Hypercasual games: Day to day

[Music] the title is different to what's actually in the program but that shouldn't really matter it goes in the same direction so first of all for people who don't know me my name is Mark I currently work in the Graham Istanbul office and heading there the production for all of our titles also including the ad based titles I'm not gonna say hyper casual I'm gonna give a little bit of an explanation about that why it's not hyper casual what we do so yeah let's start let's start who's Graham games for people who don't know us also right now we're Zynga actually but anyhow we have eight at monetize titles out and we have

one in the purchased title so this hour at titles they range from like something you could consider hyper casual to something which is actually wouldn't go there at all considering the download numbers and there's our latest title is much Bregenz which is in a purchase which I won't be talking about today so when you talk about hyper casual sleek jános actually talked about a little bit what are you talking about this for us for Graham we are one of the first people or first companies in a kind of sense who figured out that you actually can acquire users which are cheaper than what you can make out of the ads when you show that was back in 2014 I've back then it was ketchup already out there different different strategy they actually acquired for morality we didn't for again why I'm talking is

like building the supporting pipelines like that's one part of the presentation later on it's like how can you as a company also built the same pipeline and then how you can build which supports actually producing a lot of games in a short amount of time that can yield actually positive results for us we for the last three years we actually released 137 prototypes mostly of them are hyper casual and then the last thing is luck lots of luck a lot of people don't know that when we release 10/10 it was actually in a purchase base you had a live system when you ran out of lights you had to purchase more we scrapped that and put in more ads and that's actually very figured out how we can produce this type of titles so what makes a hyper casual game as young as also mentioned goes in the same

direction easy accessible you should be able to just open the game in like a few seconds directly play it even if you haven't played the game for the last let's say 2 months you open it you directly know what you have to do they should be cognitive simple in the sense of art how much brain power is required for you to actually play the game easy for scalable again I'm not going to talk that much about it so it was good that you honest first station was upfront it's mostly about the marketing side and what its required to make the game easy scalable and for my definition they should be primarily monetized threats that can be technically hyper casual games out there which don't monetize with ads but for now I haven't seen any type of those easy inflict reproduce you should be able to produce a lot of those type of game it at the end it's a numbers game if you can produce a lot of titles you won't find the one title

which actually can give you the numbers you require so let's start to check our games this 10/10 this our first game in that kind of sense for people who don't know it it's basically Tetris with vertical and horizontal lines you just create you place the blocks from the bottom and then you create lines if you create a line of place a block you get points you can continue playing until you don't have space anymore so as said earlier we released the game in 2014 let's check accessibility it's a very simple drag-and-drop mechanic the game actually doesn't have even the tutorials so far and we tested this tutorial we didn't see any number changed in early retention so doesn't make any sense so for cotton is simplicity the player only has to focus on one to two things which is like can I place another block and can I create the line the art style

very minimal goes again into the tetris section a little bit bit less neon color simple colors which actually is the only real problem we have with the game when people start playing the game through candy crush they think you can create free of the same color and then it gets removed didn't really hurt the long-term retention or the earlier retention but that's one of the few flaws we have right now for gameplay effect is just removing lines we show or when the people drags a piece okay right now for scalability we have right now 103 million downloads over the last four years considering that that was one of the first games who got like paid you a for a net title it's not too bad but if you look at games nowadays it's actually quite bad right under at revenue wise

nine ninety percent of the revenue comes from it's the one percent is they remove at spot so the next game is six again short description is like you basically just remove blocks you tap on the block and you try to get the hexagon down very simple we released it in August 2016 for accessibility tap the blocks you don't have to think about anything else that the blocks keep the hexagon their cognitive simplicity the same and Slee you really don't have to it's like if you don't play the game for like six months you started up you directly know what to do one thing it's like we have to just like the hexagon is has some patterns on it so the player has an easier mindset when looking at the game for scalability the last two years we got 31 million downloads and this is actually what you would consider our top hyper casual title since we could grow

it in the beginning quite a lot not as much again as people would us nowadays or catch up the snow days nine ninety percent of the revenue comes from ads there's a slight split because we reward we edit rewarded videos for skin unlocking which worked out quite well for us okay for the competition I think everybody knows right now who is the biggest player they release necrosis block in last year in May simplicity Vice their mechanics got more towards arcade hours a moto verts puzzle anyhow it doesn't really matter you just swipe left and right you directly know what to do for cognos implicitly for the players it's really easy to get what they have to do it's like either you have to pick the highest number which gives you snake pieces and the lowest number in the blocks for scalability or they check this 123 million downloads around it for the last year as you can

