HITMAN Season 1: From Executive Producer to Showrunner

[Music] all right then welcome to GDC 2016 I'm happy that I can open very early for all of us and thank you for attending this session despite the timing I'm going to talk about how we experienced hitmen I came I hope man you've heard about and the first season were recurring in the middle of that I would like to open with one short slide about myself that you know who's talking and they're likely finding myself actually more with my games than with anything else I started rather early in 1987 on the Commodore 64 so yes I've been making games for 29 years now I was freelancer for six years 13 years I was at the company called neo software which became rocks a Vienna after that I started games that matter which became deep silver I was there for four years and now I'm for six and a half years I'm with Square Enix and I'm now a studio

head at IO Interactive in Copenhagen and we are known for many games like Mini Ninjas freedom fighters DK 9 inch series but most of all for hitman and that's what I want to talk about today so the main points I will try to keep it concise because it is a lot to take in and I want you to get something out of this presentation so I will give you a short overview of hitman what the brand is what the game is because that is the foundation the baseline that we started with and that's why that is relevant to understand the majority of this talk today will be about what we call internally hitman 2016 because it's the sixth game in the series but is the first game that we just called plain Hitman and lacking a subtitle with opted 2016 and it will take you through our initial vision that we had for the project what happened over the years how we launched it and now it's been running

for a few months and I will go to the ups and downs of that I will have a core focus on takeaway points and lessons learned I know that you cannot apply all of these to your personal situations I hope you'll find some interesting and some very applicable all those perhaps not so I also want to encourage you if you have any questions after the presentation please come to me I will try to spend another 15 minutes or so after this is over if you want to have individual questions so this is the main thing I want to give you the key lessons and then at the end if there is some time left then we'll have some Q&A publicly here where I think we'll go through with the microphone as far as I know and and to some public questions all right and let's right get into it and let me give you a short overview of hitman the game has been around as a franchise for 16 years now on the marketplace and that was our starting point it was after the

fifth game which was hip and absolution we had chip 5 up to that point in time in the 12 years hitman absolution ship 2012 and by that point in time it was the best-selling hitman game in the franchise so we saw a good uptake over the years it 141 person in the world and so on but not enough self-promotion let's look at the interesting things that happened with hitman absolution that was that it was the first game where we had a major online component and retract eleven point three million unique online players in the game that as a serious was predominantly experienced as a single player third-person stealth game we had an multiplayer mode that is an asynchronous multiplayer mode to me I ask has anyone if you played hitman absolution in here ok quite a few contracts mode ok good so contracts mode was our asynchronous multiplayer mode where you created the hit on any NPC mall as any NPC in the

game and then you could send it out to the community or you could send it to a friend you could challenge each other and become better it was something I got inspired by what people already did with blood money and older games on YouTube where they created play throughs and they shared videos and stuff like that but the online mode was so successful that the amount of hours played in it it made the single-player campaign pale in comparison completely and that was very inspiring for us 1.4 million uses in total created these contracts which is I mean I don't remember the hands exactly but I think it's a good representation people playing but one I liked the 10% of them playing contracts creating stuff as well and 30 million contracts these are the missions that users created were played up to today and that is a huge number for us and they were also ranked and so on at the top contract that means the player created mission was played 1.4 million times and that was actually this

is a platform dependent because you cannot share them across platforms so that was a big number and interestingly enough these numbers from June 2016 we still have 300 thousand unique monthly active players in the game that runs on xbox 360 and ps3 and of course also on PC and the shipped in November 2012 and in the game where we did nothing to sustain a proper community so that was the starting point for us the brand itself is also pretty well known if you just google the English word hitman and look at the images this is like the first pages so we cannot own the word hitman its associated with agent 47 and it also makes it I'd say a laugh friend it's more than just the game series you know they are like two movies their novels the figurines their clothing lines and all that kind of stuff in some fans make it a big part of

their personal life and I'm telling you that because when you want to change something as fundamental as how people consume the game our people might consume your game or your brains are working on you have to deal with that you have very dedicated people that will have a very strong opinion on what you're creating so we took the success that we had in your online service and what the community did with it and that was the foundation for the vision and now I want to explain to you why after the game has been around for such a while and was actually pretty successful why change anything at all it's because times are changing as well so in a very very high bullet list high-level bullet list let's talk about hitman 2016 what he wanted to achieve we wanted to focus on the player freedom and the creative sandbox gameplay that meta Syria is great that's the bedrock of the series that so far is nothing new but we wanted to go into the current

generation and make it like the biggest and most complex hitman sandbox ever ever built so we had to ramp up our technology for that but most of all we wanted with the first game build a foundation for life and ever expanding world that we called our world of assassination the first game of more to come a platform or less where people can play with each other share stuff and continue playing over the years to come let me take you to some of the opportunities that you have and that we saw and back then already we're pretty convinced of when you go into this live episodic triple-a approach where at the end of the day we we're the first ones to do it over the years we worked on it we weren't sure about that because I know others are also thinking and trying and moving in this direction but at the end we were the first ones and that meant a lot of of resistance and also meant a lot of successes the opportunities we saw as we started with this 2013 so after we launched hitman

