Monopoly City Streets was released last week, with the tag line of “Property Empire Building on an Unimaginable Scale”. Unimaginable was probably more accurate than they wanted it to be…
The first three days after launch were incredible rocky: outages, sluggishness and bug reports coming in from blog comments, twitter posts and more. The first response from the developers was their cryptic, “It is working… but” blog post.
I can’t help but wonder if following in Google’s footsteps of beta releases and invites would’ve uncovered some of these issues before they got out of hand. And since they partnered with Google Maps for the application itself, makes me question even more why they didn’t??
- Release in BETA. User expectations are lower when they see something in BETA. They see an issue, and don’t get near as upset as they would if they expected the application to be perfect and fully released.
- Release with invites. Google did this with their gmail release: only users who are invited by other users can register and use the application. With this model, your user base grows somewhat steadily - instead of everyone accessing on the 1st day.
Game restart is set for tomorrow: Thursday, September 17th. Follow the progress of the game at http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com
- Posted By Sophia Murphy
