Helping BearHug Studios Skip Stages With Their First Mobile Game
BearHug studios appointed Growthcurve to launch their first mobile gaming title ‘Alice Legends’, a tactical card game set in the fantastical world of Alice in Wonderland.
Growthcurve’s task was to engineer a scalable paid acquisition flywheel for Alice Legends by:
- Ensuring that we could acquire players cheaply enough
- Getting players to stay for long enough
- Eventually converting enough of them to purchase (and/or watch enough ads)
- Yielding enough revenue to generate a positive Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Reinvesting that return in more installs
- Taking profit from what is left
We began work during soft launch with pilot campaigns and running experiments against the main set of ‘levers’ known to have the greatest impact on paid campaign scalability for casual games - such as market, ad creative, channel, audience, gameplay experience, conversion paths and monetisation strategy.
We identified various subsets within Alice Legend’s female skewed casual-core (casual / midcore hybrid) target audience using our in-house tools to analyse competitor audiences then served them several different creative concepts based on what we could see performing well for similar games. Once we locked on to the concept route that resonated most with each audience, we were able to optimise further by testing an array of treatments in a variety of formats until CPI began to fall within our target range. We repeated this across channels, filtering out any that didn’t perform and then began expanding soft launch tests to additional markets in North America, Europe and Asia - assessing the audience groups and channels in each by retention rate and purchase conversion rate.
With the knowledge of what works for top of funnel acquisition we began scaling install volumes gradually as the studio continued iterating on the in game economy by testing various sources and sinks to move toward achieving ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User) targets.
By the time global launch arrived Alice Legends had gone through extensive optimisation and was well positioned to scale. The game continues to achieve above average retention and strong purchase conversion rates bringing it to the attention of Apple’s App Store Editorial team who have featured Alice Legends as ‘Game of The Day’ in no less than 10 different countries to date!
