Dead by Daylight: When Creative and Business Minds Are Cooking with GAAS

[Music] hi everybody first of all welcome to this uh video presentation of our gdc talk uh with everything that's going on we've decided that uh would be better to give you this content through a video so thank you for watching um so we're going to talk about um our experience as a creative and business minds working on a game as a service title uh over the the the last four years of our game that by daylight and we want to share some some knowledge um first of all big disclaimer i just want to say that uh if you're looking at this video in the future we might have changed our way to work because uh game as a service evolves rapidly and uh it can change quickly but the part of it namely the values that we're going to talk about are a solid and forever okay let's start all right so first of all uh i would like to take a

moment for us to introduce ourselves so that we can give a little bit of credibility to the talk so i'm dave richard i'm the creative director on dead by daylight i shipped a lot of games in my 20 almost 20 years in the industry but most importantly i worked four years on a game as a service title and hello everyone my name is isabel i am the head of product strategy at behaviour interactive i have over nine years of experience in product management but more importantly i spent six years on live games all right so just so that we're all on the same page uh the game we're gonna talk about is dead by daylight it's a 4v1 multiplayer horror game so four survivors are facing one killer killer is trying to kill and sacrifice all the survivors to a giant entity that lives in in the sky and the survivors are trying to escape by um repairing generators so that's the gist

of it but more importantly is that over the four years of development we've added a lot of content to the game a lot of characters worlds survivors killers and franchises and we've been called some sort of a smash brothers of horror games like a real love letter to the aura genre some facts about that by delight the game first launched in june 2016 on steam a year later we launched an xbox one and ps4 in 2019 we launched the switch version as well as the windows store version that by daylight is also available on mobile since april 2020 so today we want to talk about what we believe makes an effective game as a service we are going to share with you the lessons we learned from four years of life of dead by daylight so first of all what is needed to have a

success a successful game as a service so first of all it needs players you need to be able to entertain players engage them and rethink them they need to feel good and have fun and a game as a service also needs a recurring source of revenue to support the game's development cost over the long run usually in the gaming world we see these two components as direct opposite we have a fear of backlash like for myself as a creative when we think about making money and monetization we uh we think of it as an evil feature you know let's let's not put that in the game and believe me it's not always easy to be the person in charge of thinking about what monetization features we need to implement as that said it's often seen as something a bit dirty but the thing is if we don't make money

it's not going to work we need to make money to keep supporting the game's development cost and um with too much focus on making money and on the source of revenue the players might leave and without any players the game is dead so spoiler alert we have a live game with microtransactions so we have an in-game store and we also have a battle pass and at the same time over its four years of existence that by daylight has seen over 20 million players an average of 2.7 millions of monthly active users has consistently been in steam top 10 most played games since launch the dev team has also grown from around 30 deaths at launch to around 200 deaths today and that by diet is also the most stream horror game on twitch for us the key was really to understand

that entertaining players and making money aren't necessarily a post we've put the conflicting elements on the side and we realized that really these two facets of making the game would be uh would create a synergy one would feed the other we realized that if we wanted to support the game over the years with a source of revenue we would need to make this source of revenue a joy for the players so the key here was to add monetization feature that would add to the fun aspect of the game we did that with a lot of soul searching uh and we sat down together and we found four core values values that we would use anytime we would create a monetization feature in that by daylight and these four values we are sure would work for any game as a service title they are valuableness respect

generosity and transparency okay so let's start with valuableness what we mean by value and most less is three things first don't remove value to sell focus on quality versus quantity and enrich the game so if my goal is to make money the instinct would be to look at what players need the most and sell this thing right so if you need a sword to fight a monster it's easy i'll give your sword the durability so that you have to buy a new one and i'm even going to make the sub more powerful easy money right well we decided not to do this as firstly this will make our game very expensive to play and secondly it will make the game even pay to win in our case because you play against other players it's important to make money but not at the detriment of players having fun and the game's dna ultimately retention

