Chat as a games platform

[Music] [Music] where our next speaker is Alena our ponine from quicksave who's talking about chats as a platform so a round of applause please thank you okay so I kind of continue on the same area as the last speaker my name is Eleanor puddin and I'm the CEO and co-founder quicksave and we develop games exclusively for messaging so to chat as a platform so that's why I'm here today to talk about what is this what does it mean to have a chat as a platform what does it offer for games and what does it offer for game developers a little bit about my own background so we started our first game startup stripe studios in 2010 tribe was

already doing social and multiplayer games it wasn't PC and Mac platforms because our games required people to have discussions with each other and we didn't think that that would fly in the standalone mobile application if you had to type a lot then in at the end of 2014 we realized that the chat apps had arrived and we realized that we could have our games inside applications if somebody would kind of distribute our games we started to contact different setups and they were all kind of interested in this idea we found our lingo which then ended up acquiring the company so for two years we were developing chat games for PAL ring which is a pretty group chat application messaging app you might not know it it has a big following for example in the MENA region in Middle East so after Padrino like basically at the beginning of this year we cannot realized that we had this experience around the chat games and the market had

been happening kind of exploding with different platforms coming into the play what we already know this that part we know is that you can do games with simple texts like both games but once you have an html5 component that also powering or rolled out you can get so much more infinitely more kind of game play inside the chat it's kind of big day we're also announcing our first game based on pester best investor is a cooperation with the finished animation studio diddlebock entertainment they announced their TV animation with the same name last week at cartoon forum so based on paced are these two characters who are always trying to find out what is the bestest thing in the world and they're making this illogical comparisons the game is also competitive site where you can try to guess what others have oh did you have some user-generated content where you can create your own crew polls for your friends so based on paster is a very social game that fits well in this kind

of communicative environment that we have in the chat that's about us now let's go and start with the numbers so what does the messaging look like overall once there was the size of the market well one key fact is that the messaging apps have surpassed kind of more traditional social networks in size so this means that the likes of whatsapp it's a messenger they have more users than Facebook Twitter Linkedin and this this kind of trend keeps on going if you look at Facebook Messenger alone it has 1.2 billion monthly active users and that's a big install base for a platform if we look at some of the other new platforms that have been coming for games like smartwatches VR they are still kind of struggling to have enough penetration for the technology that it makes sense that the games can go Coke robic with these kind of user numbers in in the chat the games can already grow and they can already become big there's

a flurry statistics on the categories and how they are growing so if you if you look at the messaging it's the fastest-growing app category and quite interestingly the game apps is the second last it actually has a negative growth in the in the app usage so messaging is still growing very rapidly the last graphical traffic static statistics flight is about the monetization so on the first one you have the online entertainment in China and what categories are monetizing most so the games is the biggest one the blue sector and also the same on in u.s. so the biggest monetizing sector is games in online entertainment and now if you look at all the statistics if you look at the messaging how big that is already and it's still growing and then you look at how games traditionally are good at

monetizing audiences it starts to make a lot of sense to put the two together so what are the platforms I'm gonna go shortly through how these six different apps have have made their solutions for games there are other apps that that display games but they are downloadable games and now we are only interested in the experiences that you can have without leaving the kind of mother after messaging app so facebook Messenger instant games it's a fully integrated html5 games they are always full screen with a portrait orientation they've been in pizza since in the Flast year and the kind of two key components here for game developer is that the games can send customized customized messages to chat and these are really rich messages that you can do and you can have a full control on how you communicate and that's very important because we are in a social environment

where people are communicating with each other and the game needs to fit nicely into that environment and make sense on on people need to want to receive their messages from the game and then another key feature is that you can easily switch contacts between groups and friends so even inside the game in one game session you can decide that actually I wanna play with these friends or or with this group of people and that's also very handy mechanic to have a have a game play in the messaging where where you can kind of choose who do you play with on the fly and the monetization the big question it's coming this year as Facebook has publicly announced the next one kick has discovered four bots that includes game BOTS and the games can create these buttons on the chat even though that doesn't look graphically so fancy it

