Badland Brawl and Rumble Stars Soccer soft-launches

[Music] yeah hi everyone and thanks for coming after lunch I hope you're waking up anyways I have a little bit of a coma feeling after eating too much but let's let's kick it off anyways so question how many of you have developers ok well that's that makes sense good so yeah I work on business development and marketing at frog mind and as I said we have two real-time PvP games in in soft-launched at the moment and I'm here kind of let's say tell maybe not learning so much but at least experiences of those those soft glances but first kind of really brief brief background of the company so we we are

very kind of indie company at at in in our history the first game badland came out in 2013 like spring and it it it was a premium game first on iOS won a bunch of awards got a lot of love from Apple apparently nice design goes well with nicely designed phones and then Android came from Christmas 2013 that did well too then for 2015 we did like this crazy sidequest with like an 8 platform console Linux PC windows like every single platform loans basically and cran managed to cram that in one week launch window as well which was like I don't know thousand emails or something but yeah there's a lot of work that didn't go so well

it's kind of hard to go from mobile to the holy platforms it's much more ok for the player's perspective to go from the like hardcore platforms to the then it was a little bit maybe consider like No not like proper proper gaming platform still so we were kind of disappointed for that I mean it it eventually made it made a profit first for us anyways but I kind of decided that let's forget the consoles and focus on the mobile so then pattern two came out for Christmas 2015 that was still a premium game won some more Awards got cut like really epic featuring like amazing featuring for an indie company like over the Christmas and New Year and that did okay but it kind of verified why we had already decided to move away from from the premium game so I mean we had kind of decided that pallet two was gonna be the

last last premium can this be make in the premium market had big learned a lot and premium games like the half-life like Tom out the time for the game it makes to make like half of the revenue that it's ever gonna make was like way shoulder shoulder in in 2016 and then it was when violent one came out in 2013 it's like I think like 4 battlin one like the half-life was something like 18 months like it's really like it could sustain the company for a long time and for Palin to it was like maybe like 2 or 3 months and that's not like I mean it's tell us basically the whole market went that way but when we were a lot simpler - we already had killed our first free-to-play game project we had developed them both at the same time and and soon had three more games games in the making at this time we were like 15

people and we felt good about the games the new games we ended up showing them to supercell in 2016 quite briefly after like really early products were running and they liked them too and in September they they both have at the company which was great and read many levels we could actually focus on doing things really properly now and we came from premium so we didn't have like free-to-play experience that said that I Joe liked all the info that we could access at Sarah was really really important skipping kind of the hurdles of doing all the mistakes ourselves hopefully so we changed our approach also in all of the three projects to from client only to to like fully server driven multiplayer and Palin role has been now in salons already for nine months

I'll show you really quick 30 second video just like a physics-based tower defense kind of like it's Angry Birds and class Pharrell had a baby I bring your units you have like found units RL units bombs explosions whose unit spells tornado all kind of to draw out your opponent that you're trying to get them into the opponent's tower to destroy it and then our crazy take on a Soaker called rumble start soccer has been in soft loans now for four months [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's kind of like Madagascar meets soccer I guess so but we believe a lot in multiplayer gaming in general now we think like playing with others is what kind of keeps things interesting and also like since badland overlay pattern was very few zzyx based game so it's kind of like fans of physics and kind of the emerging gameplay that like kind of spawns out of other physics being able to kind of expect what happens and then plan accordingly and and still keeping it very intuitive but so how about the soft ones is real-time PvP has some extra challenges and one of them is like getting the matchmaking the work work well so I mean

we simulated that before we we went to the soft loans and and kind of found out that we need at least like 5,000 daily active users to get the matchmaking like reasonable even for the beginning players and that's just for the kind of first day to keep it like under 10 seconds by avarice and then then when your progress is steered by trophies then you don't master then tend to level player against the first level so I mean it gets even more complicated and you need much more to keep it going also also later then but yeah so we went for testing in a in finland first like for two weeks and then we opened that seems to be okay then we went and opened vietnam and thailand and spent the next three months kind of really kind of working on the networking technology and the server technology because like the vietnamese

kind of online conditions just really kind of didn't provide the super good player experience figures like they would be like one second of delay and there was a lot of data conscious and and etc and it wasn't like a simple solution to any of that so i me which is like step by step like in the end of those three months of fixing and optimizing we had like maybe one fifth of the data that we had like in the beginning that's like which is like produced everything out and used all kinds of stuff to make it good but then it was also working nicely in in pretty tough condition so I mean in that sense the age of like really good and that's kind of why we went there the other reason was was really cheap you a as well but yeah so kind of why go full server approach it's kind of like Cedars are

real poison in a real-time play versus player game like somebody beats you by having 10x more health than you you are not gonna use any money in that game anymore and if you get YouTube videos showing that that does some serious damage to your kind of gaming games ecosystem so I mean for monetizing the work you kind of need people to be able to trust it like somebody it's not getting like a huge excess by hacking the client I kind of thought like cheaters would happen only for like really big known games and after the lawns and not in the beginning of the soft loans things like our third day on the market like through its just Finland so and and and we were giving getting already some you saw that some clients were trying to send some fake Evans like I don't totally understand like how that happens like finished soft once in a

couple days but I guess it's maybe like even a kind of like a combination of like who hacks the game first but kind of the only surefire method of making your game unhackable is to like full server validation so I mean basically you run the battles on the server and and if the client disagrees with what the server thinks then the server overruns and and you can't really like no matter what you do on your client size you you can can't affect and you can't make an advantage years to yourself unfairly but yeah the other side of that is did like running all those battles on the server it takes quite a bit of server power at the moment we can run like thousand battles on one server it's like two thousand concurrent users which is roughly thirty forty forty-five thousand daily active users and whenever we like

