Evolving Plague Inc: Taking a Top Mobile Game to Steam

[Music] time in 104 27 year old female infected with unknown pathogen blood analysis indicates a virus provisioner name is 12 I had traveled in China before returning home two weeks ago that must have been frequent unknown if had contact with my stuff but I could definitely see evidence of insect bites deceased had reported coughing and sneezing with a high fever I'm seeing a nasty rash some abscesses around the abdominal cavity they are signs of immune suppression cause of death appears to be catastrophic organ failure I think match reports coming out of

China this is highly concerning the deceased may still be [Music] I'm halting the autopsy in order to notify the authorities request the full lockdown of this facility effective immediately cool so hi everyone let's get started so that was the trailer for plague ink evolved which is going to be the subject of the talk today some of you may recognize the voice of the doctor in there so the easter egg which I managed to that's quite pleased to arrange we're going to be discussing the trailer a bit in a bit more detail later on so try not to forget it and I think in the middle

it's quite helpful to just see a bit about what plaguing evolve actually is so my name is James Vaughn I'm the founder of endemic creations and the developer of plague inc I'm quite new to the games industry I used to be a business strategy consultant and then four years ago I decided I was gonna try and get myself a creative challenge and make a game I ended up making platon because a hobby and it really did what it did really well when released so I was able to quit my old job and I've been lucky enough to work on plague ink ever since I'm here today to explore how and why our mobile game exceeded on the steam more and more mobile developers are turning their attention to steam they're often with often without thinking about it enough many mobile games have been ported onto PC but they rarely do very well they often attract a lot of negative attention from gamers instead it was pretty nerve-wracking when we were

working out how to take flagging on to PC and I wanted to share some of the lessons that we learnt and some of the thought processes that we did with you all today in the hope that it might help other developers working out their strategies to take mobile games on to steam or for them to work out if it's the right thing for them to do so we're going to start off by looking at the opportunities and challenges that steam provided for us and coming from mobile and then we're going to go into detail on the logic and the approaches that we use to design around these challenges after that we'll look at whether it actually worked and we'll also have a look at a few other infesting observations that we made whilst taking this dangerous journey from steam to mobile for mobile to steam and then finally we'll wrap things up with some recommendations on when I think you should go from mobile to steam and when it might be better to go from steam to mobile instead after that we'll have some time for questions so before we get

started that I think a quick disclaimer slash warning and I'm going to focus purely on issues that are linked on going from mobile to steam I'm not going to bother talking about all the infinite number of problems and challenges that you have making a steam game in general I'm also going to use the word steam and PC interchangeably sometimes I've been trying to stop myself but I haven't been able to stamp it out quite yet most importantly I think let's remember that this is the games industry and nobody really has a clue about anything everybody's sort of got opinions and theories but nobody knows anything for sure so this is going to be one case study for you guys and I hope it will be helpful for you so first of all what actually is plaguing you'll have seen from the trailer it's it's not a very nice game it involves designing and designing a custom pathogen to infect and kill everybody in the world before humanity can come up with a cure for you so it's a bit bit sinister it launched originally on mobile for iOS and Android

it was in launch in May 2012 and it's available for $0.99 it also has a number of ia PS in there in the form of expansion packs and examples of these would be a Nakoa virus a zombie virus that I added to it we also did a partnership with dawn of the Planet of the Apes to add the simian flu and these are kind of big new content features and these are the reason why plague inc has stuck around for so long and why it's done so well we've had over 45 million people and play the game so far and 45 million players and we've had around 900,000 games played every day on average it was the third best-selling mobile game of 2014 in the US and it was the number one best-selling iPhone game of 2014 in China and it's similar numbers elsewhere in the world where we've localized it so it's done quite well on mobile and that's been that's that's been a great gift because it's meant

that I was able to start thinking what else did I want to do with plague ink and once it was clear that playing ink was a success I was able to start thinking a bit about getting it onto PC and in mid 2013 I was able to really start planning in earnest the first thing I needed to do is work out why I wanted to bring it on to plague ink there's vast numbers of different reasons and I know this is the business money track so I've got a big list of business reasons to share with you all but before I go into those I want to tell you the real reasons the unofficial reasons I just thought it would be really fun to take a game that I'd already made elsewhere and then bring it onto steam with all the challenges and all the cool things that could be done with it I'm a PC gamer at heart and there was a certain appeal to being able to take the baby that I had created and then put it on the platform that started me off on my love for games so I already really wanted to do it and the game designer in me also was sort of leaping at this chance to be able to

