How to choose the right partner to make your game a success

[Music] I think it's important thing we've talked a lot about monetization which was a lot about you know discovery with all sorts of techniques but it all comes down to working with the right partners so I think it's an important thing we should recut recap regularly here are a bunch of people I suppose it to a certain tenor you can include me with my unity hound as well and we're going to talk about kind of why you know people should be very careful about how their shoes the right partners and what they should do to prepare themselves for it let's start by introducing each other you all know introduce yourself I'm you know I look after I look after sales are marketing for get social and we are a tech platform that helps developers with morality engagement and community so you can focus on building a great game and not everything around it hi everyone I'm Jason Iran marketing at app lyft app lyft is a mobile ad tech

company we have a programmatic media buying platform called dated of 360 where we help advertisers launch grow and retain users prior to appt lift I worked at agree and at game insight so a couple of Studios familiar names okay hello I'm Jamie and business development at game sparks and gang sparks is at back end platform for game developers that allows you to build Oh all your multiplayer features all your social features of your game really easily really efficiently and basically bring your game to launch and manage the game after launch a very very easily so yeah hi everyone copy from app next apnic's is a mobile app discovery platform that helps developers monetize and reach new audiences we have over 45,000 developers thousands of advertisers any given point hi everyone I'm Anna from Appa do we make intelligent and mediation and we

give you access to certify most productive let network in the market and fopen exchanges and it is B and fall of these you will have only one account and one is the Cape integration cool so these are our partners and we've got to try basically think about what it is for these guys in the audience and how they're going to work with you so let's not like buying what do you look for in terms of a client you know what will make it easier for you to give value to your end clients but what is are you looking for from them what about more weather so because the main the main things we focus on our variety and engagement so we have a platform called smart invites that allows you to invite players into your game through Facebook we chat kick in line anything outside of the the standard facebook notifications in an email so what we're looking for when we're when we're talking to these clients is having a clear idea of how you're going to implement this and having also taking ownership of the

implementation so not just taking our UI which is my intention extremely ugly because we want you to make your own so we help developers having a clear idea and then bring that through to implementation making sure that it looks as if it's a native part of the game basically we don't want people to know that you're using us it sounds a little bit like comment that was made earlier today about kind of monetization as I so kind of basically having people consider the the way they're going to use these tools as part of the integrated design process absolutely guess you're having any sort thoughts what we're looking for in advertisers is someone who's actually looking for like a partnership you could do you a a couple different ways you can do a short burst or something like that but for us we are trying to look at the entire life cycle of a nap so launching an app growing and then ultimately when some you just fall off we also do reengagement right so and we're looking for a partner who actually will communicate with us talk to us exactly what part of their app is you know key

metrics is and how we can re-engage the user what parts of the apps are actually pure KPIs that we can actually optimize your a paid you a campaign so more and more like a long-term partnership is what we're looking for so sounds like someone who really understands that they're making a service not just a throwaway product exactly yeah cougar came to the service that's something you guys think about a lot Jamie and give any thoughts as well yeah so am I would always think that a good parent or somebody who makes your life easier you also would make their life easier and just going forward and you're reducing the difficulty in getting a product out on the market also generating revenue because that's the goal right you want you want to make money so a good partner in my opinion is someone who can help you do that and and and just reduce the barrier to entry that you would have had before and that's what we try and do with developers we have a tool that allows them to reduce the development time and reduce their costs for for ongoing management of servers for example and that's what we look for in

other partners when we partnered with Microsoft we knew straight away that there is going to be really useful for us they're gonna make our lives easier and they're going to spread help spread the word like like we did for them as well so it usual partnerships are obviously great and if you can help each other as much as possible it obviously works better I upon me power that for me is about sort of the consultancy part of its like you you you're an expert in your platform and your platform delivers but you I hope that your your team that you're working with a client company are focusing their expertise on the game experience that they're trying to create for dead players and I think that kind of sense of competence that mutual competence is something kind of important i think you know if you don't know what game you're making and for who how can you make effective use of any partner okay we do have any thoughts I think we try as a self service platform we focus on unveil you so we don't really care who the partners and is as long as it brings the end-user value because we're trying to give them an

offering of new apps to try or re-engage with and the more you're going to finish products if it and then the day it's a real time algorithm and if it interests users they will see it and on the on the supply side you know anyone that has real value real products I talked a bit about my in my presentation before that they actually display the ads so and of course long-term partnerships but you say that I think that's right beside this there are two different ways of approaching it you can have this self-service broke tuning out of this kind of clients in a current partner relationship kind of a way of working but actually you know from what you were talking about it seems like you spend a lot of time trying to make sure that you're providing a lot of information a lot of kind of best practice in the process as well and there's that important the way you engage with people yes definitely we have a nun boarding team that basically will take you even if you're the smallest developer that just launch your app they'll take you through the process of setting up your

