From Dormant to Dominant: How Studios Are Reviving Old Games To Drive New Growth

[Music] Welcome to the pocketgamer.biz podcast. I'm your host Peggy Saltz. Brian is out doing some amazing things and he'll be back on another show. But in the meantime, well, I go out to all the events, listen to all the marketers, and I'm hearing them talk more and more about, you know, we need to get more from less. Clearly, no questions. But what about getting more out of your older titles? Reigniting community engagement that you had. So, you you nailed it once, why can't you nail it again? Or the other question, should you nail it again? Sometimes maybe it's best to let it stay just the way it is, dormant. Either way, we have the answers because I've got Mike Gallagher. He's founder of Untitled Advertising Lab. Mike, fantastic to have

you finally. We do it because you've been talking about this at many events, most recently at GDC. So, yes, you've heard it and we want to dive into this, but first, everyone's more than a title, right? And everyone has more than an amazing company. And in your case, that's a creative and strategic engagement agency. We'll get into more about that because you're helping small and medium-siz game studios make the most of their marketing spend and also their older titles. But quick one. First of all, great to have you and you've brought some stories with you, I think. Yeah. Yeah. No, we've um you know, we we've been in business now for a year and a half. So, we've got uh we've got some good case studies I think we're gonna we're gonna tell you all about today and and you know, obviously I've been in the business for for quite a while. So, yeah, super excited. Thank you for having me. I know this has been a long time coming. We've been trying to schedule this for a bit. So, I'm super happy to be here. I'm excited, too, because we've been chatting about it for a while. And now, yeah, I'm even happier

because I didn't know it was you seem to me to be almost like part of the furniture and it's only been a year and a half. I've been hearing about you, seeing you everywhere. So, you are you're on the road, man. You're on the road. I'm I'm trying it. I'm doing the world tour. I'm I'm uh everybody's at reboot this week, so I'm a little bit jealous that I'm I'm at home in rainy Vancouver, but uh you know, I I can't complain. Okay, so I want the t-shirt that has like on the back, right, the the world tour. I think there's an untitled lab world tour. Anyway, yeah, there you go. Quick detour to yourself because uh everyone's more in a title as I said and you interesting. You adopted a dog from the Airbuddies movie. So that's not your everyday thing. And then I had to ask myself other than the fact that you're an animal lover and I am too. What's the connection there? Because you're building trust in communities and you've got the loyalty of a good dog. Is there a connection there? Oh, I wish I was that meta, but I don't know if I can I don't know if I

can make that connection for you. But um that's uh so the funny thing is that's from an entirely different career. So before I even got into marketing and and games and and entertainment um I actually worked in the film and television industry for almost seven years. I I I started out on the Airbuddies franchises. Uh and yeah, they it's I'm not going to talk bad about them, but there's a lot of puppies that come through because once they get a little bit too big, they're not as cute. Uh so they go up for adoption. So, I was uh I was lucky enough to stag one at the end of the show and and uh he was a rascal. Oh, that's so sweet. And it's true. That was maybe a bit meta, but it's still fun. I was like, I know there's got to be this great loyalty and engagement story here, but let's move on. We talked a little bit about your agency, but what I like about it is that you don't um call it um just an agency. You're calling it an engagement agency. Uh and not just community agency,

everything. What is that? Break that down because no one you know everyone's a creative agency, right? Marketing agency, digital, whatever. Engagement agency. New one for me. Yeah. So we we call it an engagement agency first of all because we wanted to do things a little bit differently and I think it kind of comes back to our core philosophy, right? So, when we look at kind of like our throughline services, uh, and and kind of what we like to do when we look at a project, it's not just, well, we're going to run your Discord or we're going to build your social media content or we're going to do your PR. Um, we want to look at that full player cycle all the way from, you know, like a closed alpha. How are you going to find those initial that initial cohort of like 100 players all the way up to, well, we're going to sunset this title. How are we going to offboard these players into different titles or are we just closing down the project because of unfortunate, you know, market circumstances? And then what are all those touch points along the way, right? The the philosophy that we kind of prescribe to is the wider you can make your engagement funnel, the more you can engage players at every step along the

way, the better off your game is going to be, right? You're going to stay top of mind. There's going to be more awareness for your product. Uh people are going to come back. they're going to want to engage with you not just in the product but also outside and then loop back in. And so our goal is to kind of close that pushpull relationship between the product, your your communities and every step along the way. Very interesting concept though to keep it broad, you know, and usually marketing you want to narrow it and you want to get hyper local and hyper personal and all of that, but no, like engagement you do you want to keep it a bit broad because you want to be able to move with that community and be very flexible. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean without trying to pitch myself too much, I mean um we like I I come from studio side, right? I've been studio for for a long time before obviously starting this and so I I wanted to build a model that was really in line with what I was looking for when I was leading marketing departments. Um I wanted someone who would always be on uh you know and and