take my big list of stuff that I hadn't been able to put in the game initially and then make it and realize these through Steam I only did about 50% of my design document so I hadn't had way more ideas that I could handle and I wanted to try and squeeze a few of those in I also wanted to share with just with more people I get it get more people playing the game it's nice seeing people playing and enjoying a game that you have so those were the kind of the unofficial reasons now putting my my sort of business hat back on there were a number of other reasons that were also important and they were useful for me to justify it to myself the key reason is that I could make more money from the game I'd already put a lot of work into creating a game that I was proud of and so I've got the game already let's try and make sure we've got it on as many stores as possible so that as many people as possible can can get at them I wanted to strengthen the I wanted to strengthen the for the plating brand like every platform that it's available on it

builds up the reputation of the game or it makes it more likely that people are going to tell their friends about it and that people are going to have heard of the game and I want to say me one second I was going to increase the size this slide again I wanted to extend the overall life of the game the more people I've got playing it the longer I can justify continuing to support it and continuing to add new content to it so just getting that extra player base was vitally important as games are always gonna sort of lose players over time another big one I wanted to do is diversify company revenues for mobile developers you're basically you've got Apple and you've got Google and that's where all of your money's coming from it it's it's it's nice to have a certain amount of other revenue streams coming in as well so I wanted to use get get it onto PC start getting those other revenue streams meet make sure that the company wasn't as dependent on any single source it would also be a foundation for future games I don't know what games I'm going to want to make in

the future but I do know that it's incredibly important to start building up a reputation with gamers showing people that you can be trusted to make a game that they would enjoy playing that you can make a good quality game that's worthy of their money as I mentioned before I was quite new to the industry so I kind of need to start building those credentials sooner rather than later and with plaguing I had a game that I was proud of so it was good a place to start as any so I felt when I started looking at it an earnest there were several main ways to take plaguing from mobile to steam which could really fall into four buckets they've all got various strengths and weaknesses option one in the bottom left corner is you take exactly the same game as you've got a mobile and you charge exactly the same price for it on on Steam and that's it it's easy it's relatively low cost hopefully there won't be too much technical stuff but the negatives for that are you don't really get to do any

fun game design stuff you can't really expand your vision for the game expand the appeal to other people and also potentially you're missing out on a big opportunity what if you were able to just add a load of new stuff to the game to build it into something bigger than better than it was already option two takes the same game in charges more money for it or puts in more additional monetization methods this is again it's easy in low cost but I consider it quite risky this is like this is the key thing that people hate when they can see a game that's costing lots more more money on Steam that is on mobile and there's still no guarantee that it's going to drive it lots of extra revenue like it maybe you'll make some extra money in the short term but what you really you're missing out here again is that opportunity to design to design something that's better that's got more complexity that you can use to justify charging a higher price for it option 3 is you make a better game but you don't charge more money for it and

it's a nice thing to do but at the end of the day we're all here to to be able to sort of feed ourselves as well and I didn't and so I'm not quite sure about that one because you've got all the challenges of expanding the game but you aren't getting any of the rewards of expanding the game and then you've got option 4 which is where you expand the game and you then charge a higher price for it you get to do scratch the game design itch you in hopefully get to create something which allows you to create a better value for players and they're prepared to pay for it but on the flip side of that it is going to be hard you can't just like click click your fingers and you've got a whole new extra bit of game to bolt on and you're going to have to go to the game design line and sort of do a bit of mining to be able to actually create something that you can make there and that will also cost money making the game worthy of them so as you can probably tell from when I was explaining those I was quite biased towards a certain option for me I felt option 4 was the only one that

would support my aims for plague ink on PC I didn't just want to do a straight forward port or cash grab I wanted to make something which I could be really proud of which would scratch that PC Gamer itch I wanted it to be supercharged improved version with lot the things that I hadn't L to do in the original game it'll be bigger it would be better it would be built from scratch for PC and I would charge a fair price for it I didn't want to be trapped by that mobile price point so I had to make sure it had enough content to justify a higher price and we'll touch on that a bit more later but making plaguing on PC wouldn't be easier to do it successfully it's really hard to make any game successful on Steam you've got to make it a game you've got to capture player imagination you've got to market it well you've got to get lucky you've got to engage your players all of this stuff has got to be done however incredibly unfairly and unfairly in my opinion games that are coming from mobile have got to do all of that and they've got to do significantly more as

well they have to defeat and what I've called the mobile stigma and I found a lovely iPhone photo the devil there which I thought I'd share with everyone but what actually is the mobile stigma I I've kind of defined the mobile stigma as the belief the average team players belief that all mobile games which originate all games which originated from mobile are sent by the devil it basically means that in order to be successful games coming from mobile have got to meet a much higher standard than any equivalent game would that it not come from mobile and I mean this is a really big deal like you see there's a lot of negativity about early access but people get even more angry and passionate about games coming from mobile take-all looking quite a lot of talks about early access games and how you need to be very careful about dealing dealing with players on that it's it's infinitely worse coming from mobile and if you do mobile and early access then you're really in trouble which we actually did do early access as well but so we've got this issue that we