absolution and seeing how the online mode takes off but over the years already MIT's development we saw that the overall market started transitioning the digital all some consoles I mean PC is very digital writing PC sales are mostly online anyways nowadays but also on the consoles let me show you from Activision that is deliberately November 2014 it was the q3u assault and they had 67 percent of your q3 revenue all of Activision Blizzard was digital that included of course World of Warcraft and other games from the from Blizzard but it also included all the other offline games did it and mind that was before overwatch or hearthstone so that is really remarkable and then we saw this overall market trend this is either a market research facility Institute that published at that went from 2008 to 2014 just just looking at the consoles and this is the

share of physical only physical only digital are only and different physical mixed within 90 days and you can see that physical only is marginalized and that digital only has been the majority already since 2012 admittedly if you look at releases you have a lot of small games that come on Xbox Live Arcade and platforms like that so the amount of titles is not totally representative but the trend was undeniable already at that point in time when you are online when your life when you have a service running it can be way more open and inclusive towards your fans and that was very important to us because we are not necessarily the most mainstream game out there we are a game that is perceived as hard is difficult there's a thinking man's game and we want it to be close to the fans and be able to react between Blood Money and arm the absolution it took us six years to make a game and that is a very long time to react to any feedback that you get also mind that your margin when you

sell a game digitally is over two times bigger then when you say the disc and what that does to you is that you can tailor your game to your fans instead of actually looking for the lowest common denominator because you do not have to sell the same amount of units to reach the same amount of profitability and that gives you creative freedom that was a key point for us who wanted to go back to the formula of blood money that made the game great and successful but it also made it difficult for some people to play and in order to do that digital was a great opportunity for us it also helps to make games that are a bit different than you know many of the big triple-a blockbuster games on disk they have a tendency to kind of become alike and we didn't want to be like that and that's an opportunity or at verdun you can also innovate faster as I said faster than six years for sure you can innovate within weeks sometimes within days you can balance something within

days you can add a feature perhaps within months you can add content within a few months you don't have to wait years for that that is much more often much better that ultimately leads to better games you can also on the marketing side and on the community and social media side see more coverage because you have events you have content coming and so on let me given a recent example let's say uncharted 4 was a huge hype right fantastic game huge hype after the launch people stopped talking about it and that's because it is this kind of game that is a great weekend experience it's linear right you don't replay that often if you have a life game people are still talking about destiny or not to mention World of Warcraft and overwatch and and League of Legends and so on right these are some some of them are very different to hitman but these are games the people engage with continuously and that also gives you coverage and then and I personally

perhaps overestimated that because we experienced most people buying the full pack the full price but it still opens the opportunity for more flexible pricing models in our case we had a so called into a pack that we sold for $15 and that helps people to get on board without spending $60 perhaps they can't even spend that much perhaps you don't want to spend that much because they just want to try it out and see whether that's a game for them so that's an opportunity as well and last but absolutely not least you are very close to your players and your players are very close to you trust me very close you hear all of their opinions all the views and that's a very positive thing in my opinion I personally went into games to entertain people if I may say so to make people happy and seeing people play our games is what it also gives me job satisfaction and when your life and online and when you have a gamer divorce and changes over time this is where you can be closer than ever before and we had a huge distance when I

began like 30 years back distance was gigantic and it became a bit smaller and smaller over the years and now we're as close as I can imagine to be and that is really great in order to pull it off though you need to change a lot of minds you need to make people come on board with you I'm gonna take you through a short list of things that we have to do over the time and I would like you to be mindful of as well so first of all your shareholders need to be on board with what you're doing there because you have a completely new sales and development strategy and that can be scary so you need someone to back that vision and understand why you're doing it you need your development team to be on board with you because is fine if it's to do your head or an executive producer or a lead programmer they have the vision to believe in it but everybody working on the game should have trust in what you're doing and the uncertainty of facing something that unknown after having had a success formula something you shouldn't you shouldn't

underestimate you need to take it seriously so also legit change is risk right so you need to take your dev team on board you need to have your publish on board of course right because many publishers it's a pin changing but when we started with that in 2013 you know there was not that much experience in selling a big amount of units at a high price digitally that was the world of free-to-play and browser games and stuff like that back then right and that's also a big change of mind then you have your sales teams the people that actually are in the territory is trying to put boxes somewhere obviously and naturally they're afraid of the drops if they hear digital because they see the workers pushing disks but you need them because you're still selling you need to sell in the territories you even need retail I mean we do things like SD cards and then other opportunities that bring the game to people who don't don't see it online but still compile digitally so see else is important but you need to

have these people support you as well then they are the first parties so who is there living for consoles here it's not many no console developers here all right okay if you so with first parties obviously you have a very close relationship because the console is an encapsulated environment and you need to have some abort and they have your policies and at that time most of the policies we needed didn't even exist there wasn't a model for that for for a full-price game now there's more and more and I'm happy we were able to pioneer for ourselves also for you and for other developers but trust me even after so many months and so many years working there's always something new that comes up is oh okay that's a new policy we need to change something here otherwise we can't do this or that a lot of that that is a continuous effort as well you have distribution partners so you might not sell everywhere yourself you might not have publishing units in in Arabia or New Zealand or so so you need

