The first part of the history of "Titans" ended with the fact that we have completed the development of a new social midkorn strategy. The game in test mode was launched in Odnoklassniki, and a full launch took place on August 15. Almost a month after the release, we studied statistics, and we can say that the launch was quite successful. Today, I suggest you look at the real statistics of a modern social game, and also try to make assumptions about possible changes in the game based on it.

Launch

So, on Friday, August 15, after several weeks of polishing, testing and preparing the infrastructure, the Titans got into the catalog of new applications. During the first weekend we received 101,000 installations from there (along with virality), and then another 111,000 more over the next week. Now the number of daily settings has stabilized at around 10,000. According to Odnoklassniki representatives, this is a good indicator for the game of our genre.


The effect of hitting the directory of new games on OK
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Of course, we wanted to get the maximum of installations from the catalog - after all, we will not have a second chance on the platform. And how does a new user decide to launch an unknown application? First of all, of course, everyone looks at the title and the cover. So we had to choose the optimal picture that would not get lost among the neighbors and approximately corresponded to the real content of the game. Fortunately, in this important matter we had the opportunity not to rely on intuition, but to conduct a real experiment. Having drawn dozens of various banner options, we launched them into targeted ads during a soft lunch. Then, after several iterations, we simply made a cover from a banner that showed the best conversion from impressions to installations.






Check your intuition and try to sort these banners by efficiency.

A few words can be said about the demographics. As you, I think, understood, "Titans" is a game for men. So the key indicators (recurrence and involvement) for them were predictably higher. And of all ages, men of 27-40 years old have been the most active. Here are the full statistics on demographics for players coming from the catalog:


Demographics of incoming users, data Odnoklassniki

Backend

A sharp jump in 100,000 new installations is always a serious test for infrastructure. To pass it with dignity, you must either have a serious performance margin at all major nodes of the system, or immediately make it scalable. In the previous part, I talked about the fact that, based on our experience, we decided to take the second path and immediately launch the “Titans” in the Amazon Cloud. But, unfortunately, before the release, we did not have time to fully configure the auto-scaling system. Therefore, in order to cope with a sharp peak load at startup, we raised our hands in a cloud and connected four EC2 instances to the balancer. As you can see, they occupy the most significant place in the structure of expenses.


Schedule of daily expenses for the infrastructure of the "Titans", data from the AWS admin panel

On the other hand, the DynamoDB service, in which we store profiles, did an excellent job with a sharp influx of players. With the help of our script, it is easily adjusted to the load jump, and now its daily content costs about the same as a regular static server. At the next stage of the system development, we want to connect the quick on-off script of EC2 instances, and then, finally, combine them into an automatic load balancing system. After that, we will finish the asynchronous statistics recording system and, thus, our infrastructure will become fully scalable.

Real statistics

Since the launch, three weeks have passed, and you can explore the key indicators of the game. To make the picture more complete, we will compare the behavior of users who came from the catalog with those who clicked on our banner during the “soft lunch”. For greater objectivity, I also added to the comparison the real indicators of the “Knights: Battle of Heroes” game. A year and a half ago, our friends, the company Playkot, successfully launched the Knights in the Russian networks. We know that now this game is constantly in the Top Grossing of Russian networks and Facebook, so its indicators can be used as a benchmark.

So, first the return in the first month of the game. On the x-axis we have - the amount of time that has passed since the installation of the application by the user. On the graph - the average values ​​for the last 30 days:


Return rate dropped during startup, but not critical

It can be seen that the excellent return rates that we observed among interested users (who clicked on the banner) sank noticeably during launch, but still turned out to be higher than those of the Knights. Here the statistics confirms the assumption that the game really makes a pretty strong impression on the players.

Now let's break the covers and look at the "cash" charts:




Income to a paying player is good, but not growing fast enough.