need to deal with and I wanted to look into it in more detail because the more I looked into it the more I realized that the sad fact is that PC gamers alight to be wary of mobile games coming to steam in the past they've frequently been burnt by straight PC ports of mobile games which are 10 or 20 times the price providing an inferior playing experience to the original mobile version and often providing gameplay or monetization options that are don't really align with steam player expectations and here are some of the key emotions or prejudices that I felt made up this move our stigma and which I felt a plague in game on Steam would need to have to defend itself against mobile games are not proper games they're overpriced compared to mobile they rely on pay to win mechanics and they're just exploiting the player they're they're not designed for PC and

if I've already got it on mobile what's the point about getting it again on another platform it's the same game if I wasn't careful all of these emotions and prejudices could deal huge damage to playing when it came on to steam and it could potentially prevent it from being the game that I wanted it to be from having the success that it would need to be to justify the investment it would result in unhappy players who felt that they'd been cheated it would damage the brand it could damage the brand and reputation of playing it could damage the original game when people start complaining about it and then it destroys the viable loop that we've got where players come and recommend it to their friends if they don't feel passionate about the game enthusiastic about the game anymore they're not going to share it with people it would result in wasted time effort and money we're very small studio we don't have time to be working on 15 different things at once if we're going to focus on one thing we've got to hit it out the park otherwise that's a whole lot of time gone down the drain which we're not

going to get back and maybe most importantly it would completely burn sort of chances I've got in for future projects on PC in the future like a Steam player so they've got they've got a long memory they're going to remember if they feel that they've been exploited or not or the game that's been released which didn't wasn't really worth their money and I didn't want to kind of shut that whole market out in the future so to ignore all these kind of nasty negatives we had to consider the mobile stigma in every aspect of the game design and make sure to neutralize it otherwise all that hard work and would be for nothing so I felt we had to main weapons that we could use against it visible differentiation and clear communication basically we had to make it really obvious that the PC version was different to the mobile version that it was improved and then we had to clearly communicate to players these

differences because if we can't if the players don't see it then it doesn't matter what stuff we've done so we had to make absolutely clear that those messages were being heard so now I'm going to go in more detail into exactly what we did to achieve this differentiation and to meet their communication goals that we had so we'll start off with the big stuff the two single biggest additions to the PC version are custom scenarios and multiplayer these are big tentpole features which we want to sort of really use as the shining light for why plaguing comm PC would be better and the difference is in the custom scenario creator we open up all of the data that we use to make the game so that people can play around and create their own diseases create their own worlds they can they can customize the disease that would be evolved they can change country stats they can manipulate various variables they can use an event and scripting engine to create incredibly

complex scenarios and then they could publish them online for other people to enjoy or suffer through as the case may be and it's been fantastic actually seeing how players have taken to this system there's there's custom scenarios for everybody I went online yesterday I think it was to get sort of the latest view of what the most popular custom scenarios are in it it proved my point wonderfully we have lives of the Xenomorphs which has been is a great so now it's been played by a huge number of people and that's quite a serious gritty scenario and then you'll see later on someone else in the steam community has risen to the opportunity and we've got lies of the fridges which was made by noob McNew beam who was inspired by his friend killing him with a fridge in Garry's Mod I haven't actually played this one but it's managed to get quite high up on the popular scenarios let's say you've got a lot of a lot of fun stuff being made there the other part was multiplayer which is actually still in development and being quite eagerly awaited but this is really where we have one player versus

the other player their diseases are battling to see who can wipe out more of humanity set against this backdrop of the world doing everything it can to stay alive and nuking really infected countries and doing all sorts of things to try and slow you down whilst you're trying to still suck over the other player at the same time and it's it's going to be really exciting when this comes out and players are already looking forward to it a lot here we are actually doing a playtest in the office unfortunately I lost this play test significantly so they're having to do some rebalancing to make sure that doesn't happen again and so these major tempo features are really key to differentiate from the mobile vision they're made a temple features for a reason and they're also major development efforts as well they're incredibly time intensive to do adding to the core game so it's very important to make sure that you pick the right ones the ones that are really going to resonate with Steam players that they're gonna that are going to capture their imagination that they're going to want to talk to people about they need to be

really hard for players to ignore and overlooked they need to significantly increase the depth and the life of the game so that if we're increasing the price point players are feeling like they're getting increased value for money from these things these also had the advantage of appealing to the more hardcore and involve involed Steam players who are wanting more from their gaming experience they're able to they will be able to strategize and work out what the optimal strategy is a multiplayer they're also able to look at some pages of variables which will give them a headache and think wow okay this is there's some real depth behind this it provides marketing headlines great talking points so that when somebody's explaining the game to their friends they go oh it's like the mobile version but it's got multiplayer and scenario created them and it just these all these things they build together to support the higher price point the $15 instead of the $0.99 that the mobile version goes for them and as a bonus on these features it actually help discourage piracy I didn't want to get distracted with DRM or anything like that but these

