS success: The flywheel growth model’s team-centric approach for mobile publishers

Finding the leaks: Why do your mobile gamers churn?

While reasons for high, consistent churn derive from different issues and areas of the business, here are some of the most common causes:

• A focus on cheap UA: Opting for quantity over quality in user acquisition can lead to high churn as you’re funneling in low-LTV or improperly targeted users who aren’t likely to stick around and enjoy your game.
  
• Misalignment between ad promises and reality: When the messaging or creative within your advertising fails to match the actual product experience, users are more likely to churn early. With 71.7% of mobile gamers reporting that it’s important to see real gameplay in advertising, it’s clear that the experience between ads and gameplay has to match to mitigate early churn.
  
• Poor onboarding practices: Inadequate onboarding can leave users feeling disconnected, disinterested, or even confused about your game, prompting them to abandon it prematurely.
  
• Intrusive or heavy-handed monetization: Overly aggressive monetization tactics can drive users away instead of fostering engagement. As found in our 2023 Mobile Gaming Loyalty Report, a game that is too “pay to win” with IAP or has too many ads are leading reasons for players to churn.

For UA teams, it’s all about finding the right, high-LTV users to funnel in, while LiveOps ensures ongoing moments of engagement to foster loyalty. And for Product, it’s about getting ahead of moments in the app that could cause friction. Let’s break down some key guidelines for how teams can rally around player retention to build a sustainable growth flywheel.

👀 Related reading: The long game: How to reduce churn and retain mobile gamers

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Patching the holes: 4 guidelines for better mobile game retention (and loyalty)

1. Strike the right balance between quality and cost in UA

While the siren call of low-cost user acquisition is enticing – especially in a modern landscape of rising CPIs – this approach can cloud the broader perspective on user quality and downstream retention. Prioritizing sheer quantity in user acquisition efforts, without due consideration for user value, can have detrimental effects on retention rates and return on ad spend (ROAS). The name of the game lies in finding high-LTV channels (quality) and achieving sustainable results (quantity) through creative and targeting optimization, which together will help lower overall customer acquisition cost (CAC).

“When running efficient UA campaigns, there can be a tendency to focus on the most ‘cost-effective’ users to maximize user scale. However, this neglects the bigger picture of down-funnel users’ quality and can cause users to churn. This may include lower retention and ROAS within campaigns.

‍Additionally, it’s important to look at later cohorts per media source to see how they develop. A strong D1/3/7 does not necessarily yield a strong D30 depending on the media source. So while your high-funnel metrics look strong, they can also give you a false sense of security and lower your business revenue.”

💬 Nick Cullen, User Acquisition Team Lead at Mistplay

Every UA team’s challenge is to find the right channels that consistently deliver high-LTV users for LiveOps and Product teams to effectively engage during their gaming experience. Therefore, UA teams need to collaborate closely with Data and Product teams to monitor the downstream effects of their campaigns, while aligning against ROAS targets to deliver results further down the funnel.‍

‍👀 Related reading: Reeling in success: User acquisition strategies to catch high-value spenders for gaming apps

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2. Find the “aha” moment and recreate it for everyone

Onboarding plays a crucial role in shaping the user experience and setting the stage for long-term engagement in mobile gaming. The principal aim of any app’s onboarding experience goes beyond familiarizing a player with how your game works, but more importantly, gets them to that moment of delight (the “aha” moment) where they see value in the gameplay experience.

‍“Every product should have a magic moment where the value of the experience is clearly understood by the user, which will unlock long-term retention. Famously, Facebook’s ‘magic moment’ for user retention was when a new user added seven friends within the first ten days of signing up. The company found that reaching this milestone significantly increased the likelihood that the user would continue to engage with the platform. All companies should have at least one hero metric they’re working back from that has an exponential impact on retention.”

💬 Justin Gerrard, Senior Director of Organic Growth at Mistplay

By providing clear guidance, relevant information, and engaging tutorials during onboarding, LiveOps, Lifecycle, and Product teams can work together to help users navigate the game’s features, mechanics, and objectives more effectively. But don’t just push users through onboarding straight into the “aha” moment as fast as possible – consider that players need to understand why they’re completing these steps and following this journey in order to choose to put effort into completing it. Onboarding experiences must strike a balance between speed and education to mitigate drop-off before that moment of delight.

‍“The first-time user experience (FTUE) is an important flow to review and optimize. It serves as the user’s first interaction with the application, and is where the app prompts the user to complete the most tasks in order to initiate the core engagement loop. If a user does not know why they are completing these actions, or providing data, they will likely churn. That’s why it’s important to design an FTUE that is both informative and efficient to get users engaged quickly.”

