Clash of Clans: Bigger, Better, Battle Pass

[Music] hey everyone my name is aina yas and welcome to my talk titled clash of clans bigger better battle pass title like she encapsulates the whole talk so in essence this talk is about how we made clash of clans bigger better and added a battle pass before we get into the meat of the talk let's give a preview option to clash of clans so clash of clans is building battle game that came out in 2012 it exploded to success back in its day and was a pretty big phenomenon and it grew even bigger in 2014 when the clan war feature was added to the game what do you do in clash of clans well you build a new battle so you attack other peoples villages steal their stuff bring that

stuff home to your village use it to build it up and then rinse and repeat there's strong social aspect to clash of clans so you can also establish clans with your friends and then build those clans up take them into Wars fight against other clans and do other stuff together the village is really at the heart of the game so it's something that you start with it's something that sticks with you the whole game you build it up level by level by level and as you level it up as it grows it becomes more powerful you unlock new toys to play with new cool ways to steal other people's stuff and new ways to wage war the core loop of clash of clans is pretty simple so as I mentioned you steal other people's stuff in battles then you bring that stuff home and you use it to build up your own village and train armies you can also get a bit of

resources by building these resource collector buildings gold mines elixir collectors though those will give you a small trickle of resources on the side so that's clash of clans in nutshell if you have been following gaze media last year you might have seen headlines like this one so our revenue jumped pretty drastically in April last year when we introduced a feature called goldpass which is a battle pass you might know battle passes from games like fortnight it's a system where you sign up every month and get some get a progression structure to go through and get nice rewards out of it and for us that room worked really well and the revenue jumped pretty drastically and what's better we finished a year at nearly a 30% growth year over year and by hearing me say this you might feel like ooh these battle passes they're pretty sweet maybe I should add one to my game and you

might be right maybe you should but then on the other hand it might be a terrible idea and it really we think depends on where your game is at and what it needs that sort of brings me to the bigger journey of this talk so touches on the battle paths and it is a big part of our success last year but it's not only thing that this talk is about this talk is about the journey over the past few years of the things that we did to actually make the battle path succeed how we see it is that we worked on the foundations of the game fix some fundamental problems that we had that if we had left him alone and just did the did our gold pass feature it wouldn't have succeeded as well to give you an an analogy of the Infinity Gauntlet this baby doesn't work on its own it means all of the stones to work Gold Pass was just one of the stones and

the other things that we did where the rest and when once we did the gold pass that's that was the moment when everything blew up giving me this context I would actually go as far as to make a bold claim which is that if he had done gold past two years ago without working on the fundamentals it wouldn't have been a big success in this talk I will take you on a journey of through those two years and show you what we did why we did it and why it actually supported the gold pass and bringing us great results so you might be asked thinking Who am I to make this claim well my name is Anil I am a game designer slash game lead from an imaginary country of Finland I have loved games since I was a kid and that wasn't my first career choice because when we were little and we racked up a massive modem bill playing quake online my dad got really angry and said playing all these games will never do anything good for you so I took heed

of that and I went to get a real and UK education I studied in Helsinki School of Economics majored in economics and started getting really afraid of working in a consultancy or a bank or an insurance company towards the end of my studies luckily I met this guy really late of the era he's a researcher in virtual economies I met him at a dinner party in the Finnish Embassy in Tokyo and we started geeking out about the economy in Ultima Online so great way to make new friends we ended up starting a company together and he was my mentor in getting into virtual economics and learning more about how do Burchell economies work what can he do with them what are good idea is what a bad idea is we did that for two years and that eventually landed me a job at a company called CCP games I moved to work in their studio in Shanghai worked on a

game there for three and a half years then ended up working in Berlin in Germany at a company called Jaeger for three years and then finally I returned to my imaginary native land of Finland to work for supercell at supercell I started first on boom beach as a game designer and then moved to clash of clans in August 2017 and that's sort of where our journey begins beginning of the journey in August 2017 I moved to clash of clans and then September 2017 the game lead at the time told told me you're gonna take over the team now it's gonna be fine don't be scared I know you are good luck and he went to work on a new game project it was a interesting time because the team was pretty new at the time there were quite a few new faces and a lot of movement was happening the game itself had been declining for a while so we were coming into a situation where the pressure was sort of on we

