How to bag an IP like Rick and Morty and deliver a killer game

[Music] hi everyone thanks coming my name's Dave I'm VP and co-founder out of studios and I'm gonna talk a little bit about working with IP and namely you have to pick an IP some techniques of winning that IP and then going forward to making a game and making of it and yeah go forward so who are big pixel so big pixel we found in 2009 myself and Paul Varun or I can see over there and James Harkins we all nee and set up big pixel in 2009

we've partnerships over the years with Disney Marvel wine candy and Adult Swim so we've worked on a bunch of different IPs some small some big we released Rick and Morty pocket Morty's in 2016 so it's been out for a few years now we continue to develop it we do live up so we update it every every week with new content and every month or soldiers so it's an ongoing project for us and we're acquired by Turner March last year so Turner of the parent company that own Adult Swim who owned the Rick and multi IP hopefully if what commodious because it's quite hard to explain Rick and Morty say yeah what do we do so essentially we make now Rick multi mobile games so as I say we work on Pocket Maltese and there's lots of new and exciting things coming as well with new projects and that's the main focus for our studio so why go the IP route so

someone pointed out to me before that not everyone knows what IP stands for which is which I should probably point out is intellectual property so it's a known brand or something that's out there that someone else's property usually that you're going to use so yeah it could be a TV show it could be a film it could be a musician it's something that you're gonna utilize there's potentially not yours one of the biggest benefits is you've got an existing fan base so you know kind of you can work out roughly how many downloads you're gonna get if you do a bit of research so you know what your kind of bottom line is the kind of the flip side of that is there's also sometimes a ceiling so if you've got a I P that's a bit out there that's quite hard for someone to explain if they haven't seen the TV show then it might be hard to get new players in who don't know right p is cheaper user acquisition so you a prices

continue to go up what you'll find is if you put an ad out with a known IP then hopefully it brings your CPI cost down which can head off for a marketing and other support from the IP holder as well so a lot of times you'll get insights to what's going on in that world if there's new movies or new things going on that you can get on the back off with marketing and you could I P holders can also sometimes offer you different marketing channels so that I have their own use groups and their own Twitter and their own Facebook and everything so they can push you through that we're lucky with Turner and Adult Swim here a TV channel in America that we can actually get spots in America so it's great for us to use IP with a bigger IP holder because they can help us in other marketing initiatives which is what I've just talked about publisher connections so there are a lot of IP holders out there he publishes Adult Swim games is a publisher but there are other IP holders

that are not but what they can do is hook you up with very good publishers so you may be a development studio you want to work with an IP the IP holder want you to work with them there's a funding issue but you don't got a publisher or a marketing issue or you a so they can very often hook you up with very good publishers and marketing insights I spoke a little bit about this but they can you know IP holders hopefully will know their IP very well they'll know their audience very well and how we have to guide you on what that audience wants out of a game and they also be able to give you some good research on territories and languages and all these sorts of things you can get a lot so you can make sure your target in your game so we move on to choosing an IP so one of the big questions we ask is are we passionate about the IP that we're working with and this is a big deal with games you know become an Orion development as I say pocket Morty's been up three years now we developed it for a

nearly a year before that so we're a full four years where we're dedicated our studio to Rick and Morty so luckily we're all big fans but if we were not big fans that would be a problem so make sure you're passionate either you're going to work with is it saturated I use spongebob as an example here but there are a lot of other games that are quite saturated if you search the App Store are you going to get a hundred competitors because what you'll find is you're sometimes your biggest competitor a different game with your IP how big is a super fan following so this comes back to sort of Wales you know there are a lot of IPs out there that a very well-known and may have huge numbers in terms of audience size but what you really are looking for on top of that our passionate fans fans that are willing to really invest time and money into that IP just because they love the IP and you can look at different things you can look at social media you can just you know build a spreadsheet put load of IPT you want to

