Levelling up – How to move from a small indie to an established publisher

[Music] it's a real pleasure to be with you here today so I'm Roman I work for augury I'm pretty sure that most of you don't know augury yet it's number this is the first time we talked to so many a gaming publisher just in a row so just to give you a few words I have no slide for this so I'm going to be short we are 220 people within four years in the market industry and we establish in 12 different offices and Oguri is the solution that publisher used to maximize their user engagement and ad monetization basically it's a technology company that is specialized in mobile journey marketing so you may wonder what mobile journey marketing it's just a very new concept that we're bringing to the market and basically the technology that we have developed it's powered by artificial intelligence that is going to analyze this the raw

signals from the smartphone users for the users of the smartphone of the users and throw these raw signals we are going to create data from this data we are going to generate insights and from those insights you're going to be able to inform your mobile marketing strategy and so as a result publish your users in order to maximize user engagement and ad revenues but today the real subject of everything is how to level up how to switch from a small indie developer to established video and today I'm going to share trends and observation talking to many different gaming studio in the world from very little to very big studio and that wit includes advices trends that we observed how to use premium that we are advantage how to find simplicity in your tech at stack but also how to maximize your ad revenue so the first thing that I would like to start with is some some global figures for thanks Chris for free bringing some

of those because actually there was the first light of what I had prepared for today so the future looks bright for us because global app downloads and comes from Spain with reach new high this is a report made by Apple and basically we see that the annual mobile downloads will it would reach 258 billions which is a grow of forty five percent from last year while actually consumers been install will almost double by 2022 and we know that the average and your consumer spending will reach twenty six dollars per device which is an increase of 23% and when we try to understand when this growth is coming from and how its supported actually you can see that the gaming industry represents 7g 2.5 percent of the global spend in the stores which is huge the thing is that when we look at how the users are going to use their phone it's a very nice thing for the

industry because we know that the average time spent in a per day would increase over the last year next year we expect to be 2 hours 43 minutes we expect that to be beyond 3 hours in couple of years which is usual this is a great thing for the industry less for your brain and for your fund the thing is that the real interesting things that you can see a whole stable the mobile web remains while the in app takes the lead and when we look at what happened during the last two years we saw that a new game drawer has emerged in the markets and this new game jar is eiper casual games this is just a snapshot of what's happening like two days ago in the stores on the left you can see the overall ranking of all the games and all apps that have been ranked by a opinion coming from this is iOS statistic and basically you see that 2 to 3 games in the global overall ranking 2 to 3 apps are actually game and when you look at

the game in ranking 3 to 4 apps actually hyper casual games so we can see that there is like a lot of traction by I per casual game user love them and you can see like why do I love them because they are just like very addictive so I took just two example of Voodoo I'm pretty sure you have heard this the studio they've raised like 200 million dollars now the real question is that what they are going to do about it on the right you got a game from Lion Game Studio which actually was proven as invested a lot of money in that video so you can see that a lot of actors are coming to the market because I want to share those games and you as you can see here like the time session are very shot on average users are going to spend like 10 minutes for an iPod casual game like this one as a cooperation like a game like candy crush for example users are going to say more than 20 minutes so you see that the time they are very

addictive it's just a very simple mechanics so basically it's more open to everybody my grandmother can play those games but the time is shortened so the things to understand when the users do don't play those games what are they doing on their phone and the thing that you will most probably know is that what you're usually your users are doing when they are use your game but I've got one question for you today what you do when they do not use your app most of you will say I don't know because most of the tools that you got today on the market will help you understand what your users are doing so you got some very amazing analytics tool tracking tools that helps you understand the number of session session retention tracking where the traffic is coming from but actually when they stop using their game what do they do this is what we do at augury and today I'm really pleased to share with you we are working right now on a gaming

insight study that will be read at the end of the year and actually I'm going to share some few highlights with you today in Avon home yeah so we just for the matter of this presentation we have decided just to pick some stats but of course you can come to see us we got like you just the table over there and we take the time to explain more in detail what's happening right here so for the matter of this presentation we have decided to focus on free games category the first one is casual games think about candy crush for example hyper casual like the two games that you've seen before and what we call arbitrage too because games like mostly rely on worlds or like card or stuff like this the study is very fresh because he takes into account the last four months so until the 31 of August and this is just a worldwide study so the first thing that we wanted to analyze it's very simple is there a relationship between

