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

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There is a day in the year when young adult men form new and exciting long term relationships. With games.

That day is approaching: it is Valentine’s Day.

Pascal
Zuta is the CEO of free-to-play developer Aeria Games. As part of his
company’s portfolio, he collects data on when games are at their most
stickiest: the times when players are most likely to stick with a game.
Looking through the data for his company’s catalogue, he found “we had
one curve that was completely different to most of the others in January
and February…. On one single day we’d targeted gamers who were just
much more likely to stay in our game than anyone else.”

That was February 14.

“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.