still makes the game able to have a lot more deaths and tests with text messages so that's already a big improvement for just game bots but then also in in kick you can have like a full html5 page is opening and what they are doing with one of the season it's kind of interesting they'd sussed it well maybe it's still ongoing that's in the process of doing an initial point offering a token distribution event and presumably they will use that their own token which they say is it's a decentralized ecosystem of digital services for daily life so they will use that to monetize their games interesting to see how how that will go free contacts that was already mentioned by their by the last speaker which is the most popular messaging app in Russia and they launched direct games last month which is html5 games launched directly from the app and they have this V contact points that they monetize with but it's currently only available in Android and so they only are saying that

iOS is coming and we don't know when the iOS comes but definitely something to to look at on how how this works as well convinced at Ritter can be a bit elusive from Western game developer because the app that we download here is a reduced version of what you get in China so it's hard to investigate what does it actually have they don't have a game discovery for this kind of html5 pay five games they have games tab but that's only for downloadable games so for these games you have to search for them as you would be searching for your friend and you can kind of print the games and you can play them they'd be launched from there from the chat and you can share them to friend but they but the kind of integration between the game and at the platform isn't as strong as like in facebook Messenger we and have those rich messages up here and where you can switch the context of who you play with so so I haven't seen that

here and somebody knows otherwise correct me it's a bit hard area to investigate without the skills in memory iMessage obviously only available for iOS users for iPhone and iPad often the games are also native iOS games so the download kind of happens in the background so it's it's almost it is like you are playing in the in the chat in the messaging but they're still off in a download into your phone but then Don the monetization side obviously there are both paid premium apps and in-game purchases it's it's a straight connection to App Store monetization the last app telegram has html5 games played via a bot so you have to talk to this game pot and the game pot will tell you what teams there are available and then then it can launch this html5 games telegram announced

fairly recently that they brought pot payments to their platform but what that mainly means is that if you are like ordering a pizza through a pot you can pay for the pizza inside telegram but I haven't seen like a proper game monetization and I haven't been really expecting one because the electron has been run kind of like a non-commercial project and until at least so far so so it's still technically interesting interesting to see what happens there and and and how they will develop in the future and I'm pretty sure the list will will still grow I mean there are still chat applications that haven't introduced anything like this kind of instant game type of gameplay and they still might do that so how does it work for games so what do games benefit from being on this platform a couple of things first of all it's a natural multiplayer environment this may seem like a self-evident thing of course but let's it's it's worth to take a note

like what does it actually mean because a lot of the games out there right now are single-player games which don't really utilize this and it's it's a multiplayer environment inside your social graph so it's very easy to play games with your friends and it works both for like turn-based games or synchronous multiplayer games asynchronous multiplayer games really all types of multiplayer is a natural fit then the chat group kind of functions as the game lobby so that's where you launch the game into the game sessions alone or or with your friends by your side at the same time also kind of related but different it is instant clans if you look at games like clash of clans there's kind of a funnel you go and you download and install the game you start playing the game you join and find a clan for yourself and then you start chatting in the clan chat and the

chat is a very important feature because it provides their attention you often come back to the game because your clan needs you you can't let down your friends so that's why you start playing again but in in the chat environment this is kind of reverse that you start with the chat and you start with your clan around you and then you then you go and play the game so this is kind of a different environment and you have to you have to consider it it can enable certain things that in the AppStore are difficult to do are actually easy to do in the chat environment and here after you played the game of course you can go back to the chat and talk some more and also talk about the game and share the game strategies so the chat is kind of there for the game to use then obviously easy access because there's no download you just click on it and it you can play instantly and it's worth noticing that there's also no uninstall so after you get fed up with the game there's nothing that you remove

