It’s all about the Gamification Examples & Case Studies
Below is a list of gamification examples and cases with ROI (Return On Investment) stats and figures, with many links to the case studies, so you can see for yourself the tremendous impact it is having on businesses.
I want this list to focus on cases that can confidently be measured as ROI.
The current gamification market size is estimated between $3 billion and $12 billion, depending on sources.
The Octalysis Group: Yu-kai Chou’s Case Studies
- A 712% uplift in sales for a well-known hotel chain, through our human-focused designs that boost product attractiveness and market performance.
- A loyalty program for a Major Airline with a 175% performance enhancement through a well-crafted reward system.
- An employee engagement platform for sales staff led to 28.5% more revenue and 59% higher KPIs.
Read the case studies done by the Octalysis Group of our clients.
The Octalysis Group has a decade-long track record of success working with clients across industry and service verticals. We specialize in creating engagement in areas where this is difficult to achieve.
Enterprise Gamification Case Stats and Figures
2) SAP: The SAP Community Network gamified its already-mature reputation system, increasing usage by 400% and community feedback by 96%
5) CaLLogix: reduces attrition by 50% and absenteeism by 80%. The company saves $380,000 per year
6) SAP Streamwork: added gamification in brainstorming groups and grew generated ideas by 58%
7) Galderma: a pharmaceutical company, uses gamification to train their sales division regarding new products. Despite the voluntary participation, nearly 92% of targeted employees ended up playing
10) Inside View: gamifies their employee social media usage and increased Twitter updates by 312%
12) Danske Statsbaner: through their “Engaged” platform, employees share their actions that support the value and strategy of the company, resulting in 92% positive ratings in content
16) Nextjump: uses gamification to get 67% of their employees to go to the gym
17) Bluewolf: gamified online conversations and posting increased employee community activity by 57%
18) Ford Canada: gamified its learning portal for employees and increased actions per user by 100% within 5 weeks
21) EMC RAMP: with their gamification platform, the company rewarded positive behavior from employees, partners, and customers which led to a 10% increase in documentation, 40% more videos watched, and 15% more discussions
22) DirecTV: uses gamification to overcome the fear of failure
23) HCL: decrease new hire “Pre Join” dropout rate by 90%
24) T-Mobile: dials up employee engagement by 1,000 percent
25) Royal Caribbean Cruises: All-time high customer satisfaction with facial recognition.
26) Slalom Consulting: participation in the employee name recognition program increased from 5% to 90%, and recognition scores improved from 45% to 89%
Sales Gamification Case Stats and Figures
1) Autodesk: gamified the free trial, incentivizing users to learn how to use the program and offering both in-game and real word prizes, increasing trial usage by 54%, buy clicks by 15%, and channel revenue by 29%
3) LiveOps: call center reduces call time by 15% and increases sales by over 8%
4) Step2: children’s retailers used PowerReviews’s social loyalty scheme to boost sales with a 300% increase in revenue from Facebook and 600% in content uploaded
5) Domino’s Pizza: created the gaming app Pizza Hero and increased sales revenue by 30% by letting customers create their pizza with an app
6) Moosejaw, a clothing company, used an innovative gamified system that saw 76% of sales revenue come from gamified activities, including 240k social media impressions, resulting in a 560% ROI from initial marketing expenditures
7) Silver Grill Cafe: received a 66% Return on Investment for having its waiters/waitresses play a cross-selling game)
9) Popchips: uses games to personalize mobile advertising and has seen its sales rise 40% leading to $100 million in sales.
10) Teleflora gamified its store with a social engagement scheme offering points for actions, increasing traffic from Facebook by 105% and conversion rates by 92%
11) America’s Army: 30% of Americans aged 16 to 24 had a more positive impression towards and recruited more people than all the other methods combined while costing a fraction of the marketing cost
12) Extraco Bank: raised customer acquisition by 700% through a gamified system
16) Sneakpeeq.com: increased their conversion rate by 18% with a 3000% lift in the total number of click-per-buy
19) Hewlett Packard: launched Project Everest to give rewards like holidays and other goods to the best reseller teams and saw 56.4%.
20) Grouper.MK: A 600% increase in monthly signups.
Product Gamification Case Stats and Figures
2) Leadership Academy: within three months, daily visitors increased by 46.6% with one user earning the Leadership Academy Graduate Badge, which was expected to take 12 months
3) Microsoft: obtained 16x more feedback from people through its Communicate Hope gamified system
4) EMC2: increased the amount of feedback it received by 41%
5) Dosomething.org: got a 26% response rate from the teen audience to a scavenger hunt game
9) Beta One: Microsoft’s Testing Division got a 400% increase in participation for the pre-release testing
10) Uber: The rideshare app gets more drivers on the road using gamification.
12) Audible: Audible uses badges to keep readers reading, even though they already have a strong product.
