Replay Campaign

Product: Prodigy Game
Platform: Desktop Browser Game

We identified a significant churn risk among late-game Prodigy players who had defeated the final boss, the Puppet Master—particularly members, with nearly 80% of them having reached the max level. At the same time, we noticed that a portion of these players were abandoning their original accounts and creating new ones simply to replay the game. This behaviour heavily skewed our understanding of late-game churn and masked the true retention challenges at this stage of the player journey.

To address this, we initially talked about a larger “Game+” investment, however, decided on a smaller MVP approach that let us move quicker, learn faster, and make decisions backed by real time player data.

We decided to give players the ability to replay the game without starting over on a new account. we felt this didn’t feel compelling enough on its own. We wanted to add meaningful incentives—not only for players already interested in replaying, but also for those who hadn’t considered it before.

To make replaying the adventure feel fresh and engaging, we introduced the following changes:

Added a lightweight storyline to frame the replay experience and draw players back in
Allowed players to retain their pets, gear, and wizard level
Introduced a new Pet Restrictions system to meaningfully change up gameplay

Why play the game again?

The first reason we gave players to replay the game was that the Puppet Master’s story wasn’t finished. The antagonist still had more tricks up his sleeve and only the player, in their current form, could stop him.

We introduced a simple time-travel storyline where the Puppet Master journeys from the past to celebrate his future victory over the player. When he arrives, he discovers that he actually lost. Determined to change his fate, he travels back in time to wield stronger magic and defeat the player. It’s up to the player to follow him into the past and stop the Puppet Master before it’s too late.

Mr. Inquiry is an independent YouTuber who regularly covered and reported on new features and updates in the game. In his video, he showcases the new Hard Mode storyline that I wrote and storyboarded.

Managing Fear and Anxiety

Looking at our data, we noticed a clear reluctance among some players to face the Puppet Master and complete the game. Many players reached a certain point in the campaign and then stalled there, continuing to play multiple sessions without advancing through to the final battle.

Through user interviews, we learned that this hesitation was largely driven by anxiety around facing the Puppet Master. Some players had previously fought him and lost, while others felt intimidated by facing the final challenge they had been building toward throughout their entire game experience. Even though Hard Mode was only offered after defeating the Puppet Master, we were concerned that this emotional resistance would still carry over into replaying the campaign.

To address this, we reduced the difficulty of the Puppet Master battle, increasing the win rate from roughly 25% to around 60%. While climactic boss battles are typically designed to be difficult, this level of challenge proved too punishing for our audience and often led to frustration and decreased motivation to retry after a first failure.

Another design choice we made was to allow players to keep all of their pets, gear, and wizard levels going into Hard Mode. This reinforced that Hard Mode wasn’t a full reset, but a continuation of their existing journey. By preserving player progress and strength, we aimed to help players feel more empowered and confident, lowering the emotional barrier to replaying the campaign and encouraging them to re-engage with the journey to face the Puppet Master once again.

We also gave players the ability to return to Normal Mode at any time. This safety net provided additional reassurance, allowing players to step back, regroup, and progress at their own pace before committing to the tougher challenges Hard mode offered.

Restrictions

Replaying the game exactly as it was before felt repetitive, so we introduced an additional layer of challenge that encouraged players to approach gameplay in a new way.

To support this, we added pet collection restrictions to certain parts of the game. In Hard mode, players were now required to have a minimum number of pets in their inventory to pass key checkpoints, with their first encounter happening when trying to enter Hard Mode. From there, Mini Bosses and Major Boss battles in Hard Mode also required players to meet specific pet count requirements.

This change was designed to encourage players who completed their first play through with a small number of pets to explore the world more deeply and collect a wider variety of pets.

While the main storyline in Normal Mode was complete, players could still travel back into Normal Mode. This gave them a more relaxed environment to collect pets at their own pace and complete pet restrictions needed to progress in Hard Mode.

Phase 1

The first iteration of this screen was designed specifically for Hard Mode and targeted experienced players who had already defeated the Puppet Master. These players were better equipped to process multiple layers of information at once, so we surfaced details about the upcoming enemy and allowed them to adjust their team before entering battle.

When we decided to expand the feature beyond Hard Mode and introduce it much earlier in Normal Mode, we discovered that newer players struggled to understand what the screen was asking them to do. The amount of information and available actions became overwhelming at that stage in their journey.

Phase 2

In response, we pivoted to a much more streamlined version of the screen. We removed the ability to change teams, limited encounters to a single battle rule per enemy, and reduced the prominence of the hero imagery to lower cognitive load.

The changes we made to this screen were applied globally across the game. As a result, more experienced players in Hard mode lost the ability to change their pet before a battle, highlighting the challenge of designing a single solution for players at very different levels of experience.

Results

The Replay Campaign was launched as an experiment to gauge performance before fully committing to the feature. We started with a single zone, and after seeing positive results, scaled it across the entire campaign, while positioning Expert Mode as a potential future expansion.

The feature performed well across several key metrics.

Conversion rate increased by nearly 9%, and overall revenue rose by more than 10%.
We also saw statistically significant gains in overall playtime, home playtime, questions answered, hard currency spent, hard currency engagement, pets captured, and the number of players capturing pets.