see it's already bigger than what we do and at monetization I suppose they will make 99 percent of the revenue fluids then to not keep it all 2d your hyper casual titles don't have to be 2d you can do free D but they have very similar traits as our other titles and other hyper casual titles accessibility it's actually like snake versus block you just swipe left and right here the goal is a little bit different you just swipe the platforms so you both can fall down also this is level based I suppose they're not actually doing the levels it should be just a no random pattern generator yeah that's the simple scalability this is one of the most fascinating things I figured out myself while doing the presentation in the last 6 1 they got 220 million downloads which in my perspective is quite crazy and it

should be one of the best hyper casual titles out there for ad monetization we had an argument in the company about that if they actually make more through in-app purchase maybe they do I doubt that less than 90 percent of the revenue will come through its then the last one it just ketchup as far as I remember they had a different type of strategy they actually didn't use pay to a they mostly do that through featuring and then pushing their players around from game to game so this game balls which they released in February 2017 it is just a clone of another game which is called bb10 we looked in the same because we did bouncy it's a bit mechanic wise it's a bit harder and harder to access for players which doesn't really hurt early retention but it makes it more difficult to down to engage players so for cooking the

simplicity same as all the other titles I showed earlier it's very simple blocks very simple effects the player always knows what to do here again since the mechanic itself is a little bit more complicated when they come back there might be small issues scalability device it's 35 million around that downloads again if you couldn't pair it to Hilux jump it is quite a low number which still doesn't mean if you don't pay for you a as much if you user basis law doesn't mean you can't make as much money as the biggest skill games at monetized I suppose again it's all--it's so what should you do when you do this type of games you should check for some key features all of hyper casual games have in common at least the ones who made it in the top ten top five it's a

very simple core improving tonic if you can't explain your mechanic in like five seconds it's probably too hard the arts should be I always tell our artists it should be as generic as possible it shouldn't offend anyone if you have a theme it's problematic because that downgrades your user base it should be very easy to read mmm yep and then the gameplay should be have provide feedback I think a lot of the new type let's actually use the vibration mode in the phones to give you feedback when you play the game which just creates a nice feeling for the player so let's say your game is more complex this is one of our titles which is merge form description wise it's basically a consumer yeah it's like you plant you plant your vegetables you merge if you have two of them to create more than you harvest and you give it to the customers and there's a different

production pipeline as well which is very very complicated if you think about this the game has actually a trainee step tutorial we released it in August 2017 a little bit actually it's not always should be October anyhow it's yeah it has a drag-and-drop mechanic it has a swipe mechanic a setup to purchase mechanic and then it adds more complexity the further you actually progress through the game cognitive simplicity is really not there if yet if you don't continue playing the game continuously if you come back you probably won't understand what's happening very several goals the player has to set for himself so yeah there we come to scalability it's not really hyper casual titleist that's 2 million downloads over the last year almost partly through it has a theme and there are certain exit expectations from the player attached to a certain theme and 87% of the revenue comes from ads here

at the split is much higher towards the reward that less on the interstitial and banner site bouncy very similar title to both more complex than balls released in May 2017 same mechanics actually changed a little bit the mechanics to boss works more like a bubble shooter the player doesn't have to drag to shoot again if you progress for the game there's going to be more complexity you unlock new spells you have to select the spell order and so on effects there's lots of effects happening you can see it in the UI there's a lot of things to consider before you do a shoot a scalability vise it actually worked out better for us in terms that the TV we get with the game allows us to spend more on your a so we have 15 million downloads today and 90% of the revenue comes from ads so when you do this type

of games what you should expect is a higher CPI a slower growth higher production costs through the art through the theme for the content generation and you will should consider higher maintenance costs through the art through the content generation so is it all bad as I've mentioned already it's not all that bad this you just should think they're friendly about those titles those titles are not like scalable to 100 200 million user doesn't mean that you can actually make money out of them through ads it usually allows you more complexity allows you to have more spaces where you can I use higher CPM formats which is at the end rewarded videos so if you could do that right you get a higher our pool and bigger margin with fewer players so I have a couple of examples we have five

different rewarded placements in merge from those are like three of them you can speed up the harvesting double the harvesting and you can double the initial purchased items for bouncy you can use power-ups which you can also purchase but nobody does you can use rewarded videos for that and then we have a gameplay mechanic in it which supports rewarded where you play through half of the level you get the chest if you finish the level you can open the chest if you don't you can watch your rewarded to get a key so what right way is the right way for your company it actually a lot of it depends on the people not what you want to do if you have a lot of people who come from triple-a and want to work on titles or come from purchase items where you focus very heavily on art you probably not gonna do very well in hyper cacher requires a different kind of

