Fireside Chat: Great User Experiences vs. Successful Monetization: Perspectives From Industry Vets.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] we're going to talk about great user experiences the Counterpoint to that so uh great user experiences versus successful monetization perspective and we have Eric and Eric and Tim who are going to come up and do a little fireside chat on the very subject come on up Eric thanks all right let's get started um so we're here uh with Eric and Tim both uh wanted Embrace wanted backbone um both more like on the technology side um now uh but oh both of them worked at scopely one worked at

twitch so um my name is Eric I don't know if anybody knows me here but I'm on the podcast deconstructor of fun every week talking a lot of trash about Apple and other people in the industry embracer anybody that pisses me off like Ubisoft whatever um I'm a consultant for both uh hedge funds as well as for um some industry like Warner Brothers Etc so I've been doing this like 25 years so um usually I'm the one that's giving hot takes not doing a panel but you know we like hot takes I'll do do my best to let them talk um so first I guess we'll go to Eric who I just met uh what's your background and what are you doing now uh my name is Eric federan uh multi-time founder I founded uh scopely where I built the publishing business which obviously they've grown beyond my wildest expectations uh the publishing for me was IP building the right game teams understanding UA and some of the Dynamics we'll talk about today uh I also helped uh found Max which became

the ad server of record for Apple uh so I can talk adtech as well uh the hidden arts and then uh built embrace my current Endeavor uh Embrace helps mobile teams really understand what's going on uh from a stability and from an analytics so that Engineers can dive into a problem let's say one of the hot topics of today is Google Play starting to mon monitor anrs we help you they identify them we help you actually decide when they're a real problem and how to resolve them uh and so true for anything that an engineer or a mobile team especially in games needs to prioritize to build better user experiences you're not wrong okay and then we have uh Mr Tim who also worked at scopely uh nope didn't work at scopely sorry n n and twitch uh where uh yeah nanch you were relatively early or uh no it was a little bit later but uh so my career is so I started off at a company called curse uh where I ran our whole PHP Linux

deck so was the creator of gamepedia if you remember that platform uh after that I helped run the foundation team that built out uh kind of the new curse app which had Curse Voice we were later acquired by twitch um there I was on The Game Dev side so I did a lot of things about bringing twitch and game Debs together which was really fun um after that I I went and ran production and Engineering for Pokemon go and now I'm the VP of software for backbone which is a mobile game controller that turns your phone into a console so that's what I'm doing now awesome so I'm more of the engineering side so this will be an interesting uh an interesting discussion I can pretend but I'm not allowed to do PRS yeah okay well I I would I would just say no to them it's okay and I and I don't know [ __ ] about tech so I'm I'm just a business person so anyway this is an age-old question that we've been trying to answer for like the last 12 years since mobile really and freeto play started taking off is like the balance between um

you know user experience and monetization design and and how does that balance work and PE some people do it really well and some people don't do it well I think a lot of freeto playay games are optimizing around monetization design um to the detriment of of of gameplay but and those games tend to be more successful something like Monopoly go and um you know scopely would not be happy with me saying that but that is the truth um so anyway that's kind of what we're talking about and so I guess my first question to to either of you is how do you define like user experience in Mobile versus monetization yeah i' I'd like to turn this on its head we were kind of talking about this earlier so for all of us when we build games we think of games is a fun Endeavor we want to build beautiful experiences uh and to some extent that's what we're most proud of like you sit on a plane and you see someone playing your game and I see someone playing yatsi or Monopoly go which I didn't build but obviously has done tremendously well off

the the publishing business at scopely um that's what you Endeavor for but at the heart that's [ __ ] uh what you're really trying to do and I think it is like the core equation is LTV lifetime value for users versus uh the effective CPI how you acquire them and if you can get that equation right you get a flywheel and so player experience is defined by that flywheel you have to earn the right to continually build games and so while we deor to build beautiful games and fun games it's not the definition that a core game developer generally thinks about if you do that and you stick on that route you company will fail unless you're Pokémon go which you'll talk about but the the core is yeah the core is thinking about these principles from the Geto it's how do you monetize obviously how do you acquire building the game moves to fit that whether it's a coin dozer or turn-based asynchronous or other game and making sure that you build a game so that it has a life and that can continue to run and those are I hate to say it

they're fun games I play them all the time they're not necessarily a definition of beauty and player experience so player experien is getting the player to come back making sure they want to come back and then they Define what player experiences you do not and the game developers that come to me and say this is the experience I'm building I tell them to go away it's not the way you build games which as we were discussing is completely different than how we approach Pokemon go uh which is when you step back and think about it it's like well it's Pokemon right it's one of the largest IPS in the world however when we were planning out whole road maps for the next year and when we started kicking off seasons and that our our mind wasn't in okay how do we squeeze our players or how do we get the most out of it we actually started from the aspect of okay what what do we want to do what do we want the players to feel well how do we want players to interact with each other with the real world with you know with the Pokemon because they are you know they are your companions

