Keynote: The Multiplayer Compass - Mark Val, Head of Growth at Photon

foreign [Music] [Applause] I would like to invite to the stage Mark Val from Photon who is going to be delivering a keynote session on the multiplayer compass and Mark will also be helping me run the track today so give him a round of applause please all right so people that are here uh have to know that the previous track the live abstract is a track that I created seven years ago

uh because live UPS back then no one was talking about live up seven eight years ten years ago so that's why I created that so um uh personally I'm uh before Photon also build playfab the number one live game Operation platform uh but anyway so while people are coming in and out of the place here what I can say is that if you want to be part of the next leg of an index success live UPS is not enough so you have to go further than live up so multiplayer will give you that so this track that we're gonna go in today uh have a lot of content that is new for a lot of people so I suggest you take a seat and listen and which is happening now it's filling up so let's wait um so the thing is that uh live you know I've listened a bit to the panel before regarding live operation and I just want to add that um as part of a live Ops Team there's multiple roles you cannot say I'm gonna do live Ops there's multiple Channel

multiple segments and you have to treat off and then you're gonna get good at it I see the timer going down here just just set it once we actually start and just so that'd be great um cool so um now everyone is sitting down so we can start so maybe we can show the first slide of my presentation so that we can start from there uh I don't think that's it so oh there we go all right cool I just have to press it so thank you so much uh for being here for this uh multi-period track okay I can use this one this is much better um so um So today we're going to talk about a lot of various subjects but first let me give you a bit of news regarding like Photon uh suno Photon here in the room raise your hand all right there's a few of you okay cool so uh we operate currently at 1.4 billion players a month across a pool of about 4 000 plus games so we have the

biggest games on pretty much every vertical vertical so we we made some of the guys the number two worldwide downloads on The Meta we have VR chat rec room pocket uh pocket Stars VR and much many more and on Steam platform now we have Goose goose doc which is running in the 600 000 plus CCU and uh and so many more um so in the past uh decade we grew a lot we had a lot of new products that I got launched including Photon Fusion for on Quantum I'm going to talk about that way later uh and we're also now going native uh so we're going to have products for unreal and other engines very soon for all of you to enjoy but enough about photon let's move on about the core of this this subject and what I have missed is that we also have the gaming Circle so the gaming circle is the biggest multiplayer community so we have about a thousand plus developers that are mingling every day and talking

about the future of multiplayer and how to do things properly so that said what are we going to talk about today so first the multiplayer landscape then I'm going to give you two opportunities that you should fully invest and look forward to streaming and Technologies and then Photon today I'm going to finish with that so first like let's look at what is going on in the mobile market today so we probably know that chart that's the data that AI Chart top games downloads paid and grossing but what is missing is the multiplayer filter so everything that is left here are multiplayer games so as you see multiplayer games are leading the top of the charts and if we go a bit further if we look at the downloads the chart on the left four or five years ago there was nothing multiplayer nothing at all and now look at that now we have games that are multiplayer so what you have to understand is that okay fine lightning compression and all that but if you want to be in the top grossing or the top 100

grossing in the Thousand grossing you really have to consider multiplayer because it's adding the final touch to Bringing communities together and whatnot so I've added two there's a written butts two time because those there's still some IO games that are fake multiplayer games right because that was very popular for a long time so these needs to be replaced so please create real multiplayer games we don't need fake one obviously um so yes so um in the previous chart what we saw is that the RPG games are literally leading in top grossing action is the same but the thing is that it's extremely hard or very hard to do good VR uh RPG game you have to do World management economy management and so much more so instead I'm gonna try to give you something more to look at so if we look at the same chart as before but this time by Jean and then by in-app Revenue so how much which one is making

money and then we apply the multiplayer filter but this time inverse okay so what do we see is that the match 3 and Casio barely have any multiplayer games okay so these sectors these Jean are so ripe to have new multiplayer games there's uh Bingo Blitz okay fine okay but still there's a lot of work to be done so I say that um this is where the next Innovations can happen and then every single genre will have multiplayer games in the coming let's say three to four years but to give you you know some hints or some tips uh we're gonna look at a game called matchmasters so uh match Masters uh we have some volume we can raise it absolutely fine so it's a game that is currently sitting top 93 worldwide grossing okay it's a Mastery game but it's multiplayer so as a multiplayer game it's a very simple your turn so there's multiple modes in

the game we're gonna see a bunch of them but essentially like the queue of multiplayer game is to have a very fast matchmaking I don't know if you turn remember just what happens now like the games the the I press play and then five seconds later I'm in a match so having a very fast match making extremely important and then second as well this is your best onboarding you see the other player playing in real time you learn as a player from the other player you cannot have it looking at them and then you actually learn what are the best move and how to move forward so um so I've cut parts of the of the game or mechanics just so we can see much more of the game so um as part of the multiplayer games what you have to implement is team objective which is that you and your team have to amass either items currencies or other elements that you

