Recently we released both a demo and a prologue for our game Rise of Humanity, we would like to share with you some of the reasoning behind this decision and some of the results.
Let us start with a small introduction to Rise of Humanity. It is a combination between a deck building game and turn based strategy game. Think of it as XCOM meets Slay the Spire. Except for movement, players use cards to give actions to characters they control.
Having the possibility to take part in the 2021 June Steam Next Festival we knew we needed a demo of our upcoming game Rise of Humanity. Luckily, we already worked hard on a prologue version of the game so, our initial though was to modify that version slightly (basically text that says prologue would become demo) and release both at the exact same time. Reason for doing either was to drive wishlists and get more eyeballs on our main game and that puts us in a perfect position to compare both over a one week period.
However, because we had problems with our saving and loading system and the games localization, we had to change our plans. We ended up releasing the demo only in English during the Steam Next Festival and then a week later we released the prologue with the missing features included. The good thing about doing it this way was that it also helped us look at demo feedback and make a few small adjustments to the prologue improving the game.
The demo ran from the 16th till the 22nd of June and we will be comparing that to the performance of prologue running the week after. Enough talk let’s look at some numbers.