Bringing Discovery Back to Mobile Games, Jong Woo, Samsung Electronics.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] bringing Discovery back to mobile games and it's John from Samsung hey everybody good morning um all right so we're going to talk Discovery or I guess sort of the lack thereof right I think um you know sort of the industry Mantra in Mobile gaming is that Discovery is dead but um if you've been in the industry as long as I have you know that that wasn't always the case right so you know 10 12 years ago sort of you know in the early days of the App Store the mobile gaming

industry um mobile game Publishers they built growth strategies around verality and sort of you know discoverability right um we used to measure things like K factors um I don't think anyone really sort of monitors actively K factors anymore or reality these days right um and you know it it was at a time when like you know smartphone activations were hockey sticking right there was millions of people activating new smartphones for a very very first time upgrading from like their feature phones or flip phones and everyone was super engaged interested to see what new cool experiences touchs screens could sort of enable um there was a ton of organic traffic into App Stores um and game Publishers wanted to take advantage of that right so if you played any kind of bizdev function back in the day like I did like you spent a lot of time driving down to like Meno Park and copertino and you know sort of Mountain View um talking about sort of the latest and

greatest cool things about your game and the hopes that you would get featured right because they're featuring like a top Banner placement for a week into the app stores right it meaningfully moved the needle for you right or you know you worked with sort of the the Facebook teams about how to sort of activate things like open graph stories or you know sort of send requests and so if you guys ever got sort of you know um Candy Crush requests around sort of you know send me lives um I apologize uh that that that was totally us um but you know those days are now long and gone right um now we've all had our smartphones for many many years some of us sort of decade plus right like we've got the 10 15 apps that sort of you know fit nicely into our lifestyles we're not really looking to you know sort of uh look for a whole bunch of new experiences right um organic traffic into app stores has has gone down um and even if you do get featuring with all the sort of design changes of the app stores

um it's not meaningfully moving the needle for you anymore right so everyone's got massive UA teams trying to figure out how to do paid user acquisition right I think on Android um you know since we're Samsung we tend to look at it sort of within the sort of lens of Android um 80 plus percent of game installs are happening through paid channels right that means game Publishers are driving that traffic with their own dollars uh into the app stores uh to drive uh the installs um even when we buy a new device right um as as a user all we're doing is backing up and restoring our old devices to look exactly like you making our new devices look exactly like our old devices right our pictures transfer over all the apps that we used to have transfer over that's just sort of the way the ecosystem runs today right and now you know these ad networks and the game Publishers they're trying to catch your attention

where your attention already is like I can't open Instagram uh these days without a game ad uh sort of you know in my face in in my News St in my Instagram stories right um there's a lot of pains around that right there's there's you know we're starting to look at things like you know what's the cpis what's the what's the return on your advertising spend and the yields right um M&P attributions like it's just you know this massive operation um that didn't used to be the case um and and so you know at Samsung we have been thinking about this from both from a user perspective as well as uh a game Publishers perspective right how do we bring Discovery back right how do we bring sort of the joy of you know sort of finding a game and getting into it and playing um without all the frictions and the burdens I think that has massive impact both for sort of the end users and how they engage with the content that you guys are creating but also how you guys get that content in front of these people right

um so you know at Samsung we are a technology company we we predominantly sort of you know are in the hardware space you guys know our phones and our TVs but really sort of you know the way that we look at technology is how do we utilize technology to drive sort of you know a new user experience a a sort of you know solving pain points how do we innovate to create these types of new experiences for for our customers and you know for us we look at this particular problem around discoverability um as something that we think we can solve um we look at streaming Tech and what it's done for other media like movies or music right and how it's changed consumer behavior um you know all of us is probably gone into Netflix sort of wanting to watch something not really knowing what we want to watch getting something recommended to us clicking on it in a matter of seconds being in it and fully immersed right same with you know streaming like Music Services like Spotify I don't know how

many new artists I've discovered right through Spotify um and being able to go in and if I don't like the music just being able to get out right no sort of you know skin off my back um this is the type of experience that I think you know um Samsung can deliver and this is something that we are developing today so there's two aspects of this um from from what we are developing one is the ability to discover this content right so it needs a surface right if it's if people are not visiting apps stores where can you get in front of people to be able to surface this content right and make your games discoverable to them and personalized um the Sams every Samsung Galaxy device comes with an application pre-loaded called the game launcher which we've rebranded to the gaming Hub essentially what this app is it's a utility application for Gamers on our devices right so if you've got a bunch of icons that you've downloaded from the app store we'll folder it for you just like a launch

right if you want to toggle the settings of your device for sort of optimal gameplay you can do that within the game launcher right maybe you've got like 10% on your battery and you want to run Battery optimization because you need to get in to fight with your clan uh for that battle right you're going to turn on battery optimization so that you can at least you know sort of get in for that session maybe you want to sort of run sort of you know full sort of blown uh 20 120 frames a second on your device those are the types of things you can sort of toggle and do within sort of the game launcher application and so the game launcher application which is the gaming Hub today has globally 160 million monthly actives and the average active user is visiting the gaming Hub three times a day right so high engagement and what we're what we're now introducing in the surface is content Discovery right so we want to be able to take the games that you guys are developing and surface it to these users in a personalized way

and sort of that's s that's step one right but then step two is we don't want this to feel like an ad right like if you think about the way ads run today you discover it on a Surface you click on it you have to go to the app stores you have to click the install button wait for the install to happen right open it download you know gigabytes of resource files before the user even gets into the game right that's a high friction process and you know if you think about your ads performances these days right from a conversion stand Point you're probably sort of in like that 5 10% range which means that 90% of people who showed enough interest in your content to click on your ad actually never get into your game right um that's a massively leaky bucket and a missed opportunity and so what Samsung has also developed and we are in beta now is an Android native mobile native Cloud streaming platform what that means is that we are able to take Android native apks and pre-load them into our virt

