Data & Analytics; Shaping the Future of Gaming and Maximizing ROI - Raheel Iqbal, Game Storm Studios

I am very glad that we've also happen to have our next speaker who's right here in front of me raheel uh I think your next uh talk uh rail from game storm is going to come and talk to us about data and analytics shaping the future of gaming and maximizing our eye and I believe your video is built into your slides hopefully [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

[Music] hi everyone welcome to game Expo Summit I would say Marhaba and musalan welcome to the way as well so my name is rahil Iqbal I'm senior at the game from Studios with a network of mobile game developers and Publishers based out of Pakistan so my talk today is about how data and analytics helping shaping up the future of global gaming industry and also very importantly how data and analytics uh helping game developers and Publishers maximizing their Roi their return on investment because obviously in this business the bottom line is that

really matters the Publishers and developers are always looking for actually maximizing the ROI so uh moving on so first and foremost so in my topic today so I'll be sharing me my and my team's experience of developing and Publishing games across like we've published so many games across the multiple app stores and a wide range of genres that we have covered so far ranging from casual to smart casual to hyper casual to Mid core farming games to MMORPGs to brain puzzle so all the experiences that we have covering all those genres and how to maximize we can Roi we can maximize the ROI and Publishing facts uh the data that we have gathered so far so I'll be sharing uh all those facts and figures in this uh my topic today so first and foremost things from ideation to scale

and growth the first and foremost sex is game design and development so we rely heavily on our historic data on ID on ideation process okay so these days the main challenge for Publishers and game developers is to test the markets as soon as possible they can so the first and foremost thing is that data helps us to uh for better you know to take informed decisions so developers and Publishers are now having more informed decisions in terms of reducing the production time so this is very challenging because at these days you have to decide that whether you're going to invest how much money on your production life cycle or on your acquisition life cycle so Publishers developers mostly looking up for an ideal solution where they can rely on the historic data in terms of game design development they are able to produce better quality and less amount of time and the games that are more addictive and the people and they know how to Target different audiences

different marketplaces so data helps us reducing amount of time and development and Publishing and then we are able to spend more on user acquisitions so the next so the second and most important thing is the marketing and monetization so the thing is that data helps us that we can actually segment our users more effectively and more accurately so you can Target your marketing campaigns accordingly you can actually Target your segmenting your users from your spending users to your non-spending users and then there's increase with the data you can actually increase your acquisition percentages from 20 to 40 percent so this is a very important point where actually this is the make or break of time for any Studio or any publisher if you're not able to scale your product you will be most probably stuck in a spending versus non-spanning cycle and that is where most of the studios run out of cash and they have to decide for

something else so scale and growth is something which is critical which is very important so how data helps in terms of scaling is that the first of all that these days Publishers rely a lot on their communities so they have Community managers where they they know how they target their different communities for example if you're launching a brain personal application so you will go to your community manager say okay we're gonna test a beta test and obviously uh with the help of your historic data you're able to compile a well-placed uh product in less amount of time and for more quality so you're gonna go to your uh Community manager and it's going to help you to Target only the audience which are more prone which are more accurate which are more uh you know aware of brain puzzle or similar Direction similar games so this is where you need to scale up so uh what I will share some of the practices that we follow so in terms of scale and growth we have our own mattresses so if you are able to achieve 20 to 25 Impressions per day elective users if you have rewarded percentage of

more than 30 to 40 percent and if you're able to optimize this user acquisition campaigns you will be able to scale your your gaming product from 1.2 times to 1.8 times so talking about numbers a very interesting slide about how the gaming industry overall gaming industry is evolving so if we have a look from 2017 to 2023 the gaming Global gaming industry for 120 billion dollars now is that 220 billion dollars and by 2026 it is with with a compound annual growth rate of 10 it is expected to cross 300 billion dollar industry so it's the industry is huge and massive and we can see that from 2017 to 2023 the main segment that actually wrote is a mobile so mobile is a segment where if you're targeting if you're trying to publish or develop something so mobile is a segment that you should Target another important factor is that the consumer spending the overall Global consumer spending the worldwide consumer spending is also more

