Deconstruction of Chinese Mobile Game Monetization

[Music] okay hi if you have your mobile phone ring around please turn it off I'm going to do the same okay this is going to be a very hands-on lecture I've spent tens of hours at least 30 40 hours on this presentation and it's because I want it to be useful to you I usually don't have to spend so much time

on a presentation but this time I feel like it's hard work so put it in another way I'm revealing to you the secrets of how Chinese monetize mobile games and you're going to see the numbers and the numbers are you cannot dispute the numbers because they're real the game that I'm going to present to you came from a game that everybody knows if you're in game industry its contra and it's a adapt ation of contra by $0.10 the games called contra returns you're gonna see the numbers but I'll just tell you right now in the past two years so they just had their two years anniversary last month with this month and in average over the 24 months every month they generate 40 million dollars in Chinese market alone and I'll tell

you other things the game has failed in in Korea and the game has felt in some of the markets I don't want to say many markets because I only know about one or two but that's not to say what they're doing has a lot for us to learn okay so this game contra Returns was commercially launched in June of 2017 first year's income is here second year so this is all the breakdown and I didn't go through some internet website and get these numbers you cannot find these numbers anywhere I spoke with people who worked on this project I don't give lectures based on what I find from Google all right so an average monthly income is 40 million US dollars this is the original

title actually I don't have the mouse otherwise this is actually a video but you can probably call from your memory where the game looked like just to refresh your memories you can have multiplayers stay you shoot and they drop out drop down upgrades it was great Oh a tease okay so keep this image in your mind this is this is the same game done with a different spin and I have to tell you I've been in game industry for 33 years when I was trying to reverse engineer

what dissect in this game I was suffocated I was suffocated because I knew what I was looking at and I actually floundered for a few days not knowing how to put together this PowerPoint and I thought I was going to screw up my presentation because I don't know how to put it together because there's just too much information and I don't know how to organize them I mean this is probably how the scientists felt when they saw the first photo from Hubble telescope but that's how I felt when I started looking into this game so I just you know I downloaded this game I started taking screenshots and I kept taking screenshots onto I've taken more than 100 screenshots and the rotator which is too much and I couldn't organize them so so I've decided to organize it this way we look at the

screen this is the main menu and I'm gonna break it down to top down bottom you know left and right and then there's the center piece that's just how I'm going to do it the the biggest source of confusion or massive amount of data actually came from the events the ops events the Chinese call it events I don't know if you call it anything else but you're gonna you're going to see them okay right part of the menu it's right over here so you know I can tell you this is the shop just the shop just the shop alone I can probably give a three hours lecture well it's going to be 30 seconds so you know where the shops alone you know obviously they break it down and you know I have this interesting conversation with a game designer of this game I said you know the shops looks like the same to every other $0.10 games shops so to use shears was code that each year some kind of library do

you guys have a tools group and he looked at me kind of like weird like I'm weird that he says no he says we're in competition with other Studios and say okay you came from a very big studio timmi timmi studio do you guys share the same source code within your studio he says no so I thought about it and you guys should know this so I was a lead program around Madden football we also never share source code on Madden now every year year to year we had to rewrite the source code from scratch and most would look at the source code from before but we wrote it from scratch out of pride it's not a very economical way to do it now I will tell you they're working on Metal Slug Returns so it's the same treatment with metal slugs and they are using this source code but it's very different so it's not code sharing its code dropping or code

dumping so they just like dump this on you and this is supposed to be helpful whether it is helpful or not it's up to you anyway so that's on the shops and they have this thing called benefits it's not what you think but they're basically deals you know upsells and then events and they don't just call it events they actually have like anniversary they have events with styles like you know if it's Halloween or it's is it like loot boxes and so on so these are all different different types of events and over here this time limited upsell event this is event calendar they have so many events they actually have a calendar in the game and you see that they have also have an email system I mean in a way it's not a game or it's more than a game

it's a platform what's its media and this is another event which is a mini game so this is very becoming very popular in China sometimes we just say meta games is very important in China but that's really too big of a category because American can be what can be actually reusing the elements from the same game to make a different game does that make sense like the characters the backgrounds you know they can take those elements and make it a new simpler game now if the results of the mini game can add to your endeavors in the main game that's great if not it doesn't matter because we need to give users something different to do the will get to that they they actually have a preferred minutes of gameplay per player per day so based on where you are if if they

