Product Launch vs. Marketing Launch for Games

Here’s a very interesting idea from Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. Start-ups often mix them up but there are fundamental differences between Product Launch and Marketing Launch.

Product Launch is:

1. Making your product available.
2. Use SEO tactics to acquire users like SEM on $5 a Day.
3. Use analytics to understand from real-world user behavior, understand what your fundamental driver of growth really is.
4. It’s not a Beta test or limited launch. Your goal is not to test your software with a limited set of users – you are really going public. (Of course, you can still call the public version a Beta, but that’s another thing.)

Marketing Launch is:

1. Announce a new product.
2. Spend a lot of money in PR, promotional actions, ads.
3. PR with blogs, magazines and newspapers to get Media Coverage.
4. Buzz/viral marketing activities.

Eric is saying startups should not Marketing Launch until having a solid understanding of how their products retain and monetize, which is only really discovered after a Product Launch with real-world users.

Could that be applied to games? 

Now consider each game is a Product or even a startup all by itself (for many small studios, the company is the game). Could this tactic work?

Recognized IPs can’t do that. Marketing Launch will occur spontaneously the moment they Product Launch. Portal is a big franchise, a media powerhouse, and media will swarm to cover availability of the next installment. Less-known IPs which caught media attention in the past will also naturally draw awareness, such as the next Scribblenauts or World of Goo.

It also looks nearly impossible to operate such tactic on consoles. You must be able to update your game fast. Not only there’s the retail problem but the platform-owner also impose a lot of barriers through approval policies and fees. Even with online stores and online updates, those things constrain developers quite a lot on frequent updates.

Finally, it looks like it would work a lot better for free-to-play games than for premium, pay-to-download games. Maybe you can still go premium and do a trial-basis or shareware-basis thing, but you won’t get all of the benefits as your players will inevitably quit after a limited time.

Online Games

This tactic is perfectly possible for Desktop, Browser-based or Facebook online games. In these platforms, we can update the game daily to optimize the user experience. Development teams will already be prepared to implement user analytics and some BI to support Live operations. So we’re just changing the context of Launch a little bit.

Some people still think games can’t be saved after a Product Launch, even online games. If the DAU goes downhill after launch, it’s doom. In fact, in 2011 we saw many companies like Atari giving up from Facebook initiatives for not showing results early. They expected big launches that make a lot of money, just like old retail days.

But look how Playdom did the opposite: using the experience with real-world users and investing in a re-design of a game already Product Launched, the team of Wild Ones showed impressive increase in retention and turned into a successful product.

Mobile Games

Some people in mobile games are also pursuing big launches. Part of this is because the iOS App Store, the main Mobile revenue source of today, operates in a way to favor you to download the next cool thing. There are the Genius helper, there are the Top downloads charts, and there are the Featured tab and banners.

But take a look at Tap Paradise Cove: launched in March 2012, the game went reasonably well on downloads upon launch but quickly dropped. Pocket Gems ran a few marketing campaigns to put the game back in Top 100 Free downloads but nothing impressive. It’s been very low on downloads for the past couple months. However, it’s far from dead – Tap Paradise Cove climbed the Top Grossing charts and stayed there. The game is acquiring fewer and fewer new users, but optimizing itself for more and more retention and revenue-per-user.

The thing about Product Launching before Marketing Launching with Apple (and now Microsoft) is approval times. You need to account for the fact a binary update may take from 1 to 3 weeks to be approved. Just because of that you will likely need months to get good improvements. Android doesn’t have this problem, but if you’re using Android to optimize you app after a Product Launch, always remember Android is different.

Conclusion

I think it’s perfectly possible to Product Launch first on games, optimize the product with fewer users, get more and more of revenue out of them, and then Marketing Launch using ad networks, social networks and good old PR. In online games it looks like a very good fit. It’s also possible for mobile games.

And remember, we’re not cutting Marketing Launches altogether, as it is still a very good thing when done in the right time. We’re just making it differently.

References

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/dont-launch.html

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/three-drivers-of-growth-for-your.html

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/sem-on-five-dollars-day.html

http://appdata.com/

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134856/interview_the_secrets_of_woogas_.php?print=1

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/ios-revenues-vs-android/

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134731/redesigning_wild_ones_into_.php?print=1

http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2012/05/03/zynga-com-2-8-million-mau/

http://gigaom.com/2012/09/16/563158/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2012/jun/10/apple-developer-wwdc-schmidt-android

http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/tap-paradise-cove/ranking/history/#store_id=143441&device=iphone&view=ranks&start_date=2012-03-07&end_date=2012-05-31