💬 Thanuree Pathiranawasam, Principal Product Manager at Mistplay

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3. Don’t neglect support

There’s no such thing as a perfect product. When you have an active mobile game that frequently rolls out new feature updates and events – key pieces of any good retention and engagement strategy – there’s bound to be issues along the way. That means your Support team and system must be deeply rooted in the gameplay and player experience.

Having strong support processes to easily intake player reports and requests, quickly respond to issues, and actively incorporate player feedback into game updates, can turn support into your superpower to not only plug growth leaks but also cultivate a loyal community. In the grand scheme of things, a well-rounded support mechanism is the silent hero that contributes to long-lasting success and resilience in the challenging realm of mobile gaming.

“Customer Support’s fast response times are key to retention. If CS can respond to the user and solve their issues fast, they are more likely to open that app up again. A big part of this is to marry your support data with your user data. This will help you surface issues to your Dev team, prioritize fast response times with your valuable users, and open the door to improve what users are reaching out about.”

💬 Sam Coffey, Director of Customer Support at Mistplay

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4. Drive cross-team collaboration with a North Star metric

As previously discussed, building a sustainable growth flywheel is a multi-team, cross-collaborative effort. It’s up to all teams, from UA to Support, to monitor, refine, and optimize their strategies to reduce friction within the player experience.But breaking down silos and ensuring productive cross-collaboration within a large organization is easier said than done. One way to keep teams running in the same direction is to determine a single North Star metric – the one KPI that serves as a beacon for all teams, guiding them through their shared vision, joint decisions, and common strategies.For example, say your North Star metric is retention. Here’s how teams across departments could organize themselves:

• User acquisition could focus on attracting users with a higher likelihood of continuous play sessions, such as targeted advertising in genres with higher D30 retention, like Puzzle games (as mentioned in the 2023 Mobile Gaming Loyalty Report).
• Product could prioritize features that encourage quick, daily engagement loops to keep players progressing forward, incrementally, each day.
• Monetization could leverage a hybrid monetization model of in-app advertising (IAA) and subscriptions to remove ads, which would encourage players to come back to the game since they paid for a certain period of ad-free play.
• LiveOps and Lifecycle could introduce dynamic, in-game events, challenges, and even sweepstakes that require a specific play frequency or duration to be met.
• Support could tailor their strategies to ensure swift responses to player inquiries and concerns with in-app reporting available to submit detailed requests, quickly.

While each team’s decisions, strategy, and processes might look different, they would all play a pivotal role in guiding players to the enjoyment of continuous daily play sessions – moving the needle on their North Star metric.In addition, by leveraging predictive analytics and models (over reactive ones), publishers can better forecast player behavior against your North Star metric to help LiveOps, Lifecycle, and Product teams pave the path to their players’ “aha” moment.

“Having a North Star metric is crucial to get all teams rowing in the same direction. To drive your player behavior towards that metric, the ideal is to inform your strategies with predictive (rather than reactive) insights. For example, if your North Star metric is spend, and your data shows that if a user plays for more than 60 minutes per day, they’re very likely to become a spender… You can use that data to target users who play 45–50 minutes per day and offer them an incentive to play more, increasing the likelihood that they will spend.”

💬 Blair Nordstrom, Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Mistplay

👀 Related reading: Cracking the code to player loyalty: 6 metrics driving LTV

Fortifying your growth bucket for the future

Churn can happen at any point in the player lifecycle, which means that fortifying your growth strategy is an ongoing mission that involves effort from all sides of the business. But by fostering a culture of collaboration across departments, from UA to Support, you can get all hands on deck to increase engagement for more sustainable growth.

“A well-oiled growth engine is one that removes all silos and rallies around strong collaboration between Marketing and Product teams. It’s essential that the whole user journey, from ad impression to post-install engagement, is analyzed cohesively to realize maximum impact. The user experience is one continuous flow, and developers need to cross-functionally optimize it through that same lens too. Even improving long-term retention by a single-digit percent will compound into higher LTV and become a game changer for UA performance that can help fuel the next leg of growth.”

💬 Kyle West, Senior Director of Marketing at Mistplay

One surefire way to fortify your growth bucket is to grow your player loyalty. By prioritizing player-centric approaches, personalized experiences, and community-building initiatives, publishers can effectively pull the loyalty lever, creating a foundation for lasting mobile game retention and success.

See how Mistplay works with game publishers like Trailmix to take a loyalty-first approach in UA and retention efforts, in order to unlock results like 25% higher D1 retention and 30% aggregate install lift for Love & Pies. Want to unlock the power of your player loyalty? Contact us today.

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