Bringing esports to mobile

[Music] [Music] hi everyone welcome to the eSports track I guess it's the first eSports session of the day today we're going to talk about few things I haven't checked the program just kidding i-i've seen some good stuff here but we'll start with a breakout heat of the last year called guns of boom it's one of the games that we've built at game insight in the last year like we've launched at 8 months ago and it grew to almost 30 million downloads and it keeps growing rapidly so for those of you who are not familiar what

gaming side is way around for like 8 years got 500 people developing games we started with simulation tycoon hidden object games and spent the last three years explaining to hardcore tribal and turn-based strategies space simulation games and then it clicked with first-person shooter so just a quick trailer of what actually guns have boom a first-person shooter game for mobile tailored for eSports is let's look at a quick video [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] yay so it's been quite a nice road for us in the last eight months we went from zero to that point with a friend couple of events we've signed up couple of leagues to run tournaments on mobile for us and it's been quite a discover how do you take a game that has been originally a PC game actual Gansu boom started as a pc FPS like three years ago and throughout that time we spend so much time figuring out what esports is how

the transition to mobile how do we simplify controls I had a whole session about that we had to remove crouch-jump all the things that make the game fun on PC and we had to compromise to deliver the first-class mobile experience super accessible game that has recently reached those numbers and since this session is about mobile eSports let's take a picture the global outlook of mobile eSports that's my attempt to kinda combine all the games that have been participating in mobile tournaments that have that have ventured into that space anything from the first games like hearthstone world of 10 blades and then kind of the pivotal moment when clash Royale has launched and it took over a year of attention span from gamers worldwide serie non-stop and shark

position and that's the moment when gonzo boom has launched and we've managed to snack over 20 20 % of monthly downloads in that nation now we see that the niche for mobile esports for mobile first-person shooters just keeps explaining so it started with mobile games then tank based games then many more games has launched in variety of genres and multiple first-person shooters have tried to do that but they always lacked something they have been into Khan flex or the theme was kinda restricting so it took a while to get there and just for mobile at least for that most significant moment I would say the supercell managed to launch game that half has been so accessible so simple it had tournaments built in it had it cuz just tremendous things that the the tournaments that they recently ran are amazing but it's a path for the whole

industry for the all of mobile games to go from just one game to a point when we'll start seeing articles like that why doesn't mobile gaming have its own overwash League well why don't we have all those mobile games being played in arenas why is this still not happening and I think this here is a pivotal moment when we finally have four five mobile games that are so great that you'd like to really have a league for them so that question was only raised like few weeks ago by the press obviously by anyone in the media the industry investors saying like hey we kind of feel it's a it's this explosive moment when we have enough content to actually have things going on on mobile so let's go back to guns a woman I would

like to kind of identify three core things that are required for a mobile game to become kind of eSports centric and eSports oriented we've seen many games that have competitive elements we've seen many games that have great streaming elements but I think this two must be combined to have an eSports centric tile first of all it has to be super competitive and the second part has to be inherently streamable so these two characteristics make it a really great eSports central game and we've seen games that have hundreds of thousands of videos or that have been played versus but then we figured out the third part is when the community just comes in and says we want to run our own tournaments that's what we found with gonzaga even before we launched sports play mode we've had players from day one organizing their own tournaments running their own mini leagues and saying we'd like to go bigger how do we

go bigger how do we run those 64 team tournaments and how do we run them and mount it here's could you do that for us so if you have a game like that where players are just like every day 64 teams are ready to play like that if those players are streaming the game and it's fun to watch and then you've got something on your hands that has to be adapted and scaled for kinda eSports way out there soon as I mentioned like it took us a while to get to a point when we had all those things in place we've built our own video hub so players more willing to share game videos and gameplay moments out there and throw out that face we've started seeing tens and tens of thousands of videos of gameplay be ensured the clans have started running their own channels and we've

started growing at a huge pace because the players have started evangelizing the game they kept saying this is the most fair play mobile game out there it doesn't really feel like a play to win you should figure out that too many games have this matchmaking this balance that makes it really hard to play competitively it really makes it hard to perceive the game as fair so that's another definition of things and not to my games have managed to achieve this balance that makes the game fun without skewing it kinda towards play the win side so that's the growth that we've had that's explosive growth that I was talking about we were building our records with every day we just hit 30 million downloads and 25 million players so that's over five million players in the last month and actually we just launched in Korean Japan like just few days ago so this is the like these numbers we've managed to achieve that

without Asia so now we're super excited we'll be launching in China soon and we are managing to drive those numbers by creating super high quality content that players love the flares left the stream and every time we rotate the maps we have a limited set set of maps and you could only play like five or six at any given moment and then we'll bring new ones remove the old ones so players are much more eager to stream all the new content then release it the old content once we put it back in can rebalanced and with new modes integrated so I would say that's one of the core characteristics of mobile eSports it should be as fun to play as far as watching that and a lot of the content that we bring into the game has to be explosive I mean we have to think about creation of the game content firsthand that it will be streamable it will be enjoyable and shareable it it will be

viral and that's what we've been doing and as I mentioned like we've got over 150,000 user-generated videos on YouTube and those numbers have been growing at a steady pace now it's actually the growth is more in the channels and the quality of the content than the quantity of the content we keep seeing the channels with guides with clients competing with each other with mini leaks and that has led to a decision to launch Pro Play which is a special mode inside the game that has certain caps and certain limitations making it much much closer to a paid PC game that's super super balanced so you could only get specific set of weapons and specific set of health has been capped your armor is being kept and it feels like you're playing I would say quake 1 quake 2 CEF so really fair play balance game and I used to be a pro eSports gamer back in the days and I realized how important that is it to

