In this article I will explain some of the things that make games addicting.  

Firstly, keep it simple.  Pretty much all addicting games have a simple concept.  Like asteroids, as everyone knows the aim is to destroy rocks before they destroy you.  Try to come up with a simple concept.  Then players won’t have to spend much time learning how to play it, thus they’ll catch on quicker and won’t walk away from the game.  

Try to make the game quite small with decent but simple graphics.  This is for a fast loading time.  It means players won’t walk away from the game, in particular people with slow internet connections.

Make it hard, but not too hard.  You should make the game hard, but easy enough so the player thinks “I almost got it”.  They’ll think if they play it one more time they’ll win.  So the game needs to be easy enough so the player won’t walk away from it, but hard enough that they won’t win very easily.

On the game over screen it would help if it said something like “Almost, try one more time”.  Each time the player loses it will get embedded into their brain that they should try one more time.  Try to pound a message into the player’s head.

Make the title of the game easy to remember and eye catching.  A lot of players might want to play the game again later on, and they won’t bother bookmarking it.  Generally they try to find it on a search engine like Google or Yahoo.  So make the name easy to remember and catchy, plus try to make it easy to find on search engines.

So those are the main things that make a game addicting.  If you want to make an addicting game you should keep these things in mind.

Thanks for reading!