"Niantic & the problem with using "time of use" to drive monetization"

#PokemonGO: This sub tends to assume that the top motivating force for any action Niantic takes is monetization. When there's a glitch or a new "feature" rollout that we don't like, one of the top comments is always about, not using/buying raid passes or eggs. Ultimately it is probably correct to attribute ultimate importance to the bottom line.However it may not be right to presume that this is the primary objective. Niantic very well may seek to drive that monetization by tracking and promoting other marketing metrics including user retention (how many of us are still playing after a day, a week, a month, a year) and time of use (how long do we play every time we open the app, or every day?). In marketing terms, these metrics are about creating habits. If you wake up in the morning and log into PoGo to complete a research quest for the day and exchange gifts, that's habituation.Habituation is an essential first step in eventual monetization. No one is going to spend money on an app they can easily stop using. So it makes sense that Niantic may not be focused on directly driving dollars, but instead on driving the increased use of the app.There seems to be a growing body of evidence that this is the case.Consider the patch that will force users to watch the entire gift sending animation. Or the likely removal of the quick catch glitch.Consider the long list of QOL updates that the community here has been begging for but that Niantic has completely ignored: Shortcutting the raid lobby, sorting friends to facilitate gift exchanges, skipping hatch animations. These QOL suggestions almost always revolve around ways to make the game more efficient and faster.But Niantic has ignored these requests. We attribute that to incompetence, but that's a hard sell for a company this big and with this many resources. There has to be a better reason.And that reason is very likely that the game is designed to require an investment of time. That time creates behavior. Behavior creates habits. Habits command money.Think about it. So much of this game seems so needlessly obtuse. The time it takes to open a gym. The animations after a gym battle. A raid. Catching a Pokemon (even with quick-catch). Gift exchanges.Only, here's the problem.As Niantic adds more and more features - buddy systems, battle leagues, raid hours, spotlight hours, etc, - these little time-sucks can actually start to become counterproductive. That's because rather than supporting the creation of habits, they become conspicuous and problematic. They become frustrating. They can actually make users turn off the app in frustration, breaking the almighty habit.Another problem with the "time of use" metric is that it can lead to programmer tricks to 'cheat' the system. Say you're the PoGo programing team and your marketing department is telling you to find a way to get users to play the game longer. Well, you can do this the hard way - engaging content - or you can do it the easy way - adding another animation, or removing a glitch that allows players to save time while sending a gift. Both will look like success on the ledger, but one will increase long-term play-ability and the other will have the exact opposite impact.All of which is to say something very simple:TL:DR: The need for QOL improvements the community has been asking for have grown acute as their utility for keeping users engaged with the app has declined and actually began to reverse. As more features have been added to the game play, we are very near a tipping point where unnecessary time-sucks that have driven app user time in the past instead become a barrier to the continued use. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2SBtGGd