were of course young and bright-eyed and we felt that we wanted to make a difference since we were a new team and since we felt that we needed to do something or otherwise the game probably continued declining it felt like a good opportunity to reassess how the game was doing five years is five years in so the game was 5 years old at this time so how was the game doing in 2017 a small preamble some old games develop old game problems and what class had been live for 5 years at this point and there had been a lot of content added a lot of new things happening and we were starting to see problems or it was apparent at this point that there were some problems in the foundations of the game and systems that were great had been working very well until now we're sort of falling apart and when we started looking at the problems the first one that was very obvious and we talked about lot about it

at the time was the exponential economy so how the clash economy works is as you level up your village things get more expensive and they get more expensive in an exponential way now this works great in the beginning of the game because the costs are low but as you get to the endgame the progression can slow to a crawl and that gets really tedious in my one make you want to stop playing so quite a big problem the next problem we had was that our top level players and absolutely nothing to do and the reason was that it had been over two years since we had released townhall 11 and while we had done some content drops along the way those were immediately burned through by the most dedicated players and they were back at square in square one maxed out nothing to do and this was concerning because these these guys were our most active and most loyal

players if they had didn't have anything to do there was a high chance that they would start churning out third problem was that there was something weird going on in the mid-levels saris we were seeing that on townhall levels 9 and 10 a lot of people were actually not upgrading they were getting to a maxed out state but then they were stopping there and there was really problematic because from our perspective if people are not progressing they don't want anything I mean it's really hard for us then to provide them with cool stuff to do they don't want to move things are tough for us when we investigated this it turns turned out that the clan war system that we had done was actually putting it some social barriers in the way of upgrading and we needed to do something to those barriers so the last problem we identified was that our conversion was not great it wasn't super bad but it wasn't great we felt that maybe we needed to do something about it and the way we

generally think about tackling problems is at supersize retention always Trump's monetization so the logic for that is if you have retention you could always figure out motorisation if you don't have a retention well monetization doesn't really matter at the end of 2017 we decided to break the exponential economy and just to give you a little briefing on what they exponentially exponential economy means in practice so in clash of clans the basic components are essentially resources and time and resources gold elixir dark dark elixir those you get from playing the game stealing people's stuff time it's just something that exists everyone has the same amount gems you can buy with money and you can use gems to either get more resources or get some more just keep some time then the things you spend these on well you spend them on

upgrading training armies whatnot in the early game this is all good and fair the sources and sinks are very balanced and the like you get a nice cadence of upgrades you earn some resources resources that's you raid people's villages you bring those back you start some upgrades you can get several upgrades done in a day and the durations of the upgrades lasts from minutes to hours the problems start happening when you get to the late-game that's where the exponential economy kicks in what this means in practice is that the sinks start outpacing the sources big-time suddenly to start a single upgrade you actually need to Ray instead of draining one village you need to rate 20 villages and instead of an upgrade taking 8 hours it can take 8 days and naturally this will cause some frustration to give you a concrete example if you take a level seven cannon

upgraded to level 8 it will cost 200 thousand gold and take 24 hours that's like early mid game level so it's still pretty good two hundred thousand is something that you can get maybe in two attacks so not too painful pretty okay now if you take the max level cannon which is level fourteen you upgrade from thirteen to fourteen it will take you 7.5 million and one hundred nine to two hours which is equal to eight days and this is quite painful already so we decided to make this better the first thing we did was we increase the income before fall in multiple places where we could inject some resources in the system and make it a little bit easier for people to start upgrades in a similar vein we cut the upgrade times and cost so working the other side of the equation and we cut pretty drastically up to eighty percent

of the costs around tunnel levels four to ten different amounts in different levels but to really solve this problem we figured that we need something new also that lets us deal with the problem in the future these comes seeking the economy is nice but it didn't really solve the fundamental problem and we needed something for that and that thing that we added what's called magic items and what magic items do is that they give you guaranteed results so one a magic item always has the same result it has the same effect and if you use the example I gave previously upgrading level seven cannon to level eight and we use a magic item that gives you a time skip it costs two hundred thousand gold takes twenty-four hours hours to build but if you use one of these magic items that we just added instead of spending 24 hours you can just spend one book of building and it's keeps the timer and then to the second

