Fortnite: An Unconventional Launch

[Music] hi I'm ed Zobrist I'm the head of publishing for Epic Games on fortnight as well as spy jinx and battle royale the right out of the bet though I'd like to talk about what we're not going to talk about we're not going to talk to that much about Battle Royale some but from a marketing standpoint it's actually not as interesting from intellectually for what we did as what we did with save the world so we're going to focus more on save the world which is our PvE game that preceded battle royale that we launched this summer I'm also not really going to talk a lot about numbers or metrics first off they're probably some analysts or competitors out there and I'm not interested in divulging more information than I have to but really it's because this presentation is more about about

principles and ideas that we use to launch save the world and why we diverge from what is really sort of conventional business practices for major publishers so to give you a feeling for my background I was basically classically trained as a marketer coming out of Wharton went to General Mills consumer products and eventually went to Mattel the Walt Disney Company the vendee Universal games then Sierre entertainment which became activision blizzard so a pretty well grounded when it comes to traditional marketing as well as the major how major publishers operate and and launch games but I in spite of that kind of background that's not at all what we did for save the world and I want to give you a little insight into that and for you indie developers which is really what what I'm here for I used to also do indie development I'm trying to give you a sense of how you could think about the world and apply some principles to what

you're doing when you launch a game and you don't necessarily have to follow the same recipe that the big publishers have followed for that all right so let's first set the stage for what was going on with fortnight we started development 2011 that's right seven years ago it's a survival game action building had a cover for Game Informer in 2014 and I just want to give you a flavor of the video that was given to a Game Informer back then in 2014 to give you a sense of where we were at that time for tonight is an action building game that is heavily focused on exploration discoverability obviously building the shooter aspects to it there's RPG and progression aspects to it when players first get into the experience the absolute raw thing is that they're going to be masters of what

we're considering the home base this represents sort of a group of Heroes that have undertaken the task of saving the world from the oncoming storm our storm is our mysterious force in the world that where the monsters come from they start out with their base and then they move into this sort of action aspect of the game which is they spawn into the world they don't have any equipment they immediately have to get tools they have to get weapons they have to get resources so they can build and there are gates in the world that the players will be closing because those are the things that tie the storms to the world and if they can shut the gates they can push back the storms and push back the monsters so they're basically taking terrain back one area at a time and then hopefully they interact with their friends and being like okay we both have home bases like let's let's link them together and and the benefits from both our bases helped us together as a group and that to me that cooperative nature of the primal building like you know I never built forts alone when I was a you know in the woods and a kid that was something you did with your friends the same feeling

in for tonight like let's get together we will work as a group to build these giant forts and fight the bad guys for us the way we build is super new the use of use of the building system so I can't build Mordor or you know the Starship Enterprise I can't so I think because people feel like they're awesome and creative from the very beginning without necessarily having a lot of artistic challenge for tonight's gonna really feed you that there's a lot of really awesome building it's a we love and we play all the time and I feel like we're riffing kind of on that site guys we're like let's take it from next level although helms deep is a great fight to have but it happens like what do i do in between that Wow the truth of the matter is you explore the world you get resources to bring back to the structure that is the permanent one but since you can access building anywhere you can use those tools however you wish and so making some quick strongholds that you can just hold up into for during a storm and just weather it that's what you'll do but you know the truly majestic version of it is back at home waiting for you people are

going to get the experience for tonight this year it's gonna be free yeah and I think you know that's awesome it's a great way to have a conversation with with players because they're not obligated to like it so we have to do our jobs we have to be awesome game creators to say it's worth your time to play this game I think we've done that we looked at the people that we're doing it really well we were saying you know we could do it that way there are ways to have our game be free and have it be fair our game is definitely not pay to win it is just an experience to have fun we know that the more that people play and the more people play people will buy into it like I mean if you like it there'll be something about it that you'll want to spend some money on even if you don't that's fine too of course you know it's it's business but it's also one of passion we're gonna do things really smart and super fair we're gonna start making a cool game that gamers want to play and then everything else will fall out of there we feel like for tonight is

a conversation with our players we want them to tell us what they want because you know we're gamers too and we recognize that you know we're just a few people we don't have all the right ideas and we know that a lot of players out there have a lot of really cool ideas but we would love to see is a game that lasts for years and years and years and it ends up somewhere we don't even expect because that makes it interesting for us now it seems really excited so sooner we get it out there the happier I'll be [Music] pretty good marketing Game Informer's sporting it would have been great if we had launched in 2014 but we did the the issue then became when we finally did get around to launching or start thinking about to launch we started thinking about the launch at launch to planning in 2016 2017 knowing we were gonna launch sometime that summer mid

