Crafting an Unbeatable Game Thesis with Phillip Black

[Music] hi everyone uh I hope lunch lunch was good I enjoyed it uh thank you for coming I'm going to be talking about crafting an unbeatable game thesis and this is something I work with a lot of my clients on we need to form an Arguments for games we just don't want to tell people that hey you know we want to make games for ourselves we want to make games for others we need to make an argument for why Games should exist and if you don't know who I am I am a game Economist at my own consulting firm called game Economist Consulting I do this podcast thing with other people called this week in games which is a part of deconstructor of fun and I also have my own podcast called game Economist uh the game Economist cast so if any of this talk interests you there are other ways to connect I run a Blog as well uh so connect with me on LinkedIn I do LinkedIn content all right

let's cut to the meat and potatoes here thesis what is it what does it mean um it goes without saying but hey I've always liked mobas and I want to make another mooba is not a good argument for a publisher or for a VC and I would argue even for yourself that is not a good basis to make games and so what I would propose is that the best way to convince someone that a game is worth making is to make an argument and that ultimately is what a thesis is it comes from Greek and it means a proposition or to stand on something and that's exactly what we're going to do here today is we're going to make a game thesis and we're going to do it very quickly but ultimately that is the best way to show you what a game thesis is is just make one okay a game thesis tries to answer five questions it can answer more than this you can change these questions these are just the questions that I've arrived at working with clients that I think ultimately form the most persuasive argument about why a game

deserves to be made all right so let's look at the first question what has the market told us so if you want to make a game I think one of the best things to do to convince a publisher or to convince a VC or to convince yourself is to show that there is a pie that is worth going after so tell me how big is the market uh what's been happening in this Marketplace what are some highlevel observations about the genre you want to enter that demonstrate that this is a big pie that there's something here worth going after okay second question this is one of the most important ones what is the opportunity so you you spent some time you've done your Tam analysis you've showed your total addressable Market show me what is the opportunity for you to get a seat at that table and get a slice of that pie one of the most important parts of a game thesis how will we be the different how will we be the same this gets a little bit more tactical so now that you've shown me what the total addressable Market is now that you've shown me what the opportunity is give me something

more tactical show me how you're going to be different than the products already on the market and I argue even more important than that show me how you're going to be the same this is part of the thesis that people miss the most is that it's not just about how you're going to differentiate yourself it's also what you're going to take that's already been on the marketplace hedge some of your risk figure out what's already been working so again it's not just about what's been different it's also about what's the same now I put the next two questions together because they're very closely related and I ended up refining this after working with a lot of PC and console developers so the next question is what are the main content pipelines very very important so you need to figure out hey look at I go out I make this game it's successful it's doing well what is the thing that you're going to dump more Capital more headcount more reses resources into that are ultimately going to build on the retention that you've already established this question asks you to figure out what is the part of your game that's driving retention and how can I tune it so that I can get

more of it how do I make more widgets how do I make more Candy Crush levels how do we make more fortnite Cosmetics after we've established that question and this one's very closely related we need to figure out clear monetization hooks now when I've worked with PC and console developers I can tell you that sometimes the main content pipelines are the monetization hooks sometimes they're not but even more important than that after you figured out the main content pipelines how are you ultimately going to wrap it in some sort of monetization mechanic so great I love that you have Cosmetics are you going to sell them with a direct store are you going to put them in a loop box are you going to put them in a battle pass so even though you have content pipelines you need to figure out what those monetization hooks are or at least have some high level idea of how you're going to do it okay so best way to see a thesis in action is to use it so what we're going to do is we're going to travel back in time to when second dinner might have been considering making Marvel snap and we're going to try to form the strongest argument for Marvel snap's

existence and we have our structure here our five questions here here's what I would argue is what the market has told us leading up to Marvel snaps launch or at least it's it's funding from nettis IP driven ccgs generate sizable revenue and we'll be diving more into each part of these questions in each part of this thesis but mobile lacks a digit and mobile first ccg that I think is the opportunity that second dinner saw when they made Marvel snap mobile is lacking a digital and mobile first ccg how will we be the same or different by optimizing match length nuux we'll create the first digital and mobile first ccg now if you if you look at this one there's not a whole lot of the same there's a lot of the different part but there's not a lot of the same part and I think ultimately that's what's going to bite them in the butt so maybe if they had gone through this process they would have hedged their risk a little bit and

