It can go by a few names, like Geo-Lock, but most of the time it’s called Softlaunch.  This technique is mostly used for mobile games, so that is what I’ll be focusing on.  In fact, SuperCell, makers of Clash of Clans, have a game in Softlaunch right now: Clash Royale.

Using the same art style, but not all the same characters as Clash of Clans.

What is Softlaunch?

Strictly speaking, softlaunch is when a game is released into a test market before it is released worldwide.  This can be done in one or two regions at first, or have several rounds while the release expands.  This is used to make sure the game actually works while open to the public, and that there aren’t any big problems, before it reaches the most important markets.

Now, some of this should be obvious right?  I mean, that’s what QA is for, to find things that break the game, and any of these “big problems”, yeah?  Unfortunately it’s not that simple when things hit the real world.

What bugs can you learn about with Softlaunch?

Let’s make an example.  Let’s say we made a game…  let’s call it Enthusiacs Kart Racer.

Sure, let’s go with that.  I think this has success written all over it! We should put it through the Softlaunch process first, though.

We’re testing this and trying it out on our own, and everything works well for us.  We decide to soft launch it in India, and we learn that…

People in India can’t connect to the server!

The physical location of our server is in the east coast of the USA, and that’s a long way away from India.  The time it takes for the information to go from their devices to our server is SO LONG that the game we gave them thinks that the server just isn’t there.  Ok, this is embarrassing, but we can fix this by making the client wait longer, or have a server mirror closer to India, and we go again, when we learn that…

The game doesn’t handle 1000 people at once!

Sometimes you can do everything you can to stress test, or load test the server, but you can never know until users are on it how the server will handle it.  Allright.  We got further this time, and we improve the server so it’ll scale up better.  We release it again and learn that…

There are bugs and exploits that break the game!

No matter how much time you spend testing a game, if there’s any significant user base for it, the time that those players will almost instantly dwarf the hours you can put into it while developing it.  When that happens, players out there will find all kinds of things.  Any time they come up you have to do what you can to close loopholes, fix bugs, and do so while being as fair to your player base as possible.

This is just the technical stuff, though.  There’s also the design and business side.

The design problems you can find in Softlaunch

In our example, we’ve already released Enthusiacs Kart Racer in India, updated the server twice, and the client at least once, but we’re making progress.  We’ve got the game running how we think it should, but we never actually expected India to be the market we were targeting.  If they like it, that’s great, but it’s not where we figured we would make our money.  We figured this would be big in the countries with big Formula 1 racing involvement, as defined by the number of events by host nation listed here.  (No, that doesn’t make real sense, but let’s roll with it for the sake of the example)

India has some F1 involvement, but not much, so let’s try Portugal and Mexico.  They’re a bit bigger, but not huge, so we can see how people more in line with what we want will react to the game before we’re hitting our prize audience.  We go there and we learn…

The analytics systems in the game are flawed

I’ve spoken about analytics before, and softlaunch is one of the big places where they matter.  We need to know how the players are using the game.  Without information coming back we can’t find the problems and fix them.  We need to update the game again and release it again.  Now we learn…

The analytics information isn’t good

Do they spend more time tuning their Kart, or actually racing?  Do they start the game, play once, and never come back?  Let’s say this is a free to play game, do they ever spend money on the game?  Do they get through the tutorial, and if they don’t, where do they stop?  Well, any of these could be bad, so let’s say we lose 50% of players in the tutorial, only 10% are still around after a few days, and only 2% spend money after a week.  Everyone has to go to the drawing board to see if there are any simple things to fix, or if we have to dig deep to fix this problem.

To continue the example, let’s say we update the game and things are looking better.  We’re now much closer and almost ready for the big time, but we want to make sure.  Now we release in really big countries.  This is all but the big time, places like Canada, Brazil, Japan, and Australia.  They each have bigger F1 involvement, bigger populations, we’re adding more markets, and we suspect they have a better chance to pay on this game.  This is the spot where Clash Royale is right now.

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