we could have retained so that we could we could spool up certain things but then also knew that we had this the smaller retainer. So for working with, you know, someone like us, we're essentially like a team for hire. Like think about us as more of like your fractional marketing team, right? So we we do have the community managers, the social media managers, the art teams, uh the UA leads, all that kind of stuff. Um but we we cost ourselves in a way that is going to be, you know, more affordable for um like a smaller studios budget, right? So that it does actually make financial sense. And so, and there there is other obviously a lot of other studios that kind of do similar things and and there's a ton of really great contractors out there as well too that do similar things as well too. But, um, it's it's you don't need a full-time team working 40 hours a week, you know, when you have one smaller game. You need a team that can spool up a lot of resources when the time is appropriate, when you have those key beats, but then look at the strategic pipeline and look at those engagement touch points and see, all right, here's an opportunity. This worked, this didn't work. this

message is resonating, this isn't. And sometimes it's just having having those other strategic eyes on your work outside of just having one person or one community manager um who's doing a great job at what they're doing helps you see things that you might not recognize, right? Uh that that might be able to find uh you know patterns within the analytics that say this is where we should probably start to explore something different. which you know when you're a marketer of one or marketing team of one uh you know because I've been there I know a lot of other people listening have been there it's almost impossible to do that right um and and and then fighting internal battles to try to get the budgets to find people full-time to help you with that. Yeah, because we sometimes it's it's it's a lot of work to say. It's almost like sometimes um you know feeling like you're you're you're on an island or something alone. You know, you want a fresh perspective well well from home and sometimes as you said it's just as simple as that and seeing the potential and what you have which is something you do a lot and you're talking a lot about

which is yes we have an older game you know you often overlook the potential of what do you have in that you have IP you have you have a community with that game um how do you work with them where should they start do you just say you know look I'm looking at this and here's something you didn't consider. It's a conversation we have a lot actually with a lot of our our studio partners. They, you know, come to us and say like we're working on this new project, but we have this old one that we want to get started. We want to reinvigorate for various reasons, right? And we and and people say like, you know, exactly said, where do we even begin? And it's it's just start by looking at the community around that project, right? A lot of times we hear for some reason people are still engaging with this game. We don't know why. Um we moved on but the community hasn't like and and so step one is just go figure out why. You know

get in there, spend time looking at communities, looking at comments, looking at posts, looking at reviews. Get involved with the community from the perspective of your player, right? And understand what it is they care about. And if there's an opportunity, then yeah, I mean, sometimes it can be as simple as just restarting to post, right, on on on Facebook, right? Because maybe the game is is, you know, six years old and Facebook was still relevant to that audience, right? Um or or maybe it's a couple years old and and it's something on TikTok or like a COVID hit or something like that, right? So, it could be on a very very different channel. Um but then as as time goes by, you know, people go back outside. Those CO hits don't really necessarily stand the test of time for various reasons. Uh, but there's still this core player base that's that's engaged, that's paying. Service them, right? Talk to them and and just and just start the conversation and you'd be surprised at kind of like what can happen. Well, that's just the point. We were chatting about a few of these examples and you told me about one where it's just like,

you know, listening and listening to the community and wow, it boosts revenue. It does work. Maybe you can walk me through one of those examples of like what happened, what made it work, because you know, double-digit growth. That's awesome. And to get it from something that's there underneath your nose all the time is like off the charts. That's fantastic. the particular project you're you're speaking on. I mean, I'll I I can speak to a few numbers, but I I can't speak to to everything just because of, you know, various NDA purposes, but um the specific project you're referring to that we talked about, uh saw about a 30% growth in revenue from uh from day one to day 365, which was, you know, when we actually started to like look at that, it was it was fairly impressive and and we were pretty we were actually like very very happy with this. Um, honestly, the first quarter that we worked on the project, it was just social, right? Nobody had been posting on this channel. They had maybe been posting once a month, nothing too crazy. Uh, and so we

just went in and looked at the community, looked what they cared about. Um, you know, it was based on an IP, so we had the ability to lean into a little bit more than just just the game. um you know and so that gave us some a bit of an inn when it came to what we could say right which was which is a great jumping off point. As that kind of grew we we started layering in ASO we started layering in uh some some various campaign beats. We started layering in a little bit more um work with the dev team as as we started to see you know the charts work right in in our in our favor. And as we started to do that, we're like, okay, well, now we have this opportunity to work with the dev team because there's you can see that there's meaningful impact happening and we can start to say, well, we should we should consider this when it comes to various, let's say, AP packages or sale dates or um limited time events or anything like that. And we were able to convince them to start reinvesting in the game because

