2021 wild ride
Neopolis from 0 to 1 million players
This article was originally a Twitter Thread:
January: after a year of lockdown and gameplay iterations with our lovely community, we get to see retention increases, we start growing by +25% month-on-month in France and the UK
March: Discord grows and we have less time to keep a close relationship with our community. The first conspiracy theories appear:
- We built bots in Corsica to fill the island
- Our game is secretly owned by the NEO illuminatis-linked conglomerate
- Devs cheat. Truth is we farm hard
March: Moderation and support issues appear. A lot of players offer their help, we start to give them ownership of the Discord, to improve moderation and animate the community. The Neopolis administration is born, and is led by the community.
Community staff grows independently: 60 people today. Our main involvement is paying for tools and building mods features. Our first community leader @notix_ was 15 when he reached us with cool ideas. Followed by Frank, Cirius, San, Andre, Dadou, Flow, Mapi, Grif & many others
March: After discussing with some sharp VCs, and seeing the value of Axie Infinity and, we understand a revolution is coming to our industry. We start designing something big for Q1 2022. Resisting FOMO and focusing on long-term value
April: New characters
April: we see more and more Youtube videos on Neopolis with great tutorials and cheats of course. By the same time, we meet our first self-proclaimed Neopolis pro player
May: classic Offsite
May: 🥈 Appstore
June: new office, new adventure. House-warming goes well.
August: End of our Seed Round (2.5m€) with some great investors from gaming, startup and web3 space: @tiboel @hthieblot @fred_montagnon @eronzano @jromanetto @Bpifrance @Level-Up
September: new awesome team members. We also get sweatshirts and a neon lightning, we can finally say we’re a startup!
September: Game Camp at Lille by @SNJV with the whole team
November: New UI, welcome dark mode
November: First announcement of our new project @neolandgame to the most engaged members of our community.
Warm welcome, they love the concept. We move forward.
2022 plans: Launch Neopolis all around the world & launch Neoland, which will be announced in a couple of weeks. As a teaser, we’re building a social gameplay based on real-world lands, and we aim to give even more ownership and share our revenue with our players