example of the max level cannon cost 7.5 million and 192 hours eight days instead of spending that's or waiting that you can just spend one again one book of building to skip the whole timer it doesn't matter how long the timer is one book of building will always keep it so the result is always guaranteed and no matter where you are on the townhall levels you can always use one of these to get finished not grade mmediately we thought it was pretty cool solution because it's something new that adds to the economy which means that it's tightly controllable so you can use this as a surgical way to tackle the problems where they come up and not actually have negative effects elsewhere also as a solution speedy tidy we tried to make it as simple as possible and what it adds a little bit of complexity it still we think better than reworking in the entire economy to fix the problems just

to give you an idea of what different items do we have the hammers hammers give you a level directly to the thing that you're upgrading the civil of types so there's hammers for and magic items for different types as one on the left is for troops that we have something for spells then we have something for upgrading your heroes or adding a level two heroes and then finally something to add cave level to your buildings a similar vein we have books the first one allows you skip timers on your troop upgrades second one allows you to skip timers on your spell upgrades certain your hero upgrades and then lastly the book a building on your building upgrades then a bruise one for each resource type these allow you to full fill your resource storages to max capacity whatever it is and then finally we have potions and potions have nice little effects that are temporary you can for example boost your builders for time you can add levels to your

heroes for a time you can get your troops to max level for time and so on and so forth having done magic items and all the other tweaks to the economy to make progression better we felt that we succeeded we had succeeded in solving the economy problem and we had found tools to best exponential economy we were pretty happy the solution was good the problem was that there were a lot of players who didn't really care about it so we still had the Maxell players who didn't actually want to upgrade anything so magic and I'm Sidda matter for them then we had the mid-level players Town Hall 9 and 10 war players who just didn't want to upgrade so they didn't care about magic items either it was clear to us that our work wasn't done yet and the next we think we did well we proceeded in the order that we had sort of thought up before we started working on giving our max level players something to do this was in summer 2018 that we set out to solve the next problem so the problem

for these max level players was that it had been so long since the release of tunnel 11 it had been two years these guys being the most active the most loyal players that we had they had been playing the game actively all all the while since and they were basically constantly hitting that cap whenever we dropped some new content a little bit they would immediately consume it and end up in the same state max saw nothing to do so the smaller content upgrades weren't enough anymore and we needed to do something else and again this was a problem that we really needed fix because if we didn't add any content there was a risk that these players would start churning out of the game because what it's boring if you don't have anything and you might think bomb just add another Town Hall level but for us it wasn't so simple we had had this tendency to think that hey is it really is this really the thing we want to do

maybe you should actually come up with a new content loop for the in-game players so that when you're in town hall 11 you graduate into something else and then you enter that new loop and keep playing that maybe that would be a great thing to keep you happy the reason sort of we thought about this this way was that we have a pretty small team and we don't have a lot of capacity for making content there's reasons why we have small teams I'll explain towards the end of the presentation but that wasn't something we wanted to compromise so we need we always tend to look for solutions that scale nice fee and allow us to stay small and do things in a smart way coming from this angle we were thinking about this as a challenge okay maybe we could actually get really smart here and come up with something for the in-game players that will keep them excited forever and it's gonna be great for us but in the end when we thought about more it ended up being a really stupid idea the way we kind of concluded

was that if we really wanted to pull this off we would need to create something that would be more compelling or as compelling as the core game of clash is so we would have to in essence we would have to build a game that is as good or better than clash of clans and not only that we would have to have that game speak and win the hearts of the players who love clash of clans once we realize this we just kind of concluded that hey let's stop searching for a silver bullet let's just give the players what they signed up for and why what they expect that meant doing another town level that said we felt that whatever we do the bar can't be low and we needed to do a really good job with this update with this town hall level it needed to be something that really delights players and really