2017 so from a marketing standpoint we had a couple of issues that we had to deal with one was this sort of indifferent perception about the game it had gone through a long delay and we'd also described it all long as free-to-play and that's how it was designed as a game it's going to be a free-to-play game which which led it to a certain sort of play system associated with it it will also a somewhat unusual game it's sort of the mishmash of a bunch of different genres so it wasn't that easy really grasped or described what it was in a short pithy statement and finally we were going off to launch in that summer of last year but we knew we weren't quite ready we knew it still needed tuning it still had features that needed to go into it but we also wanted to start getting feedback because we needed some players more players playing it in a live environment to help us guide the the the ongoing development to get us to that free-to-play state that

we ultimately desired so we decided we're gonna go a route that's very common on PC but very uncommon on console and that's is we're going to call it free-to-play or call it a paid early axis and everyone who knows stayin and PC knows what early access means but it's a little bit more of a alien concept when it comes to to canta console the but but in our mind that was a way to signal to the players that it wasn't quite finished wasn't quite done and that what they were experiencing was going to ultimately change and evolve on its route to becoming a free-to-play game but we were paid we were paid early access partially we are paid because we wanted to make certain we had a really qualified group that was coming in to give us feedback on on the game and when we choose the price points we probably as a company could have made a lot more money if we just started at $60 the theme but the product self look like a triple-a game but you know just epics

just general stances is just not the right thing to do for players it's if people wanted to come at a lower price point we were going to let them go in a lower price point because it wasn't really ready as far as we are concerned therefore we'd offer the lower tier but if someone wanted to you'd go from one of the higher tiers and you would get even more loot and starting starting goodies and by the way those prices they were set around to deliver to the players the equivalent plus a little more of what if in the free-to-play mode you had spent that much money the kind of things you would have acquired early on so is our way of calibrating it to get a sense of what the what the gameplay mechanics are going to be like when we started to tune it all right now it starts getting a little more interesting a3 a couple key milestones that a lot of big publishers go through our they typically have a big cinematic trailer and you guys know who

I'm talking about they have a gameplay trailer and then they announce so here's the date we're gonna launch go the stores pick us up and I've come with my sense of just a rough industry standard of what most big publishers would have done around the time frame with the cinematics a-coming 12 to 18 months in advance and then gameplay trailer I should use plural start coming out around for six months in advance and then about two or three months before the actual launch happened happens they announce it they start a big pre-reg campaign and the Machine kicks in leading up to the launch so here's what we did we actually didn't lead with the cinematic trailer we had one I'm gonna show it to you a little bit it's beautiful but we didn't lead with it we started the gameplay trailer and we announced the date of our ship at exactly the same time seven weeks in advance and then eventually they get cinematic came along about three weeks before before the before the actual launch occurred so let's look a little more deeply at those four seven weeks

before launch we announced at a press release just before e3 we're dodging the tornado of e3 we know that we have got a lot of ground we've got to recover for the game because of that in different perception and we have baggage so we want to launch or announce at a time when we can get the maximum amount of attention and not get overwhelmed by all the all the storm of e3 coverage we put out our website and then we put out a gameplay trailer now remember I said the game is a little unusual it's a little bit not not conventional and it requires you to actually think a little bit about more about how you play the game because it doesn't fit a neat tidy description so we did two gameplay trailers we did one real short one 30 just because that's the norm so people didn't have time to watch it but we also put out a really long one I'm gonna show you the long one because it gives you a sense of the things we thought were important that we had to start conveying to the players and also a sense of where the game had evolved from that first trailer I showed you I

mean the game did evolve not just in terms of gameplay and art but it frankly involved as far as epics basically its video services capabilities we put together a much more polished and and better trailer in my mind on gameplay and you know the whole video the whole area of video with an epic is just as she's been a huge huge progression over the years let's take a look at that if you're out there we need your help the storm came the monsters followed they took everything about towns families if you serious danger [Music] now it's time to fight back [Music] all we need is a leader and that's you

