1. A lot of your games are clearly inspired by others in the market, how do you take steps to differentiate them from each other?

The studios we work with have a huge amount of independence and autonomy when it comes to the conception of new games. This freedom is very important to them and we wouldn’t want to limit their creativity. As with any other artistic sector (movies, music, painting etc.), it is natural that studios will be inspired by what others do. We try to go beyond that and encourage studios to be innovative and create something new and disruptive. In coaching studios, we regularly push them beyond their comfort zone, particularly when it comes to game ideation. We also provide more specific feedback and guidance at later stages of the prototyping cycle. Just to take an example among many, with “Perfect Hit case study,” a hit we launched in August, we were able to take a game with a 9% D7 retention to a 15% D7 retention by making fundamental changes to the gameplay. But we went further and tipped the scale for both the D7 retention (22%) and CPI ($0.15) with a creative addition to the game, both to the visuals and to the game feeling. By layering each level on top of each other (essentially adding a hole in end-of-level targets), we transformed a good prototype into a major hit. In this case, the idea itself originated in the publishing team and was brilliantly executed by the developer.

2. How much value does differentiation have in the market? How do you decide how much differentiation is good?

Differentiation is important because an innovative gameplay will have more chances of being successful. For example with the hit game Tenkyu the initial prototype’s gameplay was based on the classic game where you navigate a marble through a tilting board. This was too static and not particularly innovative. The main twist we worked on with the developer was to add layered platforms of different shapes, so the marble would fall from one maze to the other. After this big change D1 and D7 retention went through the roof!

3. How many games does Voodoo publish on a monthly basis? How many games are cancelled in soft launch vs globally launched?

We’re on an upward trend at the moment. On average we’re looking at 4 games per month. A studio can expect to publish a first hit game after 5-10 prototypes on average; subsequent hits are typically even more frequent.

4. What % of developers that you discuss with do you end up actually working with?

All of them! We are very tech-focused: we have built a platform that has allowed us to scale our efforts. This dashboard allows developers to access Voodoo’s growing knowledge library, and also to test their prototypes to get data. Voodoo’s dashboard is unique on the market– every studio we work with can launch free test campaigns for their prototypes, from Day 1.

Thanks to this dashboard, our partner studios are informed, in a matter of days, of whether their game is a future Hit, a prototype with high potential, or a prototype to ‘kill’. Whilst we’re very proud of this dashboard, we’re aware it’s far from perfect; we’re constantly bringing improvements to it based on the developers’ feedback.

5. How have the success-criteria KPIs changed for hyper casual games over the last year? (CPI, D1 Retention, Videos/DAU, Adoption, etc.) 

Our historic KPIs have been successful indicators to date, so we’ve used them consistently. We are open to revisiting our KPIs; at the end of the day, it’s about the LTV of users, and there’s only so much a seven-day retention will capture.

6. What metrics do you typically look at when a game is in soft launch? How do you run a campaign in soft launch to ensure these metrics are measurable?

We typically look at retention (D1 over 50% and D7 over 20%), as well as a low CPI.

7. It seems like there has been some blending of Idle mechanics and Hyper casual mechanics over time — do you see this as a lasting trend or just a fad in audience tastes?

Idle is an interesting mechanic that can definitely help with long-term retention. However, integrating it in hyper casual games should be decided on a case-by-case basis. This wouldn’t work well on a game like Helix Jump, or Hole.io for example.

8. Testing & developing UA Creatives seem like an incredibly important part of your process. Any recommendations for other developers on what types of creatives work for hyper casual games?

If you work with us we will take care of all of the creative ad work. We’ve got a really talented and wacky team of artists who will test out a lot of creatives every single day. This means that the developers we work with can really focus on what they do best and what they enjoy the most: building amazing games! This is particularly relevant for smaller studios. When we worked with H8 to develop Helix Jump, their small team was able to focus on developing innovative and crazy prototypes, rather than on developing creatives. This approach was more effective, time-efficient and eventually led to Helix Jump.  Part of the “Voodoo” mindset we encourage studios to adopt is to focus on what they do best and where the value really lies i.e. game development.

9. What role do you think demographics of gamers play in a game’s CPI?

It’s really important to build a game that works well with men and women at the same time. If CPI is low in those two demographics, then you are much more likely to have a big hit! Otherwise, if you have a low CPI with men, but high with women (which is often the case), then you’re cutting yourself from half of the market!
Some features to consider when building gender-balanced games include gameplay (contemplative vs too competitive) and color scheme (pastel vs too vivid). Ultimately, we study each game’s data individually to develop a strategy to achieve this balance.

10. What do you believe are the next opportunities in Hyper Casual? (genre, mechanics, audience)

We’ve seen a recent surge in .io games and multiplayer games, and a shorter ‘incremental game’ trend before that. We don’t claim to consistently call hyper casual trends ahead of the curve, but trends have begun as a result of a conversation between our publishing managers and our partner studios in the past.

11. What do you believe the next threats are in Hyper Casual? What do you think will change as new developers and established companies enter the fray?

The biggest challenge we face is time to market. We know that our partner studios will publish hit games down the line, but our work is to help them get there in record time. Whether it takes 5, 10 or 15 prototypes to get there makes a big difference for our partners, and we are always looking for ways to reduce this lead time.

12. Hyper Casual is becoming more and more competitive, do you see any other promising developers in the space?

There are always promising developers out there! We like to work with developers that have raw talent and that are hungry for success, regardless of location or the size of the team.
The studio OHM Games is extremely promising. They have a great vision, excellent creative talent, and the team is very focused and united. They’ve recently launched two successful games, “Knock Balls” and “Wall Clean,” and we have no doubt they will break the top charts again.

13. Can you tell us about some of the developers you’ve helped succeed?

I think the Flappy Dunk Success Story is a great one. Paul Breton and Clément Germanicus, around 25 to 27 years old, french and cousins.

The gameplay was too difficult and the controls were not intuitive at all but we felt otherwise the game was well executed and the idea was original. We schedule a meeting and we felt immediately the good vibe and strong energy from Paul. We immediately got along and we created almost a friendship relationship. 

So we tested their game Madwad and the results were terrible. High CPI and low retention. At the time, we were doing a hackathon at Voodoo so I suggested to Paul to follow our rhythm and create a game in 48h. He accepted and all we needed was an idea. It was early 2017 and Ketchapp was totally leading the hyper casual market. But we were not fans of how they balanced their games. Theirs were too cold, too minimalistic and, most of all, too hard! I was playing HopHopHop at the time but was really frustrated with a lot of small details in the game.

I asked Paul what he thought about the game and he told me he was playing it as well and had the exact same feeling as me. We knew what to do. Two days later we were playing Flappy Dunk.

The game did millions of downloads and still growing.

14. What is the typical lifespan for a hyper casual game? How long does an average successful game remain in the charts? What typically restricts their lifespan versus a typical free to play mobile game?

Only time will tell! Some of our biggest hits seem to defy gravity and remain very popular. Take Snake vs Block for example: it came out in May 2017 and is still comfortably in the top 100 ranking in the US on iOS. Hyper casual is such a new market, we simply don’t know the limits yet!

Thanks for a great interview Alex! If you’re interested in working with Voodoo you can get in touch with them over on their main site.

The post Everything you want to know about Voodoo – An Interview with Voodoo Games appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Reviewing the estimated data on Sensor Tower for June in the Top 100 US Free Game charts, Voodoo accounted for 24.7%* of all the free downloads. Broadening the view to all Hypercasual games, approximately 57% of all free game downloads can be attributed to this space.**  

Number of games in the Top 100 Free Games US Chart - June 2018

*Data taken from Sensor Tower estimated US game downloads from June 2018
**Data taken from Sensor Tower estimated US game download from June 2018 and assessing the apps mechanics and monetization stream
***Rock of Destruction, Stone Skimming, Dune, Twenty48 Solitaire, Fight List, Paper.io, Twisty Road, Splashy, Waves, The Cube – What’s Inside, Flying Arrow, Stack Jump, Rolly Vortex, Baseball Boy, The Fish Master, Snake VS Block, Color Road, Helix Jump, Hole.io

Of all the genres of games released on the app store, no other genre commands the pure number of downloads that Hypercasual games do.  The simplicity of the gameplay, coupled with the speed of gamers learning and mastering the challenge creates a voracious need to download the next new idea, older games are quickly discarded or deleted. This has not escaped the notice of many game developers with hundreds of studios trying to build the next mega hit. However, Voodoo has truly mastered both the sourcing and promotion of their titles making it tough for studios to compete. How has Voodoo dominated the Hypercasual space?

