Analysis on Kim Kardashian: Hollywood
Main improvements to Kim Kardashian: Hollywood
1. Charging
Kim Kardashian is a very expensive game and it doesn’t seem to be shy about this fact at all. There are circles which consider this as positive, but for the main audience this affects negatively and thus decreases the revenue.
The most important change would not be to make game any or much cheaper than it is now, but to give appearance of affordability. I do not try to cover all different scenarios, but I bring up one of them:
Player is young enough that she does not have a credit card of her own. So every time she needs to purchase something, she needs to request money from her parents. Typical parent gives one look on purchase options and then decides if the game is too expensive or not. And the first purchase is most important: when the child has played new game for a few hours and asks for money, they are not going to give 100$ to it. But if the child has played this same game for three months already, then they are much more likely to do that.
So the first purchase option needs to be smaller. I suggest that the maximum amount would be 40€/50$. And give extra clothes or other items on smaller purchase amounts at least on the first purchase.
2. Too few things to do / power runs off too easily
This is a designed feature in the game to ensure that players stay on the game for a longer calendar duration, but currently it is overly tight.
Some options on how to loosen it up somewhat:
-Purchases always give energy as a side reward
-Energy from inviting friends
-Feedback and energy each time that invited friends pass 10 levels
3. Better info
-Needed especially for purchasing which is not covered by tutorial.
-Perhaps “Despicable Me: Minion Rush” would be a good example on this.
4. Second try option
-If player recreates the character, inherit half of the purchases to it and kill the old character more-or-less permanently including removing it from high scores. All real life connections will remain.
-Even if players will never use this option it will give them more confidence to do purchasing when they know that it won’t be wasted if they play badly.
5. High scores
-Non-active players are removed from high score.