How a hidden object game can reach the top grossing chart

[Music] [Music] thank you so much for joining the talk so today I will be talking about how hidden object game can reach top 10 grossing the talk will be based on our flagship hit hidden object game seekers notes hidden mystery I hope we try to make talk really interesting and transparent and as possible so it will be more focused on game design yeah so let's get it started sorry where's my okay yeah okay so let me briefly introduce myself my name is Diana and I joined my Tona two years ago as a

business development manager right now I work on seekers notes and some of our new projects one project is coming out next week so stay tuned yeah so I feel super lucky to be working in mobile gaming industry it's been really really great two years okay so here is what exactly I'm gonna talk about I will introduce you my tone on who we are and what we do then I will tell you about seekers notes and then what our current goals for the game and the most important part of the talk is what did we do to make the game successful like that and then I will try to summarize everything and then at the end of the session we will have the Q&A if we have time okay so my Tona we are free to play

a mobile game developer and publisher the company was founded in 2005 by two brothers right now we are more than 230 people and office is located in Yakutsk it's in Russia the northeast part of Russia which is the coldest inhabited place on earth it's actually has crazy weather like four to six months of the winter yeah and we have office in Singapore yeah which is it's not the hottest place on earth but it's pretty hot in there yeah so yeah we're also planning to open offices in some of Southeast Asian countries and other cities in Russia and we have remote work for for some roads okay so the team has over ten years experience in creating hidden object games all these games were really really well developed because we were stuck since the beginning we were really

really focusing on high quality content graphics narrative and etc and these games were premium for PC and released with big-fish games then in 2011 we decided to move to towards free-to-play mobile and after the completion of the whole development process and everything so we created the secret society and since we didn't have any experience in mobile we decided to work together with g5 entertainment and it was published in 2012 so it is indeed one of the first successful hidden object games and it still didn't generating really really good revenue and the game is now five years old it's pretty stable among like top 6070 grossing games on ipad in US so after that we've got an idea

to make the best hidden object game which would be significantly different and better from others in the market and from our previous ones and we made this seekers notes hidden mystery it was published by us it was our first self-published game it was published in 2015 and right now according to the top charts it's the most successful hidden object game in in the u.s. it's doing really well in other Western markets and some numbers you can see in the screen and in this graph you can see how it progressed in last year in blue for iPad you can see that the graph is pretty gradual so you can see that we were improving the game step by step but in red it's the iPhone version it has really sharp graph and I will explain you what did we do to make it to top 57

sorry so what are the current goes for the game we always improve the game we monitor the new technologies and for hidden-object game the most important part at least for our game is the graphics so those things like retina and parallax makes us ensure that players get the most from the game yeah so we always monitor our new technologies and add if it truly fits the game and other thing is we want seekers notes to become a long-term hit and another thing is that hitting object so we always target high and surpassed our talks that's another goal and another thing is we want to make it even better on iphone so right now we already made some UI improvements you can see in before

screen how it was before and we did a lot work a lot on the UI optimization and eventually that's we also did the smaller packaging which we decrease the package to one hundred megabytes and that's how we reach top 57 but of course we work on it more and more all right so this is the most important part of the talk so what to do to make the game successful they are there are two main aspects here it's a game design and game economy for game design hidden-object game starts with deep storyline it is indeed the most important part and then those the storyline has to be well visualized and here the high-res and really really high quality graphics are

the must and then you should never ever stop updating your game so the constant update and content update is what makes the game successful in I think in every case then another important part is game economy I pointed here the balance and offers I'll be talking more about offers today and yeah there's a lot of essential parts of course so some of them I listed here its customer support marketing and tech resource of course motivation of the team and yeah let's move to game design okay so first of all everything started in hidden-object game everything started with deep deep storyline and here is the short description of seekers notes the player awakes up in in the curse city with no way out and he has to help its citizen

to reveal the city from its ancient curse so when a player start to play the game he is the game is capture him into the deep world of the game of the dark wood city he starts to revealing it's exciting plot he start to talking like interacting with every citizen creature and monsters all these people inside the game have their own identity own behavior all those creatures and people interact with each other as well they have some conflicts intrigues etc so basically we emerge people in neverending story book okay so for for the graphics players our players really really

appreciate our graphics and I think that's why they choose our game and the secret of our arts is not only how beautiful is it but it's all about the fantasy of our team so all these like unique monsters and people and citizens they drawn from scratch so and all these important things like locations they also drawn from scratch and new technologies like retina and parallax they make it even better on on devices so another really important part is constant updates and content updates so every month every month we update the game and with every update we renew our quest tree and add 200 quests we so we

