How to find soft-launched games and apps

Before a studio spends its launch budget, it usually releases the game quietly in a few countries. It watches whether people come back the next day, whether they pay, and where they get stuck. Then it fixes the game and launches everywhere, or drops it. That quiet release is a soft launch.

For anyone who makes apps, soft launches are the earliest public sign of what the market is about to get. A game in soft launch today is a game you compete with in three to twelve months.

How to recognise one

• It is only available in a few countries. This is the clearest sign. A normal release is in a hundred or more.
• The countries are test markets. Studios pick places that behave like their main market but are cheaper to advertise in. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and the Nordic countries are common choices.
• It is new and updated often. Several versions in a few weeks means the team is tuning it.
• The studio is known for bigger releases. A large publisher with a game in four countries is testing, not struggling.

Finding them by hand

1. 1

   Switch your store to a test market

   On the App Store this means changing your account’s country, or opening the store’s web pages for that country. On Google Play you need an account set to that country.

2. 2

   Look at what is new

   Browse the new and top charts for the category you care about. The App Store’s “new” lists are rolling windows, so an app can sit there for a while: check its release date.

3. 3

   Check where else it is

   Open the same app’s page for your own country. If it says the app is not available there, you have found a limited release.

4. 4

   Come back next week

   A soft launch is only useful if you follow it: new versions, new countries, and the day it goes worldwide.

This works, but it is slow: one country and one category at a time, and you have to remember what you saw last week.

The faster way

IndieTower’s soft-launch radar does this across both stores every day. It lists recent apps that are in only a few countries (fewer than twenty App Store storefronts, or seen in at most three Google Play countries), which countries they are in, and which studios are testing the most right now. You can see the last week without an account, and 30 days with one.

When one matters to you, save it. Saved apps are re-checked every day, so you see each new version and each change to its store page. How to read the radar.