One Life is a free browser life sim: you get one line of story per year, and your birthplace is randomly weighted using UN birth data for 124 countries.
Nine days after launch, One Life has had 263 players start 789 lives. They made 8,589 choices at crossroads and reached 181 deaths.
The sharing numbers looked less dead at first. Players tapped the birth-card share button 88 times across 29 people, and saved the card image 24 times across 14 people.
Visits arriving through a share link: zero.
My current explanation is painfully ordinary. The card is an image. Saving or posting it does not carry the URL along. My share text did contain a link, but most shares were the image, so the useful part was easy to lose.
I am changing the output rather than asking players to behave differently. The game will write a result sentence containing a number, a title, and an everyday unit, with the link inside that text. A Japanese browser game that went viral this week used the same basic pattern: its share button produced result text like 「永」銀賞 74点 plus a link.
The image can still travel. Now the sentence can travel without it.
When players share a screenshot, how do you make sure the link survives?
