Not-so-trivial lessons learned from launching mid-core games

What the talk is about

Maks Samorukov, a project director at Crazy Panda, shares non-obvious and costly lessons from launching mid-core games. His team analysed successful games by genre, combining revenue and downloads into a single metric. High-LTV genres (4X strategy, RPG) demand huge investment in content and meta, and are slow and expensive to test: LTV is hard to predict and traffic sources behave differently. He warns about a soft-launch trap: optimising for payers gives great numbers, but at global launch that narrow audience burns out, so soft-launch buying should mimic the scale planned for release. He also covers creatives, white lists built from a similarity graph based on Google recommendations, and the market growing roughly 25–30% a year. Finally, a game that starts low and does not grow in its first months has only about a 4% chance of taking off later. Useful for UA managers and producers.