Aampe’s Jim Laurain On Smart Steps To Inspire Players With Messaging That Matters

[Music] hello world welcome back to the pg. bz podcast with me Brian Bago and the ever effervescent and increasingly festive Peggy and salts hi Peggy how are you today I love that I love every episode a new adjective with you Brian and it is festive right here we are we are in December and we are getting into some shows that give us a look back and give us a look forward and I could ask you the same question Brian it's great to have you back I've been doing a couple solo without you but it's not the same how have you been I've been good I've been good it's um I I I took a couple of weeks just to kind of get my head back together after running um Scottish games week at the end of October beginning of November and really taking stock and and just trying to figure out you know what what exactly uh this year has been all about because because while it was

incredibly enthusiastic really positive so many people out there are hurting so many people have kind of run into problems we've had closures we've had layoffs we've had a a really strange year um for video games and I think you know one of the things that we're going to talk about today is is really kind of drilling down into a part of that um because the challenges facing developers as we cover week in week out the challenges facing developers are changing yes yes but is some good news so there's some bad news I'm going to start with and I'm going to get to the good news because that's the type of person I am so yes I will chime in with you Brian it's nearly every day anyway that you're seeing something that is talking about the state of the market and uh you know the market correction as some would want to call it uh it's there and it's real and uh I won't go into deep dismal reports but it did catch my eye and we did write about it at uh Pocket Gamer the supercale report for example example what a title by the way

good games don't die uh that's true where again we had a survey of 500 game devs and basically the outcome 83% of launch games fail within three years how does that make you feel I mean those sound to be quite terrible odds so we want to have a show about how you beat the odds how you stay fresh guess what the ways are content live Ops ongoing Communications not really rocket science is it Brian it's not it's not and it's something that comes up you know time and time again when we speak to the incredible guests we pull into the podcast everything is in a almost constant state of flux which means that the challenge facing developers is going to be changing as well you know it's no longer the case that if you build a good game people will come and play it because you know the the Market's more competitive than ever so you know how do you succeed how do you build a game that that you can't it's not just going to make you proud but it's going to make you money and you got got to remember the community if you

build a community you need to talk to the community and interestingly enough also in the report Studios get poor marks for ongoing engagement nearly 40% don't release regular updates maybe it's a money thing but at the same time onethird of reduced their UA budget so it's like well what is left and what is left is ongoing engagement good news is games Studios can do this it's not that hard it's paying attention to it and I think also being aware of the problem in the first place so that's where our guest comes in because he's been tracking this engagement message for message he reached out to me he has a brutal report card to share but also some smart approaches to help marketers improve help Studios improve and it's in his wheelhouse as well because his company is focused on AI powered approach to messaging and so I'll just bring him in and he will come in with

his big reveal I have no idea Brian we didn't rehearse this he's just like I've got this data I want to talk about it so how can I say no so we have Jim Lorraine he is head of growth at amp Jim great to have you on pg. Biz we are already in pumped for this big reveal thank you thank you yeah it was a lot of fun to put together this this sounds incredible it sounds like you've really been out there in the trench is getting your hands dirty so talk to us what did you find I appreciate that you saying that me down downloading like the top 100 games list is in the trenches and hard work if you could tell my boss that I'm just not playing games all day that it's actually legitimately hard work I would I would appreciate that but that's the point Jim I mean you did do it and i' I'd like to start with the motivation behind that you know it's great to say okay I'm GNA see this for myself but tell us about you know what really motivated you here methodology well let me take a quick step back because I think it'll help give some context uh so the company I'm with is called amp it's a MP so everybody in India calls it AE it's just how it is I

didn't name it um what we do is AI powered push notifications so turning instead of a notification that we send we use notifications to actually listen so when we send something we listen how does somebody react and it's not just clicks but like what do they do after they click do they click and then when they click what do they do and all this stuff we've done a lot of work in e-commerce and fintech and kind of all the major industries we built up a notification Library so this is part of what we'll talk today about um with over 28,000 different notifications from all kinds of apps so that we could look for patterns and understanding and how are people approaching messaging and things like that so when I looked through our library I thought man we're kind of light on gaming we don't have a lot in gaming and I thought well this is a great this is a great thing to do so I'm I'm going to go in get the top 100 games it's very very easy to build a library like this yourself I use if this then that and dump everything into a Google sheet and then you can do all the fun calculations you want from there so I went and got like I said the list of the top 100 games I pulled in all the notifications you know and some addition games beyond that pulled in all the