effective and more adequate on the mobile segment on the mobile side also we see a huge shift on advertisement side we see a lot of Brands and a lot of international brands are now focusing from different media from when from web and TV media they are now focused more towards the mobile media they want to spend they want to run their ad campaigns and they're approaching Publishers and developers directly to run their campaigns on their targeted audience so this is where uh you know the consumer spending is overall increasing and we can see the growth is coming in to into the the mobile segment and why not because overall uh the the global gaming players around the globe has crossed almost 3 billion so a very important uh you know fact that if you're targeting something if you're trying to publish or develop something so this is a genre wise comparison of Revenue versus download so we can see by downloads the hyper casual is no doubt the number one uh place to be you know hypercast the most downloaded most

played uh genre in the world in the globally but Revenue wise role-playing games are on top so in terms of Revenue RPGs and you know the the there's a shift from hyper casual to smart casual recently in the industry and we see that RPG and the Brain puzzle RPGs are more popular these days so before going on uh jumping to mina Market let's have a look at APAC market so we know that half of like half of the the global players in the world they are from APAC so Global gaming we say players are almost 3 billion players globally half of them are from a pepmark APAC market and Apec Market will see a craze of gaming and especially when the when there was a shift from pay to play to free to play and now played one when we see a shift from free to play to play to earn game this was the market the a pack is region which is most uh you know the first one to come and we see many hits like x infinity so many more uh from

this region so Apec is a market but Mina is the next upcoming region so the revenue in the Mina is exciting with more than 10 percent compound annual growth rate and the very important and very interesting fact from Mina Market is that most of the players they have more appetite of of playing but obviously they have more appetite of spending so if you're looking for you know targeting your audience or optimizing your your campaigns you should look for this region because highest Spenders are based in this region and this is known for the next upcoming Market so if you're targeting Meena Market you know there's a very important fact that which genre you should Target so by download again hyper casual but in this region the most popular genre by spending is strategy we see a lot of strategy and battle games and we see with social uh integration social interaction we see there is that the the the Meena Market the Mina players they

actually in competition they spent more on on battle games in terms of you know when they uh interact socially and 70 of mina players are more aware of Esports so if you find a mobile gaming user he's more prone to playing or participating in any sort of Esports competition as well so a very important fact that how AI is actually besides you know data analytics how AI is actually evolving the pipeline of production reducing the time and improving the quality so we see that now the developers and Publishers are able to you know give their their players more enhanced experience using right AI tools and I was participating in Google gaming growth lab and there was a very interesting question asked by one of the participants that with the introduction of uh you know chat GPD mid journey and creative Fabrica because these are the

AI based tools and the people think that maybe their jobs will be replaced by these tools but no it's not going to happen basically these tools are there to help you these tools are there to help Publishers and developers so they can optimize their their ad campaigns when you're at a when you run a b testing we see that acquisition campaigns rely heavily on creatives and you know we run a lot of a b testing to set Optimum uh level of creatives For Better conversions so with help of these tools we are able to increase our Acquisitions from 20 to 40 and 50 and these tools are actually uh help you to to localize your content for example uh one of our derby games we launched and it gained a lot of attraction in Mina and in in Brazil so so the the acquisition was 20 but they have these tools we we localize the creatives because it was difficult for us to how to you know what but the local market so if we if we take an example of KFC We Know KFC in China is

very different than KFC if you find in in any in any other region that's how they localize so with the help of these tools we localized the the ad campaigns we localize the creatives and we were able to increase our Acquisitions from 20 to 40 to 50 so obviously uh you know AI is there to help you to you know uh because without human brains AI cannot be you know replace humans obviously it's not possible so one of the case studies uh uh in our uh you know the mid cap the mid core farming games we have almost uh with 40 billion downloads so we leveraged the the uh we leveraged a local events like you know prompting for for Eid or Diwali or you know any such local events we localized the content and we we saw increase in an acquisition and retention from 50 to 60 percent so these are a very uh useful use cases uh that based on the data and we analyze our historic data and we make

