Clans (commonly called guilds or teams) are social features that group several players together, allowing for cooperation, collaboration, and interdependence. In these groups of ~50, players can chat, share gifts, and compete in challenges.
With the emergence of more immersive virtual worlds, as well as rising player expectations around better forms of meaningful social interaction, best practices to accommodate engaging experiences among players are becoming exponentially more important for all new and existing products. After all, regardless of how good a game is, players will always, in time, get bored of it. Games that can retain long-term interest drive players to interact meaningfully; these in-game friendships and rivalries can create loyalty over the years, thus enhancing long-term retention and often monetization.
Social features usually add a new layer of dynamics to a game. They can breathe new life into a product through unexpected behaviors, exciting new content, and fresh challenges. This is especially effective for players motivated by social comparison and competition. Clash of Clans is an excellent case study of this. Released over a decade ago in August 2012, Clash of Clans is still going strong, earning $296.75M this year alone.
Being core to the experience, cooperative and competitive social features (such as clans) are a strong driving force behind Clash of Clan’s ongoing success.
You can find another strong case for the power of clans in Century Game’s Idle Mafia. Let’s look at some of Idle Mafia’s key competitors (data source: Sensor Tower):
You’ll notice that there are two stand-out performers here, Idle Mafia and Egg Inc. These happen to be the only two with a clan-like feature. More specifically, Idle Mafia has significantly higher LTV than its peers due to:
- The game’s subscription system (Mafia Club) strengthening monetization (learn more about VIP subscriptions in our recent article).
- The game’s fleshed out PVP and social features (such as Gangs, Idle Mafia’s clan feature, and Arena); motivators that are missing from most of their competition.
Although they come at a high development cost, clan features often provide numerous benefits from a revenue and retention perspective, harnessing the power to push a product on top of the competition.
The Benefits of Clan Features
Clans have the power to boost activity throughout your game, making it feel fresh and exciting. They have the potential to uplift KPIs and audience appeal across the product, as discussed in the sections below:
Clans Broaden Gameplay Motivations
When designing a clan feature, it’s key to appeal to as many people as possible.
The best clan features look to introduce a mix of new content that creates a variety of reasons for a diverse playerbase to engage with the game. Grouping players by motivation helps us identify what a player wants out of a game — or, more accurately, the reason that a player plays a game. Different players approach games differently, with varying priorities and expectations, as shown below:
Most commonly, clan features look to target social players through socializing (chat systems), cooperation (gifting and clan events), social comparison (leaderboards), and competition (tournaments). For social players, community is essential. Developing and nurturing this player drive ASAP is key to having a successful clan feature.
That said, adding depth via adjacent features widens the appeal to a broader range of players. For example, adding an achievement system to clans that awards trophies for contribution or tournament placement appeals to a whole new player group – achievers.
Clans Provide Strong Retention Benefits
Clans improve retention in three core ways:
- Progression Vectors (clan level, member level, etc.): Through progression vectors, such as clan level, clans create regularly refreshing obtainable goals for players to drive towards; this is especially true for highly engaged players who have reached the end of the core content.
- Return Triggers (daily donation limits, clan events, etc.): Return triggers create an appointment to return each day. Common implementation examples include daily donation limits, clan events, and player activity notifications.
- Social Obligation (event progress, item donation, etc.): Social pressures increase spending behavior and engagement for players working to earn their place within the clan and maintaining that sense of loyalty and friendship.
Including a healthy mix of the three points above sets an excellent foundation for a successful clan feature.
Clans Uplift Revenue
Numerous monetization catalysts, such as live-ops, are often present to help drive revenue, being compelled primarily by a technique called loss aversion. Considering the limited nature of live-ops, players look to gain an advantage by increasing their performance and accelerating their progress, or else they miss out. Boosters are a great consideration in this area, allowing players to boost their gains for a limited time at a small cost.
Clan contribution live-ops (events where players must all contribute towards a mutual goal in exchange for a reward) push for players to increase their engagement and spending through the limited nature of the events and the fear of missing out and letting down their clan.
Source: Shop Titans.
In Shop Titans, guild members all work together to upgrade a guild-owned town; this is done through donations, as shown above. The buildings inside the town act as repositories for the majority of resources in the game needed to progress. Additionally, these periodically provide essential benefits and boosts. This social dependency encourages a high level of social interaction and communication, making it worthwhile for all players within a guild to work together in order to increase their chances of success and accelerate their progression.
Contributions are listed in the ‘investors’ tab, which is viewable by everyone in a clan. This puts social pressure on players to do better. Social cooperation is a strong catalyst for spending, especially when there is a yardstick for comparison, such as the investor leaderboard mentioned earlier.
To summarize, Shop Titans encourages players to sink their resources in exchange for group benefits and highlights their contribution as they go. By creating a meaningful reason to engage, socialize, strategize, and share, Shop Titans creates a strong case to engage with its guild feature.
Aside from live-ops, player exposure can also promote increased spending. As aforementioned, clans primarily target social players. This group values how their peers perceive them; their status is of the utmost importance to them. And when this is consistently showcased within a social space (or better yet, the core loop), social players become increasingly conscious of their position. Sales of cosmetic items or VIP systems often increase alongside the implementation of clan features, with players looking to improve their visual standing with cosmetics, enhance their reputation, and gain bragging rights.
