Creating enticing sports games with short and fast play time

let's let's fix this problem first of all thank you for being here can you please introduce yourselves if they don't know who you are I'm pretty sure they do sure I'm John Middleton I'm CEO and co-founder of nifty games nifty games is a mobile focused comedy doing sports games short session head-to-head we've been in gaming for about 25 years and we funded this company up with some interesting partners Bend last year in the late last year and I'm people on it I also been in games for 20-plus years co-founder with John for nifty and you know we had been we've been the game industry for a long time and had actually met a really long time ago when

I was working at acclaim John was making a game about a cockroach and I ended up that's true I did working on it with him and at acclaim hosted mostly sports games and I did sports games for a long time and then moved over to making a lot of games based on tell him which sports games don't be shy so I my first game in the industry was I worked on an NBA Jam te I did these stats for for the home ports that a claim did and then worked on Frank Thomas big hurt baseball all-star baseball on a file quarterback Club and a number of other sports titles that a claim was doing and they moved from sports to doing games based on TVs and mood TV and movies and then did that for about 20 years I went from acclaim to Universal and then I left Universal last January I was talking about John about sort of what you know what what games we wanted to make next and we felt like we were both playing most of our games on mobile

devices and it sort of even though we occasionally get a chance between you know kids and stuff we had to do to keep the family going we had less and less time for console and PC games which is sort of what we grew up on and we were playing mostly on mobile and wondering where all the sports games on mobile web and I think that's what started the conversation that started so that connects quite nicely to my necks well which is why sports well I think while there's one I mean one initial answer is because we love sports we're sports guys through and through Pete and I have been doing every you know of fantasy sports and just fans of sports well as long as I can remember literally I think we've been in fantasy baseball and football leagues together for 20 years but secondarily and probably more pertinent you know more importantly from a commercial standpoint you know we've used sports as very much

community driven there's a you know not just passionate fan bases but there's also a lot of community around amateur sports around playing sports viewing sports you're really every aspect of it and we view that as you know from a mobile gaming perspective when you look at user acquisition and trying to the you know you're gearing things towards retention jamai even monetization it's a nice asset to have when you're when you're kind of delivering product to people that really want it I think sports fans have I mean fan is short for fanatic right and fin you know fans have a tendency to if you are a lover of a team or a league or a player you tend to spend more you can buy a 350 dollar Boston Bruins hockey jersey and just did an inordinate amount of money to buy

things with your team's logo on it right and you did the amount of ridiculous stuff that I have that is you know Boston Red Sox logo DUP is insane and then not only do I do it for myself I've got two kids and they're six and three and both of them are diehard Red Sox fans my daughter might not quite know it yet but I'm pretty sure she is so but I think it's that fanaticism that we feel like you know we know it you know it's supported you know games like Madden and FIFA like you play the game you love the game you want to play the digital version of it and we grew up playing all those games and have a love of sports games in general and I think something that ginger made in the you know the seminar but right before us where she was talking about the social aspect sports are inherently social it's you call up your friends and whether they've you know root for your team or root for the rival team you know as a Boston Red Sox fan who grew up in you know 20 minutes outside of Manhattan so all my friends were Yankee fans growing up it was you know shit-talking is part

of what makes it fun and even so it doesn't matter if you don't root for the team I root for it can still be you have a shared community like that and for us we've used sports games as an instant community you probably have leagues as opposed to guilds but it's pretty much the same thing you have a group of fans are united by a love of a sport and sometimes in our case a love of many sports so it's not just one sport that is the driver for that yeah and you may have picked up that Pete and I are both pretty much diehard Boston area sports fans so I apologize for that we can be a bit obsessive and annoying I went for the cheap he did the hometown football team's whole ichiro yeah that's good I unfortunately I don't know anything about the Americans like it's not just an American phenomenon right so if you look at sort of the way you know the