by their very nature they're both set online and so we're able to make sure that people have got to have a proper Steam account in order to be using them that was a nice little bonus for MIT the next thing we did was we significantly improved the graphics so this was actually a key reason why we rebuilt the game engine from scratch we wanted to take advantage of the improved PC hardware they obviously quite a few constraints on mobile especially when the game was create was created obviously those those don't we don't need to worry about that but more significantly we now had the funds to invest in graphics a bit more and and have a bit of fancy animation of a very sophisticated things which I was scared of when we made the first game because you've got a member plaguing was made as a hobby I spent less than five thousand u.s. dollar making the original game so there wasn't that much money to be spending on fancy graphics and the more complicated the game the less likely it was it to be shipped with all of that out the way though we could really do some fun stuff so we took the original 2d world map and replaced it with a 3d

map it's quite hard to actually see there the benefit of this in a 2d image but we're able to have a much more intriguing disease dot spread the disease dots pulses they slowly spread around the countries we can have we show the trajectories are planes you can look at them and see where they're going to be flying to rather than wait to see where they end up going and we did a various other things as well we took the evolution screen and added 3d models of the disease which respond as you do as you evolve your disease we added a body scanner in the bottom corner which shows which of the organs will be impacted by the relevant traits that you were going to evolve for your disease we also managed to add and take the world screen which we could take some extra space for and we were able to show additional stats about the country we could show people where in the world that country was because we actually find a lot of people improve their geography through plaguing trying to

hunt down various random countries which are resisting them and we could also have these city cams which were in the bottom left which which help people see the situation on the ground as their disease continues to to spread throughout the throughout the game the wonderful thing about these graphical improvements is that they are impossible to ignore every time the players doing anything about the game they are constantly reminded that they are playing an improved version of the game it's there's it there's no way you can look at or get a look at somebody playing the game and think oh are they playing the mobile version are they playing the steam version it is categorical which version they're playing and it makes it feel shiny and new even for existing play game players it's great for marketing materials you can you can generate wonderful screenshots you can hit people on the head repeatedly with the fact it is different and it just makes it harder for people to say that it's identical to the mobile version even our friendly trolls on the steam forums have to admit that the graphics look diff and so their comments always have to start with yes

it has improved graphics but and then go into whatever they want to say so we put them on the back foot a little bit which is nice another important thing we did was the UI all of the UI was redesigned from scratch to suit the PC we could think about things we had to think about things like distance between the options when you're not using a finger to touch there you've got the greater precision from the cursor double-click and can give you significant extra options and obviously significantly fewer space constraints we could take the main menu and streamline it to be something much more PC orientated selecting your disease could become a lot more elegant and let people really get a feel for the fact they're kind of in a laboratory selecting their various different pathogens that they want to play with today we could significantly expand the disease screen to again make use of those 3d disease models but also take some of the the stats and the graphs that we provide players and put them face in right in front of the player we

can show them the evolution history so they can see how their disease has evolved over time and we can also give details on what genes and the player is currently using redesigning the the UI is so important it's what makes it feel like a PC game it prevents that kind of feeling sometimes when you've got all this too much space here on or too little space here you sometimes get that with console ports as well it just something just feels a bit jarring sometimes there were because we started from scratch there were no remnants of mobile there was never a time when we had to make a trade-off of oh well we could change this but it's a lot easier just to keep it as it is and hopefully no one will notice it was it was PC or nothing and that really ensured an optimum and a natural playing experience for players and I think players have definitely appreciated that it was designed from scratch that they can they can fit they feel they've got a bespoke game which is absolutely targeted to their platform it helps make it premium supporting the price point as

other elements have and in quite a lot of cases that actually improves on the original mobile experience because we've got that extra space and we're able like I said bringing data into the game earlier we can we can just make sure that the players got all the information that they need to create a world ending pathogen which is important we also made huge numbers of other enhancements lots of numerous smaller additions throughout the game often in which they were heavily influenced by player feedback from the mobile version the aim for these was to have medium or high impact while still being relatively low effort so we had things like the body scanner I mentioned before we added in more save slots which was a major requested feature from players so they can have multiple games on the go just very simple things like letting people have longer disease names we were no longer were limited by space there the city cams I pointed out before we can have a an image for each country which again makes the world feel like it's like it's a more unique place as no

similarities between the countries adding end game replays these have been really popular with youtubers in particular because they're able to play the game and then they get to the end of it and they can just hit the play button and quickly their whole triumph or abject failure is repeated and they can have a nice quick summary whilst discussing the game even militarily minor things like animating the zombie horde so here we have a group of zombies to 20,000 zombies about to him hit Greenland and just making them look a bit cool and making the world feel a bit more alive these are all things that cumulatively they just provide a general feeling of improvement and polish almost an author of these things and you can't quite put your finger on it but it feels better it's appreciated by existing fans especially because it's targeting the feedback that they've given in the past and sometimes you can still bundle all of these improvements into marketing bullet points into obviously quite important but you can take the City Council there'll be body scanning all of