they might be more successful than where they are today but still they at least had an idea of how they were going to be different all right main content pipelines single ability cards with Cosmetics I think this one was pretty clear early on I think Ben bro who was the lead game designer knew this fairily early on but they understood what they wanted to do in terms of card design and they understood that cards ultimately are going to drive a lot of their retentive effect and that Cosmetics are going to be some icing on the cake and their clear monetization hook and again this one starts to get a little bit more skeptical and ultimately we're going to show how a lot of their monetization didn't pan out the way they thought it to but I think they at least had an idea of what their monetization Hook was going to be when they were making the game and that was their collection level system which I'm sure they thought would generate sizable arpo okay let's dive into each of these questions and let's start with what has the market told us IP driven ccgs generate sizable Revenue okay so we want to show that

there's a really big pie here how we going to do that let's go to the market leader and let's show some exciting not only numbers but also growth so in the case of Magic the Gathering again we're traveling back in time to when second dinner might have been considering the proposition so we're going back to let's say 2020 or late 2019 wow Magic the Gathering makes a lot of money surprise but here's the other thing that's really interesting growth huge growth between 2019 and in 2020 every publisher every VC wants to see that big numbers big growth things look great other leaders hearthstone's making a lot of money at this time hearthstone's doing 300 350 million Yu-Gi-Oh still making a lot of money around 200 300 million wow there is a big pie here and that's what Publishers and VCS want to see and ultimately again this is something you want to prove to yourself why is it worth making this game why does this game need to exist it

should go after a big pie you want to have a big effect you want to make a game for the biggest possible audience and you need to show that first you can dive a little bit more into it top IP dominates that seems like a a rather obvious observation I think also pops out of this Yu-Gi-Oh is a anime of course as we know hearstone is from blizzard and it uses the warcraft IP and imine the gathering's been around forever but the other thing we see here is that the players tend to uh there only there's there's three top players and their revenue is really split between mobile and physical but you can see there's a huge gap between mobile and where they are with physical smells like opportunity to me hearstone is the only one that has all their money in the digital Zone because it started as a digital game and never had a physical component to it okay so what have we done here IP driven ccgs generate sizable Revenue again trying to show that there's a big pie and it's something worth going after

there's big numbers there's big growth great so what is the opportunity I get that there's a big piie there's a lot of big pies out there match is a big piie Forex is a big Pi what is the opportunity that you see that no one else sees and I think what second dinner saw is that mobile lacked a mo a digital and mobile first ccg magic added some digital cards later on but again it's still starting its life as a physical ccg Hearthstone is the only digital first ccg but you got to remember that Hearthstone came out on PC first they didn't even have a mobile skew that came a lot later so magic the Gathering Arena its mobile launch was two years after its desktop launch Hearthstone went to mobile one year after its desktop launch Yu-Gi-Oh dual links is the only game that was day and date with the desktop app and that's that's a weird app we can we can spend some time on but that's a that's a weird case

the other thing is that even though Hearthstone ended up going to Mobile it really still feels like a physical or excuse me a PC first app when it launched it was over 8 gigabytes there was all these weird langu language packs you needed to download if you just played the game you could see that the ux and a lot of how blizzard made that game they were clearly a PC console developer trying to do mobile rather than the other way around and again what are we trying to establish here mobile acts a digital and mobile first ccg okay how will we be the same how will we be different and again I was mentioning earlier that I think second dinner strategy here is to optimize match length ux and by doing those things they're going to create their first digital and mobile first ccg only thing they're missing here is some of the same parts and I I wish they spent more time on that how are they going to be the same how are they going to use existing mechanics that already exist to make this a sucessful

