1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

foreign [Music] to the 1500 slot machines walk into a bar talk adventures in quantity over quality a couple notes before we get started please silence your phones also you may have heard that there is a event given Next Door by Microsoft with some servers that need some extreme cooling so it's extremely cold in here that's untrue we told them to turn the heat way down because the Heat's going to get way up in this talk am I right [Applause] yes um so my name is Alex Schwartz and I founded and ran Alchemy Labs uh the folks behind mobile games smuggle truck uh Jack Lumber discourse we also made job simulator and Rick and Morty VR uh we were acquired by Google a little over a year ago and I left recently to to found an unannounced new venture and I

am zaiba I run pop cannibal makers of such gems as adult swims girls like robots the igf nominated LG for a dead world and boat building crowdfunding success make sale now in Early Access so let me first start off by you may have read the description you may have come to this talk thinking what's going on here let me tell you what we did uh in 2013 as a joke slash experiment the two of us built a robot that builds slot machine games a lot of slot machine games and this robot went on its journey to automate the process of creating re-skinning theming and launching those slot machines on the Android Google Play Store oh we eventually created 1500 slot machines um way beyond our expectations we received over a million installs of these slot machines and made actual money so uh let's talk about this

so we are going to tell our tale today in four parts first Alex is going to describe the seed of our discontent which blossomed into this Enterprise second you will ride with us as we roll This snowball downhill collecting mass and speed until third we realize this may not be a joke and finally we will enrich your lives with conclusions that can only be arrived at by people who have breathed the rarified air from Heights such as we have achieved so uh let's go back to 2013. just a quick heads up um if you're watching the slides during the talk at the bottom in the footer every once in a while we'll have actual slot machines that were created and released and downloaded with real stats displayed next to them so keep an eye out for those gems like 3D Puffin slots with 42 000 downloads so 2013. um here's a picture of zybun myself just two indie game developers with whole

cans and we're working together in a co-working space making video games and at the time we had actually just launched premium mobile titles and we're kind of coming across subpar sales and uh discontent with the whole Market 2013 was a different time um and we felt like we were doing everything right based on what we knew about the mobile market at that time everything within our power to succeed so by that I mean we're hitting uh all these kind of like we're doing it right check boxes on mobile we're working with big brand name Publishers which was Sega adults and games uh we were winning Awards we were getting good reviews and none of that seemed to actually make a difference in um you know making our money back and being able to make enough money to make the next game so at this point we're pretty much concluding that the mobile space is dying in at least for premium games and we weren't feeling too happy about

that and sharing that unhappiness with our other Indie friends and seeing that you know hey this is not really a great market and we were looking through the App Store and realizing how kind of scummy and gross some parts of it can really be and there's clones everywhere there's garbage reskins low effort shovelware and um you know Casino phone bill I have no idea like what is this gummy bear card game I have no idea jackpots all around and so we thought you know oh this garbage how do we how do we do better how do we do gross better how do we hit rock bottom and find that spot so uh Global game Jam was coming up and it was at MIT and we're feeling so burnt out on mobile and we just thought you know let's just build something really really out there so I did most of the tech on this project I'll admit to that

um so at this point uh we want to make a terrible game I didn't know if I was capable of that but I was going to try really hard then we need to clone it over and over so this involves like pictures and sounds and assets and that just sounds exhausting and like how even do slot machines work nah let's not bother with any of that sorry there we go we just bought one off the asset store fifteen dollars so um that's right our whole talk our whole Enterprise is all based on a 15 game that we did not even make ourselves it was just this generic machine that you pull the handle you get noises and spinny things and coins sometimes I don't know I don't actually really know much about all these slot machines work um just don't judge us too harshly though because we did put in effort to make it our own we

stuck advertising on it thank you you're welcome um playhaven adds to be specific and Alex will tell you later how they eventually felt about that so this is going great but we only have one game and I needed infinite games which required further and deeper customization so we swapped the name curling slots becomes cantaloupe slots curling Stone becomes a cantaloupe are you feeling that yet this is okay wait there's more um so we also added in an about blurb for every slot it's uh it's it's this flavor text it just really brings the feel of the theme to you in this example here we have hair slots uh which did you know here is a protein filament these are practically educational games at this point and the pizza resistance every slot gets a custom theme song so we use

