Warren Woodward

Some larger developers need to present the marketing plan for a year or more before you have the soft launch data. If that’s the case, define profitability targets and create 3 scenarios and “budget pools” amongst which to choose once you have the data:

• Above profitability targets? Use the larger budget pool.

• Average? Use the mid-case budget pool.

• Below profitability targets? Use the barebones budget while you continue to improve the product

The goal of the soft launch is validation by real users. You have a functional version of the product, and you need to understand if the game has a “pulse”: does it have a healthy economy, are the core loops effective, is the game stable? At this stage, the Growth org is a data provider for Product to validate all those things.

You can break down the process of growth into 3 pillars and subteams: 

1. UA - arms of the beast (operations and day-to-day)

2. Data - mind of the beast (tooling and analytics experts)

3. Creatives - heart of the beast (ads, app store assets, information, organic social)

In the development and pre-launch phase, you need to get the piping in place and start developing the go-to-market strategy. There are also some things you may want to do before you build the game, like live-play concepts to get data on what’s going to work or not in the market.

There are 3 different phases when launching a game, each with its scope of work:

1. Development - getting the game ready to launch

2. Soft launch - getting the initial batch of test data and building the full go-to-market plan

3. Scaled growth - transform the game from an idea to a scalable, profitable business

Store page assets (icon, screenshots) are one of the first things you need to think about on the creative side because you need to be able to submit your build.

Make sure you have a flexible infrastructure that allows the UA and creative teams to constantly turn on new channels, test new things, and an easy way to compare past results to current results (apples to apples) even over a long period.

You don’t start measuring stuff after the game is live. Performance marketing starts from the beginning.