Pre-launch Prep
Howdy folks. It’s been ~4months since the last Blog post and boy, have we been busy.
Last month the Engineering Team completed the full Player Journey from Account Creation to Lobby to Base Game (and back again). Kinda like remodeling your house, it looks like a building site right until the very end … well, as we sit with diverse stream of play testers interacting with our current build (and being recorded playing) we’re getting the hoped-for positive feedback … but endless play testing and QA testing is just one of myriad work streams in motion. The Art chaps have been hitting the ball outta the park, with stunning hand-painted art work set pieces being cleverly inserted into the procedural landscape generation system newly supported by a ‘clutter’ framework capable of making the world feel suitably lived in, organic and interesting for players to mosey around in. And the water… did I mention the water? Now it shimmers and reflects the sky at night. Lovely.
On the commercial front we’ve signed agreements with a host of third party service providers required for launch (y’know, the folks you need to plug into for payments, KYC and other important aspects of launching). We also finished up our legal review with expert attorneys specialized in skill-based games Stateside. Naturally this is very important but hard to finalize until the end-to-end customer experience is complete.
Marketing … wait, what? Yep, that thing you do to build awareness and BOOM launch a new games product to rave reviews and insane success. Righto. Well, the world is awash with marketing agencies specialized in games, launch marketing, user acquisition, branding etc so those are the obvious candidates to engage, right? Wrong! We’re too early for those folks. We need data, the kind of data that only comes from soft launching the game, stress-testing the underlying (and new) Platform capabilities (make sure it scales folks) and establishing metrics from a relatively modest cohort of players. Only when we have a sense of how much it costs to acquire a customer (and the rate of return on that upfront cost) can we safely deploy shareholder capital responsibly.
But hey, where are all these early players going to come from? Well, step forward User Acquisition marketing. All home grown and executed in-house (for now). Implement a bunch of Landing Pages in your website, setup an advertising account or two and leverage the usual generative A.I. tools to create some cool imagery (without attracting “A.I. slop” commentary). Press the button on small scale spend and … there y’go. People clicking on adverts, landing on the web page, inputting their email address and joining our seed marketing database, ready to play the game as and when we make it available. So far so good, we’re capturing emails at the cost of ~$3 each (Cost per Registration) with a view to gathering a few thousand hungry players to introduce our game to when it’s ready. There’s a side benefit too, which is to warm up the advertising platforms. These guys take time to warm up to you and your advertising campaigns, limiting your ability to spend in the early days and slowly lifting the spend ceiling as you establish a track record. So far, so good. We’re seeing >7% Click Thru Rates (CTR) on the adverts which suggests we have a willing and responsive audience of ~30M Americans liking what they see and wanting to learn more.
So that’s the Bloggish update version, for now. Plenty happening here at Paydirt Games, I’l keep sharing as we go (not that I think many / anyone reads this … but maybe one day we’ll have an Industry audience, and these blog posts serve as a nice reminder of our key milestones).
