Giving Back to the Community as a Game Developer: A Case Study

My name is Milos. I'm coming from Nordeus gaming studio based in Belgrade. I'm here to tell you a bit more about our giving back efforts to the community. I will mention community few times during this half an hour and when I say community, I mean the community where we are working and living as a company. So, for us that's Serbia. I'm going to talk about different strategical things, different tactical things and I hope there will be a lot for you to take away from from this from this lecture. Ask yourself, why should we as game game producers, game developers give back to our communities? I have few reasons why. First one that we need to figure out

that our businesses are integral part of our communities. If our our communities are not developing, our businesses in one moment will have problems with the resources. What when I say resources, what I mean, I mean knowledge, I mean people, I mean funding. We need to figure out the ways how to develop our community so our business can grow can grow with it. Second important thing is that you need to stand out. In this moment, there is hundreds, thousand, gazillion companies that are very similar to yours. And if you want to attract the brightest and most passionate people to work for you, you need to find a way how to stand out. Um and if you show your future employees that you're thinking strategically and you're how to develop your community, that you're thinking

strategically few years ahead about your business and that you're having a cause that is bigger than your business in some sense. That is the best one of the best ways how to differentiate. Eventually, if you don't want to do it, your players will ask you to do it. With all these generations that are now here, millennials, Z, Y, all these generations, the for all these generations purpose is something that is very important. There is many many surveys surveys that shows that millennials, for example, will rather buy products from companies that have some kind of purpose the comparing, of course, the ones that don't have. So, one way or another, if you don't want to do it, in one moment your players will ask you to. This kind of activities are awesome way to create a different

type of engagement for your people. When you say people, I mean your colleagues that work with you. When I say different engagement, different than their everyday everyday work. And of course, that will create different content for external and internal communication that you can use and of course, awesome content that you can use to to tell tell everybody what you're working on. So, how we started? We When we were founded 2010, we didn't know a lot about giving back. But we knew that we want to do it. Uh so, what we did, we asked our colleagues, "Hey guys, what is the thing that you're passionate about?" And it was babies. So, yeah, awesome awesome thing to be passionate about. And what we did, we invested 1 million euros in the construction of 15 maternity wards in Serbia.

Those 15 maternity wards are responsible for 30% of all babies born in our country. Huge thing. If you want to compare it to US market, it's like we invested 180 million dollars into some cause. A lot a lot of money there. I'll talk a lot about Serbia. So, for starters, let me give you a little bit of context who we are as Nordeus and who we are as a country. So, as I said, we are founded in 2010. We have three games published by now and one that we are mostly known for is Top Eleven Football Manager. We have 200 million registered users and that game and Top Eleven is one of the most successful games for mobile platforms in in sports category. We also have Golden Boot and Heroic, which are out there for for a

short period of time, but we will see how they will develop. We are a crew of 170 people from 22 nationalities. So, very very diverse group. And as I said, we are based in Belgrade, Serbia. So, Serbia, not Siberia. Siberia is in Russia. It's very cold there, bears, snow. Probably the half of the half of the Siberia is not even livable. We are in Eastern Europe, uh in Balkans region. Very beautiful region, small region, but with very turbulent history. We as a country have very thriving IT industry right now. And worldwide we are known for our tech talents. Also, we are very known through history for our scientists and our sportsmen. So, to test your knowledge, do you know who this guy is?

Tesla. I cannot see anything, but I heard Tesla somewhere. That's right. Nikola Tesla. So, this is the guy that this Tesla automatic company was named by and he's responsible for all the electricity we have here. So, what he did, he created a system to transport electricity on long distances. Of course, he did many other amazing things, but this is the one that he's mostly known for and he lived a a lot of his many like half of his life here in US. Mihajlo Pupin. It's not a quiz because probably you wouldn't know who he is, but he's very cool guy. Why? He has a crater on the moon named by him. And he was the one of the founders of NASA. Also, he perfected the phone. So, um not mobile phone, the landline phone, so our parents would be very happy happy with him.

