How Hyper Hippo's Live Ops Operations Maintain its Success in Different Cultures and Locales

[Music] hello everyone I am Sam I'm from Canada hi per hippo I'm CEO and co-owner of hyper hippo entertainment it I left Canada yesterday morning it's 8:30 in the morning there so I'm ready for breakfast so who wants to go for breakfast let's do it I'm thrilled to be here today in fact a little bit of a world of opportunity and I'm learning a lot at Pocket Gamer I don't know are you learning Lots going around through the different sessions I'm personally learning Lots and the reason I come to Pocket Gamer as well as

other places is because to learn about what's going on in the world I find it tough to do unless you actually go there and so it's powerful to come here and I I actually find it an honor to be a part of our industry because I think our industry is a pretty cool thing we're in the entertainment industry and I think the entertainment industry has something really unique because in the entertainment industry I think we actually get to affect the hearts of people and it's more than just playing a game sometimes it's like you really can impact the life of a person and so it's an honor it's an honor to do what we do and that's what we talk about when we talk about hyper hip about connecting people around the world we really think that there's a fundamental difference when people have common understandings and common ideals and common interests and that's something that we can do we can do they do a games replayed just for the everywhere around the world so what a cool opportunity we have so our

company was kind of was born out of has a background and sort of pedigree in children's entertainment probably 20 years or so ago we were the team was doing live ops at a time that nobody knew what live ops was live ops was something that came about later but it started out with the snowball fight on on online and it was very popular with kids and that snowball fight changed every week it changed every week and every week something new happened in that snowball fight and it became this world called Club Penguin Club Penguin was something that then grew to 300 million kids playing regularly on these set of Saturday morning cartoons number of different things and that's all because you just had new things coming out all the time and that's what we talked about with live ops so that's kind of some of the pedigree and then

after going through some of those things live ops became sort of a core tenant of everything and then what our team was doing it was very very core to what we were doing and from there we've started to develop a another core tenant which is in the global so that's why we're talking today about a world of opportunity and so we started building other types of games and one of the things we stumbled across was when we were trying new games was a game that somebody came up with that I really didn't think was a very good idea and the only problem was is that the players did and so we started out with this game and it started and it was like I really didn't quite get the the purpose of the game when the game designer pitched it but the more that we had people playing this game the more we learned that people liked it and then we updated it and then we updated it and then we updated it and for the last five years we've been updating this game and if you were to play this game today it's different than the game you played five years ago but we're getting close to I

think we're approaching close to 70 million people who have played this game so adventure capitalists is something we're proud of it's something that has grown and done a great job one of the challenges that we've had in in venture capitalists is that the vast majority of our players are in four countries english-speaking North American UK and Australia so that's why global is becoming such an important part for us is we have to figure out how to do that do that better so yes building a global strategy that's what I'm here to talk about a fight you want the 30 seconds man this is what I'm gonna talk about over the next few minutes is just get really good at something find some good people to do it with find some great global partners and then and then go for it so [Applause] I'll skip through some of this but basically this was on a trip to China recently I was going to I was going to

China and it was interesting to me that we were going to I flew for for 10 hours from Vancouver to Peking Beijing and I probably covered a hundred thousand people when I flew across that there was nobody there was nobody there but what what this is something that I showed our team when I was flying from how how you can have a difference in perspective because here's flying from Seoul to Delhi and when I was on the flight from Seoul to Delhi and I took this picture from the you know this is the map in the front of the seat in front of you ever seen those in the airplanes you know you see your map this is the map and it struck me when I saw this and it's like wow there's half the world's population on this map most of those people have never played our game most people never heard of it talk about opportunity there's a world of opportunity so I stole something from new zoo here and I was listening to them this morning and they were updating this and I was pleased to hear that their 20/20 information actually reflects what

I thought it would say and is is that basically North America where we do a lot of our games is staying it's growing but not near as fast as the other areas of the world we look at China we look at the Asian markets we look at the European East Africa Latin America that's where a large part of the growth is coming from in our company we haven't got it all figured out the majority of our our players majority of our audience the majority of our revenue comes out of the North America area we're missing a whole bunch why are we not doing more so let's figure out how to do that team that's what we're working on the 2020 basically says that the new zoo report says that the growth is growing in those other areas as I said that's what I would have thought you traveling and seen different places that's exactly what is the reports tend to be showing a huge opportunity for us our team is spending a lot of time now thinking about what are the growth areas outside of our existing markets when you take a

look at some of the simple things who are the big Giants in the world where they were this is data from new zoos and on mine but it's where's the new opportunities and when you look at that we have like the United States which is the majority of our market 80% penetration and smartphones how many new users you're coming on it's compared to where some of the other markets are there's there's growth and you know in the global markets that's why we're talking about global LiveOps now just as you know as an anecdote places like India I spent time with the Google the people in charge of Google over in India they tell me that they have 20 million new users coming to the Google Playstore every month and you think about what that means when they come every month 20 million new users I come from Canada where it's taken 10 years to get like 10 million and now they get 20 million in a month

most of I've never played a game before what does that mean to the way that things happen so there's a lot of opportunity out there and for us we're looking at being active in in those top three markets within heavily within the next two years so and we have a lot of friends from Brazil as well when we look at Brazil because Club Penguin was very popular we had a lot of Club Penguin friends in Brazil still are so opportunities from the global side so I'm just giving sort of a perspective of there's something about going global now this is just our an embarrassing thing to say but it's true is that you know you think it's just how hard can it be you know because we live in a digital world we we we build make our builds we put them out it goes global you hit that little checkbox on the on the app stores and your global right oh well you know what what we're finding out is that it's complicated