the data and and and talk to people about it in a group even so even though individually they're not significant enough together they're quite powerful and again these just help support the broader price argument there are lots of simple generic quick wins that can help out as well a wonderful example of this is hotkeys I I'm always amazed when games don't use hotkeys properly having well-thought-out hotkeys shows that you care it's improves the player experience significantly and it's an easy way to defend yourself against a criticism that people always love to lob against mobile games or other ported games and as a wonderful bonus it makes testing your game so much easier we added hotkeys into playing on PC really early on because I was playing it with just a mouse and I I found my hand trying to use hotkeys that weren't even written yet just because it would feel natural it was what was required and so that's the one if you're finding yourself wanting to press a button there you've just you've got to put these things in there and yeah I don't understand why

sometimes you just don't get them don't don't people people aren't all that people don't put these hotkeys in there also it's important to let people customize them we haven't actually done that yet we get if we get requests for it but I think to be honest if you target your hotkeys appropriately and you maybe have multiple options built into it maybe the customizing isn't as important we'll see how many people actually do do customize them let me put that option in other examples of quick wins are just using the course team or PC functionality steam achievements trading card trading cards it's just a sink a simple graphical asset which you can upload through a web interface this there's no reason not to do it and yet quite often you don't see trading cars coming in for weeks or months until after the game has been launched cloud save bit more technically complicated but it still is something that's appreciated by the player video settings the hardcore PC guys hate it when they can't customize video settings and it's not the end of the world to just provide a few resolution settings to provide a few dev settings to disable or enable various little graphical toggles and all

of these things they're mostly easy and the apps no-brainers and it makes some players for your love maybe most players won't care they weren't even noticed but the few who do care about it care about it very passionately and it's it's just worth worth doing these things so I've kind of have explains two of the key ways that we differentiated plague ink on PC but as I mentioned before that doesn't mean anything if you can't clearly communicate the impact and value to prospective players so how do we go about doing that first of all it's on messaging so you've got to use all of the hard work that you've just put in to craft a really compelling story this this story is so important you're going to be using it so much you've got to spend several days just constantly brainstorming on it you've got to polish the story repeatedly and then when you've got something that you're happy with you've got to tell it again and again and again to people you've got to have it on your

store page you've got to use it to the press you've got to use it in press releases trailer the trailer I showed before at the end whist we're they're just hitting in those features multiplayer custom scenario creative improve graphics like those you've got to make people never be able to look at anything to do with your game without being having those messages continually given to them because it's easy to overlook at the first time the second time but eventually you will get through to people and you will help them understand the value of what you've created the other major place to use it is in customer support both by emails and the steam forums you you've you're gonna have people especially in the first few weeks you're gonna have people battling over is this Antichrist is this a wonderful game is it awful is it average is it a waste of money all of these things are going to be going on and you've got to make it easy for fans to educate other people about it because a you can't handle everybody who's going to be coming at you Youth questions and be you're biased it doesn't any matter what you think of course you're going to love it so really you've got to enable

the players to defend you for an instead and the way to do that is by having those short sharp easily understood messages a web page that they can link to in arguments like these aren't rocket science but it's it's about doing it consistently and repeatedly and having that clear messaging and I think in particular we found that the first few weeks of launch are vital for customer support cuz that's all this when you've got holds of people who don't know anything about the game coming on and that's really when they make up their mind about are you a good developer or a bad developer and after the first few weeks of doing support pretty much 24 hours a day it began to kind of solidify down we had our community of players who would help defenders that kind of the argument had already been decided it was just a case of linking players back to the argument saying oh don't ask again if it's the same as mobile it's not it's been said here here in here in here so definitely worth in those first few weeks especially pulling out all the stops and doing nothing except sitting

in front of your computer typing or copy pasting if you've got your story and prepared correctly the game name was also something that we found was very important from the communication point of view because of what we were trying to do with it we wanted to make sure that we avoided any confusion to play in with players around which features were in which version of the game is quite scary taking our existing mobile game and slightly fragmenting it and we didn't want there was gonna be a bit of misunderstanding anywhere but we needed to make sure that players when we were talking about the multiplayer that we were working on we could say the game name so that players didn't feel it was coming onto the mobile version then you've got miss miss set expectations and everyone gets upset and angry for the name itself we wanted something that clearly said same game but better we wanted to maintain the brand so we definitely wanted to have plaguing as the core thing so that when people search for it online they were able to find all the existing good stuff they can find stories about the CDC they can find stories about various scientists automatic game we didn't want to lose