[Music] I mean there's not monsters got massive ports [Music] we stick together they don't stand a chance it's time to take it back the world a fortnight is filled with places to explore and loot to scavenge collect building and crafting materials while traveling across landscapes where no two are ever the same you never know what you'll find or where you'll find it make sure to go inside buildings searching can pay off everything you collect can be used to protect yourself

or help the survivors out there who need you for protection from the storm you and your friends will need to build forts use a variety of building pieces to keep enemies at bay and make a strong defense edit mode lets you customize pieces to fit your needs make doors or windows or get more creative stronger materials like stone or metal will give your fort more staying power being able to build on the fly lets you respond to threats quickly and adapt when you need to you didn't make all this just to watch again knock down you want filled sniper towers if that's your style or use all of the powerful traps you've crafted to make a maze of death that'll do the dirty work for you when monsters do take a bite out of your defenses you can repair and reinforce them during the heat of battle keep an eye out for weak spots because the enemy sees them too

use your imagination build the ultimate fort and use it to withstand all the bad things the storm will throwing it with what you've harvested you can craft hundreds of weapons for melee to heavy arms [Music] we traps to set up the perfect surprise attack or use gadgets that will help you and your team manage your resources well and you can be fully prepared for whatever is headed your way your friends will help you succeed each hero is a specialized version of one of the basic types constructors soldiers Outlanders and ninjas each hero you collect comes with individual advantages that fulfill different roles on your team of course constructors are skilled at building forts but they also provide valuable crowd control primed for combat

soldiers brink renée's as well as the big guns and sometimes the biggest gun Outlanders are the best at harvesting and have some unique tools at their disposal all that and a mean right hook finally there are ninjas great for melee and really into throwing stars they're good for getting into and out of trouble quickly collect cards to get heroes with different skills more heroes equals more abilities that your disposal give your friends together for a well-rounded team cooperation can make all the difference the people need you rescue survivors and give them a home defend them with everything you've got don't seek shelter make it a part of that video was also driven by

research we were wanted to confirm it was no surprise actually that there are certain things that the gamers had to know was inside the game before they reconsider it for this style of gamer and things like you know we showed a skill tree there's a lot of people one can make certain that's how the game is played or don't weight classes so that's why we tended to dwell on a lot of the different elements the game to make certain people understood the depth associated with it alright so two weeks go by we've just done the three we've come out with the gameplay trailer and we start a program called search for survivors a lot of people talk about our our influencer programs that we run in epic but this is the first time we tried it on a major scale our search for survivors program was essentially us teaming up with a whole bunch of youtubers and we would space them out so a few every week would come out with new videos they're sponsored and the idea was the the their viewers would watch these videos and if they went and they

click through to pre-register they would also get a banner that was unique to that influencer that they could use in the game the game has banners in it inside of it Figg using the game and they would end up getting special loot as well if they if they had signed up through our search for survivors campaign plus in the actual if this was all time back to the website for the pre-register program as in almost compendium like way as more and more people signed up for pre-registration we had a higher and higher level of extra group of loot that was given out to anyone anyone who pre-registered as long as the numbers of kept going up so let's take a peek at one of those influencer videos what's up everybody ain't sure the leaders here we are playing a game called fortnight is the awesome game I've already played it I played it with all my played it would be nice to play with a bunch of people already but this game is just me and um

goofing around making a massive base of our own I hope you enjoy it I'm gonna leave a link in it the description for you to click it if you are an interested at all in the fortnight game so please click it for me anyone who signs up through the link will be granted custom banners which will be one of my own and it would be added on the 21st of July if the game gathers enough survivors which is you guys for pre-registrations there will be additional items a lot for you for pre registering on the game that being said I hope you enjoyed the game peace out everybody and goodbye welcome to fortnight home welcome but welcome part of this also was you know very conventional you know devices trial you know we really would love to a try had some sort of trial device to people could play the game do their own sort of hands-on but he remember we're a co-op PvE game which requires a lot of players so it's not very easy to do a trial device prior to the launch of that kind of game except just before and we do have it we did have a head start program

so by using you know youtubers an influence or we're basically simulating what it feels like to play the game so we accomplished that in a different way than actually doing a trial device all right I've talked about the cinematic and how we didn't launch it until just before launch three weeks before launch we debuted exclusively at the Ridgid Eve convention in Austin now this was an ideal setting for us these are the folks that did you know the the red vs. blue videos and there this is an audience that it's a really high affinity for for for quality cinematic so they were naturally going to be you know receptive to seeing what we had to offer and you know roosterteeth also has a decent network for getting out getting out the word about what's going on to their group of players so we thought that was great and they are frankly just

