How to successfully adapt board games to digital

[Music] [Music] fifteen minutes to give you a summary of 15 years of business so not surprisingly I made 15 slides it okay good morning everyone so my name is John Connor and we CTO at us with the digital and we're going to talk about something different we're going to talk about ball games yes so I'm sorry we're gonna have a quite a few introduction slides because I was asked to present the Bobby market and since its kind of specific market so we're

gonna have a few of these coming up so the inevitable sight about myself so I've been doing a company's for a long time now which explains the gray hair starting in the late 80s with 3d graphics company which went public in 96 and at the end of what had become the 4th graphics company in the world then I did I went to the mobile communities business which didn't work because it was a bit early and and so my investor came to me and tell me ok well I don't want to be an investor again I want to be an entrepreneur again would you join me to do to leave the high-tech industry and do physical board games company I said well yes since we were doing playing Dungeons & Dragons when we were teenagers together I was really motivated to to go along so and that's how we created there's a wonder which

was acquired by MIDI in 2014 all right so but yesterday is the number one publisher and distributor in Europe and before E in the US the US who have has ruined material in front of us the whole spectrum of of games you know from mass-market games midco and with Catan and some of the other names that you know ticket to mine and image and X cup games most of the games that we do IPS that we actually own there are still a few licenses with some well-known names like you know Star Wars game of throne a lot of the Rings but basically a cover of the whole spectrum okay so so the digital in this picture is to be the digital arm of as fidelity's we all job is to look at the huge catalogue of the

group and pick a few titles and choose which ones we're gonna translate to the digital space okay and so we currently we have all these products shipping on iOS Android PC Mac for steam and and so on okay all these titles are premium titles except from spotted in the middle of it and usually we price them pretty high so you're talking about selling the game at $6.99 even more with lots DLCs that people would be happy to balance and and so on okay so we're really not in the free-to-play business at the moment now let's talk about the ball game market so that's interesting so you know pretty much everybody in this room has this image of you know the old-fashioned very boring you know for your grandmother also whatever okay that's

completely untrue for the past twenty years there has been a renaissance of the ball game market with the arrival of euro games and some other games in the US which are called a mail rush games and so on so the most famous one is Catan obviously and the game is the market is not about the kids anymore okay the sweet spot is actually young adults and are very active it's a very active market and we've lots of fans and a lot of staff the interesting thing to understand about the ball game market is that it's it's a very stable market steadily growing to give you an idea it's very much like the books business okay to give you an idea successful title in the u.s. is like ten thousand copies so that's very small okay so it's actually very bad business okay because

you gonna have to build all these boxes and store them in warehouses and ship them to to distributors and to to retailers and so on so it's it's very capital intensive so it's actually again like the book business it's a very bad business okay but if you are able to get the equivalent of a Harry Potter okay then it becomes a mover of all businesses because you actually print money okay twice a you're going to call your printer and you're going to ask him okay three P's some more money please because the market is going to have sold everything and well now we are talking with millions of copies okay so it's completely different for example for Ticket to Ride for the US market the products are a manufacturer in China and so is it shipped my container else you know the cross the ocean and so on the containers are sold before reaching the US the US Coast okay so that's a very

good business if you if you able to if you are lucky enough to have that and like I said it's quite stable market in your opinion what was the most sold most successful ballgame last year thank you monopoly 1945 okay so we can speak about evergreen products there okay so we know we know that we're going to sell more copies of Catan and ticket to right next year we just know it I saw that give us you know it's nice you sleep well in the evening and you can make long-term choices all right so it's a pretty good market you know estimates say it's ten billion so of course it's much smaller than the video game market but that's a pretty good business to be in alright and so shooting from that digital ball games came after that not immediately

because the IPO Nyanza were kind of afraid that the digital space would cannibalize the physical the physical market but they realize that it must not be the case and that would be my conclusion at the end and so now you have lots and lots of one of titles on in the digital space as well okay all right we're done with the introduction let's talk about how we go about developing these digital versions so now I would say that there are four main differences with the classic development of video games all right the first thing to keep in mind is that the product lifespan is much longer I mean this longer than mmo's and free to play games all right we need to think as game over service to give you an idea we have some players for ticket why for example we've been playing since 2005 the game

has evolved over the years ago and in the beginning it was a Java applet and then became a PC and then mobile and so on but we have something else who played more than ninety nine thousand games online okay so I five minutes the game on average that 340 continues day of pain so there are some of the high road the interesting thing is that you not starting from scratch when you develop a digital board game because you have the existing physical game already okay so you have to be faithful to the original game if you do something completely different the market is not it's just not going to understand what you're doing there is still some adaptation to be made okay you don't have you should not do a straight fault but yeah be careful and and you know faithful to the original game that's really important is a bit different because we you know it's like a it's not like in video games when you start by doing the code and then you have this long phase when you produce