notifications so that I could reverse engineer the methodology each game has to engage their users and really quick note my process was to download each game open each game you know put in your email create an account it depends on the game on how you do that not actually play and leave and so the intent is how do you because I I forget what the latest stat was but it's like around a quarter of people like only visit an app one time so 7 this is 75% of your users are going through this experience so how are you bringing me back that was that was what I wanted to learn so you've got us this is the methodology this is what you did um as I said big reveal we don't know what you found but we do know that onboarding is the most critical point in the journey that is the phase they'll make it and break it because what you've done if you think about Brian is you've set yourself up and said I have highend ENT to play this game I've downloaded it

I've done all the things I need to do now it's up to the games Dev to come back to me so what did they do Jim the big reveal 75% of the apps around I can get an exact number but around 75% did nothing like absolutely nothing don't worry I have more data to show of the apps that did something what they did but but I was very surprised to see that the majority of apps did not send a single notification and there's an ship stat out there that 90 what is it like 95% of people who don't get a push notification in the first 90 days churn right so I mean it's easy money to send a welcome hey hi es especially if someone goes through the effort to put in their email so there are some games there was like eightball pool that never sent me anything until I actually played around Candy Crush was similar I opened it I had it I had but they didn't send anything until I actually played companies may say oh yeah we do send a message but like at what point like you should be sending a message I almost

don't care what it is and we'll get into the details on that but you should be sending a message when somebody installs your app easy money but but like I said 75% of games Totally Miss that which I was shocked by and it and it seems like such a an easy thing to do which is it it's a whole hello world you know hey you downloaded the app you've opened it you know as far as I'm concerned that it's you're one of ours now you're for all intents and purposes of player so how do you how do you encourage people to come back that day one man you know it's quite concerning did you kind of have did you get any sense is to as to why that might be the case I've reached out to a few apps who didn't send notifications and let them know and usually it's usually people have good intentions like I said they do have some form of welcome but they expect you to get to a certain threshold to be able to send that welcome so one easy example is like um location services some people want your location services on and if

you don't have location services on then you don't get anything or some people want to wait until you input your email or some people want to email and phone number and then they send you something so my argument would be you know do the minimum legal requirement right you don't want to send if you're not authorized to send although there's some provisional messaging you can do but like get to the point where you can just send and it almost doesn't matter what you send but send something cuz it's this is just easy money and missed opportunity cuz I think again this is the majority of apps if you can just look at what you do and what what you are asking to do before you send a message right what the requirements are knock that out just send something no it makes sense I just want to say something here because I've been looking at this since there were apps I'm sure you have as well Brian since they were mobile games but there was all this discussion at the very start that it was like a social contract if I download your game I am indicating that I want to interact with you and therefore it's like a relationship I'm saying yeah here I am

and then you're supposed to come and like greet me like you would if I was moving into your neighborhood you know hey you're new here and and there the idea that I have to give location and other things before I'm just greeted is is very very odd but you said to yourself 75% nothing so 25% did something right what did they do yep uh so the second observation was I received no message that I would call a welcome message at all so there was no like Hello World um and the danger with this is that user falls into your ad hoc messaging your ad hoc messaging is just the messaging that you're just sending everybody um and there's there's there's difficulty in most CRM systems that if you have somebody onboarded they will fall into your onboarding sequence and your ad hoc sequence um and that actually something like that happened with one game so the concern is you know if I'm sending messages to everybody every day but then I have a new user I send them a welcome but then I'm sending them the messages that I'm sending

everybody all day this is a common concern with CRM teams because now instead of sending at the Cadence you want you're really bombarding those new users that said didn't have the problem this time because nobody sent a welcome so the things I I have a list of like some of the messages that they send but they ended up being the normal messages that they sent normally so like Monopoly go for example Now's the Time To Roll quick wins or renewed this was an interesting for me one for me because I bailed right away I have no idea what quick wins are I played Monopoly plenty of times the board game right there's no quick wins in Monopoly so as a message if you think that this is the first thing you send me quick wins are renewed like renewed it's day one like what am I I don't even know what that is this was a pretty interesting um finding that there was no like even introduction or how to play or let's get started or anything that guided me um all the messages were as if I had been playing for months and and had prior knowledge of what the the game was I think that's