But, he did also so many amazing things in in in different in different areas. And do you know this guy? Come on. Yeah, I maybe I heard greatest tennis player of all time somewhere. Yeah. I think he is. Maybe we can argue about it and talk a little bit after, but 70 and something titles speak a lot who he is. So, small country with some amazing people out there and and tech talents thriving in tech industry. But, let's get back to our babies. So, how we did this activity? We We found We supported the NGO that was working on this project. We give them financial support, and we support this activity in different communication ways. So, we help help them spread the word about it. And mostly that was it because we couldn't use our expertise in this area

because we do not know anything about babies except they're cute and cetera. So, to keep before we go more deeply into the into the construction, let me give you one other example from Serbia of giving back activity. This activity is from the banking sector, so I have to use this very generic banking slide to show it. And you're right, there is something missing here. This guy is like the guy for the all corporate PPTs, and you can find him everywhere. But the the text out there, it's something that is not generic, so pay attention on it. What this bank did in Serbia, if you want to take a loan as an entrepreneur, your company must be older than 2 years. You're too risky for the banks, and they don't want to give you a loan. What this bank did, they created a support educational system that gave you a consultancy before you asked for a loan, somebody to

help you to develop your business plan, to understand how your business should look like in the future. And when you get your loan, they gave you a mentorship of one duration of 1 year where some entrepreneur from your industry will help you to further develop your business. So, what So, essentially they created a product and attached different giving back activities on it. We have these two examples side by side, let's try to to compare compare them and understand the differences. So, we can both agree that both of them are giving back. They are activities for the community. They are solving some problems out there. So, that's that's out there. Can you help me with this? In what ways were companies involved? When you When you look at the activity that we did, in what way we were involved as a Nordeus in this Battle for Maternity Wards? Finance. Finance. You're true. You're right.

You're true. You're right. So, and the bank? Service. Yeah. Service, knowledge, people. They used the expertise of their people to create a value for the community. How the How their people were involved? Our people were involved in communication. We were out there. We were talking about the things that we were doing. We are going We are opening maternity wards. We are trying to use our our our PR agencies to help to spread the word, etc. And the bank? The bank used the expertise and knowledge of their people to really do some work out there and help entrepreneurs directly. How this impacted the businesses? For us, when we thought about it, we we didn't thought about the business when we made the decision to support Battle for Maternity Wards. It was a burning problem in Serbia. We just wanted to solve it. We want to help

Um we want to help our community, so we just went out there and did it. And it it's very hard to put a value when you're helping babies. You never know if it's very hard to to like calculate it in your business. But for the bank, bank, they created a pipeline for their future customers. When you help entrepreneurs in early stage, it's very very probably they will be uh they will stay with you after they they grew and become a uh stable business. When it comes to external communication, a lot of people asked us why babies. Where is the connection? What what's happening there? Why why are you as a gaming company are helping babies? And for the bank, it was something that was very logical to explain. Since hey, we are bank, we are financial institution, we are helping entrepreneurs start their businesses. Super logical. So, nobody asked them

why. They just asked them to give them more information how we can help. So, when you have those two examples side by side, what do you think? Which one of those will have longer impact and bigger impact in a long run? Let's let's show up hands. Who think the baby example? And the bank? So, probably others. You heartless people. You choose banks before babies. But you're right. Bank will have the the the bigger impact. Why? Because the pro- they their giving back activity is integrated in their product. And their product and this activity will help them grow as a business, so they impact when you're calculating it over the years will grow. Just imagine the situation where we as a gaming company ran into some problems.

This activity will be the first one that should be cut. Because that's how businesses work. You have a You have like expense. It's not giving any value to your business. Cut it and move on. So, in that sense, the bank will will will create more impact. Also, what is important, this activity was a part of a bigger strategy. It was just one of activities that was aimed to create a value for the community. So, when we finished with our with our giving back with our battle for maternity wards activity, we wanted to figure out, okay, how should we use more knowledge and our expertise to help community out? And what we did, we created a strategy that has four different stakeholders in it. First, stakeholders are employees.