is at the heart of how well your monetization is doing so the key takeaway here is don't remove value to sell there are other ways like selling cosmetics for example cosmetics are optional but players usually love them because it allows them to customize their beloved characters with monetization if you don't know where to start characters customization is the type of monetization feature that usually works well because it is additive of value so we decided to sell cosmetic items in the store cool now our next challenge was to fill the store with content we have tons of different killers and survivors so let's create lots of color variations of our characters and also let's create tons of weapon skins maybe we could invest in tools that can automate this process filling the store that way would be

super efficient well even if it might sound efficient to create cosmetics that way we decided not to do this and to focus our efforts on creating very high quality cosmetics rather than focusing on quantity why because we devs would love efficiency to equate efficacy but with cosmetic items what really matters for players is the quality not the quantity so from our experience what sells is not a store with tons of color options and a wide range of t-shirts but a store with high quality items and from our experience what works for us is high quality cosmetics that sell a fantasy they look way more interesting for our players as they allow them to express their personality also they are more fun to produce for our teams of artists the dream of playing a specific character is at the core

of uh these cosmetic they have a strong fantasy that is goes beyond gameplay purposes so being able to customize uh your character allows the player to uh express their own personality and it also allows them to play very specific roles like specific characters that exist in franchises for example and that's uh super important and will is adds a lot of value to the cosmetic they also enrich the game universe they add variety to the game they they enrich the visual so the more cosmetic that we add to the game especially high quality one it means that you'll see more differences in the game world every match you play there's also something uh very special we do in dvd uh the the cosmetics are not only just uh visually stunning they also come with a story and it's a chance for us it's a

platform to tell more stories about our character and deepen the lore so that the the players can know more about their their favorite characters obviously there are some limits we found our own limits because we're doing a horror game there are some things we have to refuse as cosmetic item even though we know they would be super popular and they would sell well for example we could have a uh demand to make a grim killer looking aesthetic item for a survivor and vice versa we could have like a very funny or sexy in this example uh skins that are requested on on our characters and this goes against immersion when we see these skins we might think that a lot of people would love him but a lot of people would go into a horror game expecting things to be horrific

and when this happens and it's funny it breaks the immersion it breaks the game so it doesn't add to the gameplay experience so it has to be a no so last year we released a new feature to our game called the archive the archive is amazing because it was a dream that i had for a long time in the game a platform to be able to tell even more stories to show animatics and to show our characters in new ways that we didn't have in the game before and also to add new objective to the game well we had an issue with this feature because it was super expensive and it was hard to support on the long term we knew on that on iza's side they also wanted to add a battle pass to the game and so both of us we thought well this is the perfect opportunity because iza also wanted to make sure that the battle pass was not just a battle pass so this is when we've created this amazing feature that has both so we've decided to add a lot of value

to a battle pass it offers more lore more story it offers gameplay opportunities and it offers tons of rewards that are linked directly to the story that we're um we're putting forward in the archive this strategy that we have to add lots of value to our monetization features has paid off because we have in general one player out of five sometimes more sometimes less but in general one out of five that spends money after the initial game purchase so this is very good that works well for us but something important to know is that creating outfits requires a significant investment this is our skin's production pipeline making one single fantasy outfit involves easily 10 different disciplines and can easily take up to 2 months to be produced and that's just for one skin now

you have to fill the store and if you have a battle pass you have to fill the battle pass to and there is also a maintenance cost because you need to keep adding content regularly past features launch so this represents quite an investment and building the store itself is also an expensive feature you have to build the entire ui just to be able to save skins then if you need bundles or a featured page or a discount section it's even more work and you also have all of the online services like the backend services for in-app purchases the tooling for customer support that are tracking to understand how well you are doing and so on to sum up it is more expensive to build and support when you're adding value to your game through this feature but it's totally worth it at scale driven a cosmetic driven business model is very profitable

