Episode is a top grossing free to play mobile storytelling game that lets players choose their own story. With over 150,000+ stories, Episode has the largest selection of interactive stories available on mobile.
This case study presents the process of creating and designing Episode's new social engagement feature Book Clubs.
Our goal was to boost long term player retention by introducing social interaction to the Episode platform. This presented a unique challenge of how best to incorporate social interaction with other players into a historically solitary user experience in a meaningful way that didn't feel like it took away from the experience that players had grown to love.
For the initial concept we took inspiration from the real world parallel of book clubs where people read separately and come together to discuss their experiences. We continued to build on this idea by looking for ways to further deepen these connections and build a sense of community by looking to more traditional guilds which allow players to work together toward shared goals.
Before getting started we needed to validate with players the key assumptions this idea was based on:
To do this, I set up interviews with Episode players to discuss their interest in socializing and how they envisioned themselves interacting with others in the app.
The result showed that users were either interested or open to the idea of socializing on Episode, provided that it did not negatively impact the way they were currently playing. They were also open to collaborating to earn rewards but didn't want additional tasks that felt like chores and took them away from their primary goal of reading stories.
I set out to create an experience for players that would focus on only bringing additional value to the way they were already playing. Rewarding players for coming together and reading more stories together.
We ran a beta test putting users into groups and manually controlling challenges and rewards with chat occurring through a web view of our forums. In spite of the high friction in this test users were overwhelmingly positive and we saw significant increase in engagement, stories read, and monetization .
User feedback was primarily directed at the high friction of the beta and wanting the experience to be more seamless which would be addressed once Book Clubs was completely built.
Final visuals were created for the MVP version of this feature and rolled out to the rest of the Episode audience.
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Our initial release to all players contained core features with additional features being planned for future releases.
Since the release of book clubs we have seen the improvements we were hoping for in long term retention and engagement. We've also continued to see lifts in stories read and monetization.
Book Clubs is still under development and the team is currently in the process of expanding on the current feature set.
A sampling of some other projects I've brought to Episode.
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