Environment friendly person acquisition is the problem going through each try to efficiently scale a sport. What as soon as labored like magic might not work in any respect now, and builders are having to regulate to the altering UA panorama and make modifications to their video games for any chancce of success.
Talking of which, Rivergame’s survival sport Final Struggle has managed to attain over $2 million a day income and round 200k downloads a day. However how is that this attainable, and what technique was used? On this visitor put up, product and sport design advisor Jakub Remiar explains all.
Rivergame’s Final Struggle is the newest evolution of a product that has been adapting to the present person acquisition market situations. And this isn’t an accident however a technique of a few years of iterations. The truth is, that is the corporate behind Prime Struggle – launched in April 2019 and Prime Heroes, which will also be categorised because the “new era of 4X video games” – and is much like Whiteout Survival.
The important thing connection between all of those video games is that they go to nice lengths with a purpose to conceal the 4X layer of the sport through the onboarding of the participant.
This funnel begins from the advert artistic, continues into retailer screenshots, and easily transitions into precise gameplay in each the early and mid-game. Throughout this time, the sport nonetheless retains the phantasm that it’s truly a sport from the creatives, with the hyper-casual gameplay of the mathematical gates. Final Struggle truly has two devoted modes to this. One the place the participant completes these puzzle-like single-player missions on a saga (left picture) and the fully-fledged autoplay fight mode (proper picture), the place he truly must degree up heroes with talents. It’s mainly a second sport in-built from the viral creatives that they’re utilizing, with all of its parts. Participant enter may be very intuitive and it truly looks like a hyper-casual sport from the beginning.
The entire onboarding expertise is totally scripted with a narrator character that truly finally ends up sitting on a bomb with an eight hour timer that’s a part of your major base constructing. She duties you to gather pliers, with a purpose to lower the wires of the bomb. This will likely appear irrelevant, however it’s truly a play on one other viral artistic the place reducing wires is the centre. This was additionally already used beforehand within the Prime Struggle tutorial, the place gamers needed to lower wires in electro bins with a purpose to unhide areas of the bottom, which is precisely the identical case right here. So I count on this particular setup to be a product of quite a few AB checks, which interprets viral UA creatives straight into the sport performance.
Despite the fact that I wasn’t in a position to accumulate all of the pliers within the eight hour timer, in fact the bomb didn’t blow up, simply the timer disappeared and the story “waits” for you anyway to complete the principle quest.
As the sport progresses, it slowly begins to unfold the 4X characteristic set. It is advisable to construct buildings, practice troopers, generate extra sources and at last, the sport unlocks the 4X “marching battles” map. This advanced step is finished very neatly by way of a “world quest” characteristic, which is precisely the identical characteristic utilized in Prime Heroes, Whiteout Survival and Final Struggle. It streamlines the 4X map interplay, in order that even a non-4X participant can discover it straightforward to method. In older 4X video games, you would want to seek for monsters, bosses, and sources to farm on the map, both by manually wanting close to your base or utilizing a search characteristic.
Now you simply observe your semi-randomized icons in your “scanner”, which makes positive to slowly take you thru each completely different encounter sort on the 4X map. The extra duties you full, the upper your scanner degree is, and the rarer are your random duties, with larger rewards, in fact. You don’t want to consider what you’ll want to do, which encounter to farm and even the place to search for it. This manner, the sport makes positive that you’ve got sufficient sources to proceed your progress and teaches you the ultimate step of the 4X layer.
Later, the sport turns into your typical 4X eventualities, comparable to Rise of Kingdoms, Recreation of Struggle or Cell Strike, the place you’ll want to teleport your city into the nest of your guild and just about play so much every single day. In any other case, you get both kicked or destroyed by your individual guild. Then, compete in dwell occasions and wars between different guilds for sources and territory, rinse and repeat till solely the strongest gamers and guilds stay within the centre of the map.
Final Struggle additionally innovates a bit of bit on a few of the options. As an example, your clan mates may also help you together with your “world quest” process, and you may simply open your radar and accumulate the rewards. There’s additionally a “Plunder mechanic, ” which ensures that your heroes from the gates minigame keep related within the late sport. It is advisable to ship them to escort cargo vehicles, which different gamers can assault and in addition you possibly can assault different participant’s vehicles on the map. You want a number of groups of heroes, with a purpose to ship a number of vehicles on lengthy cooldown timers.
That is once more one other instance, the place the preliminary mechanics from the “onboarding sport” are nonetheless getting used within the late sport making the characteristic set very cohesive. Earlier than, we might see this UA tactic executed solely by way of placing playables of your UA creatives into the early funnel, with video games comparable to Hero Wars, Storm Shot and X-Hero. This was clearly not sufficient and gamers would finally uncover that there isn’t a extra gameplay they noticed within the creatives. Right here within the “new wave” of 4X video games, it’s nonetheless current and utilised in the entire sport, due to this fact your UA group actually dictates what ought to be your product’s onboarding and even gameplay mechanics.
This new technique was already efficiently executed by Prime Struggle, Kingdom Guard, and Whiteout Survival final yr, leading to big business success. It’s at the moment making round $2 million a day within the Western market. It makes use of a simulation sport as an alternative – taken straight from Century sport’s different title, Frozen Metropolis, to masks the 4X layer. Final Struggle is at the moment doing $2.8 million in income a day and continues to scale up. I believe that it’s primarily as a result of the UA artistic is paired way more carefully to the preliminary gameplay, and the 4X layer is launched a lot quicker in comparison with the opposite talked about video games. I believe that this setup, the place UA straight overlaps together with your product design, can even change into obligatory in different genres sooner or later. Should you don’t produce other technique of decreasing your CPIs, comparable to having a world recognized IP, there isn’t a different solution to obtain this large scale from scratch at the moment.
Edited by Paige Prepare dinner