football culture the soccer culture is in you know basically the rest of the world and the amount of the fact that you have you know 3t you know of a team in in Manchester in the UK who is as big a global entity or whether that's Barcelona who's not just a football team but sort of a nationality defining movement for you know that community brazilians cue each other for football is right of course yeah it's it's - it's the Dodger parking lot either way whatever it takes yeah and I think you know that it's a global standard that as humans we enjoy sport it's just the way it is and I think it doesn't matter what region you're in the sports tend to differ you know whether it's baseball in the United States so whether it's soccer in Europe or whether you know it's basketball in a lot of different parts of the globe and then you know different territories have different sports that they're driven by

and anis and drawn to but the big thing is still fans behave the same way in there and they're always supportive of not just teams and and you know snow is just where they're from but it's also players they're supportive of players and they follow players from team to team or from you know effort to effort and you see it all the way through to Olympic sports and and frankly the other thing I think that is lost as far as kind of the general fandom of sports is that low level amateur sport where you know people are either playing themselves or their kids are playing and you tend to get wrapped up more and more in different types of sports I've got coaching like two little league teams right now I think I'm more fanatical about that than anything come like oh we got to we got to get by those Diamondbacks some of the you know like in a Thursday afternoon is going to be brutal it's it's kind of it's a fun thing and sports wraps really well into video games obviously and then when you get into mobile when you get into short

session and you get into competitive head-to-head it just it all adds up nicely and having your developer hat on what are the biggest differences in developing games for fans for sports fencing disk' but for fanatics instead of the normal game users I'll pass it down on the busy guys so I have no discernible skills I'll pass that one to pee yeah I think with anything it's about you know and I did a lot of games based on movies and television shows but it's the same thing it's about authenticity right like I think when you see sports that are even something like sort of MBH em which is sort of the cartoonish version at sport it still had real teams real players and it followed the rules of basketball up into a point and then at that point it decided like what you know the great gaming thing a gaming element which is you know keep it true to the sport and this is an axiom for us as well keep it true to the sport and then any place we have where we can really make sure that we add another

level of excitement and fun for the player then we go there but we want to stay true to the sport we don't want to make fun of it this isn't you know giant bobblehead version of the sport or comical you know putting up a brick wall behind a hockey goalie or a soccer net or in front of a soccer net so that you want to keep it real to the sport but then make sure that at the end of the day you're still making a video game and the game has to be fun and that for us is something we spend a lot of time making sure that we are very true right up into the point where we have to make sure that at the end we're not making real football or real baseball or real hockey we are making a digital version of that and that has to be fun and for us has to be fun not just as a single-player experience it has to be fun all our games are designed just like real sport to play vers another competitor and that we want to do so in a manner that is faster than a traditional sort of console game we're playing on a mobile device so that game

has to be played in a much quicker session so that I can get a game in and if I have the time I can get another game in but if I don't I can move on and go through and deal with the rest of my life has shorter attention spans I mean we just sort of watch the thing about instant games which is you know really really fast I don't know that we're quite that fast we're sort of core casual or casual core if we're trying to define where our spot is but it's a it's it's definitely a game that has to be played versed somebody else you're kind of reading my mind so as you're your specialized in fast paced games what do you think are the biggest issues that you developers find in about to keep retention when you're talking about fast paced games I think for us it's a you know I think for us it's about making sure that the player feels it's just like any good game right when you play it and you lose you immediately go oh I know exactly what I did wrong that time and I'm gonna redefine my team roster my

roster construction very quickly and I'm gonna go back again or they performed a move on me or they had a certain setup of the way they you know had their players in the field or on the court or in the rink on the rink and now I know exactly what I did wrong and it's you know it's like I remember sort of playing any great game from my childhood my mom would tell me like okay you have to go to bed now you have to put down the controller and then I would go upstairs and I'd lay in my bed and think about like oh now I understood and then couldn't wait to get up the next morning and go solve you know that particular puzzle element that I couldn't figure out in the game while I was playing it but once I left and went away from it and that's what we want players to do to constantly be thinking I upgrade my player here I can be able to to perform better than I did last time and and win as opposed to lose yeah and again that's that's uh you know we talked about capturing the essence of sport you know that's we look at sports that's one of the the real true aspects is kind of a you know reward and regret