all the levels and scripts and evens and and so on you know you don't have all this so-called production phase so it's more about doing do user interface the gaming system dei and so on so it's much more technical again in ticket white we have like five developers in the team and only one UI graphic designer that's it okay and the great thing is business-wise is going to be easier to launch your game because you already have this existing community so you're not going to have the disk discoverability this issue that you usually have with video games you probably show your digital ball game and the market is going to jump on it right away and your project is going to be in the top ten very quickly so that's that's the great thing about about that there are still strategies so like I said it's much more tech that you've

anything because well your artificial intelligence you can't cheat okay so it's got to be really good the online gaming part can be very complicated if you have to do a some Converse gaming these kind of things so it's tough you have to focus on quality first and foremost because again that's the flip side of you know starting from an existing product with an existing community there are going to be very unforgiving if you screw up with the product so polishing and polishing and polishing stuff because you're starting from a design that you know fits like 32 inches on the table and you have to shrink that through an iPhone that's not easy a lot of tricks and to give you an idea ticket why there are in ticket right there are three different versions of the use on toughest deepening the shopping it on the phone on a tablet or on a PC with little

tweaks and changes and and so on okay all right very flat very 2d you can do a little bit of 3d if you want to make it more modern but be very careful because if you're doing something that looks very nice but is not usable it's not going to work okay so I have shown it's probably a very good example that what you should do this this is some test that we did with Caucus on moving the camera having the camera you know showing the big bits automatically these kind of things can be tricky so be careful it's okay and actually I would advise to create new content and new game modes that's an example that we did we planned on doing some challenges with changing little bit the rules of the games and so on so the IP owners they were very anxious about that you know they were like you're going to change the rules are you sure and so on and

actually it was very successful and that increases the usage of the game and and playoffs they really like that everyone understood that it was not the actual game but it was specific challenges that would teach them some specific points about the game and I really like that a lot so but that's an additional work obviously that's also something else that we do when are we gonna be this we test a lot new technologies I know dr. Liang so that's the test that we made with doing it and the switch trying to translate the general speed so we're you have to grab the totem in the middle of the table so here you have you know people think to punch so that's a prototype we tried all kind of things we smoked out the small tablets this is a song okay we also went into the V of s so digital shipping product at any VR here the interesting thing was to to test the interaction the emotion and song you know when you do board game you have

what is the most important people it's not really what happened on the table with what happened above the table between the players and or authors was can we reproduce that with Livia so that's something you can try it ships alright and to conclude I would say yes it's a complicated and specific type of development but if you can do it right you're going to build the virtual virtual chuckles circle sorry between the physical space and in the digital space and and in fact my if you have one thing to remember from this presentation is this is you you should not talk to an IP one error and say okay we're going to develop your digital version of your board game and then you walk away and you do a thing in your living on your own you know in your corner that's not going to work you really have to work with the IP one hour and the physical space and the distributors and and so on all the

people involved in the market because that that works together to give you an idea when we came out with the iPad version of Ticket to Ride the sales of the physical product increased by forty percent in the US market during the free following weeks okay but that's because you know in the little in the digital game you have a pointer to the physical game and in the physical game you also have brochures and code to have that text motivates you to sign up online and so on so you think you have to think about the development of your product as in a multi-channel context you have to think globally because at the end of the day we don't consider ourselves as you know doing physical games or digital games we just doing games okay and you need to think rub have a global marketing strategy if you want your digital or physical game to succeed okay that's it all right thank you for listening try to

go and play board games you'll see it's fun it's the whole kind of new game system and there are huge trolls like Gen Con in the u.s. Essen in in Germany and so on we've lost a lot of people and you new system to discover our and it's a very very active market it is fun thank you very much thank you very much thanks very much lovely spawn question questions there's a question there let's that question come on [Music] well it tells in terms of business well we've doing free to play is quite complicated because you you're gonna have to change your game system okay because of all the virtual economy that you have to put in players and and that that can really break down your you know

your gameplay so it's stuff that usually what people expect and it's okay because you know they they still think they're making a good deal because a physical game is like forty to fifty bucks and it would buy the digital version for five bucks and a happy with that other questions everybody sure is more like it you have all the options we do everything is a specific deal we have publishing deals we have Co publishing deals we have distribution deals we have all kind of deals it's it's not a one by one business so and then in sometimes it's like that these for game creators are looking for someone to have silent project yeah it's

it's a complicated business relationship well one thing you have to keep in mind is that you're working with the game designers okay you need to build this relationship with the business relationship obviously but also the gameplay and and the game designer he's going to be very anxious about what you do some question for I should man thank you with ballgames spot I don't know what we are trying to push is competition because the community can be a part of the community can be very competitive and we we saw signs that you know there are the already competitions created spontaneously online by the various groups of the community and we would like to structure that a little bit but it's still very I mean we are very early so I don't see professional eSports

online that type of things they still very much related to the physic what's happening on the physical space at the moment [Music] [Music]