any of that so we have to keep playing because the core name and we wanted to keep in the theme so we ended up going with playing evolved which kind of ticks all of those boxes and it sounds it sounds like it it's it's part of the same sort of disease II environment it wasn't easy getting there that took about three months of discussions but I'm quite happy with it in the end a more subtle thing to think about also is the game logo now I don't know actually how important this is but I felt it was we wanted to support that branding diff for by having something that against had the same brand but it wasn't quite identical it looked a bit a bit sharper if it fits in with the PC UI it makes more use of hexes in the background to again tie back into that PC experience and this is something we use on lots of marketing materials so it's it was worth worth playing around with it a bit just so that players can see graphically okay talking about this one or this one but to an uninformed person they will see both of them and they will still recognize that it's plaguing so now we

go on to the really big stuff which people clip up on price so price is the big elephant in the room here which is so so hard to get right and communicating the price is so incredibly important I think the key thing really here is that you have to accept that players will compare price against mobile when I was looking at how other games were doing it if it felt often like sometimes people just they were just hoping that players wouldn't notice that it was available on the App Store for a tenth of the price and maybe there'd be ok with it and they will go and look and they will feel ripped off if they see the game is here for $0.99 and you're asking me to pay $10 that's really unfair why is that and they're gonna want to know answers about it so you've got to meet them head-on and clearly explain why it costs more but you can't just explain it using the actual logic that you you you came up

with the price because if you de said oh why I'm going to charge $10 because I've had to completely retool the engine to make it work on PC the player doesn't give a about that like that is not a player relevant thing it's they all they want to do is play the game and it's so tempting to be like what it's not fair I've got this new resolution in it was all this wonderful technical stuff and we're basically geniuses making it work and we deserve to be paid for it but you have to break it down into things that the player can understand going back to our big temporal features its multiplayer its custom scenario creator it's improved graphics it's all tangible things that the player can touch and you'll see on the right-hand side of the slide we've we've got a sort of a section from our FAQ here which and we're using the same messaging over over and over again how much does it cost it costs this much because it's got this expansion these expansion packs it's got loads of new content it's got significant all new features for PC and Mac including

multiplayer and custom scenario creator them it's very helpful if you can justify the price difference mathematically because it's logic players feel they can't is harder to argue with logic and so you'll see down on this the second part of that image we're saying why does it cost 1499 well it's because the mobile version cost $0.99 but when you take all of the expansion packs that cost $6.99 and actually enter the couple models because that in more expansion packs since writing this and so then we're just in a position where it's actually you're paying $5 for multiplayer custom scenario creator improved graphics and having it on PC with PC UI and stuff and that suddenly feels much less significant it's not $1 versus 15 it's oh I'm paying a few extra dollars for that so you need to use this clearly message it and then educate the players about it make sure that you're repeating this logic everywhere that you've got it in places where it can easily be found and then be prepared to repeat it over and over and over again again until the

players agree with you and buy-in with it and then they can start telling other people about it giving that more unbiased honest approach to it once you've won over your fans then then that's that's the main hurdle done but you've got to be you've got to be very careful about about how how you go about trying to make sure that you're getting the money not just from in the price but also around other forms of monetization or DLC and then coming from mobile you're quite used to charging for expansion packs and adding additional content and it's worked very well for us on plague ink on mobile boom on Steam because of the mobile stigma like players will be watching for any sign at all on mobile behavior we have people coming on has it got a AP's in are you gonna add a PS in it is it pay to win still and for us at least we just decided not to take any risks on it we we're gonna strip out all of the the fact that on on the on mobile you can pay to to go past to go on to the next level if you can completed level and we actually softened

the game progression so rather than having to complete it on medium difficulty you just have to complete it on casual difficulty to get the cheats it's brutal instead of mega brutal you just took it all down a level to make sure that players didn't ever feel like they were actually being asked to pay even though actually that's the proper way I made the game you should be able to complete it like that if you're a good player and we do even have people asking still for us to let people have the option to pay but it's just it's not it's not worth the potential reputational damage that you could get so how did things go we launched in early access on the 20th of February 2014 and it went really well it vastly exceeded my expectations the thing I'm most proud about are the the ratings the reviews we've got an overwhelmingly positive review score so I think it's 95% positive and that puts us in the top 2% of all Steam games things around 76 just under 7,000 reviews making that up like this isn't some metacritic thing it's not a journalist deciding that it's good or anything else this is players

talking all sort of voting voting with their their their mouse clicks and it's nothing we can manipulate or encourage or anything else this just shows that players value the game that we've created and like yeah immensely proud of that statistic of course we need to make money so that we can keep on making games and the people sales have been very healthy across all channels on PC the year 1 sales we have been 500,000 units which has obviously been nice and then a minor side we've also I think been one of the round the top 20 pirated games of the year every now and again I'll go on to the file-sharing site and have a look and we're always quite high up on the list which is maybe it's a bit annoying but it's also nice then at least they care enough to download it and it's not some mobile piece of crap that's not worth clogging up them their bandwidth so that's a nice thing to have as well so I feel that making a high-quality PC focused game helped us beat the mobile stigma even at a 15 dollar price point the approach we took