Text-to-Speech for the vocals and then we definitely match that in with our fat beats are you ready for this let's do it cantaloupe [Music] [Applause] oh so then we just swap those assets about a thousand times by hand of course not we wrote a Unity editor script that would just take one word and then it would use Google to download the text-to-speech for a hot track it would go to Wikipedia to pull in a blurb for the about page sometimes we'd end up with a disambiguation page because it's like GDC also means general Dental counsel and other stuff I didn't really care because sacrifices to equality weren't just made they were sought after uh we use Google's image search API to find the images

until we hit a rate limit we use Bing's image API to find some images thank you ping so at this point we can just type themes into unity and it pulls in all these images it makes the app and this is amazing but that does not cover publishing these in the Google Play Store the Google Play Store it wants screenshots it wants as these check boxes and blurbs and more screenshots and drop downs and Google you are asking too much of me are you trying to ruin my entire day ah what privacy policy yeah um so the screenshots and the icons were not a real problem we just uh go into Unity we move the camera around we throw up a sassy frame bam that's quality uh but for the actual Android developer

page enter selenium so selenium is this super potent web automation tool that lets you record customize and play back these web browser interactions so we connected that into our Unity editors group script and we got it to open up Chrome login is our Google account create a new Android app uh fill in all these text boxes uh screenshots blurbs uh more nasty nasty check boxes upload the APK and it's live so at this point we have reduced the gap between conceiving of a game and having it live in the marketplace to typing in one word and pressing enter so you might be wondering what now what foreign well uh some stats for you uh first two

months we launched 126 games had 32 000 downloads um some some old classics such as Richard the third slots um 71 downloads in the US great um we've got the Harlem Shake slots 2013 remember it was cool then um sure it was so you know this thing's chugging along we launched some games we had our fun so we did what any self-respecting game developers did is we walked away and forgot about it um and we actually came back many months later after the holidays uh a lot of times app stores have kind of a bump during the holidays we're like I wonder what I wonder what happened um and we saw that downloads went way up but then we checked our playhaven ad Network back end and uh you know we were surprised as you

um we first saw that in January and throughout the holidays we were making 210 a day on ads um not only that we saw that the ecpm for those interstitial ads was at 59 uh and so I you know I think we promptly Googled what is it ecpm and is that's way too high um we also saw and I'm you know I'm no scientist but 27 click through on the ad there's no way that humans click on ads anywhere above somewhere around one percent so we needed to step back and think what have we done what's Happening Here what the [ __ ] is going on and after thinking for a bit we have to kind of step back and think about the basics what are video games and why are we showing why do people show ads in games so the typical mobile model for ads which I'll dub the retention model is as I see

it you make something of a quality game for the intention of having human beings have fun in said game so that they will stay inside of the app and if they're playing for longer you could show them more ads right this is in one game now what if you took this model and you turned it completely on its head ladies and gentlemen I present to you the signal to noise anti-retention model you have an obscenely low quality game thousands of them in fact that are found via hyper-specific keyword searches if you really love unicorns we've got like nine slots for you it's great then you get the game and you're instantly bored disappointed dismayed uh disgusted and then bam we show you an ad but not just any AD a perfect ad

this ad looks so damn good the idea the idea that a real game a real game of quality is just Out Of Reach that with a single click you could be onto greener pastures the contrast and quality between where you are in this garbage pile and where you could be is so high that of course you click you click to escape you click for a better future foreign and maybe that's why our games are making a lot of money I don't know so it's just a theory um uh so clearly you know chugging along thanks Shutterstock um the next thing is well clearly we have to put more time into this obviously so next step gotta incorporate signal to noise LLC you're welcome we are the noise uh

and uh yeah okay so technically what we had was good but my life was not yet all just champagne and Three Musketeers bars I had two major problems one we had to sit there and type in theme after theme wait for the process type in another theme imagine sitting at a computer for up to 20 minutes a day just so you could publish a half a dozen games no second problem we discovered Google had a Max 15 app a day upload limit I mean come on it's like they're not even trying to support our workflow it's time to re-architect so I wrote a web service and a website middleman we call it the goose Golden Goose um and it's a PHP MySQL server uh with this HTML front end and it takes keywords and then it lets me pick from several of Bing's finest images and I can tweak the blurb if I'm feeling artsy and it lets us build up a long queue we can just pile a hundred different ideas

into this most importantly I stole unity's documentation style sheets for this site so at a distance my activities looked very legit to my office mates please note um there's only one language so uh we put these hundreds of apps uh into the goose and then back in unity it doesn't have to talk to all these crazy different apis it just talks to the goose it says hey Goose give me an egg which describes uh describes one of these apps and then it builds its 15 the day and now it publishes it and we can now do this from a web browser anywhere in the world we are just typing in our ideas and willing these slots into the world um but what I don't like is that I have to leave a Unity license open in a machine running that's capable of building all these and it ties up my license and I have other side hustles that I need to be getting on with and I'm not trying to break any terms of service so the next idea is how do we