to find partnerships with them because naturally they ask where's our March if we don't move boxes around so you need to find incentives and business models how you can work with these partners to make that a success and last not least need to have the players important to people that consume your game because let's be honest especially at the time when we started there were too many games out there that did something like early access or half-finished game in the games that never got finished and people paid money for that right so obviously there were says hey you're selling us an unfinished game if it's episodic that is a very very long way to get people to understand that you always get some on board you might get many on board but it takes a long time to convince the majority of your players and then of course you have our friends at the press they'd also want to talk about what you're doing there and you know press loves innovation when you do something new they're really supportive and eager but they also need to find words to talk about it and that's tricky

because we needed to find words how to talk about it so often was understood but then how does it work again what's the detail and especially what can I call it what can I compare it to now people can compare to hitman but it's it took a while to actually get there and that's understandable and if you do something new and I assume you're also here not only thinking about copying exactly what we did if you try to move something into this space you need to think about that so what we actually did in the first years before we went out so we also we worked it on top of our partners we worked with internally we also had external partners and tools and we established structures how we could actually run and develop a service with it continuous a market research with two main partners one is the big solutions group which is a company that takes the journalistic angle on what you're doing they do mock reviews so they give you like Metacritic predictions and stuff like that but most of all they also help you take is feedback from different angles like the

consumer magazine the technical magazines point of view that helped us to shape what we are doing and how we are doing it and we worked with a company called ether which is an analyst service it's a real mark real market research institute statistically data based and they helped us to look at the trends of a digital marketing is there even enough digital market to justify the development and publishing budget of a game like hitman because a different thing whether you ship 50 small games on one big game and hope that this one big game is actually able to recover your and recoup your costs alright we did continuous user research that's our internal team we have a team in Montreal we have a team in San Francisco we have a team in Copenhagen and that helps us to have a look at what players actually do so we get players in show them stuff let them play the bill to just ask them about that that helped us as well because it's very close to the players and we also established two steering

groups and one was the internal steering group so looking at what happened in the game to decide what we do with development and as of now we meet daily now that the platform is running but in the beginning it was like every few months they were month and so on and then we established a war on group we call it which is our international publishing and marketing teams or partners we meet weekly and that does more or less the same on the sales and marketing side and what we use there is we use what we call the hard facts and the soft facts and we collect this data and the hard facts is what people do in the game you know what what features to the use what levels of the play how many hours do the clock and stuff like that the soft facts is what people tell you what the most of the same view but most of all what do they tweet what I put on Facebook was in hitman four remotes and read it and that kind of stuff and I'll tell you what people do and what people say that's not necessarily always the same so you need to be

careful that when you collect this data how you base your decisions because you don't wanna le alienate 95 people based on the feedback of a vocal 1% right so that is what we're doing and that's that's what we use to steer the project all right now let's see how that went in reality because now let's take you through how we executed that and we'll give you a short overview of the timeline so let's start from the announcement of the game in June 2015 and let's talk a look up to almost today actually tomorrow so we announced the game at e3 2015 and DeRosa actually really successful announced for us we had a lot of good reactions but then a lot of freshening began so we had event after event after event where we explained what we did we explained or did it we explained what we did we tried to find our language how to talk about

it and to show people what we're doing all the time in the background we had a closed alpha with a bit over 1,000 hand selected players that we're already running the game running the service who playing with us that was very important for us also for a change of minds then we had a bader that started a few weeks before we launched the game and it ran for a few weeks and that was the final change in tweaking with the actual public and then we didn't launch the game we premiered the season so this is when we started with him and then we tried to keep a major extension of our role of assassination every month we had Italian level Americans level the most recent our summer bonus episode and actually tomorrow we're going to launch Bangkok in Thailand so that's the most recent extension and while this season is running with a major content coming we also had what we keep I call the

weekly pulse so we have live features that are like events we call them elusive targets or we have so called escalation contract and challenge these are things that happen and actually I'm very proud of our development team so far we have really managed that we can extend the content of the game every single week I think that's important because you want to keep people engaged I'll get a little bit into more detail very soon but now let's have a look at a look at this early announcement phase because there are those interesting first of all when we announced the game there was a lot of surprise I was surprised that people were surprised that Iowa announces doing another hitman game I think that's not wasn't the biggest surprise but people were also surprised about what we did to the game and we had headlines like we're changing the way games are played it's awesome we might change games with Hitman's granik's will change everything it's a fantastic assassination game it's the great game we cooked completely get it and we thought fantastic score what we

are doing everybody understands within less than 24 hours this surprise changed into utter confusion it was really surprising okay this is hitman but wait is not on the disk yeah maybe totally sorry yeah I know but really why what how so then we had headlines like these so that I had active explains hitman is confusing digital release plan it's been confusion hints at gamers mistrust that is the player part I mentioned before hitman demands publisher trust we don't have and then we even coined the term that we internally used for a while that was in a headline called the hitman situation that was really interesting we had also more confusion in the actual community people were arguing back and forth about it already we were saying hey I really want this to be good I don't want it to be so great that others might do the same that world of something weird to take in and then