a blast to work with as well so here let's look at the cinematic [Music] all right people let's search this dump and get out of here ASAP dump what's wrong with the derp burger yeah it's going garbage rats they structural damage some people just can't appreciate fine dining did you hear that you've got nothing to worry about trust me I've got the heightened senses of a ninja I am so sorry hey hey it's okay we're gonna get you out of here oh thank you

we thought you were more of those things you're coming like we're safe but vital area to you to stick with me yes ma'am let's get to work [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] I guess Meat Is Murder you killing me man oh okay that's up to the referee vak hardware we almost died that was amazing hey don't mention it all night

all right guys who's up for pizza [Music] pre-order now and get a four dick okay so you get the idea pretty high quality video I mean this is a further initiative yet another way for us to just re-emphasize the the quality of the products that we were we were making and bringing in again this is three weeks before launch so very very soon thereafter we would be selling the game July 25 we launched we had a minor small head start program where some people got in early we launched it with mainly with digital advertising so important to note we didn't use TV to do it decided we didn't need it actually we had a twitch viral quest program and for those who don't know what this is it's when a streamer completed a quest online to

someone who had a twitch account it was linked to our accounts we knew it through epic through their epic account that they they had been watching someone who had completed it and they would get a special account request inside the game so we're actually tying you back to what was going on in the game that whole searches survivor program activated the banners went out the loot went out to people who had participated in the pre reg program we all said retail support from gearbox we didn't originally plan to do retail but late along the ways we were talking with gearbox and decided to go for it and I just got to give them props and a really really tight timetable gearbox was able to get a retail program in place and then we had Sony and Microsoft Store placements to help help us with the actual launch and you know everything depends on whether or not whether or not do all this for whether or not it works it frankly exceeded our expectations it laid the groundwork for the game to

continue to grow as it marched on to it's free to play staffs which will do this year I'm happy to say the retention is high and and here we are over six months later and our audience is larger now than it's ever been before save the world not just for BR this is for save the world so for us it's worked out extremely well okay here's why you probably really came here a little bit about Battle Royale and I'll talk a little a little on it about two months to develop it launched in September 26 so let's let's do some math save the world the PD game launched July 21 this comes out September 26 so yeah we started working on this just about the time save the world was was coming out and it was the Unreal Tournament team that popped over to pick

up the pick up the charge for us to basically put originally what we thought would be a PvP version inside of our PvE game then things changed as we got really close to launch and we had already started marketing it as if this TV key mode battle royale which is going to be incited and slide have saved the world and people as far as we could tell we saw an uptick in sales were beginning to buy save the world an expectation of being able to play it we changed the mind we decided that this would work better if it were a free to play game and separated it out from from save the world even though it's just still one client you can just go directly into play battle royale and you wouldn't need to go through the save the world purchase gate in you know in order to play it so if any of you are from a deal very much with first party or pub

console manufacturers you can imagine how difficult this was in two weeks time to get through it you know the marking staff at that epoch probably worked about 14 days straight no weekend's no anything trying to make the transition points and pivot into the our ability to launch it as a separate game and you know ultimately we did it's an example of where I think you have to see a little bit of an edge we are still a very nimble developer by mindset I think I doubt any major publisher really could have pulled off this kind of pivot and they kind of the time that that we ended up doing him but there are a few interesting I said most of the most interesting from marketing as far as life is concerned had more to do it save the world but there are a few interesting things with with with BR and here's I'm going to show you a sequence of videos that gives you a flavor for how we've evolved and how we think about battery al over time so first we're going to take a little quick like the launch trailer

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Applause] don't you see back then we're also still talking about to save the world's kid the but I want you to think about when you look at that video is it's a pretty action-packed video it's really he has a feeling like it's geared towards players who may be more competitively oriented and originally that's what we thought we needed we we saw the landscape out there and we said okay what we need to be more more hardcore about three weeks into the game we had started to get some traction it was going well we held a company meeting at epic and as part of the company meeting we just put together a video to help support the company meeting and that video which is

showing influencers playing the game worked really well and was received so well we decided you know what we're gonna use it when we announced our we hit a twenty million user mark and that was in the beginning of November but to me this was the turning point actually for how we started thinking about what was the tonality what was this is where we early started to find our voice for the battle royale brand so I'm going to show you the 20 million video but remember it actually was created about three or four weeks before this video came out to the public as part of a company meeting [Music]

