Official announcement
Dear friends,
During last year we have been hard working on improving the game and looking for publishers and business partners. We released a new game build each week, we collected users feedback and data. We did all our decisions according to this data and advice received from experts in game industry. We added many features to the game, completely redesigned the entire UI, added more tutorials. And the game did became better. The users rating in Google Play got better, we have a few fans who have been playing for years! We started getting some revenue from the game. In general, basic KPIs of the game were getting better. Everything looked well.
But then we faced very significant difficulties.
The first problem is that all publishers refrain from launching a game which uses cryptocurrency. Some of them show their interest in the blockchain technology, but not one is ready to use cryptocurrency in a game. At least not until the USA government has defined its status and usage rules. Our main goal was to find a good publisher, because an MMO game needs good marketing. This plan failed and we had to do some marketing by ourselves. We tried a lot of promotion channels and got almost 40K of installs. But lacking big marketing budget we could not find a channel that would be effective enough.
The second problem is that due to the year-long crash of crypto markets we’ve lost most of the money. All potential investors and partners became over cautious. So the fact is that we have run out of funds. Technically, we collected almost $1mln during the ICO, but we spent much of it on marketing during the ICO and on other services like paying out advisors and lawyers. The net amount after the ICO was closer to $500k. Since January 2018, the price of Ether dropped tenfold, as a result our funds for development and marketing got over. We were too optimistic about the crypto market and hoped for the better. Obviously we should have sold Ether right away in January, but we didn’t.
And finally, the third and the main problem. Despite all the improvements of the game, we still have onboarding problems with new players. We did loads of iterations trying to improve the beginning of the game including tutorials, user interfaces, quests, game balance, etc. And we see positive changes, but they are not enough. We still lose most of the players on their second day in the game.
After a year of experiments, we have only one hypothesis left — there is something wrong in the core gameplay. We tried to change it in our release 2.0. We did as many changes as we could and we even changed the battle to make it deeper and more tactical-oriented. Players did like the changes, but the retention rate still didn’t raise.
Now we have to put all development work on hold. We will keep the game servers running as long as we can, you can still use Lord Coins inside the game while it is online, but we can’t do any significant improvements any more. In fact, we will have to shut down the game servers in a few months time.
If any of our ICO investors or any third party would like to continue working on the project and make it an AAA game as we strived, we will gladly transfer all the rights, source codes, graphical assets, etc. to them. Of course, in such case the receiving party will also receive all of the obligations we have regarding other investors including Global Top Round and those who bought Lord Coins during the ICO, but if someone has a realistic proposal and wishes to continue working on Lordmancer II, please contact us at admin@lordmancer2.io
We deeply apologise for the failure of this project.
Sincerely yours,
Lordmancer II team