the games and the type of age and gender that are using those games and what we have realized is that actually for catcher and arbitral game arbitrage game those gamers mostly used by woman and when we look at the age category you can see that the biggest part of it is led by 45 to 54 years old while when we compare that with IP or casual games you can see that actually the user are mostly men's with younger audience so the thing that we want to understand is that is this age and gender category as an impact on how the game is going to be used on the daily basis and what we are so what we have seen sorry this is the a position and usage benchmark for the free category and on top left you can see this is the average of those free categories what we call app activity is the number of time the app has been used during a week time period so high

activity the app has been used six or seven days low activity the app has been used one or two days per week okay few highlights here what we can see is that actually remember mostly women for casual and an arbitrage game and you can see that those kind of two games really attract the people and those users are playing it like every week on a daily basis white 4i per casual you can see that the level of activity the high activity is very low and actually you've got like a huge proportion of inactive user four week time period so the question here is to understand what do they do when they are not using this app now they are just stopping use either phone or other using like other competitors up here what we can see is we've have ranked the studio we can't rely we can't like reveal the names but this is just like an extract of the

report that we are doing right now you can see top left the exclusive owner this is like if you think like a respectful level you can say that casual studio one eighty one percent of those user just own an app from casual studio one and you can see on the left that actually many of the studio that you can see our casual Annette arbitrage whitefish an owner most of the studio data on the right are actually hyper casual studio so the thing that we do it here is that the audience from those guys are very volatile and so they spend time judo switching from one app to another let's take an example and look at the I per casual one studio and here is this what we call the ultimate knowledge because this is the mobile marketing the mobile journey of a user on a smartphone and here you can see what's happening on the mobile user journey of all the user using apps from iPod casual studio one

clearly you can see so it's big complicated but the first column is what have they done 15 days before using their app what have they done during the same day and whatever they've done 15 days after we can of course tweak this time period but it's just a matter of the presentation we've done it this way and what you can see here is that I per casual one can see what his user are doing before using it's up during the same day and after the user here are really liking the iPod the apps coming from the iPod casual to an iPod casual studio for and actually you can see that for three of the five studio that are ranked here actually I per casual studio conclusion here what about if tomorrow instead of switching to a competitor's up your user could stay in the same environments we know that those two do

rely mostly on ads to make money so the old concept is to be sure that you're going to show enough ads to those user in order to make them profitable so tomorrow the thing that we know is that hyper cacher studio are not really strong right now our building they are not strong enough to build right here like an ecosystem of users and I just wanted to show you some some like clear example of what's happening on the market I think you all remember three years ago when Facebook has decided to remove the messenger functionality to create a new app this is what I call like a first ecosystem and here are the result this is the cross app usage between Facebook and messenger over a month period and as you can see here 83% of people that own both app has used both up in the 1-1 month periods so this is clearly less you see you're forced to use messenger I knew not who right through your friend and actually let's

now have a look on what's happening between Facebook for example and what's up the share owner drop a lot 30 point less so this is like a good example of not first ecosystem now let's have a look at what's happening between whatsapp messenger and for example a gaming studio clash of clans I love that game by the way and here you can see it actually there is no so much relationship between the two just 4% of the owner of matzoh are using clash of clans during the same month and now let's have a look between two apps of the same studio and here you can see that actually clash of clans clash Royale they have supercell studio is created like an ecosystem of the user that they love their game it's not 80% like actually Facebook because I'm not telling you here you need to foster user to play your other games but the relationship here is to say that maybe you will have like a proportion of those user that will be able to stay in the semi system and as they keep on playing your

game you create like a very loyal user community and this is what's happening on the ipod casual suicide to play a Pixum to apps we can do the exercise we got like the system here we can pick your games with a vs. like some big video game studios and you can see that here only six almost seven percent of the share owner are using the same app during the same month so the key takeaway that I want to share with you here it's a it's a bit long and I still have a bit of time in front of us so it's ok is that I per casual games attract more and more user which attract also more studio because the business opportunity is here the things that you know keep in mind that those I per casual users are very different from casual and arbitrage categories mostly men and actually there are younger audience those user will switch more easily toward other apps and actually as

the user is shortened it decreased more quickly over time than other game it would be out of huge as to create like a good echo system to find profitability with your ads tomorrow the studio's using at best those information could create a complimentary app system they could do like cross app promotion in order to create like a real ecosystem and the thing is that if use tomorrow you start understanding your user when they are not using your app you will be able to get like a very clear advantage on the market in order to be better than competition and we scrub across a promotion you will be able to promote your app all the time most of the games rely on as as I said you need to make sure that the users see enough ads to find profitability so now comes another problem if tomorrow you have developed your amazing games and you want to reach the market this is how the mobile market looks like so you can see that there are