of course Allison why not is flexible isn't that a good thing to do the whole design is taurah is terrible because if it if it tanks that launch will not get content anymore will rip us off that was a fear the players had I understand that when you come from an early access a marketplace for instance obviously as a public company you cannot promise one thing in not they're not delivered the players don't understand of that understand that I don't understand the legal of an ends background of a big publisher and they don't have to write but that's something we had to deal with and then that's what there was a key recurring theme here just the end is important so I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to be to feel ripped off come launch day because obviously when you buy the whole game the whole season like a season pass so to speak you pay your $60 you get the game but they want the content this of course not everything and there was a recurring theme and I need to tell you we did not

find the perfect way to answer these concerns we had to find the right voice for that so we decided to go with something for the straightforward with the QA we had a video blog done and we thought about EMA's unready it and we had all kinds of ideas community events and on but then we just decided you know what let's go for a Q&A be straightforward with it we were that for a long time and that explained quite a bit to the players but after that we made well I think looking back was our biggest mistake we became very concrete and we launched and infographics actually two of them and and these infographics were very specific and although they explained ambition and direction obviously it makes it very tangible so that's something going back I would not do anymore I think for us it was the wrong thing to do we had to keep adding more details at Gamescom or after Gamescom which exactly a year ago we showed our first a built to press we've

got good feedback there's like okay this is this is hitman coming home this is the blood money you've been looking for that's the hitman game so we actually really achieved these goals but if state also impress and with the players is yes more content coming coming coming but how much is it going to be so let's look at the first three most important lessons we learned out of that and let's see what you can take out of that for yourself one is that being transparent can hurt you and it can hurt you a lot we made the decision that from a ivory tower developer that makes this game and then publisher sells it and we never talk to the fans which we did for the better half of 15 years it was a very very long time we were closed and we opened up January 2014 actually we opened up with a letter to the fans when we explained that but when you are open you sometimes expect people to understand too much because many of

you you know the details and the problems and daily struggles of development taking people through that is the hard thing to do people don't trust the publisher we're always the evil corporate company no matter what you try to do no matter how open you are these things we also have to take into account so what I would recommend to you if you decide to change something on the French chanson the game that people like and you have been working on for a long time choose what fits your vision the open be closed show them everything show them nothing but take it through I think our main mistake was being very open getting scared for some of the reactions then becoming overly corrective and then going back and forth over too long a time I would recommend to take it through the light will come and that helps you to actually keep your voice finding the right language so how you talk about the change is a huge challenge I would recommend using

existing terms wherever possible we try to avoid things like episodic or MMO in the beginning episodic games really like telltale games right very different from our game experience we were not naming mo either I mean you never really see multi knows multiplayer we're not like destiny but somehow we are you know so we try to avoid these comparisons but that was not good either it's it's okay we changed the voice to episodic we explained what it is why it is how it works and that was a huge change for us it helped us to explain things better I do understand that you might not find the perfect word for every single thing that you're innovating but whenever you can try to and these things together also when you look at other companies that are trying to do that the the reason why Vincent's valve doesn't talk to anybody right they are not very public about what the to development wise or Niantic or riot and so on and and I think this comes from these two

things it's hard to talk about some of the things you do and most of all being very transparent can be very painful all right and then third important point is a life game in my humble opinion must not be static if you set out with the game that you want to have life and it runs for two three years in the future and today you know what you gonna ship in 24 months what features would level then don't go live what's the point you came in to react to player feedback you can make the game better you just have a production schedule that didn't ship in a staggered release but that also means when you talk about it don't promise deliverables promise ambition and be as careful as possible not to make this like vague or interchangeable people might perceive everything as a promise that you make and we work with partners that are also able to think that way so looking back at the distribution partners the first part is you're publishing teams there is a certain ease if I may say to estatic

huge release at the given point in time yeah you might chief states there were always some problems with development and submission and manufacturing but it's very different from something that's running and constantly changing and evolving so finding partners that understand that is very important all right let's look at the next part which is the time around our bader it was a time when people actually started playing the game the big change for us at that time that we faced the clarity we gave and the skepticism we received that was an effect of changing our tone and don't mistake skepticism with confusion so people were much clearer what we wanted why we wanted it and how we did it and some were rightfully skeptic about it but that's a good thing because then people are asked to write questions you can think about it they can make up their own decision how they want to consume the game and we also we started actually with a cover story on edge but then we also had the

first playable for many people and what we did is when we changed the way we talked about the game and we changed also the release model in a way to completely episodic because there was easier to talk about there was writing the game also feels better that way and as it has an effect we had to cancel the pre-orders on one of the platforms and that of course was also an important message to get out because it was just another part of this how Eyal talks about hitman you know people could we already instantly afterwards again right and and actually most did almost all did it was but it was another trip in this and never got the headlines with Hayes fully episodic it's clear hitman ditches confusing alleys model entirely not fully episodic and a short quote from this article I'll draw your attention to is that this change that episodic game translate the intent into language gamers understand and the