We wanted to figure out the ways how we can help our employees give back to the causes they care about. So, we want to create different internal events, different fundraisers to help them to do it. Other stakeholders are players. We, as a gaming company, have a huge platform, our game or now our our games that will grow and the those platforms and those players have some causes that they're passionate about. And we want to use our platforms as a way to give them opportunity to give back. Third is environment. There is a huge talk about environment and and what kind of like about the problems that we are in right now. So, we don't want to be part of the problem. We want to try and be part of the solution and think about how we using our resources and what can we do better. And fourth, which is most important for us and probably most interesting for you, is community.

So, when we were thinking about how to help out our community, we figured out that there are three challenges out there. First one is very low level of digitalization in Serbia. So, we are very our systems are very outdated. We are still waiting in lines in post offices, banks. We don't use modern tools in in our everyday business or administration and we wanted as a company to figure out how to help there. Second thing is education. We have a outdated higher education, which is not creating talents that are that are needed for this fourth industrial revolution. We want to change that. And third thing is we as a gaming company we care about gaming ecosystem. In Serbia the gaming ecosystem is very underdeveloped and it we wanted to to set this our mission to find a way how to help that system to

that ecosystem develop. First thing that we did to do to like go out and solve all of these problems is create an umbrella organization with like-minded companies. Why an umbrella organization? We figured out that if you want to tackle the system the systemic problems like huge problems, you need to work very closely with the state. You need to go and change the laws. You need to work with ministries. And we as a company, we didn't have that power to do it. So we created Digital Serbia Initiative with 26 like-minded companies that are from different industries so we will have more we'll have more soft power to use when we're dealing when we're like dealing with different different stakeholders on the top. We wanted to to to figure out how to solve this for to solve problems in these areas. First one is higher

education, second one is legal framework, third startup ecosystem and fourth we want to figure out the ways how we can help wider public understand the importance of digitalization and such. So, when we had an umbrella organization, the second thing we wanted to do is create um physical space from where we can run these changes. So, we created the Nordeus Hub. Nordeus Hub is a co-working {slash} event space where it's a physical space very close to our office. And from there, we want to do different things in the community. We want to run different programs for talents. We want to help talents develop even further and help them to help them to start creating value for their community as early as possible. Also, we want to help out the community-driven

pro- programs. So, we want to help communities co- programs that are coming from community to have a space where they can do their programs and and help them increase their impact. We want to help our people develop even further so they can increase their their impact on the community. And fourth, we want to help Serbian Gaming Association develop the gaming industry as much as possible. We're helping them doing helping them to do different events in in Nordeus Hub and also run the run different programs in our hub for gaming community. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about those programs. So, first is game making boot camp. We figured out that our students in Serbia are not getting into any touch with the with the gaming industry during their studies. So, if they're they're if they're playing games, that's the only way how they they communicate because in in our

curriculums, there isn't anything that is connected to the gaming industry. So, we figured out that we have to show them how gaming industry looks like from inside. And we created a boot camp that will have different tracks for different type of students to show them the bigger picture how the the gaming industry looks. We will have track for artists, we'll have tracks for game devs, for we'll have track for business developments, game designers, etc. And with the idea to put the gaming industry and career in gaming as one of the first few choices for the students when they think about what is my next step in the career. Second program is Indie Game Incubator. We want to develop gaming industry in Belgrade in Serbia. And if we want to do that, we need to we we figured out that we do not have a mechanism that is

creating or or supporting new and upcoming gaming studios. So, what we did, we created a incubator program, which will last 6 months, and it will consist from um co-working space for 6 months. We will also do assessment of the Indie game studio and give them mentors for different areas where they need the help the most. And we will organize different workshops that are more they're like general business workshop workshops that will help businesses understand the other roles their business needs to to have, like HR, finance, account accounting, law, and etc. We hope that this program will help us to produce one, two, three game new gaming studios in the future, and it will help us fuel the fuel the gaming industry.

