From Data to Development: Using Stats To Keep Up With Mobile Game Trends

[Music] i'd like to welcome to stage michael stahls from gameloft who's going to be talking to us about how to keep up with mobile gaming trends okay i guess i'll get started um welcome everyone uh my talk today is going to be about from uh from data to development so this is how we at gameloft toronto uh research our data analyze our data and um and then turn that into kind of our development process early on through the conception phase so um before diving into it i'll introduce a bit of myself so i am the studio

manager at gameloft toronto um gameloft toronto has been uh open since about 11 years now so we have about 120 130 employees at gameloft toronto we've made numerous different mobile games uh we've worked with numerous different ips like uno and mattel with uno and friends we've worked with lego and uh and our one of our longest running games is disney magic kingdoms which is about six years live right now so we're pretty happy about that um i've been in the video game industry myself for about 15 years uh starting pre smartphones and pre iphones and androids everything like that i started on old nokias the indestructible ones the old motorola razors and so with early j20 and brew games the majority of my experience is with mobile mobile games mobile platforms i've spent uh 11 years at gameloft toronto previously i was at game off montreal so i have quite a bit of mobile experience

and i do come from a technical background so i started as a programmer moved into a lead programmer role technical director and then now recently as a studio manager at gameloft toronto so that's a bit about me and then i think uh the question we always ask this is where we're at right now especially at uh gameloft toronto is we're we're trying to start a project what do we start we uh you know there's lots of different ideas there's a big market what do we want to start with so we start with a bit of data analysis so we have different sources of data gameloft has a consumer marketing intelligence team this team is great for providing surveys different market feedback what type of genres are working what type of genres aren't working they can provide a lot of different information for us to roll with we have third party market research companies so one i'll talk about uh in a bit these are companies that we can partner with that allow us to run surveys at a larger scale bigger scope of information

from people and and again allow us to kind of narrow down what the market is showing and what uh what um area we want to go into with our future games and then finally some uh other third parties like sensor tower and game refinery these are all tools that we use to collect data on store information revenue installs what's happening what genre is good what genre is bad um and uh and yeah so we take a lot of these different data sources and we try to combine them and and figure out how we're going to what we're going to build next so to start um one of the third-party companies that we did partner with ledger uh they did a survey across canadians um to start talking about canadian gaming habits over the past couple years with the pandemic but why is canada important for us so canada can be used to identify at least in our our our mindset uh bigger trends in bigger markets so um we can we can kind of correlate uh canadian habits with uh united states

and users in the united states so which is a much bigger market to us we often soft launch our games in canada for this reason this allows us to well first technically make sure that the game works well on a smaller scope before going worldwide but also to allow us to rebalance and make sure that it's going to be a good positive experience for the for the end user the video game industry i think it was mentioned earlier the video game industry in canada in toronto specifically continues to grow in my 15 years i've seen it go just crazy in toronto and we now have a lot of different new studios in these studios competitors which would have been great 15 years ago when i was fresh out of school looking for a job but uh but no it's always awesome to see so i think we're seeing a lot of good positive growth in the industry and then finally i think as a canadian myself as a canadian studio um it's just it's important for us to look at canadians and look at how we can actually bring some entertainment some joy to uh to canadian users and canadian gamers so

um so a little bit of habits uh that we saw with the the first survey so this survey was taken at the end of 2021. um what we saw a bit from the pandemic is that we did see a bit of a bump in terms of users who started playing games and continue playing them they started during the pandemics so this is about a 16 bump in end users which is great we're sitting around at least on the survey about 46 of canadians continue to play games at at some form or another you know some type of platform mobile console or uh or pc so this is great we have um quite a lot of canadian users and quite a lot of a range of people we can hit there with the market uh some of the platforms used by games canadian gamers so we have at the top they're mobile so one of the more commonly used and probably one of the more preferred use so this uh continues to again validate our our efforts and our um our kind of agenda to to continue to

focus on the mobile platform um despite it becoming more and more bloated of a market we still see an opportunity for for growth in uh in mobile games and we still feel like it's an area that we can continue as a company as a studio to grow into but we also see a whole other range of of platforms there that we are um needing to focus on so i think this validates gameloft's strategy to expand go more cross-platform um figure out how we can reach other users on pc console as well as mobile so some of the spending habits of canadians so um free to play model is still i think one of the more commonly used and commonly like top preferred of canadian users so this again it's something that we do with our mobile games we do have a what we hope is a well-balanced and a positive experience for our users to be able to come in and enjoy the game and and purchase where they see fit