We can say that the income per paying user turns out quite good in the first week, but over time it does not grow very actively. This indicator, in turn, directly (with the standard for the genre share of paying players at 1-2%) affects the average income for the installation. It can be assumed that after a week of active play, users stumble upon a barrier in the gameplay that prevents further involvement in the game. And the activity of paying users here can be used as an integral indicator to assess the objective quality of the gameplay. In simple terms, the more interesting the game is, the more likely it is that users will “vote with a ruble” in it. Despite the possible presence of this barrier, by the end of the first month, we still pass over 4 rubles to install, thereby discouraging, on average, the cost of buying advertising. Pay attention to the fact that with comparable ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User), the income per one organic plant turned out to be noticeably lower than on the banner one. This is due primarily to the lower rates of return and conversion to payers.

Debriefing

Now, after we have studied the real statistics, the most interesting begins. You need to understand what to do next with the game. At first glance, nothing complicated: from a business point of view, by the end of the first month we need a higher ARPPU. So, it is necessary to strengthen the involvement of users in the gameplay after one or two weeks of the game. But what exactly do you need to change for this? Is it worth making more diverse fights? Maybe add more weapons and robots to the game? Finalize the PVP and matchmaking mechanism? Maybe just raise prices by half?

The options are incredibly many, each of them can potentially bring us closer to the goal. With limited resources, it is necessary to prioritize in some way. Changes should be significant enough so that the effect of them can be discerned in the standard noise for indicators. On the other hand, none of us wants to get into a crazy long-term construction project (like the “global war of clans for territory”), which would paralyze the work of the whole team for many months.

In addition, the indicators are quite objective, but they can be interpreted in completely different ways. Therefore, no matter how seductive another hypothesis may seem, one should always remember that this is only one of the possible interpretations of real data. However, from time to time to listen to intuition is still worth it. Over the years she spent in game devise, she repeatedly told us the right steps.

In an effort to maximize the use of our time, we have established for ourselves the following simple rule: before removing the perceived barrier in the gameplay, we must first try to clearly define the problem to be solved. In addition, the effect of changes in game design should be measurable.

Using these principles, we chose the most likely hypotheses, which are to be tested in the coming month:

• At some point, the difficulty of moving through the game increases dramatically, thereby reducing the motivation for active play.
  Check: analyze the accumulated statistics, find the moment of decrease in activity. Search in this place the distortions in the balance, correct them.
• Players do not see a clearly defined goal, for which it would be worth actively pumping a squad of Combat Robots.
  Check: Add to the game a campaign of several dozens of missions with increasing difficulty.
• The game has too little content, no sense of perspective and great opportunities.
  Check: Add more content to the game (new robots, weapons, shields, armor)

What's next?

First, in August, Julia, a first-rate specialist in UI and UX, joined our team. Now, when the heat of passion after a successful launch is a little weak, you can spend some time trying to fix the numerous problems of the “Titans” interface that have accumulated during development. We have already managed to replace several windows in the game that caused the most questions. The result made a strong impression on everyone, so we plan to continue moving in this direction, correcting the old jambs and preventing the appearance of new ones in the windows that we still have to impose:




Modification window for robots. It was-become

Secondly, we want to start on Vkontakte in October, together with the start of the season of player activity. In addition, we have already begun to prepare the game for localization in order to go to the “soft lunch” on Facebook before the end of the year.

And, of course, we continue to actively seek opportunities for meaningful changes in the game. When the art-department has a minute free from creating stunning graphics, they help to define directions, creating illustrations for our concepts of various features. Having such a picture in front of your eyes, it is much easier to imagine a complete image of how the feature will work and be combined with existing elements of the game:




Concepts of possible changes: a tree of research of robots and a tree of technologies

Call to action

As you can see from my story, developing an existing and earning product is often more difficult and interesting than creating something from scratch. It is necessary to correctly interpret the indicators, choose the most attractive directions of development, and when introducing features, you need to be careful not to break the existing functionality. Nevertheless, I believe that the strength of our team (which we plan to strengthen with several more specialists in the near future) will be enough to cope with this difficult task.

In the next issue, I hope to tell you what the changes described above have brought. If suddenly I explained something too confusing - you can ask a question in the comments. Last time, having failed to get an invite, I posted answers on behalf of Odnoklassniki with a big delay, when they were already of no interest to anyone. But I understood my mistake and now I will be more operational. Here I am: ivangrigorev . And if you want to make a game with us - write me an email .