Hacking the human brain – Irrational thinking will triple your game revenue

[Music] so how many of you are Developer game developers okay so I think you will like what I will show I just checked outside how many slides I have in my presentation it's 65 so I will jump on every slide for on every 20 seconds I will jump to another slide so uh if you cuz I save the best for L if you have uh uh pictures if you have if you want to take pictures uh and you miss a slide just call me so I won't introduce myself I will introduce the whole company because this is the first time

um someone from our company imper online is here in Canada uh basically first time in the North America uh we came from sopia which is the capital of Eastern Europe really far away from here this is our office uh we also have a trade office in in London two things are um I can't see my slide here down there can you put it um two two things three things actually describe our company the best we're self- sustaining from day one we never took Investments and we are independent and flexible this is my colleagues right now we are 185 employees and 70% of them are in development so we are a company that have maybe one of the biggest r& the

Departments so this is our company timeline we start in 2005 a lot of stuff going on but I won't stop here cuz the time is so short a lot of new platforms for us steam Apple TV Xbox I will show you how we did this trick in 201 and from 1.4 million we jumped to 4.6 million in the revenue and how we double the company in uh in in its size um this is the awards that we get for our success in 2040 Deo gave us the Rising Star Award for the fourth place uh and put us on fourth place in Central Europe for Revenue growth of 498 in 20150 we were in the overall um

classification of the companies in in Central Europe so we took the 14 place with the revenue grow of 592 per. uh what you what now it's perfect what you do when you have so many cash in your hands and you need to grow of course we open a Academy for developers this is our first company spinoff and one of the biggest academies in in uh in my country two 200 uh students graduated every year and they study in our Academy for free the second one is when you have access to the brightest talents in in uh in the business and when you teach them uh with your knowhow of 10 years uh the things that you do is

opening an Outsource service or right now our our company has a second spin-off that is taking care of all the projects that other companies want to do for them this is our game portfolio is really powerful more than 20 titles from casual games to hardcore MMO strategy uh multiplayer single player different platforms um I won't stop here this is the last game that we made uh it's a co-production with the Viber one of the biggest um chat applications in uh South uh South Europe Mina region and uh it's also popular in United States so we did this uh MMO for them this is how our allstar game imperi

online we actually named the company to to this title it's a crossplatform medieval MMO you can find it on whatever platform uh you you've checked it has 30 million registered users and we are on more more than 30 social networks from Russia to Brazil uh so the one thing that makes our company different than the other that do the same thing is that we really like diversity so every title that we produce is is localized on 30 language including Japanese and Chinese um Hebrew and some unpopular uh unpopular languages uh not only this but we actually localize the whole content of the game this is how how the game look

lies in Europe this is how the game looks like in Russia for 9 months and this is how the game looks like in Mina region so this is something that we are really good at it but actually what we do best is think irrationally so I will give you some examples how we started and what is the whole idea behind this everything started with this book predictably rational the hidden forces that shape our decision the author is Dan arly it's a Duke University Professor for psychology and behavioral economics my personal advice is check check his books his that talks everything that I'm going to tell you today is

taken from directly from his theory so I will try to summarize it in one sentence the idea is that we're not perfect our so our brain cannot make decisions if there is two or three things to to compare and basically people are really easy to fool and we can save stupid so let's start with an optical illusions I want you to think about Vision as a metaphor for something for rationality for something for something real so this is one of my favorite optical illusions I I hope you all

like to see them um so what covers are the two blocks if you ask now if I ask now you will say the the a is dark the B is light but if I remove the surrounding content you can see that a E B A and B are identical I will do it again so take a look at now now they're again identical yes they are identical this is the number of the color the color code so you can check it later the thing is that you didn't learn anything your brain didn't lur anything I didn't learn anything there is no possible way to unse this illusion your brain is fooling you in a consistent

predictable way so the key here is to know that our brain is full in us and to go one step in front so this is three that is more that describe vision so and uh help us to understand that we are not perfect so vision is uh the thing that we use a really big part of our brains for it we do Vision more time of the day and we are evolutionary designed to do Vision so the key question here is if we do such a simple mistakes in Vision do you think that we are perfect in taking financial decisions cuz we don't have a special brain for the special part of the brain for financial

decisions we do don't make much financial decisions our daily routine and of course we are not evolutionary designed to make decisions financial decision so the good thing about optical illusion is that it's easy to demonstrate you have something that um fools us like the surrounding elements of those two blocks BLS but when you remove it's easy to show that this is actually a illusion and and you have mistakes talking about cognitive illusion or decision making Illusions they're really hard to demonstrate but they exist so let me tell you something imagine if you have if I offer you a weekend in Rome all inclusive