makes them want to upgrade and we need we felt that we really needed to hit that level of quality with it as you might know the thing that we did was townhall 12 so to achieve this sort of delightful upgrade level that gets from people really excited and what makes him want to upgrade we decided to tackle with the tackle it by adding novel exciting gameplay and we did three things with this hombre he added the townhall that fights back so first time ever townhall was weaponized if you poke it violently it gets angry it will shoot back will try to destroy your army then we added electro dragons which are super powerful and super slow and then finally we figured that clan castle is pretty boring because it always deploys on the side of the village maybe we could spice that up by delivering it in the middle

of the village and we did that with siege machines so siege machines are a new way of attacking you put your client castle troops inside the siege machine and then the siege machine will deliver the troops in various ways do they enemy village there was a slight social prestige element to the siege machines as well so siege machines are something that you can donate downwards to your clan mates this twist was nice because it made it also a nice thing for your clan for you to upgrade to tunnel 12 in addition to these novel gameplay elements we are of course also added a lot of content we added a level for nearly everything in the game from defensive buildings to resource storages to resource collectors to barracks to everything pretty much and at the same time we added also a level to nearly all

the troops that we had and in hindsight that wasn't a great idea because we it's actually good to hold some content back in reserve and we should have done this here as well but we gotta fill that Hey maybe it's nice to since it's been such a long time since people got new content maybe it's actually nice to just release all at once and give them a lot of stuff to play with at this point we had two problems down one problem or two problems to go and we had nice rewards the economy was better we had a way to deal with the exponential exponential economy we had fresh things to do with Donald twelve lots of new gameplay content for the max level players and it felt like a good time to shift our attention to the lower levels namely the war players stuck on down low levels nine and ten we decided to start working

on this problem next and this was at the end of 2018 where we decided let's get everyone to progress as I've been mentioning couple times the problem with people not wanting to upgrade had its roots in clan wars and before we dive into the reasons let's give you a refresher of what clan wars is clash is a game where you're upgrading by day and it's you're being social by night and it's called clash of clans and until April 2014 well there were clans but there wasn't a lot of clashing between between the clans and then clan wars came along and that with clan wars social gameplay social PvP arrived on the scene and suddenly you had clan verse of clan play you could basically take your clan taking into a war with another clan just at a press of a button very easy features you access and the

matchmaking was geared up sold and it was very casual so matches that you were getting would be always equivalent so if I have a town hall 11:00 then the opponent would have a town hall level or if we have $5 lemons then the opponent put had 5 if you have tunnel nines five of them opponent would have five times Hall nines so always seeking to make matches really fair the feature turned out to be massively popular there had been a total me a hole in people's game to just play with other people and fight against other clans and when clan wars came along it supercharged everything and it made the game rise to new heights so a couple of years in interplay on Wars we started seeing some problems rise up the first one was that people were really good and really serious about clan wars had started to figure out how the match making algorithm really work and this

allowed them to build their villages in a way that made him look fair to the match making algorithm but in reality was not fair and since this was the case they would actually end up winning more often getting matches that were biased for them for them to win and they would win more often causing a really bad experience for the other side another problem was that there wasn't really good incentive socially for people to upgrade so since you were getting always even matches there wasn't a reason for clan Lee to say hey let's upgrade to you to the next town hall level there wasn't really a reason if you operated your town hall level let's say you went from nine to ten your opponent would go from nine to ten so there's a zero-sum game and in fact the best strategy was that you would upgrade to the max over level and then stay there because that would give you likely a worse opponent in the

matchmaking finally even with everything all this another problem in the system was that there wasn't really an end game so you were bad about fighting these wars over and over again but to what end you in this system you could never figure out who's actually the best clan in the world and some people started tracking the win streaks but it didn't really satisfy anyone because the wins tree-top win streak clans would actually never meet in the game so we decided to think what do we do about this from our side what do we felt that we needed was we needed village strength to matter so to get people moving from 9 to 10 to 11 to twelve we indeed needed your village strength to matter for these competitive players who really cared about winning currently they didn't because whenever they upgraded they get got equal opponents or even screwed up their chance of winning so we didn't fix that another thing we needed to fix is we needed real competition we need really