and that's how we looked at the problem we didn't think about monetization first um we built a feature called as an example postcard book when we started that we started from okay we have people going around to pois and all this can't go into the full details but that's that was our start right and then it wasn't until like we had gotten the game Loop into something what we thought was fun um and added some more detail that then it was like okay how are we going to do we want to monetize this are we going to monetize this and then we would take a look and say okay well most people will take them X number of days to fill up their postcard book Because all point is you want to remember these these uh these moments in life and so we we had a formula that kind of worked it out to was you know the peak and then were like well if people want more they can buy more pages and that's how we monetized it and so that added to our flywheel in a sense so we actually approached it from what is fun what is intuitive what is what is for the user and then figured out how to monetize afterwards and to be clear

don't do that yeah don't don't do that do not do that like people use these as examples particularly um fortnite right as a way of everyone should do cosmetic economies but that does not work unless it's at scale and similar to Pokemon go that's a bad bad bad thing or people make mobas which inherently don't monetize well because it's all cosmetic economies and they're competing against the biggest games in the planet right so anyway that's a bad example so let's talk about a good example I don't know if it's a bad example different how does how did scopely they seem to be the best at balancing both user experience as well as monetization where where how do you think that worked out or why why do you think it worked out for scopely more than anybody else or not more than anybody else yeah I there's two pieces so I brought the LTV CPI I mean at the core and everybody says it but then no one really follows it it's the core kpis of your game I think of it is like we have life equations like equals MC s

like that's your equation LTV greater than ucpi and if it falls out of balance for every cohort you're screwed so I think of it that way how do you think about it from the beginning is deciding how you look at the not creative Endeavor of thinking about the flywheel focusing on it making it go as fast as possible if you're a turn-based asynchronous game your goal is to have as many turns per day as possible right people will get addicted to your game they will like it because they keep com coming back that's your kpi and then everything else around it is built in your monetization which could be ads or non-ads uh it's your user acquisition with verality or Organics it needs to be built into that flywheel and so when we were building scopely part of it came from my lifeblood I was an attech guy before scop Le it's part of the reason I exactly I started Max but even that's a trade-off like but it's a great tradeoff like you need ads for certain styles of game to make sure that they work then not go doesn't have ads it's purposeful

while YSI does like you need to make your LTV as high as possible and then you make those tradeoffs everybody makes a face at ads because it's not amazing for player experiences generally um they crash they have bad performance they're third party sdks it's part of the reason Embrace exists um at the same time you have to use them to make the tradeoffs so that users will continue come back and you have to earn that right so they will watch ads uh a lot of users actually don't mind them and in fact life rewarded as for instance uh and so you build that into the game from the beginning which is funny because you talk about kpis and what you know ensuring nothing goes out of balance to where your game would die we also had to do that we also had the same kpis we had to look at and you still have to look at CAC you still have to look at all that and it's just interesting to hear that that's where you start from versus you start from the game playay which you again from a fundamental standpoint I I absolutely agree but it's interesting that the the of dichotomy between the

two and we look at uh one of the terms just for everybody here I like to be provide recommendations when I say ECPI it's like an effective CPI so it's like you're organic Blended uh based on user acquisition but also rankings based on other ways of getting people to talk about it could be TV commercials I love watching commercials at midnight it's always mobile games and mobile apps uh trying to figure out this equation um and it's how you acquire but we would think about it from the beginning we would look at the genre look at comparable metrics and then actually build games to hit those metrics and we wouldn't release until we were positive we would hit them or we had the hunch we would like the trajectory or we' kill the game and speaking from my experience at cabam we would focus on transaction velocity as well as conversion so you buy currency you spend currency and how long does that process take and in the strategy game in particular it's actually critical right for them to keep spending having syns that can keep them engag engaged and in some ways the

monetization design is the game design you're optim people are optimizing around what money to spend the most effectively right and that that becomes the game and everyone game designers hate this stuff right because it's not really game design it's actually monetization design for the game but that's what we were optimizing against for both Marvel contest of Champions as well as the strategy games yeah the economists are the most fun to talk about they're like the uh the Hidden Gem that no one likes to talk about we have Philip black on the podcast if you listen to it and he is almost a gross you know Economist like that's all he talks about optimizing around that and uh and I think it's a little bit more nuanced than his his take but um all right on the other side of it we're start starting to see that Google has been focusing on player experience as of late with some metrics and what's going on with that like how developers should be thinking about these type of player experience metrics and why is Google kind of focusing on that these days yeah it's interesting I think take a step back there's a lot of Trends not just

Google or Apple but I'm sure you could talk to some on PC and console sure um and there it's hard to understand what they're really happening but one IDE item that every game developer seems to be thinking about that has a a game in the store is an anrs anrs is Big not necessarily because player experience although it does affect it it's when an app freezes and the player can no longer play a game or is forced to abandon it and come back um Google monitors that at least a portion of it they monitor crashes which is the age- old parad they mon monitor other metrics the question is why now and they expose it now in the Google Play console and uh cor on a correlative note they don't they're pretty opaque there but if you start hitting that above a threshold for a certain period of time you could either lose ranking definitely piss them off and maybe not get featured then your ECPI goes down uh We've even seen some apps start getting pulled I was to say you can get delisted yeah which is the kiss of death um I'd like to think that the doing it out of potentially