Android based virtual machines and we can actually start streaming these games directly to your device right so now from a user experience standpoint users who are coming into the game launcher they can click on your game because we've recommended it to them and they can get into the game seamlessly in a matter of seconds all the actual APK and all the gigabytes of resource files that you guys download from the cdns right those are all pre-loaded onto our virtual machines kept warm and instantly delivered to users on Demand right so this is a way for us we believe that we can sort of you know reimagine uh sort of mobile game distribution on mobile on on our devices right we want to bring back sort of the joy and excitement of discovering new content in the same ways right that you know you do for movies and media today and as game Publishers this has huge ramifications in how you think about user acquisition now we're not saying that this is going

to get rid of paid right um paid will still be there in terms of sort of user acquisition channels but now you can imagine a scenario where you drive an ad click and the ad click takes the user directly into the game right what what would your user economics be look like if you could drive 100% conversion of your ad clicks to actual gameplay versus the five or 10% that you're seeing today right that would have massive impact to the bottom line lines and how you guys sort of think about and build out your user acquisition strategies so you know this is what I wanted to share with you guys today this is the work that we're doing at Samsung um on the mobile side uh we are in beta uh with our Cloud streaming platform as well as the gaming Hub um we are in beta in the US and Canada at the moment so if there are any game Publishers out there you know who are interested in bringing the content in and testing this with us like we welcome from uh you know sort of your

feedback uh and your participation thanks thank you very much um I I love this direct into the game stuff this is I mean if you were talking about other um device manufacturers I think there'd be a level of skepticism but the the the market share that you guys have the the the coordinated experience between multiple devices is I think unparalled in the in the space and I think that makes it a massively interesting thing to me as a publisher um I think I think also for those of us who are doing games on multiple platforms that becomes much more interesting as well so I I think that's fascinating does anyone have any quick questions before I dive in there's a question over here if we can get Katherine to grab the mic uh or I might shout it I'll repeat your question yeah for the recording so just to repeat that was far as retention is concerned I missed the

rest yeah can you send push notifications oh can you send push notifications thank you so this for the recording yeah that's a great question yes you can so the way that you can send push notifications within sort of our platform today um is you know we had this problem when we were running through the user flow of someone who clicks on an ad let's say they went to Instagram they clicked on an ad for your game they were immediately in the Stream they loved your game and they want to get back to that game the next day right how do they get back into it if it was actually a stream that you know originated directly from an ad unit um and so being the device manufacturers um what we have the ability to do is to sort of background install um sort of apps on the device and so what we actually do is we create a little shortcut icon which is actually an APK um onto the user's device essentially what that what that is it's just the artwork of your icon and a deep link into the cloudstream and it lives on your home screen so because it's an APK that APK can now send push notific ation to the user to re-engage that user um

and so we do have a return path for the users that you know has huge sort of impact on the retention and we also enable all the tools that game Publishers utilize today you know by way of things like push notifications to drive that increased engagement and retention I'm going to geek out now because that that sounds fantastic that's the stuff that we've been talking about that cloud should be doing and you know because that's the stuff that you can't do in other context that's right and I think that is a unique position that Samsung is in as sort of the sort of the device device the OEM manufacturers and sort of the the the the abilities that we have um you know alongside you know sort of the the ecosystem that we build um and one thing that I also wanted to mention right like if Cloud streaming in gaming is not new right like there there's Cloud streaming services out there today um the way that we approach this is a little bit different in that like we're not charging subscription fees to end users right to to access the stream um what we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that this business fits seamlessly both

to the end users expected experience but also to the game Publishers experiences what that means is that like you know all of this is optimized for freeto playay gaming right it's it's free to the end user we fully enable I AP and IAA um Ina advertising monetization um and so you know you can think about this almost as just taking the App Store functionality of distribution and virtualizing it in the cloud I it just reminds me of a small Seattle based company that talked to real networks back in 2000 about using streaming technology they decided to go off and become steam but um they did actually have long very early conversations about cloud gaming back as early as 2000 that's how long this has been around anyway uh last quick question before we move on anyone got a quick question so I mean the thing for me is how many people are really understanding the power of not just your mobile devices but the crossplatform potential that you guys have particularly with the gaming Hub do you are you seeing uh mobile publish and other Publishers starting to engage in

that space we are um so you know we've got actively probably about 1.2 billion mobile devices and probably you know near 300 to 400 million TVs right um in people's living rooms and so you know we've got now Publishers who are looking at sort of cross device um experiences we already have some Publishers let's say like the epics or the hoyo versus of the world that have you know content that you know Works seamlessly cross device and so for us you know in partnership with them trying to figure out how we deliver that seamless experience right across all the sort of screens um that you know Samsung provides both in our pockets and our in Del living rooms and I think because I'm old and I've done this for a long time it's interesting to see how often we fluctuate between device based uh acquisition versus platform based acquisition it feels like this is kind of redressing some of that balance as well on that note uh go go for it quickly just a quickie so there a microphone behind you G yeah say you

have an app and testing on test flight apple or uh Google Play what's involved in uploading to your uh service is that something that's pretty straightforward you just re reinstall uh the app it is straightforward so you know the Sam Samsung ecosystem also has the Galaxy store which is a third party our our owned and operated third party app uh App Store so if you upload the app into our sort of developer console for Galaxy store um we can immediately make it enabled for cloud great on that note thanks you so much for that very much I'm going to be going looking into that uh direct into game stuff [Music] [Applause] okay