we are starting to see the the product grow. Um, and as that as that progressed, it got to the point now where, you know, they've they've built up a bit of a buffer for this particular project where we can now start reinvesting in UA uh and and doing UA for the project based entirely on just like this this lift that we've seen in in year one. Uh, and from that, we're now on track to double the overall value of the game uh for year two. Uh, so which is which is like, you know, from a game that was sitting on the shelf to now doubling its value. um you know and and and seeing really strong organic download rates. Uh we're we're pretty happy with the way obviously that that's going but it you know honestly it just starts with like you said being brave and looking at your community and saying like there's still something here like what is what is potentially going on? So yeah, they're there and and and maybe you just have to come back as you said it was just present being there communicating and ultimately hey converting. Um, another one you told me

that's just sticks with me because I'm just trying to even just try to imagine what this was like, you know, to uh to hit into a community that's so die hard, you know, you really have to lean into the community because you're finding out, you said yourself, find out why they're there and you can find out some amazing things like they are living in almost a parallel universe because you were talking about the one game you revived, Adventure Communist, where where the community is so into it, they're actually speaking uh are using fake Russian accents to converse. That must tell you something, right? You got it. Yeah. So, this is a couple studios ago. Uh this one I'm not under NDA for, so I can talk about this one. This is a wild one, by the way, because this is like my favorite so far. Yeah. So, when I started at Hyper Hippo, I mean, I I will say we didn't revive this game. It was it was already live. Uh it was just, you know, secondary to Adventure Capitalist, which is their their big legacy game. Um but and and so when I first came in, we looked at this

at this little funny little game that uh they had released and uh the community was yeah, like you said, always kind of speaking to us in this like fake Russian accent and and at the time, you know, the the team was traditional CS was just like, "Thanks for your comments. We're going to log your bugs, blah blah blah." Uh you know, and and um not, you know, and I don't I'm not speaking ill of them. they did a really good job and we had a lot of volume and for a small team and they did excellent. Uh but we started to like say well what if we just make a little bit of a tweak with the way that we're talking to them? What if we speak back to them in the same language uh from the perspective of the glorious leader right which is the the character within the game. uh you know and and what we started to realize, you know, going beyond just the you know, the fake accent cosplay was the the unit of com of um I I guess whatever you would call it like mining or the currency in the game, the base thing was always a potato, right? Your character would go and mine potatoes and then you'd trade potatoes for science and

blah blah blah blah blah and so on and so on. Um, but for some reason the potato turned into this like icon like all hail glorious potato and it kind of overtook the glorious leader and so uh we were able to lean into this like rallying cry of we work together for the common good of growing potatoes essentially and and then we started to say okay well what can we do beyond that right what can we do beyond that and so we started to say okay well let's play off the ideology of our portfolio of capitalism and communism let's start having, you know, the communists try to like hack the capitalist mainframe. And so we started doing these like cross attacks between the communities to try to infiltrate the other communities and kind of gify what we were doing there. Uh and it first of all it was a lot of fun. You know, we had a lot of opportunity and this was during COVID so obviously everyone's very engaged with with games and so you know that uh that that really started to to help it take off. But I mean, I I

think the big thing here was like, you know, the big takeaway is like don't look at your players as a collection of player IDs, right? They're real people who play your game for a reason. And understanding like why they're there. I mean, especially for these games because they're little idle clicker games, right? There's not a lot to engage with. There's not a lot of action. There's status bars that that that move and you just tap and they've got, you know, a couple characters. But these communities were very engaged for what they were. Um, and and you know, so it's it's just remembering that these are people, not a string of numbers in your code. What a great story. I mean, it's something that simple, which brings a whole different life to the game or or to the community. I mean, then you start to really feel part of it as well, you know, because you're watching how your audience talks and uh and you're finding those opportunities. I'd like to deep dive a little bit more in that because you know if those insights come from paying

attention to the audience, how they speak, is there a process? Is there just something that tells you what those hidden opportunities are? Do you are you just like great for finding these Mike? This might be your your talent. I I uh I will Yes to everything. Um great talent. Um, yeah. No, but leader here, Mike. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, but no, but I mean there is a lot of tools that you can use to help this, but they are they're quite expensive. Um, you know, and and their subscription rates are are quite high. I mean, even if you look at like your your base level social platforms that do some light social listening like Sprout or Hootsweet or whatever you you might be using, I mean, they're still a couple thousand dollars a year, right? And so for some smaller studios for it, Mike, I don't want to interrupt, but I mean you're dealing with small teams. So even could pull the money together. I think it's more of a of a manpower talent thing. But uh as you were saying Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly right. And so like the meltwaters of the world are just inaccessible for these smaller teams and you know some sometimes they require like like a coder to go in and just build the you know build the search terms and search strings. you actually need to use the tools properly. So, um, yes, there's tools, but I think the in this, if I had to give a tip, the simplest thing you can possibly do, set a calendar invite in your in your calendar for first thing in the morning and just get a cup of coffee and spend an hour going through your channels, engaging with people. Uh, if you want to kind of take it to that that next level, um, set a spreadsheet up, right? And and I mean this sounds really basic, but it's, you know, it's it's probably the simplest thing you can do is set a spreadsheet up, start to tick off, you know, volume of what people are talking about, right? So if everyone's always talking about bugs, then, you know, log the bugs, right? What is the what is the key key bugs you're seeing on a regular basis and you can you'll start to