mindset all right what worked for us mostly work to us is like puzzles we're doing mostly puzzles which we kinda limit ourselves already in the user base voodoo does mostly arcade which everybody can play not everybody can play puzzle games or not everybody wants to play puzzle games simple very generic minimalist up as I mentioned earlier we try not to offend everybody with the art by offend I don't mean it's like it's gonna say bad words or the player so let's look gonna look bad I mean just like anything you can think of that somebody might not like so yeah for us for our titles the game speed is defined by the players which makes it a little bit more hard to have control of a session length for game length and yeah again their puzzle at its core and they have one input method submerge farm and

bounce you don't really go into this category but the other titles we have two so what didn't work for us is arcade which is funny because that's what we do and ketchup dozen but they're generating most out of it the most revenue and user base or the width didn't reverse fit right we a set we have 137 titles out right now we prototype none of them reach the basic numbers we required niche input methods like Tooting your phone did never work rhythm games in general if your game requires sound it's gonna be hard for you to reach a large audience most of them do not use some focusing or not we spend a lot of time trying even tent and trying with different themes and everything at the end we learn this the more generic this the better it is for you eight better it is for the player in the game plane so let's say you want to start your own ad format or hyper caters could you read how we did I

will go through it like how grounded it and how you probably should do it if you want to have constant success everybody can release one title if they are lucky with some certain methods but if you want to have continuous title releases I will run you through how we did first of all you should adjust the expectations it's all about the numbers the more titles you can release the mo tides you can test the highest your chance actually getting something out of it which will work at the end it should be long term plan laid out which kinda is pretty self-explanatory you need the production pipeline which supports that not every production pipeline the fit hyper casual you need certain data requirements which you should track with your prototypes which can give you an education if the title will be successful or not you need the you a strategy and you need the monetization strategy for both I'm not going to talk that much about it you know so I think covered it pretty good so how grounded it for the production pipeline to

maximize output we already had prototyping days but we changed some rule sets to it once a week we would sit down everybody could work on a prototype game or whatever they want to work on we changed it to like you have two weeks two days you have to finish a complete game ready for the store to be released which we call fake launch which for most companies should be soft launch but after the fake launch phase there's a soft launch range for differentiation it made sense to us we built the prototyping framework for design for art and for development which removes the barriers for people to create aims two days it's not a very long time so they haven't they don't have to redo the UI they don't have to redo the play button and so on that all works you just have to work on the gameplay we said prototyping goals I said two days and for retention wise we looked at 41 which

is not an but you should release a title volute that is the number we figured out for ourself if we reach that in two days we can bump it up to higher numbers so for that the requirements what we usually look at never release those fake launches into this we look at daily session session links and game live which actually can give you a pretty good indication how many hits you can show and how many yeah it's actually how many eighths you can show and how long they will play for you a strategy for the prototypes this is done by our bi people who provided us with those numbers those are not numbers where you get like certain like really certain key numbers which you can act on well it gives your very good indication is like if you get even freebase every day we're getting 300 users to see the basic retentions lengths for the games and so

on and then yes we do minimum ads we create ads for all of the fake launches ourselves we don't use the predefined ones they've you can ask any ad network they will happily provide you with what is required for the monetization strategy we don't monetize and prototypes I said we have the game like there's a session length we can time that estimate how many ads and what type of Advocates show which is not always true we also released titles with ads in them you don't do those titles in two days so let's say you have your first game out the most important metrics to check on it's like the day 1 day 7 day 30 retention engagement scalability is one of them naturally so your CPI ECPI cost should give you an indication it doesn't matter if you have they won 70%

in a lifetime of let's say 20 days if your CPI is around $10 that's not gonna make any money in that space at impressions you can give and the are pure real receive so what you need basically those those metrics you need gameplay should be polished and balanced by that I don't mean like nice art I just mean like the game should be flavor constantly and very smoothly the content should last for 30 days if you have an endless title it's not a problem they're just gonna go for new in your high score if you don't you need something that will generate content for the play you do not want to sit there and actually make handmade levels you actually need the patent generator or something else it should be implement and working all right let's say you release the title the numbers are decent

you basically made it you should build up a strategy I do not know that much about you a so you should ask somebody else basic rule has to be should be I had a nice API there is some ways where you actually your ECPI can be lower then you can be higher than your a TV and if you scale high enough your ECPI will drop I wouldn't recommend that for anyone it's a lot of nothing world it doesn't always work out and the market changes a lot if you don't have that you should iterate if you work on a hyper casual title and it takes you longer than a month to get some decent numbers I'd recommend you to kill it it's no point in constantly reiterating on it yeah so why does Graham do prototypes first of all it's a huge data generator if you release 137 titles you have very a lot of knowledge what titles work with