#1 Game Design doesn’t matter

Voodoo doesn’t care about your game’s design. Voodoo cares about your game’s market potential. As a publishing house, the majority of their releases can clearly be seen as “inspired by” reproductions of older games.

• Tiny Wings – Dune
• Donut County – Hole.io
• slither.io – paper.io

In each case, success is not down to the game mechanics or technical quality of the product, but Voodoo’s ability to market games more effectively and reach a larger audience than those original games. Bad game design still won’t make the cut, but innovative game design is not as important as tried and tested successful mechanics. If you want help with your hyper casual game design we wrote a post of the Top 10 Hyper Casual game mechanics present today.

This is very hard for the average game developer to swallow and it’s hard to think that game design is the least important aspect to Voodoo’s success. What set’s voodoo apart is their ability to work with a large number of talented studios each working on simple, tested, game designs, and then apply industry-leading marketing and growth practices to push games to the top of the App Store. Dictating which game design is the most popular is something the market decides, not something Voodoo strives to set.

#2 Voodoo releases games faster than you

Making rough approximations through tracking the releases of the majority of HyperCasual publishers on both Google Play and Apple App Store, Voodoo have released 7 new titles that reached top 300 in the US Free in the last 30 days. Most of the other publishers have released between 0 and 2. This is a phenomenal pace compared with classical studios or even publishers who might schedule 1 or 2 apps per month in order to give it the support needed. This highlights a fundamental shift in business practices.

Most developers’ first start to iterate, test and soft launch titles in cheaper CPI countries such as the Philippines or New Zealand. Based on the feedback they got back from players, designers and developers optimize and iterate the FTUE or monetization balance to slowly improve the LTV and retention.  When a studio is confident in their polished products, they would approach Apple and Google to showcase their app and hope for a feature. At the same time, they might allocate a large marketing budget and test multiple ad variants in order to be confident in having the largest splash possible. This is too slow for hypercasual, this is not the way Voodoo approach app releases.

Voodoo may have 100-200 development studios each working frantically on new game designs.  In each case, the focus is the core gameplay. The meta and even the advertising is left out for the initial soft launch release. Core loops are then tested without fanfare into key territories such as the US or China in order to see if there are good responses to the mechanic. Voodoo released a simple guide for their gameplay style (Snackable, Youtubable, Straight forward, Not punitive, Innovative) which clearly restricts multiple game designs from the table.

Games are then measured on a brutally tough scale. Each game needs 50%+ D1 retention to even make the cut.  This creates a very competitive environment where stats and data become the key to becoming picked up by these top publishers.  As a developer you want to know that your game can actually reach a large audience, this is where Voodoo has developer a lot of skills.

#3 Voodoo grows games cheaply

In a system where CPIs are low, games can grow fast. If you’re able to spend $1 and make $1.50 back then you should just keep spending more money and grow faster.  This relationship is often quoted as LTV > CPI (check out the bible for more details).

Different genres of free to play mobile games have different monetization profiles and can roughly be categorised by their mechanics or via their audience.  Games with the highest monetization profiles (i.e Casino games) are able to spend $50+ per user because the LTV of their titles is very high. However, their audience is usually quite small.

IAP based monetization models focus on generating the most revenue per user but in doing so their audience becomes harder to find. Hypercasual as a genre works so well because they can lower the CPI to incredibly low levels through clear advertising creative and data-driven programmatic marketing. However, without clear IAPs or items or gacha systems, the model relies on users watching and engaging with advertising. Getting the balance between a very low CPI while maximising the Advertising yield is where the profit is.

#4 Voodoo have better relationships than you

As a developer, you must tread a fine line between showing as many ads as possible (that result in an install) while not breaking the user’s enjoyment of the game. Getting the right ads presented at the right time results in much higher eCPMs.

Because of this, many genres of game perform better than others simply because they create natural breaks in the gameplay where an ad can be shown without disturbing a users playtime.  The better the app is at retaining players through its core loop the more opportunities there are to show ads and therefore the higher the LTV. But this isn’t the only piece of the puzzle. You must show the highest performing ad to the right user in order to efficiently display ads that will result in installs.  

Voodoo is in a better position to maximise this than other studios. Due to their immense size and scale, they have more relationships at better rates than your average development studio.  This means the ads they show are more likely to result in higher paying installs, increasing the LTV further.  The mobile ad networks are ruthless and competitive: everyone wants to work with the largest player. When considering the Hypercasual segment as a business strategy you must take the business development time into account.

#5 Voodoo can scale games into profitable cash cows.

For larger businesses, opportunities must provide enough profit for them to seem interesting. I would say that any game that can drive $10,000 a day in gross revenue is enough to support a smaller gaming studio. Many studios don’t think about making games in terms of gross profit and they often neglect to think about the number of users necessary in order to make that magic $10,000 per day.  

Hypercasual games tend to make lower revenue per DAU. A typical game will be anywhere between $0.01-0.10. Along with their large network of titles Voodoo also has a large volume of data on who their most active players are. Using in-game events to look into player actions, helps you to know clearly which players are playing your games the most. The larger the Voodoo game network becomes the more refined the company can segment or target individual players with effective marketing messages.

As they expand into new genres and different players engage, further refinements in their voice or creative might work better for individual game types. By doing hyper-specific segmentation you can get lower CPIs and more ad views.

What becomes hard for developers is to perform this correctly and at scale. This requires a team of people to analyse, review, create and then execute effective marketing. Voodoo has learnt how to do this very well.

Competing against Voodoo

The biggest mistake most game developers make when attempting to attack the hypercasual gaming market is to think they can innovate through game design. Voodoo has proven that innovation in game mechanics is not as important as cheap and effective marketing. Their pace of release and the scale of their network is growing all the time allowing them to learn and understand their users more and more. To have a viable shot at competing you must be prepared to invest heavily in a strong data warehouse, a talented marketing team and use metrics and data to decide which games have the strongest business case.

Even though this seems like an impossible task, strong-willed and talented studios can carve out their own niche. Find a mechanic that you know well and has strong retention metrics, then work on expanding or perfecting the metagame. Be careful to keep the mechanics pure and simple or you will lose what makes hypercasual special. You must also be ruthless with your game designs and drop anything that doesn’t make the cut, be quick, be bold and follow the low CPIs. Studios like Playgendary, Lion and Super TapX show that it can be done.

The post 5 reasons why Voodoo beats small game developers on the app store appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Shoestring Soft Launch GDC Vault

The talk focuses on being a practical guide to preparing, running and analysing your games soft launch.  Whatever the size and scale of your studio I consider a soft launch critical in the process of creating a successful product on the store.  There have been so many different methods to soft launch and so much confusion that I tried to sum it up in a guide.  The guide keeps it simple and light and focus’ on the maximum bang for $2000 of spend.  A big focus is the idea of bursting a soft launch rather than running an always on campaign, this can save you money and keep your team focused on development rather than watching your numbers all the time. The bigger your studio the more refined your marketing and soft launch tactics might be, but hopefully there is something in there for everyone!

Outline

1. Definition of a Soft Launch
   1. What?
   2. When?
   3. Why?
2. Before you Soft Launch
   1. AARRR + GQM Data design
   2. KPI / Dashboard Setup
   3. Audience and Location choosing
3. Running a Soft Launch
   1. Bursting
   2. Analysing
   3. Critical Decisions

The post GDC 2018: Shoestring Soft Launch – Low Budget High Value Launch Strategy appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

These are the hardest questions a Product Owner can ask and the truthful answer is, you will never really know. There are no clear answers, there are no strict redlines or clear benchmarks, at the end of the day it’s a call based on the data you have. Soft launching is all about data. Data comes in from the market and as a PO you have to judge whether you have strong game/market fit. I feel you have four key questions your data must try to answer:

• Are players stuck anywhere?
• Do my players stick at the game?
• Have I stacked some cash?
• Can it scale?