free up the uni license we realize we only need Unity to build these slots not to publish them so we have the website where we just throw 100 ideas in we go to Unity and then we just build hundreds of slot machines all at the same time but instead of publishing them we get shove them back up into the goose and moving on to the next step we built a standalone game that does the publishing it says hey Goose do you have anything needs published it opens a chrome does its thing and publish so now any cheap computer can be a publishing terminal and so you can think of this very much like steady at home there's this Central repository of important work that any computer can now process to advance the state of mankind what you're explicitly seeing here is that every time Marcus Phoenix from Gears of War gets hit in the head by an image from Bing a slot machine is Born Into the world

so with this we could keep a stream of 15 games a day being published as long as we had this queue of them ready to go in a garbage laptop waiting to do its bit on a good day we did absolutely nothing so you might be wondering what uh what resulted of this next adventure 10 people still playing Lobster slots I don't know why um one year in we had launched 750 games with over 200 000 downloads across those games so a couple quick stats uh we've got bowling slots that's simple simple bowling game with 8 000 downloads we've got dolphin slots which is killing it 17 000 downloads just for Dolphin slots it's very American Malaysia you know um and we've got now hundreds of apps

on the store we're bound to get some takedowns or arbitrary takedowns from Google right uh first you know we saw apparently side boob is no longer okay uh which that image alone if I were to show it to you with no other context no one would know that that is that's side boob once you add the text Maybe we're starting to get bug reports from users in emails so that means that someone's so engaged and so upset about their diaper slots having having crashed that they opened up you know Gmail screenshot it sent it to us and had a whole whole thing about it um we're getting user reviews back these are actual user reviews I swear to you um why are people enjoying any of this I don't understand um okay some fair fair content

um this person really wants to rate it lower than one star that's fine but this person really loves dolphins and they were very satisfied this person also loves dolphins and uh you know what I think we served them well so at this point the robots arrived uh and this is in the form of automated email Outreach so let me clarify our automated b2c casino app company is now starting to attract automated B2B Outreach so here's a good screenshot uh app eggs was very interested in promoting 3D cabbage slots I could see why this is this Baby's headed straight for the top but we're also getting a couple other pieces of Outreach from that company um and you know we both run actual companies and we get a lot of spam and our [ __ ] detectors really high and a lot of you could tell like hey they're not actually talking to

me that's just a robot that said this and when I get those at the real company that I run I feel like man I don't deserve getting all this spam but here I kind of feel like we deserved absolutely deserve getting all this spam and you know that's fine okay so third push already on a good day we are doing nothing um but we still have to occasionally shovel keywords back into the goose so it's time to optimize question is what makes great garbage why are dolphin slots Hot and Hot Tamales not um well when we started making these slot machines we were just kind of randomly coming up with these themes willy-nilly it's kind of like Kaiser so say we're looking around the room we're making microphone slots handsome co-presenter slots beautiful audience slots whatever we want we're just throwing them out there but it occurs to us that most people are probably getting

to our apps by searching for something they actually wanted and just stumbling over us instead so how can we figure out what it is they're searching for so they are sidetracked by us more often well we couldn't find uh any actual uh search lists for the App Store but there does exist Google Trends which is just a global list of what people are searching for on Google so here's a shot of Google Trends last week the stuff in red are the sort of the problematic things it's a bit of a copyright landmine so um once you filter out all the celebrities and sex offenders and litigious institutions what you're left with are mostly current events and often they're actually very weird current events which of course we used um this led to an early favorite of ours uh deer antler spray slots so this was at the time there was some sort of NFL doping Scandal where people

were uh spraying themselves with deer antler derivatives I don't I I don't know I'm not a reporter I don't have a responsibility to actually carry this story to you I just made the slot machine and so this one has a particular spot in our hearts um but surprisingly it actually failed to Garner an audience so if Google Trends isn't working for us there's not enough of them and people aren't into it um what can we do uh to to automate this more uh um how can we think less word lists so I downloaded several large lists of words and you may also have noticed that we have a bit of a formula to our slot so let me give you the tour of that first 3D because 3D is hot it's the future also it's really good for the alphabetical optimization it's right there on the top of your phone and then an adjective any old adjective will do I have a very long list of them and they're not all great and after that

put in a subject every country got a slot machine and Slots note it is because with this audience there are some questions and free so you know an incredible value this is uh then we made a button in the goose where I could just click uh try again over and over and it would just iterate through this shuffle them together go through the apis and stuff and this is how we um came up with genius such as uh Viceroy butterfly and tremendous face paint slots I did love that one which culminated in the creation of a masterpiece by far my favorite slot um maybe the the greatest slot of Our Generation uh something so specific that one pure soul out there might see it and think wow they really know me they know my needs and they know my generation and I present to you 3D inexperienced great horned owl Slots free

