Helping Smaller Game Developers Play in the Big Leagues, Leonard Tatum, Tatum Games

[Music] thank you [Music] um so this is the section where we're talking about how you can grow your your audience and revenues I guess so we're going to kick off with uh Leonard Tatum I've taste some games who's going to talk about helping small are you ready to my house helping small developers play in the big leagues so over to you give a round of applause please well um my name is Leonard Tatum and I'm the founder of Tatum games uh before I get into my spill I just want to thank everyone in attendance here and also thank Pocket Gamer connects for for having me it's my first time in Toronto so I mean it's been fun all right let's get into it

okay um I'm just going to start from the beginning I've always known that I wanted to create games even as a child I was inspired by squaresoft I love pretty much every game that they created here's some of my favorite products there um I wanted to actually work as a developer for a square it didn't work out that way instead I went to I.T and then I went into web development and then ultimately I found a home as a native Android mobile app developer and I've been doing that ever since so you're probably wondering like we're in this timeline does Tatum games fit well I got old I started reevaluating my life and I started thinking about what makes me happy right what am I passionate about you know is my career fulfilling all these sorts of things and that that made me revisit my idea my childhood dream of becoming a game developer and

developing games so there is a reason why I'm sharing you all this this backstory and and it's related to the statistics here so according to Electronic Entertainment design and Resource Institute that's a mouthful only four percent of games that are released whoever will ever turn any sort of profit and indie game haven reported that it's just straight out 70 of all indie games are just going to fail another 30 percent that are successful only seven percent will earn enough Revenue to even start a second project you know when I look at this I don't think of this as just companies failings products failing uh to me this is aspirations and childhood dreams that have sort of gone to rest and that's just a very tragic story so now the question becomes what what can we do to change this outcome

I know a lot of us are probably thinking this is a matter of money right if you have more money that would solve everything um and we've seen this sort of be played out a thousand ways right game steel goes out raises 100 million dollars and then meanwhile us as bootstrappers smaller game studios we're thinking to ourselves man if I had 100 million dollars I have like a hundred thousand games all right um but it's not really a model for success and neither is relying on Revenue either and we've seen that with companies and games like vainglory for example these guys raised over a billion dollars and they still failed you know so money isn't everything and it doesn't guarantee you success um I'm going to take it back a little bit go back into my little origin here for Tatum game so when like I said I got old started Tatum games and then

um I started working on my first product it was called Heroes versus villainous um the whole title is heels versus Villains rise of nervo um and it took me three years just to get that product into an alpha version I was just a solo developer I took that product and I showcased it at Pocket Gamer connect London and it was there that I met the founder of King and if you guys are unfamiliar with King these guys created Candy Crush and in our conversation he tells me that he had just opened up his ninth game studio in that each of his Studios produces and releases about 10 to 15 games per year so maybe it was just my ignorance but I didn't know that you that you were allowed to open up multiple studio so that that came out of shock to me um but but then also just doing a quick math I mean that that would mean that these guys are producing over 100 games

per year which which is crazy and I think in that conversation he was a very nice guy he could sensed that my energy sort of changed and he offered me some advice he says to me that when I release my game make sure that my app icon is of my main character just screaming out into the distance and if I do that you guys know what I'm talking about right if I do that no matter what no matter how good or bad my game is that's 20 000 downloads and then he did this number right here he looked over to the left and he got in close and he said and if you have drool coming out of his mouth has 50 000 downloads right so there's a lot to digest here right number one you don't know what you don't know that was that was one thing that I got to understand very clearly and during that conversation was a very short conversation

um but but number two I was out of my debt and I knew that if I went down the Journey of continuing to develop HV Heroes versus Villains try to get Revenue use that Revenue to create another game repeat the repeat that process maybe get an investor on board that it just more than likely wasn't going to work out for me right so um I got to thinking I got to masterminding I identified that over over several years of research that that this is what I need to address right I need to think about how can I get enough data because the reason why King is able to figure out how many downloads drool is going to give you right is because they just have a tremendous amount of data Me by myself I'm not producing 100 games per year I don't have that and then also I don't have a team of data scientists data analysts data Engineers as well that's super costly right so even if I did have

that data I mean I need that as well and then how do I get the support that I need just to keep moving forward so it was all these problems that I started thinking about and that's what led me to creating micros right micros is analytics service and and before you guys think this is a sales page it's not micros is a free tool for everyone to use but this is the secret sauce is is just data um let me just go into how micro is sort of uh addresses a lot of our pain points as small small developers independent Developers I saw the issue of there not been enough data by using data pooling so now it doesn't matter if you have 10 users 10 000 users or a million users our technology is going to look across the entire ecosystem all contributed data

and it's going to figure out Trends and stats and share that equally to everyone so that's pretty cool um the other problem that I solved was and this was a little bit easier is that well what if you don't have or what if you can't afford data scientists data analysts and so forth well we just replaced that with AI our Rai is co-developed by Google it's one of our strategic Partners if you want to know how powerful it is it's more powerful than gpt3 but less powerful than gpt4 so it's right in between there um but what our AI does is spins 24 7 just looking for Trends looking for ways to improve your game and it tells you in plain English step by step hey you should do this and it could be recommending some sort of service it could be recommending some sort of change in your app it whatever it can figure out is going to suggest to you

