How PlayRaven is working with CCP and Improbable to create next-gen MMO experiences in mobile

[Music] [Music] what anybody listening to my presentation in Helsinki in the autumn anybody yep couple of guys okay so I was talking about working with big partners and I basically couldn't say anything because we hadn't announced any partners so there's a difficult talk to have back at that time this time around I wanted to you know repay payback for that and just put it in the title we're working with CCP and improbable there it is and I guess the the time is creating next-gen mobile memos we're going to talk about that why we working on a

memos and why with these partners and what's what's the whole partnership about but first of all I'm lost as a parent welcome to this session I work in games for 20 years now I started as a game designer ended up a CEO it's not much of an improvement I don't get to do any of the fun stuff anymore but my career has basically been about an ambition to create new things to push the industry forward I worked in both mobile and triple-a and for instance I worked six years at remedy entertainment heading as executive producer a project called Alan Wake one of a games that had an original angle to it and that had a long tail of sales and I've been always fascinated with that long tail of sales with an original game but without further ado let's talk about

play Raven a little bit so we are based in Helsinki this is our fifth anniversary we're about to have a fifth birthday party very soon end of this month and we're based in Helsinki over the rooftops there as you can see very comfy with the triple a mobile background like me but there's also many other people there who have worked in both worlds we released three games we were focused on MMOs right now these are the titles we have released so far so from 2014 to 2016 we launched three games and I like to think of this as the maturing of our company so we started from a relatively naive new guy you know new company new team so awesome we get to do whatever we want sort of an approach and we made a game that was pure single-player hit

top-five strategy in more than 100 countries but we were not really happy with the long tail then we made a couple of other games where Rob aside hit number one strategy in the u.s. 41 countries in total number one took five in more than 100 countries again and we interstate more than 100 countries top 5 and these games had multiplayer in them but we still were had a sudden a significant single-player aspect to these games and again we saw improvement but we were not happy with you know we thought you know we are we are breaking new ground for sure we have fans really loved these games but it's just not you know having that long tail that we want so a year ago live it over a year ago we made this big shift in strategy and decided ok let's leave single-player alone let's just get rid of it altogether let's focus on multiplayer social this is really our approach now our mission has always been to discover

the next big thing in mobile we don't do we don't work on derivatives like a 10% better clash of clans whatever that would mean our ambition is to create something like coca-cola when it entered the market it wasn't a mix of strawberry soda with lemon soda so if you mix a couple of best-selling sodas you get the next best selling soda no rather you would work on an original formula but you would test the formula so what Pemberton who invented coca-cola did he would go back and forth the soda fountain we had where he had actual customer and his own basement where he could remix his soda and he would test with actual customers until he got it right and he created a new category of soda it's not a variant of strawberry or lemon or any other soda that's really the ambition we have can we make something like that a game which then

spawns a whole category and other developers will want to work in that category the way we're approaching this lofty mission is focusing on MMOs or social experiences and a very important key thing that we added a year ago is we are working with partners and external ip's where it makes sense for that mission so once again making various IP based games that would be lets say a reskin of an existing game to an IP wouldn't be a really a good match with our culture and our team whereas an ambitious partner that wants to break new ground with their IP would be the ideal partner for us so of course once we had made that decision we would have to do a lot of this just going to events like Pocket Gamer talking to a lot of

people and seeing who shares that ambition who wants to go the extra mile find a new thing and one place where we really of course immediately resonated very well was CCP CCP very famous for EVE Online a unique game there is no other we won't read the stories about the backstabbings the CFO stealing all the money from the corporation but it's a desktop game and we wanted to create something new inspired by EVE Online so we talked with CCP and came up with a concept that they liked and which is breaking new ground while being set in the EVE Online universe it's a really an

amazing opportunity like once in a lifetime thing it is the first time when CCP has worked with an external developer and for us it's an amazing opportunity to create something into a such a well known universe with creative license so that we don't have to just play safe every single angle we already tested this you remember the inventor of coca-cola tested with the real people so in October when we announced the smiths acp at Eve Vegas a big fan event where we have a thousand even line sort of the most active hardcore players the went on stage and together with CCP's producer we announced the game that was I gotta say a little bit stressful moment you know PC gamers and mobile games don't always mix well but it went really well

and the thing we did was surprise them we told them that they can try the game themselves all they have to do is open their email and install you know click on the link and install in their own phone and this was a pre-alpha of the game it's a scary scary proposition for any developer hey let's just expose our pre-alpha to the actual cost customers I don't know if it's scales I don't know if it works you know it's gonna crash it's not gonna be fun whatever but we got really really good engagement metrics and I'm super happy we did this and maybe with some other partner we wouldn't have been able to do this but CCP and us we were aligned but we have to put this to the people we have to get the feedback we have to understand if we're going in the right direction with this game and I think that the metrics really proved our direction and we come a come a come some

distance from that moment now but if I just tell you a few basic things about the game as much as I could share right here these are from the pre-alpha by the way the the one we had in Las Vegas these screenshots so I wanna stress that they are not final quality by a long shot but you basically have a space station of your own that's a key difference to EVE Online even in EVE Online you have a spaceship that you pilot you might have multiple spaceships but you always pilot a spaceship you don't pile up the spaceship at all in this game it's an entirely different game set in the same universe inspired by the emotions created by EVE Online and here you can produce various things materials and so on resources but most importantly spaceships you can have your own little fleet of spaceships this is the star map so here you can see all these little things they're not really

