From Casual to Hypercasual - How to Turn Your Casual Production Team to a Hypercasual Commando Unit

uh we have a session called from casual to hyper casual a practical guide on how to turn your casual production team to a hyper casual commando unit which is a particularly exciting title there and we have moria from crazy labs joining us um hi hi guys hi rick hi awesome um right yes we're basically on time for you to start so i'm gonna drop out and go quiet let you do your thing and then i'll come back if anybody has any questions towards the end um but yes floor is yours yeah just a minute please i hope that everybody can see my screen

thank you very happy to be here today and my talk will be about why this is the right time to go hyper will start five million dollars think to yourself i mean in hyper casual games how long do you think it takes to reach five million dollars my name is maria and i'm head of publishing at crazylabs i work in the company for almost seven years and i think that i worked in every studio that the company had but to be honest since i started the hyper casual publishing business i think that was actually the moment that i really fell in love with my job and i'll get to that in a few minutes so today we're gonna have i'll tell you a little bit about crazy labs and dive deep into

why this is the right time to go hyper i will share with you our latest success story of i can paint and then we will have some time for questions so we can drop them in the chat so crazylabs is top five publisher with over 3.5 billion downloads and we have 100 million unique active users we have offices in tel aviv skopje so if you're also searching for your next job that might be an opportunity for you we are a developer as well as a publisher and we are crazy and we're working in labs so we have the casual lab and the hyper casual lab and we also have another lab that might even find a vaccine for coronavirus so stay tuned i want to do a short recap about hyper casual these are free to play games they

can be played by anyone anywhere they are short easy to understand satisfying they have mass appeal and usually can be played in one hand see this video don't you feel that this is what's happening in the gaming industry in the last six months think that one of the reasons why i fell in love with my job even more was the fact that hyper casual games are games for non-gamers and i am a non-gamers there i said it that's why playing a game that i immediately know how to play and i can play in one hand and even throw the phone away after 20 minutes after 20 seconds that's the game for me and it turns out that there are a lot of non-gamers and this is why you can see the constant

increase in downloads i think it's related to the fact that we are just bored or stuck at home for too long and maybe we're just tired of you know scrolling social networks and then we see a cool ad of a cool game and we download it just catch our attention i fortunately believe that most of you know uh the mobile group in download since the pandemic has started it grows in 40 percent and when looking at sensor tower q2 report you can see that in each of the stores there's the spike of uh uh uovillia there's no doubt that during the first and second wave of coronavirus i feel luckier than ever be working in the gaming industry the games that we released just since the pandemic started brought itself over 120

million downloads when looking at top publishers and the top charts you can immediately see that that around 70 or 80 percent of the top games are hyper casual games it's true that in revenue hyper casual makes only five percent of game revenue but when it comes to download you can already see that we're talking of over 12 and thank you iron source for this data so now that we all understand that hyper casual is the best party in town i'd like to explain how you can take your first steps in this genre with just little resources and maybe trying to form a new line of business to your studio it doesn't matter if you're indeed your work for hire studio any other types of gaming studios this stock is for everybody

if these were regular days the big studios would work on amazing hollywood production making games for brand or just regular work for higher jobs but during these crazy days and the unclear situation some very talented studios they're standing in uncertainty and and some of them even standing idle so there might be an opportunity here for very talented people to take their first steps into high or casual with a minimum risk i think that the best combination would be of talent would be like a very good unity developer a 3d artist and a game designer of course it can be a one-man show of someone who knows how to do it all i heard a lot about a lot of studios that between projects they work on their dream game or just an indie game that their talents have um so i'm saying if you have time between project

and so just go and try making hyper casual games because those dreams games sometimes doesn't even meet the store so why not trying hyper hyper casual development starts with some feasibility test so when you or your publisher have a great idea for a game you need to ask yourself do people want to play my game so we will start with a ctr test we want to check if people are watching and clicking the ad so we will just develop the content for the ad itself so we are more of an ad director other than just a game developer at the beginning after that we see that we have people clicking on our ad we will go and see if they are also downloading the game and go into cpi test and once you know that is good and people are downloading the game you can

