DAY ONE (DELIVERED DAY 158)
Last month, in the doldrums of August, we finally delivered our shared ‘Day One’ vision for what a new category of games could play and feel like. That’s a lot of emotion, so perhaps a dose of numbers would help any readers with dominant Left Brains.
ASYMMETRICAL CHANGE = 3X ACTIVITY
Let them eat Cake (in-game). We launched back in March. It was a messy first few weeks, but we got through it. One regret was launching without letting players purchase while actually out there, exploring the virtual frontier landscape. You’re a player who’s found a deep wide vein of gold, stretching from A to B … but you run our of a precious resource you need to keep fighting to survive (Ammo) or digging for more. Your only choice was to exit the landscape, bounce back to the Game Lobby and purchase in our Lobby Store. Janky UX. Players asked for on-Expedition purchasing, which took a reasonable amount of in-Platform Dev, and so we launched it. Tah-dah. Players rewarded us with a 3X immediate boost in activity/spend/time-on-device. We now have players digging for gold more than 10,000 times a day. Uh huh. Not robots (we can tell): People. At home. Prospecting and surviving the frontier for hours on end, playing day in/day out. No longer were we forcing players to stop … they could continue their epic Expeditions for as long as they wanted. Obvious in hindsight? Well … no … you’re constantly battling competing priorities. If we’d stayed the course we’d have launched +3months late. That’s a lot of precious shareholder funds to burn, so as with all things you get the model live, start bashing it into shape (optimizing) and eventually reach a point where the metrics exceed your initial expectations.
THESE ARE THE DROIDS YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
Where next? Well, we’ve acquired enough players to know early Product-Market-Fit has been established. It’s never binary and no doubt will change some. But now we know who wants to play, what gender/age they are, roughly how many of them are ‘out there’ to be acquired, how much they cost to acquire upfront, how the upfront CPA changes over time as players engage for free, then monetize over time, and how much they return to us as a fair bargain for being able to engage in this new category of games. Explore, Survive, Prospect, Extract. It’s a stick gameplay loop. We’re shortly launching onto Apple Mac (yep, we know gaming is a small scale activity on Mac, but there are soooo many Adult U.S. users active on Mac’s each month, seems a shame not to bring the frontier to them too, right?).
Meanwhile, we’ve started designing our Android mobile app, not just as a companion app for existing players to login and play ‘on the go’ but also to address the substantial mobile gamer audience that seems equally excited to explore the frontier on their mobile. We designed our first product to translate onto mobile pretty well (like all point n click games the controls will port easily enough) but squeezing the game into Android phones’ 1.5GB mem remains a moderate technical challenge (we’ll get there).
Huge thanks to all the excavators at Paydirt Games.
/teamworkmakesthedreamwork