campaigns and doing the right things and the right tweaks until they get to a point a small advertiser big advertisers we don't care to they feel comfortable to platform then we let them go and usually we'll see the best results when they're working themselves in the platform trying to do some kind of hacking find what works so we try to combine our tips but let them let them go so I know how do you guys work anymore on the kind of self-service kind of model that Kobe's describing all the more client partner model these other guys in for working with work with us and how should they be prepared to engage with you to be honest tree works only for publishers and developers mama main goal to be good for them or not for your test but last time during this year we make a lot of partnership with advertisers as well because we know that some debt networks have really strong position in some markets yes and to prioritize them in some countries we can engage their really better results for our publishers

and developers in advertises its longtime partnership and we try to make always decay not from BK blah blah yes but the main goal its publishers and have higher CPM if you write for them so it sounds like you you the focus areas are almost like creating layers of scale so happy to have your developers you have your publishers you have your other other kind of partners to help people to self-publishing and then you're kind of getting engaged in that model so you can engage through the whole industry as a whole that's that sounds quite interesting because it's something I don't often think about which is that we're especially if you've seen their grids of different companies working in the ad space it's an incredibly complicated mix and most people in this room don't want to get involved in DSPs and SS peas or whatever the acronyms of today are and actually you need to find your point of contact which allows you to get this resources and scale that you need that you can

afford to deliver on that fair that make sense so let's move on from that so we've now said ok all right these people are going to kind of be prepared they're gonna they're gonna have the up their understanding what they gonna try and do as a game they've set their criteria why should they work with people at yourself and we want what why should they not do it themselves here on Jonah I mean I think there's and this is this is true for any tech I think if you're building something the temptation to build something yourself is always huge and we see that as one of the first things when we when we speak to developers look okay so you have these smart invites you have chat and activity feeds why don't I just build it myself and you know if you if you want and if you have a lot of developers sitting around and do nothing that's a fantastic idea but chances are you're gonna be a small team and you want to focus on what you do best our team does smart invites and chat and activity feeds really really well we spent a lot of time and energy on it why don't you

take advantage of that so that you free up the time of your developers to focus on your core loop and your monetization and things like that that will actually make your game stronger and better instead of focusing on all the stuff or the ancillary stuff around it I mean you're not gonna set up your own ad sales department to do you know what what any of the guys here can do so why would you do that for back-end services I think similarly though maybe even go further if you're making that back-end service you're encountering a number of different scenarios you're making your own you're only dealing with your own scenario you're only your own setup and I think there's something that creates a robustness of software when you've got all these different perspectives that you can bring to play is that it makes it more robust it brings in scale advantages that you wouldn't normally have if you if you're doing it on your own looking at stuff like you know one of the products that we're going into beta with at the end of the year involves machine learning now if you're a smaller developer you might not have

all the data points or enough data points to make sensible decisions from machine learning however if you're working with a platform that aggregates data across many developers all of a sudden there's much more that can be many more learnings that can be had from that data and many more statistically valid learning so you can make so what were future and what's the parallels to that is there I mean it's not is it not Pacific Peter start I presume it's not about building the back end in your context towards it no I mean and so most of our clients we work with they have their own internal mobile growth you a team on it but I guess what partnering with us are a company like ours is about like expertise growth the scale that you're looking in different markets or particular area of expertise like app lyft we kind of made our bread and butter through gaming right work the likes of kings and we've expanded globally so you know you couldn't have your own internal you a team and go direct with some clients but partnering with the company like ours is that about

like the reach and the scale on the expertise understanding where to pull the levers and really how to optimize the big word of fraud is pretty big out there right now I mean fraud has ever persistent in every 1z way campaigns so working with a company who is actually understanding a fraud what that actually looks like on your campaign because if you have your own you a team internally you don't have the resources or manpower to be running campaigns checking fraud checking quality checking roi across the board so partnering with a company like us is about the expertise more than any then like the scale because there are dozens of companies like ours but it's about like what we can gain or what an advertiser even work with us and also vice versa what we can learn about and advertisers their game where they're targeting what areas like why you're soft launching in you know I can in Australia rather than another place right so this is a two-way street that that we're really looking for particularly with the game developers cool Jamie

first I mean I personally think that what games marks what what we're just trying to do is just trying to make a developer's life way easier we want them to focus on the things that are going to make their game great and we've been providing the tools out of the box to do that and we allowed them to focus on on the tweaking of variables just to optimize that one specific part of your game that that may not work with work right in testing so instead of rebuilding the whole back end from scratch when you win it when you even need to start a new game all those tools are already there I did we plugged into your game so what you got to do that from that point it's just it's just make and make a good game and that's well as a platform provider trying to do we want the developers to have the game in their hands and not worry about building servers and maintaining servers if the server goes down they don't have to get up at 6am it or 3am if it goes down we do that for them we got a message straight away and take that right out of their hands and we fix that problem for them it just allows them to focus on making a core game that that's gonna

