Rift bumping up userbase with Raptr rewards
How do you save an honest-to-god subscription MMO in a free-to-play world? You use Raptr, apparently, to give stuff away.
Late last year, Trion Worlds teamed up with Raptr to see what they could do to boost the player base. They came up with a tiered reward system that ran from November of last year to the end of January that has managed to significantly increase the number of Rift players, at least among Raptr users.
The first thing they did was gift people a copy of the game for reaching the Experienced level of certain other RPGs, like WoW, Skyrim and Torchlight II, among others. Once they had folks in the game, they would offer in-game rewards for playing the game enough to reach certain Raptr ranks for Rift.
This all came together to increase the Raptr player base for Rift by 470 percent (some of which could just be existing players just beginning to use Raptr to take advantage of the rewards. Beyond that, Raptr monitoring saw an increase in average playtime a day from four hours to 6.3 hours. That's a lot of hours.