A lot of DevForum posts say that word of mouth is the most powerful way to get new players to your game. So I am trying to use this for my game by telling the players things as “If you are having fun, consider inviting your friends”.
Now I was doing that by just putting some text on a sign and place it in the map, but nobody actually reads them. So I was wondering, what are better ways to do this? Should I use small pop-ups, or maybe a gui that fills the enitre screen after the player played for a while? Or something else?
And also, what kind of things/sentences should I say to the player to convince them to invite or tell their friends about the game?
If anyone could give me some tips and feedback on this, it would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!
You can try to make a gui that asks after a level/thing (or whatever) “Are you enjoying the game?”, and if they press yes then a gui comes to ask “Would you like to invite your friends?” with yes or no.
I would not recommend just smashing that invite GUI into the player, since that would feel like being attacked.
It’s better to have a UI that won’t be too intrusive but will get the players attention. Ideally you’d want the player to have some incentive to invite their friends so you can maybe offer a small amount of currency, anything really to make them invite people.
A good idea would be a pop-up happening every 3-7 minutes (randomly chosen) saying about the perks of inviting friends with an “Sure” button. Once clicked could bring up the built-in InviteFriends UI.
It’s impossible to do so artificially. No one would comply after a GUI telling them to invite their friends, they have no motivate and the incentive to do so. Reviewing motivation on game design, the only sources you have are:
Material Gain - give players rewards for inviting friends.
Social Interaction - players invite friends as a social activity, give reasons to play with others. Design your game around social play.
Sharing of Experiences - recommend to their friends because they want to share what they experienced. Think of when you recommend a book or movie to someone.
Honestly, a material gain reward isn’t the best option, stick to the other two. The last one, “sharing of experiences” is the strongest source, whenever a player joins your game with good retention, they are in a state of virality, this is a time period when a person is most likely to recommend your game by reviews or word of mouth. Their passion of sharing such experience are much more convincing to others, rather than an empty “join my game”. There are plenty of reasons for someone to market your game for free, but an obvious method is to leave a deep impression on the player, most of the time it’s because of the art, story, or music. Except for some people like system designers who recommends based on unique game mechanics.
Let’s be realistic, I doubt a simple Roblox game could facilitate such experiences, seeing how much it costs to design for it. Best bet you can do is to design around teamplay, using a simple call to action button to invite friends doesn’t take that much developer time. Just… don’t reward them for doing so, explicit motivation is a dangerous tool. Oh and, don’t be obnoxious about it, like what Microsoft did with theirs, no one recommends operating systems to their colleagues.