Lifestyle Gamification Case Stats and Figures
1) OPower: reduced measurable energy consumption by over $100M
2) Aetna: increased daily healthy activities by 50% with an average engagement of 14 minutes on the site
3) ClinicalAdvisor.com: embedded a social platform that improved user submission by 300%, comments by 400%, and Slideshow Visualizations by 53%
4) Bottle Bank Arcade: gamified bottle bank was used 50 times more than conventional bottle bank.
5) The World’s Deepest Bin: 132% more trash collected compared to conventional bin
6) Piano Stairs: 66% more people use the stairs if they can produce music with it
7) Speed Camera Lottery: a lottery system that causes a 22% reduction in driving speed
8) Toilette Seat: 44% increase in lifting the toilet seat when urinating
10) Recycle Bank grew a community of 4 million members by providing a gamified recycling platform.
Consumer Behavior Gamification Case Stats and Figures
2) Joiz: a Swiss television network increased sharing by 100% and social referral traffic by 54% with social infrastructure and gamification technologies
3) Muchmusic.com: increased their music userbase by 59%
7) Allkpop: during the week-long promotion of game mechanics, the online news site experienced a 104% increase in shares, 36% in comments, and 24% in pageviews
10) Green Giant: generated 420,000 likes on Facebook through their gamified system
13) BlurbIQ: introduced Interactive Video Interruptions and within two weeks obtained 915% more interaction, 1400% increase in click-through rate, and 95% increase in recollection
15) Club Psych USA: saw a 130% jump in page views and a 40% increase in return visits to the game
17) Boyd Game: the casino gets over 700,000 visits each month by introducing gamification on its website
19) Topliners: introducing gamification in the community lifted active users by 55%
22) Ask.com uses game mechanics to increase user engagement through real-time notifications and activity streams, increasing answered questions by 23% and votes by 58%
24) Badgeville & Kendall-Jackson: increase customer engagement by 65%
25) Patient Partner: uses gamification to improve medication adherence
Education Gamification Case Stats and Figures
1) Beat the GMAT: students increase their time spent on site by 370% through a gamified system
3) Deloitte Leadership Academy, an executive training program, increased by 46.6% the number of users that returned daily to their platform by embedding gamification mechanics into it
4) Stray Boots & A.L.Penenberg: the professor taught journalism through gamification and saw student grades increase by more than a letter grade
5) Devhub: a place for Web developers, added gaming feedback and watched in awe as the percentage of users who finished their sites shot up from 10% to 80%
6) Foldit: gamers have solved a 15-year AIDS Virus Protein problem within 10 days
7) Duoling: Grew to 300 million users and 10 minutes per day per user.
Scientific research related to the effect of Gamification
1) Research findings support the impact of levels, badges, and a (dummy) feedback system connected to a study course, results were significant, with 18.5% higher average grades for students enrolled in the gamified course
2) Research findings support the impact of levels, points, leaderboards, streaking, and visual storytelling to improve participation in crowdsourced assessments. Results were significant with an increase of 347% of participants returning for recurrent participation. (compared to the control group)
3) Research findings support the impact of point-based levels (Status titles) and leaderboards on IBM’s internal social network service. Short-term impact showed a 92% increase in comments posted, within this research long-term engagement was also measured and a rise of 299% more comments posted was found compared to the control group
4) Subsequent research in the same social network service above showed the effects of removing the point-based levels, status titles, and leaderboards. The removal of the game mechanics showed a significant result as across-the-board activities on the social network service dropped by 52%.
5) Research findings support the impact of narratives, leaderboards, and countdown timers on online training. Results were significant with a 61% increase in participation in online training.
The Octalysis Group: Case Study Collection
- A 712% uplift in sales for a well-known hotel chain, through our human-focused designs that boost product attractiveness and market performance.
- A loyalty program for a Major Airline with a 175% performance enhancement through a well-crafted reward system.
- An employee engagement platform for sales staff led to 28.5% more revenue and 59% higher KPIs.
Read the case studies done by the Octalysis Group of our clients.
The Octalysis Group has a decade-long track record of success working with clients across industry and service verticals. We specialize in creating engagement in areas where this is difficult to achieve.
Updated by Howie Ju: Oct. 10, 2023
Ariane C Not a thing!
Yu-kai Chou Thank you for taking the time to answer my question 🙂
Ariane C Hey Ariane,
It’s not a real taboo, but since the majority of the world still likes to say, “Gamification will never work” or “it’s a fad” it has just been more meaningful to find examples that worked very well.
The EGC Wiki has a small but growing list of gamification failures: http://www.gamification-workshop.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Failure
Hi Yukai / fellow gamification enthusiasts !