actually go and start developing the game itself then you want to know if people are coming back to the game the day after and you will go on retention test only then you will add the ads and test the average revenue per user once you have all that you will go and see if the game can be scaled and then go on a global launch i think that this process really helps you to stay focused and not waste time on games that uh that you're not sure about of course that it doesn't matter that if um that that if you have a ctr test that was amazing you are on the highway for success but at least you know that you are not wasting time on uh on games that doesn't have a chance

to succeed now let's look at let's compare two different games casual game and hyper casual games these also have a lot of similarities and this is why i wanted to compare and i'll i'll talk about the average game casual game and the hyper game they both released at the same time a casual game is taking a very long time to produce let's say 18 months to produce when cat when hyper casual games will take you around eight weeks to produce in um in the casual game you need a big studio let's say 15 people to work on the game while in hyper casual game you only need three people to to do that and when in the same time the hyper casual game can bring you three times more downloads than the casual games so i'm

not saying that that uh the casual games won't bring more revenue at the end but what i'm trying to say that in these risky times you should try to minimize risk and this is why i'm saying you should go on smaller scales production as always we have the good the best case scenario and the worst case scenario so i'll start with the best case scenario you go and try to make uh you have an idea then you will produce the video the prototype uh and test it it has great results awesome and you will develop the game and you are on your way to success so and you knew that in just you know one two three four weeks you know that you are in a good direction in the worst case scenario you just know that you failed after let's say uh three or

two or three weeks okay that really helps you stay focused and even some of the publisher like we do even cover some of your team expenses at this time so that minimizes the risks even more okay what i'm trying to say that you should keep on iterating because you can do very short cycles of iterations and know how to test your next idea fast now let's look at it from a different angle remember the 5 million dollar revenue at the beginning not saying that this is the revenue that uh hyper casual game is making i'm just trying to show you that you you are reaching this milestone very very fast okay so let's look at these four hits of crazy labs

soap cutting the studio that worked on this uh this game nailed it on their third uh their third try they failed with two prototypes and on the third one they nailed it only three people worked on it and they reached the 5 million milestone in just 12 weeks in asmr slicing they tried four games and they nailed it in the fifth one three people worked on it and they reached five million dollars in just seven weeks tie-dye it was their third try five people worked on it and they nailed it uh with five million dollars after seven and a half weeks and the same for amazed that uh two people worked on it and reached the five million dollar revenue in just eight and a half weeks and it was released like one and a half years ago so you do

the math so i'm saying that it takes a lot of tries and a lot of times you know to to fail on your way but i'm saying that with talented teams you can also do it very very fast after saying all that you need to remember that everything is nice and and cool but you have to remember to have a very good okay without an addictive and satisfying core none of the above makes any difference in some of the games the good core will be something that makes you want to come back and will surprise you every time that you are playing it for example in this uh in this video that you see of tie-dye this was the video that we tested in

on our first game for the first test sorry and this video itself and this was the only thing that players played reached almost 50 day one retention that means that the core of this game was incredibly good and if that all doesn't seem real to you or just too good to be true i'd like to share with you our latest success story of i can paint let's see how in this crazy coronavirus time a small studio from slovenia that doesn't even make game as their main business decided to play with the idea of making hyper casual games just last june our dear friend primos from tricky tribe introduced us to uh to uh dawn of play just in july he said that we have to meet them that they have a great game coming

rotten doll for my team contact them and within just two days they started a cpi test for the game it started with just a paint can on a pendulum and i was extremely excited by this game because this was one of my time killers watching on facebook and instagram and i just enjoyed it so much but it was also suspicious because i knew that many game developers tried this trend before and failed so probably something else about the way they gamify the trend that made it so great because the outcome was always beautiful and satisfying and i found myself keep playing this game over and over again and and then like i said when the outcome is beautiful that was very very nice and so was uh their cpi