I mean I was training at Great Hornell recently and I had some difficulty with their owl related drills and I thought oh man I should go to the slot for Comfort but yeah maybe it is slightly too specific or too targeted uh so at this point we thought we need a professional we need to bring on a contractor who can help us decipher all this data and optimize yeah let's do it if you recall from our presentation uh description on GDC we said that we involved in MIT statistician I regret to inform you that we forgot what uh University they were from and that was incorrect um they were actually a Harvard psychology PhD uh I regret that small error so um she came back to us with some real scientific looking data uh and I won't bore you with the statistics uh but I will call out one of my favorite Parts in the middle which was that um in the spirit of automatic automation she employed Amazon Mechanical Turk to do

all the mundane tagging and sorting of the slots which for those who are not familiar Mechanical Turk is a form of human beings who complete tasks that robots cannot yet get to the level of automating which is just perfect so our consultant on our own without you know inquiring with us outsourced monotonous work to essentially a human robot farm so that we could better automate creating robots foreign anyway uh the final slide of the presentation um was the most important one what are the takeaways what have we learned about all this data um we learned that sex is great people hate other people and they hate objects but they love dogs and specifically dogs um so you're welcome everyone this is the hot juicy data that you could use in your games moving forward um so yeah we're giving it away for free which is incredible um we also after seeing all this are

wondering about all the inputs and there's so many things we could test against one thought was what if we did a side experiment to see and try to answer the question does quality actually play a role in all of this um so we thought let's just rewrite the entire slot machine from scratch and make a really good slot machine and see how it compares to our really bad slot machine but we clearly were not incentivized to do that so um we used some of the money that was coming in to Outsource the entire process to Romania and you know what we reached out and find a fine Romanian developer who uh well we reached out to him under a pseudonym Ron and paid them hourly to mock up art design program a new slot machine template from scratch you could see this looks very complicated I have no idea what it does no idea uh apparently you can bet on 15 separate lines and there's all these kinds of knobs and and buttons that people who play slot machines like so we did that

and it got built and it's beautiful and it had audio and all these things and we never ended up launching it because we were too busy creating the the low quality ones but I regret that part of the story um so at this point we uh have lots of questions and opportunities um what to do next um and what do you do at your company when you need to make high level decisions company retreat so uh just like our original slot machine we did not set up this Retreat ourselves we used somebody else's [ __ ] uh it was time coincidentally for the annual Indie cabin so every year for almost a decade East Coast Indies will be pulling about 10 to 20 game developers in a cabin in Vermont or New Hampshire and we work and play for a week um so this particular cabin we show up we have this growing awareness that we've kind of been torching our friends with our hilarious slot stories and how easy it is to make money for years now so um we came with a pile of booze sort of as a bribe or apology to forgive our

exuberance um and as a stunning Counterpoint to demonstrate our inability to stop celebrating ourselves we showed up wearing deer antler spray t-shirts by the way we created one extra and this is the last and final shirt that exists in the world for deer antler spray slots uh it's a medium raise your hand if you would like it and we will throw it directly into that pile of hand somewhere [Laughter] [Applause] oh yeah we had the picture over there that's it for all you who didn't get one this is what you're missing out on it's really comfy too all right so uh at this point we are literally drunk on our own power here uh it was excellent I regret nothing but

this is when a lot of the negatives and the opportunity costs start to come into Focus for us so let me paint a picture of this pivotal point so this cabin we've rented is actually an off-season Sex Therapy Retreat that was last rented by strong and vigorous people so Alex and I are in a room with beautiful tapestries of barely abstracted genitalia and a shattered bed and we are there this is you know it's where you hold your business meetings we are there with a friend who is a perennial advisor and investor in the Indie sphere and he's telling us this really isn't a joke looking at your growth curves and what's happening and if you actually paid more serious attention to this you could pull in real investors you could maybe sell your company sell your data or just go further yourselves and maybe make piles of money but you'd have to take it seriously um so we're looking down that road and the question is are the people down that road still us would this be our first steps to Wild success as a business

person or is it going to convince us to cross lines we maybe didn't want to cross and we become super villains uh should we really go all in on this crap Factory so this is the point at which a number of mounting issues and back-to-back kind of surprise issues arose um all adding to the overall friction of this Enterprise that we're trying to do on the side so keep in mind uh first off this is several hundred hours of work so far uh the entire Enterprise is a fragile scaffolding with so many points of failure uh it's incredible and hard to even explain so the whole process end to end relied on so many external Services over a dozen all remaining functional every day for this to keep going the servers databases text-to-speech the developer back end remaining consistent Bing Wikipedia Unity updates ad Network stuff in fact

