Launching Monumental Franchises with Supercell's Kasım Zorlu

[Applause] Marhaba Istanbul yeah I I bring you uh some warmth and some personal opinions uh from Helsinki Finland this is me on the corner uh a regular day Through The Long Winter of Finland uh yeah so let's start I mean it's amazing to be here I'm super proud and super excited because uh looking looking towards you guys there are lots of mentors coaches Role Models peers through throughout two decades uh uh it's it's really interesting uh to to look at this audience and then reflect

through my personal Journey uh but you'll see that like I'll be very opiniated I'll try to step back and uh try to uh share some perspectives uh mostly is like uh thought starters some triggers that can be applied on principle levels to 10 people teams with emerging IPS emerging Brands future brands or it can be applied like 500 or even a thousand people teams yeah so of course uh we have to thank a lot but I'd like to start with the crew here they have been doing an amazing job from the very early uh times of the day but uh leading up to this event so let's make sure that we recognize them so let's thank the crew first but also we have Google uh Google isul office broader Google Organization I mean if they haven't uh

been putting up with me originating from Istanbul I wouldn't be here on this stage so thank you Google uh but also uh we have the Constructor of fun uh I have been a big fan like for a decade learned a lot from them MSA and others amazing blog and then podcast emerged and we have more people we had two Erics I like the other Eric more I like I'm getting used to Eric CR uh I hope he'll be sweeter eating after some baklava here yeah but thank you the Constructor of fun uh yeah and uh I needed to put this disclaimer this is like all me it doesn't tie to my uh previous employers or current employer but I I need to highlight that like uh I was always opiniated strongly in certain things uh

so I'll I'll have lots of quotes referrals and questions uh but luckily no AI visuals I promise plain simple straightforward yeah so uh I'd like to dig deeper into my journey first so you can uh kind of relate to my opinions whether you are a local or whether you are visiting and by the way to all guests visitors thank you for uh the effort uh I I met with many of you so you also spent a lot of time money to wake up at 4:00 a.m. or like coming here from day before I hope like you are having a good experience uh we we are proud with our Hospitality here so please call us out yeah but overall uh I I refer to roomi here uh we call him remember him as his

Holiness uh with his longer name uh but overall he's he's so famous that he's one of the uh top poets top selling poets in the US for decades uh so you can see the quotes on Brett Pit's forearm back arm or like any Instagram post randomly from a celebrity but I think uh this quote cuts through in a very different way uh with my life story or career uh but overall I'm I still think that I have a lot of ress uh overall uh it requires lots of learning and unlearning but I think fundamentals remain the same so I'll focus on fundamentals uh I think it it should be a fixed reminder for all of us let's focus on the fundamentals before breakthroughs let's understand what a conversion funnel means let's understand what a brand means and that and dig

deeper into that yeah but overall uh these opinions emerg from launching or relaunching massive franchises from Angry Birds to Warcraft Diablo mini games many sequels to contributing to Call of Duty lunches uh and the list goes on yeah but like franchises all these games Brands however you call it like but what is franchise in gaming who cares in the first place do even players care if if if something is vast as as a franchise uh I think it's the most important part we we we always in gaming think that we we don't take ourselves seriously and we take the work itself seriously the work of one business of one yet then we come out with these universes franchises bundle it with wordss but if it's not fun for a massive

franchise the new expansion the the upcoming SQL I mean what happens like overall uh it doesn't matter much uh as long as players uh have fun or they don't they don't have fun and then how how do we Define a franchise is it like unit sales shipped is it subscriptions sold is it number of installs is it daily active user or is it some kind of equity I mean this this should be challenged and we should be humbled by these questions in a way uh you can look at the Acquisitions and merg mergers uh happening in the last few years if there's a brand Equity then how does a company can be sold for a few hundred million dollars uh with that brand that that has a value of a billion dollars like we don't need to name the names in

specifics but it's it's a very easy meth to do then on the other hand what do communities think about it like let's say that we have the ambition to come out with a franchise can we actually build a community or do communities build the games I think that's the other perspective and if we look at this perspective I think we have our ironic examples coming from uh last year and the year before for example battle bit remastered uh it's quite relevant because there's the name of the game let's say is a brand battle bit and then it's a new game but the name is remastered of course it's it's kind of a maybe triple indd or double a indd uh overall but yeah it it it comes across cuts through the audience uh people connect with it millions of people bought it