worked and we were able to show that it can come from mobile but it can still be a flopper game it can cost more on though on mobile but it can still be a fair price and we've now got to a point where even the trolls mostly accept it we don't get many trolls coming along trying to poke the Mobile Hornet nest anymore which is quite nice they found other things but it's it that we've we've pretty much won the argument there and that's how that's thanks mostly to help from the players who help communicate these the message that we're trying to get to people who help make sure that people realize the truth about the game before mouthing off I thought it'd be interesting to take a quick diversion and look at a few of the key differences that I noticed when going from mobile artists team player numbers are way smaller so I think and we've got I think it's four thousand custom scenarios have been made by people I'm really proud of that number like it takes hours to learn how to use the custom scenario creator and then to make a scenario create a custom scenario

takes even longer but from a mobile mindset that numbers not even worth holding a space in your brain for it's so tiny but on PC it just it makes a difference sales numbers again 500,000 units doesn't sound that impressive when you put it in mobile context but on steam at a premium price point it's it's very significant the thing I really like about steam is it gives me a much closer connection to players the the steam community is immensely valuable it can be toxic and and and make you feel like if you if you're having some former management issues but if you've managed correctly you just get a really close link to players you can have a dialogue with people and understand what's happening in the game what they like what they don't and I thought I had enough to get that anywhere when when doing that doing when with a mobile game I don't think the social links was relevant we still we have a way where people can tweet and share about how they've just wiped out the world of the disease it gets used a lot on mobile people don't really bother with it on Steam too much analytics I've struggled

a bit to find sort of great examples of where analytics being used on Steam but I'm not sure if that's just me failing to look properly but it definitely seemed to be less focused on analytics and the while in mobile and I mean finally I think I found the steam platform is very friendly for games it's been designed with games in mind from the beginning where there's the mobile stores have to do games and lots of stuff as well and they're both functional but I think it just it shows it's it's quite pleasurable using steam to to be uploading games and changing stuff and in having control over what's happening so what do I recommend other people do bearing in mind disclaimer I mentioned at the beginning and I think you you can absolutely go from mobile to steam successfully but only if you can beat the mobile stigma you've got to fight it there's no one approach fits all your going to have to find your own way that will work with your own plans for the game personally I think option 1 is quite a safe safe way to do it and you hopefully might make you some money but maybe you're leaving money on the

table and option 4 I mean I'm biased but that's worked out quite nicely for us option 3 I don't think makes business sense and option 2 I would be a bit wary of because I you see quite a lot of games getting tripped up when they try that approach I think you need to think how players will respond clearly communicate it and be just be very careful and sensitive to Steam players here are a few danger signs that I think are worth looking out for if you are bringing a game from mobile to steam if these are popping up it doesn't mean you're going wrong misser but it's worth being careful and and looking at stuff again if you've got the price higher for the same game if you can't explain why that price is higher without going away from player relevant stuff if there are no species specific features if you're not using steam functionality if you're not using hotkeys even if you find it hard to communicate the benefits the differentiation z' that you've done to the player that's that's potentially difficult and if you're selling consumable currency that's really worrying like that's that's a landline waiting to step on if you can

find any other way I would highly recommend it just because it's a red rag to a bull it doesn't you could be it doesn't matter how well you've done it it's just the fact that it's there it your whole story up and selling multiple DLC at launch I mean people don't like this win any game does it but again because of the mobile stigma you've got to be extra careful and if you're worried about these things then it's most people seem to feel that going on steam first and then going to mobile instead makes the most sense and I think it does definitely make your life a lot easier although I haven't tried it myself and I don't want to scare everybody completely off going mobile to steam because it there are also benefits that you get going from mobile to steam you've got an existing game to build on so all of the tech the design there's a bug fixes there they're all there you don't have to worry about that you can focus purely on making it perfect for PC you've got that existing fan base and brand awareness so when we launched plague ink evolve it instantly went into the top 10 top 15 best selling on steam

without us doing any advertising or anything and that was purely because we already had this existing player base that we we told about how we're excited about it there's a lot of cross cell potential so at the moment we haven't yet told the mobile players officially that the PC version exists but it's gonna be very interesting to see how many people actually then decide they want to get the PC version we did send people from the PC version to the mobile version and it works quite well but because of the size of numbers it's not actually that significant if all of the Steam players go and get the mobile version I think the only other thing which is really quite helpful is that you're forced to design for the more restrictive platform from the beginning I think it's vitally important that you get if you're working really hard in a game you've got to get that game on as many platforms as possible but it's a lot easier to start off with the core game which works on every platform and then add bells and whistles to it then have a wonderful game on PC and trying cram it into a very small mobile box where you have to make all these design sacrifices so I think designing with

