Building mobile esports in Guns of Boom

[Music] hello everyone thanks for coming my name is Nick Sherman and I'm the head of strategy at game insight and I also lead the whole eSports initiative in the company so you know we've spent already some time working on eSports we've learned many lessons at first hand and I'm really happy to share this experience today with you so but you know talking about eSports regarding game inside of course [Music] I'm talking about guns open our leading product which so it's a first-person shooter you could see it from the next video introduction and it was launched May 2017 so like a year and a half ago

and has already guarded really huge audience more than 55 million downloads active daily users number is more than million and they play average 15 to 20 million bottles a day so there is a huge you know potential for many things including eSports and that's what we are working it now the game was also nominated for different awards and was over did by some of them it has huge communities and different social networks so yes it's as I said it's a fruitful soil to work with but the thing is when we just started working on cancer boom you never thought about making it an eSports so our first big

goal was to create the best mobile shooter first-person shooter and that was the challenging goal cause you know shoot first-person shooter and mobile has you know some complicated puzzles to get solved so and I think that we've kind of redefined the whole genre for the Mobile's because you know to play first person shooter a real first person should to not pop G style of games you need simultaneously doing three things to move your character to aim your weapon and to shoot so at least three buttons but playing mobile you have just two fingers to you know get control so the solution in our case was to get rid of one of the elements or the control

elements and we came up with auto fire so you don't need to put button to fire once your weapon is aimed exactly on your enemy out the fire started so that's I would say lead to the whole success because of this control solution and because of the whole I would say funny way the game was produced this cartoonish style you know beside of that by the way we still have problems with the platforms because you know it's it's not actually the best time to have for example word gun in the name of the game because all the shootings every once in a while happens in the US the guys instead of you know working on the real problems decided to I would say you know

blame somebody or someone or something and videogames is really you know nice example so yeah it's a also a problem to total war peace but still we've never thought about eSports but once the game become popular once millions of players started to join the battles they inevitably came to us and asked to organize some kind of tournaments to let them compete with each other on some new level and I can say that eSports was something we haven't heard about before but of course it was not the area of our expertise we sit down to you know to discuss how to

deal with it and not you know manage to find all the answers to all the questions you've decided to approach a friend of ours is sports holding es force which owned that time a couple of biggest names in traditional esports world na'vi and yips prom and from the very first meeting we understood that we talk in the same language language and the guys had completed the same thoughts as we had and that gave us an opportunity to find common goals common interests and to work very tightly on creating all you know stuff that fault so we also realized how many challenges

we are going to face on our way to success here first of all and the main headache to deal with was the basic concept of the game because Gonzaga is a free-to-play game which means that besides you know working on your skills you can take an advantage through binds and stuff and to buy kind of superiority and it doesn't work in eSports world because pay to win situation and is cannot coexist under one roof so we had to find a solution but besides that there were many other challenges for example Community Challenge you know mobile gamers are not hardcore ones I mean of course they could you know play

every once in a while some kind of hardcore games but in general meaning they are just you know guys who want to kill time not you know making plans of going to some offline tournaments to different places and they have they have their normal life their jobs their families and eSports is not their professional kind of interest so we need to find a way how to make these people who used to play single get organized in teams and play in groups we also had to find a solution of how to make game not only interesting to play but interesting to watch because eSports first of all is something to show for other people not

just to play yourself so it's you know it might be watched about the product also you know had to go through many changes but again we couldn't break the basic model the free-to-play model because the game generates much revenue and we you know didn't want to kill the business we just wanted to develop it so yeah many challenges many open questions many things to think about so that's everything we always like but the first question to deal with and to begin with the biggest question was for what reason why we need to dive into

this you know unexplored ocean of eSports something we don't know a lot about and why we need to spend our resources money time everything on that our first guess was my money I mean something obvious maybe we thought we could you know make some extra bucks out of it but the answer is no you cannot of course you need money but for you know otherwise purpose to spend it on your eSports initiatives not to earn it from it but besides this you know bunch of competitive oriented guys who wanted their tournaments there are really a lot of high level users who had played for a long time who spent some bucks on it who started get bored and they need some