many many many many actors in the market and would be like really really hard to understand just look at how big the mobile ad network industry is so there are not all of that this is coming from landscape so you can do your honor as well but there are many many many many studios just for the matter of simplification here and to just help you a bit you will realize that let's have a look on how many SDK are integrated within games up so what we can see is that sixty eighteen point six SDK are integrating in games which is not that bad this is quite big and actually when you wonder what are the two most used SDK in the game industry first is analytics I understand your user second advertising and then we get like payment social crash reporting location and even attribution at the last part when we talk about and we want to understand among the almost 20 SDK integrated a

games how many SDK are about advertising the overall category for Olga or all apps in the world our six but when we come to games is between nine to ten so you will need nine to ten ad network advertising SDK in order to do a good mid monetization system and the thing is that when you look at the advertising partner integrating in game I pick some here but you have like many others as well you will realize that some of them are just ad network some of them are magician system keep in mind that none of the network here are the strongest all the time for all your user you need to find a solution that will optimize on what we call the ad request level every time that you want to display an impression to a user you need to be sure that this network is going to pay the most for the specific ad and the things that the bigger you will be the bigger those are that where he will come after you to manage and make some deals with

you which is normal because I want to give you some tips in your user acquisitions I want to love you inventory to the riveter campaign it's like the a global ecosystem work this way the things that when you're developing games most of the time you will display ads in your game coming from other games so remember you will keep on recruiting some user that will see ads coming from other games so you will make them go to use all the game in the industry do you really want that no so the thing is that keep in mind that advertising partner integrated in game you need to be sure that there will be optimized on the ad request level and tomorrow you will see that those guys that will look after the what we call the first impression this is a report coming from Missoula which analyzes like the differences of performances between ad network and you can see how

difference the first expression price is much higher than average why do we network once the first impression is very simple because the first impression convert more for them when they do some user acquisition campaign just like to put in simple when you are in a game you're using that game after a moment you may be a try you will be attracted by the first ad but then when you see 1015 rewarded video after a moment you're not that much into it so you will just keep them in order to keep on playing your games so in that context as you can see there's a lot of advertising partner you need to make sure that you will optimize other advertising partner on the ad request level try to be and try to look for a solution that is going to be unbiased because this is the best way to be sure that all the network are going to provide you most of their ad revenue okay - so this is this is what I wanted to share with you today so those

are few stats few trends that we observe on the market and what I wanted to do is to bring someone on stage that lived the story from the inside and I would like to welcome Adria so give him a round of applause please so as we have thanks a lot for flying with us today at GGC would you like to tell us a bit more about eastern entertainment and as you are at war yes of course thank you enough for inviting me and good morning everybody thank you for joining this early session today so on the yarn the CEO of eSchool entertainment so his current assignment to the studio based in France we are roughly certified people and we are today in your terminology I guess I would be in the arbitrage game one word about is cool we have been acquired last year by a chat

group so I should group as you may know is a leading book publisher so the old world and as you may also know the book publishing market is less booming that the game mobile gaming market so they have decided to enter more booming markets and they have done three acquisitions so far the first one was a neon play a uk-based studio in i per casual games the second one was Brainbow it's a studio editing the peak app it's a brain training up I guess you might know it and the third one was us so if you want to chat about this later in the day I'll be very happy because I shot as a good ambition in this sector so coming back to his corner so we are unlike the long story very short because every studio has a long story but let's summarize the last eight years in the following way the first phase of the studio what about Facebook games so talking back you know on Facebook brother games business model with about

microtransaction and marketing was about virality so zero paid marketing and it worked pretty well at the time but then we had of course this platform changed so the phase 2 of the company what about mobile games still on the microtransaction and marketing was I would say of virality of paid marketing this was a bit more difficult for us for many reasons so we had to change the good point is that we survived and we got better teams and better team that we had to change a bit so here come the phase 3 for now one year and that's the reason why I think I'm there with you the phase 3 is about mobile games it's more about business for then around advertising so it's now our games are 80% monetizing ads and the sub-points is a marketing is exclusively paid marketing I mean there's no morality nursing you can expect so on the for

example on the on the under the left side you've got a word game which is typically in our arbitrage game so this is something new we have a lot of ads you can see in this game so after every level and on the right it's more like the phase 2 game so it's a real PvP games it's it looks very simple but it is quite complicated and at the end quite difficult to make those games very big because you have difficulty to get an audience ok ok could you tell us like a bit more what you have seen in the last year on the market like you think you mentioned one time like the difference between top-grossing and top 3 yeah I think among the developer communities there was something that we were all looking at the top grossing ranking I mean this was the only thing we we want to travel you because without ads you cannot really monetize a sort of a top free that wouldn't be in the top grossing so but in our mindset now we will really look at top 3 and this top 3 is trusted by