product okay let's talk about match length if you look at other titles at the time the average time to complete a match for a lot of ccgs was enormous Pokemon 15 minutes Magic the Gathering Arena 13 minutes even Hearthstone which is much much better is 6 minutes if you have played Candy Crush you know how quick those levels are you know how fast they go and that is the beauty of mobile is that it can fit into your life in so many different ways because the session times are so short so if you're waiting for a bus you're waiting for a train it's very easy to whip out your phone and play a game of Candy Crush it's very hard to do that in a lot of the other ccgs and why because they started as physical games they were not mobile first and they've not been digital okay what's the other problem here ux Hearthstone

horizontal no thank you that's not naturally how you hold a phone that's not how you take out your phone the first thing you do when you want to take out your phone is not flip it you want to use it naturally as you would in other applications huge problem uh gets worse magic gaing Arena same situation again these these developers are so imbued in their early earlier paradigms that they can't see mobile and they can't create a game from the ground up for the medium the only exception here was Yu-Gi-Oh dual links and again we we talked about it earlier that was day and date with the desktop app but you can also see if you if you look at the screenshot here it's still kind of awkward it's kind of a 3D view it still looks like a physical game they haven't completely adopted the Paradigm yet they haven't built something from the ground up that takes advantage of the medium their failure is your opportunity and you need to point it out okay what's the digital part of

this so here's a a card for Magic the Gathering this is a card that's only available in Magic the Gathering Arena so the digital version of the game and you'll notice one of the effects it says whenever this card attacks conjure four cards named lightning bolt into your library now if you were doing this in a physical game it's a little bit weird right what what the hell is a lightning bolt where does the lightning bolt come from where do I get these four lightning bolts you know opening a pack of cards I play this card I use it where are my lightning bolts very strange but when you think about a digital medium you can do stuff like this I can look at the card I can inspect it I can hover over the text and I can see where the lightning bolt is and I certainly don't need the physical cards the magic of digital will just automatically create them so again Magic the Gathering was just starting to experiment with these digital first cards but what if you built a game from the ground up that took advantage of these effects that you can only do in

digital what design possibilities could there be and I think this is where second dinner saw again some more opportunity for them to come into the market and do something different here's another example so with this particular card you see that there's a effect it's called Spellbook Spellbook is a very interesting effect again it's only available in the digital version of Magic the Gathering and what a spell book says is or when you play this card you get to you get to pick a card from this card Spellbook so this card has a specific series of abilities that you can use but again if you're operating in a physical Paradigm I play this card like where is this spell book how is it magically going to appear so again imagine if you could create a card game from the ground up that started with the idea that it was digital what new design space could you explore and so in this particular case you play this card you get to pick a card from its spell book in the digital format of Magic Gathering the cards automatically appear in front of you a

digital only effect really really cool really really cool but again imagine if you could do this from the ground up okay what are the main content pipelines that was one of the last questions we were talking about we need to figure this out this is ultimately the dial that we're going to tune we're going to add more headcount we're going to add more capital and this is what's going to drive retention and it should be what's driving retention right now in your game but thinking about this ahead of time really really important if you're King and you're going to make a match three you should know that your main content pipeline is the things that are going to drive retention of the levels and you should be thinking about that day zero day negative one you should be thinking about that and in the case of Marvel snap I think they were looking at single ability cards with Cosmetics I think they had a very clear idea of what was going to cost them the most amount of headcount ultimately the most amount of design leverage or design weight for them

so let me just talk a little bit more about single ability so when you think about ccgs like mag of the Gathering or Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh there's all these different card effects there's an instant card there's a sorcery card there's a creature card and they all interact in weird and complicated ways and sometimes they have multiple abilities so this isn't just one ability this card can do you know a million different things you know if we' go back and look at some of these cards there's a lot of text on these cards too there's a lot going on you know this card says it has haste and has this other ability I was talking about that's going to conjure these lightning bolts so there's a lot going on here and I think the Insight that they had very early on from both a Simplicity and accessibility point of view but also from a design point of view is that hey when we make our cards they're going to have one ability we're going to simplify a lot of this so they have an idea ahead of time or what the content pipelines are and when they made that really important design decision only to have one ability per card I think they