[Music] yeah so the company meeting version just didn't have a little slice it was just the trail of the the influencers unreal so that when I say turning-point it's like this video is different has this feeling sense of just the sheer joy right this gentleness of this sort of playful aspect to what was going on and how much fun people are having with the game as opposed to being more focused on this sort of core and the competitive competitive side on it immediately after this one we started to pivot and try to change the way we're thinking about it and we came out with a new video for something called the bush in the game this is something you hide inside of it's it's a consumable you pick up you can got you'd hide yourself as a bush so it started to shift the way we presented

the game to the players so let's take a peek at that [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay really short quick it's because it's for one of these you know updates that we do we made that video but you can tell it's starting to become different than the earlier videos from before when we were more more serious about it and so for the full evolution of feeling what the progression was like let's look at what the most recent videos like him this is for c4 so that pretty much sums up where the brand sort

of evolved to as far as the way we were talking about it and presenting it to players and you know largely driven by the way that they were reacting to to the the game the game itself I have a couple more be our videos that I think are interesting the next one is 50 V 50 what's interesting about this is that we launched it at the VGA Awards when I say launch it literally when Donal muster went up on stage to talk at the VGA Awards the moment he went on stage we threw a switch and this mode he demoed the video you're about to see and the mode went live at the time because you know we have a little bit of a flair for the dramatic and the the mode just it was incredibly popular did really well [Music] the quiz you will have to wake up this face

what's going down [Music] never let it coming since I'm a no parachute [Music] [Music] [Music] okay I should have mentioned that for if you're not familiar with the Battle Royale typically it's played the 100 players going down to either one single

person or a single squad this particular mode allowed the the hundred players to be split into two groups fifty V fifty and the battle was whichever was the last man standing on one side of the 50 and of course we've recently come out on mobile so ever you guys have been following that so here's the trailer we've been using for mobile in this case we were it's funny the the engine is so good at rendering and the mobile version looked really good into on the on screen and we had to be really careful that people when we were visually showing what was happening understood it was on actually on a phone and they weren't just seeing yet another port night video so here we go [Music]

[Music] you win by the way if any of you are curious where we are doing this as a invite event on iOS only because it's mainly about us wanting to throttled our CCO we're so popular we're very careful about how many people inside the game so we don't over stress the server's all right let's talk back to this timeline and what I consider actually the real purpose of today's talk so if you look at this you you know start to think about well why why would we scale this down to such a short time frame concentrate that marketing happen in a very narrow window versus other

companies which will do it over a much much longer period of time and I'm not saying the wrong it clearly works that's for how all the big major publishers launcher games and they are clearly successful for us at epic though we're sort of an engineering driven culture and a lot of this comes down to just the basic logic behind what's going on and the basic theories and principles being applied that's why I'm saying that for a lot of und developers if you think about a lot of the principles that's what you really ought to be thinking about when you're trying to do marketing and you see those basic basics I have down there is just you know gain awareness communicate key benefits have some call-to-action it's really all it ultimately boils down to it's not about time it's not about scale it's not about how big your marketing programs are yeah and a lot of you can't pull off what we eaten we pulled off but as long as you're focusing on those elements you can do similar kinds of things you know

tailored to yourself now for those long period of times that that major major publishers do it and I think they'll continue to do it a lot of it is driven by the fact in my mind that historically retail has been such a huge portion of their programs and it became a way for them to get a lot of retailer excitement and and interest in the game in advance they could start planning their retail merchandising programs they could have big big orders for selling at launch they could have big signage lots of skews on the shelves when they when they launched but from a consumer standpoint it doesn't really mean anything to know something 12 or 18 months out in advance do you think our cinematic came in three weeks before was any less effective than somebody who saw a cinematic 12 or 18 months before because we weren't really retail focus other than you know the gearbox element of it and we're more digitally oriented in our sales it wasn't relevant to us