what kind of combination what mechanics work it allows us to explore different ideas not everything we hear think that will work well work and not everything we think here will not work won't work that keeps us kind of grounded for exactly that kind of reason is that we had the title everybody in the company believed on we released that it has one of the lowest retention numbers there was it's so some general force to consider when doing hyper casual games as I mentioned earlier it's not for everyone don't try to force yourself if you have an artist who wants to work on RPGs or who wants to make fancy art hyper casual is not the way to go the more titles you have out there the bigger your support team will grow you will have to update a lot of SDKs you have to manage that networks and you have to negotiate with their networks that basically goes if

you don't like working with add metrics don't work in hyper cacher if you don't like to respond as be and reliant on partners your ad revenue will depend on how you impact if you add networks if you don't like to constantly be hunting with them don't do hyper casual that's one of the important things a lot of people tend to forget especially when they start doing their first games they're disposable games don't expect to have a lifetime of 30 days don't expect to have a TV of like 3-4 dollars that's not going to happen they're disposable games to generate a certain amount of income and if you can grow it they will generate more income for you your games are easy cloneable there's a ton of tentang clones out there you can do anything about it if you're lucky enough you release if your game is not you lets itself a clone you released it first you'll have to hire user base if

somebody comes copies your game he has a higher budget you probably not gonna make it should do another game hyper casual games are very dependent a lot of ad networks I think we implementing like 15 different ad networks into our games which have to work together it's going to be a lot of problems there's going to be ads popping up showing porn in the middle of your game you have to get used to it it will happen you have to fix it so you should consider that there is somebody who will fix those things I talk to a lot of people who work mostly in inner purchase and they ask me why do you show bonnet banners why do you show interstitials rewarded it's like the best player based approach interstitials give us the most money first and for all I think for most of all titles 60 to 70% comes through interstitials 20% comes from banners and

the rest comes from like rewarded and in-app purchase so if you make a game right now for hyper casual first you should implement as interstitials I wouldn't even think about rewarded you should consciously study the market right now especially with food or there was the target casual connector we'll talk about there is a free month cycle it's actually not a free month cycle it's like when who the release is a game that is scalable the trend changes and you should go with it you should know your competition right now there's more and more people there's play Jim Derry there is lion studios who just started who have ethnic mediation and at network backgrounds there's companies you can't compete with there's companies you can't compete with that's I wouldn't go right now and compete in the same genre as food oh you probably I should know you if you have that kind of money I should

know you by now you probably don't and you shouldn't go for the same market for us what work is puzzles we're doing better puzzle games than who do we know better how to assess players for puzzle games or how to market towards those players that's basically questions hello hello hey thanks for the interesting data insights I wanted to ask if you had a general figure on how many prototypes it takes to get something that's worth you know iterating on rough number we released 137 prototypes we have eight that made it okay I'll figure out the math and then the other one was how bigger your prototype teams from one through three people it's like if a developer has a certain idea he doesn't really need the design you don't need the designer who tells you you can swipe left and right it's no point in it if there is no

general idea behind that there is usually a designer and artist helping the developer for the art side you also don't need an artist for every team I did a lot of art for our possess ourselves I know how to use paint any more questions for mark I've got a few minutes actually so if the questions from the back can you reveal what you're working on at the moment of 137 prototypes is a lot are you prototyping something right now that you all happy to talk about actually no we currently do not this interesting because for us right now we're more into the inner purchase titles we did a lot of when the market was smaller for head based titles

it was easier it's live in release six it's not easier to push it to number one right now you have far bigger competition which doesn't make much sense for us so was that was that a change in strategy for that company generally a little bit we will release smaller titles but less frequently and with higher expectations with regards to your hyper casual games do you find that that you have a broader target audience like all age groups male/female and do you think that that actually contribute to the success of these games for our puzzle titles it pens towards more towards female users actually so we have a smaller audience in that kinda sense we're nating a lot of male users which for Budo is actually

more important since they are doing more acade style of games and they were question phase okay there are not tools the grower grammar using but there are engines out there like build box for instance the deliberately designed to very quickly iterate hyper casual games and it's that is the fact that that hyper casual games can you know be quite generic is that is that a problem or is it is more merrier in a in a market it depends on if you go with burdock's you're quite limited with the amount of ed metrics you can recruit there they limit we looked into it and they limit it you can't work with every ad partner so it makes sense if you work by yourself to work with them if you would try to build a company around have building hyper casual I wouldn't suggest that doesn't mean that it doesn't work is like it doesn't really work for us

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