reduced a lot of the scope and it let them generate more and more content so the other piece of this is single ability cards with Cosmetics so this isn't just cards that are going to form their content pipelines I think they have a very early idea that Cosmetics are also going to matter here they were HD developers I'm sure they saw the success of fortnite at the time we're going to do Cosmetics that's the other part of this okay imagine the Gathering again we're back this is a land in Magic the Gathering it's an energy point you play them a lot and sometimes they have nice little artwork on them what mag the Gathering realized is that you can do very small things to these cards to generate huge effects so one of the things they did is they just made it take up the whole card space that was it that was the very simple thing they did and players freaking love this they lost their they lost their mind when they saw this they immediately wanted to go after these fulls screen cars cards because it

differentiated them from other players on the battlefield that's exactly what you're trying to do with Cosmetics is differentiate yourself okay what if someone again from the ground up said we're going to go after Cosmetics we're going to make Cosmetics work in ccgs we see some evidence that it's already working we see these cars that people went bananas for what else would there be the oldest freaking play in the book holographic cards it's been around forever and we can observe the difference price between a normal card and a holographic card right we can go on the secondary market and we can say okay what does a Charizard go for maybe $100 and we can see what a holographic Charizard goes for maybe it's $200 so players seem to clearly value when we make small cosmetic changes and here's the thing I really want to point out here here's the Brilliance of things like this extremely cheap a holographic card near zero marginal cost I plug it into Photoshop maybe I use a filter and boom I've got a holographic card and I know

artists may be offended by that but by and large it's pretty cheap to take a guard and make it holographic and if we were to go back and put ourselves in second dinner shoes I don't think they knew that they were going to have the cool 3DD effect which if you play the game you know about if you tilt your phone a little bit it's got a little bit of 3D effects but what I do think they probably identified early on is that hey this is something that players really respond to and it's pretty cheap to make and this is going to form a a lot of our content pipeline same thing with these lands I'm talking about small changes to the art of a card seem to be producing these crazy effects in these card games but very few people are taking advantage of it okay clear monetization hooks probably the most skeptical part of second dinner's whole strategy here is what their clear monetization hooks are because they're going to go off the reservation a little bit so here's how I think they got to their collection level system which is in the game

and I think they identified it ahead of time I think they identified that they weren't going to do card packs and they were going to use this collection level system and I think they saw something in the collection level system that other developers didn't see when they looked at the ccg market I think they saw a battle pass I think they saw when they looked at ccgs when they looked at mag of the Gathering when they looked at Hearthstone the thing you realize when you play these games and again remember they largely started as PC games they largely started as physical games I think what they saw is that there isn't a lot of progression in ccgs there isn't a lot of the core game mechanics we see in other games like an account level system or a way to consistently acquire cards a lot of these games even though that they're free to play they don't have clear ways that I can get cards for free there isn't a lot of these systems uh you know there might be a mission system in Hearthstone but there isn't a lot of like core retentive

systems and I think that's what they saw here is like Hey we're finally going to build a more traditional free-to-play collection mechanic account level system and we know we can monetize this we've seen people monetize account level before we've seen the monetize battle pass before let's do that who needs card packs we can do that so I think at least at this point they had an idea of what their monetization hooks are they had something identified ahead of time now the thing to keep in mind is that this is a extremely highlevel presentation right we've gone over we we went blazing fast over the five questions right we tried to say okay what has the market told us what is the market level Insight that shows that there's a big pie here that's worth going after and what we tried to show is that IP driven ccgs generate sizable Revenue which again is going to tie in ultimately to the proposition that second dinner is making we're going to go after an we we're going to be an IP