new goals they need some ultimate goal they need I mean they need something to look up and to do to achieve - and they all actually really enjoyed in sports then of course marketing because eSports generates so much content you can use in different in different ways and first of all it's the great opportunity to show your product in action to sell your product in action which is probably the best way of selling anything and of course with all this content published in social networks it worked great for increasing your brand awareness as well and later and ultimately of course all the players who you know received a new goal something you know postponed something to reach

they start playing more the stud spent more time in the game the stud buy new weapons and it all leads to you know a long lifetime higher LTV and ultimately more money that's where money is here for us at least and at least at this moment forget about money yeah but again after considering all this stuff we realized that we need somebody with ready-to-use infrastructure to help us to put our plans into a reality and that's how I met Ralph Lee ray Hart who

is the CEO of ESL ESL as a germany-based company probably the largest eSports Holdings in the world it's I would say more media company and on our first meeting I just put a foam with launch the guns of boom interrupts hand and said this is our mobile game which as we think has a great potential in mobile eSports please try it and the guy had played it for the whole meeting I mean like half an hour and I immediately realized that this is the right person to talk to and this is the right place to be and our partnership was kind of inevitable after that so of course it costs us I mean many many meetings with

the SL team countless conference calls internal discussions hours spent on you know thinking of can we do this should we do that and everything but we ended up with our inaugural season a season for gonzo boom which took start early June this year and it started with online go for tournaments on ESL platform where teams can earn their qualification points and those who collect the most of them could go through qualifiers to offline events and there are two of them this season the first one is in was in Katowice Poland late June July sorry and Yakupov

it C is not an accident I mean ESL has their studio there and Kitab it's in Poland now is the kind of capital of European eSports where they held one of the biggest tournaments Intel Extreme Masters every February great event I really recommend just to go and to witness it and the second one is going to happen mid-november on ESL studios in LA and it's going to be the first one was European Invitational so we invited only European based teams and the second one is going to be kind of Grand Finals Global Finals now we're in the middle of the season and yeah it was I mean it all sounds great but there were much work to

be done before coming to the action first of all we had to deal with the product we had so much work to do [Music] this competitive mode I was talking about eventually had the name properly mode and we've came up with this solution so we decided that only players with twenty second layered or level or higher could enter the problem mode first of all we wanted the players to get some experience before going pro and second we've decided to equalize all the staff all the weapons inside the problem mode on 60 second level to make everybody more or less equal so the next huge

thing we've developed was this unique technical integration and it's really unique I mean nobody but us has this kind of integration with here so it works this way so first of all you need to apply for a tournament on ESL's website after that ten minutes before the tournament you get notified by the game that tournament is going to begin in two minutes ten ten minutes sorry and after that whatever you are doing in the game you are pulled in into the tournament without pushing any buttons I mean not a single tab you just start you know playing the tournament with your team spectator mode which is the crucial part as I said before and we've even produced these specific AR mode

spectators mode for broadcasters and video bloggers to let them show the game from these observers points of view which works really great you can see it on the picture and of course in-game promo because you need you know to make eSports visible for the players to let them enter and try the thing the show components will also spend much time trying to understand how it should look like they actually the most problem with mobile is sports as a whole thing now is that nobody knows how it should look like everybody knows kind of is traditional eSports character the traditional eSports player the guy in you know this brand that too short full of different

pages with sponsors sitting on a fancy chair with these you know super expensive computers Razer computers or hyper X computers and stuff like Mouse's and mouse pods and everything but nobody knows how mobile is Paul should look like should players stay or sit or lay down I don't know and nobody knows should they be in eco see studio with sofas or sitting in a bar or I don't know you know walking around and played playing on on there walking so nobody knows and we are still working on that we still don't know the ultimate answer but we've got some ideas so and maybe later we will find some ultimate solution and also much work with