if a new language or country is added to Google Play or a checkbox gets moved 10 pixels to the right the entire thing falls apart uh and you know that's not to mention when Unity updates and you need to fix things and Android SDK updates that are required for the play store or hosting issues that come up and so in addition to all of that pain there's now competing interests in our lives as developers doing real things uh outside of the side hustle uh VR is just beginning to take off as the Oculus dk1 Kickstarter happened and Alchemy was jumping on that and focusing there LG was getting some great attention I believe my sensitive poetry writing game is in the experimental gameplay Workshop I'm an artist and right around this time this is all all happening very very quickly uh after the advisor meeting is we're contacted by our ad provider play Haven and they said hey can we have a meeting um and uh we were like why are we so nervous about this did it it's because we did something wrong did we do

something wrong we tried not to and so uh we had this call and I'll describe it to you they said um we're seeing some fairly erratic data coming from your side of the world uh you did not break any terms of service it would be very clear we did not break any terms of service you're not doing anything wrong per se you're just inconvenient to us foreign and uh you know they said we're not interested in continuing to serve ads in your game games plural uh and also by the way you have the worst users somehow no one who comes from your apps wants to spend any money and uh you know I think there's another way to think about that which is you're welcome for segmenting your users so uh finally and you should be able to capitalize off of that but you know what fine we're off to chart boost immediately uh no worries and you know what that relationship turned out quite well we even received this little digital postcard from them after a few

months so how sweet thanks for our boost um at the same time Google anyone who's a Google developer knows that you just get emails about the store and what's changing and new new terms of service updates and they send out these periodic uh emails and they seem to start kind of mentioning some common topics which are about repetitious apps and uh duplicate content and then specifically unique functionality being maintained within uh the ecosystem and so it sounds increasingly like they're talking directly to us um and we're wondering you know okay we need to actually make that decision now as like where are we going what are we doing uh so you might be wondering what happened next uh this thing is making real money some uh there's some obvious issues to deal with but they're not insurmountable we could fix them it requires serious

dedication pulling back from the main things that we're doing uh so what did we do we walked away again that was that was our big decision yes lazily stopped touching the entire thing inaction was absolutely the decision that we took and I think the weight and the responsibility of all the things that we could not they still could not automate away from ourselves was what ultimately drove us from not wanting to continue don't get us wrong uh don't get me wrong we left the keys in the car in the car running uh you know we didn't we didn't shut it down we just let it die slowly over many years uh so you know we watched the Empire slowly crumble um and just focus on making real video games but the Enterprise lasted way longer than we thought it would so when you log into Google Play now it alerts you at the top very hopefully that uh hey one of your apps needs attention that is the understatement of the century uh there it is a ghost town

hundreds of apps all removed that goes down of its previous Grandeur you know uh of course installs dwindled over time down to zero but it lasted years past the mission it was constructed for much like some other proud robots out there and uh you know I think it's worth going over a couple fun facts um about the ashes of our Empire first the Middle East loves puffins [Laughter] full uh the U.S loves Obama 62 times more than Malaysia and India is super into sexy librarian slots we see you India um and so here we are present day and I think it's worth reflecting on the

Journey about what we built why we built it and how it changed the world so clearly you're thinking well what's the what's the legality of all this I will answer that we're always within the legal lines to our knowledge our Auto generation algorithm did occasionally stumble upon some trademarks sure if we ever got a takedown uh from Google we would of course comply for example the time that we stumbled upon someone who had a very aggressive trademark for Bible slots you know we received the takedown of course we removed it we want to let Bible slots person continue on their way they work hard for that yeah um so if it's legal sure but is it ethical zaiba so first question did we harm players well we never took their money that was a big line for us uh it's it's gambling uh some people have problems with that I'm not really educated in that area and I don't want to be involved in these problems we only took money from ad

providers and I don't feel bad about that and in fact I think that puts us A Cut Above a level a lot of other slot machines and we're actually creating a safer place for players to come and enjoy this kind of entertainment similarly we never took anybody's data have you ever seen an app as low quality as ours and felt safe that it's not stealing your data we were a real Cut Above in uh being a steward of our players uh money and and privacy um of course you saw we had quite a few good reviews uh not all but some people we were happy with this we were bringing joy into the world and as a tangent if you remember that is actually against our business model if we really wanted to to go for this we would have brought more disgust into the world but The Virtuous beings we are could not bring ourselves to do that and we couldn't help but make people happy

