We spent 3 years building a game nobody wanted to play twice.
Soccer Legends was my first professional project. A soccer anime RPG. Started as a university project, ended as a funded studio with several investments from big names behind.
And the only active players were my co-founder and I. We did test it. With friends. Gacha anime fans, our exact target audience. They all said the game looked fun.
On release, May 29th of 2023, we found out it just looked fun, it never was. By month 3, our Day 1 retention was 16%. For a mobile RPG, you’re aiming for 25-30%. That means roughly 8 out of 10 people who downloaded the game never came back after the first session.
Revenue: $0.
We could’ve launched six months earlier with half the content. A prototype. We would have detected the problem and work on it when we had the resources to do so.
Instead we built on top of a broken core loop for 3 years.
Now it’s the first thing I teach with every new dev I work with; mobile, PC, doesn’t matter. Before you build content, before you pitch, before you even think of a release date: validate the core loop with the market.
Your core loop either works at 20% or it doesn’t work at 100%.