people to be this ultra competitive people they needed to be able to show who's actually the best again when we thought about it we started from thinking should we rework the existing system and you could argue that you could do it but when we thought about it it didn't seem really like a good idea namely because we had a lot of people who had invested immense time to this and mastering the system and getting really good at it and we felt that if we would change the existing system we would take something crucial away from those players and we didn't want to do that disservice to them the breakthrough that happened when we realized that hey what if instead of fixing the existing system what if we add a competitive endgame layer on top of it that actually worked as an idea wonderfully well at the same time we felt that we could boost the economy so we still we had sold a lot of problems but the game was still a bit stingy in the end game at some points and we felt that actually

adding something new would actually give us a good opportunity to give even more then most importantly if we added something new when we could make sure that it actually may worked in a way that would allow us to find out who's actually the best plan in the world and the feature that we did what's called clan war leagues so clan war leagues is a totally new plan system of clan wars it uses the same basic structure but it's run totally differently so normal clan wars you can sign up every two days here you can sign up once per month so at the beginning of the month there's a opportunity to sign up for clan war leagues if you take that you get matched with seven other clans for seven wars for one week and sort of what we did with the matchmaking is we fix it by not having any making clan war leagues works in a league structure where you get seeded into the league structure based on your strengths but after that it's

free-for-all all your opponents are just from the same randomly picked from the same league and then once you start it's all about how good you are and how strong your villages are so if you do well in the against your opponent's in your bracket you get promoted if you do badly you get demoted and again it's a combination now of skill and strength that will take you higher so there's 18 leagues in total and if you make it to the very top so the top league is champion 1 if you make it there and you make it to the top of the leaderboard for champion 1 you cannot get invited to our offline qualifiers for clash of clans world championship the cool thing about this is that you don't actually need to care about eSports to make it here you know actually it's okay not to even know about them all you need to do is play your game be excited upgrade your village be really good and if you

do that you have a chance of winning ending up in the World Championships rewards get better as you go higher so there's always a reason to push higher the rewards that you get are mostly feeding into progress so you get magic items you get resources and you get exclusive cosmetics if you participate in clamor leagues when it came to the cadence of minor leagues we wanted to sort of set people on a nice cycle give them some structure into their game so Clara leeks is run at the beginning of every month and then you get nice rewards from it that help you upgrade your village and get stronger and then you can be stronger for the next round of clan war leagues so by this point we had worked for a year we had tackle several foundation level issues we had fixed exponential economy by speeding up progress in hiring magic items we had done town hall twelve added content for our end game players and made them have stuff to do again and finally we had

fixed a incentives for upgrading for tunnel level nine and ten players remove the social barriers for it and then so at this point we were looking at the fourth problem and we went like hmm maybe you could actually do this now and this is where goldpass enters the scene clash of clans just got more challenging introducing seasoned challenges jestro metal with daily and weekly tasks [Music] battle your way through multiple challenges at the same time Bern challenge points to advance down the rewards road and unlock up to 30 tears of awesome prizes season Bank is the new resource storage that lets you double your winnings with every raid unlocked goal pass each season to earn a bigger

Bank amazing boosts and exclusive hero skins the road awaits you chief when we started thinking about how to fix the conversion problem we didn't actually start with gold pass in mind or battle paths what we started with was we had several needs that we need to tackle first one was we needed something that would be low price point because we have a lot of players in countries with with less income overall and the current offering that we had was sort of pricing them out outside and they couldn't actually feasibly get anything in the game the value just wasn't high enough so we felt that we really need something that is low-priced enough and baha'i value enough to get them excited about it then we wanted whatever we did we wanted it to feel fresh so that when he looked at it it went like oh that's cool

that's something new I haven't seen that before maybe I would could get excited about this and finally we wanted something that wasn't the keeper head we wanted something that lets you as a player work for your progression and instead of just getting to it by spending money we wanted you to spend some money and then have a nice experience and putting all these things all these four things together actually came together why wouldn't we do a battle pass and we did and we called it Gold Pass starting out with Gold Pass once we decided okay let's go for a battle pass we had a high level goal of course same thing that I've mentioned before we wanted to fix conversion we wanted to increase it but at the same time since battle passes are actually great for improving retention as well we included and decided to treat that as a secondary goal when we delved into design we broke things down into a lot of sub goals that

