In honor of the company’s fifth birthday Friday, Hatchlings is dropping its beta classification and releasing a bevy of new features, including expanded privileges for premium users, additional levels and a redesigned site, to its loyal fans.
Billed as the “world’s largest virtual Easter egg hunt,” the popular Facebook game launched its latest round of updates at 6 p.m. today (12:00 a.m. GMT Friday) – with players around the world, the company uses GMT to schedule its releases. Though the beta version of the site has been nearing completion for some time, creator Brad Dwyer said the recent updates are some of the biggest changes to the game since the launch of Hatchlings 2 last year.
“The game is going to hopefully be exponentially better than ever before,” he said.
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Dwyer (right) said that he and his team of nine full-time employees are finally confident that their product is ready to be taken out of beta mode.
“Since we released Hatchlings 2 last year we’ve been building on it and each week we’ve been releasing refinements and new features based on user feedback,” Dwyer said. “This is much more of a revamp than those weekly changes have been.”
Along with redesigned branding and game pages, the new Hatchlings will offer additional features for users paying roughly $10 a month for premium memberships.
With the introduction of premium-only eggs, the ability to store eggs for future challenges or gifting to other users, and a private help forum, paid users now receive more benefits than before.
With the launch of Hatchlings 2, the team determined that many of the game’s previous premium-only features were integral to game play and should be available to all users. Since then, Dwyer said that Hatchlings has been working hard to show the value in subscribing for a paid membership.
“We kind of compare it to the price of one ticket to the movies,” said Dwyer of the premium membership fee. “So if you’re getting as much entertainment out of Hatchlings, that’s how you can justify the cost.”
In order to bolster activity during the game’s re-launch, an incentive Power Hour, where egg hunting is faster and produces more rare eggs, will engage when the number of users signed on reaches a certain point.
“It’s both an encouragement to work together to sign on at the same time so the game will be boosted into that mode and to keep playing so you’re not the one who shuts it off for everyone else,” Dwyer said.
Users also have more opportunities to interact with an all-inclusive Social Sidebar, complete with chat capabilities, friend rankings, news feed and announcements.
The Social Sidebar (far left) is one of several new Hatchlings 2 features introduced today.
Hatchlings, which Dwyer created in 2008 when he was a sophomore at Iowa State University, recently surpassed 150,000 users on its beta platform, though the original version of the game had more than 3.5 million registered users. In the coming months, Dwyer and his team are confident they will see a sizeable influx of new or returning users.
“Now going into the Easter season it’s our big time to shine,” Dwyer said.
Historically, the months leading up to the holiday have been those with the largest growth in Hatchlings’ user numbers, and Dwyer hopes the collection of new features will provide an even larger incentive.
Hatchlings also will be launching an online store where users can purchase merchandise like T-shirts, mugs and apparel, as well as the ability to purchase gift cards for memberships and in-game extras.
A combination launch party and fifth birthday celebration for the company will be held in Des Moines on Wednesday.
Credits: Hatchlings logo and screenshot courtesy of Hatchlings. Brad Dwyer photo by Anna Jones and Phillip Harder / Thinc Iowa.