uh could have been bigger maybe I think it's on us how to make bigger because all of us are proud with the transparency level of collaboration in this industry how do we own it as a as an independent team or emerging brand uh super interesting to challenge yeah but overall uh I'll I'll dig deeper into my recipe of launching or relaunch Laing a franchise uh there's nothing new here quite old uh principles it applies through decades um yeah uh I won't get into the kpis metrics or like some trading uh buzzwords but overall I think these principal level pillars remain the same if you're a 10 people company trying to launch your own emerging franchise for the first time or

a for a SQL or you may be a bigger organization trying to uh countown and launch right so volume velocity and volue and then if you look at volume again like do you do you do you try to tame the hype and how do you countown do you collect wish lists do you set up a wish list and with a number goal of wish listing or do you chase pre-registrations preorders on mobile or maybe you are going crossplatform or you are trying to build a community on Discord or on Facebook or on Instagram so what does this volume mean and how long should it take for the volume developed in develop into a velocity so you can understand the hype understand the depth of Engagement and you can look into it uh from a value perspective so that uh you can decide to invest more

time more budgets maybe look for Investments or convince your stakeholders to drive more energy into it and then frame it out um I think overall uh this is applicable all across and the other angle is again there is nothing new here there's I I don't think there is nothing nothing new Under the old Sun here in our work how do you operate whether it's a small-sized organization midsized organization or or a bigger one uh you align across you make sure that everyone uh across the company knows what the shared goals are but also you try to on board your partners because it's again we cannot work without our distribution Partners Ed networks production Partners uh there should be also a an alignment outside in when you

are working with the team how are you developing that common language right and then the other angle is inside out how do you work with your players Prospect Community how do you size it up how do you balance this with volume and velocity and then uh how do you come out how do you name it how do you let players own it how do you allow players to create content for you expand on it uh and so on so there's this uh social scientist called Marshall makluan I think my college professors will be proud of me now uh quoting him it has been very tough to study but he's also famous with his quote called as this go as it goes medium is the message so but this is also wise and this guy also um I don't know predicted the internet predicted globalization but I think this

is this is super solid so we all developers like Mighty developers all these sizes we think that like hey we shape our communities we build communities we shape these franchises at different scales Scopes but are we sure about it after we put it out we we come out and then what happens is I think our communities start to shape us yeah so it's it's another interesting perspective perspective to think and reflect on it there are like I think dozens of case studies that we can flip dissect I'm sure uh we can reflect on it uh through longer uh writeups through the Constructor of fun or other thought leaders but it's out there we are living in it um yeah so I think it's really important to stick with these

fundamentals and uh regularly reflect on it as a healthy Rhythm and ritual yeah but while doing all these things I think there are uh we need to also remain present and look into things like what do we do about our day-to-day operations how do we how do we tie our day-to-day operations um into a grand Strate stry maybe Nest our tactics rhythms into bigger uh dolls and then develop this hierarchy and design the strategy on top of it so that we can look back and also connect but also we can look forward and also do better forecasts do better predictions and uh it can be more granular as well but as long as uh you have these fundamentals you can put

science behind it you can increase the accuracy but do we need to have science in all the steps do we need to optimize everything it's it's it's super interesting so I'll try to dig deeper into these five five uh things to keep in mind I'll double click in them but also I want to walk through it uh a bit so again uh we think that we are building communities shaping communities is it really true like we should be very humble about it and we should reflect think deeper on Community First marketing what it means how it works how it can be scaled how it can be nurtured and also how it can be measured how it should be measured and then of course we have teams like we have talent on the business side with different specializations and I think it's the uh I think our times everything gets fragmented lots of small

screens lots of bigger screens and massive screens how our players spend their times how they engage changes a lot it causes fragmentation and then we have maybe 12 marketing experts in the same room but how do we balance this hyp specialization with generalists with broader picture how do we operationalize and make sure that we don't miss the mark while making things happen day over day week over week it's it's really important I think it's the biggest biggest flow in bigger teams whether on the business side also develop development side because we talk about sometimes like 300 400 500 development teams when they don't enough have enough um generalists it's very easy to get distracted it it applies to marketing teams as well whether you are a 10 people marketing team or 200 people

