Completed
Mobo Gaming Network
Product Owner, October 2014 - May 2016
Mobo is derived from pronouncing "Mobile" in American English. From its name, you can easily tell it's designed for mobile users. When I joined MEcorp, I worked as the Content Director of the Mobo Portal, not realizing that it was just a small part of a much larger project—a social network for mobile gamers. Sounds exciting, right? Upon closer inspection, Mobo was actually an ecosystem consisting of the Mobo App, Mobo Portal, and Mobo SDK for Games.
Mobo App - Social Network
A few months later, I officially joined the Mobo Team, marking my first real experience as a Product Designer. The Mobo App was still under development and not yet ready for beta launch. Its primary features were similar to Facebook's: finding and adding friends, sharing, connecting, chatting, and group chatting—but exclusively for users playing games integrated with the Mobo SDK. My first task was to optimize the chat feature and the content display rules on the user wall (similar to Facebook's wall). It was acceptable, but not great, as the content still showed repetitive patterns. Due to the limited user base, I had to wait for a larger sample size to make reliable adjustments.
At that time, MEcorp had around 5-6 mobile games, mostly MMOs. Based on our projections, if all games integrated with the Mobo SDK and we launched the app, we could amass a massive user base, which would also drive the project's development. However, this was when a significant issue emerged.
Mobo SDK for Game Clients
In short, the Mobo App was just the tip of the iceberg, while the Mobo SDK was the real foundation. Through the SDK, users could chat and connect with friends directly while playing games, without needing the Mobo App. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, most Mobo App users came from MEcorp's games. This meant that the SDK was crucial to the survival of the entire Mobo ecosystem.
Acknowledging failure is never easy. The SDK's structure seemed to have veered off course from the very beginning. Although the dev team tried to improve it, the problems persisted. One day, the Head of the Mobo Marketing Team decided to force concurrent users of a game to move into group chats. Instantly, disaster struck. With more than 200 groups and 1,000 users per group, the games froze and crashed. Users became furious. What's worse, if these players switched to other games, those games crashed too. In this case, the “connection” turned into a double-edged sword, simultaneously crippling both the Mobo system and the game clients.
End of A Journey
As a result, the Mobo project was scaled down, and all SDK development was discontinued. Five product owners left the team. The Mobo App reverted to its simplest form: just a game launcher for MEcorp's games, stripped of its ambition to be a “social network.” Although I wasn't directly responsible for the project's downfall, I couldn't help but feel regret. This was genuinely a promising project with high potential. My experience with the Mobo Project taught me a critical lesson—the importance of having a solid technical foundation during development.