think the 90 minutes is the right amount of time for you to play in a day if it's you if you're below or you're if you're above they're going to push different events to you during my investigation of this game I also got very confused because I press the same button twice I got different results so you see where I'm getting at that's how deep this game is you have a user interface you click the same button like a different time of day or at your different state of development in the game you actually see different pop-ups and this is a two year anniversary event okay this is a top part of the menu this was actually a one hour lecture and now I have to cram it down to half half the time okay so this is actually quite incredible most usually the top part of the in any game it's the most prominent place right you'll usually look at the up side that's why all the scores your

amount of money you know your progress your you know HP XP it's all there everything here that looks like a display they're actually all clickable I mean sometimes it's obvious sometimes it's not very obvious but I actually did try to click everything that I thought wouldn't do anything but everything does something so if you click your profile photo you go to my account and in my account you can't see it it's it's very blurred so it actually tells you which guilt you belong to in my case I'm not qualified to join killed yet because I haven't spent enough time in the game so that's actually a motivation for me to play further in the game it also shows me that I'm not part of any group or hunting group it's not guilt it's a smaller like hunting party because I also have not achieved that level I spend most of the time dissecting the game not playing the game and then I can change my profiles background I can

change my character and I can share to my which add moments just by one click of a button and then they have another button it's to switch account because a lot of hardcore players they have more than one game accounts so they don't want people to quit out of the game and then come back they allow you to be able to just click one thing and you can switch account now if you pay attention which ad has the same function okay so seriously this is a quite blown away to me because most games don't even have this button like how to set up your account how do I want to project my persona to other players in the game so that's what this button is for and this is VIP privilege so you can just pay you know X amount of dollars per month so you're getting more resources in the

game and whether you pay or you don't pay the amount of resources it's based on a scientific or experiential factor you know you'll see that in a separate page okay first time purchase bonus you'll you'll know this and then by one click of this yeah so that W my internet button you go to the games website to to have gained access to all the fa Q's so you don't need leave the game you actually go to a window go to the official website of the game within the game and then if you click WeChat they show you all the benefits you get as a WeChat user they encourage you to use your which ad account to log in so when you're tired of the game when you uninstall the game they can still reach you on WeChat this is very powerful they also have an internal email system so

when the system shuts down the server or whatever they want to give you some rewards they do it to do it through their email system and then they have a configuration screen and in their configuration screen you can set up your privacy settings like how much information about you you like other people to know I have to say this is quite progressive how many games do you know have privacy settings and obviously if you click the gold coins you can buy gold coins if you click the diamond you can buy diamonds and see that that network latency icon you can click it and it will tell you what's uh what's the latency right now I mean it's not a big deal but it's the small detail that they pay attention to and because this is potentially can be a network game you can play PvP that's why it's important so this is configurations I sort of blow it up so you can see more you can record

the video I mean it record the game just by doing the setting here so I think those two functions are very worth noting one is how do you you know you can record the game the only thing that I don't know if it's iPhones the limitation which is in some video recording they actually turn on the camera and record that game at the same time and the players face appears in a little box in the corner I really like that setting because once you record it once you don't have to do any editing you know there you go on you know whatever Twitter in you know Instagram but I haven't really personally seen it in a game so I have a feeling recording the video game video game screen and turn on the camera at the same time it's doable on iphone cool okay so more people should do that

okay and this is my account you know change the background change the frame I'm not joining a legion yet I've not joined a team yet and show it off and this is to switch account okay this is bottom part of the the menu so they just show you heroes because you know the two most important things in the game for for monetization is one is heroes second one is weapons the game designer just told me told me this straight out and I think every game designer should know exactly how your game monetizes and what's keeping your players in the game what's your retention factors so you know look at those two buttons you know and if your player in the game after a

while you're gonna know you need better heroes and you need better weapons and that's where you spend the money okay and then they show you different quests are very important a lot of Chinese players like to be led to do tasks they hit exploring and because a lot of times they just don't know what to do next so when they don't know what to do next they would say the game sucks so you need to tell them what they need to do next tutorial becomes very important daily quest becomes very important and that needs to take up most of the users times okay and their chat oh yeah they even have a radio station button in the game if you click it you're going to see like Instagram type features what like tick tock you know type what tick tock is is 15 seconds so this is like let's go go open a channel and they start singing or

they record videos of them playing this game so it's new additional content surrounding the game most of the time this only one channel it's playing like like like now it's electric music you know that's themed to the game so you can actually go there turn it on or turn it off or you can listen to other players playing and then they also tell you you can get different rewards next time if you go to a certain level okay this is left part of the the menu that's a ranking chart and look at how many categories they have on the ranking the reason is obvious they want to give you as many dimensions or metrics as possible to make you feel good so you know if I don't have the most the best firepower maybe I can lose