This example This is also one activity that we did, but it's not connected to the to our community. It's more connected to our our community of our players. And but I wanted to mention it to you just for you to understand how you can use your games maybe to impact the impact your impact your players. Do you maybe know what is this? Have you heard about War Child Football Club? No? Yeah, um it's a soccer club, so foot not football soccer club. And War Child is an organization that is helping children um reintegrate into their societies after they survived some kind of war or they were they lived in near the war zone and etc. War Child Football Club is the program they are running in Central African Republic where they want to use football or soccer as a tool to help those children reintegrate into their society.

For us, we have a football game and it was it was an easy match to make. You can see they have very funky jerseys. And those jerseys is they're using those jerseys in real life and they're all they're awesome looking. So, what we figure out what we can do, we offered those jerseys in our in-game shop. So, you can buy those jerseys and their emblem in our in-game shop and all the proceedings will go to them. The response from the community was amazing. The sales of those of that of these jerseys surpassed the sales of jerseys from some of like most famous soccer clubs football clubs in the world like Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and others. Um for us this is just scratching the surface. It's it's a new turf, but I think there are studios out there that are doing great job with this. And I think this is a terri- territory where we can do so many amazing things

in the future. So, let's summarize how we how we got there and how maybe you, when you go home, can retrace our steps and and maybe be here even in few years and talk about it. First of all, try to start with with anything. Really, don't overthink it. Go back home and think about what is the cause that you're passionate about or what is the cause that your company is passionate about and just or or your people that are passionate. Just go out there and solve it. We did it with with better for maternity wards and in the end, it was something that created a huge value. We solved a huge problem. So, it's just important to start somewhere. But when you're doing that, think about what are the problems out there in the community that really you or your company have expertise and knowledge to solve it and that you are of course passionate about. For us, those were higher education,

digitalization and gaming ecosystem. When you figure out those those challenges, try to figure out what are the knowledge what are the skills and expertise you have that you can use in solving those problems. Look, money can be given by anybody. But the expertise and knowledge we have as an industry, it's a quite unique. Uh for Serbia, it's certainly totally unique because maybe there is one, two, three companies in Serbia that created a product from scratch and had a global success with it. But for for your communities, it's important to understand what are your skills that you are excel and knowledge that you excel and how you can transfer it and create value for the community. And of course, try to create a holistic strategy around it. Try to understand who are the people that you want to impact and try to understand what are the ways that you can impact

them. We're just in the beginning of this of this like adventure as a gaming industry. The rest of the world and the rest of the industries went few steps ahead. But the important thing is that we are not pioneers. So, we we can maybe use the knowledge and experience they had to start few steps ahead of them and try to to do amazing things. We have a possibility to to try because we are in the entertainment industry. We are very high grossing industry and what is more important, we are in we are like touching so many lives out there. So many people that are living in so many in many different communities with many different problems and we have a platforms that we can use to harvest different skills, expertise, money, or whatever it is and try to solve some problems out there.

Thank you so much. This was This was all for me. It was an amazing experience being here and talking with you. Uh please, if you have some questions, feel free to ask. I think we'll have 3 4 minutes. Anyhow, if we don't have more time to do it, I will be in Overlook 2014 for 45 minutes. So, you can come over there and like talk to me. Also, these are the my contacts, so feel free to reach out and and say hi or ask any questions you have. Thank you so much. Well, uh how many people does it take? And like what's the size that you need to do something like this? It really depends, but you need to Yeah, it really depends. Right now, from in from Nordeus' Dog's perspective, there is always 10 20 people involved in some capacity. And it differs because there is different activities, so we need

different skill set, but you need to have one person that will lead the charge. It doesn't have to be a full-time person, but it has to be somebody that will think about how these activities are progressing and the person that will talk with others, with managers, with people in the company to try to help what is the scope of the job and how they can be involved. So, out of the the 15 to 20 people, none of those are full-time on this? It's just a passion that they have? Uh yeah, it's a passion they have and also it's something that we we we we presented as their part of their job and their time that they can use. So, it's something that we are very passionate about as a company, so we mindfully invest time in it. And yeah, thank you. Uh-huh, please. Uh I wanted to ask you, what were like the biggest challenges? You talked about like that you did like a program for teaching game development, right? Yep. Uh what were like the biggest challenges to like setting all that up? Uh

