4.5 Million Players in 100 Days: Lessons from Dying Light

[Music] okay um hi everyone thanks for coming to this uh before we start I'd like to gently remind you to switch off your cell phones and to evaluate the session at the end um this is my first talk at GDC Europe and your feedback will be very valuable for me so please do that at the end uh I'm paval I'm director of research and development technology at techland and um I came to you from RAV which is located in Poland and I'm going to give you some insights about Dying Light game so the title for the session is 4 and a half million players within 100 days there are two important takeaways for this talk so you'll learn what are what are the most important aspects of successful game before the release what have we done before the release to make it successful and then how to increase the game virality and visibility to make it great Commercial

Success so things we've done after the game is being released to the market to the to the platforms so the agenda for this talk is as follows uh I'll give you some very brief background about myself and ding light game and then we'll jump into the mid of the presentation so we'll we'll be talking about things before and after release and hopefully at the end we'll have some time for questions so please stay tuned about me uh I'm a director of research and techn technology development which means I'm doing pretty much everything in a company which means I'm responsible for stuff like defining vision and goals for technology development advising the business development and supporting internal teams in terms of Technology decisions uh I'm also conducting research and contacting scientific and technological centers like Hardware manufacturers and so on and also managing internal teams running inter program hiring people and all stuff

connected with game development uh at last but not least I'm working very closely to game teams uh so I try to provide the best technology for for game teams that they could take benefit from yeah a lot of stuff but I believe strongly in Synergy between business art Science and Technology that's why really I really enjoy my work okay so first question have you played D Glide please raise your hand okay and who hasn't heard about the game at all like for the first time here okay cool just three people okay so I'm going to show you very short like this 60-sec video clip about the game so it will like remind you what the game is about but first uh why video clips are good for the presentations like this so there is a Chinese proverb which says that where where this worth 10,000 words

so if we have a 60 seconds trailer at 25 frames per seconds it gives us uh 1 and a half th000 pictures that is 15 million words right I'm speaking to you right now at 180 words per minute approximately so I would need almost one and a half thousand hours to talk about this video clip so uh let's save some time and see the trailer a

a [Music] okay so this was something we've done before the release of course uh yeah and now it's a very good time to jump into that part of the presentation so we'll start with the things that we've done before first we try to clear to do the clear communication of the game features so there are certain game features in the game which are really like the face of the game uh for example in our one of our first major feature was the melee combat so so uh in the game you can kill

zombies in many different ways like using weapons traps environment World objects you can kill zombies by kicking zombies jumping out of them and we really made we put a lot of effort to make killing fun so that was our first feature the second feature of the game is that uh you don't have to use the first feature so you don't have to fight zombies you don't have to kill zombies if you don't like to uh instead you can use plier parkour style of moving across the world uh and we call this feature the natural movement it means that you can jump over the zombies you can push them kick them you can climb the building smartly away from the zombies uh you can use grappling hook to very fast and uh quickly and efficiently move around the world so the second feature is um is something that you can use the first feature or you can combine them together so it worked really really great uh the third one is the night so during the night gameplay changes zombies are more scary more powerful

much more dangerous than during the night the day and you should really avoid the night if you want to survive there are new types of zombies for example like volatiles which are chasing you always when you're looking back you need to use your flashlight which limits your field of view which is even more scary uh and we call the feature Hunter by day pray at night and really we try to make the Game feature strong and visible for for everyone and the last feature I'd like to mention about is the co-op play so you can explore the world of haran which is the m main location in the game uh with other players up to four players and people really love that apart from the co play you can play in players player versus player mode which we called be the Zombie Mode uh when you can be a hunter chasing human controlled by other players and that was one of the major things that major thing that we did before the release

so apart from the feature we were showing the features we were not afraid to show uh like the one minute of the gameplay it's not a trailer it's a gameplay right the video that the that you have seen it's a gameplay video it's not a like trailer for marketing purposes it's the gameplay and we we're showing each week New Game feature or the features that can be combined together to create the new gameplay for the game and we call the those features dying highlight lights so to keep it interesting we weren't afraid to show the bit of humor as well and one of of the clips that was in a dying highlights was the clip that you saw saw um um two minutes ago and also I'd like to demonstrate you another clip which is very popular and a little bit humorous uh and it's a clip about traps you can use to kill the Zombies in many different ways