have few main storylines and several secondary storylines and we update all of them so we also add one more content location it's a lot of extension we do that because it is unexpectable if there is nothing to do in the game so players can always play but additionally the main feature of every update is a unique event it has separate storyline which doesn't connect with content storyline basically we give some problem to player and he has to solve this problem every every event lasts 28 days and if player complete the whole event it's like 30 quests they help they're revealing together with the plot step-by-step each each event includes

like unique location unique unique monsters we need unique rewards like Maine chess on the table avatars and all these things things are really unique and after you complete the whole event you receive the most desired the world as an avatar and all these things you cannot get anywhere else in the game only only in this event so means like when the event is ending you will not be able to get it anywhere else okay so every event has the location and it's seamlessly added to the game permanently so that's how the event benefits the game it gives you more content basically player enjoy playing and receiving gifts we give additional

go-to players so if they have like a challenges and it makes you your game deeper and eventually KPIs are improving so let's move to the game economy together with the publishing seekers notes we open new departments an analytics team is one of them I always theme is monitoring all the game moments we made our own analytic tool and a/b test system analytics team is focused now on user engagement and user monetization so these are really really important part of the game for engagement we looked at these magical numbers please always remember to look at the first and third day of you it's like the beginning of your game 7 is the first week and you might change something 14 is the middle of the month and 30 is the end of the month so we're also looking not at not only a daily retention but the monthly six months 90

days etc because it's important to take a look at it for the long-term perspective of the game and of course we'll always look at the players behavior from start to end it's important to make it for like for example players who read text demo they they are engaged more with the game okay I have only two minutes left for our monetization side we look at these indicators indicators every everyday moment or the performance of the game okay of course remember that your LTV have to be higher than your capi and for conversion we always use IB test for example for offers the image is the most important part for the offers and here is the example for additional meditation we use offers we target offers by segments special filters so each player

gets the most suitable offer for him like for example they also offers for specific triggers that is like when you run out of the energy you get offered with energetics and when you like lost ten times you get offers with hints okay so also we have special offers for players during the main event and yeah those are like Bank bonus - in apps in the bank and when you buy them the player gets free access to the event location yes so additionally we have special separate special offers who participate in the event and yeah when we added these type of types of offers the bank conversion increased by 15 to 20 percent and offer conversions for from 50 to 75 percent so I guess and I

need to skip this part because I have only 30 seconds left but yeah our customer team customer support team is pretty unique they work 24 hours seven days a week they work really closely with our operational team yeah so they do maximum to solve every issue they talk to every player even if they send some empty messages sometimes that's happening and yeah that's at the end how all the update interation looks like so in four weeks we have to complete all this and yeah we have like there's a lot of a lot of works to do like draw two locations avatars all these rewards and etc so that's why they big the team is quite big all right and yeah here are the numbers which I would like to share with you so overall next week we'll have 49 locations 90 characters now we have already 206

260 thousand words and these numbers keep increasing with every update okay to sum up what to do to make the game successful so the game always starts with the idea so you have to develop your idea and the team it's really important part I didn't tell you a lot about that but we always grow our team inside our company for example our marketing lead is xqa and lead producer also was xqa so we don't look for great people but we create great people and really important part is great marketing of course it's really really important and analytics you should always analyze all the game changes features if you can't analyze it you have to make something and make it analyzable then and another the last most important part is passion for making amazing games ok

thank you and I hope you enjoyed the talk [Applause] yes do you have I didn't even ask the questions and she was already a - in your last slides it seems pretty content heavy yeah / updates and I was wondering what is the size of a gym you have in house and do you even work with outsourcers to be able to full of a content pipeline no it's all made in-house for outsourced of course we use like localization companies like audio music companies but the team currently is like I think 60 people yeah so yeah but everything beside like localization and music is

all made in-house more questions hey thanks for the talk I wanted to ask you said that you contributed your some of your success to decreasing the size of the application to under 100 megabytes yeah how did you measure that like was it just the update with only this change or how do you know that this had an effect because that's actually something that is often discuss in my company and there's you know a lot always a lot of controversy around this ok so basically you mean why did we discrete decrease the build packaging right well I know that it has something to do with the user acquisition so if the build package for iPhone is lower it's easier for user acquisition side that's what I can say

so when you change the size of the application the new so mmm better acquisition no yes exactly [Music] [Music]