work with in the spreadsheet and go through to different social channels and see what the numbers are see how much chat there is on discord all those sort of things to do a lot of research there but that will give you a snap you really want is a trend you want to see where is the IP going so you know is the IP dying is it doorman and flatline or is it actually about to blow up so you want to try and pick a trend and trying to get IP that's on the way up rather than flat book so one thing I hope you can read that one thing that I have used and we've used as studio as a pass which is cheap it's free in fact you can just go on google and type in Google Trends and you can start putting in different search terms and you eat what the activity is of those different terms that you put in so here's an example I put American Dad versus Bob's Burgers and you can see that you know five years ago there was quite a big and American that was there was a lot more

activity going on with just people searching for that term but as time went on they started to converge so American dad probably is a much more well-known with a bigger audience but in terms of the activity going around the two IPs you can see that they're getting quite close and and if you went to someone like Fox I don't know but you might be able to discuss a better deal for something like Bob's Burgers than you would for American or as America that already has games out there you can kind of carve a niche on something that potentially has got just as much activity around it if I put Rick and Morty on here you'll see the different trends and you know it makes it quite obvious what's going on with the Ricker multi IP from the fan base side say season 1 you can see like a small spike there this is season 2 this is season 3 there's a pre spike because first they released the first episode early as an April Fool's joke and then they release

the rest of season 3 there so what we can see there is each season the trend goes up and the other interesting thing here is when you look at season to the baseline before is lower than after season 2 so we can work out from that that each season or at least season 2 and season 3 that the audience grows so it's not just the same audience that spikes every time there's a new season were actually are in new fans to that IP so this looks like a good idea to work with John wick one of my favorite pieces John wick and we looked at it a few times and a lot of people in a studio liked it as well so I thought it and just see what's going on with John wick so you can see a spike there where the first movie came out you can see a much bigger spike there when John wick chapter 2 came out and they've announced and also released a trailer I think last week for John week John wick so yeah who knows where

it's going to be but it's a great example of an IP that's trending upwards and would be potentially good on to work with I think so you've done a bit of research you've worked on my piece you want to target so how did you now go about it so how did you go to that IP holder and target and try and win the win the pitch so one of the biggest things is do they know and trust you so have you got a proven track record and it doesn't have to be made yeah I've made a bunch of games with different IPS they've all been super successful a big pixel we've had a lot of success of the back of games that we've made that were not financially successful but they got us a lot of credibility and yeah it shows that we've got a proven track record of a certain quality bar and pretty much every game that we made on our own IP ended up getting us a partnership or a work-for-hire opportunity on out of this so this is another big question there's lots of different ways you can you can cut a

deal when you're working with IP so it could be purely work for hire you can have a revenue share you could be looking for recognition to raise the profile of your studio or you could look in for that UA and that marketing support so it's important to know what you as a studio or you and your publisher want out of this deal and it could be a mix of all these things but there's different ways to go about it and then talk a little bit about the pitching process so the main thing is to keep it brief and simple so what I'd recommend is don't go with a full you know 70 page game design doc as your first sort of foray into this focus on the premise and the up so yeah we kind of you know I'll show you a picture in a minute but you know don't assume that the people you are showing it to you're gonna use their imagination and look at your mock-ups and say well yeah by the time I know that's going to be much better so

spend a lot of time on your artwork and make it as polished as possible include references to mechanic so another tip keeping things simple is if your game is like another mechanic just say it's like that mechanic don't describe something that already exists out there go easy on the puns and in jokes so especially when you work with you know an IV like rhythm or D or some in comedy bass it's very easy to stick a load Oh what's up for your pitch dick but you know it might not impress people too much and make sure your pitch works without you so in an ideal scenario you're there in person you've got your pitch you've prepared your you know going through your your slides but and a lot of the time that you actually just send a PDF and you don't hear back from anyone six months and then you do hear back and it's gone for a chain of all sorts of different people from traders to business people to artists so make sure your pitch works without you you might not be there to present it and think I'm going to talk

