A Month on the Farm: Designing Games for Apple Watch
Last year our first game for the Apple Watch, a cute virtual pup who goes by the name of Toby™, was recognized as part of the Apple Watch Best of 2015 awards - a great moment for the team and huge motivation for us to better ourselves in 2016.
And so, a little over a month ago, we tried to do just that with the launch of our second Apple Watch game, Farm Time. The launch has been exciting: the game was featured by Apple on the Apple Watch Store in multiple countries around the world, and our daily active audience of smartwatch gamers has grown each day.
After a month of being live, the results are encouraging and we wanted to share a little of what we’ve learned so far.
We’ve seen that players around the world are super engaged with our second smartwatch game - on average, they’re opening up the app 20 times a day and playing for around 13 minutes in total on the Apple Watch alone. As well as playing regularly, they’re also sticking around for the long haul, as demonstrated by solid retention numbers that beat the averages for games on smartphone.
These positive results are all the more notable as our small team created the game relatively quickly, from concept to first App Store submission, in four months.
As you can imagine, we’re stoked. To coincide with Wooga Product Manager Sarah Schadow’s presentations this week at Digital Dragons and Nordic Game conference, we decided to share this information as a way of celebrating our first month in the App Store and to welcome update 1.1 - the first in a series of expansions and improvements we hope will keep players engaged well over the summer and beyond.
Here’s a little more on what we have learned from Farm Time so far.
Farm Time players on Apple Watch are super engaged
20 sessions a day, 30-40 seconds per session (per player, per day, on average)
Average player plays 13 minutes per day on the Watch alone
Top 2% play more than 200 sessions a day
Maximum amount of sessions played in 1 day by a player: 900
Farm Time is the first farming game designed specifically for the Apple Watch, and from the outset it was clear that short, snappy and engaging play sessions would work best.
That said, the average of 20 sessions per day since launch has surpassed our expectations. Those sessions are roughly 30 to 40 seconds each, taking the average playtime of each user up to 13 minutes per day only on the Apple Watch.
That’s already pretty impressive, but that’s before taking a look at the players we can only describe as ‘super engaged’. The top 2% of Farm Time players played more than 200 times a day - that means they’d be playing at least once every 7 minutes or so. And the top player? 900 times in one day.
How is this possible? Our goal was to design a game that supported short, frequent sessions, where players could make consistent progress, multiple times a day. Farm Time uses a dead-simple, one-tap harvest and auto-planting mechanic, inspired by incremental games. This design allows streamlined UI that fits well on the Watch, and short, efficient sessions appropriate for a wearable software experience.
Retention: Players stick around
Although it’s still early days, after the first month we’re really pleased with Farm Time’s initial retention figures. Below you can see the retention a smartphone game typically sees over the period of a month, compared to Farm Time on the Apple Watch.
Farm Time’s short term retention is approximately twice that of smartphone gaming averages, and trending toward 3x better than the average mobile game after a month.
We want to keep these trends going, and do even more for our players through updates to the game. Our 1.1 update adds a tractor to players’ farms, as well as numerous bug fixes and performance improvements. We are working on even more features and updates every day based on feedback from our loyal players.
The key to keeping players engaged for long term is, of course, creating a fun game and supporting it over time. But outside the main game, we also spent a lot of time thinking critically about the unique design opportunities the Apple Watch affords. For example, we use precisely timed long look notifications to deliver rich, illustrated detail on farm status and entice players to come back to the game. We also spent a lot of time designing and testing our Apple Watch complications so that they worked well with every Watch face. Well-designed complications allow players to keep track of their farm easily and launch the app very quickly.
Farm Time has an international audience
We shipped Farm Time last month supporting a total of 8 languages. This appears to have been a good investment, as players around the world are enjoying the game. Given that Wooga is a German developer it’s perhaps unsurprising that Germany has registered the second highest amount of play sessions, behind the USA in first place with close to 34% of the total sessions so far. The UK and France lie in third and fourth place with Australia coming in at fifth place. We’re excited we’ve been able to appeal to players internationally, and hope to grow this audience and reach even more players in the future.
Today we’re releasing version 1.1 of Farm Time, the first in a series of updates and improvements that will expand on the game’s feature sets and keep players tapping away over summer.
Designing games for the Apple Watch is a lot of fun; it’s a new platform that offers creative challenges aplenty and some really interesting design opportunities for new games. That’s why seeing early results like these for Farm Time are encouraging - it tells us a motivated, interested audience is there and they’re having fun. Which is exactly why we make games.
