1 Year of Live Seasons - A message from our CEO

One year since the first official Footium Football League matches began - Wow. What a journey it has been. Looking back to just over a year ago as we were leading up to launch, it’s crazy to think about the things we were so worried about that are now second nature to us as a studio. Season rollovers, player aging, promotion and relegation, deploying bug fixes during a live season, reward claiming.

It has been a tumultuous journey, learning to adapt to fixed seasonal development delivery cycles, adapting feature plans based on the game’s needs & user feedback, and maintaining a live service game with bug fixes, server upgrades and more at the same time.

Looking back on the game state one year ago for Season 1 kick-off provides a stark contrast to the game we see now as well, despite all of these challenges along the way. There was no amateur league in the FFL, promotion & relegation were yet to be added, and reward claiming was being worked on whilst Season 1 was live to ensure users could claim their hard earned rewards for their Season 1 performance when Season 2 started.

Since then, we’ve added Legendary players (and gone through several iterations of auction systems), team chemistry, fixed poor metadata refreshing on OpenSea. The registration system has been revamped and limited mid-season windows added. Injuries and own goals are now in the game, as well as player records, club records and club trophy rooms. We’ve expanded the Footium universe from 16 to 24 nationalities, added coaching and an in-game store, as well as bringing the entire transfer market in-game (improving the general user experience + unlocking social sign-in wallets)

We’ve added sessions so you don’t need to sign a pop-up for every single tactical change and training session (I remember thinking this was a bug when testing it for the first time because the experience was so different than what I was used to!). Recently we’ve also added the Caretaker Manager mode to allow new users to try the game for free, as well as adding an onboarding flow for new users and a referral system, which will both help with upcoming growth efforts.

Ultimately we would’ve loved to get even more added to the game in the last year (Our desired feature list is definitely longer now than it was even at game launch!), but learning how to efficiently build new features alongside the efforts needed to maintain the live game took some time.

Aside from game development, we’ve also done some small growth pushes, around the New Era Club Sale in Season 2, as well as smaller campaigns following this. One thing became clear from these growth efforts - the game is currently not accessible for non-web3 users. The onboarding was very difficult to navigate, required going to several external platforms, and overall meant marketing efforts to a wider audience fell flat. We conducted a feedback survey to capture the issues with the onboarding flow at the time, which was very valuable in in-forming our recent onboarding improvements efforts.

Where we are now

Jumping back to the present, it is definitely fun to see how much our workflows have changed internally. How much of the season rollover process is now second nature, how we’ve adapted our development approach around features to be much more agile and the confidence we’ve gained for deploying fixes to live during a season.

Recently we’ve been focused on onboarding improvements to address the feedback raised from our survey + observations of what is stopping the average football gamer from starting to play Footium. The goal for us is to allow a user to sign up with an email, and start playing immediately as a free-to-play user or add funds to their account with a credit card then purchase their own club + initial squad in one transaction. We want this flow to be as similar to existing football games as possible, so we can effectively onboard the tens of millions of football gamers around the world and bring them into the world of Footium.

To do this, we also need to get the word out about Footium, which has been our other focus across the last few months. We’ve been working hard on preparing marketing activations to execute when the improved onboarding process is live, so we can start expanding the Footium userbase and reaping the benefits that should bring, across a more active community, more demand in the game economy and more resources to continue improving + growing the game with. We are almost there with solving the fundamental pain points of our onboarding, so expect to start seeing these activations go live soon!

Finally, it is very interesting to observe how the game economy has developed over the last year of the game being live. I remember having many many conversations with the team and investors/advisors about the game economy design prior to launch, and the consistent theme/advice being that there will inevitably be issues with it that need to be addressed and that even the best game economy designers in the world consistently get it wrong.

Our goal has always been to ensure the game economy is rewarding for players and self-adjusting to the natural ebbs and flows of any game economy. We had observed that fixed rewards and too much direct intervention from studios are often what lead to a complete collapse of a game’s economy, ultimately leading to the death of the game (as we have seen happen to many games in our industry even over the last year). This has led to some tricky situations, where we could have stepped in and artificially propped up the economy or add short term boosts/demand increases, and being restrained here is definitely difficult as the game economy goes through a current downturn.

On the bright side, we are nearly at a full player-economy cycle, which will bring about a different set of circumstances than the last few seasons. Over the last few months it has been almost entirely OG squad players retiring (many of which are not actively used now given the higher rating ceilings for academy signed players), which has seen just a couple dozen rares + golds retiring each season, and around 100 silvers + under 1000 bronzes each season.

From Season 14, the first academy minted players from Seasons 0, 0.5 and 1 will begin to retire, causing a major jump in player retirement across all levels. There will be hundreds of gold and rares leaving the game each season, 1000+ silvers and 3000+ bronzes, meaning a shock to the player economy supply on both the total number of active players as well as the quality of them.

Future

Our immediate focus is now on the Hard Launch of Footium, which will soon be possible with the game being accessible to all football gamers.

Your support on this can have a huge impact - by spreading the word about Footium, your journey so far with your club, referring your friends who might be interested (and getting rewarded for any successful referrals) and supporting Footium’s announcements + comms, we can give Footium the boost it needs to start breaking into the massive football gaming audience.

Looking forwards (Living Roadmap update coming soon!), we expect more onboarding improvements will be required based on feedback + metrics from our growth pushes, however this should no longer require our full focus. This will mean we can get back to what I love - iterating based upon user feedback, improving the game, adding fun new features and continuing to expand the world of Footium.

We have been paying attention to all of your feedback recently, even if we haven’t been as proactive as normal in addressing it given the focus on onboarding. We have many plans to improve the current game, as well fun feature ideas to bring completely new elements to the gameplay and the world. We’ll be working on match engine improvements, UX upgrades, new feature areas around Club Improvements and much more, which will be covered in more detail in our upcoming Living Roadmap update.

Our long term vision is making Footium into the digital world of football. One that is as engaging and culturally rich as the physical world of football, but accessible to everyone to become a football club owner and manager. So far, we’ve built the core of this world - the Footium Football League.

We’re confident now that the technology necessary to build the world we’ve imagined is here. Football is the most obvious and natural place to build an incredibly engaging and content rich world that is everchanging based on participants actions, and that’s what we are here to do.

It hasn’t been the smoothest journey, and I am sure there will be many more challenges along the way. Building a game which evolves an entire genre of football gaming, as well as an entirely new world around this, is a huge fucking challenge. Nevertheless, this is what we signed up for and still have ultimate conviction in. Your support along the way with constructive feedback, words of encouragement and belief in the team is invaluable as we continue on this journey to achieving the vision.

Ultimately, building a successful start-up and game studio is about one key thing: how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. At Footium, we keep moving forward - because that’s how winning is done.

Forza Footium