You may not have a clear answer to any of these questions, but you should still be in a position to make a call. Whatever numbers you have you cannot expect them to change by more than 20 percent in either direction.

Stuck

This is the easiest of all the questions to answer initially, but hardest of all to call before launching. This simply requires progression tracking of players based on something that gradually increases as a player plays, such as XP, Levels or Battles. You want to track cohorts of players who are at each stage and see of those players what percentage churn out. You’re looking to see:

• The XP level after tutorial with the biggest churn
• The single point in your funnel with the biggest loss of users
• Any gameplay feature that is used 10 times less frequently than your core loop

Churn is not directly related to any one feature, but spikes can signify bugs, difficulty issues, lack of clear objectives, or a game that’s devoid of challenge.  Keeping a track of your funnels and setting yourself a baseline which you want to stay under will allow you to optimize your game development to areas that are losing the most people.

Stick

If being stuck is all about Churn, then sticking is more about retention.  Rather than really looking at your game in terms of a progress, you’re looking at your game in terms of time. All F2P Games need to be playable for long periods of time, and it’s preferable to try to setup a habitual format that players get used to on an hourly, daily, weekly and even monthly timetable.

Retention graphs provide the best measure of this. Rather than obsessing about the metric you are at right now, focus on improving it from week to week by analysing weekly cohorts.  Each week take the D7, D14, D21, D28 and compare it to the previous weeks during development – the question is, have you seen any improvements? The later day retention figures are much more important, but also very difficult to clear quantify.  If you’re game is not improving steadily week on week, you’re missing a feature or the core loop is not holding up well after hundred of playthroughs.  This could be down to the core game not having enough Luck, Stats or Skill and requires deeper analysis. You want to see subtle but gradual improvements throughout your soft launch periods.

Stack

Stacking Cash. Quite simply, is your game ROI positive or getting towards ROI positive? You need to look into your marketing spend here and see how the LTV > CPI balance is looking.  During soft launch you may not have the data to accurately estimate purchases, or your retention curve and so you amplify those inaccuracies with an LTV calculation. If you’re only just ROI positive when you run a 365d LTV calculation, I would assume you’re wrong.  

What you do have at your disposal and with greater accuracy are:

• Total spend Vs Total Earnt (ROI)
• Conversion Rate + ARPPU
• Gems spent in game

Your ROI will almost certainly be negative. It’s likely to be extremely negative perhaps at 10 percent or less in 30d period.  Dependent on how your game is intending to monetize and how your retention curve does look you will need to set a benchmark with what you as a team are happy with and see if it can be improved with each build.

When observing conversion rate and ARPPU look at them as averages for each build.  This will give you a fair indicator of what’s likely to happen if your game could scale to more and more people.  Use a spreadsheet to work out, what’s the total number of installs we need to keep the lights on? Does this seem feasible with a feature/strong press coverage?

Finally, use your Premium Currency in game to see how quickly or how much spend is happening with your users and what they are spending it on.  As very quick reference, the gem spend per user per build should be increasing. Also making sure that the average number of gems in someone’s wallet is low means that people are not hoarding but need to spend them to progress. You’ll have to think about it in your games context but, the more gem spend the better.

Scale

The hardest of all the questions is “will my game scale?” Scale changes lots of things in lots of ways and is a true reflections of a well executed game is one that grows in fun as this scale, e.g. Pokemon Go. So without truly knowing, you have to make gut calls. In my mind, there are are four key piece that your team needs to be aware of:

Marketing – You can test this, it just requires money and it requires you to spend it faster on the marketing platforms.  As you increase your bid prices and your spend limit you will speed up installs, hopefully without changing your CPI as virality and organics help. Without going into detail here, you want to try to keep your CPI flat as the rest of your costs and spends increase.

Mechanics – The core game might work for the first 100 levels, but is it simply a matter of adding 100 more? Do you need to add an evolution or twist to the mechanic to keep it fresh? If you do make that change does it break your previous mechanics?

Economy – Almost all economies blow up at some point.  You will likely have an imbalance of power or items in the game, but can you detect them? This is what a soft launch will help you to decide?

Content – Is the team ready to handle the technical challenge of doubling or tripling the game? How much time does it take to create a level? How much time does it take for players to complete a level? Can the servers handle it? These are practical questions that if the game is a large success, you are not shocked by the complexity of growing your content.

Conclusion

All the decisions in the world won’t prepare you for abject failure or viral success, but in most cases your game will launch to some acclaim and then face the uphill battle of fixing, smoothing and perfecting the mechanics that work for your audience. The more harsh you are during the early stages of a game’s development, the better you can scale it later on, however, killing a creative endeavour that never hits the app store can be just as costly to your company and mental state. At the end of the day, launching games is why you started game development in the first place sometimes you should go with your gut. Fuck it, ship it.

The post The 4 Critical Questions a Soft Launch Can Answer: Stuck, Stick, Stack, Scale appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

It goes without saying that GDC is a very special industry-focused event, not only because it’s the largest, but also because of the sheer density of great game designers and developers who make the trip. Without fail, each year will throw up something new – a new lesson, or a new contact who proves to be invaluable over time.

If you’ve never considered attending GDC before, I couldn’t recommend it any more strongly – it’s easily one of the best games events on the calendar, though the expense required for non-American developers to make the trip cannot be ignored. On that note, try and look into your country’s business investment initiatives, as there may be a budget to get you a ticket, flight or hotel.

For those heading to San Francisco for this year’s she-bang, both I and Adam will be giving two separate talks on topics we’re both passionate about:

GDC Talks

Shoestring Soft Launch: Low Budget, High-Value Launch Strategy

Speaker:

Tom Kinniburgh (Director, Mobile Free to Play)

Location: Room 2006, West Hall

Date: Thursday, March 22

Time: 4:00pm – 5:00pm

In this talk, I’ll be looking through how you can get the best data about your game for the lowest cost. Soft launching is something I believe helps every game improve, but how to do it, when to do it and the costs involve put off a large number of developers. I’ll show how, for $2000, you can get any game ready for a more successful launch on the app stores.

Deconstructor of Fun: Breaking Down Top Mobile F2P Games

Speakers:

Adam Telfer (Director, MobileFreeToPlay.com)

Anil Das-Gupta (Product Owner, Wargaming.net)

Location: Room 22, North Hall

Date: Wednesday, March 21

Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm

In this talk Adam and Anil will break down some of the top grossing games on the app store – you’ll have to wait and see which ones they both pick. Deconstructing games is what we do best. We’ll show you how the best performing games create strong core loops and through understanding, you can make better calls in your game.

Mobile Masters Meet Up – GDC 2018

We’re also throwing an invite-only party with Gram Games, MobileDevMemo and Deconstructor of fun.  There are really limited spaces and we’re focussing on letting Game Designer and Product Managers in, to meet with other talented folks! Get yourselves on the waiting list and we will be inviting a few people each day.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gdc-mobile-masters-meet-up-tickets-43356218617

Hope to see you all there!

Tips for GDC

If it’s your first time to GDC it can seem a little daunting and you can often get lost in the sheer size and scale of the place. Here are my tips.