about driving a lot of retailer and just so a lot of things that other companies would take an account we didn't chose not to take an account because we thought from a user standpoint that really wasn't meaningful and we wanted to be as impactful with the resources we had and in terms of the launch so that's part of the why we concentrated it down so so tightly so you can see we had a lot of the same ingredients that big publishers use we just baked it in in kind of a different way tailored to our needs and in my mind that's part of what I would hope you guys can look at when you're thinking about your launches that if you can just bake it down in a way that's really specifically designed for what you're trying to accomplish you're gonna have a lot more ability to have success within your world you don't have to have a huge huge huge boost like we did but you can still be successful if you just stick to these really core principles and not be as obsessed with some of the templates or the recipes

that that a lot of the other companies follow all right well we're questioning add superior but before we do that I got a one other call-out Kylie could you stand up this is Kylie now I just walked through a marketing presentation for how we think about things at at epic if any of you out there are in marketing or know folks in marketing that think they might like this kind of approach we are hiring so please reach out to Kylie after the presentation and we'd be happy to entertain any application you have all right who's got a question hi I'm a big fan of the save the world game I thought the twitch integration you guys did for save the world was really interesting just wondering if you could kind of talk more about that what your goals for that word you feel like it was effective yeah the for the twitch integration yet prior to that we hadn't

done as much with with twitch we had you've been focusing primarily on youtubers and you know frankly our videos on YouTube are astronomically high these days in particular but with twitch it was and if you guys and if you guys have followed our own you know like the even for Battle Royale we only broke into the top ten in the last four months or three or four months with any regularity we didn't start off that high I just sort of built a built over time but but for twitch it was really a way for us it it was a neat trick in a sense being able to pull it off but for us it was really more about building that relationship with the streamers and having something fun for them to do and to work with them and and that sort of partnership we try to have with with the influencers is you know a big component of what we're trying to pull off it was a little bit gimmicky to actually do to what we did so will we do it again sure

if we would do it again as long as you know the influencers wanted to get behind it and do it and work with us on it so we'd be happy to but this is a sort of an example of where we consider this more of a partnership and it frankly if it hadn't gotten a lot much traction from the influencers they didn't want to want to participate or participate of course we could pay for it we could buy for if we wanted to we probably wouldn't have done it yeah I was always curious if the monos Asian system in fortnight was mainly created so that you could market a soft-launched and the Western audiences by having a paid-for game and then going free-to-play for the Asian markets was that a consideration at all in any of this I mean we are we are all the wait should I be repeating these questions or is it okay it's okay do they say to repeat them eat them yeah all right they'll repeat as best I can you tell me if I'm saying it wrong you're asking about the monetization system intimate whether we were

strategically thinking long turn about the Asian implications of us doing it this way well first off some of you may know that we are 10 cent is a large equity owner has a large equity stake within epic we consult with them regularly they are well aware of everything we're doing they they they give us plenty of advice we don't always take it but but there's a lot of close collaboration with it I can unequivocally say no this was we were not considering the Asian implications of anything we were doing as far as the monetization system was going at the time when we do get to the point that we're extrapolate and making a bigger push into Asia we may have a separate separate approach for what happens in in Asia unlike you know Battle Royale we might have unique clients around it but it wasn't part of our thinking at all thank you hello so an important part for the strategy for

for tonight it's to pay a lot of attention about the trailers if you have to share a little bit more details for us what when we should produce the trailer what kind of important points we have to pay attention when we did the trailer what's the major point okay yeah the question is about for that the trailers we did about what we considered important for building it in and was there a question about timing too I wasn't certain yeah he's right yeah okay so help me I showed you a lot of different trailers brought on cause hard to learn too for example my watch okay so the two trailers one was a cinematic and one was the gameplay trailer right again we did this so we started seven weeks in advance for the gameplay and then three weeks for the cinematic having gone through this experience once if we got tried to do this again I might try to do it over four weeks I don't

know if even seven weeks we needed necessarily it's really about trying to build as much about much of a bang as you can in a short amount of time while still top of mind to the people so that's about the awareness part right so it's the awareness it's communicating key benefit and then this called action I think that with it depends on what you're trying to accomplish remember when we did that long-form gameplay trailer we've had specifically we're trying to convey depth there a lot a lot of what was happening in the game also that explaining some of the complexity of the game so we went out of our way to go deeper into it knowing that we could have made that more brief we could have made it tighter we could have made it sexier more entertaining but it whether it wasn't the point of that particular trailer and we did cut one that was that was 30 to do that that part of it the cinematic trailer was solving it for a different completely different issue the cinematic trailer was yes it's telling