on the first cpi test that we did we reached 15 cents cpi and because it has a repetitive mechanic we could also look at the day one retention it almost reached 4 40 day one retention on our initial test um then we knew that uh we have something good in our hand and we also knew that we have to be fast because sometimes these trends come and go so uh we wanted to hit the iron while it's hot and we help the studio plan their next steps adding meta game and mostly we wanted to enrich the creativity for the players at first we allowed the players to make some choices requests from buyers and our ui expert worked on the ui of the game with the team and improved the art the retention got extremely better and the cpi

remained great since the average revenue per user was good we decided to launch the game even not even though that we knew that we have to add a lot of more content to to the game so we started a heavy live ops work we added the painting technique we added a vip customer we added a lot of choices for the the players and i think that in this simulation games one of the most important things is to give the player choices to allow them to express their creativity and be able to discover new things all the time that would keep them engaged for longer so i'm not saying that dawn of play uh i'm i'm not sure sorry that donna played thought that this is how their summer will look like when they just started to work on their first hyper casual game ever

i'm saying that every studio that will start and i'm not saying that every student that will start working will launch their first game so fast but i'm trying to say that it's more than possible and when it's happening it's sweeter than ever and i'm always saying that on my talk and i will say it again every game can become a game changer by the way if you feel that you have a great team but you're not sure how to start or you have an amazing idea and you don't know how to gamified you can maybe try to join one of our hub we have one hub in india and one hub in israel and we are about to have more hubs so keep following in the hub we are uh giving a hyper casual training and injecting all you need to know about hyper casual it's kind of a hyper casual boot camp um but if you didn't find a hub that

fits you then you can always get in touch with our publishing manager and they will be my coaching you and mentoring you and they will do whatever they can in order to help you publish your game you can also use our new click dashboard that's actually a great opportunity to invite you to sign up and maybe you will get invited to join it it's a self-serve platform it has full transparency and with zero hassle from your site so to sum it up if there's one one thing that i want you to take from my talk is stop being afraid of failing we are failing all the time but we keep trying um try to make your first steps in hyper casual start small build a small team or just hook up you know with some talents from the

industry and once you start developing hyper casual game you might find yourself having the best summer or winter you ever had so thank you so much for listening and thank you pocketgamer for an awesome event and i can't wait to meet all of you in person thank you wonderful thank you um yeah we do if we've got some time for questions if anybody in the audience does want to ask some i've got a couple uh to kick things off that i'm kind of interested in so um obviously crazy labs makes its own games but you've got the publishing arm as well how involved does the publishing team get in the games if a developer comes to you and says i've got this great idea like how involved are you getting in like the actual creation of the game um actually very much involved um i think that publishing manager wears three hats they you know they are business development and they do business development they do project manager but they are

doing a lot of product they are very much involved in ideation in the game design so every game developer that uh that come to work with us get to enjoy their talent and their experience in casual cool um and you mentioned sort of spending time on with um i can paint on like live ops and involving the game um how how long do you usually spend um maintaining a game after it's launched because i know how casual games kind of they kind of have a smoothie a short life cycle but obviously like if like how long would you say because usually we think about hyper casual game with you know very short lifetime but at the beginning of course we will try you know it's the honeymoon period of the game so we will uh try to do as many updates as we can and try to uh upgrade you know the game

and improve the kpis as much as possible afterwards we will just uh uh let's say do a an update once every two weeks then every month but we will always do something with the game maybe it's just upgrading you know uh uh xcode and and the other thing will be just to uh try to do something with the ads or adding new levels we will keep on doing it all the time and of course a b testing our our performance all the time try to optimize it uh great we've got a few questions coming in now um from the audience so someone's asking anonymous attendees asking for a bit more clarification on that five million revenue number uh just checking is that a developer payout um and what is kind of the average like revenue that you see generated from these games yeah i'm talking about revenue of course so it's not

