Build everything from scratch.
Turn nothing off.
A video game trading marketplace that had been running for more than a decade decided, in August 2021, to start over. The old platform was buckling and it was also where every order came from. Both things had to stay true at once.
This is Arkade, formerly LeapTrade. Naming, branding, product design, and QA across roughly fourteen months of rebuild. The name came out of the design work instead of the name lists. The build went fully green in June, and the same build regressed in August with twenty failures.
The old site was the business.
So the old site stayed up.
The engagement notes are dated August 31, 2021 and they are not diplomatic. Under the heading General, one line reads: “They have performance issues with the site.” The line directly under it reads: “New version of Leadtrade / Build everything from scratch.” The typo is in the original. It survives into a second document.
The decision that mattered more than any of the strategy work is the first item on the list of things to do immediately. It is maintenance.
“Getting a php developer to help with minor fixes for the site to keep Leaptrade 1.0 working, stable, and running for the next few months while we develop the new version.”
LeapTrade engagement doc · 2021-08-31
A revenue-generating PHP marketplace stayed patched and trading for the entire rebuild.
The “next few months” became a year. The PHP developer stayed funded the whole way. Nobody at the client was ever asked to choose between this month’s orders and next year’s platform.
Five dates carry the whole fourteen months.
Twenty-one candidates on the lists.
Arkade was not one of them.
The naming workshop started from competitor rankings, and said so in its own first paragraph.
“Following is the SEO search on our biggest competitors to find out what keywords make them rank higher than other platforms in the market. Our name suggestions would be based on this ranking so our name is not only marketing friendly but also SEO rich analytically.”
“Biggest competitors are Gameflip and G2A”
leap trade 2.0 naming workshop · competitor set: Gameflip, G2A, Kinguin, G2G, PlayerAuctions, Steam, Epic, Green Man Gaming, GOG, Humble Bundle
Every name proposed in the November 2021 workshop and in the list headed “Types of names we can consider after the meeting”, exactly as written, spelling and casing included.
The name came out of the design work, not the name lists.
The lists were serious work, driven by real competitor analysis, and the winner is on none of them. Design ran ahead of naming and wrote the brief the name had to satisfy.
“This branding exercise started without a brand name. This made the process to be more conceptual. Design led the process entirely, defining the tone and style the brand name should have.”
“we transformed a joystick (a nostalgic gaming notion, just like the new brand name) into a planet with multiple orbiting ‘moons.’ The ‘moons’ represent the continuous and unrestricted trade constantly moving from one corner to another corner of the globe.”
The published Arkade page · portfolio copy from the previous Innovation Theory site
One more line from that published copy is worth having, because it explains why the mark is a rendered object rather than a drawing: “Arkade video-game nature and the rise of the metaverse phenomena made us be interested in creating a brand that could exist in the metaverse. The final brand work in both 3D and 2D contexts.” Late 2021 wanted brands that could stand up in a room. This one was built to.
Seven surfaces, thirty platforms,
and a card that behaved.
The QA process document dated January 31, 2022 pins the MVP scope in one sentence, verbatim: “MVP is focussed mainly on following pages to be delivered: Home page, Registration, Browse games, Product Details, Shopping Cart, New listing creation journey, User profile.” Everything below that line is what those seven surfaces had to survive.
Around 30 gaming platforms mapped.
From NES, Game Boy, Genesis and Sega Saturn through PS5 and Xbox Series X and S, each split by physical and digital, with key import rules for third-party stock. A trading marketplace is only as good as its taxonomy, and this one was hand-built.
58 scenarios. Every row PASS.
One component, tested across every combination of same and different platform, same and different seller, quantity above two, and same and different prices. Get that card wrong and the site lies about stock.
320px supported. 360px the working floor.
Written into the standards rather than discovered in review, which is why the mobile screens exist in the design files instead of being promised for later.
Modelled, then re-specified.
Scenario modelling ran through late May. By June 10 there was a new reputation spec built on a rolling twelve-month window of positive, negative and neutral outcomes. The second version exists because the first one was tested against real scenarios first.
Design goes to zero in June. QA goes to High.
