Not a Footium Blog

A Blog Because Of A Tweet

I was very intrigued when I saw the following tweet (sorry, X post) by the Co-Founder of Footium, as it strikes the heart of my experience with Footium, and also what I’m getting wrong.

There’s a few key bits that stick out here:

• Footium really IS optimised against session length – not just in name but in actuality.
• Retention vs engagement. How many of you have played games or had apps where you’ve spent countless hours on them week one, and then dropped off? (I’m looking at you, SIMS 4). Duolingo works because of the concept of doing a little bit each day.
• Top percentile retention – the stats that Footium have evidence their concept is working.
• The top reason for churn is multi-club ownership, which a lot of people are doing.

I rarely retweet anything but this was such an important read!

Season 9

Our performance in Season 9 was by far our most disappointing in all our time playing Footium.

We had squads that were capable of getting promoted from Division 7 across the board, especially Marrouck Villa who had a squad strength leagues ahead of their peers.

Here’s how it finished:

So we ended up 5th, 6th and 6th. Yes we were in the money, but should have really been pushing our way into Division 6 across the board.

So What Happened?

In summary – we didn’t get the balance right. Unless you are raking in thousands a month from your Crypto projects, you probably have a real life and real job that gets in the way.

In taking on extra clubs, we had upped our ambition, but weren’t finding a consistent way to manage the 3 clubs with everything else going on in life. We’d fallen into the churn trap that has already been identified by Footium themselves.

As you get into Footium, and want to continue to progress in the game, it may be tempting to add more clubs, more players, more time commitment. For some – it may pay off – but for us, it hasn’t just yet.

How We’ll Fix It?

We’ve got to find the balance!

We won’t be adding any more clubs for now, and we’ll be making sure to focus more on tried and tested talent than young players. One of the biggest time commitments for a lot of players in ensuring they are queueing up training sessions and checking in to make sure they get the most sessions done, and maximise their squad improvement.

With the arrival of Coaching, this has added an extra training slot and further time spent on training in game.

Whilst we don’t have the answers to this problem, we would be very keen to see automatic queueing for training in game!

I’m also making sure to have a phone alarm as a kind of ‘notification’ to make sure to check in on Footium.

What Are Footium Doing About It?

Now we’ll be in the realm of speculation, but I’m really interested to see how Footium addresses this as it progresses.

The tweet mentions:

• Long term progression routes
• Social crossover

Long term progression is something we’ve speculated on before, but what direction this takes is very much up in the air.

It seems to me that one of the potential biggest footfall is that 100% of your Club’s performance is based on players.

So the cycle at the moment is to continually replace players and utilise these players to stay competitive. There are some changes in terms of better academy prospects up the divisions, but there are no concrete progressions for the club.

In real life, players mean a lot, but there are many other factors including training facilities, stadium attendances, momentum, managers & staff to name but a few.

Could performance in Footium be rewarded by long term upgrades to your Club Infrastructure?

Social Crossover is the other section, which has already begun in earnest for Footium. You can view the social feed in the game, and we are seeing more and more clubs utilising social media as part of their Footium experience.

Could social performance be tied to in game performance?

The future of Footium is exciting, and we look forward to being a better balanced part of it!