so second value is respect and what we mean by that is uh to respect the player's taste player's time and the player's money so let's start with respect their taste so let's take an example here we have two characters of dbd and we have their popularity ranked in the graphs uh so you can see that uh meg the survivor is played uh is the top play character and the clown is in the lowest percentage of uh character that is played so the instinct here would be to leave the clown in the dust and not make outfits for him and just focus on the characters that are more popular to make sure that they sell and then we make tons of money right um but no this would be unrespectful so here's the way we we want to do it and that we do it right now so of course the most played characters will have a lot of outfits this is important

because these characters you see them a lot in the game so you want more variety and you want to support more players with more choice so that everybody can be happy but it also means that the underdogs will have outfits it's important to support them it's important to support all of these little percentages of of players and actually when we do this we sometimes see a surge of popularity for the character so here's an example with the raid around halloween last year we've created the aloe by collection which is a series of very very cool cosmetic with visual effect and we have this one on the raid which is amazing and we can see in the graph that at the moment we release this outfit the rate at a surge of popularity and that he would be playing more so this is a high value because respecting the the taste of the player giving access to this character will make the game more fun as you'll see more variety

in gameplay as well another question we had once was how much should our cosmetics cost should we go with loot boxes or a fixed price the logic to maximize the price of an outfit would be to sell them through loot boxes loot boxes would allow us to have some of our outfits valued at hundreds even thousands of dollars because we could make the odds of dropping some cosmetics super super small easy money right well we decided not to salute bosses but to offer an a la carte store instead even if it meant generating less revenue because we find this model more respectful of our players wallet players can purchase the outfits they want they can even portray the individual piece of an outfit if they wish and we also wanted our cool cosmetics to be accessible to the many even to the

smaller spenders in that by daylight there are four shields of outfit from common to very rare our outfits cost from 1.2 dollars to an average of 10 and since players can purchase the pieces individually our item actually go from fifty cents to four dollars the other component is respect their time we talked about a battle pass earlier right so a battle pass system you have to play to unlock tears to be able to unlock some rewards the more you play the more you'll unlock you can buy the tiers to unlock more content if you don't have the time to play for it so an instinct here would be that to optimize the revenue we should make it a super long grind to be able to get everything easy money again but really this is also wrong for us it's it goes

against respect uh of our player so um here's how we do it instead so first of all we use the data out of the play time of the players to understand what's an average player in that by daylight and how much time they have to spend on the game in average so here the idea was not to push everybody to play more to be able to grind everything so we found out that an hour a day was the average for our players and so we uh made sure that the whole rift was accessible to everyone and that most players would be able to go through it and unlock cool content we've also took the decision to put some of the high-valued cosmetics in the first tiers of the battle pass so that a lot of players would be able to get them let's talk about some of our learnings now first we did not see backlash when we introduced our in-game store to your

sparse launch same for our battle pass introduced almost various bus launch and for the few negative comments we could see on our socials we didn't even had time to react because we saw 10 times more players defending and supporting us and i think that when you design monetization respectfully this is what you get you turn players into ambassadors and for having worked on live games for quite some time now i can tell you that this is the position you always want to be in and instead of fearing backlash we actually saw lots of positive wall of mouse every time a competitor does something that has to do with microtransactions that gets players angry we see lots of players praising us also having a respectful monetization design helps to get the buying from our deaf team as dave said at the beginning of the

presentation it is very important that your deaf team doesn't see monetization features as evil features so to sum up this value of respect it may sound obvious but you need to respect players of all types and you need to ease their chosen way to access what is fun in your game next value is generosity and what we mean by that is inclusiveness so uh have the most player as possible to experience what is fun in the game to have access of what is fun in the game and also it's to get more than your money is worth when you do want when you do decide to buy something we put our hearts and soul into these product that we're making uh it costs a lot of money a lot of resources a lot of energy to create awesome content so the reflex ear is to say that every game play every concept every model every marketing bit that we

need to do should bring back profit so we should put a price tag on everything and so we would make the most money as possible but this is not a good way to uh to do it for us we've decided to do things otherwise uh and we've decided to be more generous so uh here's uh you can see on the right is a near distant shard and that's our soft currency it's a currency that you can grind through the game so just by playing you unlock this currency and it allows you to unlock and play all of our original characters [Music] also 60 to 70 of our store is unlockable with the soft currency um so this is great because uh for the characters for example a player that decides to not spend a dime and just play the game will eventually

