As a strategist, here’s what I’d recommend to the Bellring team
I don’t have direct connections with the Bellring team so I’m just sharing this here. TL;DR—I think MFH has awesome potential as a game, lots of people loved it at launch, but some major things need to change in the management of the game and community.
38,000+ people played on Steam on launch day. Two weeks in, MFH still had 28,000+ peak concurrent players. That puts MFH in the top 1% of Steam launches this year. Clearly, there’s something people love here. Obviously, we’re sitting at 1,200 players right now because something went drastically wrong. I think the game and community are still salvageable.
Here’s what I’d recommend Bellring do:
- Get flexible on testing. In theory, the duos debate has fair points on both sides. In reality, we’re sitting here with 3% of the launch playerbase. At this point, what’s the risk of testing it? There’s enough community conversation about it that MFH could be missing a massive potential audience here.
- Invest development in maximizing the playerbase. The rest of the monetization will follow. These bonus events and season packs that try to incentivize daily logins just aren’t valuable when you have 1,200 players. Invest development in the things that keep players excited and engaged—fun and balanced fights, new maps, new specs/classes, good matchmaking, meaningful reward for progression. Worry about the monetization later, you need more top-of-funnel.
- Class balancing needs to be tempered with what’s fun. There are boring wins and fun losses in well-designed games. In games that balance strategy with fast twitch play, super low time-to-kill classes are extremely temperamental. Maybe the devs see shadowstrix winning only a proportionate amount, but the experience of losing a fight to a shadowstrix is just significantly more frustrating because losing a fight in one combo just isn’t fun.
- Create actual dialogue with the community. The “AMAs” and Discord updates don’t really feel like dialogue. Many of the updates from the team have felt deeply out of touch with community sentiment. There can be lots of different reasons for that kind of disfunction, but even when decisions are unpopular, explaining things to the community goes a long way.
- Tell us about the roadmap. The community needs stuff to get excited about, and right now, there’s just not much that we can see. What content are you guys focused on? Will there be new maps eventually? New classes?
With the right development and community management, I think MFH could reasonably get back to that 28,000 concurrent mark.