visible back there but they're all space stations so there are players and it's an MMO it's a social MMO we don't leave anybody behind so we made sure that everybody joins a corporation when they click play so they're part of a guild which is called a corporation in the game and they already have multiple enemy corporations in the vicinity so there is a need to coordinate with fellow players there are there are many things you can do on your own of course mining little asteroids and so on but really the important things and the big payoff things like mining whole moons require you to work together with the other players in your corporation and moon drilling is a good example of an activity where it's beneficial for a lot of corporation maids to to join and drill the same moon but also it makes

them vulnerable it's an easy target for rival corporations to attack so then you might go into a little bit like a rolls that hey why don't you guys defend the moon while we mine it and maybe we do something else to divert their attention at the same time and then finally if you look at just a visual look we've added more color we've simplified some of the designs mobile users users we feel and the glossy screens that use outdoors and so on instead of a dark dungeon where you've drawn down the curtains as old you need to have certain design the changes made to the just to the look so all in all it's it's pretty amazing to be working on this game and we don't we don't have a set launch date that I could share here but stay tuned for news they're coming in the near future also I'm going to touch on our other

partnership that we announced in December this one is trickier to share because we haven't announced the game so I'll just have to leave you guessing a little bit but it's called project Metro and we are working with improbable the technology company they did raise some money last year I don't know if anybody heard about it what did they raise anybody 500 million yeah sounds about right yeah so they are building this little technology called special OS and it's a fascinating fascinating thing our ambition really is this we are the first developer on mobile who wants to work on special OS and that's why we we felt that we want to reach out improbable and work together with them and they felt the same way that it's beneficial for them to have a partner who is an actual game developer

I can't really talk about the game itself but I can talk about the potential of the technology so if you are not very familiar with spatial always the idea is that it's a cloud technology that allows for massive scalability basically you can put all your players all your assets all your buildings whatever you have in your game in a single sharded MMO and this means that you can make player run worlds that have actual simulated economies or activity loops and so on if you compared to something like a traditional MMO like let's say world of warcraft it's heavily scripted it's almost like a single-player scripted experience that you can share that somebody else is doing the same scripted experience next to you but what's special always promises is this massive massive scale

where you can put all the players all the activities everything in one world and essentially that's what EVE Online is in its own way on desktop persistence is another very important key thing so if you play a traditional MMO if you kill an orc the system has to get rid of that body has to disappear because there's not gonna be any chance of keeping all the persistent information stored somewhere there's just not enough space there anywhere special aura solves this problem and of course for us it's a fascinating possibility and then finally simulation so they allow for simulating putting a lot of a lot of simulated objects in the game so let's let me just give you a simple example this is not from our game because we haven't announced it so I can't really share that but massive scale let's think about a vast vast fantasy world covered in

forests now putting the players they can cut down the trees they can make warships out of them now those cut down areas are going to remain cut down until the simulation Ceylan at some point they're gonna start growing but all that wood that you gathered it's gonna continue its way in the ecosystem so that warship you know it might come into a battle with a lot of other warships and eventually it's gonna get destroyed maybe it's a shipwreck on the beach but still you might be able to use it you take that wood and you use it to make whatever like firewood or anything like that and then imagine the possibilities for the game game developer if you want to create big events in the world how about a forest fire if you unleash forest fires in the world where the economy is heavily based on the this would cycle

thing it's just creating experiences that are pretty much impossible with the sort of person permanent day they like a scripted normal old-fashioned ways of working of course it's challenge is on mobile we just can't expose the player to all the complexity that you might be able to get away with on PC or or a desktop or even a console so we got to make sure that all of this doesn't interfere with this very simple usability experience that you can get in you can get out quickly you don't have to worry about it too much but then again the simulation is gonna be running in the background while your way things will happen and that's part of the magic you want to go back there see what's happened finally so those were the partnerships we have right now of course we're looking into other things as well we are always always looking for the

next big thing and the couple of things we're looking into right now in more like an R&D mode is geolocation and AR think about Pokemon go it's a has been a very successful game however the technology and the capabilities in terms of geolocation and they are they're quite rudimentary at the moment it's very inaccurate and the promise of the next generation what are we gonna have in let's say two years we've been talking to tech companies that are working in this area and we think we can get to persistent indoor environments we can get a very precise positioning of objects there's some magic tricks that can be done in that area and even if not all these dreams become true in two years some of them will and some of them will be integrated into the platforms so what we're looking into right now is not what we would do with the current generation

of AR and geolocation but what we would do with the next generation and that's a very very fascinating area because if you have that precise positioning and precise reading of the geometry of these areas like this then you can build a or experiences that are seamless with the real world you could put objects in this room and they would be just a natural part of it and maybe even difficult to locate or see them unless you know what you're looking for it depends on the game that you're building now of course the other thing that we are very much fascinated with is blockchain so everybody's heard of crypto currencies that's one aspect of blockchain but for us it's really a question of what's the frontier what's the what kind of game experiences can we

create that would be a category creating new kind of experience and I have to say today was the first time I was having a business meeting first time somebody from the other side at the table said so we're really interested in blockchain do you have any ideas you know that's just the way it is it is coming one way or another and we have some people looking indeed as well let's see you know you cannot look at many ideas to come up with one good one so that's where we are and I gotta say it's super exciting time to be a game developer in this space when I was starting out 20 years ago I can imagine anything like the blockchain let alone you know being able to position anybody anywhere on the globe and put some game assets into that environment so yeah it's a great time for all of us thank you any questions

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