did we harm game developers I love you all I wouldn't want to do that to you so we had the same tools as everybody else we didn't have some secret back end we just used them a little differently possibly more aggressively than the rest of you but we generally played by the same rules um you know we drove the speed of traffic if you look particularly at the Android store it is a pile of unlicensed Star Wars things and and weird clones of your games uh we did none of that and as Alex alluded to earlier you know when playhaven dropped us because they didn't like our users come out of there what we had done is we had taken chaos and created order we had had filtered uh filtered people through into a group and if they couldn't figure out how to use that knowledge we presented them that's their loss but I say we made this ecosystem better by doing that did we harm platform holders um we

never knowingly broke the terms of service we didn't argue any of the takedowns I will still contend that tasteful side boob slots deserves its Shining Moment In The Sun but I'm not going to engage in that email thread with anybody at Google they don't have to worry about that um and I think we exposed some insufficiencies gently often when uh you know terms of service have to change it's because some sort of catastrophe happens somebody really gamed something did something bad there was a leak but we were I think a really gentle partner in this period of discovery about what they did and did not want on the store kind of like if you have like a rash on your arm a doctor May draw a line around it just so you can see if it's growing outside of that line or not um but we were respectful of that line we were like a very manageable rash that just it helps to remind you that you should wash your arms more often here's a shot of what our actual impact looked like on the store on an average

day when we were operating roughly at capacity so here we are we're all the way down on like page six of specifically top new free casino everything outlined in red is ours and yeah if you go down to seven eight nine ten they're probably very similar there's a lot of us there but we're not right at the top and I mean imagine uh we were not on this page at all uh number one fan marijuana light might have been half a page higher and I hope they can forgive us but I don't think we did too much damage there so what I'm really getting at is every hour we spent on this was an hour we didn't spend competing with the rest of you for a feature on Android or Apple or steam we didn't spend our Runway funding on a four-year passion project that nobody but us wants underpaying contractors and promising rev share and filling every subreddit and Twitter thread with our gifts and elbowing to Get Cozy with platform holders we just quietly put out crap

if if you spend four years making a game that nobody wants and I spend four seconds who squandered more of their precious life who used more of the world's resources and who uh took everybody's attention in time we are the good guys you all are animals yeah okay so um that last bit was half disingenuous and we can argue about that later I don't really believe all that though I'm afraid some of it is true so let me leave you with a bit more of a sincere lesson which is that this whole project was an itch that felt so good to scratch we conceived of this improbable idea and we used our talents to make it come true and we received rewards and we filmed our noses at the mobile market of 2013 that broke our

hearts we got to share these Joys with dozens of our friends and it culminated in this overblown spectacle right here and the itches scratched and now we are done we have not put out a new slot machine in well over a year they are all gone from the store because all that is left would be maintaining this machinery and turning the crank to poop out more slot machines and you probably realize by now I do not care about slot machines so we've moved on and if there's a business lesson in that I would say scratch that crazy itch and you know try try your dream idea there um but be prepared to walk away even if it is successful because it may just be the attempt that made you happy and not the result well said zeiba uh I think it's worth going over some final stats to close this out how many downloads did you actually receive in total it was 1.6 million downloads of slot

games over the course of the history of the company what was the number one slot I'm sure everyone wants to know what was it 3D sexy skin Slots free 200 000 downloads and uh how much money did you guys make over the course of all this about 50 Grand off of ads that is what happened uh of course it is worth saying uh oh yeah sorry click through 50. we did it what is the weirdest stat uh that you came up with the sexy skin slots which is number one huge in Iran we see you Iran you know I think we need something special to play us out so here we go thanks for attending the GDC talk

so uh we would love to take questions now but um before that just one more thing okay so I lied a bit we have revived enough of the Machinery just for today and today only that if you email slots at signalto noiseapps.com with your idea in the subject line it will reply to you with a custom slot machine today only you get a slot you get a slot Etc thank you very much please fill out your uh surveys and don't say we never gave you anything questions [Applause] hi I'm Simon rake Shaw I work at a company that makes real actual slot machines in casinos

in Las Vegas um for us it costs literally tens of thousands of dollars to get a new game approved so is there any takeaway that I could get from this so the question is uh I'm doing this for real and it's expensive like theoretically let's say the App Store had a publishing cost how you know would this work I mean how much work are you doing can you do less we still spend a lot less time than like actual games it's still like a couple of months I'm surprised these are all actual games I mean if I don't know what's going into your your budget to do all that but if you just try and try harder to make worse things you'll have some metrics to see if uh which which path is going to lead you to victory

