MouseHunt - why is it different?

This video inspired me to write something about mousehunt, 1 of the application our group wanted to present about.



Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=10337532241

Its name suggest that MouseHunt is the game that you will have to hunt mouse. How? Setting your trap, your bait and check the trap every 15 minutes. Plus excellent design and drawings, it gets around 500K MAU and 40% DAU/ MAU (meaning the returning players rate is quite high). The game is super addictive, but I guess the market for it is smaller compared to Farmville and other games.

500K MAU? grain of sand compared to 70K of Farmville. So why talking about MouseHunt? I think it is very successful in connecting users with users and users with developers. I did a research on other popular games but what I found was only disappointment. What are they doing?

- Every Friday they have Feedback Friday session, in which users and developers chat with each other (via broadcasting): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mousehunt-live! In this session, the developers will listen to users feedbacks, comments, talk about improvement or upcoming updates, and sometimes chit-chat with users. I think this is the most distinguishing feature they have.

- They have a newspaper for themselves. Here is the external version: http://mousehuntnews.blogspot.com/. The newspaper summarizes interesting stories happens in the community, updates users of new content in the games, interview players, etc. I found it quite informative and interesting. Must check everyday!

- The forum. Very well participated by users. They had a sub-forum called Suggestions, where users can put their suggestions of new adversaries or tools. The suggestions are actually used by the developers some times, like the famous hydra mouse. Sometimes they made changes to the games mechanic based on users feedback. That's why users participate in that section very actively.



- The community. Users have formed various groups to help support new users, develop the system of mentors and mentees by themselves. etc. Many users are very active in the community.

Take a look at Farmville forum, http://forums.zynga.com/forumdisplay.php?f=91 and Mafia wars, http://forums.zynga.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36. The forum and community of Mousehunt is much more effective and developed. Mousehunt is doing much better work in connecting with users, which is an advantage of social network. We should learn from them when developing games/apps on a social network like Facebook!