How to Make Money in XR - 10 Tips for Success | Develop:Brighton 2024

We're going to get started. Uh yeah, welcome to Make Money in XR. Thank you for coming along. Um been asked to please turn your phones off and rate the session at the end if you wouldn't mind. Um so just a quick bit about me. My name is David Solari. Um I started about 28 years ago at Jagex. Uh worked my way up the marketing track. ultimately became uh VP of the online studio where we launched games like Lord of the Rings online and Dungeons and Dragons online. Uh I then moved to be chief marketing officer at Jagex was uh a lot of great fun. Uh they obviously have the game called Runescape but probably the biggest thing I did with a group of other people there was launch Runescape Old School which is uh is still a massive thing for Jagex now. Um, I then went to work with some friends at Pixel Toys where I was a VP of operations and um, we actually spun Soul Assembly out of Pixel Toys a couple of years ago. Uh,

and I became CEO then. Uh, just to tell you a little bit about uh, Soul Assembly. Um, so we're primarily a XR uh, games developer. Um, like I said, we spun off of uh, Pixel Toys in April 2022. U, we've got 19 members right now. um 73 full-time staff and then another 17 contractors that we've been working with for quite a while. Based in Lamington Spa like so many other games companies in the UK. Um team background in PC console mobile and of course XR. That's really our specialtity now. Uh we've had launch titles in the Quest, the Quest 2, the Quest 3, the Pico 4, and the Apple Vision Pro earlier this year. Uh we work in both Unity and Unreal. Uh we make and publish our own games, but we also work with others. Uh we're actually making the Just Dance VR game for Ubisoft, which is coming out later this year, which has been an awesome thing to work on. Uh we've been profitable since launch, and all of our games uh have uh at least broken even or better. Um excluding the Apple Vision

Pro, but we never expected for that to make any money because there just isn't enough of them out there. Um so, first off, uh VR and XR games development. Um, it's not the same as flat screen development. Obviously, uh, you've got lots of other things to think about. You're going to be rendering twice. You got to think in 360. Um, there's lots of crazy things. But here's an example of some of the other reasons why it's a bit different. Oh [ __ ] man. Whoa. Watch it. Hit your team.

Yeah. So, there some of the wild things that can go on in XR games. Obviously another thing that you have to do is you have to put in lots of notices to make sure that people try not you know don't hurt themselves is to try and look after your customers. Um but the thing that's for me the most important thing is interactions are everything. That's what sets uh XR games apart uh from games that you play on consoles and steam etc and so forth. So all the interactions some of the examples of that are a game called Gorilla Tag which is absolutely huge. Uh they've recently announced they've had 10 million players. they've made hundred million dollars and this game was originally made by one guy on AppLab. So, it's been an enormous success in the uh in the ecosystem. But in that game, it's very innovative the way that you move. You move by swinging your arms like a gorilla. Um and the subtlety of the controls is actually very high. You know, you can climb trees. I've been in there. It's all kids in there. It's it's it feels a little awkward to be honest. These kids are trying to teach you how to climb a tree. It's quite tricky, but you know, there's a lot of skill involved, a lot of subtlety in terms of the movement. um

golf plus. So, you know, obviously I used I grew up playing micropose golf in my AmIgga. Um and it's like hit the mouse at the right second to stop the line in the right place to take the big swing. Um but now you can actually swing the club yourself. You know, depending on how you hold your hands, you might you might slice the ball. Um you know, how hard you hit it is how far the ball will go. Putting it in the right way is is very important in terms of being able to do it. So interaction is absolutely key there. And then Walking Dead Saints and Sinners. I don't know if anybody's played that game, but it's very much like the TV show where quite regularly you're called upon to stab the zombies in the head. When you do that, if you know it sticks in there, it feels like it's struggling to get it out. It feels icky and horrible, but because of that, it's amazing at the same time. But looking at kind of other ways and people trying to work in XR, there was a game called Moss that originally did very well in the early days of the kind of the Quest ecosystem and stuff. And it's a kind of a platform game where you manipulate the environment for the uh