and and how do you look at ways to compete with your you know who you're facing off with your competitor and and it's a win or lose situation and I think it's again it just dub tales perfectly into gaming when you get into short session gaming you know as as mobile evolves and then we see a lot of success and in you know synched head-to-head sports is is like absolutely the the nicest fit it's kind of like you know we feel like with nifty games we're running around with a key and the door showed up you know and it's it's just a perfect situation for us to go and and you know fish where the fishes are deliver a product to passionate audiences that that already have a total proclivity towards towards getting engaged with it staying engaged and that's feel as obviously the keys with mobile so we can monetize what we're building I mean look at gingers presentation from before right like it was nothing to do with sports about instant games how many

examples of sports did she have in instant games it's like the most popular the one that started off the instinct game craze at Facebook was a basketball game one of the ones I had started the most users was a you know a soccer penalty kick game it's like she wasn't even talking about sports and yet in games sports shows up over and over again look at the you know the billion multi-billion dollar success of Madden and FIFA like sports and games have always been tied together and so for us it was a natural fit to sort of bring them to mobile in a way that they hadn't been currently on the mobile platform before I wanted to go back a little bit to the fandom part when you're talking about sports fans there is a big connection there is an identity of the sports fans to a certain team it's not only it's not only wearing the jersey or liking that in some fans but most fans have a real identity it defines them even like the personality

that they are by the team that they love how do you think you can create that was with a fast-paced game like do you believe it's possible to create the same passionate connection to the game that they have with the team sure and it's a little bit of a double-edged sword for us because you know in a lot of ways if you're if you're a fan of a baseball then you know that we can address that and then we can work with those fans and in our games and how they want to you know engage with the sport but however if you're a fan of the Red Sox versus the Yankees there's very it's very much a bipartisan black and white situation and you know so for us it's more in many ways we're looking at it you know similar to fantasy sports not the word you know statistically driven kind of a you know static content where we're going after I was a more dynamic head-to-head a short session but we're

looking at ways where maybe the the the eclectic lineups that you see in fantasy it's more about a collection of different types of items and games that would have more of an affiliation with with what you like as a fan but not necessarily isolate the entire fan community from one another so that you know in in UK terms you know if you're a man city guy versus you know a man you guy or gal you know you might not have the idea that maybe you want to interact with those other teams but the way we're going about building out the games and the structure of our content is to set it up in the way that it that it can be the most you know digestible or approachable for the fan and we talked about fans a lot you'll hear us at all the time and I think a lot of a mobile game companies startups it's always like you know the gamers they're going after the gamers gonna we're definitely coming

as going after fans of situations and events of sports but also obviously gamers but we were definitely highly focused on fans and that that aspect of it and add to that the other aspect for us is always going to be about you know giving the players of fans the most customizable version of that sport so that they can feel like they're making part of it their own and we're looking at free-to-play microtransactions and that we want to be able to let fans sort of have a greater influence on what their look and feel is within the context of the game and so we constantly talk about how do we make this so that if you're a fan of you know men menu or you know Arsenal like that you can really make sure that your gameplay feel has more of that right so if you're it's you know the Liverpool you'll know you'll never walk alone and you can really make sure that it's all tied to that that was very international well

done and and my last question was you developed for mobile but a little bird told me that you're also working like looking into going to other platforms and so I want to say do you believe that nowadays it's key to get all the users that you want - for developers to go for more than one platform instead of focusing on just one yeah I should be clear we are absolutely positively focused on free-to-play mobile but we've you know since our announcement we've been at our doors knocked on quite vigorously by other people who you know who have devices that you can either touch or click and you know they also are interested in even though it's not the core focus been asked a lot about will we bring the types of games we're doing - you know consoles are PC where you can you know I