platforms each community PR social media everything so eSports is about content how to produce it and how to distribute it methods and despite our eSports season far to go into an end so it's still not over but we already have something to be proud of and one for example of the latest latest news about our eSports initiatives is the one of the teams which played qualified for European Invitational we were acquired by a professional sports organization Forza and played this European Invitational under the new brand under a new name and they kind of

you know grew up to the next level and we really expect similar events to happen more and more later on but I think that the most important thing is that we've managed to grow this number of competitive oriented oriented players and we've learned that these players are as twice more active as regular players which you know makes sense and explains everything so and we will work on you know growing this number later so that's basically it thank you for coming again

and if you have any questions I'm really happy to answer it [Applause] Thank You Nick if there's some questions yeah I would probably want to get it is there a roving mic we can get down to thank you there we go oh yeah there's someone over there there's loads of questions don't worry yeah this there's loads will we'll get onto everyone don't worry hello I have a bit of a design question when you mentioned first developing guns of boom you started by automating the firing and the you know sorry implementing auto fire I wanted to ask you in terms of a balancing aim assist for eSports so did you I imagine you're still probably working on that during live ops and so on but did you do extensive AP testing or were you following like the established pattern from my console developers was it was it

a different pipeline in getting that right from for example what you would expect in console shooters and eSports titles well of course it was an important part of the whole work and did I get you're right that you want to understand how we built the I'm very curious to discover you actually put your firing mechanics and especially when it comes to aim assess did you have like some for example data modeling during internal tests okay yeah so I mean it's it has nothing to do with eSports I mean it's about the auto fire mechanic I mean it's a whole yes but that's kinda seneschal for essential but when everybody are equal it doesn't matter I mean if everybody has this auto fire I mean that explains everything you don't need to know to imagine something but we've also thought about making some

special maps for example for snipers where you should you know excellent your sniper skills because it's a little bit different than just playing with a regular weapon but speaking of general auto fire thing yes it was I mean really great work and I think it's a tie I mean that's a theme for a different discussion thank you well we'll make our way around the room and we've actually put plenty of time aside for questions so we'll get around to everyone though right all right hello so how have you structured yours your team especially the community management around the esports do you have like a team handling this or somebody who is like specialised in esports what kind of roles do you need to make this happen yep very good question thank you very

much so we had to you know to find these answers with our experience because at the very early beginning there were nobody who understands eSports and who got involved in it so I was the first person in the company who started this initiative then it turned out that we have a number of people who just themselves are competitive players and who played the different I mean different hardcore games PC play PC games like League of Legends like dota 2 like everything so and they knew a lot about how the this environment work and how I would say how to and how and where find questions find the answer to the questions we were actually busy with and

incidentally for example the head of community in the company she is a woman she turned out to be one of them and that's helped us you know to solve many problems actually because she works really hard and tight with the community stuff is everybody involved into the community kind of things so that was great because she really helps us to build these you know communication with the audience and she lured us how to toughtest how to you know how to make them get involved into the stuff so that was really great and besides that we found this you know a couple more persons who were really interested in in

the initiative so and it was we didn't hire new people we just you know understood who wants to be a part of it inside the company alright thank you very much hi Nick I have two questions - one is what do you think about streaming of your game is it going to be like a classical streaming to have already assigned streamers or broadcasters and the second question is how are you building your strategy regarding the classical eSports tournaments I mean like are you gonna have like online leagues LAN finals other ABEO - Oh Bo three systems yep thank you very much so yes streamers actually is a crucial part for any sports and any action kind of game I

would say in competitive game and what we've started with was it was a before eSports we started working with different influencers and streamers all over the world but I will tell you these numbers we we've probably paid for around a hundred videos and then in a year we ended up with more than 100 thousand videos published on YouTube from just regular players not you know any kind of paid partners so and now once I mean eSports became so important for us of course we put it on kind of new level and now we work with influencers and different organization even not on our own but through ESL also

