Behind the Scenes of Mini Golf Matchup's International Success

Along with our partner Scopely, we recently launched Mini Golf MatchUp™ on both iOS and Android. Our first game, Major Mayhem, had been well received. But Mini Golf MatchUp achieved a level of success beyond our highest expectations, ranking #1 overall in 28 countries on the first day of release and driving over 10 million downloads in the first month alone. Following this recent success, we wanted to take a look back at the game's development and global launch, sharing our experiences regarding the opportunities and decisions that led to these results.

Choosing the Right Partner

It's a decision that every independent developer grapples with: to self-publish or work with a partner? While there are benefits to both approaches, we ultimately partnered with Scopely because their value proposition was clear and their style of communication was direct.

A lot of developers are either blindly determined to self-publish or under the assumption that they need a publisher no matter what -- even if they don't fully understand what a publisher will do. In contrast, we remained open to both options, and we asked potential partners specific questions about how a relationship would work. For example, we asked questions like:

These types of questions cut to the core of what a partner could provide, and whether or not they were thinking about building the business around our game in a sophisticated way. Ultimately, we recognized that Scopely would be an excellent partner because they had clear and direct answers to our questions, and they made sure that we understood the value they could provide.

More specifically, we were excited that Scopely planned to build a heavily customized distribution plan around our game. Scopely’s social infrastructure was also very attractive to us, since we lacked server-side and multiplayer experience. For instance, Scopely’s login and matchmaking tools, while they seem simple to the end-user, would have been very difficult to build on our own. Scopely also provided us with APIs that supported more complex features like daily events, tournaments, and achievements, and we worked with their engineering team to implement these tools into the game. Finally, we realized that Scopely could provide data-driven insights in a way that we could not ourselves – for example, we had no idea how to compare the lifetime value of users acquired from different marketing channels – and the fact that they planned to assign dedicated product managers to our game was a resource we valued highly.

After analyzing our other publishing options, including self-publishing, we realized that working with Scopely provided significantly more upside while mitigating our risk. And since we found partners with a wealth of expertise and tools that we lacked, we were able to focus on the core gameplay and presentation – our specialties – while Scopely built the business around the game.

Big Changes During Beta

Staying open to new ideas and being able to change design direction quickly was very important to our development process. We took advantage of Android's open platform to test game elements like our control mechanics and new user flow on over 50,000 real people all over the world, and the feedback we gained from these players was invaluable to the game's eventual success on both Android and iOS. We made use of a custom analytics system that Scopely provided, and we were able to understand high-level metrics like session length and retention as well as more granular information like which holes were too difficult or what courses were the most popular.

As we tested the game, we noticed that many players weren't completing the tutorial, and we dug into our data and analytics to understand what specific parts of the tutorial were losing users. It became clear that there was something wrong with the first hole -- users who played through this first hole in the tutorial generally completed the five-hole course, but we were losing over half of our users on this initial hole. By fine-tuning the first hole, testing several different iterations until we found one that was easy enough but still fun and exciting, and we were able to increase the tutorial completion rate from 23% to 83%, while increasing our player registrations from 13% to 65%.

 

Mini Golf MatchUp Funnel Analysis by Rocket Jump Games and Scopely