editor appreciates how flexible the publisher has become in the face of the feedback both things are very important so we found a way to talk about what we were doing and we had our shareholder who trusted us and gave us the flexibility in was flexible enough themselves and that that headline up there I really want everybody to take the time I belong I believe in that it built speaks more than thousand words the moment people had hands-on the perception was changed the beta was the first consumer hands-on also press when they got to preview builds he handled that really helped us a lot we got great great previews happy with that yeah even the episodic model was on that was understood it was seen as the game that we focused on and so on and also our online features like the elusive targets and so on we're already understood and community was very very happy about that too

and that happened in a relatively short amount of time and it was a change of tone and actually proving of course so the lessons I would like to give you there is that if your message is complicated and unavoidably sometimes your message might be complicated look at no man's sky for instance they had a long time to understand for people to understand what they were doing right games at innovate in what the area whatever have complicated messages but don't deliver too many of them at once we actually made a very deliberate decision how we talked about changing the release model cancelling the pre-orders and then how we actually gonna ship it and what the features are so think like in messaging one headline at a time because otherwise you come you lewd convoluted and that creates more confusion then if I may say if you're groundbreaking or trying to be groundbreaking in one area then be

conservative in others look at what other bedrocks of what we have been doing successfully for us it was our open-world sandbox gameplay people really loved that we were I would say surprisingly conservative about the core gameplay experience which was broader to the new generation of hardware and the times but choose what to innovate and what to keep steady that will help you in my opinion because then you have at least a certain bedrock that you can count on and if you do a better and more and more companies do that make it better at better I don't believe in better so that just glorified demos or let's clarify demos but it better also shouldn't be too broken if you're trying to be a more mainstream product or have a bigger target audience you cannot take people through a complete alpha and expect them to understand the game but a beta can be a huge help for a development obviously but also for your marketing if you time it right we did a

lot with our beta actually and because of the digital release we could afford the five week time span between beta or the betas and releasing and still change a lot in the game so we changed our opportunity system that was actually one of the key things that gave us great scores in in reviews is that there was a new feature in the game we changed our difficulty balancing the eye reactions we also even changed the complete setup of the second toriel mission to make it more sandboxie and we fixed a lot of stuff a lot of problems we had because the data was actually very successful I've fixed a lot of problems in the server connection and given how many problems we had at launch with the server connection I would say I don't want to imagine what the would have been like without the beta so that is that is something I want to give you if you can plan if you have the luxury to plan do a beta that can help you sell your game but also gives you just about enough time to do the final most important to tweaks all right

let's have a quick look at the actual launch now it gets really interesting and and hot so premiered the season and we came in really really well when people played that one level it was the size that was recognized it was the the actual quality of the gameplay but also at launch there was a certain group a certain percentage that found too short knowing there was more to come knowing it was huge but also knowing hey it's about the 6th of the game and that affected us so very top line we were praised for the best of Blood Money and absolution huge replayable nonlinear sandbox level design and gameplay quality nothing of this is new everything of these things were

appraised for the game had been praised for for 15 years before and we were criticized for the episodic release model that it acquires life connectivity and we had on top of that launch the ratios that we shouldn't have had and that combination was something that we got criticized for a lot because to certain extent rightfully but we had to make a tough decision do we want to avoid cheating or do we want to have a an easy as possible single-player experience and we chose to avoid cheating because our vision is a life service our vision is a platform where people to share and play with each other for years to come life is important for us not cheating is important for us when I look at some gamers like for our from the division team for instance they are also fighting cheating it's a difficult thing difficult thing to choose what do you prefer obviously hitman having been a single player game was more criticized for being online than let's say and an MMO or a first-person shooter and the load

times on some consoles which was our problem and we overlooked that but because it was a live game we were able to fix it in I think two three weeks or something like that so we were pretty fast with having the first fixes and made it better over the time of the service so these are the highlights but what it did is also polarized our community to an extent we haven't seen before every game polarizes anyway right but for us that these two extreme ends were really really big we had extreme strong voices from and con interestingly and a lot of negativity came from people who haven't played at the game and that's that's because people have strong opinions how things should be right I think that's okay to a certain extent but we are in the industry where things are changing if you look back at the 70s we all come from a case and the case about like microtransactions where you play a quarter to continue and that's that's kind of where we come from right things change but some people think they

shouldn't change there was what I call the al way to the disc meme it was a recurring thing so no matter how good to review was no matter what assets we put out and then what people liked about trailers and stuff like that there was always roll down 1020 comments down you'll find the first thing I'll wait for the disc cool I'll wait for the disc I don't like the model I'll wait for the disc and that clashed with feedback and articles of people that hate that's perfect hitman is the right game to do that I really have the time to play that level before I go to the next and the next and have some active players so what we actually had to resource with we're really happy with the start of the reuse course and we had very very bad user Metacritic points this is actually from like last week at launch that looked way worse so and then we still have about comparable about user Metacritic that they also led to an hour on the other King position it was called hitman got a meter pumped and I would actually if you find the time and have

