What’s a soft launch?

The story so far, as you have likely read elsewhere, is that Rovio is launching its brand-new game Angry Birds Go! on December 11th. In case you don’t know, it’s a kart racing game whose resemblances to Mario Kart and Re-Volt are more than obvious, but featuring Angry Birds characters instead.

However, there are a few lucky users who are already playing it, and no, they aren’t beta testers or part of Rovio’s workforce otherwise. They’re the Kiwi users, who eventually will have to get used to enjoy this kind of premieres. Our goal today is to explain you why, and by the way let’s understand a little bit more how the mobile gaming industry works from the inside.

There are at least three reasons to start a “soft launch”, as they are called.

Early feedback

Before you release your game, which has costed several hundred of thousand dollars, it seems a good idea to gather a group of guinea pigs to test it. They can’t be people related to the industry, because they have been employed by you at some stage of development, or would express biased critique and keep the gossip for later. You need real users able to write real feedback.

The feedback you receive can then be extrapolated, both in numbers and quality, to what you would have received in your true target market, namely the US. New Zelander users share overall the same culture and tastes as American ones so it’s quite reliable. If that feedback were to be too negative, well, then there’d only be a bunch of islanders there at the end of the world complaining, something seldom spreadable to the rest of the world.

In the worst scenario, you can pull your app out from that market, redo and outdo it and push it back with a different name and design as if nothing had happened. Same goes for the good and kind words: great ideas for future updates have come from first hand users, so when US (or elsewhere) players ask you for a new character or whatever, you may be already working on it.

Technical twaddles

The game released should be version 1.0, but this doesn’t mean that you can make your worldwide release with 1.01, does it? Said otherwise, those your very first real users not only share the same culture as those you’re actually planning to sell your stuff, they also have the same devices divided in the same proportions, so any bug, unexpected issue or “hidden feature” as programmers usually say, is easy to be detected there and fixed up before the product reaches the masses.

In the end, you can’t test your game in every known device under every known configuration, but a hundred of thousand users will collectively -and willingly- do it. Any bug relevant or recurring enough will -or should- be corrected at this moment. If there’s some kind of online multiplaying, cloud saving or whatever, you can also put your servers under a test of strength. There are so many advantages.

Advertising

Don’t you see? We are here gathered around the bonfire telling stories about a yet unreleased game, chit chatting about how it’ll be and why we’d rather prefer this or that. Would have Rovio gotten so much buzz reaching every single online media, sending them review builds and bribing them with plush toys? Not really.  A game released is a game released, and a game released by a big company is much bigger news that a game released-to-be regardless of how expected it is.

Lastly, when you liken any marketing strategy to an early release in there where people live in holes in the ground and visit Rivendel for Holidays, there’s a key point: releases are utterly for free, and advertising costs money, much money. Of course you can always spend money to boost your sales later, but you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Before you rush to coin the word kiwing to refer to this kind of release, know that it hasn’t always been this way. In the recent past, the chosen one was Canada, but the Maple Leaf country’s market has grown much, it has become so important and has so many users nowadays that big companies have needed to find a smaller and more controllable environment to carry out their tests. Who knows if tomorrow we’re talking about some anglophone island in the midst of nowhere, or if app stores can segment releases by much tinier shares, perhaps enough to cover a single city or neighborhood. Can you imagine a “Angry Birds 3D Pachinko Game” (or whatsoever) released in Sedona, AZ? Guam? Malta?

 

No nazgûls were harmed in the making of this article. Angry Birds Go! will be launched on December 11th as expected, unless force majeure occurs.

Promotional images courtesy of Rovio.