MAG CEO Daniel Hasselberg on the power of free growth opportunities

um so I'm I'm going to talk a bit about mag interactive and how we got our first game Russell to 50 minute downloads without having an approach of of actually paying for for getting new players into the game so when we started out the company this is the third company I'm involved in starting up I'm the co-founder and CEO of maget directive uh we saw that too much DC money too early can be a bit harmful if you're unlucky so boot strapping was the approach this time around so 2010 we we started the company and did work for higher building games and apps for other companies in Stockholm where based and one half years into that had some money and father okay let's spend a few months now and try to build our first game so what we did was looking at how can we find a game that has the potential to to really grow without huge marketing

budgets so we we wanted to find a genre that was really had super broad appeal so looking around in the just people around us in Sweden and looking at the abore charts at that time again word was immensely popular a very simple word game like scrable for smartphone in our opinion not super well executed and pretty slow in terms of gate play you make one move and then you wait so we thought if we do something that's super polished and a bit more fun and fast in the work game genre we might have potential thing going for us and since we were then seven guys in just a few months of Runway U the focus was really to keep the scope super narrow so what we did we could really execute well and then the lack of marketing budget was also uh drivers behind trying to make this

own so there's there's like no guarantee to high growth but I think there is a guarantee to non- growth so we try to focus on that how do we avoid non growth so like things like any time anywhere anyone kind of questions how do we address that so mobile game you solve a lot of that from the getg go and anyone we couldn't really solve because we were such a small we did iOS only otherwise of course you should be on all the platforms the NH time aspect we addressed by thinking about short game sessions to anytime in theory yeah you have a phone but you know if you need to invest 10 or 20 minutes at a time maybe that's too ambitious for you if you think about it anytime so we even a bathroom break or between two stations in the community Train That's you need to be able to play the game then you have the any time Factor

and then of course the sharing of the game experience if you like it must be super smooth and that's a kind of reactive thing people won't share if you don't remind them that they can share uh and when their friends see this sharing is it easy to act on when they come to the App Store is it appealing and do they understand what the game is all about and if they take that step to download and start the game the onboarding process is super important and you need to make sure they find a friend who actually invited them to make sure they become Boy Players so what is this game Russell then if you haven't played it it's it's a very very simple idea you have 16 letters in a grid you swipe your finger to to make words from that GD then you have two minutes to make as many words as you possibly can and it's your your opponent's turn to do the same thing and then you go back and forth it's very competitive and I think the the magic behind is that it's so

easy to understand the concept you can explain it in 5 seconds but you you realize after playing like for just a few minutes that you get better really really quickly so it's not a random game skill based and you improve quickly that's super addictive for a game and you also realize that the guy who invited you to the game maybe played a few more days than you and he's better but just putting in some extra time you'll P to to improve and beating after a while so super competitive and of course since it's a PVP game it's social you need to find your friends to be able to play and that's kind of a barrier to growth in a way but if you reach critical mass it's it's a super powerful thing from enir perspective and also of course for engagement and retention maybe you get tired of the game after a few weeks but you have some fanatic friend just keeps inviting you to to play more games and you can't really get out

so we launched the game in March of 2012 uh we we had expectations that the people will actually find the game would play a lot because we've seen that in the friends and family testing uh but of course you can't plan for super high growth you don't you don't know if that's going to happen and I think for us the timing was fantastic this other word game people have been playing that for half year got the habit of playing like a synchronous PVP casual word games but maybe they were a bit tired of that experience and now this is a new F so people started talking about it so in 9 days we were we went to number one overall in The Swedish App Store and we stayed there for about 2 months and it just kept spreading from Sweden to Denmark to Norway to Holland France Italy Spain it's one over the year so about a million downloads per month every month

we reached the first milon in 3 weeks at the launch and that of course this quick growth made us realize that okay we can quit the work for higher stuff and really focus on the game now and and continue to to add more stuff that we had left out from the start um so tweaking that kind of social integration has been the key for our success so working with open graph to make sure the timeline posts are optimal comes to clickfree rates what kind of me message should you send out and when and then in the later part of 2012 we also added the the possibility to challenge our Twitter followers and that was not a big thing in in Europe but we saw something super interesting in the analytics dashboard in early December with the US numbers were like2 $300 per day but then 500,000 2,00 4,000 really exponential growth so

