Case Study

Fossil Museum

Self-publishing Experience Shared by Gravity Games

“We will never give up creating high-quality games, and confidently move forward.” -Luo Linzhi, Founder of Gravity Games

Project Set-up and Launch Test


When "Dinosaur Museum" first entered XTiming, it was actually just a demo that existed as a project idea. The CEO, Luo Linzhi was not sure whether it was worth keeping this project idea and digging into the product design.


This poses a challenge to the XTiming team: Does the product have market potential?


At that time, the gameplay had not yet set off a huge wave in the market, and in general the idle game wasn’t prevailing, the CPI of the simulated game in the overseas market was not high. And "Dinosaur Museum" is the first to combine the Idle gameplay with simulation games, supplemented by excellent art skills and unique museum themes. XTiming initially assessed it as having great market opportunity in the evaluation report.

“Actually, there was enough market potential for idle gameplay and simulation games at that time. But now, the CPI of the entire simulated games market overseas is much higher than before.”.


Project set-up is extremely critical. The earlier the test, the sooner the market situation and the product development direction will be realized. Therefore, the XTiming team helped the product perform the CTR test in Europe as soon as the evaluation was over, and the result verified the market forecast.


The CTR of "Dinosaur Museum" is about 10% higher than that of similar products.


"The difficulty of the CTR test is whether the material directly reflects the attractiveness of core gameplay or graphic style of the game, and whether the product matches the target user of the target market. XTiming has helped us solve these two problems."


After obtaining the test data, Luo Linzhi verified the CPI and eCPM. Comprehensively considering eCPM and CPI, the strategy of overseas publishing was preliminarily determined to try the US iOS market. At the same time, the development direction was further determined based on the analysis of the data.


It can be said that the early game evaluation plus the CTR test created a bridge between the game and users, and Luo Linzhi also drew on the experience of the project development.


Uncertain elements are best tested in the market as soon as possible to get users feedback.


"We have fell into a lot of different traps, so later on we decide to test first, such as new package testing, so that users can experience the game earlier and give important feedback.


This is a very important to make a UA test as soon as possible, and continuously optimize your game according to the data and update the version accordingly. Don’t work just behind the closed doors, because there may be no positive results after repeated adjustments without a clear direction. The more you invest in the early stage to understand your game, the more clear it will be to see if the game is worth to continue developing in the later stage. Hence, do the test first, analyze the data to see whether the project is worth investing that much in the beginning, and don’t waste your time and money.”


Developers are often very concerned about how to start a project. Everyone is discussing the methodology of projects set-up, but in fact, only users can answer this question, because the game needs to have the feedback, target, and interaction with the users, and whether all of the information is accurate depends entirely on the users.


It is the users that determine the final market performance of the game.


Developers need to consider whether users can smoothly understand the design and logic in the game, whether the design of the game is clear enough for the target users, and what the player's real needs are.


Based on this idea, "Dinosaur Museum" created a variety of ad combinations for the UA test, and unearthed many unexpected problems. Luo Linzhi concluded, “For example, we found it difficult for users to understand some of the things we designed before. Even some features we thought were very simple functions, users still couldn’t understand them. So we had to see the problem from the users perspective and optimize it accordingly."


Nowadays, many games have unexpectedly achieved breakthroughs with clever core gameplay, delicate art styles, and novel game themes. Excellent content is scarce and has the most market opportunities. From the beginning of the project, developers can think about product strategies from the perspective of users.



Assisted by XTiming, Max Monetization


"The "Dinosaur Museum" suffered many setbacks during the global release, but all the problems were solved with the help of the XTiming team. If there were processes we didn’t understand, the XTiming team always gave us detailed explanations. Therefore, it’s very fortunate that although there are many problems, the XTiming team helped us solve them efficiently."


As a fast-growing advertising and marketing platform, it can be said that AdTiming has accumulated enough practical experience in response to help developers solve their problems. What’s more, all of the experience and solutions have been shared to our partners.


