From mobile to consoles and back to mobile

[Music] so develop from with the previous speech but committee basis and it's more fun personal experience on our team so I'm circus lovara from cluster games a couple of words about us we started out in 2011 because we believed after working on mobile games for a while for the companies that it's easy to start a mobile gaming company and make some cool games they'd play yet 10 millions of users make some revenue and all that currently we are a small team of five people and currently we are focusing on drunk food wasted masters or drunken

brawling game so we started out of mobile because mobile games have has to make just couple of months and you can't release the game and get somewhat of any you go in let's get some funding it's easy to get funding mobile games I used to make so we made a couple of games beaver cards was the most successful book one but it was only in like million downloads it did get some good performance indicators but all the offers we got from publishers and investors we would have lost control of the company which is kind of why we didn't static or we wanted to make the games our way so we didn't really want to give away control from that then we made some other games rival Rumble where you could have gonti fighting Hitler and Kim Jung hoon and all that stuff and Apple apparently didn't like that so we could band then we did some other tank it or they're small puzzle games so we didn't make the millions not too

surprisingly but after we cried a little and decided that hey maybe there's something else else to do and we did some subcontracting pre-capitalist worked on a are we are University projects learned a lot and learned a bug so I think that like grew as a company quite a bit we were thinking about giving up at that point and of going to work for somebody else but we decided to stick around because the team was great but we came to a conclusion after experience on mobile we didn't want to gave a developing on mobile because it was way too analytical for us we wanted to make fun games and making premium games for mobile was difficult really difficult at that point and whatever we tried we didn't get the visibility for the games even so that I've used we're good so it was kind of shouting into the darkness that please notice us but nobody did so we also at that point we in Finland

we started getting the second tier startups from Rovio and supercell so getting funding from Finland as a young team with people with a couple of years of experience was really difficult and so we decided that hey let's make console games that's why we started studying game development and then went to games industries or started researching gaming industry anyway and that's like what we wanted to do also we could focus on premium games we wouldn't have to worry about monetization and optimizing it like key performance indicators and all that stuff so and we also considered console stores at that point ever quite premium you could have tens of launches per month so if you go to the platform you would be guaranteed to get some media attention and get some sales anyway so how did we actually do that is we got that in touch with the platform holders in random events and

and through email these days you can get in contact with Microsoft or internet forum Sony is a bit more complex but they have an email address I don't know if it's public yet but it you can find it out and Nintendo has mentioned in the previous presentation is pretty easy to approach these days - so first game for consoles for spare we're a top-down shooter released in 2016 for Xbox one and PC didn't tell - well the development - couple of years we were bootstrapping it at that time so we did all kinds of other stuff on the side but in the end it almost paid its development cost back so didn't make the melee Asteria even after that we did some more subcontracting and started working on front to west masters which or that as a mobile a drunken project in 2013 also which we made us a joke but it got 600,000 downloads and generated more revenue than any of the mobile games we

did seriously which is kind of embarrassing but right now we released an Xbox it's doing well and we are currently reporting it to switch ps4 and we are going back to mobile as we got funding to actually develop a new version of the game on mobile that's like a premium so we don't have to consider the replay elements on that so what so different about console development compared to mobile development the user expects and expectations are a lot higher so if your user picks up the phone gets a free to play game they try it out that way without nothing lost if the player doesn't enjoy it but on consoles they are paying at least the ten bucks in general per game so their expectations before they even try it is that they want the game to look good have more content it should be more complex not a one button Kay game or match great game and in our cases we had local cooperative experiences so you had to

have a four to eight the support for the eight players locally yeah and all these expectations lead to longer development times so when we could make a game for mobile in three to four months in more in console certification takes that long so basically it was one year two year per game so the favorite thing about console development is that you have only one device to target on Android you have what's how many hundreds thousands different devices aspect ratios on Xbox ps4 there are now two variants per console but if it works on the lesser one it works on both of them and in the dose which is only one device you need to target also you don't need the massive test device or model you can expect that if the game works on one of the devices it will work on all the others and even if there are software updates it's the platform all holders responsibility that it actually works so

this is also you can optimize your game for one device so you can set the FPS on a very specific level and see in every part of your level that it's actually like optimized and Bucks are easy to answer thanks to all tracking the platform Horner's - so constant specific features cause some extra delays on switch they don't require them but on xbox one and ps4 they have achievements as trophies say you have to handle the suspension of the apps a certain way the OS of the console doesn't do it automatically and there's also some a long list of different requirements hundreds of different specifications have different things to work what you can do what you can do when I am pro on Android you can do almost anything using a medium to saved us a lot of time but it cost some other issues so engines are cool but

can't go do that too much so releasing the game is a lot harder certification at minimum - takes a month or well up weeks to a month and you can set the certificate a release date before you have passed certification in general so once the game is already ready and ready to ship you have to wait for a month before you can actually release the game you can fix bugs acting that time but there are some waiting times and the best thing about working on consoles is that there are actually only tens of games released in per month whereas in mobile you have thousands and on even on PC and steam it's I think in the thousands so even if you do no marketing at all on Xbox one for example you'll get noticed by the media because you are one of the like thirty games released a month so how did the transition to move from mobile to Xbox work for us well we are enjoying our work a lot more

and we are actually doing a lot more money and the support we get from different platform organizers is really nice so if you got no ticket right guys you can just reach out and ask how the systems work what kind of promotions you can get when I experienced with Google and Apple when we when we tried to go through different channels we couldn't like get any answers to questions so even if we got to talking to them the bonuses of features we're totally random we had no control over them but with the console marketing teams you can negotiate these quite a lot even though we up with spare we're on releasing it on the same week as Alan Wake and didn't get much visibility also there's a lot more influencers and media that do do console and PC games so that helps a lot so in short pros compared to mobile on 1 or 2 devices per platform to target so no need for a massive device Armada only

one store per platform where you will get the visibility so even to the nucleuses page is visited by what many users there's a lot less competition with only tens of releases per month as opposed to thousands you get some amount of great visibility on launch as media and different platform holders and youtubers pick up on that also on xbox they are heavily investing on their own twitch competitor at the moment which helps quite a lot and the influences are really active and day out reach out reach a lot to the developers course compared to the mobile include a lot longer development times the mandatory certification which does help with finding bugs and all that but it usually takes ends up taking a lot long time the user base is a lot smaller so they are in total one hundred and fifty fifty five million like new consoles and in 2017 alone there were 1.5 billion

Android devices sold and the mobile industry is estimated 70 billion and consoles is only 35 billion but in the end mobile and consoles are getting closer all the time all the examples include hearthstone and other collectible card games that are kind of platform agnostic same goes for Minecraft you can play it almost any device and fortnight so it's the younger players don't actually care about the platform that much anymore a Nintendo switch is in itself is an interesting hybrid of our portable portable gaming platform and gaming console yeah that's all from me are we taking questions well I think the

biggest thing is that we might not have a next generation of consoles in the way we think because Microsoft is contact bringing Windows 10 and Xbox systems together so you can cross play between them and rocket League just announced that you can play a cross play on ps4 Xbox and Nintendo and PC and well if the game was a mobile eye dimension that would also work from there so yeah platforms don't matter in a couple of years anymore yeah but it will probably bring some new difficulties to that so well I think that goes to the streaming more like there are some people funded startups that do that for example hatch in Finland but I haven't

seen anything solid on that yet it has been hyped for the last 10 years that streaming is going to kill the PC and all the computers but we'll see [Applause] [Music]