everything paid transport Food tickets for theater and art or I offer you a weekend in Paris everything again all inclusive everything paid Transportation food everything so weekend in Rome and Weekend in Paris this is two things that is really difficult to decide where to go but what about if we have a third option for example we in Rome all inclusive weend in Paris all inclusive or having your car stolen yeah so this doesn't change this doesn't help in the situation but what if we put an option that is more relevant to what we want you to choose so if we put an option

like weekend in Rome but without breakfast so you need to pay only for your breakfast everything is all inclusive Transportation tickets everything so it happens that in this case let me check the next slide it happens that in this case people are start start liking weekend in Rome all inclusive because they can compare it with the third options that we had and this is not all the offer to Rome it's more Superior even to the offer for one weekend in Paris so this is the results that the guys from the Duke University uh uh received so 70 to 75 % of the of the people are choosing

weekend in Rome option so 25 to 30% are choosing weekend to Paris in this case the middle option that nobody choose was the decoy just to manipulate you to choose the weekend in Rome so this is another example this is um advertisement for yearly subscription for The Economist uh Magazine onee subscription for 59 only web access onee subscription to the print edition only print for 125 or you can have both 425 so this is this looks really confusing so our friend Dan Arley just run this advertising to 100 students in

MIT and this is the results so 85% of them are choosing the were choose choosing the combo option nobody was choose the middle one and 60% was choose the the access the web access so if you have an options that nobody wants like the middle one and remove it yeah if if you have an options that nobody wants you can freely remove it and nothing's going to change but let's see if we present this offer to another 100 students what's change so this time the least popular became the most popular and the most popular became the least

popular so in this case the middle option wasn't useless in the sense that nobody wanted uh the middle option was put there just to put you in your head a price anchor that the print copy cost 125 so in this case the middle option was as I told uh as I wanted to say the decoy option the effect of the decoy option is 43% increase of the revenue so after we checked this Theory and after we saw these examples we actually decided to change our payment page and to start making money out of it this was our basic payment screen it looks like everybody else

5€ 10 2040 100 200 400 yeah it's normal uh we are talking about hardcore MMO gam so 400 is something that people are offly buying so in the first packages there are no bonuses in the third package there are only resource bonus then from forth to the end you have like 10 20 30 40% it looks um perfectly set screen so but we wanted to force people to choose the screen that we want so we put labels what was the effect of of these labels so of course best offer is the the more expensive and we wanted to put the 4040 label most popular this is our own decision it's fake of course

yeah it's normal to do fake stuff on this screen so this was the this was the the result 11% increase in the revenue oh my God so we were't happy about it and we decided to create our first irrational offer but how to how to create a decoy offer when people are used to see all the six options that they have so we decided to keep the first four and to double just to double the resources to double the diamonds in the last one but to keep to keep the same price the effect 35% increase according to the base screen that I show in the in the beginning so two

things we don't we don't uh we didn't have enough uh play uh space so we remove the 400 Euro option and we start questioning are we losing money from from removing this option because we have two for 200 and we decided to do this we become greedy so we removed the 40 40 option and we put 100 200 and 400 as a uh as a decoy so now for 400 you have two two caskets and again double the diamonds looks perfect right uh the result wasn't so good because the amount of money like €400 is something big and people weren't enable

to buy it so often as €200 there was countries with transaction limits and so on so this was the result but the worst thing wasn't this the worst thing was that we had an inflation in our hard currency because we were on constant promotion we were selling our diamonds basically on a half price because we multiply the diamond multiply the resources everything so it was really bad after the first month the results was really bad and all the statistics wasn't working anymore so how we fix it the only differences is the two caskets that we gave in this offer we gave the same amount of virtual currency of hard currency as the previous one so the only reason uh the only differences was here is it working

yes again 310% Revenue increase versus base can I borrow 5 minutes um so we decided again to find a way to put a big the biggest price in the screen so we created Dynamic screens so every player see a different screen so if you are well and if you spend already 200 in the game we remove the 40 and you see the irrational offer the decoy offer as we call it for €400 but if you are a small fish and you spend over the maximum you spend is €20 we put the decoy offer on 40 on the next step we just wanted to upsell you with one more step

the result of this screen up and down 3 90% Revenue increase versus the baits and this time there is no side effects so we get we were happy about the results but we have one question uh not question but we have one problem not all of the people were seeing this those um the payment screen so what we did is we gave our gifts only on payment SC on payment screen whatever game you play whatever task you finish whatever Quest you finish or login or for we gave a lot of uh rewards we gave it on this screen so right now 100 % of our active players see this these

offers the result is even better 425 per Revenue increase versus the base and this was our final solution this was my first ending screen I have even more tricks but have no time so send me an email and I will send you the presentation there are a lot of improvements that actually there are additional 10 slides after this so um no time for questions but I will be here for the two days so if you want to ask me something or if you want to to have the presentation with the exact numbers and uh examples just drop me a line and you will have it thank you for your [Applause]

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