a great point and when when you consider the overall user journey and again it's something we hear from so many guests so many speakers that we invite onto the podcast and the amount of time and effort that people put into the user journey and onboarding people within the game um but looking at this looking at how you communicate with that person before they start playing you know before they they've taken that that step in it seems like a a a reasonably obvious part of the over all experience but clearly not if if as you say 75% of people just sent nothing I think they put a lot of attention into the onboarding sequins right when you start playing a game it shows you know the Candy Crush here do this and swipe here and swipe here but you have some people who again one of them is a kick to like how to play or what you can expect when you play you know like hey let's relieve some stress today or clear your mind or focusing on those appeals and we'll get into a little bit more of that later but you know what's the hope now that you've got me what what can I hope to expect with your game so it doesn't doesn't have to be logistical like here's

exactly how you play or something um but things to reduce you know fear and anxiety of starting things to encourage someone to play you know and and promote the benefits that they'll get when they'll play and we'll talk about how to do that in a little bit any of that I think would be helpful because you just fall into the messaging flow that everyone is getting so uh quick to talk on the messaging flow there are two things that I wanted to cover on the logistics of message sends and then we can get more into the content um one of them is the Cadence so how when are you sending your messages as far as like a daily is there a daily Cadence or is there how how does that work and then the second is timing to actually message timing and what timing are you sending your messages the average Cadence for a game is a single message per day so one message per day um is that bad or is that good well it depends like it depend it an active user is getting one a day unless you have you know triggered

messages when someone does a specific action then they would be getting more an inactive user is getting one every day it seems like a decision made by a CRM Team without really considering different user types there was no you know if I stopped if you know since I'm not clicking on them are they slowing down because I'm not or are they speeding up or is it you you think certain Seasons you send more do you try more on Fridays or Mondays or there's no there appears to be no logic in anything it's just one message per day for the vast majority just have this feeling that it was like someone said something it's like three o'clock every day no matter what yes so a lot of them are the same time or the same you know very closely coupled with time some of this is uh so I'm logging it with Android and Android has some features where they will like delay until you touch your phone and then all of a sudden messages pop up so I'm being gracious there but I would say the vast majority are sent one per day the same time per day there were a couple notes that a couple these apps stopped messaging me after seven days or

six days of inaction and just stopped forever which I thought was interesting um there was another one that stopped after like four days so they send you one message per day and then after four days totally stop what's interesting is this to me feels like a welcome sequence you know like a welcome sequence you would stop after a certain period of time but the messages that were sent again were in no way a welcome let's get started they were all like as if I had been playing for for months or weeks or something like that so if we look at timing so we have one message per day does it make sense does it not not tied to user activity or anything like that um most of them send at the same time just I'll read off a couple and I just want to see if you guys can catch the pattern but so like eightball pool sends between 7 and 10 p.m. coin Master between 600 and 8:00 p.m. fruit merge sends at 7 p.m. uh my hotel is like 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. they had a couple in the morning but 600 7 p.m. uh race Master 6:00 to 7: p.m. um screw puzzle and stumble guys were

all through the day but they send so many but uh word Scapes 7M do you notice any patterns yeah they think we don't do commuting or do anything at any other time wasn't it supposed to we we play games in spurts throughout the day uh they think it's our free time at this point right y there oh for sure and there's a few flaws in this too which is if I do have all these games when do I get every single message yeah at the same exact time everyone's fighting for the same time slot there were a few that stood out so Monopoly go has of course 700 p.m. but they also put a bunch like really early in the morning and again it could be just the time that I activated my phone right but nothing I know nothing came between like midnight and the time I touched it at 7: am. so they have you know a little advantage in the morning but if you look at this it's not only you know well this is the time when we have the most SE success or this is the most time when we play the most but you're now in comp direct competition

