Early Access #2 - Metrics and Feedback

1. Overview

Recap Video: Sparkball - "SO FREAKING FUN" - Early Access Weekend Results

From August 4th through 7th, Sparkball held its second Early Access Weekend. Given how solid the metrics were from EA #1, we had slight concerns of a 'golden cohort' and that we'd be able to expand those to a larger audience.

We had 2,900 total players play in EA #2 with ~80% being new unique players that did not participate in Week 1. We held largely identical games played stats and retention stats, the most important of which was 71% D1 for users who played at least 3 games.

2. Streaming and Watchability

Both Shinji and Yoda returned, with the latter hosting a massive creator tournament that had 11k peak viewers. You can find a snippet of that tournament here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8sifOWFfK4

With this event, we saw a 33% increase in hours watched, totaling over 90k hours watched in one weekend!

3. Player Feedback

Long-form responses (the WHY is Sparkball good): Sparkball - Detailed Feedback

4. Key Takeaways

• Unrivaled Potential: As seen in the long-form responses above, others are seeing the true potential in just how disruptive Sparkball can be. While the responses to this are obviously biased given they’re coming from our community, we asked players to specifically dive into WHY they feel the way they do about Sparkball. These are players who play every game that comes out in the space and I think when you read into their responses it really shows that this isn’t just a “hey we think this game is fun”, but instead a deep love and excitement for the future because they understand the magic and the potential.

• A Good Match is enough: We had the perfect match of Sparkball the weekend prior, but this weekend was unfortunately riddled with much a higher delta of skill and thus much more imbalanced matchmaking. What we found is that having a good match every few games at least was enough to keep players queuing (which is encouraging), but if we can simply get playerbase to have better matchmaking, Sparkball can't be beat.

• Mechanics + Control Onboarding: While Sparkball is an easy to learn game, many struggle with the control scheme until they have a few games under their belt. What we found was that we didn't need a better tutorial, we needed a progressive onramp to get players familiar with the controls. We think this is key to further reducing the one-and-done players.