Mobile Game Soft Launch: Country Targeting and Phased Release
Soft launch means releasing a game to a limited set of countries before the worldwide release, and using real install, play, and payment data to validate retention and monetization before opening things up fully. It sounds like a special program, but technically it's really just using the "country-level distribution" features that Google Play and the App Store already provide. This post covers how each store restricts countries, how the App Store's phased release actually works, and what the metrics people throw around during soft launch actually mean. Account type also changes how the release process itself works, which is a separate topic we cover in depth elsewhere on this blog.
Google Play: different countries per track
Play Console lets you set distribution countries under the "Countries/regions" tab separately for the production, open testing, and closed testing tracks. By default, lower tracks inherit production's country settings, but turning on "Unsync countries/regions" lets each track be configured independently. That means you can narrow open testing to a handful of countries to run it like a soft launch, then open production to everywhere later.
One thing to watch for is the internal testing track. Country targeting doesn't apply there at all — testers can join regardless of their actual location as long as they've been invited. If you want to narrow things down to see how a real market responds, you need closed or open testing, not internal testing.
App Store: country selection and phased release are separate things
App Store Connect lets you individually pick which countries or regions your app appears in. Apple's own help page states that you can release your app in any of the 175 countries or regions where the App Store is available.
What's easy to confuse here is "phased release." It's not a way to narrow countries — it's a way to roll an update out gradually, over several days, to users who have automatic updates turned on. Apple's official schedule is exactly: day 1 at 1%, day 2 at 2%, day 3 at 5%, day 4 at 10%, day 5 at 20%, day 6 at 50%, day 7 at 100%, and you can pause it for up to 30 days with no limit on how many times you pause. If your goal is to soft-launch to specific countries, use country selection; if your goal is to roll out an already-live app's update cautiously, use phased release. They're two different tools for two different jobs.
Common test countries are industry practice, not official policy
Countries like Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand come up constantly in soft launch discussions. The Philippines gets mentioned for low install costs and strong English fluency; Canada and Australia for their mature payment markets. But this is industry practice repeated across UA blogs and agency content, not something Google or Apple officially recommends. Which countries you pick really comes down to your own judgment about how closely user behavior matches your target market and whether the ad costs are something you can afford.
Metrics during soft launch: get the definitions right first
Here's what the terms that keep coming up during soft launch actually mean.
| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| D1 retention | Share of users who open the app again the day after installing |
| D7 retention | Share of users who open the app again on day 7 after installing |
| Session length | How long a single open-to-close session lasts |
| CPI (Cost Per Install) | Ad spend required to generate a single install |
| ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User) | Average revenue generated per daily active user |
Analytics vendors publish benchmark reports every year claiming to tell you what a "good" number looks like for each of these, but sample sizes and study periods vary widely between reports, so we're deliberately not quoting specific figures here. Rather than treating any single percentage as "the industry average," it's more useful to track how these metrics move over time within your own game during soft launch, and how they shift before and after each update.
When to move to production
The most common question during soft launch is "so when is it okay to open this up worldwide?" Neither Google nor Apple sets a threshold that tells you when to expand. In practice, it comes down to the studio setting its own target numbers before soft launch even starts, then deciding whether the real data clears that bar. Setting a condition ahead of time — for example, "expand once D7 retention clears our internal target and the paying-user rate falls within our expected range" — keeps you from second-guessing the decision emotionally while staring at dashboards every day.
You also get to choose between opening everything at once or expanding gradually. On Google Play, you simply widen the track's country/region settings. On the App Store, you can add countries and, if needed, control rollout speed with phased release at the same time. Because CPI can differ sharply between your soft launch countries and your expansion countries, it's safer to treat "when to add countries" and "when to increase UA spend" as two separate decisions rather than one.
It's also common for soft launch to run longer than planned. If your metrics haven't hit target after a few update cycles and you still haven't expanded, that's not necessarily a failure — it's more useful to read it as "not ready to expand yet." Expanding countries and ramping UA spend too early, while retention is still weak, is far harder to walk back than simply keeping the soft launch countries narrow a little longer.
What to line up when designing a soft launch
- Decide countries and tracks first. Google lets you separate open/closed testing track countries from production via Unsync.
- Internal testing isn't a soft launch substitute. Without country restrictions, it can't validate a real market.
- Apple manages country selection and phased release separately. Narrowing your initial launch countries and gradually rolling out an update are two distinct settings.
- Align on metric definitions within the team first. Whether D1 means "day after signup" or "day after install" alone can swing the number significantly.
Wrapping up
Soft launch isn't some special feature — it's really about using the country-level distribution options Google Play and the App Store already give you, applied with intent. Google lets you set countries per track, with internal testing as the one exception; Apple keeps country selection and phased release as separate tools, and it's worth not mixing them up. Test-country lists and benchmark figures vary a lot depending on the source, so it's worth separating what's confirmed by official documentation from what's only industry practice.