[Music] [Music] h [Music] [Music] so as you can see it's not not only the M fighting and the natural movement you

can also kill zombies using like the environment and uh different like objects in in the world uh the next thing I want to mention is uh that our in-house technology really worked for us so apart from those four game pillars I've mentioned um we're having our own Tech and it's really great like Advantage for us uh we're been developing the tech for 15 years right now and it gives us great flexibility and Advantage like we decide uh which platform are we are targeting which game features we would like to like bring to the higher level to to support games and really that's that's that's great right so we have physically based shading Advanced post processing us uh the photo realism is really important for us so we decide which features should support the game and how of course based on our engine so the rendering stuff the physics stuff and so on we have also in housem made tools and

this is something that gives gave us extra Advantage right so uh we can create the city like you see on in this picture quite easily uh by using the special feature which is called hierarchical selections unfortunately I don't have time to to go through that but uh if we have some time for questions you can ask me about that and I'll try to explain it in in in in few words uh but in general it's some kind of a way to build award in a hierarchical way and in Semi-Pro way so we can just clone some groups of objects which can vary a little bit to build the city which looks like this okay so this is something we've done before the release then it's release day so everyone is exhausted but it seems that the real fun is just about to start so we really wanted to take care of things such as keep the player engaged in our game so it's only not only on a one shot game keep the product

fresh and valuable in full price and stick to our goal like long-term investment and prior support and what we did what we did to to achieve that first we have used the PLS system it's post launch system we call the system like that so we wanted to gather data from users like the Telemetry but it's only a 50% of of the success we've provided the system this system provides the the ability to do the realtime patches game patches so if we gather the data from users we can tweak on a daily basis game balance like game scripts for example so we can we we have the whole Loop so we can see how the changes progresses by changing the scripts getting data and then it's a close loop and we can just uh make the game better and better on a daily basis or few times a day even uh it also allowed us to to use some uh event type even based

actions like new achievements challenges or for example first of April power up when we just increase the power of Fist and and kicks and you can just kick the zombie like for few kilometers away from from from the player so it it really worked for us of course we have implemented the PLS system before but we use that after the game is being released this is the example stats from like the screenshots from the tool that we've used for uh for Telemetry so as we can see for PC players there is a like something between uh 35 and 40% of retention um so the people really completed the game with returning to the game and completed the game after uh after the whole game play and it's really unlikely to have open world games so it was it was a good uh like a good sign for us here are some other stats that you can take a look like for example distance traveled it's something like uh 700 ways from Earth to Moon uh

but also we can see from the stats like marked on green that uh lock picking is quite well balanced so still there are more players who were able to to pick the locks and uh maybe we can see from the stats that dissolved in ACD zombies dissolved in acid is quite low so maybe we should like teach the players to do so or maybe there are two little places when you can kill the Zombies that way so we can we know that from from our Telemetry and we can balance it in real time okay so that was the the wide aspect of telemetry so we were gathering like statistic data from the users but then we decided to go very Pro Player company so we're reading feedback on forums on each Forum we're talking to community via Steam Chat and on on Facebook we are we were present in social media everywhere we were really really listening to our Gamers and tried to change the game uh taking like the

feedback into account so it was very important for us and uh the example for that is uh that uh we are always pushing harder to to the limit of our technology so uh we have experienced a lot of issues like hardware issues for the PC version after the game is being released and really working with Community was great experience for us because we are contacting individual people who had problems we are providing the the be branches on Steam they were downloaded the branches they tested said everything is okay you can go it live we made the patch live so it really worked for us and we great uh we received a great feedback from community that we're really really working with people not only like the T from Telemetry point of view but also from Individual uh player point of view and it's it's it's a great way of um of getting uh to know about your issues and and getting you know better feedback from from from Community