I was wondering if anyhone had some example of “bad” gamification cases (by bad I mean that they didn’t have any effects, or little, or bad ones). I found Goole News Badges, Jetblue, and maybe the Adobe Photoshop one, but I have the feeling that “bad gamification cases” are a huge taboo…
Hey YuKai,
Thanks for putting up an exhaustive & interesting list here. This will be helping me for my paper on gamification. I’m researching on Online and ISVs, how gamification has helped these domains. Any pointers or case studies on few companies will be helpful.
Hi Yu-Kai. Excellent work. For those who are learning gamification, like me, there is a lot of useful examples. Now we need enough time to read and understand all of them. Thanks for the post!
Bravo!!! Great compilation of real results!
That’s a great post Yu-Kai. Very useful indeed! Thanks for sharing. Cheers from Finland!
Thanks for the great list! For sure useful 🙂
Do you by any chance also have/know a list of *failed* gamification examples? I would be really interested in that..!
Very good article, it was very helpful for my studies. Do you have some more case studies of gamification in e-commerce, with information about ROI, conversion rate ecc..? Thank you.
Bob Cowen Yu-kai Chou True, making things fun should be evolutionary indeed. The practice itself is evolutionary and just reaching the “tipping point.” I think when people refer to it as revolutionary, I think it’s referring to revolutionary in traditional thinking, as most environments and designs still can’t fathom the combination of work and play.
Yu-kai Chou Bob Cowen
The purpose of mentioning the 10 year old study was to demonstrate that it’s been around that long already (and the results remain valid). The other links have numerous examples and case studies that are as current as last month.
Yes, it’s become more mainstream, automated and elegant marketplace but has been used in businesses extensively for decades.
There are 18 sessions at Dreamforce with the word “Gamification” in the title and numerous folks will claim to be the “father of Gamification.” It’s a simple, proven process that is now being significantly expanded, has a new name and lots of funding thrown at the new vendors. It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Bob Cowen Yu-kai Chou Haha yes, gamification (or making things fun or applying game rules to practices) isn’t that new, and can be traced back for quite a bit. However, it’s only recent years that it’s becoming a bit more mainstream, with better and more refined practices due to the massive trial-and-error of games.
These case studies are great, but since they are from 10 years ago, it’s good to have the above list that has more recent examples too.
Thanks Bob!
Yu-kai Chou Bob Cowen A very comprehensive meta-study was published more than 10 years ago: http://snowfly.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Vol16_03_46condly.pdf
Case studies: http://snowfly.com/resources/case-studies-success-stories/
White papers & research: http://snowfly.com/resources/white_papers_and_research/
What most people fail to realize is that what today is called “gamification” has been used extensively in call centers since they were created in the mid-1970’s. The “new” components are the name and that it’s now being utilized in the consumer marketplace. The often quoted Gardner study predicting a failure rate of 80% has already been disproven in call centers. We usually see that 1/3 of programs aren’t measured, 1/3 generates negative results and 1/3 generates positive results (typically a 20%-40% improvement in KPI’s). We also find that spending about 1% to 2% of payroll is more than sufficient to move the needle. That provides an excellent ROI (as numerous clients will attest). The same cautionary comments apply about not automating an already bad system.
achintngm Haha, thanks! I needed a list myself, so I decided to create one and share it 🙂
Bob Cowen Hmm, I tried to go to the site, but couldn’t find the case studies with ROI stats. Clicked around and took me to some dead pages. Can you send me a link that has a good compilation? Thanks!
Excellent comprehensive list of case studies, such a plethora of examples will be of a lot of help,to the gamification starters and gamification enthusiasts.
You can find lots of gamifiction research documents, white papers, case studies on the Snowfly web site. They have been offering gamification as a cloud service since 1999 (long before it was called gamification) and was founded by Brooks Mitchell Ph.D.
MayCat You can check out the video in this post: http://www.yukaichou.com/gamification-examples/converting-free-users-paid-gamification-autodesk-gsummit-sf-2013/#comment-26971
Excuse me, but I can not read the latest news (abt Autodesk), could you check what happened, please?
THKS A LOT!
@Koja Thank you too for the email! As noted in the post, I couldn’t have done it without the help of some Milan friends 😀
Sociolus Thanks! I did spend a lot of time on it so appreciate the feedback!
Thanks Yu-Kai for your effort and for these great Gamification Cases!
Thanks Yu-Kai, great source of information
Ashok Maharaj Haha yes. It takes time to design something well (and some luck), but a lot of these examples are really here to show you what’s possible but beyond your imagination.
Thanks Yu-Kai, I came across Foldit when I wrote about an interactive game called “Velu the Welder” for the National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2011.jsp I think Foldit achieved remarkable success and surpassed anyones expectation on its ROI!!!
If we truly understand the process and design a game that will suit the needs well, I’m sure we can have a “Foldit moment”
AndrzejMarczewski Thanks you!
RubenGP Thanks – hopefully this will be a useful resource on the internet.
Superb work Yukai, congrats and thanks for sharing it!
Great work!