1. Reach out and book meetings early with key individuals. Give yourself 60-minute slots, but only expect to have 30-minute meetings – often traveling to various locations takes the extra time.
2. When booking meetings, book around Yerba Buena Gardens or any of the bars or hotels directly next to the Moscone Centre.
3. You don’t need to stay near Moscone (nor is it always the safest). You can easily stay farther away at a more affordable venue and commute using the BART or Uber/Lyft.  Once you’re in, you’re then in town for the full day and night.
4. Work out which talks you want to see in advance and don’t expect to be able to do more than three back to back, they do get quite tiring.
5. The Expo hall is a must – make sure you see the indie game finalists.
6. Parties are top priority – make sure you try to go to two or three during the week, even if you don’t yourself drink. The best resources for finding them are
   1. Fellowship of GDC Parties FB Group
   2. GDC 2018 Party Map
7. Don’t party all night. It’s a full week, slow and steady wins the race.
8. Bring a bag with a jacket, water, gum, notepad/iPad. The venue doesn’t have great options, and SF weather is very temperamental.
9. Don’t wander alone at night. Every year someone at GDC gets into problems wandering alone, especially near the Tenderloin. Stick to groups and take Lyfts/Ubers at night to get home.
10. Don’t be shy! If you loved a talk, make sure to go and meet the speaker! If you see someone you admire, talk to them! GDC brings out the best in everyone. You’ll be surprised who is there and who is willing to have a quick chat.

And remember all of the talks are on the GDC Vault after the event and we will be posting both of our slide up here if you can’t make it to GDC this year.

Good luck, and I hope to see many of you out there.

The post Getting Ready for GDC 2018: The people, the parties, and the Mobile Masters Meet Up appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

On the surface, amassing a huge number of downloads within the modern mobile marketplace would appear to be a staggering task. Yet, when you look at successful games such as 1010!, Ballz, Agar.io, Dune, or Piano Tiles, the designs behind them are so simple plenty of developers are within rights to ask themselves, ‘just why didn’t I think of that?’.

The term ‘hypercasual’ has become a collective way to reference games of this nature. Such titles typically have a single mechanic and a single goal, yet reaching a high score can be fiendishly difficult. There are a number of publishers – Ketchapp, Voodoo, and Gram to name a few – that, within the last couple of years, have managed to gather a daily audience that could rival most large television networks. It’s naive to believe that each of these publishers have a ‘secret sauce’, yet how have they managed to get a game to 100 million downloads?

How do these studios choose the best prototypes? What does it take to design the perfect hypercasual experience? And, most importantly, just how do they make it to 100 million downloads?

Perfecting the mechanic

At their core, all of these hypercasual games are built around a single mechanic. Indeed, it would be fair to suggest the all-conquering Flappy Bird could be considered the beginning of the hypercasual genre on mobile.

A player’s score is used as the primary metric for a users progress at perfecting that mechanic. This is very different from say a BBB (Base-Battle-Build), in which users strategically choose how to deploy the perfect army, or a Match-3 game that relies on a balance of skill and luck of where gems will fall. Great hypercasual games are easy to grasp, but rely on players having to perfect the mechanic through repetition, measured via a high score.

As a result, players quickly grasp that the more they play, the better they get. For example, with Flappy Bird your first run was unlikely to be too successful, but repeated play teaches the player how to control, time and avoid the simple obstacles. Perfecting the basic mechanics quickly feels fun. Nevertheless, the best hypercasual games still convey the idea that, even with consistent improvements, there is still a long way to go before the player reaches the top.  

Great games in this genre rely on mechanics that provide all the tools a player needs from the start of the game, either with a single life – such as Flappy Bird – or with multiple lives, like Ballz or a full base, like Stack.  In each case, winning is in the hands of the player and loosing is clear from the outset.

Perhaps most interestingly, to date, there have been three genres of game that have perfected the hypercasual model; arcade, puzzle and MMO games.

Arcade Hypercasual

Titles like Stack, Snake vs Blocks, Finger Racer are the most prominent successes of arcade hypercasual games. All typically rely on timing-based mechanics; tap at the right time, swipe at the right time. This is mostly due to the way timing mechanics work best with touch input.

For example, touch controls provide very accurate timing and directional responses, but are particularly poor at single point accuracy. Likewise, mobile session design is much shorter than other medium’s, and so the ability to pick up and play within 10 seconds is one reason people will turn to a hypercasual game over a simulation or RPG title.  The immediacy of the mechanic and the simplicity of the tools available make it a superior choice when time is at a premium.

Tapping and swiping both open up a lot of different gameplay ideas, but most top performing hypercasual games rely on timing and accuracy as the crucial skills to master. When thinking of the core mechanic the best ones usually are very hard to perfect, but the player will have a stat such as health, size or speed that provide them with a small cushion. In contrast, serving up too harsh of a mechanic will see players drop out far too quickly.  If you are testing ideas for a mechanic, try to formulate one that provides players with lots of room to fail in small chunks (Stack), or in 1 large chunk (Flappy Bird).  Think of it as either 1 – 0 , a clear and simple challenge. Or 100 – 0, where the more you have complicates the primary action of the mechanic.  You loose more earlier on and then the mechanic becomes more manageable.

Puzzle Hypercasual

Puzzle games usually remove dexterity and timing and replace them with strategy and planning. Great puzzle games require players to think in advance and formulate a strategy in order to win.  

The real difference with hypercasual puzzle, however, is that games don’t have a clear end.   This was the strategy adopted by 1010!, MergeTown or 2048, and in each case there are ways the player can lose but no real way they can win. This is different from the standard puzzle genre games such as Solitaire or Match-3 games where in each case the player usually completes a round and then is presented with another round. As such, in more traditional puzzle games, the ability to win is what drives players to retry. However, hypercasual puzzle games remove even that goal to maintain simplicity.

Removing obstacles is one of the key ways to make a product more casual. The easier it is for players to start a game, the easier it is for them to understand it – it’s lowest common denominator gaming.  Simplifying games is clearly what many teams try to do, the difficulty with a Puzzle game is that there is still enough strategic choice that a player can still make a bad move.

Puzzle games must tread a fine line between removing enough rules or restrictions from the player whilst maintaining a mechanic that has enough depth for players to perfect. Trial and error when it comes to the game’s development is typically the approach required to work out at what size and scale these mechanics breakdown – for instance, there are reasons 2048 has a 5×5 board or Match-3 is more popular than Match-4 or Match-5.  The balance of randomness within the constraints of the board are where teams should iterate the most.

MMO Hypercasual

Classic MMOs such as World of Warcraft or EVE have complex stories and huge number of mechanics. In the hypercasual realm, games like Agar.io or Paper.io create dynamic experiences often with single goals and simple controls. Players interact with each other to create emergent gameplay in real time, but their focus remains singular – be the biggest, be the longest.

The strategic choices the player has to make and concentration required as a result means play time will be longer than typical hypercasual rounds, but perfecting the mechanic will always require multiple attempts. Indeed, mastering the controls and timing is the only way players will learn. The actions of other players rather than computer generated scripts or increasing speed create the pressure and difficulty.  This always tends to feel more enjoyable as the difficulty develops with your play rather than being set in advance by a game designer.

Perfecting an MMO hypercasual game is not as clear cut as the other genres, but score is still used as the simplest measure of success. This leads players to naturally want to be first – an achievement only one person can ever attain, of course! The drive for perfection is challenging, but in this case perfection is attainable – at least until your device runs out of battery!

Scaling the mechanic

The three different hypercasual genres detailed above take different slants at providing challenge for players, yet all three rely on players learning a skill in order to achieve higher scores. For a successful hypercasual game to stick, that mechanic must scale.  

Scaling requires that the mechanic, environment or context to gradually increase in difficulty, whilst also increasing the score received. In some cases scale pushes the mechanic, making it harder to proceed. Conversely, in other cases the mechanic doesn’t grow harder but the board or level becomes more complex – i.e. players have to think harder, think deeper or plan further ahead in order to succeed. Scores are necessary so players can compete with themselves (as well as others), so developers have to make sure scores are front and center of the user experience.

Scaling usually makes the games harder with time in order to reduce the likelihood of a truly endless game. If a game were endless they usually are no longer fun because the threat of losing or progression from winning are lessened. If a game ends up heading down either of these tracks, the developer in question must meet it head on and develop features that end players sessions more quickly.

Timberman is one of the better examples of how a developer has learned to scale the mechanic through the use of a timer bar. The more the Timberman chops, the more the bar fills, but take too long and the bar will run out and the player will reach the end. The rate at which the bar drops also speeds up the more the player chops, meaning the best players get so good at the mechanic they don’t make any mistakes whatsoever but are still beaten by that damn bar! 