appeal to the players that they're targeting so that's the real goal for us as a partner with developers we want to just make their lives easier make them focus on making the best game possible by providing a lot of Elder the Box standardized tools that they can customize they're not just you air tools I can just here's a leaderboard just do what we say with leaderboards it's we make a completely flexible that they can't we can change the leaderboards to do what they want to make the game as good as they want it to be so that that would be my mic or point and then perhaps it and again I'm we've had to use you guys first and stuff we want to do the battlekey of rocky and it's because we there it's about taking that anyway and i don't want to have to manage their servers in the morning coke what were you guys how does this this kind of angle work with you so I think but when choosing any partner you have to understand their place in the value chain what are they really bringing is that are they really bringing something unique to the table are they're just

doing some kind of arbitrage on media or anything else so they're bringing their own assets that all night be into the into the process on expertise and I think what makes app Nexus successes that we have a real real value we're bringing in if you're an advertiser you can reach the less unique reach because we have a lot a long tail and mid tail of a small developers is taking our SDK so they can reach that and also for for our developers so we give them in terms of displaying of ads full control they can control who's running on them a lot of flexible tools so really understand where you're working with and another key thing that really makes people love app next is the transparency which is very quite unique in this echo space so you can see as an advertiser exactly where your ads are running so I think for us is trying to continue to bring unique value and develop new products and would that's what we're working on right now I didn't even think transference is going to become a watchword over the next couple years at least thank you and so I know what about

you guys how do you fit into this kind of right model pop ideal it's really easy to explain because it's really powerful product we see a lot of fine house solution about mediation and a lot of companies who come to us after this in-house solution and we know that they face it a lot of problems in this in-house solution they need to integrate several SDKs they have crisis and conflict of them seem to update them tied by time they need to try to reach all statistic in different dashboards in different styles and put it in one table yeah and it's really difficult and as well you need to have strong eh team to analyze all of these lab data of these integrated Ozzie's in so really time consuming when you come to up a deal we solve all your problems about monetization we understand we chat network works better for you we have a lot of expertise we try to help all our developers and truly strong part that we

have really strong support team 24 7 and for all middle size and some big size developers and for small developers we have online chat but for middle size and big size developers we have online skype chat with support engineers real engineers who can help us who can help them all times because how you know if you have several networks certified letters in one time sometimes it's not good ahead sometimes you need to disable some campaigns for something exists you have issues day by day and you need to solve it and it's really cool when somebody solve it for you so and the the title of this talk was how to choose right partners from the start so I got to sort of asked the question about what the start is for you when an office in a realistic way because you know if you think about the beginning of a game project I've got thing about the game I'm gonna think about my design I'm gonna make any money who's gonna give me some money to make

here where we're gonna get staff there's a whole bunch of things I'm have to think about right at the beginning why should I give you my knee share early and how early is useful for you I think it makes a lot of sense not just for from our point of view but for it for any of the partners out there the potential partners out there to give this mindset as early as possible because you know that way you can scope out the differences the different products in the market and you can figure out what's the best fit for your game so if you're looking for you know an ad mediation platform or if you're looking for a platform like ours that does smart invites you know there's there several providers out there have a look and figure out what works best for your game have a look and see what you know what pricing models they offer what partnership models they offer and that shouldn't be the first thing you do right I mean you need to hire developers need to figure out the theme of your game etc ideally before you start developing or building at least stuff that it starts

hitting your back end you want to have these partners kind of crystallized because that way you know what you're going to be integrating you know will the partner will your chosen partner have an sdk that supports your your game engine for instance know stuff like that so it's those kind of things rather than finding the best partner that that you've you know that you can that you can get at the later stage when you've already committed on several decisions in terms of technology and back-end make that make those decisions early on so that you can shape your development around around those around those possibilities but it sounds like you're saying that you need to be aware of who's available and maybe having some early conversations but not necessarily starting to download sdk shin and use them though at that early stage that vision when you come later I mean that that's up to you that's up to how you how you plan your development process but yeah don't don't make a game design document and then download five SDKs you

know get some get some work done before cool so how early is too early for you or is this a feeling it's too early it's not just no such thing as a too early we've been fortunate to work with a lot of game developers who have told us months in advance that a particular game is coming out but I guess the most important thing is real identifying what is the goal of that launch like are you trying to replace another game in terms of like let's say doing a sequel or are you trying to overtake somebody else so it's really understanding and getting the communication early with a company like ours or if you're looking to do you a what the purpose of that game is it's I mean there are a lot of companies who make a game just to make a game but then we work a lot of companies who make sequels and are trying to supersede their original title and are very clear and upfront that we need to be top five in this country or whatever may be so for us it's earlier the better just so that how we can prepare is you know doing the research exactly which countries and you know the range of like CPA or CPI