understand the buckets of of stuff that's coming through, right? Crashes, whatever. Um, but then start looking at like, well, what are other people talking about beyond that? If you have an IP, is there a character people are talking about the most? Uh, is there um are they talking about events that you have going on in the game? Are they constantly wondering what's next, what's coming next, or are they like engaging with each other and and what is the response rate to them engaging back with you? Right? And start to build out just this list and and volume. And you can, you know, just do some very basic graphing and chart what it is where your efforts should be spent, right? you can start to understand what people are saying and what key messages are resonating and test it over time and see how things are going, right? Like that is the most basic thing you can possibly do and it doesn't take that long. It just you just need to put the time aside to do it, right? Um and you would be surprised with just like that little amount of of extra effort what you'll uncover about your players. And you know, it could even be you uncover what

you should be doing next for your updates. What you know, what events are resonating the best should which which events have the best balance that feels the best for players. Not always what you think as a developer is the best balance, right? Sometimes players want things a little bit different. Uh so you know what I mean? So it's it's like yes, there's a lot of tools, but there's also a very basic way to do this from someone who's never done this before. And it's understanding. It's listening. I mean, it makes sense. set a calendar reminder and just do it and do it consistently. Yeah. Yeah. Do it consistently every day. Every day. And like the thing that I like about doing it in the morning, um it gives you time to let your full 24-hour clock go, right? So, you know, we're on the Pacific uh we're in the Pacific time zone. So, you know, we get um European time zones uh later, right? You know what I mean? Uh you guys are are engaging uh while we're asleeping. And so we come in and we can see, you know, especially if that's a big part of your your player base, make

sure that you have a volume of that player base that you can then go and and like analyze as opposed to having to do it on a trickle, right? So, uh yeah, it it's also like there's a bit more obviously to it, but like understand where your players are, where you're coming from, and then set your timing up accordingly. But I personally like first thing in the morning. I knew it was going to be a great show with you, Mike, because because you're just going to be straightforward and there are, you know, there problems don't let's put it this way. Big problems don't always very need the complicated answers trying to say. And I love the fact that you're just being real. So, I want to go back to the other point, which is one that I thought was like it's going to be your trademark because you are really turning this into a science. you know what to do with an old game, what to do with a community, how to revive them, how to reignite them. First of all, I applaud that. And secondly, I'd like to understand a little bit more about, you know, that challenge, the questions you need to ask yourself. I mean, for example, for a

studio listening in, you know, what is the pitfall that they need to avoid before they even get started in this? Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, I I honestly think the biggest one and the biggest barrier we always run up against is studios getting paralyzed by starting and worrying about immediate ROI. It's not going to happen. It might, you know, like I'm not going to say it's not going to happen. It it might, right? And if it is, then like I was saying earlier, you should be doubling down, right? Because you've hit on something and and you should you should definitely be looking at at why and and trying to figure that out. Mhm. Uh it's going to take time, right? Especially with a stagnant community. The first couple months, people are going, well, I'll start it at the beginning. The first month, your first post when you go out, when people are like, they're going to be, "Oh my god, they're back. Like, this is so exciting. We haven't heard from you guys in forever." There's going to be an excitement bump. Yeah. And then it's going to dovetail, right? Because you're going to get a lot of people that

said, "Oh, right. I actually don't care about this anymore." You know, and so you're going to kind of call the herd a little bit. and then it's going to start rising, right? But it's going to take a few months. And and a lot of people say like, well, we can do like a couple months to to figure this out. And like you you need to at least invest three months in this, right? Because you need to do the strategic work, then you need to build content and your strategies, and then you need to execute, see what's working, and then let that kind of that herd call sort itself out before you're going to start to see things grow, right? Um that's the biggest thing. and and people get very hung up on what the ROI is. So that's the first thing. The other thing to consider uh or that people constantly come back is and this is something I don't remember if I told you this Maggie, but like when we look at our competitive set as like a company, we view our competitors or our biggest competitor as in-house hires, right? Because that is constantly what we hear from people is like, well, we're

debating should we hire somebody or should we hire an agency? Maybe we hire you for a bit and then we we go and we hire uh or our goal is always going to be have to have an in-house team. Yeah, great. Okay, we understand that. But then you you know, you're starting to get into that analysis paralysis again. Well, do we do this? Do we do that? And again, it always comes back to like, well, what is the ROI? Hiring people is going to be a lot more expensive. So it's always coming back to this metric that you can't you can't really understand until you have a chance to just dive in and try. Uh and that is that's probably the biggest pitfall is people get paralyzed by that choice and then they don't try. I hear of that a lot incidentally you know oh we'll have someone in house and then they are like yeah but we don't have a lot of work for that person in house and you sort of like put them in you know talent for hire and stick them in places where it's not really working out either. Yeah. Um, so I I get that it is an investment and it's a mindset shift as well. Um, so let's say they get

