Coca cola uses Norway as their test country, since it's a small market and fairly contained. Also because many say that Norwegian are more "american" than their fellow europeans. Coca cola uses it to see if Norwegians like the new product before doing massive marketing and product launch in U.S. Similarly, hardware company use Hong Kong as the testbed for mainland china. If something sells well, it's likely that it will be well received in mainland China. Apart from that, there is the obvious benefit of A/B hit testing improvement, server load, user feedback etc. Have you guys thought of that?
Our current plan for our first game is to soft-launch it in the Canadian app store. As Canadians ourselves, we're hoping to generate some light local buzz from this, but the main reason we're going with Canada is because user feedback and trends between the Canadian and US app stores are almost carbon copies of each other (personal opinion). DP
David, Canada is a good soft launch market. It's close to U.S, geographically and taste-wise. The downside is that, though small, Canada is a pretty high ARPU country. Am thinking of even smaller market as a soft launch test.
I guess that's one of the benefits of a zero dollar marketing budget - you don't have to worry about things like this. But seriously, what are the advantages of a "soft" launch to a small scale developer?
Check out this Article by Ndemic Creations (who is active here): http://www.ndemiccreations.com/home/the-making-of-plague-inc/7daysonfromfirstinfection%E2%80%93plagueinclaunchanalysis It's a review of the first seven days after the launch of their game and basically explains all the updating and feedback they immediately received. Releasing to a smaller market would likely get you most of this feedback so you could implement those updates before a full global release. You can talk to a lot of people even with a $0 marketing budget, so having your product in the best quality possible for one big push on release could certainly help you get the initial surge to push you into the charts.
A lot of major publishers prefer Canada, and I concur: It's a fabulous market to beta-release your app. It's very reflective of NA and the west as a whole while also giving you similar activity spikes WRT time of day / week / month and user preferences. Full disclosure: My employer is Canadian : P
I've kept on thinking about this the last few days and it just sounds more and more like the best way to do things. Does anyone know of any indies who've tried this method and blogged/posted results?
Test launching in Canada sounds like a great idea. Are there any DISadvantages to just having a soft launch in one country?
I don't know how new and noteworthy features behave. Are they determined per country or is the app no longer considered 'new' after it's been out for a while in a different country?
In my experience, most mid-large developers softlaunch in Hong Kong or Canada because they are consistently low monetising territories. It is easier in these territories then to benchmark the performance of an upcoming product against other released products so as to develop possible performance trends. For smaller developers though there is really very little need to soft launch. Unless you want to run non-simulation stress testing of server, etc...
What? I don't know about Hong Kong but Canada is approx 1/10th the US in terms of earning for most iOS companies. For Loopycube (being proud Canadians) we're sitting around 1/8th. The reason why you'd soft launch in Canada is Canadian behaviors closely resemble the Americans, but you'd have only 10% the number of people in your server to muck things up. It has everything to do with the number of people, not the number of dollars spent. I would assume the same rings true for Hong Kong and China (the 2nd biggest iOS market).
What about 2 semi-soft-launches? I heard about this "practice" a week ago, and I'm planning to launch NanoLooper in Polish App Store (I think the market is smaller than in Canada), then (e.g. v1.1) launch in Canada, and then the final one (v1.2) in larger App Stores (in the US, the UK, Germany and maybe in France). But to be honest, I don't know if Polish gamers give more critical rather than valuable feedback... With all respect to Poles, but something is "wrong" with their mentality and very often they are against everything (especially someone's success). Does anyone know the answer for Blackharon's question: -=Agnes=-
