Best Fiends developer Seriously on what comes after shipping a hit game

[Music] to be a little little more specific calm I was asked to talk about what happens once you I mean all the conference's are filled with speeches on how do you create a hit how do you monetize the hit how do you market the hit but the bigger question is once you finally get not one big elusive game that one mega hit what do you actually do after that how do you build up from there and I'll bet we are left on the chief creative officer one of the co-founders that seriously and a bit more introduction I have been working in games about twenty years now I was one of the early founders you know in a company called remedy working on games like Max Payne Alan Wake on Steam in R then I joined a company called Rovio

mostly in the games unit through the incredible growth the growth years of of the birds and now I'm building up seriously and and we are off to a really good start with best fields which is clocking over 40 million downloads and I'm starting to get to that nice big hit type of region and recently I was also inducted into Pocket Gamer Hall of Fame which warms even my jaded old hard so that's very kind of them and when I started approaching this subject I started with the idea of let's call up a few friends and ask them also to share their experiences so I called a PR firm supercell my co-hosts Nicholas was the founder at reveal johannes at frog mind whose ship they shipped Badlands and have won every possible Design Award and are doing

insanely good as well as the Arco from fingers off with which is very well-known from from Hill Climb racing under which has been a stunning hit as well and throughout this I'll be sharing some of their experiences there so the first thing is you finally shape the game you're looking at the dashboard sits and all of the graphs start going vertical and it's an amazing feeling it's a it's something that you don't experience not many times in your career so it's something that you should definitely enjoy I mean you're going to be in for one hell of a ride things are going to grow you're going to grow nobody gets to operate them in their comfort zones and our all eyes are going to be on you I think you're honest was saying that for the first couple of weeks they were just hitting great fresh and watching those sales figures go up and up and up and feeling really good and a bit later they

were like mmm actually we should have been working but but I saw it's okay to enjoy that feeling because it's going to be it is the point of one singular point that you have been working for often for several years but at the same time it's only a beginning of off a very long journey that so the graph over there shows minecraft from Google Trends how its developed through the last six years and often those few a couple of few months nobody has really any idea how things how big things can get and Erica was saying that prior to shipping clash of clans they actually the entire team went for one month holiday so that when they came back they flip the switch launched the game and everyone was super fresh it's basically all that hard work doing the product building up the game that's a that's a massive sprint once you get a hit then a marathon begins and you

you're going to run really hard for a really really long time and as is often the case for example with Pokemon go is taken almost ten years of work to get to the point where it becomes an organized success and in many of these cases if you look at Angry Birds if you look at any of the games or personalized making from the outside they look effortless it's everything just go in their way they're shipping shipping a hit title after hit title and it must be amazing from the inside you never really understand how much how hard people work how how intense it can be at a trivia we used to joke not one day I probably always equal to 7 days anywhere else there was so many things happening every single day and Nikko talks a lot about with the early days early days of Revere when there were just 9 people initially and and

Angry Birds was something that saw not so Robbie events after it was built into a hit yes there was a huge voter coefficient but at the same time it was something worth we were aggressively going after every single opportunity out there we had at the time summer 2012 on games unit the entire game studio was 40 people and we had committed to more than 60 different projects and it was fairly intense with Max Payne back in the day we spent five years building out that game and it was five really long years of hard work almost almost a year of crunch prior to shipping and then suddenly it turned into into a really big hit and there's actually I like to think that there's two different categories of hits there's the mega hits the viral phenomenons if you if you look at some like cross around or flappy bird or

similar and then there's the hits not our build don't or create it's not our marketed if you look up King and candy cross people easily talk about candy cross went viral but it's going viral because King is spending about half a billion in marketing per year and at the at some point with for example Pokemon go or you start hitting a region where people are playing Pokemon go because people are playing Bach Pokemon go and it starts it starts a cycle of what the hard part about that hits that go viral is that it's really hard to replicate them often you don't even know why they're so successful whereas the other type that is marketed that is built that is built with product updates is is something that's much more controllable and here's a good example minecraft for six years Google Trends was growing for several several years Pokemon for six months it's already