there's there's a lot to it I grew up in a time doing business for 30 years that I always always think that people emulated the business leaders who could say here's something really complicated I'm gonna make it into a simple statement and this is what it is and so we went through I go through all of that and I spend all this time and I'm hitting a brick wall because now I'm getting into this this for the first time in my life looking at things and it's complicated and I can't put it into a simple statement it's complicated so when you get into this if you're gonna go global which I'm encouraging you it I don't know how many of you were go Clark global now like how many of you are are developing games who how many are developers tella purse yes how many of you have games in North America how many games in Asia how many of games in Africa we all have opportunity so good for you Middle East big area wrong so all I want

to do today was just give some really simple things to think about after about being complicated and because it's so complicated I think it's fair to say that this is not something that you should try to do alone we really strongly have learned that having good people that's that's our strategy going forward is having good people around the world we're not going to know how to do it all ourselves so coming up with those trusted partners that you need you can see some of the things that need to be taken care of that I tell you you travel and you find out about monetization strategies never heard it before like some things I never never thought the complication of payment systems Wow you can spend hours and hours and hours on these things but anyway all I'm saying is is that if there's great opportunities and going global we think that there's great

opportunities in going global we're we're doing our best I'm not saying we figured it all out but there's no way that I would dare try that if I was gonna do it on my own so having the trusted partners going with the because it's so complicated the more that we can unify our back-end systems the front ends the front ends can change I talked to different game developers and they just have their games and you know the front-end changes the colors changes there's localization there's all those types of things they can change those things one way they can change them back they can change it one way they can change them back but when you get into the data and you get into the backend you can't change a one way and change it back so the more you can do your analytics the more you can do your back-end the more you can have that at all together it's hard we're trying to figure it out can't say we figured it all out but it but we're trying to figure those type of things out the third thing I say is be focused the the biggest thing that I

think we can do wrong is underestimate how hard it is to be the best in the world in something and to be that best in the world like in anything holy cow that that's an a major accomplishment if we can do that and we were we were trying to do too many things and so we were trying to do too many things too many genres too many different ways of doing things so for us it's like we need to be more focused and we've started being more focused we probably need to be more focused still it's still it's still going to be a challenge and so coming back find out what you're really really good at and then when you find out what you're really really good at then take that out onto the global stage because it's huge out there I mean the world of opportunity it's really it's really quite amazing and so some of these things I'm not reading the slides because I think you know hopefully some of them are straightforward but some of

the things that are important that like you example leverage the power of the big voice we've got hope we got displays out here from Microsoft Amazon firebase these are people who are really really good at what they do and those are things that well at least for people like us I don't know about you but for us those are the things that we have to depend on because if we try to reinvent the wheel and all those things not gonna work what do we find working closer together with them that's how we can open up doors do a lot of things that they're still learning to like they're really learning to so this is one area where you can as a developer spend time you can learn from them they could learn from you the more you get together with them the more you're gonna get their support and the more you get their support it's kind of surprising what type of opportunities can open up so that's just sort of a free financing type tip on developing just some quick things just some notes

[Music] you know I talked about you know we're Canadians I think it's really cool Sean's down here he runs one of the studio in Vancouver you walk into a studio and you hear so many yeah wave you should dance he's smarter than me so he actually should be up here and he agrees but the the it's wonderful when you walk in and in a place like North America you don't have this as often but you hear a bunch of languages how many languages eight languages nine languages in your studio yeah in North America that's unusual when you go to the studios in Asia that's it's more unusual in Europe I imagine you hear it all the time so but the cultural awareness is something that if you take back into your studio we need to do more of this this is the these are challenging things that we don't fully understand you know when I

started communicating with China on WeChat don't use the thumbs up when you're saying good job because it's not what I thought it said when you're in South America don't be a rock star because it means something totally different than what we're used to in some of our own hometowns so be culturally aware know what that is and bring that in because LiveOps means that your constantly talking with your players it means you're constantly updating things and you have to be in communication with them and if you're communicating the wrong things to them well this matter how good your game is if you just told them to hmm they're not coming back so cultural awareness something we need to do more of and so encourage that brands is something that we really focus on I mean brands is something that is more than the game brand is something that goes more we firmly believe the brands are the most

valuable asset here in your studio obviously the people but for the long-term business valuation and such like that the brands are what the people the people are building so those brands can stay but then you're gonna have games that are gonna come around you can you can amend those brands on to fit the local market we're looking at how other platforms other than games as well because if you look at particularly at younger demographics what we're finding and looking at the demographics globally is that younger demographics are spending a lot more time on non game functions sure they're playing games no doubt about it but if you go to the gen Z's and you and younger they're spending more time on social platforms and such like that than they are on the game platforms know where I have historically so that's really all I wanted to kind of talk about today just really encourage

it's like this is something we haven't figured out and if it's something that you're learning about and we can talk more about I'd love to learn from what you're doing too this is something that is gonna keep me probably in gross for the rest of my business career so it's it's not it's not gonna be an easy quick fix or anything that's done and we're looking at boy how we can all have an impact like I said entertainment with video games we have such an opportunity to have an impact on our cultures and our people around the world and and so so if we can learn together and share this is this is why we're here so thanks very much I'm glad you're here [Applause]

[Music]