May 6

May 6 Social Gaming, the New Normal 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

This analysis is a part of Deconstructor of Fun’s Digest newsletter. You can sign up to the newsletter at the bottom of this text.

Video games have received a tremendous boost from the current shelter-in-place and isolation policies brought upon us by coronavirus. However, the beneficiaries of the increased attention and focus on games have not been uniformly distributed. One of the biggest winners from this crisis has been social games and interactive experiences.

Social gaming experiences such as Epic’s Houseparty, Jackbox Games, and Bunch (exhibited below) have experienced dramatic growth since the coronavirus pandemic:

In today’s feature, we speak to Selcuk Atli, CEO of Bunch, about the sudden and dramatic growth behind Bunch’s recent big spike and why social gaming, in particular, has overindexed in downloads and user attention.

Players have rediscovered social gaming in a way we believe becomes the new normal for how our society engages in shared entertainment experiences. Find out more about this trend in our conversation below.

Interview with Selcuk Atli, CEO of Bunch

ggD: Hi Selcuk, congrats on the recent sudden and dramatic interest in Bunch. We’ve seen a lot of interest in gaming and social gaming experiences in particular. Could you talk to us about the spike you’re seeing in Bunch? What is it about Bunch that people are getting so excited about?

Selcuk: Absolutely — we’ve been seeing a dramatic surge in traffic and engagement over the past month. And our core audience has even expanded into millennials, going mainstream. Sharing some interesting stats below:

People now open Bunch millions of times a month
Mars Dash, one of our original games, was played over a million times in the past month
People spend millions of minutes talking to friends on Bunch every day
Over 70% of this time is spent playing games while talking to each other on Bunch
25% of our audience is in US and Canada, the rest is all around the world
Average age of our audience moved from 14 to 23 expanding into millennials
While our audience before was slightly more male, now it’s 61.7% female
Less than 10% of our users have Discord installed on their phones

Thus, based on this data, we believe that we are helping expand the gamer market in the world. I’m including short clip that describes what the Bunch experience is like here.

ggD: And how are people finding out about Bunch? Is this all word of mouth?

Selcuk: According to our App Store data most of our traffic is coming from App Store search, and also directly attributable to people inviting their friends.

ggD: When you think about the kinds of applications and experiences getting the most attention right now, what do you think it is about these particular social experiences (like Bunch, Houseparty, and Jackbox) that is resonating with players?

Selcuk: I think the main reason why Bunch has taken off so fast is because we have been building a category defining company in the past 2.5 years. People did not know they wanted to or were able to do a LAN party on their phones — that’s why they were not searching for it. Because of the unfortunate times we are in — they are isolated from their loved ones, and they are seeking ways that are more meaningful than video chat to stay connected with friends. This is the same reason why other video chat apps like Zoom, HouseParty and Airtime are growing — and why people are playing Jackbox with their friends over Zoom.

Another reason why we are seeing so much love in the market for Bunch, in our view, is nostalgia. I find this to be very similar to why Pokemon Go took off a few years ago. We all grew up with Pokemon, and now that we got to chase Pokemon down the streets we loved it. Similarly, everyone who tries Bunch for the first time — have experienced a Nintendo game with their friends, been to a LAN party or played a board game with their friends in the same room. They just didn’t know their phones were capable of doing this. Now they are.

ggD: As with every crisis, there is opportunity. Given what we’re learning about social experiences in apps right now, what do you think game designers can take away now for future apps or games? What do you think are opportunities with respect to social experiences that may become big hits in the future even after coronavirus?

Selcuk: I think we are seeing that multiplayer games are a killer application to help people stay connected with friends in a more meaningful way. Now — more than ever. However in many multiplayer games the experience of playing with friends is not very optimized(compared to playing with strangers) and involves quite a bit of friction.

There are some really easy ways to improve this — for instance:

Developers can allow players to share or join parties via deep links instead of navigating the game UI and manually adding each other. Brawl Stars does this very well — and this optimization allows Bunch players to jump directly into the same game session from a Bunch party.
Many games require an on-boarding experience that forces new users to play the game for several minutes before they unlock multiplayer mode. This is actually useful for driving day one retention up for people who are playing the game by themselves. However, this makes the experience quite painful for people who are trying to play together with friends. An easy fix for this problem is offering new users an option to skip or defer the on-boarding. Furthermore, games can even skip or defer on boarding if the users are joining the game from a deep link as described above.

We are always happy to help developers who are looking to reduce friction to play together, as it makes our users happy. If they are interested; they can email us at developers@bunch.live!