Clans Keep The Game Feeling Fresh
Clans can be used as a vehicle to reinforce new events and event types. With new content comes new ways to play, diversifying gameplay for engaged players who may feel fatigued by the current offering, thus causing premature churn.
Top Tips
Clans are a significant uptake, though you can build upon them over time. Adhering to the following methodologies will improve your chances of making a clan feature worthy of your playerbase.
1: Create Meaningful Interactions
Prioritize endowing players with worthwhile interactions within the clan that spark social interaction, giving players driven by social play or competition a reason to return. These include:
- Clan Challenges: Periodic challenges allow clan mates to progress together to achieve a goal or compete against each other to gain rewards.
- PvP & Co-op Events: Events that pit clan against clan or clan-mates against each other.
- Gifting: Requesting, receiving, and sending items to other players.
It’s important to encourage friendships and rivalries; building relationships is critical to getting the most out of key features.
Too often do we see teams add clans with minimal interaction or simply a chat feature that is not valuable enough for the player time in the current market. Without meaningful interactions, players will not see the value in joining a clan. This is both a waste of development resources and problematic for KPI scalability.
2: Showcase Activity and Achievement
Highlighting a member’s loyalty to their clan by showcasing their activity and engagement is vital to encouraging engagement uplift through social pressure.
Clash Royale has continued to build upon the feature over time, validating each step to minimize risk. Source: Clash Royale.
Activity feeds are a great way to highlight player activity and discussion, keeping social players engaged and making the game feel alive. Simple actions, such as highlighting when a player joins or leaves the clan, when a progression milestone (such as a level-up) is reached, or when a new event is active, create the impression that something is always happening in the clan, and clans are THE place to be.
Although communication isn’t essential to a successful team-based feature, it can be beneficial for generating a stronger bond and loyalty among players and between players and the game.
Contributor leaderboards are another great way of showcasing achievements. This yardstick comparator creates a motivational incentive to improve or spend.
3: Introduce Tangible Reasons to Join
Reasons to join a clan outside of socializing are essential, particularly for players not driven by social interaction.
Call of Duty: Warzone is a great example of this with its Happy Hour mechanic. Happy Hour is a configurable hour each day that rewards players with double XP when playing with members of one or more Regiments (CoD’s clan feature).
Source: Call of Duty Warzone.
Social players elongate session times when playing with friends, and happy hour ensures that players always have an appointment to play with friends, fueling their bond with both the player and the product.
Exclusivity is another excellent way to entice collectors into clans as it utilizes loss aversion for players driven by social status. Introduce new and exclusive content that unlocks alongside progression (i.e., clan level), and reinforce this by showcasing upcoming unlocks and creating a driver inside the clan. This will ultimately drive engagement for players looking to progress, collect, or brag.
4. Ensure You Can Support It
Clans can be complex and costly, but once implemented along with supporting features (i.e., clan events and progression), they can vastly improve engagement, ARPDAU, and long-term retention. However, for these benefits to occur, players must be able to meaningfully interact with other clan members to form reciprocal (or antagonistic) relationships. If done well, clans have the power to boost success or revive an underperforming product. Implementing clans without supporting features — i.e., clan level, events, and chat — will likely result in a negligible KPI impact.
Clans are a risky endeavor and, without proper planning, could burn runway that could be better spent elsewhere. Too often do we see teams go all-in on a feature without validating its core with the game’s audience first. As with all features, clans should be developed in small bursts (or spikes), ensuring that the team is achieving KPI goals and focusing on the wants and needs of their playerbase first. This is especially true for smaller teams that must dedicate most of their bandwidth to developing each feature. Alongside this, you must consider the uptake of networked play if this isn’t already present. Although this can be falsified during the validation phase with AI bots, it is not sustainable at scale.
Aside from human resources and time costs, clans can be financially costly too. With clans driving cooperative and competitive play, you’re likely to see an increase in CCU, thus pushing server requirements and costs. Often this means raising another round to increase the team’s capabilities and scope. Consider this before moving forward.
Clans and live-ops are late-game features, and the best time to conquer them is once the core loop has been mastered and the team is ready.
Recap
Clans are a worthwhile endeavor for games at all stages in their lifecycles; they can enhance a newer product, highlight value areas, and breathe life into a product close to retirement. However, caution should be taken as they come at a great cost.
Before venturing into clans, it’s essential to know precisely what kind of players your game has and make a plan of what your players value most. This way, you can target what excites and motivates them from the get-go, constantly offering them something of value.
Be wary of biting off more than you can chew. It’s easy to get lost in thinking that all adjacent features (i.e., clan events, co-op game modes, tournaments, etc.) are essential for a clan build, thus throwing all prioritization out of the window and building a horizontal slice rather than a vertical one.
Although more content does drive the opportunity for additional sinks and could potentially hold other benefits, depending on the focal point of the clan feature, clans can be extremely content-heavy. Clans aren’t one-size-fits-all. Validate your clan feature at each stage and calculate what is needed before adding more features. Ensure that your players’ wants and needs are met, and most importantly, have fun experimenting with the design.
A big thanks to Becky Matthew for writing this essay! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.