they have I mean huge connectivity with the different kind of guys so and they helped us a lot and regarding your second question of about the structure strategy yes so we we are already working on our next season and of course our intention is to put it also on the next level and to do something we've never done before and for example we don't have any organized league so far and of course we are thinking about it we are thinking about about League / regions as six as I remember regions I mean like South America North America Europe Asia and we are thinking about different stuff but again mobile eSports can't we of course we should learn our

own lessons from the traditional eSports we should take the best out from it but we cannot just you know take this legacy and implement it into the mobile we should invent something new we should define it so we are thinking about different stuff and I would be happy to tell about it maybe next year all right thanks for the talk you mentioned retention as the main goal or the main one of the main goals one of the main goals or the outcome so did you see returns and improve only with like the most engaged competitive players or what all the players of course first of all it's all about these

competitive players and and the main goal now is to grow the number of these competitive players but as it works with all the I mean in all the other community based products once the core audience you know goes to the next level all the hours all the others will follow so let's power thought hello have you thought about other partners other than ESL or do you plan like support other platforms or more or other services yep thank you very much for this question actually I forgot to mention egl which is England England games League or something so and we've started with them our first tournaments been organized by

egl it was before our ESL partnership and we still work with a gel for some you know local events and some smaller smaller events but before building the whole infrastructure and behold I think we we thought about well it should be kind of open kind of stuff like for example steam does where everybody could organize any kind of tournament for counter-strike or dota 2 or something or it should be closed environment like League of Legends for example or it can be a mixed one where we can do some you know close events but at the same time to let others to connect our platform and organize their own events for now it

looks like we have mixed one because we work with ESL as the main partner but we still have some smaller partners to organize some local events and what I think is that we will keep it this way maybe later we will even implement some kind of API to let the I mean to make it even easier so yeah [Music] the mics coming from you there we go thank you you kind of touched upon it briefly unlike their previous answers but one of them was like at what point in the game's lifecycle did you decide it was ready to try something like he sports and then how I wish you a brief he's just talking about them but how did you kind of mitigate the risk in the first instance without going straight into like a $200,000 tournament what did

he do on like a low level to make sure that it would work before going I full-on into a big lake can you please specify a little bit I didn't get him yes I basically how did he instead of just going for like a full lake and doing something really big to kick things off which obviously it's got quite a coil of risk attached to it did you run like any sort of smaller tests yeah anything like then how did he go about Emma yeah of course so as I mentioned we've started with a gel and it was a very small tournament with prize pool like 20 pounds or something like that I mean very small and we've tested it there in the UK locally I would say yeah it was number of events not not just one so and after that we moved to this golf or thing with ESL and

in go for tournaments for example weekly prize is like $1,000 for the winner for the team not for the one person but for the team so yeah two hundred thousand is for the whole season and basically for these two of line events to finals the first one was European Invitational with price total prize pool around and how many much was there like 60,000 or something like that and the grand final will have 120 thousand so 120 out of 200 so it's you know the the huge part of it so it's it's more about you know this offline presence then about online forums a few minutes left before our next speaker joins us just a couple of minutes maybe got time for another question Oh Billy when we get him he got very

eager so yeah for for fishing we can get two more anyway thanks for the talk if a player sees tournament and decides to download the game because he seemed it on the eSports scene how long does it take him to get to the pro play mode so to reach this twenty second level if you play really intense it will take you about a month I would say a month sorry why isn't it earlier why did you decide it too little time it for like a month play what what was the duration what were your okay can you speak a little louder what were your reasons to actually wait one month or players okay yeah so the main reason is to make person get some experience to play in professional mode and the other reason is I mean it's a business side we want

him to spend some money refreshingly honest I can be frank with you right at you know we have we probably have time for just one more question was that by for your question questions as yet that we have for you one more time from whenever here and then and then we'll maybe have to wrap it up high so that's the problem out somehow differ from the basic game besides not being paid win so it's the balance different yes of course it's balanced it'll be different I can go into details here because I'm not so much oriented on you know game play but yes a little bit different [Music]