want to share with each other and you want to help each other so if you go back way back in time in the time of the Facebook game with Farmville like what people were doing a lot is giving each other's pies and giving others but these items took a while to gain and produce when you were giving those then you want to give something back to the player and usually you have to spend some money so here's another mode so here's instead of doing one versus one as I saw just before it's one versus many very similar to Tetris 99 on the Nintendo switch you can look at this game too which is casual game approach to using multiplayer so um and then now we're going to look at another mode which is a tournament which is an elimination system so having multiple game modes is important but an elimination system is very very nice to have because then you you if you don't succeed you see the other players move

forward and then as a player you can tell yourself if he or she did it I can do it as well so I'm gonna try again very good for retention it's very good at improving your techniques real time provide these kinds of feelings in the players that we have in single-player games so you have to think about that what we also find is that in this game and actually most of the very popular game if you're game Trash if you have a call obviously or anything like that it has to be very easy to rejoin that game so for example this game you can shut your phone off return back and then there's gonna be a timer in the view of the other player and then sticker that goes from 30 Seconds To Zero which gives time to the other player to rejoin the game but these techniques are three very hard to implement for nuclear engine so that's why at Photon we made it easier for others to do so now we're gonna look at what I believe right so this game has

a chat but you can see all the other players you're part with you can gift items to others as I was saying earlier like here you can donate boosters so we try like this game is very complete and I think it's a very good example on how to implement a multiplayer properties to A Match 3 game and also to um any casual game actually so it has amazing live apps and Community obviously because if you don't have that you know it's very hard to maintain a community so um and then I was going to say shout out to their marketing team because they were able to have web billions Boris Becker and other super fans [Music] we like these actors but then we can really see the demographic right so this game relies very much on Advertising to get new players and um so the next game I'm going to show you is a stomach guy and stumble guy doesn't need advertising which is

completely the other the opposite of the other one so um as you saw earlier stumble guys is number two worldwide in download okay so that means 160 million installs and plus as you see right away that's another game where the matchmaking goes very fast you're 32 players together moving forward on this map it's 16 players right now but it runs at 30 Hertz so the frequency is very fast it's using Photon Quantum or or our engine and it's only it's all based on physics so it's an input system but as we progress and as you're looking at this game and the players moving forward there's other things that you have to keep in mind apart from the gameplay so as I said earlier you can see the others what they're doing you can do emotes you can chat with others and then now that I've just finished this level I'm actually looking at another player and I'm I can switch from one player to another to see well does

he use or she use a different path does he have a different technique to move forward in the game and those are elements that are important in multiplayer games so now the players are getting eliminated and there's only 16 players left so now into another map um so here that's where multiplayer games bring something that can't you can only do in real time with career games which is collaboration you see now I'm trying to bring the players to warn me so that we can move this platform up and then we can move forward if we don't collaborate we cannot progress multiplayer game only multiple game can do that and that brings another element in terms of psychology which is to create a bonding between the players and actually it released more dopamine and then here another game mode which is like okay well you know you have to guess which of these platform are the good one to take and obviously if you make the dive or if you wait well you

have more chance to finish first because now we have to be eight players out of 16 that needs to qualify so again you have to make the plunge to make sure that you're moving forward so then it's you know it's a it's a mixture of competition and collaboration it's much more than just regular gameplay so um obviously in stumble guys there's you know all the things you find in live apps all the beautiful cosmetic you can buy elements you can share but what you can do in this game that is very crucial for bringing players in is that you can create tournaments so we left a possibility for streamers to create their own tournaments it means as they stream they have a code they share the code to their community and then everyone plays together to be able to compete and have fun so that is if you go on Twitch today there's 100 plus right now live stream of stumble guy simply because people

there's tumors organizing tournaments so how does that look so here's one for example that decided to make a contest for I think was 500 or something like that and then it's an elimination system where the the virus now is just moving from one player to another and the idea is that okay which one is going to be the last one standing and after three different Maps which one is left at the end it's gonna win the 500 but using these things with the streamers players join the rooms makes it easy to gather new eyeballs what you want is eyeballs to your game so you can dissect these techniques that I've just talked about that will help you get more organic installs and less paid install obviously and this again can only be done with multiplayer games cool so um if you want to have

successful streamers obviously you need a multiplayer game that is very performant where the matchmaking actually works and where things doesn't break and then where you have a good onboarding and that's probably one tip I have to tell you all is that if you're launching your game just now well you want to have Bots and not necessarily players playing with the player because the old point is that the players fill the game and if there's no players they cannot play that's boring so put some bots in the game at the start of the game and once you have a good user base just leave the bots on the side and there's going to be real players um so yeah so I was talking to you about Photon earlier uh Photon Quantum so that's our deterministic engine it's entirely based on physics so the beauty of of quantum is that it's an it's an engine on its own uh it use Unity simply as a renderer um and um so why stumble guys is able to

