When a game is performing alpha and beta testing, all manner of issues can pop up. Graphics can glitch, mechanics can fail, and sometimes notifications won’t work. In a blog post discussing some of the development of Subterfuge, the devs released some interesting data on push notifications and their relation to player retention rates.
When releasing their alpha build to a small number of testers, the alpha build had a few kinks in the system. One of these kinks was that the game wouldn’t send players push notifications, even if something happened in-game.
Here’s the chart along with the percent differences within a seven week period. The Y axis is percent of players that attended the alpha in total (a testing pool of 5oo participants) and the X axis is each day. Overall, the data shows that utilizing push notifications in a game can help increase retention rates.
- Day 1: retention is 2% higher without push notifications.
- Day 2: retention is 15% lower without push notifications.
- Day 3: retention is 26% lower without push notifications.
- Day 4: retention is 22% lower without push notifications.
- Day 5: retention is 25% lower without push notifications.
- Day 6: retention is 26% lower without push notifications.
- Day 7: retention is 24% lower without push notifications.