with every single other game because you all pick the exact same time slot so you're sending me one per day and you're sending me them at the same time per day so like I guess this is we're getting into content a little bit but like what are you sending me at that one time so an interesting point is fruit merge is my is my winner 100% redundancy so every day I get the same exact message at the same exact time every single time for Fruitful Fusion like I can it's like burned into my brain um same exact message same time I also found some other Trends so some people you know like my hotel as my example two out of 11 messages are duplicated uh two insights here one is so if I look at like racem had they only sent six messages total and then they stopped they sent me some they sent six then they stopped completely two of them were duplicate so if you're only sending me six total that's your welcome sequence

you're only sending me six total why are two of them duplicate can you not come up with six okay wordscape sent four and the very first two they sent were exactly duplicate so you sent me two of the exact same messages twice in a row you only sent me four messages I mean we're not naming and blaming here I want to make that very clear we're talking about this a constructive way because the whole idea was you understand how you're getting your players and you're supposed to treat them in a more individual personalized way based on that context and information I've got this person through an influencer campaign on Tik Tok as opposed to here or whatever but it's it's very interesting to hear because I haven't downloaded 100 games how much plain vanilla is going on in a segment of the market you know games games are linked to attitude and psychograph graphics and passion and people and we're not really

a tribe that wants to be treated in one way in one generic way it's very odd given how much we know about the different player types and the the different you know the ideal customers the ideal players and the amount of work that's done to make use of the huge amount of data that you get from video games that that were simply it sounds like it's almost Brute Force automation you you know once you're in the CRM you're in the CRM and there's little or no differentiation I find it it really peculiar given all of the all of the the challenges that the sector has faced in terms of you know targeted advertising all of the ways in which we've we've had to become smarter that this seems like a a huge opportunity that's that's being overlooked quite frankly yeah I think you're on it I I will say a quick Point too the reason I call out names is because I want people get the reality of it again I think

there's a lot of room for improvement and there's a lot of Hope here this should actually be really really exciting cuz the bar isn't here the bar is down here right like there are very very small simple things we can do that would make massive Improvement very quickly um and you don't even need like massive scale automation it's it there is not much here that needs to be touched but I do the reason I call specific names because I want people to realize that I'm not picking you know games that are obscure right um one quick note on Cadence and then I do want to hop into the uh the different player types is one other common pattern that I noticed is repetition after period of days so there are several apps that like once you hit day seven they start over again from the first message this is why I'm saying by logging this and I highly encourage people to log these notifications because you think nobody sees this sequentially like a user just sees a message they don't catch this timing pattern but subconsciously you absolutely do and it falls into what

it's a psychological thing habituation effect and the habituation effect is when I start to see the same stimulus over and over and over again then I ignore it my brain kind of tunes it out because it's very similar to what I've seen so when you send someone a message campaign that repeats every seven days all of a sudden every message starts to look like every other message that I've seen and then I don't think about your game anymore I don't even see I don't even my brain blocks it from me I don't even see the notification you're sending anymore because they're so similar to what you've previously sent you said you going to get to psychographics to player types I mean that is so strong in gaming that really is you know the fundamental rule of the game play of the mechanic and of the engagement is understanding that you're getting the right player and the right match how how was that working how granular did you see that so I took the list of 12 player types social Cooperative social competitive Mastery skill Improvement Mastery completing Milestones all all all 12 uh and I ran

it through an analysis what I was across the full category of apps who messaged um there is a pretty even spread the interesting one is there was nothing that talked about exploration collecting Treasures which I think could apply you know getting an award getting a work your way up to a prize or something like that uh there were no messages about that but the other if I put it in a pie chart they're fairly evenly represented across the spectrum of games games which is good but yet each game itself only spoke to like one to three so I'm going to say that not everyone applies to every game but if we're looking at this as like a source of inspiration um I think there's a lot we could do to like look at those motivations and write to more of them because I think a lot more apply to each game than only one to three of them so Jim coming back to the customization um the player types the the sort of the ularity and the ability to customize based upon each player I

mean you have data there what what did you discover there did you did you get any kind of really good chunky data that you can share with us Based on data there was nothing that really tried to fish for like what player type I was and then react and I think you've seen that based on the messages sent there isn't much reactivity happening period right as far as um you know the Cadence is very locked the timing is very locked the message that is sent is often times very locked through repetition um so I did my own test of what would I say um and I took a little deviation so I didn't lock to the 12 player types but what I did is everybody's favorite chat GPT um and I asked it so I Ed Monopoly go as an example and I just asked why would someone play Monopoly go like give me a list of reasons why somebody would play Monopoly go right because let's let's think of this backwards let's get back to to the heart of it which is what we've been trying to address right what