narrative and telling some of the backstory which we felt was important particularly what was essentially a an RPG but it was also a clear feeling of quality there's something about that trio that just says oh this is a quality game this is a very well-crafted a lot of thoughts gone into this and look how how how much care and effort they put into this trailer and that halo effect would probably spill over to what what we were doing with with the product so I can't give you a specific answer to your situation other than say just try to think of a tiny handful of things that you think are really important that someone needs to know and and sort of boil it down into whatever you put into that trailer I can't tell you how many times that I've seen trailers from other companies or Indies to come out that to me are there they're over done they're trying to do too much just pick a few simple things and make them important and big because people just can't remember if you do a lot of stuff inside them so just stay simple that's the

other advice I would give thank you okay sure head thanks a lot for sharing the insights my name is gene I was starladder um well I'm a little bit skewed since I see the world in gaming through competition mainly but that's the question for me it's a no-brainer that in the marketing campaign for this particular game there should have been some kind of an element of competitive play hey you've got a team compete through the ladder there's also two different things you know playing one team versus another team I'm just curious why you didn't use that thing eSports and competitive play for launching the game and is there will on the book somewhere plans to include that thing in the fourth night the question is why didn't we use eSports as part of our as a marketing lever during the launch and you specifically for battery I'll obviously say the world we couldn't have done that but for battle royale and then what is the what is the

company what is the future for the game for eSports on the first topic remember we built this thing in two months I would say that it was it took everything we had just to get a PvE period component in on the topic of eSports obviously it's very big it's very topical but to us that's it's it's a it's a major major undertaking the acquires a great deal of thought but could never possibly for where we were at that moment in time been even a remote consideration for the actual launch we are doing things with you know we do have some custom servers going out at e3 we are going to effectively have a pro-am tournament but as far as the the future on that on the east we're stuff it's something that's you know under discussion and we're not really ready to talk about it yet okay thanks so you have a lot of different videos

and you had some for really small events like just releasing the c4 and stuff like that yeah I'm wondering if there's any consideration for over saturation of videos or is it just like as many as you can crank out that make sense yeah yeah that's a great question I mean you could ask a similar question about basically our content cadence because the videos are tied to the content the more recent ones the pictures like the c4 or coming soon whenever something new is coming into the game we we make a video now they're relatively short so they don't take a lot up from that but the I think the audience is begun to expect them and assume that there will be something it helps us shape the personality of the game somewhat by doing them just actually putting something c4 inside of the game that's it you think about it that's such a dry idea just a piece of explosive piece there's nothing really inherently entertaining about that so we build an entertaining a little vignette around it to just help with some of the more the branding in personality you could find c4 in a lot of different games but I

don't know if it would jump out at you the way that we carry able to do it with that one again as far as the cadence goes they're pretty short if they were really long I think he'd be right but these are pretty short and meant to live for that week that that new items out I think that they don't have a long shelf life I don't think that you know weeks later than it really runs back and we'll go back and look at our Bush video at the time so then you know the nature of epic is such that we can make videos pretty quickly but like the c4 or the the bush video things like that we can do it in less than two weeks with our with our video team so it doesn't require a lot of effort on our part so we're but we think we're pretty good at it so we just like to sort of exploit it since we consider it a competitive strength hi I'm Cheryl from China from a game company usually marketing the

marketing departments always focus on they know the newest trend and information from the marketing and R&D department always focus on a game so which department first decided to change the gameplay of RO night the question is is how basically we're inside the company I'm guessing you're talking about a rail that why we put in we're inside the company the ideas for that led to us doing the the PvP battle royale mode came from but there's a third area in our company besides the two you mentioned you're effectively in in Western parlance what been describing marketing publishing and development product development and an epic and that's a strategy team and so there are people that focus more on strategic issues and they do spend a lot of time looking at trends and and a

whole variety of factors that are considering the actual germ of the idea really came over on this on this from the strategy side but it was just it immediately adopted by everyone we we really badly wanted to have a PvP version inside of inside of the game so it was it what didn't take a lot of discussion for senior management aside site okay great no-brainer you got a PvE game your multiplayer let's go make a PvP component to it so everyone your company just decided to change the chance to PvP mode rights well change we didn't change oh you're amazing yes added it to the game yes all right thanks I could have you hi so my question is about the how did you guys picture who your players were back when you first started developing the game and then who do you sort of see them as now and how did you go through that