character to move around, but you're not moving yourself. You're not really getting involved yourself. So, Moss 2, everybody expected it to be really successful, but I don't think it probably performed as well as everybody was expecting. And I think the XR space had moved on by that point, and there's a lot of examples of games with incredible reaction interactions. And if you're going to play a platform game, you may as well get your phone out or your Switch or whatever. Um, if you're going to strap on a headset, it's got to be worth it. And for it to be worth it, you've got to have strong interactions. Okay. So, know the market. Um going to share some information uh that we have from sales data that we have and things. Um and what we use to try and calculate uh an estimate of how many units a game is sold is we say it every review that you get is worth 100 sales. Our games typically get between 70 and 130 sales. There's been other analyses that have shown it's about 100 as well. So, that's kind of the number that we use. Um, this this kind of ratio can be affected by a

lot of things. Uh, the more expensive games tend to get more reviews per sale. Um, younger games tend to get less reviews per sale depending on the genre, you can get different numbers of reviews per sale and how long you've been. So, a game's brand new, it's going to get more reviews per sale. Um, as opposed to if it's been out a long time, it's going to get less reviews per sale. So, it's not perfect, but it is directional and helpful in some ways. Um, also all these uh people that make their games have we've used the primary genre tag that they use. Uh, sometimes they don't use the genre tag that you would probably think the game is. So again, not perfect, but still useful. Uh, and the data is from November 2023. So looking at at pricing and price points, um, just to explain how this graph works, the blue lines are all games ever released on the store. I think there was like 680 when when when we did this. Um, and then we looked at that compared to games that have sold units that are, you know, top 50 ever, number of units sold. Um, and you can see there's certain price points that you seem much more likely to get a

top 50 title if you sell your game at that price point. It's interesting. Price points like $9.99 are just aren't very popular. You'd imagine they would be, but this is driven because a lot of the price points are driven by the American price points as well because the majority of sales are in America. So you can see, you know, when you're considering what price point to sell your XR game at, you probably want to go in some certain price points because they are definitely uh more successful. Uh looking at genres, so adventure, fighting, interactive story, shooter, and sports uh all overindex in terms of titles getting into the top 50. And again, you can see why because there's like there's a lot of interaction orientation uh for a lot of these games. In terms of interactive story, it could be a little bit misleading because uh four of those games are Star Wars games that were all uh kind of meta direct games. So, that could be having an impact there. Um and also, you know, just to show how the the date isn't

quite perfect, uh the room VR is actually a big success. Um but there it's a puzzle game and it's not represented here. And that's because they use their primary tag as adventure, right? They didn't use their primary tag as puzzle. So if you want to have a successful game, you're more likely to get it in those genres. However, that's not to say you can't be successful in other genres as well. Just to share some other information for us, we make zombie shooter games uh for the most part. Um so it's no surprise that the majority of our customers are male, I guess. So 80 90% of our customers are male. Um and then the ages of our customers are also uh somewhat older as well. Uh in terms of sales around the world and I think this probably is true of of most of the games. Um 60% in the US, 10% in the UK, 15% rest of Europe and 15% rest of world. Um this is kind of anecdotal but this is come with some of our thinking around audiences on uh XR platforms. So you

have your XR fans. Maybe there's these are 20% of the market, right? These people their primary gaming device is a headset. They're playing uh multiple times a week. Uh they're spending multiple hours a week playing XR games and they're buying many many titles. And then there's a lot of people who are XR curious. They wanted to show it to their friends. They wanted a new experience. They bought it over COVID. Um that they bought a couple of games, Beat Saber, maybe a couple of other things and then put it in the cupboard. Um and then, you know, therefore weren't buying any more games. And then there's this emerging audience um of kids. And whether that's coming from uh playground virality or it's coming from, you know, early adopters are putting in the cupboard and then the kids are getting out and they're playing it, it's definitely a growing market. And some examples of that is again Gorilla Tag is is primarily younger people playing that game and it's absolutely enormous and you know has a huge concurrency. Gym class is another free-to-play game that's uh that that's performed pretty