differentiation apple is the most opaque company when it comes to apps and and all and everything around it and player experience they tout that they're great at player experience and the phone is amazing but Google I think is trying to use it as a way to actually penetrate the App Store kind of mentality and they're releasing these so that they can be part of the conversation so they can say that they're helping game developers and I hope they are uh part of the reason Embrace exists just so folks know is Google is uh great at identifying these issues but they're not great at solving them it's a totally different team and so when you identify an anr or crash your developers are definitely going off on Wild Goose chases or living with these problems which then affect your ability to actually build a flywheel and build great player experiences so uh us our competitors we're trying to help uh every individual engineer out there solve these problems so that Google becomes a friend as opposed to an enemy have feel like I'm being sold while I'm up here um but no

coming from the engineering and production side uh even in my even in the the role where we're more gamey adjacent at backbone anrs and crash rates are one of the things I look at every single day like literally in the morning when I do a dashboard review I'm looking over again what is our acquisition funnel what's our fouille looking like and then there's a whole section that's nothing but errors as far as the ey can see um and that was true even on Pokemon go if if we didn't do that all we would get would be user complaints you don't want that you don't want users going and review bombing you well they're not review bombing but they're leaving you know probably not Stellar reviews and that can stop you that can literally stop someone from installing the game and you know even with apple to the opaqueness we you know that's where your own custom monitoring is just as important as looking at what is on the stores so I highly recommend that that's the first thing anybody from an engineering background that's what you need to watch more than anything else cuz once that get out of control you can just lose users overnight Word

of Mouth the whole nine yards it's a poison pill no it's like a it's a there's a death spir you hit that mess up on that equation your game is dead you just don't know it yet like in fact player experience I think is kind of three things it's the the core experience which we've talked about like how do you get a user building features getting them to to engage through new content the monetization which I agree is sometimes the same thing and then the stability and your engineering teams have a hard time figur fig out which one to prioritize and they always obviously want to work on stability if they can solve them which it's really hard um but they all affect that core of flywheel and so deciding which ones to work on it's freaking hard all right for the last couple minutes what is the best of breed games out there in terms of balance gam play and user UI and ux oh I get to go first yes oh no a oh that's true we are yeah so in my opinion right now I actually the one that's standing out to me above

all else is actually hell divers too because it's a premium game you pay I think it's like 30 bucks and then the war bonds both the normal battle pass or war bond I always call them battle passes sorry and then the premium ones are always going to be there so you always have an opportunity to start later after your friends have talked talked to you about the game you can come back you can buy those war bonds I think that's really neat uh compared to some other ones I think like Halo infinite tried it but like you have to buy it within the timeline and then you get to keep it and most battle passes rotate if you don't get in on that season so you lose out on all that wonderful uh Cosmetics Andor items or whatever but the other thing that hell divers is doing which I think is really well done is you can earn all the currency if you spend more time in the game and so if you do a whole mission or set missions you can find the metals the currency the whole nine yards which is great so you're keeping people in your flywheel longer and you're also having people explore your game get into the system a lot more so I actually think they're doing a real good job for console that is on mobile I'm going to

have to think about it actually I was trying to think about it and I think mobile there's no great examples right now like so uh I think games are great like the Monopoly go is amazing and I'm going to talk about why uh Monopoly go is amazing because it's a tried andrue genre they just executed on it amazingly well uh and you can look at the press releases on how well they're doing uh so the contrarian I think in Mobile is there's an opportunity to potentially bring that's part of the reason I was asking about realtime Shooters and MOA there are opportunities to bring other genres but right now all the genres are the same they're just opportunity to do better and maybe it's because we're early innings in Mobile in Grand schem of things and there still is the upside I'm trying to be positive I would argue that we're in a mature part of the market and so it's just a lot of iteration similar to console it's full iteration the question is why are they iterating still at such a good clip some in new games as well well I'll leave it off I think FIFA and Madden despite a lot of complaints about it really does a good job in the sense that they have a

premium game plus they have the option of in entering into a huge like monetization pay to win type mechanic so optin premium plus optin I think that's smart smart for mobile I hate the premium optin yeah yeah but I think like NBA 2K they're on the right path we were kind of talking it's it's taken them like what 15 years to figure it out but now they're on the right path that's no I don't know about that anyway the trajectory I'd like to see the next version luly they come out every year yeah exactly I think we're out of time I was going to ask one curveball to both of you so we're now watching also cross progression games come into the mobile market right so we're seeing that with war zone that's about to drop right like they made their announcement it's coming to mobile what are your thoughts on the fact that we're now watching console get into Mobile and be on the same playing field it's going to be a disaster okay War Zone in particular is going to be a [ __ ] disaster okay cuz they made that game not the Chinese so yeah I'll put that in and on that note I have to be the bad guy again thank you on thate

on that also I I also hate the uh premium plus I AP thing because I think it just well the the in when we when I used to do that kind of stuff um we we found that it C the long-term spend per user it has a psychological impact on on long-term spend but your flywheel example absolutely keep people in the flywheel as much as possible and I'm I'm thoroughly with that but guys thank you so much it was absolutely insightful as ever than [Music] [Applause] [Music]