about next is autonomy so this is great time to try and judge how much autonomy you're going to get with the IP and that's a very important thing so here it should we sent for pocket Morty's one as you can see it's just two pages it's got some blurb about the premise of the game it's got some bullet points of what the key features are in the game and it's got some artwork there that James our creative director put together I don't know if you've paid pocket motors before I've seen it but it's not that different so they artwork there and this was really the first you know thing that we sent anybody's they it did changes we went on but we were not relying on the people were pitching it to to use too much imagination so we're going to talk about autonomy and sign up so what is autonomy essentially autonomy is you know giving you ownership to do not what you want with the IP but trusting you to not have to get every little thing signed up can be a real killer for your game

if you know we've got 315 Maltese in our game if we had to get everyone signed off we wouldn't have got anywhere so we we were lucky we got a lot of autonomy of the IP but there are some tips to try and win that autonomy sure your IP holder other people you're working with they're on board of this they understand why if you're getting every little thing signed off you get you potentially you might end up with a game that's more on brand but it might be a worse game and spend that time it's right in and working on its design get sign-off early so don't wait until the end and then give it to the IP holder and then say oh no I don't like any of it so make sure you've got really good points along and you can put these in your contract make sure you're getting sign-off so there's less chance of having to go back and rework things stay away from heavy canon and story so it's very tempting to say well doing a game for a film that's coming up I want to see this game for the film story and we're gonna try and

build that story into the game as much as possible that's a sure way of losing a lot of autonomy because your your plane with something it's very precious to the crater's so one tip of god is to try and make a spin off easy on Cannon and pick an art style that's different so I've got some examples of this but yeah you know if the show or the IP you're working with has a very specific art style it'd be useful to go a completely different direction so there's less route comparison there for the IP holder and the traitors to pull apart so I've got some examples so Rick and Morty the creators and Adult Swim in general opens working with you know different people and they've done shorts they've done games they found comics they've done a lot and what you'll find is the art style changes quite drastically between all these and I think that helps these creators and these spin-offs win all so this is pocket Morty's versus they didn't change

much from the original but you can see that the actual characters in the game are very small like we don't have to go into in-depth conversations with like you know how many fingers are on each character cuz you can't see how many fingers say yeah there's one or over some autonomy there we've also worked with Marvel in the past so this is Thor and we worked on the Avengers game and Captain America as well and you can see for those games we chose a pixel art style to try and difference from the live-action or comic books or anything else that went on in the Marvel Universe and that helped us win some autonomy Rick amore as a save words of different creators before so this is Rhonda jaws so you can see these Aquino had written water in it or featured Rick and Morty and they went for a very different art style this is Bush whenever everyone seen Bush world but you should check it out it's very funny it's a short made by an Australian animator and again our star this is virtual reality which is

the 3d psvr and yes and different platforms again very different art styles to the show and Paul Robertson has done some shorts you can watch Adult Swim's YouTube channel and again they've got for pixel art style so there's less opportunity there to go back and forth through the craters moving on to delivery I think my final bit and so why don't you want to do although you want to try and make a spin-off and try and separate yourself from from the main cannon you want to make sure that you're you're aligned with the core pillars and ideas of the IP so you don't go too far astray that said don't be scared to add new content just make sure that it sits well with the IP and that you're not doing something that the fanbase essentially wouldn't react very well to know the Europeans a lot of research in

truth when we start talking about rekha more to these we didn't know what rekha Mori was and so we did an awful lot of research obviously we watched season 1 that was out but we went and watched a lot of stuff that the creators had made before and we we tried to learn as much as possible fan theories are great as well go I'm ready look at fan theories lurking the fan base figure out what excites the audience you know what are they into while they follow in a pee what characters they like the most these are all things that you can focus on when you come to make your game I can't read that ensure the game mechanics fit the IP say yeah there's different game mechanics out there you know don't go for the one that you think's gonna make the most money go for the one that you think is gonna fit the IP because you want to make that whole experience work together and it could be quite jarring if you've got a mechanic that just doesn't make any sense heat

and that's it all I've left say is we are hiring so I just want to plug these positions we have a booth over in the expo feel free to come and say hello and that is the big pixel team thanks very much [Music] you