Commitment or Sheer Madness: How we're Pushing Weekly App Updates to Millions of Users | Oliver Loeffler, Julian Erhardt
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Commitment or Sheer Madness: How we're Pushing Weekly App Updates to Millions of Users | Oliver Loeffler, Julian Erhardt
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Commitment or Sheer Madness: How we're Pushing Weekly App Updates to Millions of Users | Oliver Loeffler, Julian Erhardt
- 1. Fluffy Fairy Games. Creating truly player-centric games.
- 2. CTO Oliver Löffler Julian Erhardt Product Manager
- 4. 20M+ installs 9M+ MAU (that’s $10M+ revenue)
- 6. Games are a hit-driven business. The fasteryou can findout thata game doesn'twork, the lower the costs.
- 7. What isthe most importantthing todo? Say to lotsof things NO
- 9. We believe thatthe most import thing is the core gameplay measured by D1 retention (Everything else can bepolished later) Idle Miner Tycoon Idle Factory Tycoon
- 10. Released Idle Miner Tycoon on July 2016 Polishingand expanding thegame withmore than 80 updates. We call it games as a service.
- 11. How to do it
- 12. So what kind of process isused for it?
- 13. So what kind of process isused for it? It’s calledleandevelopment
- 15. Updatepolicy 1 Update = 1 Sprint 1 Week Planning Developing Testing
- 16. Make a new update
- 17. Make a new update Game Design – work ahead of the dev team (plan new features about a week in advance)
- 18. Make a new update Game Design – work ahead of the dev team (plan new features about a week in advance) Game Art – prepare assets for new features, only do smaller adjustments depending on development needs during the sprint
- 19. Make a new update Game Design – work ahead of the dev team (plan new features about a week in advance) Game Art – prepare assets for new features, only do smaller adjustments depending on development needs during the sprint Dev Team should not be blocked by another team – fully focus on developing SprintStart
- 20. Make a new update Game Design – work ahead of the dev team (plan new features about a week in advance) Game Art – prepare assets for new features, only do smaller adjustments depending on development needs during the sprint Dev Team should not be blocked by another team – fully focus on developing QA - tests features during development finding and resolving bugs early on SprintStart
- 21. Critical Path It's always important to accelerate the critical path It's always important toaccelerate the critical path
- 22. Single-piece-workflow Focus onone taskata time. Testthe taskonceit’sdonebeforeyoustart something new. Don’tjust focusontesting atthe end,it won’t workthatway.
- 23. Staged Rollout 1% 20% 100% 5% Day 1: Identifying bugs via reporting tool Day 3: User Feedback and Store Reviews Day 4: Android Release Day 2: Identifying bugs via reporting tool Android iOS Day 4: iOS Release (no staged rollout)100%
- 24. Be player-centric and connect to players
- 27. Make moreislands andlet usgo tospace
- 29. Features
- 31. Improved Savegame System Technical Stability+ User Satisfaction+ 31 2016 Ad-Mediation Revenue+ User Satisfaction+ More content Retention+ User Satisfaction+
- 32. Localization Downloads+ User Satisfaction+ 32 2016 Anti-Cheat Tool Technical Stability- User Satisfaction- 2017 In-App-Purchases Revenue+
- 33. Coming Soon 33 2017 2018 LiveOpsEvents Revenue+ Retention+ Social Features Retention+ Downloads+
- 34. 39 Please ask us any question ❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️
Editor's Notes
- Hey everyone, we are from fluffy fairy games and today we want to present you how we managed to evolve our game from a minimum viable product into a successful game by doing weekly updates
- So this is Julian, Product Manager of our first game Idle Miner Tycoon and me Founder & CTO of Fluffy Fairy Games.
- We founded Fluffy Fairy Games in February 2016 with 5 people and managed to grow to over 35 people in the last two years, always looking for more people to join us.
- Currently we got two games out there. Idle Miner Tycoon was our first game, released in July 2016 and Idle Factory Tycoon which is in soft launch since November last year. Together the two titles got downloaded over 15 million times with an active player base of 9 million monthly active users. Till now they made over 10m in revenue.
- As we all know games are a hit driven business. But it's very hard tell if a game is successful before getting it out to the market. So the faster you can test your game on the market, the faster you know if it is successful and if not, you didn't waste so much time and money to find out. For Example We released Ilde Miner Tycoon only after 2 months of developing, including planning, testing. We always start with small teams, containing one game designer, one artists and two developers. To increase the pressure on ourselves we also schedule release parties even before starting to develop, therefore we actually have to deliver, otherwise it would be quite awkward if we don't have a playable version.
- So how did we build a playable first version which is already fun within 2 month of development time? We basically had to say "NO" to a lot of things. With the first version of our games we want to build a minium viable product with only the gameplay mechanics included. We had so many ideas during development which were really cool, but we always had to remind ourselves if it's really necessary for a minimum product and if we need to say no to it
- After we throw our games on the market we then watch out for what we think is the most important metric: D1 retention. If D1 retention is high, we know the players get hooked by the mechanics and we know we can add more content and features to increase d7 and d30 rentention. (If d1 retention isn't high we know that we already got some flaws in the core gameplay and we need to change it or kill the game an start a new one.) With our two games Idle Miner Tycoon and Idle Factory Tycoon we achieved d1 retentions from over 70%, which we think is good number to go on.
- Player feedback, player centric After releasing our games to the stores, we just get started. We staff up the teams, add more features and content, listening to user feedback and polishing exisiting features. To accomplish this, we decided to ship weekly updates to stay very lean and agile and therefore we did over 80 updates to Idle Miner Tycoon since we released it in July 2016. We also don't think that our games will be done any time in the future, but we rather see them as a service adding continously more value to our players.
- How to ship weekly updates
- So, as I already told you, we needed to say "No" to a lot of things. But all those things we needed to say "no" are crucial for a sucessful game. Therefore I want to give you a short timeline on when we integrated what and how it affected our game.
- when we got the first version of our game out there, we got some problems with the savegame system. Players were losing their progress and complaining about it. Back then we only saved the savegame to disk when quitting the game. In some cases this wasn't enough, for example when the battery died it wouldn't save or only partially write the savegame to disk. Therefore we decided to do periodical saves and integrated some backup solutions. The techincal stability increased and users were happy, that they didn't loose their savegame.In our game we use rewarded videos ads to give the players some boost if they watch an video. We only had one ad network integrated in our game when we first shipped it. But the amount of videos a player can watch in a certain time is somehow limited. Therefore players were complaining that they couldn't watch any more videos and we decided to integrate ad-mediation to show videos from different ad providers. Because we could show more videos our revenue also increased.As I already told, our game had only very limited content at the begining and user who got through the content requested more. To also boost our long term retention we decided to put more content into the game.
- To increase our revenue we also added In-App-Purchases at some point. We have a mix out of temporary and permanent boosts and also doing limited offer sales.Our game is a completly offline game. because players can adjust their system time they can exploit the countdown timers we have in our game. Therefore we decided to integrate an anti-cheat tool which protects against some kind of exploits. Sadly, there were some edge cases that caused problems even with honest players. Therefore the techincal stability went down and players hated it a lot. Therefore we decided to get it out of our game again.To make our game also accessible to a lot other countries we translated our game to more than 20 languages. Because we also translated store pages, we also got more downloads and of course user satisfaction went up.