unlock new characters which will add to his experience but it will also add to the other player's experience because it will add variety to the game so it just makes a for a more healthy experience in the game and for the skin the skins we find out that as a reward for your playtime unlocking a skin and be able to show it off is very meaningful to players now when it comes to the battle pass we apply the same value generosity so our battle pass contains 70 chills 70 levels and i remember having this discussion with dave that 70 rewards it's a lot of content to produce so our instinct was to either raise the price of the battle bus or just fill it with rubbish but we felt that both solutions were unacceptable for us

so we decided to sell the battle pass at ten dollars and be generous with the content that is included in the battle pass even if monetary speaking it made no sense the bet here was to get players excited and bet on retention too so we are not saying that our 70 tills of rewards only contain awesome rewards but for ten dollars players can earn over two hundred dollars worth of content if they finish the battle pass they also can get their ten dollars back since ten dollars worth of orexels are hard currency are included in the battle pass and for the players who do not wish to spend by simply playing the game regularly they can get over 35 dollars worth of value [Music] also another choice that we've made is that uh there's no pressure to play uh the archive and to unlock thing in the battle pass all the challenges so the gameplay that

comes along with a tome in the uh the archive uh all the narrative assets are available for everyone forever so even the new player that comes in has 20 to 30 hours of free content that's available for each archive that we release all right so learning's out of this value of generosity so first of all is that it's clear for us that it leads to increased play time we can see here that in the graph as soon as the store launched uh the average session duration went up so people play more uh they want to get that currency they want to unlock cosmetics um and this second graph is also super interesting because we can see that in the weeks before and the weeks after uh the battle pass and of course during the battle the the battle pass as well uh the average session duration also went up so people are playing more to unlock the content of the archive seriously there's not a lot of

features that i mean monetize or not that is able to generate generate such an impact on engagement making characters accessible encourage a better meta and diversity um so the fact that the players are able to unlock freely the characters is super healthy for the the type of game that we're doing others are learning allowing players to unlock content with playtime is also good for revenue we know that players playing with more characters buy more skins and this goes up exponentially it is logic characters are a platform for cosmetics so in other words our revenue goes up with the amount of characters owned so facility facilitating the access to characters was the right bet for us our battle pass when it is active generates an average of 20 percent incremental

daily average revenue per user overall so in addition to seeing players play more players also end up spending more so our bet was right about the battle pass generosity led to incremental revenue and play time so to sum up be generous make sure that all sort of players monetizing or not are included in the whole game and that they are happy and engaged because at the end what you will end up having is a very virtuous loop i remember us looking at each other with dave and when we saw the result we felt very happy because players that are happy will stay longer and will eventually monetize and players who monetize are even more engaged and stay longer in the game so it's really perfect so now let's talk about our first value transparency so what does it mean for us

first communicate your intent always explain why and acknowledge your mistakes so if we go back two years in time i remember dave and i were wondering how to communicate after to our players we were a bit uh honestly frightened by that but what we did is that we wrote a blog post titled our store philosophy that we shared with our community before the story even came out we basically explained to them almost everything we explained to you in this gdc talk very transparency we detailed our store pillars how our currencies work and how much everything costs and above all we explained to our players why we introduced a ser our in-game store was presented at the same time as dead by the lights year three roadmap so allow me to read the section of our blog post to you we are very excited to start that by daylight year 3 with you and want you to know that the launch of

chapter 8 in june is just the beginning of what we want to do we believe that this game will have more anniversaries to celebrate and we are eager to continue to support the game as the dead by the lights community grows we would like to give an early thank you to all the players who will be buying cosmetic items as this is what will allow us to support our ambitions for the future so if you intend to add microtransactions in your game game telling players why you need them is super important when players buy a cosmetic item they invest in the game and the dev team for that by daylight players the introduction of an in-game store had in some ways become a promise of a future for the development of the game and uh what worked well for us and that i think is really important is that you have to do this communication with your own voice you need to be super candid about it and when we did it we had a live stream but

