Space Ape says music game Beatstar has grossed over $125m and has attracted over 60m players since its launch in September 2021.
Beatstar now has over 500 playable tracks and has played host to over 3bn song plays, according to Supercell-backed UK studio Space Ape, which marked the occasion by revealing the inner workings of its live ops programme in this blog.
Space Ape’s general manager for music games Johnathan Rowlands describes the game’s first year of live ops as “fine” – but says “fine was not good enough for this opportunity”.
“We actually launched with no live ops at all in Beatstar,” says Rowlands. “But we quickly added a Tour Pass, which was our version of a battle pass and later in the first year a new leaderboard event in which players competed in small groups for prizes.”
Those live ops each had a positive impact on revenue, but Space Ape’s wider goal was to use its in-game events to reach new and different types of music game fans.
By August 2022, Space Ape says new installs had plateaued and the game was not reaching into new areas of music fandom. Space Ape had been working with several top artists to promote the events, but the results were still not what the studio wanted.
“These were amazing collaborations with top artists and our existing players absolutely loved them,” Rowlands continues. “They were successful for a traditional Live Ops approach, but had failed in what we wanted them to achieve, which was to reach brand new audiences.”
This year, however, Space Ape says collaborations with Linkin Park, Nicki Minaj, Morgan Wallen and 30 Seconds to Mars have produced bigger install spikes.
“In 2023 these partnerships directly resulted in one million additional organic installs during the collaborations themselves and changed our long tail organic install numbers,” says Rowlands.
“In 2022 just 45% of our installs were organic, in 2023 this figure is 70%. We estimate the collaborations resulted in around five million organic installs throughout the year.”
The change in approach came when Space Ape realised players were using Beatstar to discover new music as much as they enjoyed playing familiar songs, and leaned into that.
“This insight was staring us in the face from the earliest days of the project,” Rowlands continues. “In our first internal playtest of a few hundred people within the broader Supercell portfolio group, Britney Spears was a surprise hit amongst the predominantly heavy metal loving Finnish developer scene. Initially we wrote this off as an anomaly. Surely the Finns were just trolling us. But the more we dug into what people were excited about the more we realised this was, in fact, a thing. Novelty, it turned out, is key to marketing.”
Beatstar now incentivises players to pre-add artists’ new music to their streaming service with free gems, and also offers free songs and real-world prizes like merch and fan club memberships through the game. These closer ties to the labels and artists led to further organic reach through their own social channels and marketing.
“We even started getting artists asking their management directly to set up collaborations with us after they had seen the success others were having with Beatstar,” says Rowlands.
All of this is great when it works, of course. But Rowlands suggests treading carefully with these kinds of partnerships. “Working with third party IP integrations in live ops is not a silver bullet,” he says.
“To be effective the proposition should be strategic for the IP holder, interesting for their fans and for yours. This is obvious and easy to say but it’s difficult and rare for these stars to align in practice. If you can’t meet all three requirements it’s usually better to not do the event.”
Rowlands also recommends “investing in regularly optimising Live Ops Cards on Google and In App Event Cards on iOS.”
“The tools and reporting on these features have been evolving and are an important tool for raising visibility of events,” he says.
Having attracted all these new players, the Beatstar team also had systems in place to “reskin the game to reinforce the event theme for new users”, says Rowlands. “The best events are fully integrated through all major components of the game: loading screen, tutorial, bundles, season pass as well as the elder game.”
Further into the process, Space Ape also found that targeting more niche and passionate fan bases was more effective than those with bigger reach. “This trend mirrored also what we had seen working with influencers over the years with our strategy games,” says Rowlands.
“Influencers – and, as it turned out, artists – with massive reach made for great headlines, but when it came to quantity and quality of installs the smaller artists with highly engaged fan bases were often more effective because it was novel.”
This led to a month-long country music event, and later the creation of spin-off Country Star, which has pulled in over $3m from over 1.5m downloads since launch in September.
“Modern live ops can be about so much more than just increasing monetisation of your existing players, think about how you can reach new audiences the existing game doesn’t currently appeal to,” concludes Rowlands.
“Don’t just follow the template of your competitors’ live ops strategy, what is special about your game that can make your live ops stand out from the crowd? Where can you find opportunities with partners who have an audience that you would like to reach, where the benefits can be mutually beneficial?”
“While music certainly gives Beatstar some advantages, it would be a mistake to think this is unique to this genre,” he adds. “2023 has seen a number of leading developers start to dip their toes into these waters, of live ops driving not only engagement but new marketing opportunities as well.”