have the super fire play field to have the same conditions for players here and there and if you have a game that's kind of free-to-play find a point which will make it fair like clash royale figured out that that Dec at level 8 when you go into friendly battle when you go into tournaments it might be kind of optimal for those tournaments MTG has its own rules hearthstone has its own tournament rules so the thing of firing this middle point of saying this is the mode that would like players to play on a daily basis so aside from that like how do we bring these ports to mobile devices what's that bottleneck that we've been seen in the last few years so I think there is this perception the same you would see between that I would say PC players and Xbox players they inherently hate each other and you could remember that halo was the pivotal moment when actually FPS

that was available on the consoles for I assume eight years by 2003 when Halo launched was it around 2003 I guess FPS was already available but everyone kind of hated it and it took one game one game which was halo to say this is the game that we've been waiting for and since then you finally get this holy war between PC gamers and console gamers so I think the mobile eSports have the same problem out there everyone hates those mobile players they playing from their tiny mobile phones while cool pro sports gamers playing those $5,000 rigs with 1080 TI g-forces and beautiful chroma key keyboards from Razer and sitting in comfy chairs at huge arenas I'm pretty sure that will get there as mobile games industry will start tracking those tournaments you've seen what supercell does with their own

in-house produced events so I think that you have you need big huge names amazing team stopped your brand's to get to that point so to get to ESL to get to arenas with your mobile game we have to go through a face of bringing the top tier name so that's kind of a small scale tournament that we would run on our own bringing players then it in a really ad-hoc way then to egl and other leagues and running it online as well so to kind of shift this perception of the problem that like mobile esports this is not serious it's not that that cool we've signed up three more sound names the winners of ESL one at csgo and all the other big household names in PC eSports so these guys are going to start playing guns of boom and we hope that throughout the next few quarters we'll finally reach a point when they

will have a mobile game played professionally by professional players and perceived by professional PC players and that's gonna be that defining moment when we will see mobile esports really going mainstream and perhaps even going head-to-head with PC eSports in terms of perception in terms of food sponsorships in terms of team and brand sponsorship out there so how do we get to this to this point when we have definite mobile eSports game I think as I mentioned in the beginning it's it's a combined effort for the whole industry it couldn't be just one game there has to be enough content the same as in PC you need to have your own Dory's lols and C's goes and Talwar watches to kind of say we have enough big enough variety of content so all the players of different age groups and in different regions could enjoy that and with that I'm open

to questions and I really hope this year will kick off mobile is for this big time thank you yes please Oh Mike it's okay this SEC okay somebody's Josh I'm a junior designer from King and for FPS games like Halo called GOP one of my passions below so one of the challenges I found though with first-person shooters is the fact that unlike an RTS game like Starcraft a player doesn't actually see what the the the view doesn't actually see what the player sees all times and they can't see this full spectrum of what's going on so they've had to do things like switching between player cams well I wasn't actually provide the same experience how have you found overcoming that challenge in producing

your own game we have really super casual experience for FPS super light we we don't see any challenges like that and players actually not asking those questions we've been surprised by that I know that once you go to a more hardcore FPS game and mobile you get all those questions so somehow when you kind of reach much more casual FPS audience it just goes away I've been surprised by that so maybe it's really not an issue that you have on PC mobile players are much more casual than that so just I don't know be brief about it you might realize it's more simple than it is so we got on the flip side games like pop G on a PC that's gone viral and that just has one pair cam itself will spectating what kind of things can we take from that do you think to apply to our games or mobile yeah well I think that Bob G and mobile although all the clones from Nettie's in these games are like knives

out and survivor Royale they have kind of ended the audience of mobile eSports they brought top tier PC pro players towards mobile and those players came to mobile and they're like yeah actually could play the full pub G experience it has all the same features but it requires me to crouch and jump and do this and do that and controls are so complex so I've shown the graph at this was what we've peaked in terms of concurrent users recently when all those public loans have launched because those PC players realize that the controls are too complex and it's not as fun to play that on mobile so I think that like if you take a look at fortnight so fortnight is kind of a super Arcadia super short session compared to pop G probably a typical session is much longer than the fortnight well full scale for tonight's session is it could be as long so I

would say that the key takeaway here is that there are different types of FPS games and they're being perceived differently by different audiences of players and for super casual game like that like Gansu boom we wouldn't find an audience on PC but we could find it on mobile the same applies to pop G pop G players would flock to mobile versions of that and would spend some time between the the bigger sessions of poverty but then they would ask a question can we actually get a much more casual and relaxed and simplified experience for mobile so it's a game of compromise it's not every particular game mode and especially due to this session length gun superman' WA has 5 minute sessions fixed time while pop G you know could scale from 30 seconds you just dropped and you've been killed with a single punch or you could last for 20 minutes and you're like just sitting and crouching in the last though and you've never even seen in a single enemy so this had two different types of

experiences I think what games like vainglory has suffered because of that they've been initially built with much much longer session times and you couldn't play shorter than that cuz you have to go through the mid game you have to do the certain push so you have to defy the rules of traditional gameplay modes for mobile and you have to come from ice alot more questions do we have more time technically no but we can always open an exception if there is one okay thanks guys hope this was insightful [Applause] [Music] [Music]