uh game subscription so this is not something that we're actively looking at in gameloft toronto but it is something that we feel could correlate to uh features in game like uh season pass battle pass um something where a user will spend to uh acquire a certain amount of content or experience for a certain amount of time so and then finally subscription for a service so this would be your apple arcade or your xbox game game pass where we're actively looking and trying to partner with uh with some of those um first parties to uh see and establish how we can uh build those platforms again bring another source of games to two users so that they can experience and enjoy on all different levels so another source of data we use sensor tower i mentioned so this can be used for for different store information some of this data here is for revenue from the end of 2021 rpg continuing to being the lead lead

genre for 2021 followed by strategy and puzzle we have strategy that grew by 2 billion year-over-year rpg puzzles seeing a 1.1 and 1.2 billion increase in revenue and then we see action with a 58 growth uh which is quite a large number and quite a large growth and i think this is um thanks to uh to one strong performer on the market that came out in 2021 so that was more of an open world adventure game that was grouped into the action phase so that's a bit on the revenue but what at least what sensor tower is showing is that in the start of 2022 all top five genres have posted a decline in revenue so this could either be a rebalancing of some of the the um the booths we saw during the pandemic this could be inflation market adjustments um anything like that so something that we keep an eye on as well we keep an eye on install so i think installs is one of the things we

always try to focus on at game off toronto we want to make sure we reach as many users as we can hyper casual we continue to see the rise of hyper-casual games in terms of installs i think this makes sense in terms of people getting a good boost good kick of uh of energy entertainment and then moving on to to something else all other genres uh saw a small decline in 2021 again i don't think anything too concerning that would make us panic and run but something that we do continue to to follow and and then finally on hyper casual so this is not something that we're doing actively at gameloft toronto but it is a source of inspiration for us so we um we look more at casual and mid-core games at gameloft toronto but we could also look at what works with hyper casual in terms of a game mechanic a feature and then expand on that give it more depth give it more uh content and more of a casual or mid-core experience so that's um

even though we don't focus on hyper-casual we still want to make sure we're looking at at that data and then finally after going through all the um different data points we asked additional questions to our teams we asked is this genre right for us um does it fit into our studio uh you know specialties is this a studio one is this something that our team really feels like they should do because i think that's still very important is there room in the market to grow just because rpg genre is on the rise are we actually able to to uh inject ourselves and inject a new project into that genre how will we do that would it be a strong ip that contributes to that success um we did that uh we've worked previously with different ips so disney obviously for disney magic kingdom is a great ip to help attract users into uh into our game and then finally what is the anticipated cost to acquire new users so uh i think this is all big questions we ask at the start to make sure that we're kind of heading down a path that we feel will provide a good good

successful project at the end so what do we do with all this data this is where we get into our early conception phase of uh at gameloft toronto so this is where we get into what we call the lab so the lab has it starts with an idea phase so in the idea phase we have a small core team and this core team are kind of the gatekeepers the the the ones that really decide which ideas will move on and which ideas will kind of get put back on the back burner so but we do encourage all our team members to submit ideas we want all total studio involvement at this point concepts that are submitted are submitted with required specific details so we want to make sure that it's a full complete product being submitted thought out well well packaged together so this includes unique selling points market comparisons and then different monetization and retention strategies so we really want to look at the game as not just a feature or gameplay but more about the whole package how will we sell this to

the user we have no attachments so at this phase it's very important that concepts are submitted but um people have to know that you know some will be put on the backboard burner some will not be a right fit for our studio the ip might be too difficult to work with um so we don't try not to have uh attachments but we do try to cl uh close down or shelve projects with proper justification i think it's important to our teams that we go through the proper evaluation so that we don't discourage them of just kind of dismissing their ideas without any proper justification and then finally this is an ongoing process so we like to keep our think tank working um even if we've gone through this process and we've moved a project into a full production there's many game loss studios worldwide that are looking or maybe looking to start a new project and then we can take an idea and they might be able to uh to jump on that one and roll with it so after we do have a project that moves from the conception phase or the idea