we wanted to tackle based on the needs of the game first off we wanted like I said before we wanted this to be incredible value for money we wanted this to be a total no-brainer and we did it by making it have over 25 times the dollar value of progression content and other stuff the price point was set to $4.99 which satisfied our low price point requirements then it's just a question of loading up enough value to make it really attractive cool thing about battle pass is that you can actually load a lot of value in a battle pass and still have it your economy protected because it's just a monthly thing no one can buy it multiple times so your economy is safe the next thing was we wanted to have exclusive cosmetics this feeds to produce things it feeds into the fresh appeal so it's something this was something new that we didn't have then it feeds into satisfying max our players who don't

actually need the progression content but exclusive cosmetics is something that they still could get behind if they were inclined the exclusive cosmetics that we did were hero's skins so for the first time ever we added heroes Kings into the game finally we wanted you to get something for your clan mates when you actually made this purchase our solution to that was that we gave you one gym donations so in clash of clans you can donate troops to your clan mates it usually is pretty DT Deus you need to train the troops and then you give them away with one gym donation you can actually donate them with gems on the very cheap just one gym core troop it turned out that this is actually one of the biggest things that people love about gold pass going further on design goals we thought okay who is this forward and what who does this need to cater to first off we wanted this to be accessible to all the players we did this in a classic battle path fashion so you have two tracks you have to treat treat free track and then you have the

gold track but you get access to if you pay you gain progress on both Dainius li so if you're just playing along you can play for free you don't need to care about it you make some progress and maybe at some point you will be interested in buying the gold pass if you make it really far but everyone gets access everyone gets to participate and the feature for free that was a really important goal for us then we wanted the gold pass to appeal to maxed-out players so as you know we have a lot of players who are very excited about the game they consume more content very quickly they push to the max max they upgrade everything we wanted this to cater for those guys as well to do that we had the hero skins in the mix and then we had one gym donations and finally we had a training boost but lets you train your troops faster then we also wanted this to appeal the late comers the song battle paths work in a way where if you come

late you have no chance of finishing it we didn't want that we wanted everyone to have a chance to finish it even if you come late if you're leaning a busy life you might not have a have a have that much time spend in the game you might actually realize that the season is ongoing at the end of the month we wanted to give you a chance to come in very late last minute and then have a fair chance of completing the whole thing to do this we made sure that there's enough points to go around so the weekly challenges actually have almost doubled in number of points that you need to max out the whole thing and not only that there's a lot of synergies between the tasks so if you come in late you'll have a lot of tasks accumulated up that actually work in a synergistic way so if you play you will actually make progress in a lot of them at the same time which makes progress really quick if you're coming late lastly we considered how do we want players to actually interact and play with this

feature and how do we want to actually operate it ourselves as a team first we wanted to reward you for being active we wanted you to get value from coming back on a regular cadence and to do that we have daily challenges and weekly challenges daily challenges refresh every day so it's good if you come in everyday that lets you make a nice chunk of progress on during the course of the month and then week the challenges unlock on weekly cadence they have a lot of points in them and if you are very active it means that you can't finish the whole thing in the first week you actually need to come back in a subsequent weeks to reach be able to reach the top we wanted to make sure that everyone everyone gets to the end so no matter if you're super hardcore player a casual player Sunday player forgetful player I don't know whatever kind of player we want to do decay to the end because we want you to enjoy the game we want you to also be tempted by the goal passive so if you're active you should be able

to max out each season relative ease and the most important thing that feeds into this is that there's plenty of points to go around like I said before there's nearly double the amount of points that you have available that you need to max out then we wanted to make sure that this not does not actually become a burden to you so it shouldn't increase your playtime to do that we made sure that the tasks are something that you can just complete very casually you don't even need to pay attention that much to what's in there you should just make progress automatically as you play the game in your style and then lastly we wanted to make sure that this thing would be operationally sustainable for us as a team we don't have that many developers on the team like I said before content is something that we're hard pressed to produce so we want to make this something that we can run every month with relative ease and still have time plenty of time to develop content for other sides of the game and to do this we focused that unique

