Make a 28-day season feel like a 10-year collection.
A digital sticker album that turned a Bundesliga IP partnership into a long-tail meta-game for Top Eleven managers worldwide.
Measured in Mixpanel against the pre-launch seasonal baseline; exact values are confidential, so directions and relative magnitudes are stated instead.
- The bet: an album-first, earn-first collection that gives a 10-year game its first permanent record of play, anchored to the real Bundesliga calendar.
- The craft call: the strongest-testing reveal was cut to a 2-second flip so 100% of devices ran it stable, and duplicates recycle into earning instead of dead-ending.
- The result: Gallery-linked SKUs led store revenue in the window with daily uplift on the tab; new-install retention stayed the miss.
A decade of play, nothing to show for it.
Top Eleven's 28-day seasons reset everything: trophies, progress, pride. IP partnerships had only ever been cosmetic skins that decayed with the season. Two archetypes carried the design brief: the Veteran ("I've won this league more times than I can count. After a while you stop caring because nothing carries over") and the Casual Returner who loves the Bundesliga but never sees it in a loop worth staying for. The deal was the chance to build the game's first permanent record of play.
Composite archetypes from player interviews, community threads, and Mixpanel cohort splits. Quotes are illustrative voice.
Album-first, earn-first.
Packs come from daily tasks and live events, gameplay already in flow; the store is an accelerator, not a gate. Trade-off: lower day-one conversion, higher long-term ARPU because the feature feels earned.
Competitors say "collect rare cards"; ours says "complete the club." All 18 clubs visible from day one as empty slots, rarity inside that frame, set-completion as the dominant motivator.
Three findings that changed the shipped product.
The strongest-testing moment in playtests, a 6 to 8 second multi-stage reveal, crashed a slice of low-end Android. I cut it to a 2-second flip, kept the haptic, and shipped stable to 100% of players on day one.
Testers read a blank album as a chore list. Fix: the onboarding pack opens inside the album, so the first read is "what you have," not "what's missing."
Dead-end duplicates frustrated testers within two sessions. A recycling currency that feeds pack earning rescued sessions 4 to 10 from churn.
What moved, and what didn't.
Gallery-linked SKUs became a primary driver of store revenue during the window, with meaningful lift on Special Sponsor packs.
Notable daily uplift on the Gallery tab: the meta-layer became part of the daily route, not a side trip.
Reddit and Discord sentiment trended toward "must-complete" rather than "another monetization grab."
First-week retention on new installs barely moved: newcomers have no emotional stake in a club roster yet, and we didn't build them a strong enough on-ramp.
What I'd argue about with my past self. Trading duplicates between managers was the missing second loop; right call to cut for v1, wrong call for a v1.5 that never shipped. And the cut reveal was the right product decision but a real loss of craft: next time I'd fight for the optimization budget upfront, not after the design lands.