the hyper casual and arbitrage game because there you can have in fact lo CPI's so you can with investing a lot of money you can really go in the top rankings and I think we have a shorter arrow eyes I can give you my experience when we were doing like microtransaction games and things like that our arrow I was a positive ROI we got it but after 12 to 15 months so it was really long so you need a lot of cash if you want to fill the machine we were quite a small studio and with our beat hard game now we we achieve something like my 3 months maximum to get the positive ROI so there you can invest really and still you can play the rankings and things like that so we are still small I'd say it's an ongoing story what I what I'm telling about that we are on this way and it's really something I think was a good move for teaming and talking about result could

you tell us like a bit more regarding what you achieve like regarding up there you or like ad revenue for example well it's it's I don't have the exact figures I know you have them you might tell them I don't have them myself but what I know it that all the girls we did in the in the year was made in ads and this was I have to say let's put it this way when you when you want to change and do what we did with our studio we had to think about change the the way we build games okay so this was something we had to put the new mindset in the team and build games in a new way then you have to deal with the UI and we decided to deal with the user acquisition ourselves to make it in-house and then you have to deal with the ads monetization and it's easy on the slide that ad monetization is not so easy so this is where we decided to build our partnership so basically we're doing the games ourselves for doing the UA ourselves and

the ad monetization is with externalized in hormones company in fact this is where we met one year ago and we were talking like about like how complex the market is regarding like when you start like your own games and you want to like achieve we know that execution is key and speed is key in this market because users which all the time so you need to renew your game all the time so what decision that you have made regarding this technology regarding the SDK integrated in that well the there were three reasons leading the day the fact we work together and I think those three things are quite key for the successful partnership we have achieved the first one is I don't know the reason why but we were not good at implementing the advertising SDKs we were always late on updating because I don't know those of you who have a lot of experience in ad monetization it will sound very easy but

for those of you are not used to that when you are monetizing with ads you got to have all those SDKs but all those SDKs you have to update them very regularly otherwise you can't get the the right revenue you expect or you have bugs etc and we were not good at that so we needed something we needed to difficult our technical team from the ads to focus them on the game so basically the obamas solution provided us with the sort of I would say meteor is DJ including everything and this one is tested and updated regularly by his company so we just have to integrate it to get the DJ update so on the technical point of view from the feedback from my developer was quite good so this is interesting the second point is is a question of team and we I had nobody to take care of the ad and you need what the job what we call adopts to to make

the ad work so somebody you know will really do the setup with their on the mediation tool somebody will talk with the networks it's a time this we hadn't we haven't had anybody in house so we decided to externalize this and this is a Hamas team doing that for us okay and the third point and also a design point is quite interesting is there is the question the in this advertising market is you know we when you go in a game you only adds four other games okay well I don't have anything about that I don't care what the money come from but it's quite strange not to have money coming from I don't know FMCG automotive where are the protesser and Gamble's the the mercedes-benz etc exit er so we really wanted to include partner who can bring this kind of advertisers and the the network

auguri brings those advertiser a lot it works only on Android so there's no solution on iOS for the moment but this is an interesting solution for us and and so maybe if some interesting to test we can have a chat and I can give you feedback about that okay thanks viki's time for questions do any one of you have some questions come on was that clear I must have questions he's tripled his advertising revenue this is good must be something you're interested in that was a good position is a starting point you know yeah that's the story again exactly what would you say what would you say is the most important kind of first step the most important tip for further people looking at the monitor optimizing their kind of their revenue you using your services like your own what's the first thing in HD apart from obviously get you on the phone and talk to you guys I think the first thing is to get some advices from other appa be sure what they are doing because you

need to win sometimes you can't try you won't have time to try everything on the market so you need to be sure to try the most trusted partner and verified partners then the second question is more philosophical all those party are going to be biased or unbiased so you need to create a system which going to create like all transparency between those partner and make sure that if they really want to fight for your first impression they need to really fight in real time for that deels can be a good way to level up like a job after a moment talking with the biggest video and some of them we have caught some of them before but we realized that those to do remove themselves from making this with some ad network because they know that they are looking in a way they are locked in the way and I can't grow the way they want just after so you need to make sure that you find a good equilibrium between like maybe at the state that you are right now maybe it could be a good way to make some deals but then maybe later it won't

be anymore create like an unbiased mediation system and then you will go and look for the folder best for your ad revenue there's a somebody saying to an empire system yes mr. nice are you serving us amazing I think I think is any other questions it's early morning in Finland this yeah exactly I'd like to say a massive thank you to remain and to Adrian for their for their presentations I hope you got a lot out of that so Caravan reports please [Applause] [Music]