offering each month on a single new hero skin that we're committed to deliver and then offer nice progression rewards for rest of the value then finally we had a couple of other things that we wanted to get done that we didn't and these are still work in progress might show up at some point might not we wanted you to get benefits from being loyal a loyal customer for example if you have bought the gold past three times we want to give you a small small perk for that and then we wanted to give you even more benefits towards your clan and we had some nice ideas maybe we'll work on them at some point maybe we won't but we would love to let's see if we have the time and so goldpass sliding into place we had our final thing and that made everything Lord so let's talk a little bit about the results starting off with the exponential economy and making progression more fun again this is a distribution of our players by Town

Hall and the dark blue bar is Town Hall level 11 and up light blue is Town Hall levels 9 and 10 and then the lightest blue is town hall levels 1 to 8 early days when we started on this journey or in 2018 in June we had when we release Town Hall 12 we had 12% of players on Town Hall 11 so a pretty exclusive club not a lot of people percentage-wise there and it's an obvious sign that it's actually pretty hard to get there and then by the end of our journey in December 2019 when we released on hole 13 the picture was very different we had 35 percent of our players on tunnel level 11 and up and overall the distribution was pretty even so we were in a much better state in terms of having players progressing a ton even even speed across different levels as a small caveat the monthly

active users have been fairly stable throughout this period of time so this really just represents the changing composition in our player base and where people are at the game mixed just to talk about a little bit about the importance of content and releases like townhall 12 and our on 13 this is some evidence from the town hall 13 launch at the end of last year looking at 30 days before and 30 days after the release the first learning from this is that players are really excited for fresh content in clash of clans and we saw the population on tunnel 12 and up grow by 17% after the release of tunnel 13 so what this essentially means is that we saw people from Town Hall 11 actually upgrading to tunnel 12 just because we release new content so much that it caused the total population to grow 17%

which is really cool another thing is that it's really obvious that whenever we release content people get excited also to spend some money and we saw the unique payers increased by 10% when we released on all 13 and finally we saw our revenue react very positively to new content namely because it had been already 1.5 years since the release of townhall 12 and we expect that a lot of people had already reached the end state but he named in case we saw a revenue increase of 75% going to be released townhall 13 let's talk a little bit about the impact of the goldpass and of course like I showed you the news articles about revenue in the beginning but that's not from our perspective that's not the coolest thing the coolest thing is that we actually have way more payers than before so much actually that there's four times as many as before and what's even cooler is that

70% of our goldpass buyers actually come back every month so on average if you bought the gold pass one month there's a 70% chance that you'll return and buy again the next month finally perhaps most importantly let's see what happened to the conversion problems that we had and this slide shows you the monthly unique payers in the game and you can see the light blue bars reach up all the way to 2018 March 2018 and then from their own start the darker blue bars at the start of the release of the gold pass and as you can see there's a lot more monthly unique payers and what's even cooler is the gold pass actually impacted our economy in a way that we have more pairs and everyone's paying less we succeeded in broadening our player base making the game more healthy giving a price point and more people are comfortable paying so to end this presentation I'm going go through some lessons we picked up

along the way and before I get to that a couple of caveats that I think are good to mention because we do things in a special way first is that lash is a 8 year old free-to-play game it's a pretty venerable age for a game pretty variable age for a free-to-play game and of course that affects how we approach things how we see things and I take away this present here can be a bit specific to those and operating all their live games in general we have fairly small teams and this is a thing that small means different things in different companies for us small means that flash clients team is 20 developers sorry 20 people with 12 developers and 8 people working in support roles of course this means that it effects and molds our thinking on how we approach things how we work around things how we plan things