are the different player types um and GPT gave me an awesome list and I thought some of these were actually pretty on point but like one being Nostalgia if I if I read through the list of Monopoly go there were none that really spoke to Nostalgia but why would someone like me for example download Monopoly go Nostalgia I mean I played Monopoly as a kid I have memories of playing Monopoly with my parents for hours and hours and hours and hours and that was just one game um but it's like that spoke to me and then there are other things like convenience there's social interaction so this is like the social Cooperative there strategic gameplay so some people are motivated by the strategy right which do you buy first which property do you get what you know and we look at casual fun so obviously we have that fun group um we have people who like shorter game sessions so but they might be turned off by the thought of Monopoly like Monopoly is a long game but hey this is a way that you can get bite-sized chunks so you can still have fun it's a new way to play there's the challenge in

achievement there's people who want learning opportunities right Monopoly is a great educational game for my kids we have like kids Monopoly and there's you know it's it's practicing the real world via games right and then there's escapism there's competition there's progress and rewards there's customizable features which some people love that you can build your own world right there's so much here that came up that it's like we really don't need to have only seven messages that repeat every day if your game is remotely recognizable or there's a game that's similar to it or in the same category I would highly advise everyone to just type into chat GPT why would someone play my game first of all I'm stunned uh as somebody who comes from a marketing Communications background and who has done this kind of thing you know I I was writing user manuals and onboarding and you know everything from the PC days which you know is prehistory in in games terms um but it just seems like such an a basic area to overlook because as you

say it's somebody who has taken the time to download install your game your app um why would you not be bringing your your best to Bear to keep them happy to make them you know make them feel valued um did you did you get any sense as to why this this kind of weird Gap exists Jim there there seems to be a a high we we've seen this and we've kind of talked about this there's a high love and attention given to UA to user acquisition and much less given to retention and there's stats there are so many stats showing why retention is the Focus right it's easier to monetize people you already own than try to get them and monetize them you can look at retention rates by the time you acquire somebody like 75% like we said are gone within the first use there's so many reasons to focus on that um I think the second one is tooling so the tools are made especially if you're using like um like Firebase you need a developer to

to be able to write and schedule messages it's not as easy as some of the other tools but a lot of the tools it's so much easier to just write a few things and like put them in Loop um because it's very it's a lot harder to send something understand which user responds make different you know user level distinctions and decisions based on how that user respond the way the easiest way to do it right now is through Triggers on your app so if if a user does things then I can send them you you reached a goal congrats you reached a goal great job get the next goal right that like those are how those tools are built where they fall down as if I if I'm me I haven't done anything yet so H how how are you testing different personas to see how I respond and then when I respond how are you like leaning into that Persona in a way that's meaningful here's how I think gaming companies could do this relatively quickly um and and start to make a a positive change so the first one is GPT which is a fun experiment anybody can do it takes two seconds

everybody's already in GPT just go do it ask why a player plays your game or a similar game you get a list the next thing is just ask it right push notifications three for each motivation or however you want to ask it um again for each motivation so how do I draw somebody into Monopoly go talking about Nostalgia right so I asked it so it said classic game new twist join uh join us in Monopoly go and experience your favorite board game on your phone like okay Nostalgia right old school charm step back in time with Monopoly go roll the dice now okay so is it better than quick wins renewed you know give it to a pro copywriter they can probably do things but hey you know like we're appealing to Nostalgia now uh just a couple so convenience play any anytime anywhere waiting in line make your move in Monopoly go or on the go gaming turn your commute into fun I don't advise doing it while driving quick note um social interaction play with friends challenge your friends will Monopoly go will you be the next Tycoon right strategic gameplay think plan conquer

put your strategy to the test and Monopoly go so this is just straight out of GPT I did nothing to it we have all these different messages what I would advise if you're already at a company and you're already sending the same seven messages over and over again or if you are you know not sending anything then you need to fix that or whatever start putting those in and then what you can do at a very simple level is when you send those out look at the people who responded to those so the question is always how do we do segmentation right how do I divide up my user base at this point I think not much is happening especially on users who haven't played or I might be in an inactive bucket per se but what you can send all those inactive people is these notifications that are written with the different motivation in mind see which users respond to which motivation use that data to bucket those users so now I know oh this person responds to Nostalgia messages or this person responds to you know social Cooperative or or family you