over the paralysis, right? And they're like, "Yes, we have to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to be patient," which is half the battle, but you still need to know what to measure and what does, you know, what do the numbers look like? So, what's a sign that you're on the right track? That's tough because every community behaves differently. Uh, so you know what I mean? And especially if you have like a multiplayer game versus like a single player game, are you reinvigorating conversation with people or are people talking to you, right? Conversation says a lot and it you really have to understand the product, right? But if I have to like baseline this, I would say the first few months you're looking at engagement growth or engagement start, right? So what does that bump look like? And then what does the baseline look like as it starts to come back up? Um that would be the first thing. You'll probably see that for the first couple months. After that, you'll start to see growth, right? Uh the audience will begin to grow as you're starting to become a bit of a magnet again in the algorithm and people start to come back in. Uh your K factor will start to grow.

People say, "Oh yeah, I remember that game. I'm going to go check it out." Right? And so that's what you're looking for. That's where you start to see ROI essentially, right? Because you're you're doing the organic thing. Uh you're becoming the magnet for people to either come back or rediscover you or ex, you know, re uh discover you for the first time. then you'll start to see your organ your organics like downloads actually start to grow, right? That's what you'll start to see is you'll start to see this bump. It's not going to be huge and and I will caution because a lot of people say, well, you know, how do you gauge organic downloads? Um it's tough. You again, you have to be willing to kind of play in the gray because of second screen issues, right? So, especially if you're doing, for example, let's say a lot of YouTube content and people are exploring your content long form on on their browser, but you have a mobile game or anything like even you're doing anything on your computer or desktop first and you're coming to your phone, there's going to be a break and a split in your analytics, right? And so, you have to be willing to look at what is your trend over time and your growth

over time. Uh, and and you know what what is the metric that it's actually growing? It could be revenues, right? It might not be organic growth. It could be revenues. It could be IPS. Uh the other thing it could be is retention. Yeah. Right. And this is another thing that we see um really get affected by this is uh retention growth. And it's kind of like the later stage metric in that longer, you know, that longer term, let's say one year uh pipeline is is players are sticking around longer, right? Because they care. The people who are there and engaging are the players that care. They want to they want to play longer. They want to engage longer. they want to, you know, buy your your your your loot boxes or whatever it is you're selling, you know, and so you'll start to see these core metrics grow and like but it'll it'll present itself in your dashboards as organic growth. And so you have to you have to be willing to play in the gray and correlate data that you might not necessarily directly say, yes, this is a social initiative that made a social bump. It's that measurement. It's that

bump. It's a little bit of incrementality as well. You know, that's the one we will we will always be grappling with. Talk so much about community and you've said in some of your presentations as well, you know, don't chase verality, go for marginal gains. What does this look like in practice? You know, marginal gains. That's another sort of vague term. I know you can't define it, but maybe what does a longer term bet look like and why is marginal gains that? I'm going to talk about virality first. Um because this is what I'm passionate about because I have again people always ask, well, like how how can we go viral with this content? If we're making a bunch of YouTube content, how can we make something go viral? Well, you can't. you you kind you can you kind of can but like you have to you have to juice it and you have to have a lot of luck right and if you do go viral and this is what I always you know say to folks as well

too is like are you going viral with the right audience you know because if you're not who cares true right you know if you're you know if you're a core first person shooter game and uh you go viral for some reason with a bunch of like I don't know 50year-old moms for some reason, right? You know what I mean? Like it's it's the wrong audience. I mean, unless they've got unless they've got a bunch of 14-year-old kids, then sure, right? Um but like it's it's if you go viral with the wrong audience and you say, "That's what we need to do. We need to do more of that." You're spending a lot of good time on bad, right? And so that's why we always try to steer people more towards like what is your how can we actually make what your audience cares about more interesting, right? And it kind of comes down to that like 8020 rule. 80% of stuff we're going to create is always going to be about the game and and the

