Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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How To Boost Long-Term Retention! Without Relying on Novelty | Episode 437

 

Don’t experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide “Core Drives in the Wild” to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD

We dismantle the myth that simply adding points, badges, and leaderboards will fix a broken product. We explore why superficial rewards often lead to a 90% failure rate in corporate gamification and cause dangerous spikes followed by massive engagement crashes. By contrasting Google News’s failed badge system with Wikipedia’s intrinsic motivation model, we highlight the critical shift from transactional features to human-focused behavioral science. You can learn how to balance White Hat techniques like Epic Meaning with Black Hat mechanics like Scarcity to build long-term retention without burning out your user base.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

Links and resources

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
Now I know this might sound crazy, but adding points and badges and leaderboards to your product is often the fastest way to kill your long-term retention. The mistake that I used to see at big corporates and honestly, the one I still see most often is treating gamification like this magic powder that on a broken process. You aren’t building engagement. You’re just building a boring process.

with badges.

Rob Alvarez (00:28)
Now, most gamification fails because it relies on the novelty effect. You see a big spike. They’ve never seen this before. But then what happens is a massive crash. Your baseline might actually end up being lower than when you started the initiative.

You’ve probably heard that 90 % failure rate of gamification, especially in corporate implementations, and it’s all because of chocolate, covered broccoli. You’re trying to mask bad gamification strategy with superficial rewards. And today, what we’re gonna do is show you the behavioral science behind the 10 % that actually works to drive real revenue.

We’ll look at why points, badges, and leaderboards also known as PBLs are a trap and the shift you need to take to human focused design, as well as which is the black hat data trap and the risks that you must avoid.

Rob Alvarez (01:26)
Let’s begin with a famous example. Back in 2011, Google wanted to increase engagement in Google News. So they did what plenty of well-funded, smart teams tend to do. They slapped badges on top of the experience. If you read a lot of political news, you got a bronze politics badge. If you kept reading a lot longer, you got a silver badge all the way up to platinum.

They thought this would be a massive hit, but users quickly realized that badges had absolutely no utility and not really any meaning. Therefore, they just started ignoring them. They proactively started opting out because they didn’t want their friends to see them as a platinum gossip badge in their profile. Google quietly killed, of course, the entire program. I think it was around 15 months later.

Why did a company with some of the best and smartest engineers in the world fall to this trap? Because they confused the game mechanics with the engagement. They built a fantastic, brilliant UI, but they forgot the psychology of what’s happening behind the algorithms. A badge is essentially a delivery mechanism without the right strategy behind it, which in this case definitely includes a genuine sense of mastery when you achieve.

any of these badges, the badge just becomes a meaningless pixel or bunch of pixels on a screen. That is the definition of chocolate covered broccoli. And I want you to look at your own product and process right now. Ask yourself, if I took away the points, the badges, the leaderboards tomorrow, would my users still have a reason to stay? And the answer of course is no, you haven’t built an engaging product. You’re just building a transactional

trap. And by the way, if this sounds like a mistake that you’ve made or that you want to avoid, we have a guide based on my experience after over 400 episodes. And of course, as a consultant looking at the core drives across past episodes, I break down those episodes and you can see exactly how they are used and misused. So avoid that very costly mistake just by clicking on the link below and signing up.

So let’s go to the second point. And the big question is, why do people spend hours editing Wikipedia for free?

and dread, drudge, and drag their feet to do stuff that they are actually paid for. So let me present to you Core Drive 1 Epic Meaning and Calling. This is White Hat motivation at its finest, at its purest form. Where performing activities, that’s what White Hat is about, where performing the activity you ask or expect them to do feels really good for the user.

This is contrasted, of course, with black hat motivation, things like scarcity mechanics that drive, of course they drive immediate action, but that’s not something you can sustain on itself forever, or at least not for the long run. Scarcity is like a sprint. Epic meaning is like a marathon. You definitely need both in good engagement design, but you can’t lead without the right context regarding which is the competition you’re even competing.

on. So let’s move on to the next situation where we have the example of Duolingo. Duolingo uses, amongst many other things, they do many things well, others that I would definitely myself improve, but there is one thing that they do that it’s very effective. generates some of the engagement that gets people to come back. However, it is very stressful.

If you, as a do it yourself manager, use these black hat drives, and I’ll tell you which one in particular by yourself, you can easily burn out your user base very quickly. That is the burnout effect and high churn that you are seeing and you want to avoid. And it has to do with the implementation and the wrong use of core drive eight.

loss and avoidance. Let me introduce you to the streak mechanic as Duolingo uses it nowadays. People keep coming back to keep their streak alive to avoid losing their streak. There’s been ups and downs to that implementation, but I can tell you expert hands as the ones that we have at the Octalysis group would never allow you to have

one of these mechanics implemented in a way in which you’re not really sure how many people are staying versus leaving. In fact, what we do always generates more people to stay every single time. You want to consider when you’re doing this, you need to consider the whole journey. It’s not just about getting those first clicks. You want to think about discovery all the way to end game. Do not design just for the first clicks and immediate click.

data-based decisions because that’s where Black Hat data all by itself is going to shine. You want to design for the user’s feeling for as long as you expect them to be with you.

So let’s wrap this up with a couple of thoughts and some ideas that you can start implementing right now. Gamification isn’t about making the game. It’s about making life and work more engaging for the humans who are actually doing the actions. Understanding these drives is step one. Seeing them in the wild, in real examples, going beyond what we can cover in a single episode is how you start to master them.

You don’t want to experiment on your own revenue, So I’ve built a nine day sequence called core drives in the wild. I break down real world examples from my consulting and podcast guests so you can see exactly how these are used and especially how they are misused. So go ahead and click on the link below and avoid those very costly mistakes for yourself. as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

End of transcription