phase we push it into the appeals phase so this is where we start getting a bit more creative we create different ads that we're going to test um then these ads will visually represent what our intended game play will be and i like like i said this is intended gameplay we don't want anything clickbaity we don't want anything like we see in in many different ua uh or marketing campaigns where you're you're excited about a game and then you go in and it's completely different and and not what you were expecting at all so we look for a truly accurate representation of what our game play is to be that that will ensure that um the results we're getting back from those tests are accurate and we can proceed forward um we can also test similar ideas but with different contexts so we might take a tycoon game put it in space or put it in the medieval times or throw dinosaurs in there and we can pit those ideas all together and kind of and see which one um comes out on top or which idea turned out better so um and then finally uh

and then we evaluate all that based on on specific kpis so we look at clicks we look at click-through rates uh we look at ad spends and these are all areas that we were able to evaluate okay which idea worked which idea didn't did all the ideas not hit the mark and we should go back to another back to our idea phase and scrap this one but then finally what we also can do with the results is we can break it down into criteria so we can start looking at did it hit the target target audience that we um we expected it to do we want to hit a certain age range and and but we hit you know a different one and that might be a red flag for us and maybe we have to go back to the drawing board and really think uh about what we're doing but if we do have an appeals test that we're quite happy with and we have an idea that's gone through this phase we now move into the prototyping phase so this is where we get more technical we still do continue with a small team we have a team of under 10 um maybe around five if we're if we're really trying to try to push a small team mentality we continue with a small

timeline so we're looking to make these prototypes with four to six weeks active development we want a prototype that can give us two to three days of a player experience so that we can properly evaluate installs we can properly evaluate how many people are playing coming back to the game early day retention and then we release this to a small limited audience so that uh we we won't uh worry about localization to try to hit a mass market globally we will focus on smaller countries just to to get enough players to start seeing how that early day retention really is and um and is this a project that we want to continue with and like i said we the at this stage the success is evaluated by our installs by our early day retention we want to see who's playing our game how did it hit do they come back for day one day two day three um and then at that point we'll uh we'll determine you know what uh if this

is a success or not and then the final point this is still uh a no attachment process of the project so we have games that will get all the way to the prototyping phase we've done what we can in four to six weeks we release it may fall flat completely no one likes it no one comes back day one uh day two and um and we will uh we will at that point we'll shelve the idea we may decide to shelve the idea just because it's uh it's not something that we feel we can make a successful product out of not worth our investment any further so we shelved that but if we do find a project that gets through this phase gets through the prototyping phase we shift now to production so this uh to me is is the final successful moment of the lab's job their job is complete they've found us a concept and something that we're excited and feel we can have a positive experience with so we will now shift this into a full production put a proper team on it build a proper

milestone release schedule live ops everything like that um but we still aim to be very quick to the market so we want to not take three years to do these projects because as we've seen the market changes so quickly if you take three years everything will uh will um will be different by the time you release so and that's it that's a bit of our uh our process going through uh conception thank you thank you thank you very much um i think we have time for any questions we've got one question anyone from the audience oh yeah running over oh hello cardio go for it what's your name miriam i'm miriam hey nice to see you again yeah so two very short questions yes and you might have mentioned it and i didn't hear it in the first phase when you're just posting the ads where do the clicks drive to

the uh so we're using different like we i think we'll use facebook at that point to kind of uh as our main source of of presenting the ads and then uh so when they click on them they just go to a landing page or they'll oh they'll land at a um it may be a survey page and maybe a page that tells the user like this is a game that's in development okay um we might ask a few questions about why it attracted them to them but we try to be as upfront to not discourage the user that like hey you just clicked on an ad for for no reason but we do want to try to involve them early on the process so okay great and then in terms of the release to the small audience is that a predefined small audience are you doing a public beta but limiting it to canada i think we'll try to limit to a like a region like a country so we um we might canada might even be too big of a a market at some point i can't remember what we did on our last one but it was definitely we only wanted a few thousand users at this point we didn't want to hit any of our big and you're still running an ad campaign to get the people in the door for that small campaign will um sorry it's not that i'm going to totally

copy your strategy i just want some more details no that's uh we'll usually when we've moved a game into the prototyping phase we may throw some ad ad spend towards it when we've released the prototype but at that point we keep this as a constant cycle so we'll keep we'll have more and more games in the ad phase or the appeal phases at that point so we try to keep it as a a constant cycle um but yeah we will try to put more uh put ad spend towards our prototypes to see if we can get people in there so great thank you so much another round of applause [Applause] you