before that we had a pre-recorded video made as well um and and this was pretty cool because we had to work with the whole team to show these values and to show this plan and we saw that they would get on board with what we were saying so we we knew at this point that it was going to work if you can get your team on board 100 uh it's going to be far more easier than to get your community to uh to understand what what's going on so in this process as we said we've also presented our year three roadmap and it was a great exercise we'd like to take some time to talk about some of the learning that we got from sharing our your three map with our community so we showed to our players one year of content including new killers the survival of the maps as well as some changes and priorities we wanted to tackle so showing your plans long in advance helps to get players excited about what's coming even if it is not live yet for example we told our players in advance that we

would reinforce an anti-cheat system and even if it got released several months later later knowing it was coming help to keep our players patient more generally it was the first time we told our community that we would keep supporting the game for years to come and as a player or even as a streamer it sends a strong message that they can keep investing their time and money in our game because we devs are committed to keep investing in it as well after all why would we expect a player to commit his or her time and money in our game if we don't ourselves commit to keep investing in the game too it can also help to structure production as it forces the death team to think about the future it forces us to think about what priorities we want to tackle next which also makes us work in the right order and having some dates laid out in the future also allows us to retroplan every phase of production from design kickoff to official release

including dedicated time for qa and dedicated time for live testing on our public test environment for example so having a roadmap has many advantages but this is definitely not for everyone it might be more difficult for smaller studios or for a game that's not live yet because yeah when you're communicating this roadmap to the whole world you're committing to the content you're promising also you're creating expectation if you are not delivering on the content you've promised of course you're gonna disappoint your community you'll have to deal with that later order advice here the best thing is to stay high level when you're communicating about your roadmap so that you don't create too much expectation and also make sure that you tell your community that these things might change communicating your own map also creates a precedent every year when you present your new roadmap there's going to be a want that this

road map is more awesome than the previous one so that gets increasingly more difficult and of course it can't be it cannot be bigger and bigger and more impressive every other year so what's important here again is to explain to your community why it it is like that sometimes you have a technical debt that you need to fix sometimes you need to do other type of investment in your product for the longer term so that way you can make sure that the player understands what's going on and then can get hyped about a better future so to sum it up uh communicate your attention with candor do it with your own voice and transform your players into investors as soon as they get it and that they want your game to succeed as much as you do they'll become colleagues they'll become investors so time to wrap up so like we explained

at the beginning uh to add a successfully successful game as a service you need players and that feel good about your game that are having fun and you need a sustainable source of revenue so that you can keep doing uh amazing content and often these two components when making a feature they're seen as conflictual by building monetization features with these or values in mind we found out that we could make purchasing a joy we found out that building fun features to entertain players and building monetization features to have a sustainable source of revenue can be the same thing they can fuel each other and become synergistic to say it another way a player who is having fun in his entertain is hooked for the long term the player becomes a colleague he works with you to make the game better and eventually they can become investor

they will want to give you access to this to this power to be able to build even more awesome feature for the game and when spending is a joy when monetization enriches a game experience and when the star becomes a promise of a future for the game we have a via choose loop where monetization generates engagement and engagement leads to monetization before ending this talk we wanted to address a last question that we thought might be useful to all the creative and business minds out there if we had done things differently would we have made more money well it is hard to say because it would have required us to do an a b test to release the game with two different business models at the same time but what we can say is that we are happy with the choices we made because our players are very engaged and

our player base hasn't stopped growing since launch we are profitable and the money we generate has allowed us to keep investing in the game our values are important to our devs which we believe has a positive impact on our employees acquisition and retention and finally we believe that our brand image towards our players is also positively impacted which is great to acquire new players whether it's for that by daylight or even for our future games in development and behavior thank you very much i hope you enjoyed this talk bye