declined extraordinary at the same time this is not to take anything away from neon tech who have a master be incredibly successful game it's totally awesome but it's also very hard to keep the order up once you go like megabyte then then building out the product is challenging some of the things that change when when you finally have a hit in your hands is that most of all you're not in pretty much every case you're not prepared for it you can't be prepared for it because otherwise you'd be building a lot of really redundant stuff in advance the things that you do have is suddenly you have vastly more resources available your game is selling like hotcakes you have you know in a great scenario you have millions of dollars coming in every week or every month and you can actually

control a control your destiny much more than prior to shipping you know there's gonna be opportunities and demand everywhere you're in the spotlight everyone is going to come after you and they're going to come after you aggressively I'm hard we had a probably of people would fly over from Germany to the office to meet us meet up with us because nobody had time to answer answer email or phone so they would show up on block a I have this great opportunity can you tell me hundred thousand boxes of family birds and it's a it was completely stunning the level of demand we were were seeing and that means that your base type requirements which you probably didn't have prior to having having a hit or suddenly multiplied by ten or multiplied by hundred and getting a few experienced veterans at that point in is highly recommended the other thing is you cannot trust any of your metrics you're

you're used to looking at retention you're used to looking at art though you're judging your game based on those but once you have a viral hit everything goes through the roof people again people are playing Pokemon because people are playing Pokemon and thirty times since it is completely off the charts all of it all of your numbers are too good to be true and they won't pretend like that all the time but our for example when nowadays if you look at what my superstar was launching their next game everyone is going to download that game no matter what just because it's super silent era Masum so it's very hard for them to even soft-launched even read software instead of reliably and trusting your metrics at that point to much's is or can can be really misleading the one thing that's our unified factor in all my conversations with these people is that nobody actually is able to anticipate in every single case the creators behind the hit

prior to shipping they have a hunch they know the biz might actually work pretty well but in practice nobody really knows until things actually connect recording the system stuff learning to say no as early as possible is is super important there's even if you filter everything that saw everything everything to a level of we're just doing the good opportunities there's still way way too much Europe one of the few people in in the world that everyone is coming after and even the good opportunities think hard which ones you're going to pick good rule of thumb generally stay focused on the game because every time you extend it slows you down and ultimately the game is that the core the game is the part that everyone is interested in and to give you an idea on on the amount of demand your cost and that's when he'll come

pricing shift at some point they were getting so many emails that they just have to stop reading email because it was they were just completely overwhelmed by that and Johannes Johannes is saying that so they ended up spending chasing way too many potential opportunities early on after Bertrand had shipped was on hindsight he he feels that it would have be much better just to focus on the game and execute that better and better and better instead of sidetracking for every bit of opportunity so good rules of thumb keep it simple stay calm get a lot of things done fast one of the things is when it happens time is the enemy you don't have that much time you're scaling up fast and you better leverage that will not last forever so move as fast as you can don't second guess everyone's gonna make mistakes well that's that's okay on

hindsight you're good you're going to do a lot of things differently next time but second-guessing will not help anything I like to think that it's a good rule of thumb to to make a lot of friends while you're going up because eventually you're going to need those when one things change and always be shipping put out a lot of updates out there keep improving the product I think you emphasize how much of a difference it makes them on being there earlier having having experienced the same thing and the one thing that's brutal is that complacency kills even if you have a great track record of of shipping great games every time every game is a new experience just focusing on your roots on your company's core values is is absolutely essential not getting stuck in the past is if teams work three years ago it's

actually more likely that the same things won't work today this industry changes so fast but if if you're not able to read recreate yourself or rebuild your company or constantly adapt if you stay put then that's going to lead down into very dark paths you should you should be proud of your history but at the same time you should put it past past and keep looking forward constantly and again so personal facade is that when we were building clashes a dance and somebody starts talking about well what they were doing back in the day everyone goes like no kind of not was four years ago let's focus on on this right here right and another thing that's related to not what's pretty really difficult is actually identifying what made you so successful it's a it's something where companies really really often fail again