in a big way we don't have small teams for the sake of having small teams of course it would be nice to have big teams and produce a lot of content but we actually believe as a company that small teams let us deliver the best product and it lets people have maximum over ship ownership over what they do and that together it just brings us to the best best results and the ownership thing is actually super important overall in this whole thing and that's my third point the game teams at supercell have full ownership over their games this nothing that can't be decided in the game team no one comes to second-guess your decisions it's all you all the way I don't think the journey that we had in the past two years would have been possible in any other kind of a structure since it's hard to imagine someone having patience towards a game team that says well we'll just work on these other things for two years and then look at the revenue problem I think we could do it because we are just

responsible to ourselves and we really believed that this is the best thing to do but in a different structure it might be hard or even impossible first takeaway I have is you really need to understand your game each game is a unique little Knox no play no snowflake each one has its own problems and its own solutions and if you go for full circle from the bold claim I think battle paths or gold pass wouldn't have been a success two years ago because if we didn't understand the fundamental problems that we had in the game we would have done gold pass and have it land in a ground that just simply is infertile and or gain that's not ready for it if we didn't have the magic items we didn't have rewards for the gold pass if we didn't have content for the Maxell players Gold Pass wouldn't be interesting interesting to them if we didn't fix the remove the barriers to upgrading for

townhall nines and tens they wouldn't care about the progression rewards or in the gold pass so I truly believe that the gold pass wouldn't have been a success if we had done it two years ago our process for understanding the game is starts with feedback and I we think that you nee should take all the feedback you can get let's be a sponge for feedback and the trick is that you listen to everything but you don't need to believe everything or you don't need to react to everything but listening to everything allows you to sort of form formulate a picture of the world of how how is this really how is - how is the reality really looking what what does it look like where are the real problems people say different things but when you listen to everything then a picture starts forming and then once you have that picture then you can choose what to believe yourself and which problems start tackling and figure out your

foundations our foundation is pretty simple in the end it wasn't a simple process to discover it but in the end it's pretty simple the heart of the game found a alternate foundation of the game is the village clash is really a game about building your village it's you might kind of from the outside think that it's a combat game it's a tower defense game it's about it's about looting it is but it's really deep down it's about the journey of upgrading your village making that grow investing in that over time it's the one thing that people start with it's the one thing that people stick with the game for sort of we we had this process where we were thinking about okay so should we come up with a different thing for in-game players should we invent a new thing and try to kind of find a silver bullet that solves all our

problems and adds this new exciting thing that in-game players will play over and over again and it didn't really wasn't a good idea in the end so my advice would be don't be like us be like you be smarter don't search for silver bullets just double down on what makes your game special and what is valuable in your game and then find the right solution to that and battle pass itself it can be a solution for your game as well but it might not also be it really depends on what your game needs so first figure out that and then tailor the solutions exhaust needs second takeaway is Pete sinner's be generous with the players give them a fun experience make them have a fun time in class make them have progress make them get to the last levels make their life enjoyable and

what we found in the process of the journey is that when we were generous we got more back from the players ourselves we believe that fun time and having a good time enjoyable experiences they also make you more excited they make you more willing to spend on stuff I think if some developers would argue that hey if your economy is too loose then people won't have to pay anything for anything and they will get everything for free and it's not great and that's not wrong it's true but then it's also true that if your economy is too stingy you will also get people who play the game forever but never spend any money that's off grade either because they've they'll reach the end of content without actually spending anything and there again it makes sense from our perspective to search for the sweet spot and give people those great deals that

let them spend a little bit and enjoy a content and then both sides win battle passes as such can be a great tool to find a sweet spot because like I said earlier you can make it a great deal immense value but it's only once per month so economy is still protected protected so my last point of the talk last takeaway it's always worth it to focus on the long term and when we were working on the gold path last year our goal wasn't really to make the papers our goal was to fix the problem and provide a fun delightful experience to our players and that sort of needs to be the way you think about things we think so you always have your eyes on the horizon you work on problems that matter

you keep chipping away making the game better making your players happier making sure that your team is working well and everyone's happy working on the game um you need to of course know your fundamentals you need to have a plan you need to challenge yourselves and sometimes the features that you have planned out don't work that's okay be patient you need longevity to actually make it this long and eight years might silence sound like a long time for a game to run for us you can sort of feel that it can be just the beginning and rest assured we have some very cool ideas already lined up for the rest of the year so look forward to those thank you [Music]