Game marketing with user-generated content

[Music] [Music] hi everyone I hope everyone's feeling okay after yesterday's party at least many of my friends were not so I hope that you guys are feeling a bit better so I'm here to talk a little bit about how to market a user-generated content game with influencers so first a little bit about me and our company trap light trap light was established 2010 in thamba finland and we focused solely on user-generated content free-to-play mobile games I know that's a horrible list of words but it means something to

us our first game Big Bang Rising was launched in July 2016 so about a year ago it has over 7 million levels created by the players so the players use an editor to create all the raising levels in that game and it was also chosen as best of App Store 2016 and I mainly work with the influencers and community but I also do marketing and PR and even a little bit of game design as you do in smaller companies you have many hats so I think I'll start by telling you a little bit about user-generated content if it's not so familiar to everyone here so working with user-generated content we've been doing that for for a couple of years now and we've learned a few things that we find in all of our games first of all user-generated content is

inherently social this means that when you create something you do kind of feel proud about it you want to share it and you also want to see stuff that others have made you want to maybe comment on those things that others have created you want to dislike or like them and you also expect to get social validation to the content that you created so through you use generate content you automatically become more social than you would normally also creating makes you more engaged we've noticed this with our games when you create something you put a part of yourself into that creation if you create something like you're actually proud of it you put something of yourself into it and when you share it you also feel that you become part of the game so if that if you create a level in a game and that level becomes part of a game then you

also feel more part of the game so it's just given in this you generate content and also what use generate content means is endless virtually endless high-quality content and when we started making use generated content we were not exactly sure about the high quality part we knew that there would be a lot of levels for example made by the players but we were not entirely sure if it would be high quality but what we found out really quickly was that when there's millions of creators making levels then there has to be the couple of percent the cream on the top that make amazing levels and that accounts to tens of thousands of levels amazing quality levels so we as a studio would never be able to hire this amount of level designers to actually do the same for us and these three things are the kind of the basis of our marketing as well so keep these in mind as we go forward so

one thing we've noticed as well while working would use generate content is that it actually works pretty well with influencers I'm gonna explain a little bit so working with influencers for a couple of years now talking with them in events and meeting them face-to-face just exchanging messages with them we've learned that they need things that to make their channels work so first of all they need fans that are social so they just don't they don't just want people who come and watch the video and go away they want a community that revolves around their videos they want people to like the videos to comment on the videos to talk to each other and talk to the influencer so this is something that they they really need for their channel also they want engaged fans not just people like you know come and go but they want people that are easy to

activate with things so for example campaigns tournaments competitions whatever creative things that where you can invite people to do things with you or activate them in them in other ways and lastly they also really need content for their channel that doesn't go stale so they just can't keep doing the exactly exact same thing year after year they want things that are fresh and new and exciting for their fans and well user-generated content actually fits this well challenges pretty well so you generate content has social players that are eager to share that are eager to you know be a community they are already a community and a social network through the content that they share they're also very engaged because they create things and those things become part of the world they they are more engaged than

just a normal player who would play for five minutes and go away and also user-generated content means endless trend trends and content thus as in the previous slide stated so these these players when they create things they actually form trends new things are popping up all the time when somebody invents something so we figured out these two actually match pretty well and whoa these slides are a bit off well it's okay we focus on two types of influencers the bigger influencers these are the guys that most of you know and think about when you think about influencer so we considered big influencer to be over a hundred thousand subscribers of course subscribers don't need everything so you need to take into account their views and thing but but over 100,000 is a good estimate and also the other group that we focus on are these micro influencers so from thousand to ten thousand

subscribers for example but also even smaller channels or people if they show potential so bigger influencers just quick facts about them or what we've learned so they are professional and they have very established ways of working you can kind of rely on that they will deliver what was you know communicated and also they can actually make pretty big impact on your marketing with just one video so they can give you of course a lot of downloads but another thing that you might also see is this trickle-down effect it's my own term I don't know if anyone else uses it but this means that when a big influencer creates a video it's highly likely that smaller influencers also pick up the game organically and start playing it on their channel because you know influencers have also influence over other influencers one thing about

working with bigger influencers is that they need a bit of special attention they need they might need the team to actually make changes to the game or they might need special features or or things like this so that they can create engaging content for their fans and usually money is involved when working with big influencers but that being said it's not all about money we have focused on in our working not just about money but we want to give them other things so what we have done so far with our user generated content game we have for example given them unique gifts and assets that they can then give forward to their fans so they get to design something for example a building block for the editor a cool unique thing that only they can give to their fans and so forth for example user generated content

campaigns in different forms for example a competition where the influencer asks their fans to give to make levels of a certain theme and then the influencer chooses the winner or a tournament that takes place in a level that the influencer created so there's many ways how you can engage your fans with this user-generated content and of course we put a lot of effort into building personal relationships and meeting these people live because that's really way to learn how they work how they think and what they need and here's some photos from last summer our Big Bang rising pre launch party and we got amazing feedback and ideas for our game which we actually we ended up implementing some of these features that the influencers told us to do and they were a great success so listening to them was really worth it so what we will do next with our youth generate content with these bigger