think for us it's a matter of we're focused on you know it's a touch based system but it works extraordinarily well with a mouse and keyboard if you know if that's a veneer wanted to go down but right now I think for us it's you know it's free-to-play accelerates its entree into the you know consoles and PC I think we are obviously interested in that but the focus definitely on mobile yeah and I think I think it's four you know on that subject it's less about extension of distribution looking at specific alternative platforms from mobile I mean like Pete said we're definitely mobile first but I think we just we believe that cross-platform plays is here to stay it makes sense for all games and all gamers really so I think you know as we grow sure I mean if it makes sense to be cross-platform which it does then there's different platforms out there were it would be

nice for our gamers to be able to play as an alternative to their mobile device if they happen to be in front of that platform whatever that may be and I would like to open the floor to the audience if you guys want to ask any questions come on I've been getting questions in London and I want questions [Music] sure yeah I think we cease so we have

done a remarkably good job of sort of talking about sports and games without sort of speaking about what a sort of a nifty game is right but I think when you when we you know when we launch and soft launch and you could see I think that our games are infinitely more accessible than what the current you know offering is and we think about that a lot right so one of the things that we know that when you have you know that the majority of you know football fans or basketball fans or hockey fans or soccer fans there are way more of these groups you know people in those groups that just don't play you know that may play a you know a match 3 game right but they're not they're too intimidated that sort of a bigger sports fair and I think what we're trying to offer is that entry level for a much more casual gamer and certainly by doing so we also are hoping then we feel like we're succeeding at having interest for a much younger gamer

so we're you know my son is six he's not playing a game that has you know all these plays and it's way beyond him right but he loves games and he always wants the device so it's like giving him games that he can play and feel like he's succeeding at so that casual audience is it is every bit if not more important to us than just the regular fans we know we're going to bring the regular fans with us but we are way more focused on making sure that the the on-ramp to getting in to play our game is a much faster experience I would argue that our game you can play a full version of our game and what would be you know this tiny woods trying to learn a tutorial of another game yeah and you look I mean it's a good second hey I'm on a panel in about an hour and a half you know about instant games compared to you know usual usual casual and you know the more lines we can get in the water the better the

sports fans tend to be pretty widespread there's a lot of guys and gals out there that maybe we're big fans of sports games when they were were younger that have gravitated moved out of games altogether they're you know they're in different parts of their life they're different doing you know I would love to bring them back I would love to find ways to draw them into mobile gaming and I think there's different tools that are there available and I think you know that the Facebook presentation before this is you know it's an interesting tactic not just to go in and build you know instant games for monetization but but for the promotion of our overall set of games and it's not you and it's not just how we get them into playing the games it's also about the way look mobile is about user acquisition right like if you're really going to build a successful financial game you have to you know you have to go out there and and and pay to bring users to your experience we also believe that we're innovating not just on the game side of

things but we have ways of bringing in players that normally wouldn't get a chance to see it somebody who's not playing another mobile game so it's not getting those insanely annoying mobile ads that surface in your game when you want a you know a couple free tokens or gems we believe that the relationships that were working on outside of the actual game itself will help to bring in some of that audience who said you know what I haven't downloaded a mobile game before all right I have but it was awhile ago and I did it wasn't like you know I gave my nephew my phone right we we believe that we have ways of user acquisition that go beyond the traditional models and it only available to us because of how sports interact intersects with those fans yeah so on that is it's not just about kind of you know cracking the rocks within the gaming market that allow us to access a larger pools of but there's also the the real-world aspect and going after more traditional marketing and event marketing where you

have you know huge available user acquisition situations that are kind of innately unique to sports ya exporters there's a real world connection it's not you know we're not talking about building games with dragons and Dwarfs you know it's it's a it's definitely something where I think our audience will you know I don't want to say they're easy to find but from our standpoint we've got a laser focus on sports we're going to find every avenue we can to find sports fans that are gamers to come in to our games and then we're going to try like heck to keep them there and hopefully make some money while we did unfortunately our time is up but thank you very much if I know we could talk forever appreciate it [Applause]