So, you’ve launched your new mega-hyped app. Instead of a few hundreds you got tens of thousands logins at the first day. and the second. and the third. Success!!
Or is it?
If you didn’t prepare well enough in advance (and sometimes, even if you did), this can often means also mega problems: players unable to connect to server, sync errors resulting players losing coins and content in the game, frequent crashes and more.
And from a successful marketing campaign (which brought all the users) you find yourself in a marketing hell: awful reviews in the app stores, bad user ranking, web-wide negative media reports and shitloads of support requests to handle.
22Cans experienced this very scenario when launching Curiosity this week.
Now, so far, this is nothing unique. Almost everyone launching an app or a game with a new team (regardless of how experienced the team members are) felt this in one degree or another. Sometimes more than once. I had a share of these myself when launching new games on mobile and on facebook as well.
The traditional response is posting a page with an apology, bragging that you were surprise by the scale of the success of the launch, ensuring players you’re working hard on solving the issues and thanking players for their patience.
22cans did all this – but in a really cool way. They released a video where one on their team members admitting he experiences all these issues – and then just walks over to his fellow developers and managers demanding answers.
They touched all the points a written apology and a small FAQ would have touched, only it came out so cool, it was way more effective.
Good work guys! 🙂
