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How we improved the success rate of our marketability tests by closing the feedback loop.

On our way to developing the next hyper-casual hit game, we take a significant focus on early marketability tests through video ads to ensure the game will be highly marketable once we publish it. Only if the video ads achieve a high CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and IPM (Installs Per Mille) we continue developing the game. Otherwise the project gets killed quickly to not waste any time and we move on to the next opportunity.

In the early summer we saw a worrying decrease in the number of successful marketability tests. The amount of successful tests per month dropped to 0 as no project passed our benchmark of 5% CTR. At first, we continued working as we did, with the hope that the next projects would surely be more successful. But after some weeks we realized that things didn’t improve by themselves. We quickly needed to analyze the situation and figure out what the problem was and how we could solve it.

After an immense amount of research and experimentation we found a critical process change. After implementing the change we saw 30% of our projects pass the marketability test. The highest amount we have seen so far! In hindsight the solution seems crystal clear: Instead of just moving on to the next project, we needed to look closely at WHY each project was failing! This allowed us to generate learnings from each failure and share those learnings with all teams!

Every time we kill a project, we now come together in a retrospective meeting to analyze the failed project. To guide us through the process we developed a system consisting of 22 different bullet points that we look at in detail, for example: gameplay readability, camera perspective, theme, toy, character and shown gameplay scenes. Those learnings are then collected and archived.

Once a week the product teams come together to present the learnings they generated from the failed game prototypes to the team. This way we can grow and improve as a company and it enforces our mindset that failure is not a problem, as long as we learn from it.

We are happy to share our learning system with you. Simply drop us an email: contact@sunday.gg and we will get back to you. If you also want to collaborate, test and publish your games with us, send us your introduction and games portfolio to publishing@sunday.gg