Hi, I am looking to release a game that is similar in nature to games such as Murder Mystery or Epic Mini games in such the way that it is round based and you need a minimum number of players before the game can start. In my case, you will need at least three players in the lobby to start the game.
The issue that I am worried about is since this game is new, there may be the case that players may join and not want to wait until another player joins. I am afraid that the games interest in the player will be lost before enough players join to be able to start a match. Ads will be wasted on players joining and not waiting for others to join and potentially disliking the game.
I have considered obstacle courses or some sort of simple activity to do in the lobby, but that may stray too far from the main idea of the game and not give the users the experience they were looking for. I have also thought about AI that might be able to perform basic functions that would make the game playable, but this could introduce easy currency farming and would also be require much more resources (time and work) than it is truly worth.
In all, I am just looking to see how others would go about this problem and seeing how I could apply it to my own game. The end goal is to be able to establish the player base so that users will not have to wait long times before enough players are in the lobby, but the player base can not be built if players don’t have enough players to play their first game.
What would make you want to stay and wait for enough players for a match to start?
Thank you for any and all responses.