Popular License and Historical Accuracy Keeps Pawn Stars: The Game Players Engaged

Pawn Stars: The Game is an adaptation of The History Channel's popular reality TV show produced by A&E Television Networks. The game launched in late January and has since broke the 1 million mark in monthly active users just one week after appearing on our top 20 list of emerging Facebook games. Daily active users reached just over 250,000 in that same time frame. Gameplay in Pawn Stars: The Game revolves around the player running their own personalized pawn shop. Players can choose from a selection of sales clerks to be the face of their shop and then must deal with a continual stream of incoming customers who want to sell their possessions. Haggling is done with a sliding-scale system, and offers that are too low will cause the customer's mood meter to drop. When that happens, the customers will provide a clue that makes it a little easier to work out how much they're willing to pay. Purchased items can then be displayed on store shelves, and new offers come in for them regularly. The player can accept these offers at any time, but many of them are far lower than the prices they will have paid for the item in the first place, in which case they're better off waiting. The game also provides a series of facts about the items that come into the store, including historical context of antiques and related trivia. All items are taken from past episodes of the show, so there's the possibility of learning while playing, making it particularly suitable for players with an interest in history and antiques. Pawn Stars is monetized through Facebook Credits in several ways. Firstly, players who don't want to wait for new offers on their displayed items can purchase "candies" with Credits in order to attract new customers -- and, by extension, offers -- immediately. Credits can also be spent on a "premium appraisal" service, which teaches the player how much all items of the same type are actually worth. Standard appraisals can also be purchased using the game's soft currency, but this only teaches the player how much the specific item is worth. Finally, soft currency "cash" can also be purchased for Facebook Credits and then spent on certain in-game items and on new store clerks. We weren't able to reach the developers for comment on the future of the game, but it's clear that a "Decorations" feature is soon to be added, allowing the player to customize and personalize their own store. At present, the player can name their own store and hire a clerk of their choice, but the visual style of the store itself is fixed. New items, avatars and store clerks are also added weekly, with more outlandish characters making an appearance for higher level players. The game's Facebook page also keeps the community updated on what to expect from each new update and encourages players to interact with one another. Pawn Stars: The Game seems to have staying power in terms of growth. Its DAU as a percentage of MAU is also fairly high for the month of May at over 20%. You can follow its progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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Popular License and Historical Accuracy Keeps Pawn Stars: The Game Players Engaged

Pete Davison

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