Appeal and engagement are two different jobs

On Monday I wrote that players play for the experience, not for the mechanic. That post was the buying side of the job, appeal, the thing that brings the player to your page and gets the money out of them. Then there is the other half, engagement, the player who paid staying in the game. They are two separate jobs and however well you do one, it does not stand in for the other

To open both up a little, appeal is the player saying “this is my kind of thing” from what they see on the page alone, before they have played anything. The capsule, the trailer, the one sentence promise, the positioning. Engagement is them wanting to carry on once they have started, the moment-to-moment feel and the decisions in front of them being interesting. These are the two jobs every game that wants to succeed has to do

The diagnosis for both is familiar. If you are saying “my game is actually very good but nobody looks at it”, you have engagement and no appeal. If you are saying “wishlists are coming in but whoever opens the demo closes it inside half an hour”, it is the other way round. Both sentences come out in the same place, you have not done one of the two jobs

Steam sees this split more clearly than you do. A game with appeal but no engagement gets visibility, but its refund rates are high and its review scores are on the floor, which is exactly what the two hour play window is there for. The ones who do not refund write a review. I wrote last month about how the review score decides conversion, so the player you bring in with appeal, if there is no engagement, kills your future traffic on the way out

Engagement usually sinks in one of two ways. Either the game is a chain of challenges from start to finish with no interesting decision to give the player. The player keeps eating skill checks and never finds a moment to breathe. Or there is a beautiful world with almost nothing to do inside it, it is just nice to look at. The second one is especially common, because building a world is a more enjoyable and easier job than designing activities

You can think of everything playable in the game as a toy. The more “ooohaaa” that toy gets out of the person playing it, the cooler and the more playable it is. Every interaction in your game, swinging a sword, opening a chest, picking up coins, has to be enjoyable on its own. What we call a game is really those toys combined with rules, goals and difficulty. If the toys are not enjoyable, no goal you put on top of them makes them fun. The player’s ooohaaa per minute rate usually decides your median playtime, and you have plenty of ways to deliver those ooohaaas

That is why order and balance matter. What you have to do as a developer is build a pool that is enjoyable to swim in. A very deep pool with a short lane is only good for diving, and a pool with very long lanes that is knee deep is only good for cooling off. The middle of those is an olympic pool, and that is the target. The way there is to set the lane length of the pool first and go deeper afterwards. If you go for depth first, making the lane longer gets much harder, because everything becomes dependent on the depth, and when you touch one place the whole thing moves at once

So what do you do? Two separate tests. For appeal, show your capsule and your one sentence to someone who does not know your game, do they understand the game at first pass, and once they understand it do they say this is my kind of thing. Then build a small, purely gameplay focused section that genuinely feels good while you play it

For engagement, have them play the core loop for 5 to 10 minutes with no goals and no score, and if they put it down before the time is up your problem is not a lack of content. They dropped it before they could even see the content, which means you need to go back over the gameplay. Whichever one is weak is where the hours go, another coat of polish on the strong one does not cover the weak one. That is why putting out a Proof of Concept as a greybox matters. You get to measure engagement in its purest form, with no appeal in the game at all

In mobile, and in Hyper Casual especially, we watched for a similar structure. First we measured whether the game had appeal with paid ads, then we tested the engagement of the game that had appeal, its mechanics first, and if the retention targets held, by enriching its content

Wishlists measure your appeal, median playtime measures your engagement, do not look at one and make a decision about the other. Appeal sets the ceiling on the money you will make, engagement is what makes that money sustainable