okay metrics thanks yeah and remember it's dogs and sex and not people objects hi I'm Anthony I'm also a slot game developer um did not expect this talk to be what it was actually about uh have either of you considered a career in comedy slots pays better [Laughter] I have nothing to add hey there uh oh you um my name is Daniel I'm a business consultant and on Monday I spent my day watching mostly mobile talks and they were quite depressing the way that people are monetizing games and I gotta say that this is way better than all of that stuff thank you I think the the depression cycle is like a 360 Loop and if you go too far it becomes yeah it's like you know one becomes the other and I'm wondering with kind of somewhere the trends that you're

seeing in the mobile market and automation through artificial intelligence do you see this becoming a growing problem with game developers in the market this type of thing repeat the question do we see what we're doing in automation becoming a growing problem in the mobile market yeah uh I've been so far removed from the mobile market for for many years because personally as someone who focuses on weird new innovation in experimental hardware and and new markets mobile is a more mature Market where you need user acquisition and you need um you need much bigger budgets so it's not really well suited for me will machine learning change the entire ecosystem of mobile I think it will for targeted user acquisition I think that will get more and more honed but you're still relying on an ecosystem of quality so I don't know that

machine learning is going to help with the creation of higher quality art if they're a way to optimize for that that would be very interesting but it seems very far removed from the end goal of getting it onto mobile and making money through ads off of that art so I don't see a I mean spam spam will get more until it gets better yeah we're this is all just terrifying yeah and it's not just mobile it's everywhere everything is going to be susceptible to um bold new methods of creating things in volume and it's we're just on a wave of that it's going to happen let's all enjoy that well I think that leads to a curation just becoming more and more important right every app ecosystem and so the whole free wild west of like well whatever gets downloads is going to be the top thing that you open and see I think maybe we're starting to realize that that's not the greatest method of

creating a good user experience for for players uh so more curation uh which is not where a lot of the markets are going anyway I mean it's not what the platform voters are doing that's not what platforms are doing so maybe automated curation [Laughter] maybe and then yeah you subscribe to things and they'll just make automated purchase for you like humble monthly that's just them maybe they have algorithms deciding what's in there and you've just done their money and it's automating the purchasing it's automating the advertising it's automating within the stores we don't have to do anything anymore and we're great consumers we don't even have to play the things that we automatically bought it's a that's yeah but it's actually interesting you mentioned automating curation because another side project they did over a weekend a few years ago was uh when steam curator program was announced built a website called steam curator curator so you can curate which curators you want to look at so I think we could there's a couple levels deeper that we could go there and I think that's a ripe opportunity oh thanks guys this was a great way to start my day

okay so I'm a I'm a huge slots fan um but are you drunk right now maybe um no I was going to ask uh both of you if you could speak to apart from all of this related to mobile if you have a mobile game in the last year that has really stood out to you just to give a moment of curation oh well check my phone uh polytopia is incredible that's what it's called right polytopia yeah no one no one went woo am I the only one who likes polytopia is that is that a thing did I make that game up did I imagine this in a dream it's like a little sieve like game it's incredible go play it a real recommendation uh I would say anything that Zach Gage makes I've been playing pocket pool on my phone for for months now it's absolutely incredible yes Cinco power is that's a good one

yeah uh anyways how many times did uh Google break your automation for um for publishing well one too many at least how many the question was how many times did Google break our automation um repeatedly because uh I mean it's probably in the uh somewhere in the low double digits I would say we had to go and fix it because things like a new country comes in or a country would change its policy about gambling so we actually had to be aware uh of like you know um Korea's no longer allowing gambling apps um we had to go in and add a privacy policy to everything and then we had to actually there were changes where we would have to actually add a privacy policy link to every app so we wrote the infrastructure for updating every app not publishing which is a whole different set of apis and once if you update to just add the app at all they're going to require you to catch up to all the not required updates before so they introduced new screenshot sizes which was fine until you actually updated your app now you have to also do new screenshots I had to

find these images from it's it was a hot mess there was actually a lot more weird moving bits than we talked about because this isn't a tech talk so uh I feel like you've found this Gem of the anti-retention model do you ever do you ever feel like there's some new way that you've wanted to wield it in the future or in or any ideas that in the past that you've had what more can be done with the anti-retention model yeah but that's the question uh I mean like escapism as a business model I think it's travel agencies but no uh what do we I feel like Microsoft's doing that right now with the refrigeration and chasing people out of the room somehow if they can benefit from that you know if we can apply that to other spheres of our life like talks and somehow profit from scaring people away from things we'll keep an eye on that yeah I don't know that anti-retention scales across multiple people trying to do it I haven't thought about that is that a one one takes all type of model I think we have a lot to think about as

