DropForge Games' David Bluhm on smart branding and why mobile will always win

there but i will guarantee you i won't be long i threw out my back and i'm on mild muscle relaxants so i'm also not responsible exactly what i say it's uh very good to be here helsinki this is uh pretty fitting this is uh in my mind the start of the mobile gaming business i guess i equate it to snake on the nokia phones and i've been at this long enough that i competed with snake and my biggest task was get somebody to pay for or do something to play a different game that was resident already on their phone i've been at this a long time and just to give you a context and really this is much about giving you my biases as anything else i go back with ilkai i used to publish some a games early on when the entire business was about the carriers i had no idea we'd be talking so much about brands this morning this has been kind of fascinating and yet i also have to say you know if you've

got a legitimate reason to worry about branding right now because you've got you know 10 million daus and people downloading your game at a level you're in pretty good shape how many people here are independent developers would consider yourself an indie developer by hand okay a handful so i really tailored this talk i guess more to the people that are trying to break through if you create that kind of a branding success believe me you won't have to worry about your strategy too much they will contact you you will be inundated with requests for branding opportunities because brands seek eyeballs and if you have eyeballs you win and that's exactly what rovio has done but i started this deal before we had even color phones and there was big editorials about whether color phones were even necessary they were just going to be a battery draw so good or bad i take all that baggage and everything i do coming from the original start of this that we really had to find a compelling user experience and that really changed

that thing with the iphone that caused me to get back in my second mobile gaming company z2 where the iphone allowed us to build really compelling user experiences real games we had real studios with real professionals and the business as a gaming business grew up whereas before it was purely a contest of who got a very limited amount of real estate in carriers around the world and now you could build a grain and you could break through and the rovios and the supercells and other people with success are paving the way for all of us and it's very exciting well i think it gets even more exciting as we go forward this is my third game game company and everything's different about the first one and everything's different about the second one so you really have to relearn the entire i think several people alluded to it earlier on most recently vladimir you can't do what you did two years ago and be successful launching a great game on ios knowing how to monetize it created a great company in g2 an ability to make a lot

of money be profitable control our own destiny build the games we wanted to um that's not enough anymore the ecosystems changed dramatically there's different markets in place but i'll tell you um we're funded by wargaming we are i'm going to do a little bait and switch on you here we are not responsible for taking wargaming's intellectual property to mobile first of all we wouldn't be interested in that limited agenda as game company people we want to go build what needs to be built for the current market today and where it's going so we are an independent autonomous company drop forged games that is funded by war gaming if we want to make the argument that we're going to take war gaming intellectual property will let tangs or the war planes world of ships to mobile then we can go make that argument but that has to be our decision so i was asked to give you guys a little bit of insight into taking a pc game to mobile and um i will talk about that in very specific

terms you have this pc experience it's very unique it's very different it's very immersive it's got long session length uh play times and take that to a mobile experience where people are on the move they're on the go the sessions are different the consumption is different and there's a lot of business model differences as well which we'll talk about so to make sure i'm adding real value here i'm not going to talk on abstractions i'm going to talk about a game that we're actually making card hunter this is a game that uh has anybody heard of card hunter or played it know about it perfect yeah we got one over there all right so card hunter was built as a personal experience by a very capable game designer named john shea in partnership with the guy who created magic the gathering richard garfield and it was their first attempt at creating an online free to play game for the pc and they built it in a browser experience so it's got a tremendous amount of design credibility behind it but

no experience in designing for the mobile platform or for a free to play experience or for that matter the monetization layers that go along with that with that said uh this has not been a financially successful game but it's been really well critically acclaimed and awarded it's made dozens of best of game lists for 2013. it's won some major awards and it's got 400 000 dedicated loyal capable players but it didn't financially turn out terribly well for that reason it's just a limited audience scope but actually the the ltv the retention is great but this game could not come to mobile successfully as it is now it's a great discussion of whether it has a brand or not just because it was listed among many games as one of the best of 2013 it's clearly not known in this room and so this one really doesn't have a pc brand that we could take but i'll talk a little bit more about that in a second i'll tell you there's five areas