we started looking what where where does all this traffic come from some written an article about us has it been something TV whatever is it was it was concentrated in one small little city called Collins in Mississippi there was a lot of stuff on Twitter there we saw the Russ Russell hashtag that you that we put in the prepared message when you chall your quter followers that was just coming every 5 minutes and more and more intense so we really Twitter that just exploded the game from that smaller City then the week after we saw people showing up from San Francisco and then Atlanta Chicago and then the east coast and in I think three four weeks from when we saw that happening first we were number one in the US app store and then a couple of weeks later number one on Google play as well so you could really see this fire thing you invite your friends it goes across the is not only

the chart position on the App Store but really it's the friend Network and and also Twitter and Facebook who goes cross the platforms so the growth opportunities that we saw here was like what what can we do free to grow the game so this was obvious than Facebook and Twitter and then it works better than you could ever have imagined but we also work a lot with the matchmaking so if when you have a PVP game one of the challenges is that if your your friends are not active right now then you need to just wait for them to make a move so we added an option to play random opponents and the kind of the challenge has been to make that random opponent less random so we have a skill level concept we use something called ELO rating to to to determine how good you are at the game and as you become better and better adjust that skill level and then match you against someone of of the same skill

because then the game is super even and becomes fun and competitive and also look at player patterns like is this player kind of player Al only want to play a few games in the morning before work and then late at night or does he play like for a full hour and want to make rematches all the time with the same player because if that's a mismatch will build frustration when you see fewer games play per day we've also been very Lu comes to influencers that this skill-based nature of the game makes it sort of brag so a lot of celebrities have been showing off their skills in Russell posting screenshots and and telling everybody how good they are at the game we had some guys in FC Barcelona that's like mocking each other on Twitter with screenshots how they beat each other a lot of musicians sports stars we had an NBA star with 3 million followers also challenged his followers on Twitter so

we had to go into the database and clean that up all the invites he got after that and U also some other fantastic things see if this works if you have some this is the French Parliament they had a voting on samex marriage I'll over so they they like documented the lack of Interest they realiz memb play Russell on her iPad they see her username and realize we try to challenge her will she answer

she's just crushed Journeys during debate and like 2 3 hours later we were on the top of the fren App Store so pretty amazing stuff so you need to have some luck I'll skip this one I think so some learnings we've seen when we created the game we thought the game mechanics in Russell you need to respect that we want to have a fair game since the face part of it it's important so we we didn't that in like boosters or anything like that into the game play so our starting point was like we add advertising as a main monetization then you can like buy a premium version that's add three and we thought still that okay if we have a lot of ads people will buy the premium version that would be business but you can really make a lot of money from advertising if done right so we we put a lot of effort into looking aention numbers without advertising and with

advertising in different kind of mix to make sure there's actually a sweet spot you can find where the advertising is at a level where retention doesn't suffer from it so but the problematic thing as everybody who who works with ads in their games know is that it's a very challenging business you can't really know what the cpms are going to be like next month or in another Market or another platform or even same network he said are they going to be consistent so that's something is that's a full-time job mediating this uh traffic and make sure you make the most out out of your ad inventory and it also makes it hard to rely only on paid acquisition because your lifetime value with will like fluctuate with the CPM levels because you can only make sure you have you get a lot of game play out of the users and have a huge ad inventory but then it's up to the The Advertiser to make the Mone

and what we also have seen is of course that the PVP if you get it right it's extremely rewarding we have amazing long-term retention when we see on any given day far more than half of the players are more than 8 months old for example so it's just really great retention if you you have a PVP game that that people like so going forward we we believe in building strong Brands since some discoverability is is of course a big issue for anyone on the App Store especially if you can't pay for the visibility so we just launched a follow-up game now to Russell for Russell adventure and building on the same kind of brand makes it easier for us to cross promote it's super relevant to the Russell players that we have a new game where they can play Russell in a new way and also for retargeting we can address people that used to play Russell with advertising for Russell Adventure it's both easy to get high cprs and then

low cpis and and it also reminds them of Russell so both games benefit from from the advertising money that we put in and of course we have a pretty big fan base all those 50 million players uh a lot of them are also following us on Facebook and Twitter and so on and interactive with them we can learn what what they like in the game what they would like to see in a sequel to the game or addition to the existing game and so on so we try to put a lot of that knowledge into the new game production so Russ Adventure we released that on iOS a few weeks ago already more than 2 million downloads was featured by Apple globally as editor's choice so super happy about that of course and um it's coming soon on Android as well so that's uh something we look forward to seeing so if I'm already over you I guess yeah okay you

can it does it's very you should all try it out