“I didn’t even know about waterfall before, and now I can flexibly combine different solutions to improve eCPM. That is why I want to thank XTiming. We were really inexperienced in monetization before and didn’t know how to make the various scenes of in app advertising. Through data analysis, we found out that the issue wasn’t how much in-app advertising scenes we had, but were these advertising scenes meaningful.


The most fundamental thing is to grasp what users want in the game, so when developers know user’s demands, a small amount of advertising scenes will be enough."


With the emergence of "traffic games" like hyper-causal, advertising has become a common monetization method. When designing the advertising scenes, it must not be overlooked that the advertising should be combined with the gameplay itself, to fully discover the needs of players, and increase the revenue of advertisers on the basis of user experience and satisfaction.


When "Dinosaur Museum" was being optimized, the problem repeatedly encountered was how to ensure that every need of the players can be met in the game.


For example, with the improvement of the game process, Luo Linzhi found that the monetization data of the previous version reflected that the design of the game's numerical value was not mature enough. For example, the consumption of gold coins in the game was too fast, the gold coins suffered inflation, and the player's demand for gold coins was greatly reduced. The monetization strategy wasn’t close to ready then.


"When designing the entire growth scenario, we created a plan. We need to know which stage the user is in within ten minutes, twenty minutes, or thirty minutes after going online. Only then, we can clearly know what the user really wants or needs."


In this process, XTiming optimized the waterfall, monitored the fluctuation of the monetization data in real time, and provided feedbacks about the monetization situation in real time, so that Gravity Games can have an assisting team on the of the monetization side.


Focus on high quality, Solve the Difficulties efficiently


When "Dinosaur Museum" cooperated with XTiming in the middle and late stages of the project, the team put more energy on the refinining data analysis for monetization, operation, as well as update release, in order to plan and create better strategies for the future version update.


"The more you test and analyse, the more you discover that the main competitiveness is the data of the product itself, it needs to updated and refined constantly. In this case, human resources cost is a relatively big problem, especially we are now working towards a more refined direction, aiming at higher goal. To achieve the goal, the higher the investment cost needed, so it needed have more talents. ".


When Mr. Luo set up Gravity Games, he insisted to make exquisite games.


In the past five years, Gravity Games has launched games such as "Nightmare", "Dream Traveler", "Escaped Rabbit", "Nightmare 2 Hunt Witch", "Nightmare 3 Messiah" and other games. The score on TapTap is as high as 10 points, which can be said that, including the current one " "Dinosaur Museum", each game is unique.


From the current market environment, Luo Linzhi believes that now is a great era, especially for small and medium developers, because as long as there are good products, there are more opportunities for traffic support. It's just that the company is adhering to high-quality games. Taking into account the difficulty of global market expansion and the manpower cost of refined operations, seeking great talents for Mr. Luo is becoming more and more urgent.


XTiming is also aware of the problem that developers are facing now. AdTiming CEO Yang Huanhuan proposed the upcoming launch of SaaS at the Lingmo Awards Summit held by Marketing department. Based on the existing XTiming’s set of services and its operation logic, it will be systematically upgraded to achieve platformization of our service, helping developers to operate it easily by themselves. Making also the services of the XTiming easily accessable to developers to reach global markets quickly and efficiently. In this situation, It will fundamentally improve developers' own industrial integration capabilities.


In the future, all data and service processes at the front and back ends, clients can self-service it based on the SaaS platform to quickly form its own data closed loop to complete the refined operations necessary for the market and their game speficics, fundamentally reducing the labor burden of clients’ operations.


Chasing high-quality products, there will be also a need for improving the ability to support the developers, XTiming will face the difficulty of making the every step as easy and accessible as possible.



Epliogue


The cooperation between XTiming and Gravity Games begins with consensus and continues with recognition, and is not limited to "Dinosaur Museum". More original gaming content belonging to Gravity Games will continue to be produced, and more services from XTiming will be used





Contact XTiming Team