that we looked at this game and said this is not going to map well to mobile unless we change these five things but none of them have to do with the mobile platform themselves you'll notice i'll talk about those differences in a second so really quickly it had literally no way to track a user through the game it wasn't linear you could move into experiences and go down all kinds of role-playing adventures but there was no way from a analytics perspective or a designer's perspective to understand where that person was in the game similarly on the player side you didn't know where you're trying to go you didn't have those aspirational paths that you were looking to move and progress through the game so we really have to restructure the game and make it linear so we can manage our player base through it and understand where they're stuck and where they need help and where we need to make changes secondly really not much of a monetization thinking it wasn't built into the start of the game design and it certainly didn't come in strong later

the idea this is a card collection game it's a card collection plus strategy game um obviously you're gonna hear a lot about those games because of hearthstone and a bunch of different magic the gathering and other products that are being recently introduced in the mobile ecosystem they're actually doing very well card games have high ltvs they're structured so that you are aspirationally motivated to buy a card the card gives powers with it they're well defined predetermined and you know how to use them in the game therefore you save up for them you buy them you desire them that creates a long retentive play cycle and it creates a high ltv so you're going to see lots of people coming into this space very quickly as a result of hearthstone and many of the other products that have broadened this category and we'll just have to see where it goes it's got plenty of downsides too it's a very core type of game and you may limit your your player base i think vladimir also represented the idea that if you dominate a niche in mobile you're in pretty good shape well i think that's very true there's not really much of a small niche

in mobile mobile is such a big and expansive space that even dominating just a niche is a very very important position to have in the marketplace as a card collection game typically you have a certain number of cards that are quite rare and unique and have a high value well that wasn't represented in carton originally and i think they missed an opportunity to build in and reflect value in card rarity and some of these are pretty technical uh discussions about ccgs but it all goes to the point of really understanding the game and your player base and how you meet that player bases needs and create a successful product so you can't worry about branding down the line and selling t-shirts instead of giving them away there was no visual payoffs in the original game we have to make it much more visually stimulating when there's something that happens i can't think of a better example than candy crush in terms of how they've done that made it fun exciting and even social as to making achievements within the game and finally uh the polish in

every game gets raised and raised and raised with almost every release hearthstone has done a fantastic job of raising the bar on polish and so polish is something you're just going to have to really push into so to bring this back a little bit and talk about uh kind of i guess 15 years in the gaming business and trying to apply some more high level wisdom as far as taking a a pc game to mobile i think i've i've taken a lot of brands to mobile i've taken a lot of things that hasn't worked we can talk about those mistakes i you know we talked about movie licenses earlier this morning and the first thing came to mind wasn't spiderman and the marvel characters that we made a lot of money off back at hands on mobile but it was matrix where i basically lost my ass never even got the game shipped because of some of the politics between aol time warner the wazkowski brothers keanu reeves agent there can be all kinds of problematic

business deals which goes south outside of your control when you start dealing with big brands i'll just say that so they can be very encouraging they can be very discouraging both ways and i don't think anybody's got that worked out because nobody knows how big these properties are going to become when they're moving properties that haven't been released yet anyway i'm going to talk about the the why when the how real quickly we'll briefly get you off to lunch on taking a pc game to mobile and uh the first thing is and i shouldn't have to say this i'm in helsinki i'm at a pocket gamer conference and i nobody up here should be selling mobile i heard king this morning selling why you should worry about mobile mobile wins i learned a long time ago and this is back at hewlett packard when i was in enterprise sales that the small fish eat the big fish in computing we had the mini eat the la the mainframe the desktop ate the mini the laptop ate the desktop the tablets eating the laptop and the phone wins the phone's the first the primary it's the largest volume you should be in phones so that

you know small device which has limited screen size everything is now a full-grown computer with connectivity with movement with tracking it is the primary device and anybody that wants to be a globally dominant company better start worrying about the phone device either directly or through a partner and um you know three major and there's plenty of plenty of data that support this it it is the largest device it has the largest device footprint worldwide it is the fastest growing platform it and tablets are outgrowing everything before it and will continue to do that and most importantly probably to anybody that thinks we're anywhere close to saturation the largest markets still have very small penetration there's plenty of upside in mobile we've just begun we've just gotten started that should be a real message of encouragement to everybody and if you think that in fact somehow we are saturated then we may have wearable computing very shortly around the corner that's going to create all kinds of opportunities for the people in this room and elsewhere