the interesting Horatio googly try to find it and and we do that because there are some good points in there and that went at the same time out like these things where people are writing articles about why you should buy it why this good why this writing so now let's have a quick look at what happens when the out because now it's all you had the showrunner I have in a title Chiron is a term from television which seemingly became popular when episodic and then fragmented content became more and more popular and is running fight a lot now just you know that but when you are when you're running a season you have submission after submission after submission and that follows you're heavily dependent on your whole infrastructure on the third parties you know on the Internet service providers on the cloud service provider so we work with Microsoft to sewer for instance and obviously we need all these systems to run they do compute for us and they run part of the games you need first party identification you release globally

right you have partners everywhere and it can happen so easy that one of the partners forgets to switch to switch one hour like too early too late whatever that happens and you always have two pitchforks in front of your doors because it's it's your game right and a little bit a little bit to me it felt like running a television network in the 70s well there was always something let's stop something there was always something out of our controls and it felt happy to get it right so that is something when you go life make as many of you have life experience but also when you go live for something that is bigger and you want to be close to the fans you will have have to work with key lessons from that part is that if you change something as fundamental as your release model could be also something else but it will affect your score negatively so I recommend that you focus on the roots of your franchise in your game series don't neglect what made your

French as great because that will help you to help counterbalance it everything that happens is your fault it's no matter where the issue lies right and I think that's okay because you are the face you close to the fans now where should they go you know they have a problem with their modem of course I think the connectivity is up again so tightly integrate you community team into the development team don't make them separate I think that is a really really good thing to do is it's it's not someone else's problems it's your problem you're running a life game when you develop avoid what I call death march style crunch so wearing out your team completely and don't don't do that because it becomes mission-critical that you can see can sustain a certain pace throughout your whole season and it's unrealistic to think that nobody ever has to work the weekend but aim for it something goes wrong anyways you cannot

plan for when you need to actually work with your release schedule accordingly that you don't wear people out and don't create a separate life team it's like okay this is the punch team or the ship and then there's the live team I have not seen this really succeed yet I heard some stories but myself I haven't seen it here the most people around successful bigger services see this one team everyone is in the live team because you're running a live game so everybody's in the game team and they also avoid the second-class citizenship price and some people feel like other just in the life team all right as the last part let's have a look how it has been going over the season and think that interval interesting because we have this ups and downs ups and downs the ops announced and when the season is running we saw that the appreciation for what we were doing what our vision was and what the game is has actually increased there was what I'd call a

midseason sentiment change that happened about two months one to two months back it was also our second drops that helped to explain what we're doing the level was received very very well but it it also brought people in to continue playing and seeing how it is fun to play for long time and this was a funny article that actually it still talked about what we had to prove we have to prove something with the episodic release and judging by the amount of people saying they will wait and see how it goes I just pick up the disk version sometime in 2031 it definitely does and we have to we have continuously have to prove something that's also a good thing because you need to prove for your service worth being in so we had very good headlines on it and that was a sentiment that also came up this is the third episode we released three episodes in I'm not confident that hitman as the bloodline successor wallet also something

community starts to say and let me emphasize that I'm convinced the quality of subby answer which was our second level would not have been possible to that level without being in life game without people playing the game and without took us looking at what they do and what they say we really use that to make that better and that worked very very well for us now let's go to charted territory few charts and I'm sorry I cannot show you the absolute numbers because we're a public company and the information is unfortunately not public but I can show you relative numbers so on this chart what you see is the red line is who enters the game is a new player each day and the total amount and this spike at the very beginning is months so from June 2015 to March 11th it's all the pre-orders that accumulated and got executed right so this is your

day one spike but the curve let's zoom into this area here and let's look at that and that is interesting because it is very different to at least anything I have ever seen when you have a triple-a game release because normally when you when you release the game you have your your day one spike your week one spike perhaps the second week spike and depending on your window perhaps a Christmas spike but it becomes completely flat afterwards we get new players every day it's extremely steady which is surprising this is month of more or less unchanged sales and new player behavior that is without any discount so it's not that we did anything with the price drops and so on and that is very different if that goes on for a long time it's gonna be that's gonna be great for us right now at the beginning it was home okay the start was not bad could have been better but after two weeks it was like okay it's not read wrapping off that that is you're not we become pretty

steady we're running really well and 64 percent of these people but still by actually an increasing number by the $60 package because now they don't have to wait for the content to come home so we had when we look at it a leaf active players a big impact with the monthly beat so when we added levels to the game and you see that here pretty well so when we launched the game and it's a bien sûr Marrakesh the bonus episode there is of course the summer asama hole we of course like all of us that guest filter are the soccer world champion soccer european championship and stuff but what's interesting is that we also acquired a lot of new players when we launched our main hardcore online feature the elusive targets which is actually played by a smaller percentage than the other less hardcore features that online I was very successful in driving the game forward and created spikes whenever we released that on top