marketing team if you don't have General enough generalists in the room across the teams there is always a big risk of becoming irrelevant while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars for goto Market activities then of course uh stateof the marketing landscape like we talk about technology change changes we talk about privacy but do the players care about it they still spend 4 hours to 5 hours a day on mobile screens I mean of course they care about their privacy they care about how their data is processed but I don't think it changes actual click through rates it changes actual engagement numbers of course every uh every Campaign Will end up with shitty click through

rates I mean this is also not mine it's a quote from Andrew Chan so uh big credit uh yeah and then the other part is like uh from very early morning here through all sessions there was always a mention to crossplatform it's again fragmentation comes to us um it's really important to remember that whatever platform the games are developed for wherever our players are playing their games in the living room in a portable console or like in a gaming room with a hardcore $3,000 PC they make their decisions on the mobile phones that's simple I mean most of the screen time happens on mobile phones so whether you are in tripa console business or 2A PC business you are in Mobile publishing if you you can't optimize your commun

communication for mobile screens you are already wasting money even at a $100,000 budget scale or hundred million budget scale it doesn't change um yeah and then of course with all this fragmentation all platform challenges all privacy challenges nothing Remains the Same there is lots of unlearning right and then relearning and that cycle how do how do you govern the data of marketing because it's super messy the more you collect data the less value you get out of it so where is The Sweet Spot yeah so this is this is the context but overall uh let's get into the community first marketing right so we can look at many social mobile games we can look at triaa games that came out out with massive hype and then how Community

takes them and then how Community accepts them with the fults with the over promise versus under under delivery equations and at the end uh it revolves around Community if we look at steam charts if we look at App Store Play Store charts uh it's the same thing it's that the community uh have people accept it on individual level customized level or at Mass level of course it it also gets fragmented like the the way um I will say sentiment uh develops and EV develops and evolves on Reddit versus Facebook versus Tik Tok uh it changes a lot overall how do we keep up I think there is again the next part comes through here uh do we need to have a Reddit expert a Discord expert and the Tik Tok expert in the room or do

we need a jack of all trades in the two in the room how do we balance that Mastery and tone and sincerity so that we can cut through the feed and become seen and balance it all across with our owned channels earned media user user generated content but also user user acquisition and of course user acquisition is my bread and butter like I would praise it glorify it put it at the center of everything with my own bias very easily but like it doesn't change the reality that like uh it has also a uh expiration date per games life cycle yeah and then the marketing landscape uh a few years ago Tik Tok was a channel to test and now it's an incumbent platform and mustn't Miss uh

part of the uh Channel mixes overall what's next is it Discord maybe or how do we balance uh meta versus Instagram uh from the portfolio perspective or specific platform perspective and then how do you tie in Generations like we have so many generations playing the same games even with smaller audiences I think it all reflects into this like landscape and overall how do we tie these also into actual retail presence I mean we can talk about hey Mo especially starting with mobila I think but also it applies to PC and console uh it becomes more relevant hey distribution is broken is it really broken are we coming to a fast conclusion or maybe it's like the retail

experience like we are going to a Walmart or a local grocery store to do basic grocery shopping we always have multitude of options and as consumers we make choices maybe it's the same with games right and then maybe when you have a brand or aspiration of a brand and if you apply it to the state of marketing and state of the marketing landscape we may be we may become more relevant and of course the mobile publishing side I think it's quite straightforward I can like bet with anyone about where conversions happen where the final influence of buying of any game 80% should be attributed to Mobile One Way or Another you can overdo it you can measure everything you can build models for attribution you can do

prediction engines all that it's amazing uh if you have resources go for it but at the end of the day that screen is the place where people make choices and decisions yeah and overall um this is also very contradictory so Peter drer like uh management grw leadership grw or of all time uh these two quotes are both from him right what gets measured uh gets managed and it goes back I think he's not the only one who phrased it uh one way or another uh again nothing is new Under This old son but then the same the same person says this there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all I think this is this is also supervised it should start a lot of

thoughts but overall it's all about this like embracing the cycle of unlearning and then looking at the fundamentals yeah uh wrapping up how to launch a Monumental franchise whether that franchise is a future franchise is an emerging one for a 10 20 people development team or you are a bigger team with an established brand with bigger aspirations for crossplatform Trans media broader storytelling I think you should start with this uh that's overall my hypothesis on the marketing side you should focus on how you balance volume and velocity and understand your Runway understands your your balancing of long-term and short-term financial goals and then operationally you need to you need to have a simple relevant uh

framework to operate and make sure that everyone religiously follows it thank you Istanbul thank you Google