know what I mean you can you can start to build this segmentation based on user motivation and it takes a little coordination because you have to be able to you know work with your data team and things to be able to see who actually clicked and did what but to me this would be an amazing experiment for a game who wants to massively increase their retention and activity uh that is very well worth doing I'm thinking that that's great for an experimentation but you know ultimately it's also about it's about scale it's about saying this is my Approach I want to make this part of the fabric of how I communicate so what's the next step from experimenting to to scale is there something that you recommend there as well the way that we're doing things today is either more work than we give it credit so we're putting a lot of work into things that are less payoff or uh or we're by not doing work we're not seeing a benefit so you know by sending

the same messages every day we're stuck with our Baseline my point is if you put more focus and attention into that area that area could improve right substantially so the the the advantage to your business could be absolutely massive um using AI in this instance again AI is great for things like pattern recognition and that's exactly what this is so we start to learn users and users who do certain actions tend to do these certain things um so I think a lot of it comes down to just how we build segments Now versus how you know this approach to segmentation so at the end of this you have segments just like you had in the beginning the segments are just more refined so you don't have to start you know the examples with Monopoly go you don't have to start with 12 different motivations you don't have to start you can start much more simply my point is right now we have nothing so like let's go for one let's go for one exactly let go for two let's go for three easy easy steps easy steps so to come back to the the sort of the the the initial point we were talking about Jim

in terms of change and the way in which everything is constantly changing and evolving where do you see 2024 taking us you know we we've got alternative app stores to the potential of sideloading all of these different changes which are coming down the pipeline how do you see all of this impacting on on that all important engagement you know one thing you you didn't mention but kind of plays in with all this is data and that is like third party data and how we learn and right now and how we build our ad creative so we're going to have to get more clever we know that UA needs to get better because we can't afford just cast a wide net right so if we look at where we get our data right now we know who our best players are what motivates our best players how do we attract more of our best players right that's the goal cuz we we want to understand and maybe it's a spread you find out for your app maybe it's you know it's tough because it's people from all different places but being able to pick up on those segments is very important so the data you generate in the experiment where you

look for different user types you send messages to different user types and then you see how people respond for example if I just go with my easy example if you did uh Monopoly go and Nostalgia and let's say wow overwhelmingly we seeing 80% of people respond to Nostalgia of those who responded versus people who respond to convenient playing well then what's my ad going to look like my ad is going to appeal to Nostalgia so my point is we have this giant pool of data every app has it right now we just need to use it creatively with our um with our CRM right with our customer engagement to feed stimulus into the system by asking for example you know do you like Nostalgia or do you respond to this or do you respond not surveys but actually through the messaging see how people respond and then use that data to then build our UA and make it more effective so it's it's part of this feedback loop of companies working you know across the borders together with each other but CRM to me is is should be the data Factory that's powering the entire UA strategy

what features we should add what game we should do next and the clever way to do this is to implement it through messaging because by asking people you know the responses you get from people never match up to their actions right so we're trying to do it in a way that we're Gathering their actual actions it's all about using the segmentation which you would think is like you know deeper in the funnel or a different department even to improve acquisition which has to be good at a time again to your point Brian you know where we are do more with less uh and do more with the data that we have yeah I I think rather than than constantly saying we we don't have the data we need we don't you know we're not getting the data that we want looking at what you have and using it in a far smarter way I think just makes an enormous amount of sense I think an awful lot of people listening to the podcast are going to be able to take that away gy and look you know differently at what they do have yeah I

think when we talk about creatives everyone's AB testing creative right what's going to resonate more we'll try this we'll try this but I don't see that done as as commonly looking back into my existing audience let me treat my existing audience like a UA experiment right what what kind of messaging do they respond to best because again the problem with UA is I can look at how many people download but I'm only looking at half the story I'm not looking at how how many people actually play and of those who play how many actually pay right how many people are accomplishing my goals and how do I replicate that bucket in my UA so maybe I get less overall let's say I get less overall clicks through UA but much higher retention and much higher monetization rates that's aiming at the Right audience so I think that that is what's so important we need to instead of it'd be awesome to have the UA guys and the CRM folks and not to say that they don't talk already but coordinate on more experiments like that like how do I you know what what is the what is