IP and and what people are going to, you know, what we know is going to work, which I'll get to marginal gains in a second. And then that other 20% is going to be like, let's try something crazy, right? Let's let's do something fun. Let's let's take a, you know, take a shot in the dark and see what happens. Um but you know when we talk about marginal gains right like I think I think the big thing is I'll use you know I'll use a couple examples. One the the game that I was talking about earlier with uh that year the year one growth of 30%. I mean that 30% in revenue was not there before. Right? That's that's growth that they didn't have before that they could now reinvest and build a marketing budget out of that now you know is is turning into potentially doubling their their audience. Right? Um, it's it's looking at like, okay, well, you know, if you've got a smaller game, let's say you're making five grand a day off this off this product, right? Uh, so what is that like 35k uh a month on average, let's say, I don't know, give or take. Um, no, is

that is that math? Sure, we'll we'll call that we'll call that math, right? But if that if that if that 35% turns into or 35k turns into 40k, right? all of a sudden now you've got an extra 60k at the end of it, right? So, it's it's not looking for like we need to make millions of dollars this month by spending everything now and then turning off the faucet and it drops, right? I mean, that's great, but like how we're in we're in this business to stay alive for a long time. So, how do we how are we building sustainable sustainable audiences, you know, and uh I met with when we were at JDC, I met with a company uh I won't name them, big AAA company, and we were talking about, you know, uh some of the case studies and and I I had this moment of realization was like, okay, well, let's say we make a game a million dollars for this company, it's a rounding error on their quarterly earnings report. But for a small studio, you know, that's keeping their lights on for a couple years. you know, that's everyone's salaries paid and bonuses, uh, you know, blah blah

blah. It these little incremental gains or these marginal gains make a huge difference and and sometimes like like was I mean the whole theme of this, right, is sometimes just turning on a faucet of something that you haven't done for a while. uh and and just engaging with your players and doing little things that are going to make these these you know these these gains happen and this impact happen and your funnel grows wider like we were saying by increasing these engagements which then grows your uh grows your your revenues and and grows your bottom line. So um that's how we like to try to look at things and that's why we kind of like to take a bit of a longer term view as uh at at the projects that we we work with. Well, see that's what it's about though. It's about the small things that have big impact because this is that time. I mean, look at where we are in the world. And look at what has happened. You know, I I don't even look anymore the articles about the layoffs and there was this tracker that you could watch and see the numbers. I mean, it's not it's not a time where you can

say, "Nope, I'm not going to look at that potential because I've got enough of it, you know." So, I want to stay there for our audience. Small to midsize companies. It's all about do more with less. So, let's do through a couple of like rapid scenarios here. Let's have a studio, limited resources. You said before 20K marketing budget. Okay, we'll stay with 20K marketing budget. That's what they have. One smart move they can make right now after listening to us here on the podcast to see traction. Oh, man. Um, for everyone listening to this, uh, Peggy sent me this question a couple days ago to mull over and I still have a hard time answering it because it's so dependent, right? It depends on your goals and where you are in your product cycle, right? I game. I mean, hell, if it's a certain genre, it's going to make it. And yeah. Yeah. You know, I would say if that's if you're a

mobile game, right? And this is your your all you've got to to to uh to start with. I would start by really really understanding your retention and your monetization curves early on. Okay. So that you know if you are going to like let's say you spend 10k on that and you're like all right we got 10k after this to actually do something with. Uh you know what that 10k will turn into and you can start to do some forecasts. Um you know I'm I'm not a UA guy. I got smarter people that can that do that than I am. So than than I do. So, uh, you know, I this is not my area of expertise, but um that would be probably my recommendation is really understand if you can scale this product or not. Um, if you've already done that and you're like, "All right, we know this product's going to work. We're good to go." Um, I would still I would still say UA uh because there is still a place for it, right, in the mobile in the

marketing stack for for mobile games. Yeah. Um, depending on the product, I might look at influencers, right? I might look at at something uh, you know, spend a little bit on influencers. Uh, and again, invest in community, right? Invest in in figuring out how to bring people into your community. Uh, so that you can have a constant opportunity to talk to them, right? Because the other thing too is like once they've followed you, it's not like you're paying per impression, right? if you've got them in your Discord or on your Instagram or your Tik Tok or whatever, you now have the right to constantly talk to them uh and give them messages. Um whereas if you're if you're only doing UA, you're constantly paying for frequency and impressions and trying to hammer them with messages to get them to convert, right? Which they might not. Um, but if you kind of blend it all together, understand what's possible, uh, you, you know, you can turn a very small budget into something usable and reusable

fairly quickly. And then for Steam, it's a whole different thing. Make sure your Steam store is like, you know, dialed and then and then start to do some, you know, some some actual like marketing pushes and look at Reddit and all that kind of stuff. But, uh, you know, that's that's a whole other conversation. So that's a long-winded answer of saying like there's there's a lot of things you can do, but really understanding your product. One other thing I would talk to or I would point out that's not budget dependent is make sure your product has community in mind or marketability in mind in the design phase. And I know that's not something we've touched on quite yet, but um you know I getting the marketer, whoever it might be in the room to say like you need to have these touch points or you need to be able to do this with this product otherwise it's not going to work is so important and do it before it's too late. You know that's an idea for another show with you Mike. Exactly that. What are the must-have engagement touch points?