from your phone not to play anymore so one day you might still think all right so there was this funny game let's go back to it so also coming back to a game it's very easy but because this start is very fast the players are not investing a lot of time to get into your game and because if this small investment in the beginning you don't have a lot of time to impress them on the first first go if you go and buy a PC game and it takes a takes an hour to to download and patch and login you give it a time you keep it a give it an hour to impress you before you decide that it's not actually for you but here it might be seconds that you need to give the first positive impression and you need to saw what the game is about how to play it and and also like what will it offer later in when you return will there be something more that you get the next time or more that you get when you keep playing it so

there's a lot of kind of requirement on the on the first game gameplay seconds and on there like the first gameplay session then there's of course the built-in notifications this is also kind of self-evident but but you know it's worth thinking about it because it's it's very important how the games communicated at chat and so that the users want to receive their messages so that they are funny and kind of relevant and if you think of the notification sometimes it's hard for to get the players accept notifications from your game app I mean you can send them from your game app but sometimes people don't allow them but here people usually allow the messaging apps to send them notifications so that's something that it's a big opportunity for virality I mean of course the people can and they often will view the group's where they play most so that the muted groups don't

in we pop up there in the in the front screen of the phone but even if they mute groups they still go into the into the messaging apps like many many times a day so they will see the little number there and they will easily see the messages from your game so this there's a big opportunity here and it's also something that you really need to think of carefully when designing your game on watch the kind of communication strategy with that with the game at the platform so is this is this like something that everything's everyone's to do like every game is an instant hit well well no it's it's still that the games are services here maybe more than more than ever elsewhere because it's technically easy to update your instant game so there's no need not to do that and players are kind of used to that level of service that the games are kept fresh by updating the content so they they would

not require any less from from from a game inside their messaging app so the meta game and if required from the games will eventually be as you dress for any any current game in an app store so it took a different platforms different type of an ecosystem there's definitely benefits of being there but you have to still build the game and work towards like how do you get it to be a fit for the platform okay last summaries so what is shared as a platform it's a natural multiplayer environment it's instant clan and community building frictionless discovery and move to the game messaging and notification interfaces are built in two points on what is I feel it's not it's not a user acquisition channel for your game in the App Store this is actually something that a lot of the platforms don't allow you to do so they don't allow you to have like lite version in the chat that just links to your full game that's not what it's the

what the ecosystem is kind of built for and it's not just for like light and small mini games you can have as much meta game and this and vividness in in your games there's also somebody was asking at the end of last year there's also 3d games came through 3d graphics in in instant games already so so you can do a lot and it's not only a distribution channel for existing html5 games again because the need to tailor the experience to fit the platform so you still need to think about how does the game utilize the the messaging environment and and how does it fit there okay thank you I think I have a couple of minutes maybe two minutes for any questions yeah yeah any questions please shout do we have any any questions about about chat as a gaming platform playing some games for

example the initial download has to be big quick quick so you have to be able to to load up the the first kind of set of graphics and gameplay very quickly so that you don't have to wait but you can actually have your own back-end and you can load on the background as well so there is no like kind of one hardly meet actually but it's just on the initial loading and the overall usability that that is kind of measured it was there question ten here first then I'll come to you next and that'll be there hi so you mentioned briefly that Facebook son knows something about monetization I read a lot that I haven't seen that anything can you point me to what they've said information on the messenger games slide Facebook say

they're adding monetization I've only seen them say well we're thinking about it and we ever actually want to solve for it has there been so many concrete there has been there has been announcement didn't they crunch earlier this year maybe I can still find a link yes they said that there will be monetization launched this year and and they haven't said much more about it at least not that I know of any links thank you and then just one phone call you've got a mic maybe to it you said that the loading time has to be quick but how quick exactly and for example I know that unity has a very slow start up time on web it's unity too slow we haven't tried unity so I don't have I don't have it there's somebody from the audience whatsoever but then I

don't remember the actual how many seconds it's that there is a there's a limit from Facebook like how many seconds you can load I don't remember the exact number right now but I haven't tried the Trinity and I don't know what the unit is loading time is so I can't really say if it's if it's too too slow all right [Music] [Music]