The resourcing sheet tracks it month by month. Product stays High all eight months. Design runs High, High, Med, Low, Low, then off entirely. Project management and QA climb the opposite way. Front-end, backend and devops are staffed every single month. Design finishes; the work becomes shipping and fixing.
The Jira project key stayed LEAP.
Production DNS said arkade.gg from April 28, 2022. The internal load balancer still said leaptrade. Tickets were still LEAP numbers in August.
The crypto half of the 2021 brief is the gap between what was asked for and what got built. Every payment case in every smoke test we hold is card processing. There is no crypto payment test, no wallet flow and no NFT listing flow in any QA document in the record. The objectives wanted a crypto rail. What got built and tested, end to end, was cards.
Engagement notes dated 2021-08-31 · latest project artifact modified 2022-10-06 · originally scoped as four months
June was all green.
August was not.
Even the green sheet was not perfectly green. Three rows marked PASS in the V3 smoke test carry a remark in the margin next to them: “Navbar filter is not working properly,” “filter is not working properly,” “not working properly.” A tester who writes that beside a PASS is a tester worth keeping.
Then the next build landed on UAT. Roughly 100 checks, 20 failures, logged between August 9 and 18, 2022. These are the rows.
“Error 400: redirect_uri_mismatch”
“Internal Server Error”
“403 (Forbidden)”
“The game has been successfully purchased but No Orders yet! on Orders page → order is not seen on the order confirmation page”
Same failure, plus a 403.
“order confirmation mail is not received”
“Sold successfully mail is not received”
All five, one root note: “The orders list is a blank display, so This functionality is not tested”
The money moved and the order vanished.
One broken orders view took out purchase confirmation, key delivery, seller notification, review writing and the sold-only-once guarantee in a single stroke. Five rows on the sheet, one root cause, and it lands after the buyer has already paid.
Everything that had passed in June was failing in August. A regression, in writing, in the client’s own QA folder, caught by the people paid to look for it rather than by a customer who lost a game key. That is what the discipline is for.
What the files hold, and what they do not.
This page follows the files. Engagement notes are dated 2021-08-31, the day the project folder was created; the latest project artifact is modified 2022-10-06; the work was originally scoped as four months. Quotations from the engagement notes, the naming workshop and the QA sheets run verbatim, spelling and casing included, and the twenty August failures are our own test sheet with the tester’s notes exactly as written. The brand images were cut for this site on 2025-01-15.
Our own published copy. The claim that the name came out of the design work rather than the name lists was made for years on the previous Innovation Theory site, and the November 2021 workshop documents back it up — twenty-one candidates, and the winner on none of them.
About the mobile composite. This page does not publish figures that are not ours. The tiles in that set carry one repeated placeholder price rather than market data — the same amount on every listing, which is a designer filling a comp, not a claim about what games cost. The rule stands; that figure is not an instance of it.
What the record does not reach. No migration count, no user count and no volume figure exists anywhere in scope, so none is claimed. Two design deliverables named in the project root do not resolve to reachable files. The 610 MB V1 walkthrough in the folder has not been watched for this write-up.
How AI would help
this now.
Everything above this line is in a file somebody can open. Nothing below it is. This is how we would run the same engagement today, with AI in the work — written as an opinion, because that is what it is.
The 58-case game-card matrix, the platform taxonomy across thirty consoles, the regression suite that went green in June and red in August — that is AI’s best work, and it is most of the QA effort on this page. An agent running the suite on every build would have caught the V3.1 orders bug the day it landed instead of letting a purchase succeed into an empty orders page. Keeping the old PHP marketplace patched while the new one was built is likewise a job you can now hand to something that never gets bored.
It would not have drawn the joystick.
The naming workshop produced twenty-one candidates and a model would produce two hundred, and Arkade would still not be among them — the name came out of the design, from a drawing of a planet with moons, and the brief that drawing created is what the name had to satisfy. That order of operations is a judgement about where an answer is going to come from. It is not a generation problem.
The rebuild was never the risky part.
Turning the old thing off was.
Most of the work that scares people is this shape: something old is holding the business up and something new is supposed to replace it. The assessment tells you which parts can move and which cannot. Two days, no charge, answered in writing.
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