Prepare to be romanced: starting a new game on Valentine's Day makes you more likely to stick with it

Is that a different skin for the sniper...?

“Those
people that have a high value,” he said, as part of his speech at
London’s F2P Summit. “The people we actually want, are those the guys
that have to play computer games on Valentine’s Day? You know, we’re
fighting against the stereotype all the time, but this shocked us.”

Zuta’s
data doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s used by directors and managers to
drive company policy. If you’re stuck inside gaming this Valentine’s
Day, expect to be marketed at.

That’s
not all that the player data revealed. In the summer in a country like
Italy, many potential players find other things to do: “In Germany or
Italy, when the weather’s good people go outside.” That’s fair enough,
and something Zuta expected, but the data also showed an exception in
the case of Turkey. It turned out that something quite different was
happening over there.

“They
have Ramadan,” Zuta explained. “It’s nationwide, it’s a holiday, it
takes ten days, and it’s in summertime at the moment. It’s 48 degrees
outside and you can’t eat, you can’t do anything. So people stay inside
and play computer games.” His conclusion from simple: Ramadan is a good
time to try launching a new game in Turkey. That flies in the face of
the tradition of launching big new games when winter starts, to reach
gamers hiding from the cold and to catch the Christmas rush.

Thanks to Edge.