transition of understanding your players your player base from the beginning and who they are now and and then also is that different for save the world versus battle royale yeah that's a great question the question is about how we were gauging the essentially the characteristics or demographics of the user base for what was saved the world until we decided to launch the Valerii on mode and then became battle royale as well we have a basically we were doing a series of closed beta slash closed alpha tests leading up to the launch and we were periodically either having focus groups or sending out questionnaires and and and and and querying the user base basically about what they liked and they didn't like and we had a series of these over time that

happened so we got a very strong sense over time of how the game was evolving how the player base was adjusting to how we were evolving the game and it really was just a lot of time spent talking to them as we went through that when we know that that you know we have a kind of a fanciful kind of cartoony look that's it's kind of fun but at the same time the game is kind of serious in terms of gameplay it's a lot of very very deep systems inside of it that harken back to you know just big big RPGs so we knew that we were appealing to a blend of people wanting RPGs as well as people who wanted something sort of mass-market you know pick up and play to some to some degree and you know I mentioned that we're still early access we still don't consider it finish we still think we've got a lot of work to do on the game to get it to the proper state so that's evolving all the time battle RAL as a free separate mode and it's obviously exploded and become huge yeah we have a certain percentage that

will play save the world and we're happy with that but a large percentage of them will probably never play save the world because it's just not the kind of game they like to play they're really into playing you know competitive competitive shooters and that's all they want to do which is fine it's fine for them so for them you know they do have a very different you know demographic characteristic as far as how they interact and how we think about think about them as well right now there's some lob sinter size and it's so big that it's sort of dominant it's interesting I didn't really talk about it too much in my presentation but if you think about it we are in a very interesting branding position because we had this what it's called save the world and by the way we didn't call it save the world until battle royale came out until battery all came out it was just fortnight there was no snow at the word say the world didn't exist but we had to create it because the battery Isle came out so we could distinguish between between the two so and we got to do some branding you

know tidying up about the rant hierarchy because it's a little bit a walk because of real but we we effectively treat them as all part of this sort of fortnight family with with some adjustments for whether it's dealing with the PvE say the world or whether it's dealing with battle royale I'm not certain I answer your question as far as I can get to it I think there's one additional element there that I was more curious about which is what is that type of person who is interested in battle royale is that the kind of person who's sitting down and playing 40 hours a week who's like I want to be the best and be the you know most competitive type player or like what a guys are saying no it's first of all you can't get to the size where at if you're just too tightly focused as you just drive we are kind of pop culture and mainstream at this point we know that we have a broad range of people playing in terms of Ages and also in terms of sexes there's lots of women that played battle so I'd say it's funny

as a marketer I love to actually drill down to very specific demographics but it's pretty broad it's pretty wide we are just so large we have to it can only be explained by something that sort of transcends a lot of what you're describing as far as those those those segmentations all right thank you it seems like there's a opportunity to leverage battle royale to get more players in to save the world so for example and save the world you have three different tiers that you can purchase and the $150 tier has this really badass ninja that I can't use in battle royale and it seems like maybe to get people more like embedded in the save the world game you could offer like quest or like things that you can unlock in battle royale for playing a certain amount of you know save the world gameplay right right the questions the questions about whether or not we will be or should be doing more cross cross mode I itemization or

mechanics or reason for going back and forth between between the two and we do do a little bit some of the skins exist in in both of them it's it's something we talked about periodically and I'm happy it's not bring it up again I've by the way with the with with with the dev teams the specific one you you refer to as what's inside the high-impact I don't think we've talked about that one quite some time so we probably would we don't have a fundamental philosophy on this at this time what we we do worry a little bit about the confusion that happens between her two and and sometimes we when we have done things that they cross between the two we've gotten feedback that people got confused about what that meant or whether it was or wasn't so it's something I I don't have a good answer view because we haven't decided what a good answer is on that one and I was curious about so last year I remember reading a story about

Blue Hole commenting on your battle royale event our game mode rather launching and I was curious if you saw a huge increase of player numbers due to the free publicity I don't know if I should be like on that one directly but I think you guys are welcome to go pull up something called Google Trends if you want to and go look and plug in a few key terms around the time of what you described and you can draw your own conclusions that happen Thanks any more questions all right we're running out of time so thank you very much again remember to come talk to Kylie if you'd like to talk to the US about marketing