then you need to scale the server so I mean and and in addition to this which is already quite big then you need of course really good epic analytics for the free to play games and CD PR had some complications to that like some additional work to do but overall this kind of approach is kind of like a really considerable R&D investment for a company I would say so like if I was starting a company from scratch now I don't know if that would be the like that would be a pretty big tackle to like build all the assistance before we are even able to really make the game and absolutely like the server costs kind of mean that then you have a running cost of your game as well so every player costs you some but yeah how

did we kick start it like how do you get to like five thousand daily actors to you so that your matchmaking image starts to work in the beginning do you have to pay like five dollars per player and says see half of them gone tomorrow already which is basically what happens and this was our first time with user acquisition like paid user acquisition rose I was pretty nervous about it because I didn't exactly know what to expect but luckily for kind of KPI testing and the retention testing and getting the game actually just running you can do it quite much cheaper as well if you don't care about monetization yet so we ended up paying between like twenty to forty cents on iOS and ten to twenty cents on Android biases like cheap Asian users and then when we finally five months later opened the Google Google side Google Play side we went to the Google

Play early access and got a nice amount of installs from there without paying anything so some some like five hundred to two thousand even per day and and could actually even turn off our own own user acquisition at times the one of the problem like being able to do good analysis is that like when the quality of your users keep on changing a lot and let's say that like today you get like lots of Italians today you get lots of Russians to play your game it kind of they have different populations so I mean like you don't necessarily know what caused like your what performance difference came from your game and what came from just getting very different players and we have had a pretty changing mix yeah because of the kind of online issues we started from pretty shitty retention numbers in the beginning of the game and and it was

easy to increase the retention just by kind of fixing the game so we went like on organic side we went like from from 2025 to like 45 in about four months and but the awkward users were actually less affected by the issues in the game although that we could see that they were having the issues as well so they started from like 35 and then went to like 45 50 yeah actually the Vietnamese users seem to be quite representative in the at least for the first days retentions the long longer term retention is a little bit worse like compared to tier 1 countries one big difference is that like when you do a mandatory update to your game you're actually losing like

even 10 12 % of your Vietnamese players because they need to download an extra 100 megabytes update and and like usually much less than 2% of your tier 1 players but you are kind of for the long long-term returns and the matchmaking is like the one of the main things like it's like it's very key for the suck like for the game to work and and we don't you haven't really had that many users yet like it would like perform really well also for those who play a lot and so I don't know it's like we had decided to launch launch the battle and brawl not too long from now so I'm I don't exactly have like I don't know what to expect so it's just gonna do it and see what happens and adapt to it I guess yeah if you want like you probably

most of you heard this before but like okay rule rule of thumb for retention it's like day one 40-day 720 and day 13 10% and you should be able to do some some at some scale user acquisition as well and all in all we have spent like sixty thousand dollars in nine months for user acquisition on battle and pro bringing like 120,000 installs it also included some some more expensive tests but for our boosters we used only 5,000 in four months because we went much faster for the for the Google early access for instance and it's been actually cheaper for them getting users as well this is kind of a nice working user acquisition looks like

we used this reflection IO which is just $200 per month for kind of seeing some intelligence of games doesn't have like retentions and stuff but you can see like the curves and entered revenues and downloads so you're getting like higher and higher returns income although that your daily downloads are not so massive so you are probably they're staying and you're getting getting good users and better and better users it's like game before fire fire ads was interesting that they pretty much shut down the user acquisition like mid year last year and then they declined declined declined until they kind of flat it out and they're still making like 50,000 per day per platform out of like no downloads no doing no new downloads and last like one funny thing about influencer marketing that happened to us was that there's this Italian guy who was actually

playing game called soccer Royale so not our game actually but he didn't have any link in his video and if you manually search soccer Royale and App Store you actually get our game as the first so people were happily installing our game we got like 9,000 installs in three days after that video and and so they were basically getting the wrong game but they performed awesomely like they were like really the best users we have had so I mean some influences have like really epic audiences and like even if they end up getting the wrong game they seem to be pretty happily playing that ok I think I'm out of time really quickly like do some AP a be testing one of our icons really performed like 33% better than any of the other icons so that's free installs basically and yeah I just keep that because I'm out of time but yeah if you have any

questions like that my email feel freedom being contact I'm happy to share stuff such huge about data you know I'm counseling and going back on the video this and just going through each of those detail quick question while we have time well let's ask this I mean in terms of challenges how do you is the worst thing knowing when to stop doing the soft launch rent or is it just trying to know how much you know when when to sort of is it harder to give up or is it harder to launch it's certainly hard to give up like I mean and most of the changes that you make don't mean squat like retention wise for instance like when we added two versus two player mode with slight pretty huge undertaking for us like retinas and pretty much remained the same people played a little bit more but the retention was pretty much the same but like then you can have like small change like if we change the

chest logic so that like you can actually control if you open the chest instantly and or you can wait for later to get bigger rewards like kind of like in enhancing the chest and that like almost doubled our Android daily average playtime it's like massive but it didn't increase retention nearly that much but I mean people versus playing much more which is a massive positive thing of course for the game when I find the hardest thing is that when you've got a ray of hope nice death because you guys it's hard to kill and it's hard to know what it is that made that thing that ray of hope work and have you scale it and it's just impossible anyway I don't know thank you very much thanks [Applause] [Music]