your metrics lie so reading reading that data can be very challenging but at the same time I mean we all have egos it's really easy to start thinking like we created a hit we know this by now now we just create more hits that's not how it works it's every single time is different and trying to build at least I think one of one of the typical failures is trying to build a cookbook for success there's no kind of as long as we check all these boxes then we're going to have a hit because so many things changed underneath the team a team changes it changes underneath the company structure similar that's every single time I mean you actually need to build it from the ground up again and once you have a big hit the feedback you're going to get is something that you cannot trust either everyone you're in the spotlight there so everyone is going to blow smoke up

your ass it's a it's a nice position to be in but it's kind of you have to relieve the filter things things a proton the other thing is is that by definition no game is perfect at launch it's the launch is just the starting point your game is actually you know the small core nugget of a game that you start then building up with the audience but suddenly that core Naga this is a mega hit and that's a hard balance when you're trying to figure out like we have to improve the game but is that actually is your work even actually improved in the game or is all that massive might be a success just hiding hiding a little actors and things that are missing from the game underneath that success the demand is going to be incredible so it's very hard to kind of charge for it to go with with the product and trusting your own creative instinct then validating with as much data as you can sounds pretty good

the way we've approached this with best things is that we shape the game a couple of years ago and we've been building it up with the audience our approach has been you know work hard work really really hard where basically every three weeks were updating the game with massive amount of new content we have a team that's working 24/7 to build that up were analyzing improving improving performance were making the game concretely far more fun every single day we have an approach where we link product and marketing they they work hand in hand together or so for example right now were running a big campaign that's a gameplay campaign built around a treasure hunt where some of the world's biggest youtubers hide their symbols into the game and then the audience can can look up those symbols and basically hunt all the treasure only if you find them find all of the treasure you get a massive prize in the

game um and it's something that our fans appreciate they're having a great time our engagement is actually how you're done done it's ever been were clocking around 2.3 million Diu currently and at the same time it's something that gives the marketing great way of reaching out to to youtubers and working with them and gives them a fresh new angle to to actually build their videos and we we put a lot of effort into highly differentiating or or marketing we just recently lost the biggest marketing content we've ever done with Kate Walsh from Grey's Anatomy leading him and Rosanna pansino and Joey Graceffa co-starring in a in a huge viral video called don't download best games you know bit of reverse marketing psychology thing and that's connecting wonderfully we got six million views in the first five days for example our telethon it's

it's now starting to fill across and we put a lot of effort into the IP itself we we actually spent far more time than what you ever see on the game or on the marketing just building off the best things world building up the characters building a foundation not we can then ship several games games out on and keep improving a building of the best things property into the bigger and bigger thing and one of the things that has been pretty central with us from the right from the start start this also do the right thing we've worked with several charities whether malaria malaria no more or us worth with Apple was a wonderful opportunity to raise money for good causes and in total I think we've raised more than four hundred K for charities as well as well and that's it it's really important for us to to combine a positive bit and good causes with the thing with the entertaining things we do

and then we get to the very difficult second album which were just about to ship but or next one but anyway one of the challenges after a hit is when you're starting to work on the next game your first game is you know it's punk worth the world it's it's bigger than anything you imagined it so everyone warm starts and it's resonating really strongly with your second game you're starting from scratch and at that point comparing anything you do with the second game just forget get everything that you've done and start again it's all if you could just put all of those experiences behind you and start playing the game from fresh again that would be totally wonderful and highly recommended and last but not least once you have a good hit it can also be a foundation that you can build into a long-term sustainable property the big ideas can flourish for

decades if you look at someone's Mario that that we've got going for 40 or 50 years so so when you're hitting those dashboards when everything goes for a recall at that point think five years ahead think what you want to be long term and try to focus on that as early as possible thank you [Applause] [Music]