It was the for us the biggest challenge was to understand the market out there because there our gaming industry is very segmented in the sense that there is like so many different gaming studios in different stages of development. And to create a program that will give a value for all of them, it's very hard. And that was one of the biggest challenges. I think that we will see because this program is now ongoing. What I can see the the future problems could be is maybe inflow of those new We need to spin few rounds of this this this game big game making boot camp, so we will have more people interested in making games in future, so we can help them. And also, yeah, those are like briefly the problems, but there is there are many challenges out there, yeah. And and and just so like a positive side note, like how did the the the kids react? Like did they love it and No, they they are they enjoyed so much. They're constantly out there.

They're like, "Hey, how can we do this? How You know, they're like asking to have more time with us, to to be there and a lot of those children then asked what what we can do next. What are next steps? How we can be involved more?" So, I think the reaction was great. That's awesome. Thank you. Please. Uh your indie game incubator you mentioned. Um obviously your studio would have put in a lot of time and effort and money into things like PR and and things like that for those. I'm curious what sort of uh systems you have for like dealing with the revenue that any of those games brought in, whether it was like a revenue sharing or like a royalty-based thing or what? Thank you for your question. We don't have any any We don't do We don't ask for anything. We don't even do PR. So, for us because um it's very very unique situation in Serbia. Nordeus is very popular there because it's like a it's like a startup child that

everybody was looking for and from like in our 8 years we grew to be such a huge success in Serbia. So, everybody knows about us. In that sense, we don't have We don't need to do any PR. We are very recognizable. And on the other hand, this is our giving back activity. We want to What we want to do We are seeing the benefits in creating the industry in that will come much later when we have 10 or 15 30 successful gaming studios that we can maybe that we can benefit from it in the future. So, for right now, we don't want to use any We don't want to ask for any money, any investment, or anything. We just want to be there to help them out to start and to see how it will develop. Okay. So, are there other people that are in the Indie Game Incubator then? Are they like officially working for you or are they separate? No, they are they are our colleagues that are using part of their time and their expertise to help in different areas. Okay, and last question. Is your studio retaining the intellectual property rights for

anything they make or are they themselves? No, no, no, no. Everything We don't take any credits. We don't take any royalties, nothing. We are just there to help out. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So, please. Sorry, one more. Was there anything specifically politically, logistically that was that caused a lot of friction on the way to getting the system set up? From if those kind of frictions we have in this like higher scale solving of the problems in sense like dealing with the ministries in higher education and etc. For incubator programs, those are all run by us and we have an expertise how to do them. We have a space, so we have resources put into them. In that sense, we didn't have a lot of like big frictions or but in when we are dealing with changing the higher education laws or trying to implement different game connected curriculums to the

universities, it it can be very hard to push because those systems are very slow. They are not reacting good on to to change. So, from from that perspective, there are challenges. Thank you. Please. This is all very awesome. You definitely you all think about this a lot and I think that's great. I did have a question. One of the pillars you mentioned was your players. I was curious if you had experimented at all with I mean having such a large player base and mobilizing them directly in any ways or communicating with them about these initiatives. About the local initiatives that we are doing, we didn't do anything around it. So, for us, the players are also like the huge unexplored area that we need to do. The only activity that we did is this one and the one with one special day that we just fundraised for them. Uh but it was nothing that So, the only activity that we involved player like very directly was the activity for for War Child Football Club. But I think there is like a huge potential there that we can tap into. But the the

the the game studios that did amazing things around this is Riot. They have few different awesome initiatives how they involved players with buying different skins and etc. So, you can look them up. Maybe there there is something that can help you out. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, people. Thank you so much. I'll be in Overlook if you want to chat and thank you for being here.