of that we had these weekly pulses or we have them still every week we have content that comes the escalation contracts featured contracts and so on and elusive targets and the elusive target is a hard core feature where you have a mission this vision is there for like two to four days and you can only play it once you kill the target you're done that's how you did it it escapes it's over and if you don't play the time window the target is gone as well will never come back so that is something that is very successful in the core audience and the red ones are the times when we had elusive target so we played around the frequency looking what that does and they change the activity remarkably they bring people back and actually this big chunk here brought a lot of people back and there was killing Gary Busey and it obviously it seems to be everybody likes to kill Gary Busey we thought it's just a marketing stunt but it was it was actually very much liked by the community and then a short overview on on the actual player

activity and what players play I found it interesting to see that as long as there was only one piece of content that's the tutorial available people played that and then when the next one came out they still they played it the new one that's a green one but they kept playing the other as well and that went on and on and on up to the level where we have now six missions out and people almost play them an equal amount because of the new features because of the life activities and so on so this is when it really started to work for us it was the the episodic success it was the elusive targets that people liked we are now in lists of and that was a huge sea change for us hey this could be game of the year illusive targets are great and stuff like that and even community even community sorry I really like it an observation I want to give you in the final minutes of this is when you look at the episodic games and let me here

take life is strange but please take the time to look at other episodic games as well take the time to look at television shows all of them follow all of them is is too much but many of them follow this pattern when life is strange was launched the Metacritic is I think an interesting indicator or 75 from the episodes changed 78 81 81 81 and then the ship the whole season at once which is exactly all of that and that's core at 85 and that is because people start understanding the whole thing how it connects what it does how it clicks it's like television shows people appreciated three weeks afterwards right and that's that's fine but that's something that you need to take into account if you do episodic games we are in a way on a similar to check three but obviously we can still it up you can still make mistakes every single release we do needs to be good because

people can get out at any time and people that thought episodically can get out by just not paying us more money and you know what I like that because it makes us as a developer responsible to deliver quality to the people who like playing the game let's go through the lessons so episodic games tend to score higher once they fully understood and what that means is be mindful with your pricing policy we try to keep our price point the status we can even if it doesn't deliver the assault after-sales bytes but it helps you to sell while your quality is increasing or the perception of the quality is increasing talking about improvements and new features is better after the fact because it would use a cynicism it makes things clear for us concretely that means we don't promise features anymore what we do is we use our release notes to talk to players and to press and that makes us very genuine because we can we can talk about the things we've actually delivered and our ambition is to live

the things that people are really asking for first so that works really well and on the charts I showed you before they're like two key things is content extensions helped us to bring players back that might have stopped playing and the weekly events kept players playing that stayed in it I think that was really interesting you see people come back every week and then there are some people that just come back when there's new content coming so the combination of that is is useful and it doesn't have to be as big as a hitman level I know that's huge content but you can do it with other things as well so plan for activities in your game and for regular additions all right a few concluding recommendations there was an impact on development team that this being a developer conference I think might be interesting to hear we started when we when we developed the game with what we internally called the first life which

was our first playable moreless that we published to all of Square Enix and Square Enix being elected 3,000 people we had a good base and quite a few signed up and we had people playing that and that that was a huge change because we had to overcome this fear of showing our like dirty underwear the first things we've done with this new game to the people we appreciate most our colleagues that are also developers and also make awesome games and although we're friends we also compete a little bit with each other right that was a very important step for us to learn what it means to be life and then we started updating this build and we practiced customer relations management right we we ran the servers for the first time we apply that place to the game while that was being played which we ultimately updated to the vertical slice which as you might know is the part where you prove your final quality and gameplay in a small part of the game and we got into this monthly release mindset and backwards compatibility you know with player

profiles if games and stuff like that that we then upgraded to the closed alpha there was the same bill which became based on the same build which became the first touch point with the real consumers that also the actual players played it what I mentioned before in the time overview and that had an effect it puts the game first and and that means that if you are someone who's only in intro technology and I come up a programming background I've been a programmer half of my career and actually I'm happy to see some of our programmers here as well so they went they went through that as well the technology focus has to come second it has to surf the game and you need to love the game also when you love doing technology first your deployment and runtime stability becomes highly important right the technical QA becomes even more important because you need you cannot afford three weeks without the working build you also need to advance your engine we had to do that because we

needed to introduce more flexibility for doing that for life updating content and stuff and more deterministic deployments and and so on and we distributed our builds differently to the especially the people who played it all our bills came by steam and the platform's more or less which helps the people to just log in and they get a new build and that helped us to pry the said stuff all right so to conclude for my point of view the digital distribution change has fully reached a console market if you took the time to read the news in the last two three weeks look look at activations this year's numbers that it's amazing how much goes digitally in the mainstream triple-a console market so think about how your brand can you to utilize this opportunities right no it's not every game can you need to have something where it fits but just think