well. um shaving stuff and Titans Clinic. You know, these are are both younger targeted games where you're, you know, you're basically doing haird doses and fixing teeth and stuff like that. Among Us was obviously already a massive IP and something that was played by a lot of kids and works particularly well in VR. And then very recently, we've got I am cat where you're a little cat like causing havoc and trying to beat up your granny. Um but it seems to have really resonated and done well. So, uh, the Meta Store certainly has always been, and I think Steam as well has certainly been good for long-term sales. Um, and if you look back to the launch of the original Quest, uh, back in, you know, 2019, um, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, and Super Hot were all launch titles, and those titles are all, you know, typically in the top 10, top 20. Beat Saber is is, you know, very often the number one title still. So, if you get a great game and it sticks, it it'll be successful for a long time. Other games that came in a little bit later like Thrill the Fight, Blade and Sorcery

and Among Us VR have also stuck around the top 10, top 20. And then, you know, kind of end of last year, start of this year, we've got kind of a new wave of shooters that's come in and been really successful like Contractor Showdown, uh, Pavlov Shack, and Ghost of Tur. And these games are also all hanging around the kind of the top 10, top 20. So, it's interesting to see the the way that the market is kind of evolving and developing. So, next thing I would recommend is make it relatable. What's more relatable? Uh being the king or being a guy from the north that likes to eat lots of food. So um thinking of games that kind of it's it's very easy for people to grab the idea. So Beat Saber, everybody knows what lightsabers are. A lot of people have played rhythm action games. It's easy for people to go like, I'm going to try this. That sounds fun. Uh Ghost of Tabur is very much inspired uh by Tarov, which is already a very successful game. Contractor Showdown, very much inspired by PUBG, right? Very successful battle royale. And then Titans Clinic, there's dental games that look very much like it on

mobile that have been very popular with kids and stuff like that. So, it makes sense uh that that's extremely relatable and easy for people to like, I'm going to try that because I can get my head around it. And I'll give you an example of uh one of our games. So, the cabin home invasion. Basically, it's a mixed reality game where you've got zombies climbing in your windows through your doors. Everybody's seen a zombie film. Everybody's seen houses getting raided and had to see them fight them off. So, it was immediately uh easy for people to kind of relate to that and feel comfortable about getting it. And in fact, when I gave it to my 12-year-old daughter to play and uh you know, she got overwhelmed by zombies and ended up called in a ball screaming make it stop. I knew we were on to something. Um so, but don't worry, she got up afterwards and asked to play again. Um okay, so let's make it relatable. Let's see if we can get the presentation to keep moving. Look, there's a spinning blue circle. That's never good.

Brilliant. Shall we wait? Cuz if I close it, it's going to be uh it's going to be difficult to get it to come up again. It was all going so well. No, it's decided to absolutely kill it. All right, please pretend you didn't see any of those things. Okay, where do we get to? Okay, make it remarkable. So, uh, probably the m most remarkable thing in the last five years is chat GPT, right? I one of my friends showed it to me and I showed it to all my friends. Everybody showed it to everybody's friends. AI is a massive thing now, right? So, make it remarkable. Make it something people want to talk about like this maybe dancing zombie. All right. Uh, gorilla

tag was remarkable because of the control mechanism and that really caught on with kids and it's actually quite tiring to move yourself like that as an adult, but you know, kids don't get tired, they really love it. um blade and sorcery. You know, in this game, you stab swords through people, you chop off heads. They've got really great physics modeling. People wanted to show it off to their friends. It was pretty incredible. And the cabin home invasion. I'll just give you an example. So, I mean, I'll talk later about how viral this was, but just my example is, you know, Boxing Day, go to my wife's family, I get one person to play it, and they're like, "This is amazing. Got to get somebody else to play it." Pretty soon the whole room was full of people watching everybody stumble around trying to battle zombies. Um, and then it was like, "Oh, we got to get the neighbors." And the next thing I know, they've got neighbors from left and right coming in to check this thing out. So, something that's remarkable and people want to show to their friends, right? If you can make something that does that, you're going to get that verality. Uh, reliable. So, obviously, you know, I make video