depending on which car do you work with and how that aligns with your own goals because that ultimately is what we are trying to do is to really like a piggyback on what you're saying was have you focused on your game have you focused on what your ultimate goal is and we can just supplement it by launching it or help hopefully retaining or superseding your previous game so it's not not good enough then to just say I want allows you use it I mean it you you can always get loads of losing users but I guess it depends is really like what makes a good user and what makes a normal user right so for us it's really working back and forth to an advertiser to understand at what point is a user successful or a high-quality user some people will say so a little bit of both I wonder though if that kind of raises a wider question a little bit to some things early said Elliot's date I I think tobin particular you know until we've actually got a police now for at least maybe a soft launch out there we don't really know the data

markers about what a good user looks like and what where we can find those people to what extent do we need to have that information before we can really engage with you in kind of like full power sure I mean I guess when you're developing a game you have some kind of make up already every user profile right there you're typically making a game I think the last talk was to finding your niche but within understanding the category of type of game that already builds his profile so that itself is usually the first step like what kind of game you're making and then who you ideally want to play it it doesn't have to be this such demographics as 18 to 35 you know is from Australia or something like some geo that has other partner maps you don't necessarily need to have that close description but at least the makeup like an endless runner or a sports teams might generally designers better suited for men or women that just naturally comes with the game top I'm a huge fan of personas so I I think they're necessary for design not just marketing but that's me I can ramble for hours on that and I shouldn't Jamie give

what do you think so it just kind of like to flip it around and just kind of warn you that not to to make that decision too late rather than making this thinking about making decision too early we've had so many huge studios some of the biggest in the world that and built back in solutions themselves release the game and then were like oh no what we do we can't man we can't manage our maintain this it's costing us too much money and ended up switching and implementing game sparks into their games and when they do that it obviously costs a lot of money to do that as on top of what they've already paid so you're they're increasing their director costs there but they know implementing something like what we build for them is gonna save the money in the long run and it should have been certainly should have done in the first place but they need to do it now because what they have isn't sustaining and I won't sustain much longer so to make the decision to put the investment putting a partner in place another solution not a back-end solution in place later on in the game which is an optimal for anybody and because you saw those decisions

should have been made in advanced than the decision that ID studios all made is let's build it ourselves which is never always the right idea i mean everybody uses unity now in the Indies space and they got a lot of triple-a studios using unity and well gang greed consider gang sparks the unity at the back end or the server side where is just pick a tool that works with what you need and just put it in place at the start and don't make the decision too late and that's that's how i feel about it but you did cheat cuz i was asking the other question but that's fine it's okay but I'm gonna quit Kobe I'm gonna get you to try go back to the other way but I don't mind if you say why too late is bad too but and you know when is the right time to start so for us it's a very early we got a lot of developers using us both sides both to monetizing to distribute in the soft mod because soft launches are about learning and you need to be agile I need to try a lot of things and our tools allow that so if you're a developer first of all you get paid quickly every 10 days and we a very

large variety of tools so you can test rewarded videos you could test native ads and see what is the exact mix of revenue versus excuse or experience and on the advertising side because it's a self-service platform and you want to do things very quickly you don't have to send an email to an account manager hey please open this new geo and then wait 48 hours everything is immediate you get immediate response to do a lot of iterations and tested different gios different bids at different audiences so took the ability to do things very quickly that full control is what brings a lot of soft launches to our place and also we get returning let's say and on a play tricks now with their new garden escape the bigger part we're a part of their launch partners because of this immediate control and transparency coop Anna of course we suggest there are other person publishers start to think about monetization early early early nobody do is

but that's for patio it's really easy because you can start use it even in any time when you want to increase your revenue and solve some problems you can start using video it really is a going integration anytime so anytime and but I mean I think we look at what we've been saying all along you need to get informed about what it is you want as a developer or publisher from these partners you need to be prepared when you have those conversations and it sounds like you know we're all saying the same thing which is we need to be really we have that in mind the moment we start putting pen to paper in terms of what our designs are not necessarily having those activities straightaway but to at least know the direction we're going in so it can plan to make strategic decisions about when we're going to put what back end tools what advertising networks what other platforms we need to put into our experience we need to be able to plan that ahead of schedule so that we can

get the best effective value out of it and so we have enough time to talk to these guys get their expertise and make sure that we make the best use of them so if we want to get started and be the most effective company we can we can't go alone we can eat to find the right partners take these thank you very much thank you guys [Applause] [Music] you