the most or maybe I can die die them the most number of times so there are all kinds of ranking system they actually have a button called I want to be more powerful so it's very verbose very straightforward and they show you exactly what you need to do now you're gonna notice some of these features are actually redundant I thought about this and as game designers we rarely do this because we think which think logically like that function is already there buried three levels down in the menu but what $0.10 does is since this is important I'm gonna paste it over here there and there in different places just to make sure you don't miss it and they have a button to show you what's your total firepower so the important stuff like where you are in the game they stick it to your

face over and over again okay the center of the screen this takes the most real estate on the screen actually this is shows they're showing you your character and when you go to what level what are you going to get so you know most of the time I just click this button because I want to go through the story but they're telling you at level 16 you got you get PvP you know at level 20 you get coops and and you know level 12 you get like kind of like eSports feature and then 19 you can more daily quests and so you know you always have something to look forward to and they even have something that they didn't say that the games that designer told me at love 4:23 your kilt feature will be open there so so maybe after I've attained level 16 this real estate will be replaced by quite that information okay the early user experience on the

first day of joining the game they're only approvals and rewards now I'm not saying you should all do this I'm just telling you that's what this game does and it works in China they believe the young young kids today when they go play a video game they don't want frustrations they don't want challenges and they don't want explorations they want to be told of what to do and when they do it there are certain rewards there so it's a very different mentality whatever I'm saying just keep reminding yourself 40 million US dollars a month the success is a fact starting from the second day the money paying players start getting more resources the rate of getting resources if you don't pay it's zero point eight X versus three x two money paying users so whenever you're considering the IP type

privileges this is what they use and they claim they get this numbers through experience the first three days the ops team look at the players behaviors in the granularity of hours and after that it will be days and they also focus a lot on places in length per day not necessary number of play sessions and it may be because play session length matters more than number of play sessions I thought they're both important but this is this is their in at the end of the day they don't want to track fifty KPIs so they they actually have different people responsible for before seven days kind of retention and after seven days kind of retention and you know from from company's perspective they pay more attention on seven day plus retentions because that's that's

where you start getting the money three techniques to increase engagement one is promote cooperations between between players by the way I didn't I didn't come up with this I didn't create this this by a game designer it's like mantra I mean when when he told me in Chinese he almost rhymed and he didn't even think it's like this these are the three things you do and I thought about it I couldn't say anything to dis build what he's telling me it makes sense now I'm obviously this is not 100 percent but this could be 90 percent it's not bad for three things and the second one is encourage communication the third one is to instigate conflicts now this is obviously a a network game you know

because in a single-player game to instigate conflicts you know that there'll be a PvE situation purpose of events okay this is I think it's very important because I asked him the hundreds and hundreds of events you guys do and I see so many screens and I don't know how to organize them why do you do them are there certain logic in when you do an event what are you trying to achieve he said easy number one increased engagement and the metrics is the number of sessions per day the second ones stimulate consumptions upsell and so he told me when you see the screen with a big gun or a big hero in the middle and the art is usually beautiful they're selling you something the third one is bring back players if the activities slowed down this is really cool most companies most game companies I know don't do this so they actually have people on the phone calling people you know it was so sorry

that you left the game is there anything we can do who does that but these are the players who played your game the opinions actually matter a lot but most people don't want to hear negative feedback so and they actually break it down to have they uninstalled the game already or they still have the game then there was they will communicate with their players through notification okay the main changes to original game simple I just told you upgrades to characters and weapons the original game you cannot do this and then the next one is collecting collecting is very important to Chinese players and the third one is in-app purchases you cannot do that in the original game the take away this is a last page what's mentioned in this presentation is a set of proven successful features I can tell you if you go to afk arena if you go to another Chinese successful game you're going to see very similar

blueprint obviously without action themed side scroller but if you go to a card battle game you're going to see something similar especially on the commercial side now I'll tell you I think the core gameplay sucks I can see the screen flickers I mean the framerate is not good and the characters animation I don't think it's flute you know it's it's good but it's not important we have to remind ourselves 40 million dollars a month in one market alone and it has to mean something and we have to learn something from it and the fact that they're using the same framework and to repeat and to do it again it's something that we need to think about so what's the game companies placed more attention I'm making games fun to play and with attractive graphics nothing wrong with it however Chinese game companies are placing more of their attentions meta games depth in gameplay social

features Network features customer services and monetization features now you can say they're focusing on anything other than the game itself well forty million dollars a month the last one ten is already working on metal skia already said that so I think that's it that's my presentation if we have time if we have time I'm more than happy to answer questions I think we gonna have to move on but Monty that was fantastic thank you so much [Music]