games. You don't want them to crash. But what's super important in XR is a smooth frame rate because if you don't have that, people are going to start to feel nauseous and they're going to stop playing your game and they're going to give you a one-star review and that's going to be real bad. So, you have to have a a smooth uh frame rate. Another obvious one, if you're making a multiplayer game, you've got to be able to have people to play with or you've got to have some kind of AI solution so people can play on their own. Solid interactions, and you know, we've had some issues with this as well, like things aren't picking up properly. you grab a gun and the gun flips to the other hand. These things really frustrate people. You got to get make sure your interactions are super solid. Uh and support usability. So, you know, a lot of people aren't used to playing in VR. Free movement makes them feel nauseous, makes them feel uncomfortable. You've got to offer teleport to move. You got to allow people to turn um in a variety of different ways. You got to give options for more comfort. You got to let them sit down if they want to. You got to let them move. If you've got

things on your body for inventory, you've got to allow them to move it so it's in a comfortable place. All these things that you have to think about in a XR game that you don't have to think about in a flat screen game. Make it good. Well, this one's obvious obviously, but here's some data to kind of support it. Can clearly see that titles in the top 50 um perform better uh well have, you know, have higher scores than titles uh that don't. So, you know, make it good. And that does come down to those hygiene factors that I talked about before. It talk it comes down to having really great interactions and it comes down to having really great gameplay. Um the thing I always say to my developers is like maximize the fun, minimize frustration. And when we play test our games and there's something frustrating, it was top top of the list to get it fixed. Um because we give that to a customer, they're just going to react in the same way. We also do testing. You know, we've built a kind of a community around our games. So we give the you know our games in development to this community to get their feedback um

to you really focus down on the things that are frustrating them and try and rub off those burrs right so this experience is smooth for everybody. Okay, so the um hedgehog principle, I don't know if anybody here has read the book Good to Great by Jim Collins and a research team. Basically, what he did is he uh looked at uh a top performing Fortune 500 American companies and looked at the ones that had outperformed the stock market versus the ones that had stayed level or underperformed the stock market and looked for a number of lessons um in those organizations. One of those lessons was the hedgehog principle, which basically says take something that you're passionate about, take something you've got the skills and capability of doing, and then find an audience or a value that you can apply it to. And if you do that, you'll hit the the kind of the perfect center. Um, and for us, that's about new technology. So, we've always been a company that's kind of been passionate about utilizing new technology, which is why we're in

the XR space really. um we've got the skills to do it and we've we've done it in multiple occasions. We were one of the first to put voice recognition and one of the first to do mixed reality, one of the first on Apple Vision Pro. And we know that there will be an audience for things with new technology if it creates gameplay opportunity um like it very much does in mixed reality and that's going to provide you value. Um another example of this is Ghost of Tur which is a hugely successful XR title. I haven't met the CEO myself. Well, I haven't met the CEO myself, but some of my guys have. And, you know, he talks about he he was a soldier, so really, you know, new guns and battle and things like that. They had the skills to be able to do an open world game, and they knew that there was a game like Tarov that was really successful. So, putting all those three things together, you know, creates an opportunity for uh for success. So if if you want to make money, these are the these are if you can if you can put all these things together, you've got a much

greater chance of success. So market smart. Um store presence is still really really important. Uh particularly in the in the Meta store and actually the Steam store as well, it's very hard to get. Um having great key art will get you uh good click-through rate. That's really important. Once they've clicked through, you need really good store assets. You need great videos. You need great text that explains what the game is. You need to hit those unique selling points that you've thought about. You need to communicate those interactions and why it's going to be great and why it's going to be unique. Um, you can AB test all of these things to try and, you know, improve the conversion of these things. And it's definitely worth looking at those things. And we absolutely have. Uh, you should be aware that the store has pretty significant seasonality. So October, November, December, January, and February are all strong sales periods and then starts to dip off and like really bottoms out kind of August, September typically. Um, but that gives you options. You know, if you have a if you think you've got something that's absolutely huge and big, you