I’ve actually been present when some scores over 700 have been placed, which makes for some seriously intense thumb tapping. As such, it’s important games in this genre increase pressure overtime, but don’t punish great players just because they are doing well.  User Testing is invaluable here.

Hypercasual mechanic scale pressure in three main ways:

• Increasing the speed of the mechanic itself
• Changing the environment the mechanic is present
• Adding a competitive human element that adds variance to the play

A natural cadence of around one to two minutes of gameplay allows people to experience the mechanic in a safe space for 20-30 seconds before gradually increasing the pressure and forcing players to concentrate. The level of concentration can be immensely high and keeping a player fully engaged for as long as possible is the kind of rush every developer should be looking to master. Games that don’t find the balance, however, will be greeted with players who think gameplay is either too tough or, perhaps even more harshly, too boring. Getting on top of this progression, is the key to designing a game that hits 100 million downloads.

Monetising the mechanic

One very important fact to note: The only viable business model for hypercasual games so far is advertising. While there may also be opportunities to sell user data such as location or activity to various data companies, the simplicity of the mechanics make IAP irrelevant.

Here at Mobile Free To Play we’ve written articles aplenty on how video ads can be a viable business model to grow a company, but hypercasual games are where they excel. The sheer scale of downloads coupled with the short round times and repeatable gameplay mean that players can view multiple ads per session and multiple sessions per day.

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Also of note, people often think that hypercasual games have very poor retention. Let me state right here and now, this is a complete myth.  Many hypercasual games can have extremely high 1-7 day retention – 60 percent or more is not unknown for day one (D1). It’s true that they do suffer from D30 onwards, but they can more than make up for this in the number of sessions and stickiness in the short term.  

The monetisation model relies on a smash and grab ad philosophy, which means that developers attempt to ensure all users see at least one ad a session, with more ads popping up after every game loop. In this way, every app start becomes a new opportunity to push players into more hypercasual games. This might lead to less engagement in a single app, but developers can see a much larger network growth when measured across all apps.  

The conclusion is, each hypercasual app becomes another opportunity to place another add, so the more successful hypercasual apps you have out there, the better. At the time of writing (January, 2018) the number of apps each publisher/developer had live on the Store.

• Ketchapp – 154 apps
• Voodoo – 15 apps
• Gram Games – 8 apps

Not all developers have the luxury of such a large network of apps or users, but it’s possible to use their tricks to maximise your ROI. One crafty trick of the hypercasual publishers is the on what I call the ‘app start ad’ – or the single advert that shows before the game even takes place. It may feel very aggressive, but it guarantees at least one ad view per session, which can add up on the bottom line. Players have come to expect that these casual expeiences are powered via ad revenue and so long as you provide an IAP to stop the advertising, I think it’s fair to subjegate players to a higher volume of ads.

Marketing Hypercasual Games

It’s important to note that mobile gaming is as much about marketing as it is game design. One of the main reasons for the rise of hypercasual is its incredibly low CPI costs and high CTR from ads.  

This is due to the sheer simplicity of the gameplay, enabling a 10-20 second ad to communicate the entire game to the player, means more people are convinced of enjoying the game by watching the ad.  This leads to a very high CTR (Click-thru-rate) and IR (Install Rate) as they know what they are getting.  The best ads show off the gameplay directly and don’t need fancy soundtracks or 3D models. Getting your Ads and game to market and testing the response rate is almost as important as developing the game.  The market decides which hypercasual games will succeed.  

The market has become overly saturated recently and thus a common art style has been established.  Clean and simple vector graphics – usually with strong and bold tones – stand out and help players make quick decisions on whether they will like the game. Sticking within this style can help people decide without even playing your game, what type of game it will be.  Again the clearer your game is for a consumer, the more likely they are to impulsively decide if they want to play your game. 

Loyalty hard to come by with HyperCasual gaming, with players quickly picking up and deleting titles every day.  Make sure that players can remember your game name and that this closely represents your core mechanic; Ballz, Dunk!, and Piano Tiles are great examples.  

By maintaining a simple theme, name and mechanic you provide the broadest audience appeal.  Hypercasual titles can drive upto 10x the number of downloads for similar budgets as RPG or Strategy Releases.  They may not command the same Lifetime Value (LTV), but they can still get into the charts. This in turn leads to a greater number of organic downloads lowering the eCPI even further, completing the virtuous game marketing circle. The sheer scale that can be achieved by modern marketing networks means that if done correctly and with budget spent in the right way, games can skyrockets, doing over a million download per day worldwide.

Conclusion

Designing hypercasual games can initially seem very simple, but creating success is as much an artform as developing a strong economy or deep narrative.  

Unlike other genres, success can rely much more on the market and whatever craze is sweeping the collective conscious that week.  Ensuring your game is as clear and easy to understnad for a user can make all the difference. When prototyping mechanics, decide which genre you fall into.  Focus on simplicity and timing but remember to use a high score to drive a competitive goal for all players. There is no perfect mechanic, nor perfect style, but the simplicity of the gameplay allows you to be fast and nimble in your development.  Set yourself strict timelines to releasing concepts and let the market decide

Making money from the genre requires a serious investment in a large variety of ad partners and understanding of the ad monetization model. The sheer scale of the games can make huge revenue via ads, but the fickle nature of the market mean unless you thought about your integrations early on, you might miss a lot of revenue. If you keep it simple, create an innovative twist on a simple mechanic and the market likes your brand – then who knows, you might reach the lofty heights of an eight-figure app store success!

The post 100 Million Downloads: How Hypercasual Mobile Games Are Rewriting the Game Design Rulebook appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Pat yourself on the back, you have created terabytes of garbage.

“Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.” Clifford Stoll, Physicist

Data collected without reason, is just data. To be able to make informed decisions you need context and only by understanding your player’s intentions will you start to be informed. There are a lot of similarities between mobile games and therefore there are some very standard metrics you might look at. We’ve created a simple tracking plan that you can use to get started.

Mobile Free to Play Tracking Plan

A tracking plan is the first step to getting useful information. Use it as a guide to help your whole team design and create events. Feel free to make a copy and customize it as you see fit.  The code section on the right assumes you’re using FB Analytics and Unity but this can be easily adapted or simply left out. You can open up the template by clicking the image below 

The plan leans on three ideas and applies them to Mobile Gaming.

1. GQM (Goal,Question,Metric) Model – Wikipedia
2. Pirate Marketing – 500Hats – Dave McClure
3. MVT (Minimum Viable Tracking) – Mobile Growth Stack

The GQM model lays out the right order to think about your events. You always need a goal in mind then to ask a question that can be represented as a metric. Pirate marketing gives you a way of easily thinking of 5 important high level goals that matter to marketing and growing all free to play mobile games.  MVT provides a framework for focussing on creating the right events in the right order.

Together these methodologies can help you to plan the lowest number of valuable events. When an app or game is young, it’s more important to understand what’s driving your users to convert to payers.  Conversion, or lack of conversion, kills more apps than low retention. If you can’t make money from your game, you have not got a viable free to play product.

You can use the plan as a pure planning tool or you could use it to help track the implementation of the events in an app.  The plan comes with the basic events most games would need to make simple marketing decisions.  As every game is different, creating goals and questions that are specific for your game will be up to you.

Designing Questions

Using the GQM model you first set a goal for the game. Goals can be very specific or very general, but all apps face similar problems when they are starting out, they lose users and users don’t spend any money. Dave McClure’s Pirate Marketing provide 5 large goals that, if perfected, will drive high growth for your app. These are commonly referred to as AARRR. Say it with a swagger and cutlass in hand!

A – Activation – getting people into your game.

A – Activity – getting people to use your game.

R – Retention – getting people to come back to your game.

R – Referral – getting people to talk about your game.

R – Revenue – getting people to spend money in your game.

Each category provides a clear goal for your app. You want to encourage more actions in each category and you want to know why some actions are better than others. Setting goals for your core gameplay should focus on what is driving players to play my core loop more? 

