Day 1
Record the baseline for play-through rate, average session, D1 retention, and current page assets.
Baseline note and screenshots of the current title, icon, thumbnail, and description.
Soft launch testing
Turn a weak metric or creator hunch into a 7-day experiment that changes one variable and produces a readable decision.
Record the baseline for play-through rate, average session, D1 retention, and current page assets.
Baseline note and screenshots of the current title, icon, thumbnail, and description.
Prepare exactly one change: test a reward-focused thumbnail instead of the current danger thumbnail.
One finished change that fits 3-5 hours, with no extra gameplay or monetization edits.
Publish the change and write down the exact time it went live.
Launch note with timestamp and what changed.
Check early movement in play-through rate, but do not make another change yet.
Early read: up, flat, or down.
Read comments, private feedback, and playtest observations for the same bottleneck.
Three user phrases that explain the metric movement.
Decide whether the experiment needs one more day of data or is clearly failing.
Keep observing, revert, or prepare the next variable.
Keep, revert, or iterate based on the decision rule.
Next experiment brief with one metric and one variable.
A soft launch should reduce confusion. The goal is not to fix everything in one week, but to learn which lever actually moves.
It is a small controlled test before or during early launch where you change one variable and watch one main metric.