probably want to launch at the end of the year because you will sell more units as a result because it's a much busier period. But if you want to get that um if you want to get that visibility in the store, it might be better to launch it at a quieter time when you don't require to get as many units to kind of get further up the chart. So getting in the chart is important. It gets you a lot of visibility. Um interestingly, a game recently called Max Mustard did something quite innovative around that. Um they um have a game called uh Richie's Plank Experience, very popular game and they put a 90% discount code in that game for Max Mustard and that rocketed Max Mustard to number one in the chart and generated a lot of visibility for that t that title and obviously generated some uh sales after the uh after this the the sale that they did as a result, which was great. Make sure you're getting in all your collections. You know, if you got a horror game, there's collections for horror games. If you got a sports game, there's collections for sports games. You got multiplayer, there's collections for that, mixed reality collections for that. You need to try and get in as many

uh collections as possible because that means more eyeballs. It means more impressions and ultimately that's more chances for someone to click. Uh content updates, you can uh negotiate some support around content updates, but they do have to be quite significant. Uh so think about that as well. And sales are obviously a big part. um getting invited to a a kind of official Meta sale is is is the best thing or you know some kind of Steam sale is is the best thing. Um but you can also run your own sales. Um and there's different types of sales as well. There's like um code discount sales and things like that. Although the generally speaking uh the kind of the organized sales are the are the most effective. Um and then social media uh I think is the other the other big thing. You need a game that will resonate in terms of social media and you might have to invest a bit of money to get it going. Um, certainly these are the numbers that we achieved for our home invasion game which was pretty amazing and made it sell like gang busters last

Christmas which was amazing. Um, but that game was very viral. It was something that really worked well on on Tik Tok. People screaming when they're getting zombies coming through the windows and stuff like that. You know, you can go out to make a game that you think will will generate that, but I think really the best thing to do is make a great game and if it has the potential and opportunity to viral, then that's what you should you should lean into. Um, but this is generally the the most effective marketing channel. Now, if your game works for that, um, so efficient targeting, digital advertising doesn't really work for premium titles. The lifetime value just isn't high enough. Um, I know there are some subscription titles that have a higher lifetime value. uh in XR that it does work for but typically the the other problem with the price points for XR games is they don't typically high enough. Um we're you know that's beginning to evolve a little bit a bit to get higher which is great to see. Um but you know you're not you're not going to be paying 80 what you do for a console title and you know most most

titles are priced around kind of 22.99 something like that. PR is not as effective as it used to be is largely replaced in many ways by social media. Um, but it's still great to get in with the the relevant sites uh for XR for sure. You can run competitions through your own socials uh or leverage other people's socials or work with creators to do that, you know, so that that can all also help generate some extra thing at a relatively sensible price. Um, events is a tricky one. You know, headsets, you got to get someone set up with a headset. you generally have to explain how what they have to do to get them started, particularly if they're not uh used to uh playing games in XR. So, it's quite labor intensive. You know, take the headset off, you have to clean it for the next person. So, yeah, I'm on the fence with events. We've done a couple of things, but I don't think you're really getting the bang for your buck with events for the most part. First party relationships, these are super important. Um, you know, we're looking at Meta and Apple, Pico, Google,

and of course Sony as well. Um, having really great relationships with these people gives you a lot of things. There's funding potentially with some of them. Um, there's opportunities of getting more exposure in the store. There's potentially publishing support for when you launch your title, you know, yeah, help you through the kind of the QA relationship and things like that. Yeah. If you're doing updates, there could be additional support that you could get. These companies are doing large uh shows that are watched by a lot of people as well. And if you can get to be part of that, you know, the exposure of that is incredibly valuable. So, building really good relationships with these guys, not necessarily easy because everybody's trying to do it, but if you have good, innovative, interesting ideas, professionally executed, um you know, they will they will start to to take notice of you. and you know that they're just looking to make the platform and uh XR work in general like the rest of us. So embrace the future.