I'm not kidding you. My mind's like going thinking this is pretty cool because you have a very very systematic approach to this and and one part of the systematic approach is you know an engagement audit. We talk about engagement with the community. Look at your engagement metrics. Have an engagement audit. What does that look like for a legacy game? Yeah. scrolling through months and months and months of posts and community engagements and get a sense of the get a sense of the why, you know, um at at the end of the day, it's why why do they care? Understand why? Because if you're going to come back and start talking to them and you're just going to push limited time event sales messages down their throats, you're just going to scare them off, right? That's not what they're there for. They don't care. They've been there forever. They know that there's purchases to be had in the game. They know the packs. they know they know the product, right? Speak to speak to their why uh and understand their why. Um and then at the same time, like you know, that's from our perspective, but

then going back to the studio, ask what the studio wants from the community, which is a question that doesn't always get asked, right? Uh you know, what is it they actually want? Do they want um do they want ideas as to how to grow this product? Do they want to be able to do are they making a sequel to this product? Do they want to be able to cross-promote other products within their their portfolio to this audience? Um, or are they trying to keep the lights on? And is this going to be, you know, are are they are they hedging all their bets on this new product and they need something that's going to keep the lights on, keep the community happy while they take this other bigger bet, right? You need to understand these, you know, these various uh problems and and figure out strategic way to answer the why for both those audiences because you have two audiences essentially. That makes sense. And I mean, I thought at the beginning, oh no, scrolling through, but yes, it is it is work. It doesn't sound very um yeah, it sounds like just

hard work, but it has returns. And a good point that you made, you also have to tell them what you want because I was talking here on the show. Uh, and it was, forget the game now, but I do remember the lesson and it was like, you know, they have a mission. They have something that, you know, if you tell them what you want, they're like, yeah, 100% behind it. Um, so yeah, it is that communication. It goes in both directions. I guess that's something maybe you have to talk more with, uh, you know, with the companies you're working with. Do you have is this something that you have to impress upon them or is this just like natural? I just wonder to which to what extent you have to reskill uh studios and community managers to ask the why question of themselves as well. Yeah, I mean we we do, you know, we do a little bit, but I think because one Okay, so one

thing we've been seeing is obviously since UA has become so difficult and expensive and and you know the the the COVID heydays are over. Um people see the value in community. They're seeing it, right? they're seeing it because there needs to be something else that studios can do to grow their audiences if they don't or if they can't afford $3 per download or whatever your CBI is, right? Um especially if it's a lower LTV style game, right? So, it's um people aren't naive to it. they just don't like, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, they just need to see the ROI and that's that that's that gray area. And so that's always why we have to say like, well, why do you want to reinvigorate this community? Why not something else? Why not focus on this blah blah blah. Um, and it does make them pause because it does make them, you know, under like really kind

of think about why they're doing this. Um, yeah. So that I mean that's an interesting question. It's uh again it's just you know the the knowledge growth within studios has has shifted especially around community. I mean I I'll be honest I started out in community and and uh as like a community manager and when I was first starting it was very much looked at as an entry- level job or you graduated to it from CS or something like that, right? It was it was very much um you know a junior position. Now, I mean, think about what you're asking these people to do and and especially if they're juniors, you're asking them to run the entire communication platform of your studio and of your product to millions of people. That's not a junior position, right? Like, that's there's a lot of responsibility that goes into that and making sure everything is is airtight and not just like, hey, we're we're putting out one message. Sometimes you're doing that every single day. You're posting multiple times a day. Like, that is a lot of content communication you're having with

millions of people. That's not a junior position. And so looking at the why really helps people think about all of those things together and and come back with a real like you know strategy uh of of this is what we're trying to do. Yeah. Because you have to have some focus. It's not just posting for the heck of it. I mean that's what it was maybe earlier on with many community managers. It's just like yeah it's like you know it's it's being there being present. It's like volume. No it's not volume. It's also value. So we talked about the why. It's important. It's uh it's it's like a a north star in a way. But there are other why questions that I want to explore before I let you go, Mike. So um why test? What's this? What is one small change that a studio can test that might make a difference, a big difference? Yeah. Um look at a community as an investment that can reap rewards, right? Um, we

worked on a game that launched uh I won't name the game uh again with a 2.1 star rating out of five, right? Uh it was not received super well. Um a lot of people within the community were not happy with the product that came out. It was a sequel to another big IP uh that was very very popular. Um we this is this is where you know a a company that really understands what they're trying to do uh and working with like uh you know like a team like ours can really make a really cool meaningful impact in a short amount of time. So they their dev team really wanted to understand why the community hated this this product in its current state. And so we responded and and logged like we were saying earlier about like logging into that that spreadsheet of of uh to to help you kind of figure out what people care about. Um we logged every single response or comment and every platform that this game went live on. It

