The Future of Brand Loyalty in Apps and Games

Loyalty programs are old. Airlines, supermarkets and coffee chains have run them for decades, and the shape is familiar — do the thing the brand values, collect points, redeem them for something you want. What is new is that the brands people spend the most time with now are apps and games, and until recently those brands had no equivalent. A game studio could see that a player had returned for a hundred days, but it had no good way to say thank you.

Gemdrop exists to be that way. Partner brands reward people for their action, feedback and loyalty on the apps and games they already use, and the rewards are redeemable for gift cards and cash. That is the present. This post is about where loyalty for digital brands goes from here, what is likely to change, and what we think should stay exactly as it is.

If you want the current model explained from first principles, what a loyalty program for digital brands is is the place to start.

From one-off rewards to ongoing relationships

The first generation of app rewards was transactional. Do a single thing, get a single reward, never hear from the brand again. It worked as a marketing expense but taught the brand nothing, and it treated a person who used the app for years the same as one who used it once.

The direction of travel is towards relationships. A brand that can reward a milestone this month, a feature next month and a survey after that is not buying an action; it is building a history with a specific person. Loyalty tiers make this explicit. On Gemdrop, freezing part of your gems moves you from Bronze through Silver and Gold to Diamond, and each tier multiplies the rewards on every task, so time with the program is itself something the program recognises. Expect brands to lean into this kind of long arc rather than away from it.

Feedback becomes the centre, not the extra

Surveys are currently one task type among several. We think they become the most important one. A brand that already rewards your usage has something most companies would pay a great deal for — a group of real, engaged users who are willing to answer a question because they know their time is respected.

The interesting shift is in what gets asked. Today a survey might ask what you think of a new feature. Tomorrow it might ask you to test an early version of it, or to choose between two directions for the next update, or to explain why you stopped using something. Feedback stops being a questionnaire and becomes a seat at the table. Our post on why your feedback is worth gems explains the value on the brand's side; that value only rises as brands learn to ask better questions.

Tasks that follow the player

Loyalty tasks today are largely set by the brand in advance. Reach this level, try this feature. As programs mature, tasks will get better at meeting people where they are. A player deep into a game's endgame should not be offered a beginner milestone, and a player who has answered five surveys this month probably wants a different kind of task next.

This is a matter of relevance rather than anything mysterious. The more a brand understands how a person actually uses its app, the more precisely it can say thank you for the things that person is genuinely doing. The best future loyalty task is one that feels like it was written with you in mind, because in a meaningful sense it was.

Rewarding choices you were already making

There is one extension of the model that is likely, and worth stating cautiously. Brands may in future also reward subscriptions or purchases a user was going to make anyway. Someone who was about to renew a language app's annual plan, or buy an expansion for a game they have played for a year, is displaying loyalty in the most concrete way possible.

Two things need to remain true for this to be healthy. Such rewards must always be optional and clearly marked, and every ordinary task must remain completable for free. Gemdrop holds to both. A loyalty program that starts nudging people towards spending has stopped being a loyalty program, and we would rather grow slowly than cross that line.

Loyalty across platforms, not per platform

A person's relationship with a brand does not live on one device. You play the game on your phone, check something on the web, get a notification on a tablet. Loyalty programs that only recognise one of those surfaces are recording a fraction of the relationship.

Gemdrop already treats your account and gems as one thing across Android, the Telegram mini app and Base, with the iOS app and web version coming soon. Expect the wider industry to move the same way, so that loyalty follows the person rather than the platform, and so that switching phones never means starting over.

What should not change

Predicting change is easy. It is more useful to say what must stay the same, because the temptation to drift is real in any program that handles rewards.

• Free to take part, with no purchase ever required to complete a task
• Brands fund the rewards; the person doing the tasks never pays for them
• Personal data is never sold, and only what is needed to send rewards is collected
• Rewards are real and prompt — redemptions from $5 to PayPal, Visa, Amazon, Apple, Google Play and hundreds of other gift cards, most landing within minutes
• One person, one account, so the loyalty a brand pays for is genuine

These are not features that could be traded for growth. They are the reason the program is worth belonging to.

Honest about the limits

One more thing should stay the same, and it is a matter of tone. A loyalty program rewards you for what you already do. It is not an income, not a career and not a reason to use apps you would otherwise have deleted. Any version of the future that promises otherwise is selling something else under a loyalty label.

The version we are building is more modest and, we think, more durable. Brands get a truthful way to thank their real users. Users get gems for engagement and feedback they were giving anyway, and those gems become gift cards and cash. The mechanics — loyalty tiers, streaks, quick quests, referrals — get better at recognising loyalty over time. The relationship stays honest.

The short version

Brand loyalty in apps and games is moving from one-off rewards towards ongoing relationships, with feedback at the centre, tasks that fit the individual player, and loyalty that follows a person across platforms. Some rewards may in time extend to purchases people were already making, always optional and always marked. What must not change is the foundation — free to join, funded by brands, private, prompt and fair. That is the future worth building towards, and it is the one Gemdrop is building.