XTiming Casy Study: Idle Fossil Museum
“We will never give up creating high-quality games.”
——Linzhi Luo, Founder of Gravity Games
Idle Fossil Museum
Based in Chengdu, China, Gravity Games develops and publishes high-quality mobile games across multiple game genres for Android and iOS. Games released by Gravity Games include: Adventures in Dreamland, Nightmare No.k, Puzzle Germ, and Idle Fossil Museum.
Idle Fossil Museum is a Simulation game with Idle gameplay. It is the first title that entered our XTiming Accelerator Program.
The Challenge
Back in 2019, management simulation games as well as idle gameplay haven’t made a hit globally. When Gravity Games first established a partnership with XTiming, Idle Fossil Museum was only a demo and a project idea. The CEO, Linzhi Kuo wasn’t sure whether the game’s creative gameplay had potential and opportunity to win global audiences or not.
With no experience in global publishing, Gravity Games needed a reliable partner to guide Idle Fossil Museum to publish in the highly competitive global market, and avoid setbacks and pitfalls. Alongside this, the team needed to gain better insights into user acquisition, monetization strategies and data analysis. For example, whether its ad creatives directly reflected the core gameplay, graphic style, matches the target audience, and if players can clearly understand its design.
The Solution
1. Game Evaluation
The first stage of our XTiming Accelerator Program is to evaluate and optimize the game. After identifying competitor’s performance and market trends, XTiming members saw great market potential for Idle Fossil Museum with its creative combination of idle gameplay with simulation style, adding high quality graphics and a unique theme.
2. UA Test
Test launch is important in the early stage of game development to realize the market situation and product direction. Using the target region recommended by XTiming, Idle Fossil Museum created a variety of ad combinations and acquired around 1,000 users in Europe to test the game metrics.
3. Data Analysis
After obtaining the test data, XTiming analyzed Idle Fossil Museum’s operation, ad monetization and user acquisition data, and generated an Advertising Test Launch Data Analysis Report to provide optimization suggestions. The report analyzed the user behavior profile, ad monetization, waterfall performance, game acceptance by users in the target market and UA cost. Gravity Games continued to optimize the game according to the XTiming report and user feedback.
4. Global Publishing
Comparing Idle Fossil Museum’s CPI with the eCPM, XTiming and Gravity Games decided to try the US iOS market to publish the game. After game optimization and a launch test, Gravity Games was now equipped with user specification and feedback. Facing the highly competitive US market, XTiming empowered Idle Fossil Museum through their whole publishing journey, from account opening, store page design, advertising platform integration, Facebook authorization, cross-border payments, cloud service, to event tracking points, etc.
5. Monetization Optimization
The hardest part of global publishing for Gravity Games was monetization. After XTiming quickly integrated the game with global traffic ecosystems built by Google, Facebook and Apple, our team optimized Idle Fossil Museum’s monetization strategy by adjusting the waterfall, monitored the fluctuation of data, and provided feedback about the monetization situation in real-time.
The key to monetization optimization is to ensure that the needs of players can be met in the game. When designing in-app advertising formats, it is important to combine advertising with core gameplay to fully discover the needs of players to increase revenue. XTiming and Gravity Games gained insight from the monetization data and identified the problems. In the previous versions of Idle Fossil Museum, the game currency was unbalanced. The consumption of gold coins was too quick, which led to a reduction of players’ need for gold coins. In response, XTiming created a plan to divide players into various stages and design advertising strategies according to their needs.
The Results
The XTiming Accelerator Program accompanied Idle Fossil Museum from a demo project to global publishing. The evaluation optimized the game from the core gameplay, graphic design and interactive experience, acknowledged its potential and recommended a suitable test region.
The launch test verified our market forecast, with the CTR (click-through rate) 10% higher than similar games.
The game evaluation and launch test created a bridge between the game and users, tested uncertain elements in the market. XTiming members and users can experience the game before launch to give important feedback, and predict market performance.
As Idle Fossil Museum launched globally, XTiming offered vast resources, industry experience, manpower, data and expertise to help Gravity Games better understand the whole process and avoid pitfalls. With our data-driven tools and customized analytics, XTiming helped Gravity Games optimize its game and monetize appropriately while increasing user retention.
With Idle Fossil Museum as the first title to date, The XTiming Accelerator Program henceforth helped 2,000+ Indie game titles win global audiences, grow rapidly and expand monetization over the past two years. Looking ahead, XTiming will continue serving our partners with transparency and high-quality service.