and another really cool thing about what we do is we allow you to do side-by-side comparisons of your kpis versus your competitors we do so in a safe way so it's we never reveal like the identity of the the of your competitors whenever I did I we never reveal your identity either it's just meant to provide context right so that now you have some sort of North Star to know this is how many more users I need to get in order to be competitive right or this is how much revenue I need to get in order to be competitive and then the last thing is that micros isn't just an analytics service um it it is um technology it's a tool that you guys can use but it's really just an entire ecosystem that you can tap into so we have this community as well again it's a free community we have game developers here we have uh animators

illustrators there's everyone that's game aligned in there we all help each other out eventually what we want to do is we want to bring in Publishers and investors into their space so as you're providing updates about your game into the micros Community they'll be learning about it as well organically um and and hopefully that's going to help you build up the Rapport and the relationships that you need to get the investment dollars that you want so I left a lot of time for for Q a but I didn't know what else to really add there's a lot more that I could bring to the table as far as equalizing things because data is only one step we do plan to also get into marketing and advertising that's another section that is just not tailored towards the small and individual game developer um um so yeah so here's our website and I'm open for questions

um let's get no so you're you're basically looking to kind of democratize and offer sort of sort of bigger data for for small developers right yeah that's exactly right and it's free and it's free so what's the catch so so there's no cash that's our mission our our mission is literally we want to seize independent and small game studios win so you seem like a nice bloke um I've got my mouth open on Julian so have you got any questions uh for for this nice bloke there's a there's a Megan then the center just here in the red top there we go uh yeah just um can you give me more information on what the raw data is that it's going through yeah so the developers all collect the raw data right so we don't work any different than if you're already using like Unity analytics or Google analytics or whatever analytic surveys you're using we're all works the same right there's an SDK you collect data the difference is how we present the data

amongst everyone in our ecosystem for things that are like Global Trends um and things like that but but also being able to have certain unique features such as side-by-side comparisons but as far as like how we process your data you're going to be able to view it on a dashboard we we input their data into our AI our AI is going to be constantly looking at your data it's going to be looking at other data and it's going to be trying to constantly figure out ways to improve your app So eventually the the end result of this is going to be you're going to be able to set up goals you're going to be able to set up milestones and kind of guide the AI of where they should put their focus and then the AI is going to help you in that regard so it's kind of a bit like this sort of the data tools like the urapanese or that magic whatever but but around a wider Rider Escape things yeah do you have that skill question any other questions we have here come on don't be shy

um oh the question at the back there's a man with a blue t-shirt on don't you hate it when you turn up and everyone else is wearing the same thing yeah terrible it's kind of fun too we're all on the same team um I have a question just kind of further what you were uh the moderator was asking about which is you know in terms of not what's the catch but what's your business model because I think that's important you're doing something really great for other people but how do we know you're gonna be around for a while to keep doing it if you're not monetizing off of it that's great so we plan to monitor so we plan to go back to creating games you know that now that we have this sort of tool in our back pocket we feel comfortable going back to creating games and and knowing that this technology is going to help us put us in a better position to succeed and it's already working with respect to our product development and planning so we didn't have any sort of idea whatsoever What type of game to create and this is something that's very new which is why I haven't really mentioned it we've only

it's only been like a month since we started on this project but we look to micros so micros told us hey this is the trending type of content this is the trending type of gameplay this is a trending type of such and such so we just looked at all of that and we said okay okay this is the game that we're going to create based off of that so that's that's how we're going to monetize so we're going to monetize through games and we pass that savings on to you and it is and also um don't get me wrong we don't we also have like a premium feature as well so if you do want to pay us you can but just the way that our service works because of this collaborative piece the more data that gets inputted into it the more powerful the technology we don't want to put any sort of price tag in front of us getting as much so you're kind of benefiting from the day but everybody everybody in the everybody in the platform is benefiting from the diet exactly exactly so it's good it's kind of pulling together like that that's kind of like a cabal and what so you can't talk about your new game then yet was very new what we did is we asked

micros tell us tell us how to create a game where players are going to play that game 24 7. so um we've we really wanted a game that was just going to generate a bunch of data so that we can be major contributors to the micros ecosystem so that's what we told micros too and then it gave us some results so that's what we're starting to build so you're tapping into ai ai is telling you what to do you're basically a slave to the AI That's What's Happening Here is this plugged into Ricardo's brain then it's just is this kind of the king CEO somewhere with like a probe stuck in his head telling us how to I was interesting in fact is that a real story because even if it wasn't it was a great story yeah yeah I know Ricardo he's a very very nice billionaire um but uh yeah that's that's cool that's really cool do you have any more questions for uh no if we don't I just just download it and and join it it seems like a good I haven't been in myself and I don't make games because it seems very hard way to make money but search through conferences is really

easy but no um but no I think um I think yeah it sounds like a good initiative and I wish you success and thanks for coming on sharing it and sharing that great story hopefully you'll get more people on board and we can all collectively take on the big guys so big round of applause thank you guys thank you very much cheers [Music] thank you