Critical Ops: A success story for mobile gaming

[Music] [Music] so my name is Yuri and I work for critical force heading the community and eSports team and essentially we do more kidding and of course you need to have a very friendly face towards your community right so my background a little bit of that I've been a game or a passionate gamer for as long as I remember but work-wise before coming and joining the gaming industry which have been part of only for two years I was a technical consultant and I always thought that gaming industry is a very hard and well I actually had three rules

I'd never move away from Helsinki I'd never show my face on stream and I will never work in the gaming industry so let's say I've broken some of my promises to myself so when I joined the company there was a little bit already of history creating awesome first-person shooter games on mobile by critical force so critical strike portable it had over 50 million downloads across different platforms and also had a large presence as a web browser game but this thought for critical ops was quite hard very limited online presence they first post reached two people no marketing budget there is no central hub where people could meet up where they could

find where to play with hope to play and well as in any competitive game find good opponents to test themselves against we weren't running any community events and the the little that the community was doing itself was very very slow and insufficient so after a little bit under two years we have 246,000 on facebook almost 50,000 on Twitter we're ranging between 65 and 75 thousand daily organic downloads and all in all actually the number is wrong we're about 28 he told 28 million total downloads and even big boys start to notice us and we were written about and VentureBeat which was very nice so how did we get there first and foremost thing of course great team makes a great game when I

joined the company or the main reason why I wanted to join the company was because I did research I went and I played the critical strike portable I saw what those guys could do I read I read up on them checked out their profiles they were a very good mix of industry veterans as well as very young very talented and extremely passionate game developers from Kyani best game developer in school in Finland by far so what we wanted to do was to create the game that we would like to play ourselves as gamers it's actually one of the one and foremost requirements to join our company you have to be passionate about games our approach was always community based community driven

this is one of the first things that was implemented by our awesome product owner magic you can harass them after they show over there we always tell what is coming up the features the problems if we have problems we explain why we have problems there is always an ongoing open communication with our players through various channels I will explain how we do it but they know they know exactly where we are with the game where we're going with the game and they can affect our development process that empowers our community and that guides us to create the best experience for our players so as a team that does essentially marketing community and eSports team we have four major missions we try to accomplish the first two are write on the board slide show engage and expand

so our first and foremost goal is to make sure that the players who are already inside the game have as much fun as possible magic and the dev team do their best to make sure that the features inside the game cater to that us as community and eSports team we work on various tools to make sure that the people in are engaged outside of of the game as well so we have for example community tournament program and the father of that sits right at the front of the stage as well so what does that mean a lot of players want to create tournaments for their friends they want to have their client tournament and challenge other clans so what we have done we have created a guidebook for them how to create a tournament how to improve it how to market it and we've

built also the different level system of how can they get more and more support from us be it more cases be it promotional support be it advice we are there helping them out and now as a result we have from 15 to 25 tournaments running every week the best of those have 1500 concurrent viewers on YouTube and that is practically free because the maintenance of that system is actually very very cheap of course it was not built in one day but you need to be have persistence if you want to build the grassroot level and that is exactly what we're doing if you guys been walking around the hall how many have seen advertisers now trying to pitch influence or marketing we're doing influencer marketing our way instead of paying big youtubers big

twitch streamers we grow our own we picked a guy with maybe 500 maybe 1000 maybe a couple of thousand subscribers and again we have the same or very similar guidebook of how to improve your channel what do you need to to do to improve your video production we have again the similar system the more you do the better you get at your game the more support you get from us be it exclusive interviews with the game developers more giveaways t-shirts whatever we have a special channel so where they can talk to our developers and meet them and ask questions and of course talk to each other and collaborate we promote them inside the game and at best depending of course on the quality of content that the influencer has we can add from 5 to 10,000 subscribers in a week of our fans

to their channel which will be demanding our content but then again they'll be very happy to consume the content of that influencer if he is good and of course we would not work with the guys who are not that let's say great partner on tournaments extremely important we've worked with ESL but most and the best partner that we have been working with valiance GG awesome guys very hungry and very important part of our community effort because they organize very professional streams we're now talking about live events and actually as was released this week we're doing a live event in Vegas with Amazon there's going to be four games World of Tanks blitz us vainglory and some Power Rangers I haven't played the game no

offense to those guys I'm sure the game is great this is the banner actually from our very first tournament and even people inside our company didn't think that we would get 32 teams we had over 120 teams apply back for our first tournament players are mobile or hungry to show themselves just as the PC brethren do the other two main goals of our team is to learn and to communicate everybody uses or a hopeful hopefully everybody uses the analytics from inside the game to see what people do how they engage with the app but we also use the social media we check what topics people talk about what bothers them because then we can go back and tell and address those issues for example through our influencers it's a lot easier to explain to 50 guys than to 28 million we have an act of discord devs are on this Court

they can comment they can talk to people we have over 30,000 if I remember correctly now on this court where people come and talk moderators they help moderate the discord channel but also they are very active not on out just in our own social media platforms but on their own the different ones on the ones created by our they engage with our fans and languages that we don't speak like Turkish for example we have great Turkish community and it is practically completely run by our influencers and moderators as a competitive game we talk to team captains we try to find out what bothers them what they need and cater to their through their need as well or their needs as well we monitor the trolls and sometimes we even flip the trolls from

being disruptive inside the game into being a positive and good influence so what is the road ahead for us and critical ops as great philosopher Henry Cartman has once said the work is never finished master goddess of working and definitely our players will have us working until they leave the game we will never stop improving our game who will never stop adding more content until it's time for the next title at least we will be working a lot more and expanding the community efforts we might do something like player Louis loyalty program where would reward people for sticking with their team and learning how to create a eSports team and for

that we would like to get input from professional teams how they've been doing it what sort of troubles they ran into and what they what made them stick together we will be building more competitive layers because obviously we will never stop working on the grassroot level but as people get better we will be ready especially with our good friends from valiance and other partners we will be working closely with eSports teams continuing what we have been talking about earlier for forging partnerships I don't think that mobile games are now at the point where they can stand alone like League of Legends or counter-strike or whatnot but definitely with the help and cooperation with let's say device manufacturers where we can showcase a

great device how it runs with the game which is comparable to PC or console game we could have an achieve great things like for example we're doing right now with Amazon and of course we're expanding we went from 15 to over 60 right now and we're always looking for more so if you have passion for games might want to send us a message thank you very much and if you guys got any questions I'll be happy to answer [Applause] thank you thank you Yuri do we have any questions there was one hi very interesting stuff thank you for sharing I got interested about when you

said about the small influencers that have let's say 500 subscribers for example what kind of cross promotional stuff have you offered them how have you grown their channels what kind of in-game visibility have you given them or anywhere else in the community well first of all we've been talking to to those guys especially when I started I started basically just going through streams and then I see the guy on the stream I would join his game I would give him some free cases I would talk to him they were just insanely happy to even see and talk to a developer we've promoted his videos on our social media on Facebook was pushed them on Twitter and just a few months ago we've added the feature inside the game where we can showcase the videos of the guys that we really like and that's what what pushes the most or the most of the subscribers

to their channel because now we have close to 1 million daily active users there's a lot of eyeballs that will see see the guy I think that even before that through again providing with great content to the guys promoting them on the social media channels the guy that I'm talking about he went from 500 to 70,000 in the space of about half a year [Music] [Music]