Hello, I wanted to share my experience with the launch of my latest game, Fantasy Forest
TL;DR: Don’t worry about marketing, ads or youtubers. Focus on improving your game’s engagement metrics, and the algorithm will give you players!
Background:
I work solo. I made Dragon Blade and released it about a year ago. That game was massive and took me over a year to make, but it was a small success, even hitting the front page on PC.
For my second game, I spent about 5 months with a farming simulator. That game failed to gather any traction after some ad spending, so I sadly decided to move on.
Right around that time, I attended RDC where the guys that made Wacky Wizards gave a great talk called “Finding Success Through Rapid Iteration”, where they argued one should release a prototype quickly to see if it has any potential, before spending a lot of time polishing it. I took this advice to heart!
Fantasy Forest:
So for my 3rd game, I decided to go back to basics and make a simple roleplaying game. I love fantasy animals so I decided to go with that. Also this way I was able to reuse a lot of the animal assets I had purchased for Dragon Blade.
In keeping with the new “rapid iteration” approach, I spent only 2 weeks working on this new prototype. The first week I experimented with adding features (flying mechanics, customizations, etc), and then spent the second week doing some polish and adding content (more animals).
I released the first public version on Oct 7th. I spent 20k robux on day 1, and 5k/day over the next 5 days. This only got me to about 40 concurrents, but that’s not the point of Ads. The days of getting a significant amount of users with ads alone are gone. These first few players will be able to tell you whether your game has potential, or you should move on to the next.
The 2 main metrics you want to watch this early on: D1 retention and Average Session Time. If these are good (think at least 15% D1, and at least 8-9 min initial average session time). With the new Analytics dashboard that’s now available to experiences very early on, this is very easy to do, and they will tell you where you stand in relation to the Top games.
Fantasy Forest was showing good numbers on these initial metrics. It was hitting Top 200 numbers for D1 retention, but was below Top 1000 in average session time. So I decided to stop all advertising and focus on adding content, with the goal to grow the Average session time. This paid off, as adding new animals and game modes like decoration, slowly pushed avg session time from around 9 minutes to around 13 minutes. This is the hard part, but again, it’s very easy to see if a new feature helps or not.
During this time, I could “feel” the algorithm start to take notice of the game (because of the good engagement metrics, not because of any advertising!). There were usually “bumps” close to the weekends, when the average number of new players per hour would increase to the next step.
End result:
Work on the game started Sept 23rd
First public release was Oct 7th.
Spend about 40k robux on initial marketing over the first week.
First week, concurrents were always under 100, primed by ads
After 2 weeks in the market, Fantasy Forest hit 500 concurrents on Oct 22th.
After 3 weeks, it hit 1k concurrents on Oct 29th.
After 4 weeks, it hit 2k on Nov 5th.
I hope my experience gives motivation to keep trying, and to not spend so much time on an idea before testing it out in the market.
Good luck to all!