about it perhaps it doesn't work perhaps it does work the transition and that's why you should start thinking will take a long time you need to take a lot of people and stakeholders on board with it that that is something that needs to go to the entire organization and be mindful that whether it's life or episodic it's not a concept it will work on absolutely every type of game it worked in hitman because the nature of the fantasy is you get a mission you travel somewhere it can be time limited it can come at any point in time it's it's a non-linear game experience there are games here would not apply that but think about perhaps perhaps it works just don't force it right and I think last not least that if you expose yourself to the players with all these things with being open being inclusive listening looking and also taking the blame and ultimately you make better

games I'm convinced it's gonna be the best hitman game that we've ever done because of that and in my opinion that alone makes it worth doing alright thank you very much for your attention and now we have a little bit of time left for questions and answers [Applause] any questions doctor phones coming hi thanks very very great presentation could you iterate on the the world room you talked about before the marketing more room yeah because I find it's an interesting transition that you know the the big games are turning more into like the commercial world more of the online marketing you mentioned CRM yourself as well you know you're using the analytics and the tools in the right way and and how do you like monitor the brand and and so forth right so the way we are

structured is that we have an own brand marketing department at each studio and their job is to collect all this data from the brand perspective and the development team looks at the development perspective you know things like connectivity player behavior and so on we use a what we use a sir to collect the data and we use a system called tableau which you might have heard about to analyze the data and visualize it and I need to say there that actually even though the hard facts and I talked to a few others as well I think it's not only us doing it like that you can look at data but it is a bit of an art form as well it's not only science an art form to actually make your decisions on data as well but it helps you it helped us for instance to see things like where do people play a lot so what level areas are visited which areas are unvisited practically in the main mission and that's a really cool area and it's perfect to place in the elusive target their order to the contract there are some life features and so on and that that helps us to make better use of what

we have created and enhance the player fund at the same time the same is true for difficulty or for for items to use or disguises or that kind of things and that is the but that's more the stealing of the project in the war room we meet with all the territories which which is it's like a conference call with with the global territories and everybody has some local requirements right Germany is a different market than France UK a u.s. sore zone and then we try to square the circle and say okay this is the direction we take it this is the for this or that market they can be things like pricing but there are also things like how do we talk about it some like some of the life things Germany people got that comparable easily other markets they were more confused by it and then there are markets that still have a problem with being life and online because they pay for traffic or they living in the country where it's only the coastlines or the major cities that have any internet connection at all that's worth mentioning so that's what the war room does for us it's driving the commercial

success or sustainability the question was what about Brandt monitor what we work with a company called brand watch which is like giving a statistical data are positive negative people are about us in the endgame and that helps us to see how we trained with the things we talk that's also when we can verify one headline at time and we know hey the game is we canceling pre-orders you cannot expect a lot of positivity about that right so you know what would you get and then you can verify whether these things are actually working I think we don't have much time left two more questions is that possible it's two more questions okay let's see yes shout out I repeat the question is why do many Triple A games despite having Bader's still have troubles with the service at launch my

honest answer is I really I really can't tell how many percent I think that when you try to push boundaries if you do games that are not the same and the same then you are always trying to push the edge and you do very complex stuff and that complexity sometimes only completely manifests itself when it's out in the consumer market I also do think in our concrete case that despite really really many people playing the beta I do think they were more tolerant towards these problems and they were reported a bit less and our tracking at the time was less sophisticated and was over the course of the season I think that's true for others as well even for companies that have a lot of experience with running live games already for us that that was the first time in that magnitude but even companies that ship more than one of these games have these problems so I think it's a combination of the complexities that just come from a vastly spread out Network because you

can connect it in in so many different ways from LTE to classify or to dial up sand and so on right and you can be all over the world and sometimes even if you use this to build systems you underestimate it and I think that is one of the reasons and it also depends on the type of game how you even use online connectivity right because an MMO is different than hitman or an FPS okay last question and I will stay here or actually outside for for more questions so can I talk more about to publish your reaction when we proposed and when we released that is of course a very subjective thing because I only have the experience with one title and I work for screenings Square Enix was extremely

supportive the vision was completely understood is we have a bit of this dog Murph you know it's like our company model to make players happy with unforgettable experiences in life and clothes it's actually very close to that vision because we want to be close to the people to deliver the experiences and there is a long-term future in that for us because as publishers it's our players that matter it's the people that spend time in our games and happy to see people clocking two hundred three hundred hours in our game already and it's not even half out right that is that is something where I see a lot of potential also in the future and the reaction from the publisher was yes that's what we want to do mind that we also the home of Final Fantasy and MMOs and so on so we know how to engage with players and that was really really positive when we released it's you know I think the same feeling I had we had on the group level as well it was like from the start yeah when we do this we can sell more of course we can sell more because we sell all of that more less

day one and then it's on the shelf for a few months before you hope that they don't return or you argue I do down pricing and stuff like that right digital means every single sale is in the hand of a consumer instantly that was a big difference and also a learning experience for all of us so I think I'm really happy at being at a company that is able to allow that freedom willing to take risks and able to use this opportunities without panicking or going back and forth too fast because as we see it's the long game that matters the digital market is something that needs to run long and it keeps players playing and keeps players buying very different to the experience I have for selling discs all right thank you very much if you have more questions 15 more minutes or so I think there is a space outside the room all right thank you you you