It's been an enlightening experience.
No longer are developers expected to come up with the perfect game, merely something that's good enough, with the potential to be modified for months or even years.
In the petri dish
Something that's also always changing is the territories companies soft launch into.
Canada was the initial Goldilocks location - at least in relation to the US and other English-speaking markets - while Australia is popular too.
As we considered last week, big publishers such as EA can cherry-pick multiple countries; Real Racing 3 is currently live in Russia, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
And some developers like to test in their domestic markets; something Gameloft is currently doing in France with its Team Fortress 2-inspired F2P online shooter Blitz Brigade.
What goes up
As we can see from the basic ranking chart of iPhone downloads, the game follows a typical trajectory.
It launches well and maintains rank, followed by a slow decline. After all, this is a soft launch so Gameloft only needs a certain number of users to test with. It's not in a hard and prolonged user acquisition mode yet.
The top grossing chart is more interesting, though.
As you'd expect, as the initial downloads accumulate, the game climbs the iPhone top grossing charts, although it's yet to get into the top 100 top grossing games chart.
The two peaks for iPhone players occur over the weekend period (greyed regions), while the game performs better - and somewhat more consistently - on iPad. (see below).
Paying the gatekeeper
Gameloft will be happier to see the uptick in the iPad top grossing chart, especially in comparison to the iPhone's decline.
It's a mark that the two platforms can have very different users and user cases.
Of course, we expect gameplay tweaking to continue, and as demonstrated by the screenshot below, changes can be significant.
Blitz Brigade is a multiplayer-focused game, so this change will reduce player's use of soft currency, while encouraging much higher play time.
Gating players' access to a game with a resource is something many developers are now doing, with NaturalMotion's fuel restriction for CSR Racing perhaps the most successful deployment to-date.
This is a sharper restriction for multiplayer shooters, however; something ngmoco grappled with back in the days of Eliminate while Scattered Entertainment will have to be thoughtful about it in its forthcoming shooter The Drowning.
But back to Blitz Brigade. This change suggests the game may remain in soft launch mode for some time to come while Gameloft investigates other ways to monetise.
After all, the customer is always right.
