Release process

The Poki release process is designed to guide your game from initial testing to a full‐scale launch through a series of structured, data‐driven phases. The process usually begins with a Soft Release stage, where we gather performance metrics and player feedback from a specific subset of our audience. Once any necessary optimizations are in place, your game moves to Global Release, unlocking promotional support and access to millions of players worldwide.

Throughout each step, close collaboration with our developer support team and continuous monitoring of key indicators—such as play conversion rates, error reports, and monetization metrics—ensure your game is polished, performant, and primed for success.

1. Agreement

Poki offers you an agreement and our legal team prepares the contract for your game. They'll be in touch as soon as it's ready, or if any details are needed.

2. QA

Once signing is complete, our support team opens the game for review; you'll get an email when QA is open. The team checks your game against the requirements. If it's not quite ready, you receive a QA report detailing what's needed to pass, along with suggestions and best practices. Resolve the items, upload a new build, request a review, and QA continues until you're through.

3. Soft Release

For most games, after passing QA, the developer support team will plan a release date for soft release. It typically takes 1-2 weeks to schedule a soft release slot in our release calendar. We'll keep you closely updated as soon as a release date becomes available.

During the soft release, your game will be released on relevant category pages. This allows your game to be played by a representative subset of our global player base to get an impression of how the game will perform with our audience. Based on the game's performance, there's also a chance that your game gets promoted in additional categories. This will increase the amount of gameplays during this phase and is usually a good sign for the performance. We're not promoting the game on our homepage or localized homepages during this phase.

The soft release period should take around 2-3 weeks. You should be available to ship updates and fixes as needed during this period. The soft release phase cannot be skipped. It is a crucial phase to test your game's performance, gather data and feedback, and identify and fix remaining bugs.

While your game is in soft release, we expect you to monitor:

• Performance: conversion to play and engagement
• Errors: the error details section of your dashboard
• Monetization: aim for at least 1 ad per daily active user, with a healthy split between midroll and rewarded videos
• Player feedback: positive, negative, and bug reports; look for patterns you can act on

This is also the moment for difficulty tweaks, UX polish, extra content, your animated thumbnail, and A/B thumbnail tests. Updates follow the QA flow: upload, request review, and support publishes the approved version.

To submit an update, simply follow the same process as during QA: upload a new build and request a review. Once approved, the developer support team will publish your updated version.

4. Global Release

At this stage, your game will be released to all of our millions of players around the globe. Depending on your game's performance during the soft release and how quickly you are to work on optimization, it usually takes 2 - 3 weeks to move from soft release to global release.

Your game goes out to millions of players worldwide and gets picked up by the promotion system. Depending on performance, the promotion system will automatically show your game on any of our localized homepages, relevant category pages, and game pages. As a new game, it will also get a significant push for around 2 weeks in our systems to increase its discoverability. On top of that, the game will get a fire icon on your thumbnail, indicating to players that your game is new.

Afterwards

We strongly encourage you to continue monitoring your game's performance and reports of bugs or errors. If you are thinking about potential improvements, feel free to reach out to the Poki team. See post-release updates for more information.