work fantastic another thing we've done was releasing the de developer tools so after two months two months after release we have released our world editor and uh people just were able to create the mods for our games for for d light games so we've uh we've got right now after four months of release like 150 maps for example so you can extend your gameplay into 30 hours just by playing mods and uh yeah so it was really really good uh like Direction so you can see the the different mods on the Steam Workshop so we we've done the Steam Workshop integration there is a lot of stuff going on on the Forum uh here are some stats so we have something like 150k downloads which is quite good in terms of game visibility and and virality and uh one of the stats for here which is I guess the most important

is the return of Investments for generated marketing value so we put the X the X amount of money for making the tools available and we got 10 x uh back in the in the marketing value but but generated like the you know links YouTube views and Facebook views and so on so uh yeah it was really really a longterm investment and it was something that you should really consider to doing also uh apart from that so apart from the the worldwide uh perspective like the Telemetry and talking to individual users we also wanted to reach all potential players and I really do mean all of them like even those who buy the game once or twice a year so we reach to uh to amp sound a parkour Collective to create a real time real life Dying Light video the video they created for us attracted over over 12 million players

and uh views both on the YouTube and Facebook so really we started to propagate the zombie culture in in the mainstream media media and it it worked also just fantastic so you were just able to read about Dying Light in in in really every review and every like Journal so it was it was great and uh the next step we've done was that uh once the game came out our Focus shifted from just presenting the game play into keep the fans engaged so we just don't wanted to showing the gameplay because the players were able to play the game but we tried to to do something like the customer word of mouth but we wanted to the users to create the content and to share the content so we decided to create something like um the community hub when we like ask our fans to participate in

gameplay Community challenges so for first for example we ask our fans to submit a maximum 30 second long gameplay clip that make feel them like a badass the process was very simple upload your clip to the YouTube tag it with a hashtag badass Dying Light and send a tweet with a link in the hashtag we gave a people a week to send the Clips in and the result was really uh staggering so we received hundreds of entries populating YouTube as the result uh B Ste C tag had over 1 million impressions on over the Twitter alone so uh the best part was that our fund were sending out like the the gameplay from the best possible angle that they were really proud of it and it really like it was the marketing which go viral and great so digital Word of Mouth at its best really uh we did some other campaigns like uh for DLC and it also go viral uh

we we had also ideas like and we we've done the ideas like uh the horen emergency line so uh to give a world of Dying Light a nod to the real life uh we set up a real phone number which is located uh in the game so it's it's linked to the Skype account with pre recorded message and people will able to find the number and call real Skype to Horan emergency hotline and uh before we publicized the number we had thousands of messages left on Skype uh accountant Reddit threads talking about the number so we decided to listen to the messages through and after a week of listening and digging through we choose the best most funniest one and create a a compilation of that it's on YouTube as well and once we release the video our social channels the fanss went went nuts over 100 thousands people watch the video and it seemed just as many people called the

number right after so it was really really great move uh and the amount of positive feedback and Community Support was really staggering um okay so we don't have much time so I'll make try to make a wrap up uh of uh all the features that we've done all the things that that we've done so um clear communication of game pillars game features you need to stick to them and work on them for for the whole production process uh having our own Tech was really great Advantage for us and we are not afraid to show the gameplay footage so we were showing the gameplay features um just on a weekly basis and just for fre or four months before the release you can see you you will you were able to see the game actually how it looks uh we use the post launching system so both Telemetry and uh patching on on on a daily basis and of course working with Community was

was one of the best shots in in like the marketing and P of d light so uh it helped us solving hardware issues making challenges uh releasing developer tools community help for sharing the best gameplay videos for for from our users and of course uh a lot of crazy and creative ideas like drink for DLC or Skype e emergency hotline was yeah was working great and apart from that we had tons and tons and tons of content updates and I'm going to show you right now the show short video about our content updates so enjoy [Music]

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[Applause] okay so as you can see after 180 days after the release we're still packing the game with updates and people just love that and we're still working on on on more on big content updates and uh that's pretty much it thanks for being here and if you have any questions I'm here I'm also at the business area and we have also our recruitment area so you can find me or my colleagues and if you have questions I'm here for you thanks [Music]