uh it's not a payout but i'm saying every publisher has you know their own profit margin but you do the math something between uh 15 to 35 profit margin which is kind of the standard in the industry and that depends of course what is the rapture that you have with uh with your publisher or what is the business model that you have with your publisher so what i'm saying that five million dollar is the milestone of course that the game is making a lot more afterwards because you know it took them just seven or eight or ten weeks to get to five million dollars but i'm trying to say that a good hyper casual game can be very profitable for both sides awesome um we've got another anonymous attendee who wants to know how much does it cost approximately from the idea to the two weeks if you even if it does fail uh so to develop and do the ctr and cpi tests again what was the beginning of the

question oh sorry how much does it cost to um yes to do the first the initial two weeks um for the developer or yeah i guess for the developer like yeah extremely hard to answer this question because it's really depend how many people worked on the game which effort did you put it in did you buy assets from the unity store for example or did you uh made it all on your own um we usually encouraged our developers not to invest a lot of effort at the beginning because their idea might fail so we just need to do the minimum in order to have great video and i hope that i answered the question i think that that probably about covers it um without going into like a detailed full-on breakdown of your business plan um we've got a question from oscar clark who's asking i think a question that a lot of people are very curious

about um particularly in hyper casual um how do you think the changes to idfa are going to impact the success of hyper casual i mean that's a very difficult question to answer but when i was planning to this talk i said okay my talk is just one day after the announcement it can be like talking about this or talking about that but yeah so i i think that i will say what everybody are saying uh we are playing you know uh preparing for the worst and hoping for the best it really depends how best you know the cpm will react and what will happen with cpi eventually but because we don't need to really target uh specific users i really hope that it will have a good impact on hyper casualties cool um got an anonymous attendee who wants to know what your thoughts are on

hybrid casual games and the evolution of hyper casual that's a great question i thought that by now we would see more hybrid casual games so i think that maybe it's just not as easy as it looks to make these games so we will continue to see everything in my opinion we will see uh the ultra casual and we'll send you just a regular hyper casual games which i think are the best and um and we will also see the hybrid casual much deeper uh games that are uh more likely to be with uh in a purchase for everything yeah uh we've got a flood of questions now um i think this one is interesting what platforms do you do cpi tests on both both yeah ios and and google play yeah that's a great

question actually because we usually uh tested our games only on on ios and we are now starting to uh work on the on the two platforms and maybe even you know moving only to google play at the end and sort of on that similar note um what do you think what do you see is the revenue split typically between android versus ios i guess like which which platform is making the most money i suppose i think that you know at the moment before i ios 14 and idfa of course uh i think that ios still brings more uh revenue but let's see how that will change yeah i guess we're just looking into a crystal ball for that one still um until anything actually changes exactly um it's kind of a more detailed question about your about crazy labs publishing and its business um from muhammad um how much do you pay to developers to

help them through development i mean you don't have to go into specifics here i'm sure it depends on the company we have different business models and so we are trying to be as flexible as possible i think that i divided into a few uh answers um there are developers that once i'll call it the lottery ticket they have the lottery ticket dream so they will go on a big rapture and not being supported by development fees and and repayment and stuff like that and we can also offer many different types of preparements or to cover production expenses but that will slightly change the business model afterwards so we can do everything so that really depends if you need an immediate cash flow or that you uh want the big box in the end cool uh we've got

still a little bit more time if anybody has a quick question to ask i've just got one um from myself that i'm kind of wondering about so um obviously like there's there's all sorts of different elements that make for a game to be a success you know it's a bit of everything but what would you say is like the most important aspect of a hyper-casual game that leads to it's being a success oh like i said the core of the game it that will eventually what makes a game become a success something that people want to keep on playing and and keep coming back to that that the core have to be perfect and polished and of course you have to start with great cpi you want to have people playing your amazing game but they hold only with amazing horror that people will keep on playing awesome right um i think that takes us

up to time so thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your talking it's really cool it was great being here thank you so much great to have you thanks very much