influencers we really want to build our games from from the get-go so that they have features that the influencers can utilize on their channels we want to focus on giving them these tools and features where they can engage their audience by using the user-generated content aspect of our games so for example that they can themselves create these tournaments and competitions easily from inside the game right now we have to set up these things for them so we want to give them this tool so they can do do it themselves and engage their fans very easily also thing that we've been talking about a lot is this collaborative creation so imagine a stream where a youtuber for example is building a level and they can invite all their fans into the same room to participate to comment to gift and things to give them blocks to use in the building or even hands on building with them also like I said in the previous

slide we have already designed and given well have given them these custom items but we want them to also do them but like actually create them themselves so that they will be able to create new building blocks for the editors and give those to their fans so not just us making these things happen but they can design and give these items themselves and one thing that we really want to focus on is let them design our games with us so not just invite them over before the launch to check out the game but actually take them in onboard them into the development already early on so before even soft launch and get them to give us feedback because they they have basically the same audience that we want to reach their audience is the audience that we want to reach with our games so they really understand what their audiences need and what is fun for them so listening to them is is very worth

worthwhile and this is what we figured money is important for them but they really want to focus on their fans needs and fans preferences so that that means more to them actually so micro influencers what we do with them well just to go through micro influencers as a group very briefly so I said they have a a lot less subscribers than the bigger influencers but what they have is super engaged fans so these guys are actually very close to their fans because of their smaller audience size they can be there they can talk to them like almost face-to-face and get to know them so they are they have more actually influence over their audience than these bigger bigger influencers but if you want to work with micro influencers and want to create an actual impact on your marketing you need to work with tens or

even hundreds of people because they don't have that many subscribers so this can turn out to be a challenge and usually when you work with micro influencers money is not involved so yep all right how we've worked with them so far Wow these slides are really off that's weird all right what we've done so far we keep our eyes constantly Oh open for this trickle-down effect that I told you about so if any smaller influencers pick up the game organically we immediately contact them and we thank them for the video and we want to show them that we appreciate them and we want to help them to keep making good content so for example give them just free gems and free vanity items or anything that they can use to make more engaging and fun content on their channel or stuff that they can give out to their fans and this is something that we've also been doing we provide them with visibility

inside the game so it's kind of like crushed promotion for example this guy de Jota CDI he was an amazing level creator in our game but he didn't have followers in YouTube yet so we made him his own tournament with visible links to his YouTube channel and and so on and he grew from 0 to 1,200 subscribers in just in a matter of that one tournament and this is something that we want to continue doing with them so what next what do we do with our user-generated content to really make an impact with micro influencers we want to focus on making this visibility and cross promotion even better right now in big bang racing it's possible to only highlight one or maybe two micro influencers at a time so it's not very scalable it doesn't yeah as I said you have to work with tens or even hundreds

of these people to actually make an impact so how do we do that we we have some ideas so for example having this weekly or daily video sections or competitions inside the game this way we can highlight or feature many of these great small creators this video creators inside the game and also we we can give them special roles in our live ops events so if these people log in the camp game automatically recognizes them as as micro influencers and they get some sort of special role in the in the event that is going on and they can use that to create really engaging and fun content on their Channel and we also of course want to design other features as well that will attract them to our game so not all of these guys have you know amazing setups for creating professional videos yet they might be still doing just from the phone so we want to make the game as you to

Babel or streamable as possible so put all those SDKs in and make make sure that it's super easy to pick up the game and start making fun videos also not just having special roles in events but giving other automated perks when these guys join in the game the game recognizes them as micro influencers and they might get like free stuff to give to their fans or other cool parts that will kind of already give them ideas hey I want to make a video about this this is cool and of course giving them similar tools as the bigger influencers like tournament creation and collaborative creation but maybe in a bit smaller scale or in a different way so basically we've noticed that user-generated content and influencers work very well together yeah there are challenges when making a

user-generated content game I don't know if there's any other other developers here that are yeah there's one that are making user generated condom games it's not always easy especially when you're doing free-to-play user-generated content games on mobile because there are so many things that you need to fit together but once you find find the kind of the golden way of doing it I think that marketing this user-generated condom games becomes really fun and there's many ways how you can engage influencers with user-generated content well if you're developing you generate from the game or or just interested in influencers feel free to ask me anything Thanks great thing okay I'm I'm in that boat as well trying to make a game that's got user edge content in my case it's dances that people share but it's it's tough it's tough because there's an awful lot of people who don't finish do you get

that experience too I'm assuming you do you get the experience how do you deal with the fact that so many people will start and never finish or never properly kind of engage with that process I think if I remember correctly they have to complete the level and damn it yeah well how to make sure that they actually create the level that they started there's really no way of forcing anyone to do that so but we've noticed that if you make the tools very very simple like we can give the give the current editor to a three year old and they can create a level that works and it's fun so this is a good starting point for making sure that they actually finish what they've started but also there's just so many level creators and as I said even if there's 1% of those millions of people that create the levels and finish them and put a lot of effort into them then we already have tens of thousands of amazing levels in Italian I love the fact you couldn't put the face of the person into the video of that experience

that they've made as well I think there's something about that which is magical because you connect with that person yeah so does anyone have a quick question I think we've got a huge amount I'm so that's not necessarily a bad thing I'm gonna thank you very much I think people clearly explained everything so brilliantly thank you thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music]