a society and as a group here we're gonna need another Retreat yeah uh yeah it seems like the only way you could make this more legitimate is to add a blockchain I had like a slide that came after this that says what about blockchain question mark and then I deleted it but I would have shown it right then uh so I would posit that anti-retention is actually just curation because you're sending people somewhere well hopefully after the curation process and then you get the thing you enjoy it oh fair enough um so I had a real I had a real question as well uh did you actually like do any Source control for these things you were generating or was it sort of a once-off and they're all gone or is there a GitHub with these things somewhere is there the question is is there uh a pile of slot machines somewhere

yes it's a big pile I managed to get uh I don't have dreamhosters regretting their unlimited space offer right now on the hosting and a lot of slot machines thanks guys this was extraordinarily entertaining um just a quick thing I um I don't know if there are people from Google Play in this room and or watching this on the GDC Vault later in the future but I hope there are and on the off chance that there are what would you tell them they should do to fix this [ __ ] laughs Alex what's your what is your message to Google do you know anybody is Google as an ex-googler okay uh there was a point in here that I don't think was drilled home as hard as it could have been which was you know you got into our uh rashes and the the idea was if people are sneaking by with garbage the thing that we did was to put a huge

neon sign with an arrow pointing at ourselves and the garbage next to us Illuminating the entire underbelly of dark weird App Store [ __ ] and so the idea that if you do it at scale clearly they're going to notice and clearly they're going to change the terms of service slowly to ice you out uh you know hopefully others went down with us in the wake of that like we provided the perfect targeted spot to drop the missile uh so hopefully hopefully that you know that helped get rid of duplicate apps that were also in the area but I mean that's that's still like a billion dollar question is in an open market how do you how do you prevent bad things and actually I think that's the wrong question it's like the bad things should be there but they should just be so invisible that it has no consequence to someone who took their phone out opened Google Play and then saw things of value

that were great and to me that is curation yeah but curation like the argument that everyone makes is we're a group of semi-homogenous people in one part of the world how could we be the taste makers for the entirety of all cultures and all people of all backgrounds we can't just say these are the best things because we believe that we have to like figure out what is best to you individually in this targeted curation and like somehow I think it revolves around curation but it revolves around a way better version of curation that is different for each person yeah I mean you guys mentioned earlier very early in your talk I mean this obviously is an extreme example but early in your talk you mentioned that the the Google Play and app stores in general are filled with clones right like not this extreme but nevertheless filled with clones and I think it all ties together and hopefully there's a message here anyway thank you if I could uh suggest to Google that they employ their own uh small team inside whose task is to grief them themselves um I think it might seriously work they could you know they they'd I mean it's

the equivalent of security uh yeah yeah so like in machine learning you have these adversarial networks I don't know much about machine learning but I'm saying they should just do it themselves they should do what we did to themselves see how they like it [Applause] hey uh first time caller long time fan [Laughter] is this and are we currently in frog fractions three question it was um how did you two gentlemen get both so handsome and so clever I think that's what was with a Gravelly velvety soft voice um is this frog fractions three that's the question um just email slots at signal to noiseapps.com with the subject frog

fractions three and it will come back to you and you've got it as many frog fractions games as you want right now on your phone this is the rabbit hole everyone go go go we have I think time Cas we have time for what we have three minutes a couple minutes uh hi um if you would have taken on this project without Scruples um and um I don't know how much data you collected if any but do you have any idea how much money you could have made if you allowed your users to play with the real money what if we'd Gone full force no Scruples collected money from users what do we think the outcome would be like real money gambling wagering Etc yeah some of you who actually make slot machines you tell us I guess I don't know if you if you took what we could talk about that later if you if someone who has a slot machine that does those things and then we multiply them by the number of times we put out these

slot machines we may be able to come up with a number um I don't know if I want to see it yeah it'd be interesting to see that yeah I think customer submission oh there was nothing when we started we actually would have had to to take money from users we would have to put in more personally identifying information to Google about what we were doing and we didn't want to do that at first yep uh and we'll take one more I'm curious if you tracked how many times people pulled the lever on average total oh uh so I have the answer to that it is uh definitely did not um actually but yeah I think we're on the same page we forgot to even add save data at all to the app and I think one of those reports we only saw while we're putting together the slide deck years later it said when I close the app and I open it back up all my data is gone and I looked at Zeba and I said did we add saving I don't know and we're like I don't I don't know and it's really not important

to the philosophy no so you don't know this actually um I did Implement stats for tracking every time a slot machine was pulled I don't remember on what stat platform and I haven't looked at it in years it's somewhere out there it's going to be huge I don't know we'll do a whole talk on just that number next year thank you fantastic question I learned a lot from it