After choosing a clear goal fro a category such as Activity, a common question might be “where do players spend most of their time?”.  Now, pause a second. WHY have you have settled at this question? Is it that you feel you already know the answer, “People spend most of their time fighting!” (feeding a bias) or is it “Fighting leads to higher conversions, people should fight more!” (improve a KPI). Try to always think of questions in a quantative mannor, where you’re not setting any bias but let the data speak. Perhaps “What actions do people spend most of their time doing?” can reveal some useful information. You could then decide on a set of metrics that work well in your game.

What’s driving your users to convert to payers?

Dave McClure’s Pirate Marketing talk provides 5 good mental anchor categories for most apps and free to play games to focus on. The nature of mobile gaming, in a market which is highly competitive and effectively commoditized, the Retention category becomes a strong focus for teams to improve. You may want to defer the Referral category until you have built out and got an app that has a stable and monetizing user base.  During soft launch you want to also focus on the FTUE / top of the funnel actions because this will be where most of your users will churn, there is a separate tab on the plan specifically to map out your FTUE. Remember conversion is king and even if you have a high churn rate of say 80% in day 1, if you have a high conversion rate of >5% then you still have a viable free to play product.

To further aid all tracking I suggest you always create an XP system and provide it as a dimension in core tracking events. 

XP is one of the best and simplest ways of segmenting your users.  XP is an ever increasing metric based only on actions in game. You should always try to include XP as a system in your game, even if you don’t surface it to the player, as it’s so useful for tracking.  Using XP levels as a bucket to separate users who have performed a similar number of actions allows you to detect points in game time where your designs start to fail.

The goal of all tracking is never to tell you what to build, it can only tell you how badly you built it as no feature is 100% effective.

Designing a Tracking Event

Let’s take the classic Base, Battle and Build game, Clash of Clans.  As a game designer you may want to know the answer to “How often do people win their battles?”

Firstly, we must establish that battling is the critical element in this question.  For now we only need to know just enough about the battle from the point of view of the defender and attacker. In Clash of Clans people search many enemies before committing to an attack so the first metric should be a count “enemiesScanned”. Next once an enemy is picked the battle is commences, to answer the question we don’t need to know anything about the battle itself such as which troops, how much gold the base contained or what Town Hall level they are, we simply need to know the win or loss rate.  Even though this extra information is interesting, stay focussed on your initial question for now.

There are 4 outcomes from an attack in Clash, either 1, 2 or 3, or a loss 0.  Therefore we need to record these outcomes as “attackOutcome” we may want to go further than this and also send over the “totalDamage” as an integer 0-100. This might give us some useful information in qualifying what type of win it was.

Here’s how it might look on the tracking document:

KPIs and custom KPIs

A developer should now be able to create an event on any platform and you should be able to quickly check how many battles result in a win (1-3 ) or loss (0). To add some more information to the result the enemyScan/Battle ratio could be important as more scans might have a big effect on BattleWin rate. If you feel satisfied that this has answered your initial question, you can now repeat the process to add more depth. Create a new line and add a new question and try to use as many of the same variables as you have already created.  You may want to know if battle win rate varies if the player is a Payer/Non-Payer or changes with XP Level?  Don’t go wild here or you will suffer from analysis paralysis and then the outcome won’t be useful. It’s always easier to add than to take away, start with the minimum.

To make life simple, games use common KPIs to measure themselves against other games.  Many KPIs come as standard and are useful benchmarks, DAU, ARPU, ARPDAU etc. Standard KPIs are a great way of comparing games with each other. However, if your game does not fit within normal ranges, you don’t always need to worry.  Your game might excel at some KPIs but not others and you should capitalize on that.  If all your KPIs are low, you will have a hard time building them back up and you might want to Kill your Project.

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Creating a KPI target will allow you to aim for something with your tracking. Coming up with the target requires some research (Adjust Mobile Measurement Benchmark Report) for your games genre as each can vary wildly.  We’ve also seen many benchmark metrics drop over the years as competition on the app store gets more fierce.

You can and should set your own custom KPIs.  These are measures that are specific and matter greatly to your game.  When creating a KPI try to think of it as a number that is critical to the well being of my game or users.  You can then start to measure and improve it by adding features that help or communicate these functions to your players.  Uncommon but generic Events/KPIs that I find helpful are:

• % Tutorial Complete – how many people get to tutorial complete event?
• Completed Views per DAU – (video ad monetisation)
• Min,Max,Median Rounds to complete – (level, world, track, mission)
• 1st gem purchase – what did a user buy after their first IAP?
• Playtime Tracking – count of total number of game minutes inside your app?
• Sources/Sinks – Which actions are providing most currency and most spend in app?

Every game is different but usually when you playtest or watch other people play your game you will notice points where people “get it” or moments of joy where every tester got really excited and wanted to play more or play further.  When coming up with a KPI talk with your team and be quite limiting initially.  Work hard to establish which custom KPI will help with the project in the next 2 weeks, not one that you think you’ll need in the distant future.

A Good Dashboard

Displaying your data in a simple format is the next step. There are a number of different dashboards you can use or create and many services that provide them.  It’s a choice of preference which analytics provider or dashboard you use as they don’t need to be from the same company.  The best companies try to own their own data so that they have flexibility in how it can be presented.  This is no small task and so only larger studios with strong revenue should consider building it themselves. Free services do provide good dashboards but are less flexible and you will loose or share direct control over your data.

A Good Dashboard

A Bad Dashboard

There are many way to represent data but I like to try to keep the following in mind.

1. Every piece of data needs a comparison period if possible.  Usually 7 Days or 30 Days will work best
2. Use colour to represent clear changes in figures when compared to that comparison figure
3. Display real numbers where possible to get a sense of the data.
4. Every chart needs a scale or an axis
5. Flexibility to flip charts to display data by major shared dimension, such as XP or Days since install.
6. Have separate dashboards that answer specific questions or topics in your app. Not one dashboard to rule them all.

Dashboards don’t need to be pretty, they need to be informative and they need to be good at revealing trends.  No matter what your data is telling you, the trend in your data is more important.  If you are increasing your 1D retention by 0.5% per week for the last 4 weeks, that’s much more valuable than a 1D retention being 32%.  A dashboard should clearly reveal the trend and allow you to filter or view these trends against time or app version.  Versioning is an important aspect of software development as it allows your to clearly know the code that people are viewing.  Any dashboard software that makes it easy for you to filter your views by version help you to see trends as your software develops.

Be aware of your Dashboards audience.  Some dashboards and KPIs are meant for marketing teams (top level, money orientated) some for your design team (progression, churn, feature usage) and some for your developers (errors, crashing, load times) if you’re creating a dashboard be sure to check that it’s the relevant information for the audience.

Summary

Everyone puts analytics in wrong the first time.  We all believe we know how our players are going to play, but once real users use the system things change.  

If you’ve not sat down and used the GQM approach before then give it a try.  There’s nothing worse that joining a project and realising that all of the data is garbage and that picking through and joining tables will be a tiring a painful process.  Starting with the smallest but most useful data points will allow you to stay razor focussed as you develop your game.  Using a tracking plan will also pay dividends in the long run as you can go back through and remember why you tried to track something in the first place.

Tracking needs to work for the project and to do that it needs to be easy and accessible for all.  I’m a great believer in sharing your data openly and freely with everyone on the team as it allows everyone to see how their work affects the product.  A great set of dashboard is the best way to do this.  The whole process of using data effectively is not a simple task in game development, but the best companies use it every day, and the greatest companies create a competitive advantage through it.  Start small, focus on events that matter and continue to make informed design decisions.

The post How to Plan and Track Events in Mobile Games appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation and do not work for any of the partners mentioned, this guide is meant as a reference to understand where value resides and what motivates the companies involved.

Making Money with Mobile Video Ads

Put simply, you use video ads to earn money and you earn money because advertisers pay to show videos to your players that drive installs of their app. As a rule of thumb the more videos you show the more money you will earn. With that in mind, your intention as a developer should be to increase the view count of videos shown to your users if you want to earn more money.