have traction worldwide is because it's extremely smooth visually even if you have a very crappy internet connection so it means you have a 500 milliseconds latency it's still gonna rock on your screen and it's still gonna be very accurate and that's what you want and that's what the engine provides and obviously much more um so um we also have a tournament system that was using stumble guys and he's using multiple other uh games of Wars um so you can have access to that as well so you don't have to build that um so um and then you open the door and so the key with tournament system is it's fine it's the system but you have to see it as a ugc type of tool where you give the keys to the players and they're like yeah create your tournaments and have fun organize your things and and then it's great for guilds teams Clans and whatever to compete between each other as well

um so we make samples so we've released with unity um a full battle rail sample last September so that's 200 players at 60 hertz in a full room uh it's made for PC but you can use it on mobile as well it's working very well um so Photon Fusion is our second engine which is made to have high amount of players which means in your mobile game you could have thousand players in the lobby exchanging information if you want a super hardcore battle with tons of guns chess and all these things it's more about 200 to 250 players in one room and obviously if you think about this there's barely it nothing on mobile doing that today so that's another you know very good suggestion for you is that to open up new time of gameplays for the industry to uh to work on yeah so you can download it on YouTube unity.com demos

or you're going to find it there so we have multiple samples obviously covering all kind of different type of gameplays so that you guys can start with something instead of nothing that really helps so for those of you that think oh my God multiplayer is so damn hard I will not try that so um last September as well we held a game jam with in collaboration with the global game Jam so we as you saw the see the numbers we had a lot of participants and mainly for the majority of the developers were like huh okay now I get it I'm able to make multiplayer games and it's actually not that hard it used to be hard if you go back like five years or if you go 10 years ago it was like close to Impossible you needed to be the full network engineer but that's not the case today anyone can make multiplayer games if I go back like 10 years ago when we started playfab there was you know

everyone was like live game Operation is impossible it's too hard the CMS I don't understand data and all that but now you know everyone is doing it so I highly suggests that you invest time in studying multiplayer so that YouTube can succeed in the field because as you saw earlier that's where all the money is going anyway so um okay so that was a quick dive into multiplayer um obviously we can talk about it a lot more I hope that you understood the opportunities in the match tree and casino sector if you want to go in action sports RPG and other high combat game it's a bit harder today to get in but there's still a lot of space a lot of room players like that but definitely like casual games per se is like is really where to go and now there's good examples I've shown you earlier on

how to do it and where you can succeed as well um yeah thank you so much [Applause] so we probably have time for like one or two questions does anybody anyone have any questions real quick before we move on no yeah so you've got very different player bases when you're looking at the mid-core games that gen to have more of the multiplayer versus casual and casino elements within it how do you think this is playing into you know what is and is not succeeding in the match three at the casino games when they're talking about multiplayer and why people might not be going there yeah okay definitely so um very good question so there's another Match 3 game that you can look that is coming from Hong Kong developers called

Little Legends okay so little Legends is also a match 3 games very similar to match Masters I was showing you earlier but the retention is extremely bad okay so simply like um their ramp up and their matchmaking is extremely bad so meaning that when you start playing after an hour of play You're Gonna Be matched with players that are you know five times ten times you know more advanced than you you just cannot compete so it gets very boring because you lose all the time so the key aspect of matchmaking is to have the right level of you lose and you win so for example like if you go like in super hardcore game like Apex Legends right so they just did a full revamp of their matchmaking system even if they've been live for a while right and people it's a successful games simply to improve the match skills because you want to have fun but you you but a video game to be funny you have to

lose as well it has to be hard right but if it's too hard you got to be like oh my God I'm losing my time here right and and if you monetize and still lose all the time well that is even worse so um so I I say like like 60 of the problems apart from the gameplay and the fun is in the Matchmaker like really uh it's really to um to leverage that properly so um in terms of um casual games obviously there's uh tips and tricks there's techniques when you go and have an actual chat in a clan there's a lot of tips that are being shared but still like it's about you know it's the same as a first person shooter game is how fast can you go to make the right decision right so then it's you know it's brain power it's um you know some players will play a thousand hours will be as good as another player who played 10 hours right so I think a good skill rating uh is important uh look if you

look at back in the days you had ELO scoring and bell curves and other elements like that you that you can Implement in terms of Matchmaker I think nowadays you know there's um it's part of the equation but you also have to think at the progression of the player in the game that's one and then second is how the the frequency of the session how long are the sessions so it means that if a player plays for an hour and a half there's a high chance that it's different than the player we just join it for the you know in the last five minutes right so you have to plug the players uh together based on time as well so that's another one it's a lengthy answer but um it's probably a subject that is not discussed enough matchmaking yeah I like great [Laughter] [Applause]

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