wasn't a mobile game, so it was it was multiplatform. Um we we logged every single comment. Uh we logged the date that it was that it was delivered and and a link to the comment so that we could revisit later, right? And then we logged the core problem and then we we highlighted that that core problem, right? So then, you know, we could we could very easily see on a pie chart what people were saying and what the issues were, right? Um we funneled that information back up to the developers and they said, "Yeah, okay, we're actually going to go through and fix all of these problems based on volume of people with the sole intention uh of of trying to make the product better for the masses." Right. Right. Once those updates started to come through and once the patches started to come through, we would then go through, look at every player that made a comment about that particular issue and go back and talk to every single one of them across all the stores and touch points with a custom message that just said, "Hey, you talked about this being an issue. We just released patch whatever,

whatever. Um, you know, it's fixed. we would love it if you could change your star rating after you've tried it and and see if like your experience is better. Uh and we did that for everybody um across the entire entire platform or all the platforms that that the game was live on. Uh the star rating went from 2.1 up to 4.2. Wow. A majority of that was just from asking people to change their star rating. But given the effort of going through and saying like, "Hey, the developers heard you." You know, everyone always says like, "Hey, we we hear you. We're going to fix And then there's there's it all goes on deaf ears crickets. Yeah, we we actually went back in and and and like made sure that people knew that their issue was resolved. Uh and we saw a lot of people say, "Oh my god, thank you so much for actually responding and following up on this and blah blah blah blah blah." Um you know, and and yeah, going from a 2.1 to a 4.2 is is a huge huge shift, right? Uh and then obviously as you become into the more favorable category of of star

ratings like more players sort of come in. It becomes like we were saying before it becomes more of a magnet. You know how do you you know bring people in. Um and that was we we started to see that that organic growth really start to take off as those star ratings started to grow and and a majority of it like I said was was straight up just from asking people to change their reviews and and talking to people like humans. It's a great story and that's it. Talking like they they matter. You care. you've done something. Um, and and they can be very forgiving, you know, it it happens that you say, "Look, you know, we're on it. We're we're fixing it, you know, and it just shows that yeah, exactly what it is. It's a dialogue and treating people like humans." Just the way we started when you said players are not IDs, right? It's not player IDs. It's it's people. Yep. This is a great great talk because I can see why you're giving it so often at uh different events and um looking forward to seeing you again Mike actually and not just like two ships in the night because you're you're buzzing off somewhere and

I'm buzzing off but uh to have a proper sit down with you. Yeah. And uh yeah and and and more of this because uh you know they're practical, they're doable, they're actionable and um we always bring it back to games. We've been talking about games, but bring it back to your personal choice because we always ask our guests here two questions. What's your favorite game you're playing right now? And what's your favorite game of all time? Oo, right. Okay. Well, my favorite game of all time is easy. Um, that would be Starcraft the original. Not Starcraft 2 or Broo the original. Okay, good choice. The why would be because uh growing up in, you know, uh I don't remember how old I was. I feel like I was like 10 or 12 or something. I don't know. Early I was young. I was maybe maybe I was even younger. I don't know. But it was like a rallying cry for our friends, you know, after school. We'd all run home, jump on the computer, log on to Battleet, and

and duke it out, right? uh not dissim not so dissimilar from what people are doing right now with Roblox, but uh a little a little bit different with the IP. Uh and it just kind of like stuck with me. So, I always have a soft a soft spot for that game. Um what I'm playing now uh I just finished the new Dragon Age and I just started uh the new Berserker. Was it like the last Berserker or the first Berserker? I can't actually remember the name of what it's called, but um it's a it's a Soulslike game. And uh I I'm enjoying it. I'm not a good Soulslike player. Uh I don't have enough time to get good at these games, but I really really want to. So I'm trying to muscle my way through on this one. So uh next time we see each other, I'll I'll let you know if I like it still or not. You are on. It's a date. Mike, I have to say a delight. Some things are worth waiting for. I have to say we have been doing this. I think it was since summer.

It feels like Yeah. And here we are fast almost back there again. Well worth it. So glad you could take the time, Mike. And I look forward to connecting with you in real life again. And I'll take you up on that. Thanks. Sounds good. Thank you so much, Peggy. I appreciate it. This show is all about how to do your job better, how to make an amazing game, how to market it, and you have a say. So, if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on, then we would love to hear from you. We want to hear from you. We want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness. So, if you have any suggestions for us, if you have any feedback for us, you can always get in touch. You can email us at podcastpocketgamer.biz. You can find us on Twitter @pgbiz. And you can reach out to us through the pocket gamer.biz website. If you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts, you can find them at

pocketgamer.bizmpodcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows. And we've got you covered on all the major platforms. So subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said, look for us on YouTube. If you want to read it, hey, you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website. Tune in again for the next edition of the pocket gamer.biz Biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future. Until then, I'm Brian Baglo. I'm Peggy Ansalts. And that's a wrap until next week.