mobile from the beginning there can be quite powerful I haven't decided what I'm going to do with my next game yet but I think if I had to pick at the moment I would probably still go mobile - steam just because it's worked for me so far although that's no guarantee of future success so my recommendation for you if you're trying to go from mobile to steam understand why you want to go onto PC what are your objectives and then work out how the mobile stigma threatens you if you're going to charge the same prices on mobile then some of the stuff already isn't relevant for you work out where those potential pain points are design your approach to neutralize the mobile stigma I've given an example of how that might work here and then finally the bit corny but have like I've really really enjoyed taking plaguing on to PC I've got it's just been so so rewarding and I can't recommend it enough so there we are

thanks for sticking around for that if anybody's got any questions we can take questions otherwise people can all run away and get free drinks while they're going from wherever the parties are thank you hey listen the question is I how did you avoid the pitfall of simultaneous multiplayer between mobile and PC well because I'm not a particularly technically competent person so anything to do with advanced technology like that really scares me and it really it it was something we thought about briefly and then just thought the benefits aren't necessarily there there's a reason why I haven't done multiplayer on mobile and that's because it's really in my opinion this is gonna be really complicated and the game is already doing really really well

on mobile there's no need to add that bit in so from I I never really wanted to do it and and it hasn't really been asked that much I think because players are hoping and understanding that we're going to be using more of the PC capabilities to make the multiplayer more complex and more sophisticated and I think it's very clear communication from the beginning that it was going to be on PC and not Mecosta multiplayer just sets the expectations and prevents people from from building false hopes and stuff can hear me there we go Jason Calkins so you mentioned briefly analytics did you have a lot of analytics in the mobile version and did you miss them when you went to Steam or did you not have them or can you just talk a little about that so we're very unsophisticated when it comes to analytics we don't do any of the monetization related analytics we do have relatively simple analytics which we can use to see how players are using the game where they get into even like

what what most popular disease how many people are playing various scenarios and so we actually took all this and we put it into into the steam version as well so it's been helpful getting that it's really it's more just acacia there's an it's hard to find benchmarks or comparable metrics for other games so if you kind of there's a stat about how many players have finished a game which always seems to float around but beyond that like is it good if you've managed to get X number of players getting 75 cents the way through the game is it good if they're spending this much time it is it's just it's hard to know quite how you're doing compared to other people sort of talking it so plague incorporated is really popular internationally on the mobile platforms and I was injured do you have any information you can share on how the PC version is doing internationally yep so we localized it playing evolved on in all the languages that we localized the

mobile version on and it's done very well there as well it's hard to know how we're relatively it's done in those countries because you can't get like country specific sales charts but Russia is certainly a major market for us so it was before the exchange rates all shifted around and it's it's Germany's been very big France I don't have specific numbers on top of my head but it localizing it is definitely being worth it we see a big surge when we when we did localize that we saw a big increase in country revenues and just a quick follow-up has the has the country distribution been very different from mobile to pc I don't know actually Russia I believe is certainly more intensive disclosed of the scale of Russia and China so China's a lot less we were it was obviously very popular in China but we don't have the same same install base on on steam so apart from those today I don't have any stats the top of my heart thank you anyways yeah

this is Luke from Disney um love your game we actually play it quite a bit in the office thank you my question would be um were there any key learnings you've had from launching the game on Steam that you were will take and feedback into the mobile hmm so I haven't launched anything else on mobile since so that that has that's--that's and there's probably lots of stuff which I haven't necessarily thought about I think one thing that has been interesting is seeing how players have responded to things like we added in some special cheats into the PC version and that made them that there was a future populace we took that back into iOS the custom scenario so this is some they've been so popular it would be nice if we can find some way to at least get the scenarios themselves onto iOS so we're the community as a whole is shaping plaguing can say obviously PC represents a huge increase in that community so they are putting in feedback and stuff it's very it is very

important for me to have the core game completely transmissible between all the different platforms so if I spend several months making your disease type I can share it with everyone rather than have to waste the work but I I don't have anything absolutely sort of wonderful as I can share from that point of view I'm afraid thank you hi what chances do seen taking a freemium at a based mobile game to a premium version on Steam so I think it'd be very hard because I think that all the whole mobile stigma stuff that they're they're looking for any opportunity to be really angry about it and plaguing had it bad enough at $0.99 and we are free on Android as well actually but it's kind of still a premium free free game if that makes sense I think it would be very challenging but you if you had the right value proposition and you had the right messaging and and you could really easily show why this game is worth that money then you've got a chance but it's certainly going to be an interesting

challenge to have any other questions no wonderful well thank you very much for listening and take care you