Um if you look at generation of the PlayStation 4 to the PlayStation 5 like graphics improved by 20%. Maybe there was a couple of additional features, but if you look at the Quest one to the Quest 3, added eye tracking, in-n-out body tracking, hand tracking, voice recognition, increased resolution refresh rates, three generations of processor, longer battery life, lighter and thinner, controller ring removed, color pass through and mixed reality, less distortion with pancake lenses, and the mesh API and depth sensing. like the things that you're able to do in terms of gameplay because of these new uh innovations is incredible and some of those are going to resonate and work better with customers and others. But the opportunity to differentiate is there. So keeping eyes open and being ready to uh utilize some of these in what you're making I think is incredibly valuing. Get people very excited. We definitely saw that last Christmas. Everybody wanted to try mixed reality

and we had one of the best mixed reality experiences and I think that was a big reason for a part of our success and we're hoping you know this year again there's going to be an opportunity there is more people buy new headsets they're going to want an XR experience a mixed reality experience and we'll be able to take advantage of that but we're always looking at new technology and what we can do with it. Okay. Well, we'll finish it off with a few more interesting uh Darwin events. Full play.
There we go.
What are you doing?

phone, dude.
Okay, just remember to put in the right messaging when you're making a VR game. Um, okay. Uh, feel like I was meant to say something before we do the QA. Yes. Uh gentlemen will be coming around with a microphone if you have any questions. Thank you. Thank you very much for the talk. It was very interesting. Um, from moving from Drop Dead, your original zombie shooter to the cabin, what was one of the big shifts in your production as a result of going mixed reality? Like, what was one of the biggest challenges for production?
Well, probably the biggest challenge was

the hardware was redot, right? Nobody really had their hands on it. We were lucky enough to be one of the the first. Um, and it was just in development all the time. And uh you know we were running into some significant issues around that sort of thing. SDKs getting updated very frequently, things just not working or making sense from version to version. So kind of riding that wave. But we have had some experience to do. I mean it was similar with AVP actually. Uh exactly the same boat with that. Um so yeah it was just trying to ride that wave. I mean I think you know we knew uh we it wasn't a massive leap in terms of what we were doing gamewise. So that that at least played in for us and we had we had done some stuff in uh in kind of XR before as well. Um so we had a little bit of experience but yes it was it was the fact that everything was just redot and on fire most of the time.
Do you think that's calmed down a little bit now?
Oh yeah it's it's definitely calmed

down. Yeah. Post launch it it's it's much more stable. Occasionally things can happen. I mean occasionally you know we'll see firmware coming. we'll start to get messages from players like my game won't work anymore. And the way that they roll the firmware out is that it you know it goes to 5% of people then 10% of people and we're like we're getting on to them like your firmware is broken our game somehow and nobody you know we don't understand why or how. Um so that's happened a couple of times as well and we've always managed to get to the bottom of it but there was there was one time they were doing the 50% roll out and it was still broken. It wasn't pleasant.
Cool. Thank you very much.
Pleasure. Thanks. Anyone else? Awesome. Well, thank you very much.
I just question. Sorry.
Hi. I just wanted to know on average, how long does it take you to develop an XR game extra testing time you need for those Darin events?
Yeah. So, I mean it varies. Um, we made our Apple Vision Pro game in 3 months. I

mean, that was interesting. We thought it was going to come out like at the end of March and then they told us it was going to be the end of February and so we had to pull it in by like almost a month. So that that was very short. Um you know the cabin took us uh a year and a half. Um it depends how ambitious the the game is that you're making really. XR games uh generally speaking are don't take as long because they're just generally not as big. But some people are making enormous XR games. You know, I think uh the guys are making Behemoth Sky Dance, you know, that I that's taking three or four years, right? So, it depends how big of a game you're making.
All right, I think we're done this time. Thanks very much, everyone.