decisions on that data to increase our conversions from eight to ten percent and obviously our uh you know what we say the console conversions increase from 15 to 20 so if you're looking uh to you know the key takeaways for today is that obviously if you're looking forward to publish or develop something uh you need to Target your audience you need to Target your region test the markets first you know early to Market uh is always better so what we usually practice is that one or two months of development life cycle go to the market test and and iterative Improvement processes actually uh we are able to increase our return on investments from 1.2 times to 1.8 times so that's it thank you very much [Applause] hello yes there we go good good good right uh anyone got any questions so I have plenty but does anyone have any questions about it I'm going to come around and ask that as I'm walking

around just um one of the things that strikes me is I love your your graph about getting to live that's exactly the stuff what do you think about Post Live what's the what the actions that you're looking at post launch about maximize and sustaining a particular game so you're talking about post launch I I like to so the number one thing is the post launcher the number one metric we should look at the retention D1 D7 D30 and then the impression count and rewarded video percentages and then the most important thing you should be equal to segment your rewarded versus your your uh you know paying users yes I I actually I like to try and think about my my conversion pipeline so I'm looking at ad use then I'm looking at those so those who convert to address I'm then looking at those that convert to one-off payment and then who who then buy VIP platforms and I'm looking for an increase in like the the percentage of that funnel from you know not nothing to add use to something to reoccurring and

that to me is fascinating particularly if you can get repeat my favorite stat is percentage of repeat users so repeat spender sorry so if you I'm not just interested in repeat users and retention which I love this is definitely a percentage of repeat Spenders my question is actually an extension or a spin-off from the post launch uh the post launch thing that Oscar mentioned uh see organic users are drying up right now on every platform so how do you think that these Avenues or these areas can help scale a game given that you don't have any organic users so that's a that's a very very interesting question because obviously most of the developers and Publishers rely a lot on organic growth but we see there's a decline in organic Acquisitions so even I see a lot of games are climbing up the charts but they are unable to have more organic users even with the with the conversions of more than 20 to more than 40 to 50

percent user Acquisitions but the organic is actually squeezing so this is actually you know most of the Publishers what they want is they don't want organic users they want inorganic growth you know why because that is how where you're able to scale and sustain so scalability is one thing but then you should be able to sustain your users so if you see the historic data that even if you have a look at our data so we see that whenever we have whenever there's an increase in in organic growth we always see that the retention matrices uh are you know affected badly after like second third week because those were the users they came to the same accidentally maybe they were just exploring something or they came here like accidentally but they were not your original your genuine users so the thing is inorganic is always long term and sustainable and if you're able to sustain your inorganic growth you will see from 1.2 percent to and in in our cases we have seen like two times of

return or Investments if you're able to sustain your inorganic growth so that is better long term and more sustainable I I pretty much agree with that we like to segment the two different in exactly the same way I'm actually looking at the organic as the kind of what happens if someone stumbles into your game What's the difference in day one retention between them and the people who you acquire and usually they're a lot lower in day one retention but more than that I think there's a different change that's happened I think post idfa possible at least World we're in where brand building is how we're sourcing our nearly organic let's not call it organic because it's not they're not stumbling in but it means that I I iPhone refers to as the K Factor so the fact that we are spending money the fact that we are building communities the fact we're going to start seeing people using streaming on mobile to show off our games the same way we are on PC we've got a lot of PC techniques he has no relevant because because the problem with the PC testing is the the beauty for for mobile uh

platform is that you're able to test beta more effectively and if you have your audiences if you have a community if your community manager able to Target your your product with the right audiences you are almost 70 percent is accurate so and from there you can actually scale and growth what's been fascinating for us is we're starting to do this on PC as well so we're taking mobile techniques and applying the PC and PC techniques and applying them to mobile and both sides are improving you see that one time that the PC was driving mobile now mobile is driving busy it's more than the I think the body of the mindset of building a brand yeah it's not something we've been do we've had to do in Mobile for so long and I think now we do because exactly to your point we've lost the organic well how do we get that back well we have to build an awareness around our our games Our Brands our publishing our developers for players to care about I'm going to quickly ask one last question because I know I'm talking

too much anyone got a last question they want to add and and I think we thank you very much thank you thank you