the motivation that's driving our most engaged players and how do I spin that so that I get more engaged players from the very beginning of my UA funnel wow um there is a lot in there Jim for something that was um you know not scripted off the Cuffin spontaneous I think there was a huge amount in there that we can take away and almost everybody listening to the podcast is going to be able to action that in some way and and at the very least start thinking about the data that they do have differently obviously what this is telling us is that the way to create these messages the way to create these experiments that happens also with the help of AI and that's at the core of what you're doing as well Jim not just in your experiments but also in your company so what can you tell me about what amp is going to be doing maybe to remove some of the heavy lifting for game devs or or just trying to maybe inspire a more playful approach to

experimentation yeah I think this is at the heart of what we do using AI so one thing that we notice is there's a a Gap a bridge left between you know where app store their events so anytime anybody does anything or doesn't do anything right that's stored in events you have a full log of every user and every single interaction they do there's a gap between those systems from an AI perspective and between your engagement platforms so like I said you know the notification experiment someone will learn a ton from when they send a notification go look at who responded but that go look at step takes time takes effort takes team coordination that can all be minimized with AI what we've built and what what we've deployed um does exactly that so what you would be able to do is you know write all the messages to all those different groups that you want send them all to your user base we would use the AI to then draw those gaps and show you the size of each pop population the responsiveness of each population so exactly what we built

is automating that you know the experiment that you mentioned but continuously running all the time Real Time with AI So What it lets game devs do is it lets them dig deeper into understanding their users thinking about different users thinking about these motivations writing all the messages to all those motivations and not worrying about the backend and how do I talk to my data team now and get all this data and see who did what but just kind of see get get a better idea of their populations because that's what this goal is is you know and this year and Beyond is let's really understand our users in a way that you know we can speak to them more directly we can use it in our UA we can engage them better and we can understand which groups are really resonating with the messages we have so I think it's a very exciting time especially for games because we don't have to just engage with people based on what they have done in the game but we can really touch the why why is the game important to them why is the game meaningful to them why do they

enjoy playing it and I think that you know that that solves a lot of the issues you were talking about in the beginning with with the dwindling engagement right we need to speak to the reason why people play and this allows us to do that which is really exciting indeed it's all about motivating players that's exactly what it is and that will keep them coming back exactly so exactly so it's just it's extending the game out beyond the levels and the menus and into the meta game um and I think it's uh it's a valuable lesson for people to take into the end of 2023 and into 24 before we let you go there are two questions we ask everybody when they come on um the first of which is what are you playing right now what's the game that's kind of obsessing you and taking up perhaps more time than it should and then number two favorite game of all time I shouldn't admit this but it's Candy Crush because I have a I try to keep myself busy my life is so busy uh as everybody's is right but but those breaks those little getaways if I had to

bucket myself into the motivation Candy Crush is a way to like turn life off for a minute and just rest and relax I don't relax like laying on the couch listening to Anya for me it's just something like can't you get a little kick of encouragement a little dopamine in a little break um and to me it's just it's a beautiful thing um favorite game of all time I'm gonna have a weird one I'm gonna go board game just because I'm you can see my gray um but have you ever played Stratego yes I'm gonna look up if there's a mobile Stratego I've never been defeated at Stratego it's a it's a game you should look at it's it's yeah it's a good one now you got me inspired I'm gonna go see if there's a mobile version because I'd never checked if there isn't then we're gonna make one I am so glad Jim that you reached out with this it's been an interesting show not just because of like hey it's fun to talk with you but you've opened our eyes I think to something really obvious but that's precisely the beauty of it it's obvious so Benchmark is low right now

everyone can do better than they are currently doing in 2024 so thanks for that inspiration thanks for that road map Jim thank you again we look forward to getting you back on the podcast at some point soon finding out what else you've been experimenting with and indeed if there is a mobile version of Stratego or if not how far you've come in the design and development of it perfect yeah oh I'm excited that'll be great this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games Market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at pod at pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach

out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm Peggy and saltz and that's a wrap until next [Music] week