Draw Something… or Nothing

A couple weeks ago, OMG Pop’s Draw Something flooded the digital world. It was more viral than Ebola. Everyone was playing and everyone was talking about it. The explosion was so significant, Zynga snatched up the NYC game company for a cool $180 million.

After a week of playing, I started to get bored – very bored. The words were repetitive, the game seemed to have no real incentive, and the “nudges” got annoying. I stopped playing shortly thereafter. I noticed that others weren’t playing as much either, so I decided to do some research. I sent three questions to the CloudKid team hoping to shed some light on the subject:

  1. Are you still playing Draw Something on a daily basis?
  2. If yes, what brings you back?
  3. If no, why did you slow down (or stop)?

Read the (not so surprising) responses after the jump…

Female, 23 

  1. Nope. I got into it because all of my friends were playing, and it was a novelty. I also just liked drawing on the phone. Then, I started playing too many games at once, it felt overwhelming and since there is no incentive to win, I sort of forgot about it.
  2. I will play occasionally on the bus in the morning or when I have a few minutes with nothing to do.
  3. Too many of the same words!  Also I couldn’t figure out how to stop a game once I started – I wanted to be able to go between games. Also the point system was stupid, if I am going to play my friends I want it to be a competition!

Female, 23

  1. Nope
  2. n/a
  3. The words got repetitive, especially since I have the free version… the gameplay was also repetitive, and there was little reward to keeping streaks going, aside from a simple counter going up. It eventually became a game of finding the word before the person even drew the picture, which was lame.

Male, 30

  1. Deleted it a week ago.
  2. n/a
  3. It was too much work.

Male, 29

  1. Nope, I haven’t played in weeks
  2. n/a
  3. For one thing, the same words repeat a lot.  I also think the reward system is a little broken. There’s also no real competition or cooperation either. Finally, the coins don’t really have any in-game value – just buying more colors, but once you have a good set of colors there’s no real reason to want more coins.

Female, 29 

  1. No
  2. n/a
  3. Two reasons: One, it got a bit repetitive (i.e., I was drawing the same word over and over), and two, at the height of its popularity, it got to the point where I had too many games going at once. To finish them all, it took like an hour. So…no dice.

Female, 24 

  1. Nope – almost never open the app.
  2. n/a
  3. It got boring somehow. I wound up not being interested. There are a lot of repeating words and there are no real stakes. Once I earned enough coins to unlock the colors I wanted, there wasn’t an incentive to make me keep going.

 

So there you have it… Everyone who responded had hopped off the Draw Something bandwagon. The response was quite similar after I posted the question via Twitter. It’s no doubt that Draw Something was a mega success, but I wonder what OMGPOP could’ve done to build a game that had more universal staying power. What’s your take?

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