Are referral systems a vital feature for games to have?

cpvr

cpvr

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Do you think a referral system is a vital feature for a game? Is it important for a referral system to offer unique items and rewards to users who refer their friends to play?


If a game doesn’t currently have a referral system, do you think one should be implemented?

What are your thoughts on having a referral system?
 
A referral system is much better than a pay-to-play scheme if you are going to reward your members somehow with an action directed towards helping the game (referring a friend vs. paying money).

Everybody has a friend who might want to join, but not everybody has money that they can contribute. So, the inequity in a referral system is much less.

If the reward is good enough, you might get a lot more from a reward than pay-to-play as referrals could spread like wildfire, upping the potential downstream revenue.
 
Demon_skeith said:
Not sure, it is nice to get more people onto a game service, but doesn't mean they will spend any money to keep the servers going.
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The more users there are, the more likely an ad is to target them.

I'd prefer to have 10000 users browsing an average of 100 pages per month (1,000,000 page views) getting served $0.50-$1.75 ads with a CTR and a CTR ratio of 0.1% (1000 clicks at an average of $1.12 per click) or $1,120 plus the 1,000,000 views as $0.50 CPM (1000) or another $500 for a total of $1,620 (probably on the lower end of $1000 though) over 1000 members doing the same but only 100 of them paying $10 per year.

You have to look at it from a quantity perspective with advertising as the main model.

From the people who do join through referrals, you can sell them an ad-free pack of $2.99 per year to increase revenue drastically from those rough figures, too. You could probably get 100 out of the 10,000 to pay that and increase monthly revenue by $12.

But, with the more referrals, the more odds you have at monetization other than having paid upgrades.

I did on the low end ($1000-1620) because I would strategically place ads and disable the most annoying of them all, the #google_vignette overlay that would have users click their back buttons immediately.

Also, 1 million page views should give you leverage to get 1 sponsor that could pay more ($1500-2000).
 
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