However, every view does not always equate to cash in the bank. The reason for this is that as an advertiser you want to pay for valuable actions. In the world of mobile, that ultimately means an install of an app. Developers only make money from the players who ultimately watch the full ad, click, then install the app. Every view should give you the best chance that a user will complete the video and are there more likely to install.

Your core KPI to maximising revenue is completed views per daily active user.

As you are unable to control a player’s behaviour after they have watched a video, you should focus on what you can control, the display and timing of the video. Within your games, your core KPI to maximising revenue is completed views per daily active user. Any number above 1 would be considered reasonable and over 4 would be considered very good! So set yourself the challenge of finding out what your current completed views per DAU is, then try to improve it.

Debunking the Myths of Mobile Video Ads

Most of the literature around video ads is unsurprisingly written by ad networks themselves. In each case, they have a mission to encourage the uptake of ads and are likely to involve selection bias to draw more positive conclusions.  On the flipside, game developers who believe that video ads break experiences, ruin gameplay and alienate users might want to change their opinion.

Myth 1 – Video Ads Decrease Retention

Yaniv Nizan gave an interesting report on match 3 games showed decreases in D1 retention of around 0.5% but increases in revenue of over 89% for android or 278% for iOS. In this case, the negligible loss in retention is worthwhile when compared to the revenue earned. In my experience I’ve not seen vast changes in retention due to video ads as fundamentally retention is driven by your ability to bring players back to the game and adverts don’t promote or dissuade players from starting up your app. When video ads are placed in areas where a user opts in to watch and a cooldown timer is used to limit viewing, the rewards and bonus associated with the video can even draw players to come back in order to watch more videos for the rewards!

Myth 2 – Video Ads Lower Engagement

Fuse Powered (a mediation company) analysed 6 million players to show that the 9% of users that watched a video ad were 6X more likely to make a purchase. Again this statistic may be misleading as the 9% of users who watched a video are very likely to be your most engaged users. Video views tend to aggregate at the top end of your player base as they value your in-game currency the highest. Rather than any video ad lowering engagement directly, the cohorts that watch on average remain more engaged in games in general. Don’t make the mistake that the ad itself, led to the engagement. Engagement is created by the desire for the valuable currency to spend in your game. Giving players an opportunity to progress with premium currency without buying an IAP is a strong incentive to engage and keep playing.

Don’t make the mistake that the ad itself, led to the engagement.

Myth 3 – Video Ads Decrease In-App Purchase Revenue

If you analyse the top grossing chart then many of the top grossing free games will not run rewarded video advertising. This might be considered a missed opportunity as video ads have been shown to improve ARPDAU, but in the case of a top grossing game losing highly valuable users to your competition is a bad long term strategy.

That said, there are many games that are top grossing and do have in-app-purchases and rewarded video. It’s a choice that you as a developer will need to gauge via your own data, typically you might look for:

• If your 90 day LTV of your players is under $1 then you should be looking to increase earnings via video ads.
• If you have a very large cohort (1 million+ MAU) of players that are actively engaged then you can increase earnings via video ads.
• If your overall conversion rate from Player → Payer is below 1% then video ads will allow you to leverage the 99% of non-payers.

If the opposite of these statements is true for your game then consider reading the monetisation articles on improving ARPU in the Free to Play Bible. If you have the ability to either A/B test or remote configs then a common technique is to stop showing video ads to your payers or to only switch on video ad monetisation after a period of non-paying days.

The Mobile Video Ads Value Chain

Advertisers (demand)

Within the industry, there are many different names for the clients on this side of the value chain: demand, publishers, brands, but I like to use “advertisers” as these are the people who pay for the adverts. Within the mobile video ad space, there are actually a relatively low number of advertisers that make up the majority of spend on the platforms. This is because running effective large campaigns can cost many $100,000+ per day. Overall the number of advertisers on mobile and their total spend continue to grow each year and show no sign of slowing.

It’s important to understand that an advertiser will only run a campaign (a video ad on an advertising network) if they are going to generate more value than the cost of the campaign. In simple terms, they usually need to equate an ad campaign to an LTV > CPI to be able to continue to run the ads.

One of the reasons rewarded video ads have become so popular is their ability to actually drive views. Every video watched is opt-in from the player who has chosen to spend the next 30 seconds to watch whatever is presented to them in order to receive a valuable reward. This works well for both gamers and advertisers as people want to watch the video at that point in time. This is why rewarded video has been one of the areas where advertisers have continued to spend big.

Nanigans

Video Ad Networks

Ad networks can get a bad rep… but they are good for one thing… they tend to throw lavish parties with lots of free drinks!

You may not like Ad guys, but they’re your best bet for driving revenue from high DAU – Low LTV games.

An ad network’s role is to talk to advertisers (i.e. Machine Zone) to run a campaign to promote apps across their network. Each campaign has different targeting (French/Dutch/German, Women, over 25) and objectives (Drive installs) and the network aims to optimise against achieving that objective. Every Ad Network has positives and negatives which can be hard to find out in advance. However, unlike the old days of print or tv advertising, a number of standard convention KPI’s that all networks provide. Comparing these numbers between networks is key to choosing which network is best for your game.

Ad networks can be private, where you receive content from a single source i.e Unity Ads or be a larger DSP (Demand Side Platforms) i.e Mobvista that aggregate lots of different ad campaigns from multiple sources.

Ad Networks tend to be very protective of their campaigns and run them exclusively on their own controlled SDKs. Demand side platforms usually allow the advertisers finer grain details of where they want to run their adverts, device, size, geo’s or even within specific apps (blacklist/whitelist). A reasonable list to check out for good ad networks from 2016 is on the Soomla site. If you’re just starting out and focussed on the US market then I would recommend Unity Ads, Applovin and AdColony as 3 networks to start with. Other smaller niche networks can work much better in other countries such as Yandex for the Russian Market. If your game starts to scale significantly, spend more time researching this field in particular.

How Do DSPs Work?

Demand Side Platforms (DSP’s) make it easier for an advertiser to buy across multiple, discrete inventory sources. The aggregate lots of different advertising channels into their single platform. DSP’s may strike a deal directly with a single large app developer for all of their views, or be working in partnership with an ad network to provide extra inventory at peak times. Due to their scale, often larger brands such as Nike or McDonlads would work with DSPs to reach the widest possible audience in the simplest way. With a single login and dashboard – running, reporting and optimising campaigns at large scales becomes much easier.

Facebook – The Biggest, Baddest Ad Network of Them All

The largest video ad network on mobile is Facebook. Unlike the other ad networks, Facebook handles all the infrastructure and tracking that is needed from the ad network to the store and even controls the display of the advertising in the apps themselves (Facebook / Instagram). This gives Facebook a huge advantage when attracting cash-rich advertisers to spend on their network as they know much more about the user and can present the user with a more relevant video. Facebook fiercely guards this data about their users and advertisers and platforms must abide by Facebook’s rules if they want to use the platform. This helps facebook maintain high-quality ads for its users.

The total mobile ad spend of 2016 is estimated to be around $40 billion and Facebook has around 1.15 billion mobile users in 2016. This huge user base is also very loyal with 66% of users logging in daily to Facebook; a metric similar to having a very high retaining game. Facebook has created its own consolidated value chain and has simplified the experience of using it from both an advertising and user perspective.

Facebook also has a lot of personal metadata about you that you willingly provide, your, age, sex and location are key pieces of data, but every like, interaction and comment can be used to guess what type of person you are. All this information allows facebook to show more relevant ads to you that you are more likely to click on and install. Inevitably this is why facebook can command higher prices for similar advertising space.

Mediation

Mediation companies (Fyber / Supersonic) and Supply Side platforms (SSP’s) we’re setup to help developers to optimise the delivery of advertising within their app. Their role is to switch seamlessly between ad networks in order to maximise your fill rate (the number of videos shown per request made for a video) and to show the highest paying network to your audience depending on their location or other pieces of data they have collected.