so now we get to the when when do you jump on an opportunity and take it to mobile well the first thing is brand i actually thought it was going to be i guess i should have looked at him the agenda all the talk about brand i'll spend less time on that i guess but i also have a something i call ddam which we'll talk about in terms of is it a fit does it fit the mobile business marketplace landscape device everything and then finally your portfolio so if you've got a brand you're in great shape but be very careful about configuring brands a lot of these brands are fantastic brands some of these don't map to mobile very well and they will not give you an edge i don't know how many brands i've taken to mobile in my life it's got to be in the 30 or 40s some have worked out well most haven't they don't all translate to a mobile experience sometimes putting a brand on all experience does not enhance experience in the old days when you had 17 slots on a carrier deck a brand got you on that deck and that

one because it was the only selectable game the ones that didn't have brands came off you know real quick story is i got my i'll just tell you my failure stories here today um we were told by we covered every single category on the carrier stack back in the days football games basketball games baseball games hockey whatever we all competed primarily back in the day i remembered his informant jammed at going at it trying to find the right brands to take to the carriers and win so they communicated they wanted a volleyball game this is when professional beach volleyball was getting very popular women were playing this on the beach really expanding the visibility of this it was hotly marketed in the u.s so all the us carriers wanted a volleyball game so we quickly got on a plane we flew to chicago and we secured the american volleyball association brand thinking we've gotten the nfl of volleyball and we started building the game rapidly we went back to the carries and we said you know we solved it we got the nfl of volleyball the fifa volleyball here it is you know where do we sign and

they said no we're going to go with the jam that game they they brought us baywatch volleyball and so if i was sitting on deck and i was picking a game i think baywatch wins every time as a brand they didn't pay much for baywatch it was a great deal they outsmarted us there's a lot of brands that may have lost their value but have great value in mobile today another example is we took top gun the movie with tom cruise and kelly mcgillis 20 years old we took it to mobile and it dominated worldwide because top gun still had a very strong brand as a movie as the character tom cruise played as maverick and did very well we paid nothing for it we got it free for licensing another more contemporary movie brand some brands don't make sense to me why people would put them on their bodies i don't know but all kinds of brands have succeeded but we do owe basically an applause for all the companies in gaming that have created a brand worthy enough for somebody to paint it permanently on their body

that's an impressive achievement and everybody this morning is right if you have one of these brands you're in very good shape there's a lot of things you can do but designing for this brand opportunity really isn't something that i think is a viable independent developer studio goal i think you should not limit any game you build to being brandable and having a brand that is what i say just extensible build something that is extensible but to have that as a strategy there's 152 000 games today on the apple ios most of those are also on google play and if you're just in the top 200 which wouldn't get you in a position to talk about a brand that's 0.14 so i would put most of the brand talk um on the back burner until you've actually got so many eyeballs that they're calling you so damn this is the idea that the design the device the audience and the monetization all fits so starting with the design um just some quick things you

know how is the game structured can you it's not so much that you know linear not linear but can you manage the player's movement through the game and track it and improvement this is a service as people have mentioned this morning it starts when you launch it doesn't end it's very different from traditional games even pc games and when you're starting that you're starting that learning process between you and your player base and so it has to be linear to the fact that you can track progress and know what track what progress isn't isn't and be able to overcome it we've all probably understood session length has been well talked people play these things on a bus waiting for a doctor all of a sudden they've got to go they got to clam it up and go on their way it's got to be a session link that supports the mobile consumption tablet's tough one because it can be used very much like a browser or a mobile device skill based games that's a very important thing to know frankly skill-based games rise um in in in stature with just a very few number of people who ma

master the skill they're less accessible over time because they take skill and people get obviously when they get beat by better players so when you have a luck involved that everybody can play and everybody can win you're going to reach a broader audience and you have to understand that and it's got to be tailored into your in your design this is one that baffles me just baffles me that nobody designs virality into their game i have no idea why people are spending three four bucks on user acquisition but they're not trying to do that as far as they can organically if you have a mechanic in your game that motivates a player to invite their friend and play with their friend over time giving them a boost in the game forever that's a huge mechanic i don't know how you can't purposely try and design organic variety into your game it's not just posting things on facebook there's got to be a mechanic that gets you engaged with your friends and keeps you engaged with your friends and their friends that create this viral fight you can't afford to acquire users any other way it baffles me that more people

