BUSY DAYS, EXCITING TIMES
Christmas is approaching and so is the soft-launch planned for December 14. Gold Town Games could probably be compared to Santa’s workshop, working tirelessly to polish the final parts to be ready for the big day. In this week’s blog post we talk about the three different phases the soft-launch will be separated into, and we will also have a word with our CTO, Lars Alin, about the upcoming mini-release.
Czech
During November, we conducted a workshop with AppAgent, a renowned company based in the Czech Republic, specializing in mobile marketing. We discussed the marketing in general and more specifically the implementation of the soft-launch. Out of all the countries that were considered for the soft-launch, our choice finally fell on the Czech Republic. It is a country where hockey is very popular while it is cheaper to recruit players there than in many other countries.
Phase 1
The first thing we will test is to see how the onboarding works, which means to see if the players are remaining in the game during the first critical minutes. Therefore, we will not offer all the features in this phase, meaning that some of them will be locked to instead ensure that users will directly get into the onboarding process – to create their club, pick their team, choose the tactics, playing games and recruit players. The first levels of upgrades at the arena, and some facilities will also be available in this phase.
Phase 2
When we feel that onboarding is working, we will be ready to move to the next phase of the soft-launch. The next step is to test our core game mechanics as well as the retention. Does everything work, is it fun and do the players stay in the game over time.
Phase 3
Only after we have confirmation that enough users are returning, we will be ready to test monetization of the game. At this stage we will make the shop and ads available to determine a so-called LTV (life-time-value) of each user. Once we recognize that our players are willing to spend a sufficient amount of money in the game we will boost marketing accordingly to increase our user base. The more we earn, the more aggressive and sharp our marketing will be.
“We are approaching code freeze”
Lars Alin, CTO, experiencing busy days but looking forward to the soft-launch.
– It’s been a couple of exciting weeks watching the last pieces of the build come together. Since we’ve gated some of our features to really focus on the onboarding process we now have a “feature bank” waiting to be released and early users will have these features unlocked as the upcoming weeks progress. Even if the target group for this phase is very limited we have the full backend solution done and ready to scale up as the players arrive. Future proofed to handle millions of users simultaneously.
Lars is very excited about next week.
– We are approaching code freeze and the main focus is testing and polishing the details, and as I said in previous blog posts, we are eager to release the game to the public and in one week that will be reality, exciting times!