The real benefit to mediation is that as a developer you can remotely control and change your ad viewing, ad caps, network priorities and revenue reporting in one place. This benefit can save you many hours of laborious report checking and analysis to find out exactly which networks have been profitable for your game. There is no single best network or best setup: track, analyse and review on a weekly or monthly basis and adjust on what you see.

There is no single best network or best setup: track, analyse and review on a weekly or monthly basis

Mediation is usually free for developers. Although this noble endeavour of making a developer more money, most independent mediators have now been acquired or aggregated into ad networks themselves: Fyber by RNTS Media for $190 million and Supersonic by IronSource for an undisclosed fee. This allows a mediator to force a percentage of the views to their ad network of choice for which they might be reimbursed.

As a game developer adding a mediator requires a small amount of work, but it often provides you with a much more stable platform to track, analyse and review your ad networks. For that reason, I would always recommend either using a mediator or mediating SDKs yourself using a simple remote config to switch between ad network providers.

Game Developer (Supply)

You sit in the middle of the value chain. Creators of hit, fun experiences that encourage gamers to play and come back every day. Without a hit game, there would be very few people watching any of the videos.

A game developer’s primary goal is and should always be, make a fun experience that people want to come back and play again. Never lose sight of this when creating a game. Advertising slots around your experience and should not detract from it. Players are not against watching videos in order to earn valuable virtual currency. However, if there are intrusive or large un-skippable video at awkward periods within the app you are going to frustrate your user base. For videos to be effective and enjoyable you should always make them opt-in to view and allow a gamer to choose when and where to watch. This will increase engagement and video completes.

You have the audience, fundamentally that is where the value lies

You’re also the decision maker to which SDKs will be integrated. There is a lot of value to the ad companies if they can have their SDK in your game. If you have a very large audience (1 million+ DAU) then you may be able to negotiate better rates with partners. Put your business hat on and be shrewd! You have the audience, fundamentally that is where the value lies. The data of how your users play, who your users are and whether they have paid or not are all pieces of information that are highly lucrative to all parties across the value chain.

Attribution

Attribution sits after the video has been shown to the user. These companies are responsible for tracking the install and reporting back to the Networks who was responsible for driving this user to install the game. They act as a 3rd party intermediary on the whole video ad value chain. They are also one of the only parties in the value chain that are able to charge directly for their service. Usually, they make money by charging advertisers a cost per install tracked and so add a layer of cost to any ad campaign.

Fraud prevention is becoming more and more important as the rate of fraud is increasing with an estimation that almost 34% of all traffic is susceptible to fraud. Fraudulent traffic, such as fake installs or click-stuffing damages the whole ecosystem as it results in bad traffic. Advertisers see less value and so stop spending money on the network. Attribution attempts to pick up on these fraudulent users quickly and ban them from the ecosystem.

Third party intermediary ad networks rely on attribution to determine which ad network served the ad that led to the last click before install. This makes a big difference if you are a large publisher who is running tens if not hundreds of campaigns on multiple sources because you only want to pay once for the install. There are a large number of legal hoops that an attribution network jumps though to ensure trust for its clicks. As a smaller developer, you may not need to add in attribution if you are running a small ad campaign on a single source. Facebook and Google and many of the other video ad networks provide valid attribution for free if you advertise on their networks and you use their SDKs.

As mobile video spend grows, fraud becomes more lucrative and this part of the value chain will become more and more important for advertisers.

Stores (Apple and Google)

All installs occur via Apple and Google and so all clicks created by videos will end with a visit to their respective stores. As neither Apple nor Google gives much information about what users do on the stores it was the black box of the mobile world. Since 2015 both stores have started to give some data back to game developers in the form of store analytics, but they don’t provide this data to ad partners directly and so the post-click journey of a user is not visible and therefore hard to optimise for.

The stores add direct value to the whole chain as installs of games drive new users who may purchase in-app purchases or create brand loyalty and awareness by apps rising up the charts. The fact that there are only two major stores left in mobile, show the power they both wield and staying on the right side of both Apple and Google is a must for any mobile developer.

Conclusion – What should I do now?

With a clearer idea of the value chain in the mobile ad space, you should understand what value companies provide and who to talk to at different stages of development. Try to take some action in your current project to improve ad implementation:

Small Game (10k MAU) – If you are not using a mediation company, find one. Get 2-3 ad networks that you know and trust and add video ads to your shop for free gems. Focus on observing the number of views and as the game grows, get better at event tracking how your users interact with video. Use this to learn what a baseline is for video views in your game.

Mid Game (100k MAU) – Now it’s about increasing video views and increasing your revenue from each view. Work with your product team to think of more innovative placements to access the video, spend time making it fit within your theme, if you can A/B test ideas do this to increase completed views per DAU. In unison set out to talk to more varied ad networks who work in different Geos, Audiences or game types, you could start making more money in non-western countries etc. Try to get 4-5 networks in.

Large Game (1M MAU+) – You are likely to have a reasonable setup here and a person who is more dedicated on marketing or revenue generation. You may be working with 5-10 networks now, avoid SDK bloat. Can you work directly with a DSP? Can you cut a direct deal with an ad network? Can you approach an advertiser or a game company directly?

If video ads start to make over 50% of your revenue, can you create new features to increase views? Remember to continually compare networks revenue and tracking numbers. Work on a bi-weekly rotation to promote or demote networks within your app based on performance in particular GEOs.

In the future, I’ll be writing more article on video ads, in particular how to optimise in-game placement and get more completed views per DAU. Stay tuned!

The post Understanding the value chain for Mobile Video Ads appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Click Here to Download the Slides and watch here if you have GDC Vault Access

Summary & Takeaways:

• Soft Launches have changed significantly
  • Soft Launching in 2011 was much easier — especially because of the free traffic through facebook virality

• Soft Launches are more important than ever
  • Wooga learned this the hard way with Agent Alice. You have to validate your LTV & CPI before launching if you want to launch with an effective marketing budget.

• Soft Launches aren’t cheap
  • Futurama and Max Ammo’s costs were around $250,000 for 5 months of soft launch. This is user acquisition costs only.
  • Wooga Soft launches now typically take 4-6 months, this is mainly to give time for both Validation (ensure LTV > CPI) and Growth (attempt to improve metrics before launch).

• You can use Low CPI Countries, but only to test, not to validate
  • Don’t use the KPIs ( LTV, Retention ) in your Low CPI test markets to validate your game. Wooga has found that these KPIs change unpredictably from country to country. You can only predict a hit in your key markets (usually Sweden and Canada)

• Retention is more influenced by Marketing User Quality than Features
  • Don’t just look at your day-to-day or week-to-week retention to see the impact of your changes. It’s very easy to inflate or deflate your retention profile by adjusting your marketing mix (what % of your users come from which acquisition source).

• The only way to see real impact of your changes in Soft Launch is to A/B test
  • If you NEED to see the real impact of features you need to A/B test. But because Soft Launches have such low DAU, the time needed to get real results from this will drag your soft launch timeline out.

• Growth of Retention is SLOW
  • We at Wooga typically see an average growth of our retention numbers by 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points per month (1d/3d/7d). So if your retention numbers are far off your target, its going to take a long time to get them up.

• Large Retention Jumps are usually improved with: Funnel Optimization, Tutorials and Difficulty Adjustments
  • Large Retention jumps don’t typically happen, unless your game is fundamentally broken.
  • The largest bumps in retention that Wooga has seen have come from 3 things:
    • Funnel Optimization: looking for where users drop out
    • Tutorials: optimizing and paring down the tutorial
    • Difficulty Adjustments: looking for frustrations and smoothening progression

• Growth of Monetization can be done
  • We at Wooga have seen that monetization can grow, especially during post-launch.
  • So if you’re LTV CPI equation is not working only because of monetization, you can still grow monetization during post-launch

Overall:
Soft Launches will not save your game.

If you don’t see strong metrics during Soft Launch, then don’t expect the Soft Launch to give you the clear learnings of how to fix and grow your game to be a hit. Costs are high, Learnings are difficult, and Growth is slow.

The post How to Soft Launch (GDC 2016) appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer