Engineering success: The CSR Racing 2 story

[Music] good afternoon or good morning as it is in my head we yeah I'm doing what I was general manager for CSR racing - our team is based in London and it's really lovely to be here this is our one year anniversary we launched CSR racing on June the 30th 2016 the game has been a soft launch for a while and we have some encouraging soft launch metrics it performs really quite well in the soft launch Geo's we had some good ua assets the marketing plan are really good and so we felt pretty confident about going into worldwide launch I remember us we all sat in the studio and push the button together and then kind of look to the graphs expectantly on the on the telemetry boards and how nothing happened for about three minutes and then the graph started going up into the

right I think you need a clicker is there a clicker somewhere it is the clicker press the green button great the graphs are going up into the right and the game outperformed our expectations very quickly we became the number one racing game and 126 countries very very quickly it peaked in the top ten grossing and today actually remains the number one racing game in about 50 countries worldwide it really really did outperform everything that we thought it would do as game players as well as game makers I think the thing that we were equally proud of is that the fans love that buy founded the original game and also new fans that we brought to the racing genre today we've had over a million five-star reviews it is one of the only games in the top 50 grossing with a 5 star rating and he's testament to the I guess the approach the team took and we took when we developed the game that we put the consumers first and you know fourth foremost in our minds

when developing the game and it's still five star rated about 50 countries worldwide including the UK in the US the documentation APIs 5 star rated as well so we sit in like a zen-like place without meditation app and at the end of 2016 we were super proud to be nominated as one of Google's best gains of the year which kind of capped what was a great first six months of the title and so I guess the question we asked ourselves I mean both at the time and also we continued to ask ourselves and it's a question that most of us work in the mobile ask is can you engineer success can you actually create the correct conditions you're going to be wildly successful and whilst I don't think there's a formula per se I certainly think you can stack the deck in your favor and this is something that we as a team believe that the Royal ways of creating a more likely environment in which are going is going to be successful and so over the next 50 minutes if you'll bear with me we'll talk through how we did that and our

experiences on CSR racing too so I think the first thing we had is a really clear aspiration from the very beginning we wanted to be number one in racing number one in racing not because we said we were number one in racing but because I gained this everywhere they would tell us we were number one in racing because they were download the game and play it we were been unborn in racing cuz it's been some money obviously the free-to-play business is quite important people actually elect to put their hands in their pocket and give you some of their cash which is obviously how you know you're doing a good job when they're enjoying the content you create a number one because our fans reviewed it well and gave us a great rating monopoly that five-star rating summit we hold really did after 12 months in worldwide launch to maintain that means we're doing something right in live operations we all had to be something worthy of this this is a screenshot from the original CSR racing funnily enough and it wasn't by design it launched nearly four years to the day before we launched this are racing to on June the 28th 2012 and both alien and natural

motion I mean they brought this amazing bold graphic style to mobile I mean it had a real attitude a lovely narrative and a mobile first design ethos which just propelled the game to wild success most people here have either experienced they'll played it to some degree but if you haven't I'll explain anyway it's real way steering it brought drag racing bang up-to-date with triple-a production values amazing assets amazing environments beautiful cars and a really simple gameplay loop you have to try and get your perfect start and then for the race you shift when the light goes green you can press a nitrous button to give yourself a boost and ideally you win and earn some money and that's kind of it it captures the spirit of drag racing beautifully it's a little adrenaline rush and after that you can then invest and buy another car or upgrade your car and back you go into the race it's simple it's very direct and it was highly effective to date the gains being downloaded now over 144 million times

which I'm sure the geographies in the room will realize is more than the population of Russia or approximately 2% of the world's population and 10 and a half billion miles have been driven in the game which the astronomers in the room were recognized is the same as flying to Pluto and back four times and the racing driver the realize is 819 million laps at the Nurburgring so a lot of racing and the game is not without its limitations though and this is something bought a in a natural motion recognized it didn't have deep social integration or cruise it didn't it certainly didn't have an elder game when the game launched it could be completed and finished and it didn't have an event harness or an event framework you can play the game get to the end of the five tiers and that was that was the experience done and it wasn't really built for live operations or events and so there were things that need to be improved so when we started to think about CSR racing - the first thing we

did is use all of that knowledge from CSR racing won all of the qualitative data we have from fans all the quantitative data that lost alien natural motion are built up over the four years and it's worth calling out that over that four year period of live operations were fading natural motions did an enormous amount to make the game events focus multiplayer focused adding asynchronous multiplayer and to significantly improve it in market and we also added selected features to see us are racing to that we believe would evolve the bracket the brand and they'll deal with some of those shortcoming to the original game and actually trait something to the sequel you know the first guy was a real inspiration for us and we wanted to make sure that to put a 2 against the name the game warranted being its own thing in the marketplace from a positioning point of view as well I mean I showed you that slide earlier that that amazing graphic image from the original game and from the positioning point of view we really wanted this game to stand alone and be different rather than it being very graphic focused and very very cartoony we wanted CSR racing

to to lean much more heavily into authenticity and real car comparison we wanted this to be the cuppa type of game that would appeal to fans of Chris Harris Top Gear the Grand Tour all of the you know the magazines that we like reading Evo magazine there are numerous North American equivalents of Evo that lean into the tuning culture and the supercar collection culture and to make this a game that really captured a much broader audience a more authentic audience of car fans around the world this movie that we created last year really captures the spirit that we want to go for but this is an authentic drag racing experience and about comparing real cards against each other which is factor you know the Audi's of the Huracan into the Porsche 9 1 8 is a lot Ferrari [Music]

[Music] so we started to blur the lines between fiction and the game to really create something they lent into tactic our comparison to collection are not that basic foundation our designers started to work on the vision for the game and the vision for the game was actually relatively straightforward we started with this this magic circle is a core loop from the original CSR racing you race you win some cash or some goals use that to upgrade your car at the barn you ride your race again and so it continues through the game it's really straightforward this is the DNA of our franchise and one thing we didn't want to do is mess around with this we felt this was really special this is a CSR

special sauce we talked about lots of different things we could do actually weather would include drifting or lane changing or cop chases all of which are valid ideas in and of themselves but actually we felt that this needed to be preserved but but we wanted to improve every single step to improve the race experience to improve the win experience that is more rewarding and there are more ways to invest in the game and the upgrade experience so is a much deeper game than the original game we also wanted to add lots of things around and this is a slide that goes back to late 2014 to an internal presentation we did to stake holders of it within our natural motion and it kind of speaks for itself right it's that original core loop racer and money and improve with synchronous multiplayer and crews and perks a multi-car garage to encourage ownership tuning fusing to have a much deeper relationship with your cars and extend the the amount of time you can play with them customization and sharing so our plates really personalize those cars events there's always something new to do on a daily and weekly basis

something to work towards and engage with Gacha and then triple a production values and this is a screenshot from the from the game today and it speaks this right in the original game you had one car in a garage and it was a simple car asset it was very much in game model now you've got a garage of hyper cars your dream garage of cars whether it's a Bugatti or a Lambo or a McLaren you can collect these amazing collections of cars and curate them to create garages of American cars or Italian cars and as you collect more cars in the game you can extend your garages the average CSR to player has 16 cards in their garage that's the average player our most prolific collector has 1485 cards in his collection so the game that really leans into collection it's an aspiration most of us can only dream of right I mean if we had one of those cars that would be amazing let alone 1485 of them beyond that we really wanted to lean into the sense that these were real physical assets I think too many games

create you know just the game objects that you can purchase but we wanted to create this idea they were digital collectibles these are real tangible objects and this is one of our game assets blown up you can go inside the cars or the interiors are built the engine Bay's the bonnets in exquisite detail I mean our cart image is phenomenal and it really takes these beyond the point where their game models there are digital collectible items that people covet and cherish and love and when they can customize and by deliveries and body zones and paint colors will color the colors and interior colors you suddenly get this which is players creating cars that they cherish and adore whether they aren't camo wraps to a Bentley or whether they add you know green paints or different colored interiors the the wealth of options is enormous is about a million different customization options throughout the game and if you look at all different combinations of colors and wraps so people can really lean into personalization and these are all images from my fans that shared on our Facebook pages and obviously I found share them within their own private social channels

as well beyond that the original game had a limitation that you're going to really get the get each of the cars to a thick PP watch it upgrade it all the weight performance potential is maxed and we wanted to allow players to really tune their cars to kind of have that aspiration that fantasy of being a car tuna and so we can choose a nine-person the final drive of the tire-pressure given more performance out of your cars and combined with our fusion part system which is where you can collect fusion parts and gaturro by winning races and blend those into your cars it creates a much deeper experience where it's much harder to get the cars to the maximum potential and therefore a longer experience for our players and they something they really love and you see this on our show social channels and in whatsapp groups people are sharing fusion configuration and trying to work out exactly how to tune the cars to get the most from them and then the race experience itself our team now looks more like a console team when we talk about the game experience itself most of our development team have worked on one of the major racing brands in the world before CSR racing and it

shows we create console quality graphics whether it's the car shade of the lighting the HDR the wheel blur the motion blur the environment the car assets themselves we follow console quality and hopefully need in many areas that level of execution on mobile including things like the the race graphics which can see the bottom of the screen which obviously move not only the the visuals on but the gameplay on from the original game and then we talked about social all of a third playing games these days whether they're console or mobile games really believe in a social experience connecting with other people all around the world and in CSR racing 2 we added a whole crews feature where you can collaborate with other groups of people in a crew of up to 30 players where you can race together in the crew championship chat communicate edge share tips and tricks and you know form a crew and obviously as we go through our live operations process we continue to lean into that and to

further develop the crew system I think it's Testaments the work of our design team I'm super proud of that these marketing assets that I'm going to show you actually really represent that original design vision of the game these are the marketing assets that were in the App Store when we launched we were building on the number one drag racing series adding next-gen customization and real time racing upgrading and tuning and crew battles to this that beautiful simple CSR racing core loop but improved at every single step and this is a super deliberate process we've kind of skip through it very quickly but you race you when you upgrade but now you do it with the deep social structure a nail the game and events and that really is how we viewed engineering success so with five minutes to go we could kind of finish there but I think actually the more interesting part of all of this is

how we did this with our culture our people and our partnerships because this is actually the other 50% of the effort and this is the wonderful group of people in London they represent every continent on planet Earth including Antarctica for those of you who understand that are actually impossible feel free to come asking us was how we got an Antarctic and on the development team but they represent 13 countries and a whole diverse range of thinking and skill sets it really has been a global endeavor it's been an endeavor where we brought all these people together we've partnered with our friends as Inga in San Francisco as well as Studios around Asia to build a lot of our car assets and we're very very proud of the way this team has worked together to deliver the sequel equally were very proud of the way our team has worked with our partners whose kato-san from Liberty walk the tune is amongst you may have heard of Liberty walk they're an amazing Japanese tuning company that is spectacular work with Lambos and MacLaren's I mean it really is absolutely gorgeous the work this man does and he's a total character and those partnerships have led to a whole

range of exclusives we continue to pursue these and we'll continue to pursue these through this year by developing deep and authentic relationships with our manufacturers whether it's Ferrari Bugatti McLaren Koenigsegg Ford Porsche Pagani of a mr. nominal at it you know and so this is a celebration right this is our one-year anniversary it's one year together with Koenigsegg we've been working with those guys for a long time and we've made new friends this year with Porsche ray bringing them to mobile and you know longmate continued and obviously more recently with universals in the Fast and Furious Frank [Music]

so we'll finish on a few stats in CSR racing so far over the past year people of race 2.6 billion miles which is 160,000 times around the earth and for those of you have been paying attention to Pluto I'm back once so far and a lot of races have been completed we have a very very highly engaged player base who love what we do who are happy to give us feedback and to support us and to help shape their game because it is their game right it's um you know we hand over to them when we're going to worldwide launch and after that we're servicing their needs and what they want and to do that we have a very very clean and simple mission which we believe in to the bottom of our hearts actually we are in the Life Enrichment business which sounds a little bit black Mesa I realize but actually we are we're out there to make the world a little bit better to make them a little bit happier to give them something really fun to do on a day

to day basis moments to distraction or indeed deep and engaging experiences for extended periods of time it's been our experience that we had we do actually create really strong social connections and friendships by people all around the globe and who share what we share which is a passion for cars every day that we get up we bring that passion to work and we hope our players enjoy experiencing it we are natural motion we make lots of stuff but we make racing games thank you so much for listening I hope that was somewhat informative and I've been to an official conference thank you [Applause] [Music]