Designing for Engagement: Effects of Social Features in Mobile Manager Games

Sammanfattning: Mobile gaming was in 2019 the biggest revenue-creating area of gaming, beating all other forms of gaming combined. Despite this, mobile manager games are still a fairly unexplored genre. The thesis explores the area of social features in these kinds of games. Studies around the success of social networks, engaging features in mobile apps and good UX practices in mobile games were made. These findings together with a questionnaire with 87 participants created a framework of how a social feature should look like when implementing into a manager game. The feature, Social League, was designed and implemented in the game World Football Manager created by Gold Town Games. The feature is available from Friday’s through Sunday’s. Data was collected from World Football Manager prior to the implementation of Social League to get measurable data. The most central data was average game time of the players. Six weeks after Social League got implemented, the thesis studied the app and the updated data. The result showed a moderate increase of player session during the whole week, 7.3%. While looking exclusively on weekends, the average session increased by 15%, a major increase. This suggests that an introduced social aspect should increase the engagement of users in a mobile manager game.