aren't we started a company called k invite which is a basically a viral ad network to combat the cost of acquiring them through ad networks ad networks are great we owe a lot to them we have to use them but you should maximize your organic virality as much as you can on the device side because they're not showing up easy devices have real estate uh some games we're doing a card game we're not going to take it to mobile we're taking it to tablets it's actually a more natural experience on a tablet because it kind of replicates that whole tabletop experience and the cards are now digital and be slid around on a surface it's a wonderful fit other games don't it was like some of the questions we're talking about is triple a games coming from console to pc well i'm one of these guys it's a bit of a contrarian when somebody says you can't do a first person shooter there's hasn't been great successes first-person shooters on mobile phones

i wonder why and i look at some of these games that have been brought over and they have lots of organic downloads every day not enough to put them into a visibility chart but it amazes me how much pent-up demand there is we just haven't got the controls we don't have the screen real estate we don't have the ability to replicate a great user experience in most first-person shooters on a mobile phone i hope somehow we break through that because i think there's a big untapped opportunity it's just right now a limit of the devices and the controls um the the the audience um there's less core gamers on mobile well is that true are they is it again what i just alluded to is kind of a pent-up demand when we interview world of tanks users we know they're playing clash of clans we know there are some many of them a high percentage i won't say a percent but there's a high percentage to play candy crush so is it's one thing to say as ilker was saying i don't look at the market like that because i can have those players come in and play my game by making accessible we spend our day on variety

of different things and sometimes we might be a core gamer but we want more of a casual throwaway experience intermittently so we'll figure all this out when we get even more analytically mature about our audiences but understanding where your audience is if you're going to take a core game to mobile you'd better satisfy that core gamer experience first and a hundred percent or you're not going to be accessible to the broad audience and you're not going to please your core gamer base either way card owners very much like that we have a very difficult decision of whether we make it more accessible and broaden the audience and upset our core audience or we really focus in that core audience and their loyalty and and design the game for them and finally monetization uh i got to tell you i i get two three pitches a week um companies that you know want to partner with us and partly our access to world of tanks player bases and our you know experience in publishing or what have you and

there's a ton of them that are like premium game strategies now i have nothing against i've no religious feelings about free to play premium or even subscription or anything else exists right now there's only one model that builds value for an independent developer and that's free to play if you don't have a 100 million dollar brand you're taking to market it represented eight percent of the revenue taken out of the mobile market last year it was about 12 percent the year before so it's actually smaller it's getting smaller not coming back i hope it does come back i i'd love to be able to sell premium games you just have almost zero chance of building a successful strategy on a premium game whether you like to hear that or not it's just true so the monetization on mobile right now is free to play that's what accesses players that what gives you a chance to invest in your game and build a valuable franchise oh here they go thanks all right i don't think i missed much

there um there's a sensitive of card hunter on pay to win you guys have all probably heard about this or understood it there's a lot of people out there that are very religious about it and all free to play games must be pay to win well that's a that's your responsibility to build a game that doesn't feel and act like pay to win and it's just a matter of not abusing the free-to-play model um the audience will speak for itself all right so last consideration is you have to i i truly believe that this game has changed now you have to have a portfolio strategy you can't just have one game how does it help you with either downloads or arpu it's hard to maximize both there's very few games that have done both making sure this strategy fits into a portfolio strategy so you can do cross promotions you can scale you can build a loyalty community that actually pays to be inside your games those are all very important to building a scalable business the how very quickly uh you have to have a platform out focus don't take a game from console from pc from anywhere and then try and port it

to mobile think of the game from mobile out reimagine the game from a mobile experience and if it doesn't work it's not going to transfer and finally monetization has to be fit in from t0 from day one you have to have the monetization expert part of your game design team i've all people come most most studios come to me with a game and they're doing the monetization in the last third of the game design and the or the game development i should say the last third of the process they throw in a monetization it's the wrong thing you got to start at the very start test everything test everything now we can we have oceans and we have drips of data let's look at them all so summary think about being as good a business people as you are gamers in the gaming business we're so passionate we're so loyal about games it's all about the game and you can't sacrifice that but spend an equal amount of energy reading the analytics reading the market

and understanding what's going to work too many studios are just loaded with creative talent and they don't have the same business acumen to take that talent and turn it into a user experience that can work in the market marketing monetization and community from day one that's the social benefit of being on mobile you have this huge social community understand all that from day one there's so many things you have to do in marketing there's so many things you have to build community and plenty of views and as i mentioned we can now test everything so if you're worried about the state of the market that a couple guys own the whole thing don't worry this time next year we'll be talking about some new phenomenas some new amazing things that the market's changing and it'll change and give you more opportunities that's it thank you