and we're going to be a ccg and we know these generate sizable Revenue we Tred to identify what the opportunity is right and we tried to show over and over again that mobile lacks a digital and mobile first ccg and there were just so many costs that come with thinking about a game as physical from the beginning and we really challenged whoever was reading the deck maybe it was a VC maybe you were presenting it we really challenged them to say what if someone built this from the ground up from day Zero we tried to identify how are we going to be the same or different so Not only was there an opportunity we were going to go after we also tried to say hey what is our strategic plan to actually go after this opportunity we're going to optimize match match length that seems broken six minutes for Hearthstone match that's the best you can do we're going to get that way down we're going to make sure that this game can fit in people's lives in very different ways and as we know they come up with Brilliant Solutions in Marvel snap right you play at the same time it's not a turn-based game in the same sense of that you take a turn and then your opponent takes term you play at the same time it's a genius solution but I

think they started from the proposition that match length is broken we need to figure this out we need to get below six minutes and ultimately they do they get way below six minutes you can have a quick Marvel snap game you can have a very quick Marvel snap game they have a timer so it isn't just about hey our match length is shorter they also made match length more consistent which is another key part of making sure that mobile games can fit into people's lives is that making sure that time is consistent if I know that the train is coming in three minutes it's great that my average you know match length may be three minutes but I want it to consistently be three minutes so I have a guarantee that I can finish a session quickly we talked about ux no one was thinking about the natural way you hold a phone everyone had been horizontal they went vertical very simple stuff again when you're trapped in an old Paradigm you can't see these things and a thesis I think helps bring them forward and makes them clear propositions and they think when they combine these things together they're going to create the first digital and mobile first

ccg we went over the main content pipelines single ability cards with Cosmetics brilliant design decision they know exactly hey if this game takes off this is the thing we're going to optimize this is the thing we're going to tune this is ultimately what's going to drive retention huge good for them they knew that Cosmetics mattered they thought about that ahead of time they had those content pipelines set up and even' been playing Marvel snap they were letting it rip they're making a lot of cards and a lot of Cosmetics very quickly and I think it's because they had a very strong early idea that this is what they were going to do and the clear monetization hooks maybe this is the most skeptical part but I think they at least had an idea of the problem they were trying to solve with the collection level system is like look at ccgs they don't have a lot of traditional account level progression there isn't a really good free-to-play experience we're going to add this we know that battle passes can monetize um this is going to generate sizable Revenue so again when they're going through this thesis they are thinking about the strongest argument for the game's existence why should this thing exist it's not enough to just say hey I

want to make the type of games that I want to play VCS Publishers they don't care about the type of games you want to play they ultimately want to know why this game deserves to be made and why it's going to be successful that's what a game thesis is it's trying to form the best argument for a game's existence okay some final remarks here and this is ironic I know but write it before you present it you know I went very quickly through these slides very quickly through through this thesis this deserves a depth of thought that I wasn't able to present here there were ways you could have torn this apart you could have said hey that collection level system that's going to generate sizable arpo that you're claiming is going to generate sizable arpo hey I looked into the fortnite numbers and I know that fortnite's battle pass only does 25 to 30% of the revenue for the game you're telling me you're going to bet the whole house on this so writing before you present can be good to critically examine your arguments and provide an additional depth of I would suggest writing out your thesis and then

wpp it in a presentation like this trying to show the weakest points the other thing I would say is prove it to yourself before you prove it to others so I've been talking about Publishers I've been talking about VCS But ultimately the most important part of a game thesis is that you prove it to yourself why should you make this game why does this game deserve to be made you need to believe in that you need to believe that this game deserves to be made and not because you want to make it but because there's a solid logical Foundation to make it okay the other thing that I've worked with clients on is hey I'm already in development I'm already you know let's say three months a year two years into development should I do a game thesis this is the only something you do when you're considering an idea absolutely not you should do this at any point in development in fact I've worked with a lot of teams who already have a live product out and we've worked backwards to figure out what their thesis is and it's not just about a check mark about what you're already doing although it can do that what it's about is aligning

your team what is it that we're actually making what are the content pipelines have we gotten Sidetrack are we focusing on the right thing do we know the market we're going after this is a really good tool to realign teams and to make a clear consistent logical and easy to understand argument about why it is you're making the game you're making okay thank you um I've think I've laid the bait I think Laura's going to teach you how to catch a big fish