Messaging, Messenger, iMessage & More – Learnings and predictions from EU experts

[Music] [Music] I guess this is the first panel of the afternoon I'm sure it will also be the best so just quickly we can go and do some introductions down the line so we're going to be talking about messaging messenger games iMessage instant games you know other messaging platforms some learnings here from folks actually building content in this area and obviously it's a very new and open area which on mobile is not necessary the case in most most other sub platforms so just quickly for myself my name is Josh work on my own in the mobile gaming space working with the

companies around key business areas so very interested obviously in new new areas to generate revenue and grow grow companies businesses so tongue let me pass this to you let you get started if you want to just do a quick intro and your role in your company hi I'm Tom Boonen and I'm heading spill games since 2015 spill games is originally coming from web and still one of the main leading game operator of off game portals and we're moving into becoming a mobile first company having enjoyed a group of 20 50 million installs within the last three years whereas more than 95 percent is coming organically from hi everyone my name is Bojana I'm CEO and co-founder of gamey game II connects friends and casual

gaming challenges we have a global community of gamers 70 games that are playable with friends across messaging apps using our boats across web and our own apps about 2 billion game plays have been played across the 70 games so we do work a lot with data and making sure the games are freely shareable my background is working for YouTube actually this part of the inspiration how YouTube how gaming is built in similar way how YouTube makes videos shareable I connects people around channels of videos this is what we do with games hi my name is Eleanor Bonin I'm CEO and co-founder of quicksave we are Helsinki based chat games company so we do exclusively games for messaging applications starting now with Facebook Messenger and our background is that we used to do a wish to use to run the the

chat games section of Perino powering our group messaging app who were there for two years so we've been a while in this space and it's quite interesting to see how it's now kind of finally catching up with our vision on how it can be big hello my name is Adam I'm co-founder of chatterbox games were based in Berlin we've are focused solely on messenger style games we started off with a focus in iMessage and have transitioned towards so focus on Facebook instant in the later half of last year our first game out is mini-golf battle and we have two more games coming out on the instant platform hopefully the next couple months hello my name is Matthew Wiggins on the CEO moji works I've been in the game industry for about 20 years my first are placeholders inger and then ran Zynga UK and then since then I've been doing other things in tech a mobile mojo she's a pretty young starts are running about a year old we're completely focused on games for

messaging platforms similar to atom focused on iMessage initially and now we're completely focused on html5 platforms like instant games and our first game for that is going submission on Friday so this is quite busy week for me awesome so I think you know we'll sort of start with a business opportunity and some learnings there and then dive into the the content side so I think to start I would love especially from the folks here who literally built a company sue solely focused on this area what is it about this area that makes it so appealing to be exclusively focused on it so Matthew don't you want to start then love to hear some other thoughts sure well I said I was never gonna start another games company unless it's for a new platform because of you know what the App Store is like now is the mature market so it's impossible or very unlikely to be able to do a start-up and be successful so when it became clear that the Western messaging platforms we're going to open up me and my co-founder felt that was the opportunity

we were we were looking for where it these were platforms that had hundreds of millions or billions of player potential players on them and of course there were no existing game companies there but crucially we also felt that there was the opportunity to make experiences for people that they hadn't really seen before particularly think about mainstream players or you know people that don't necessarily play games already so we're really focusing and we reason we're so excited about it is because of the way we can make games for groups so the father's inherently a social context in which someone comes to these games and they play them within conversations they're already having with other people that we think opens it up to you know much more meaningful type of social game play than is generally seen on mobile you can you add that to you know a billion plus users on largest platforms and that becomes very interesting for start-up yeah I would agree very much with that I think when my co-founder and I were taking a look at different business opportunities from

late 2016 we were looking at the market and what different types of opportunities it were right I think if you look at the way that mobile has matured to this point right I think the innovation just isn't there anymore I wasn't exciting to me to be starting up a mobile games company in the climate that we're in right now and then we started looking into messaging platforms even at that time with iMessage and the opportunity with things like game pidgin and experiences that were absolutely not even possible before right and being so directed towards playing with groups and I felt like the simplicity of the games actually worked out very very well because the the social connections that I actually brought into the game and the social retention hooks that were in the game really made all the difference in in pulling me back and playing and I think now is a is a new company very very young the space is very exciting mainly because it's just so early taking on that brunt of a risk as an indie company is far more likely than say a regular sort of mobile company yeah so

yeah I said our background is already kind of doing this type of games before that games really existed so you know in our previous startup we were doing kind of social multiplayer games where people were chatting with each other and and at the time it was like late 2014 we got the idea that we want to distribute our games in inter platforms and no one was really doing that yet so we we were kind of the early birds contacting chat apps like who would who would distribute our games and that's how that situation led to that startup being acquired by Perino and then we were doing the chat games at Torino and we've keep in can all the time seeing the possibilities of this new medium of four games and for me it definitely doesn't mean just a new distribution of of something that that exists but also possibility to innovate in in what kind of games and what kind

of gameplay is there and that for us it's a very exciting opportunity so and then for game II you've obviously been working on this for a long time can you talk a little bit about what was the origins of sort of starting to focus in this area when there won't necessarily as sort of strong platforms or sort of formality that you could leverage to distribute the games I mean for as it was especially exciting to see the both platforms emerge and evolve because as we all know it's harder and harder to make people download additional apps for their phones at the same time we clearly see they're spending more time with those apps they already have and these are messaging apps so it's either a messenger or whatsapp or cake or any other messenger in different regions so then we saw one platform after another opening up for both right opening up their bot platforms for other parties to blink bring contact directly into the app and it started from customer service

and it was a big hype around it so everything services or personal advisor financial services will happen from boats but actually the adoption took longer time because you're expecting some level of AI and then the opportunity actually is an entertainment because in entertainment in videos in gifts in gaming you don't really need that much of an AI because you are in a chat with a friend and that's good enough so at that point the bot can be a great facilitator of the conversation and the entertainment so most of our focus was looking really into the platforms how the Blackbaud platform is structured and using it to tap into the social graph into the conversations and connecting there to mobile web where you can easily launch many games and deliver the content in this case games directly in a conversation so it was more through like looking into the both platforms rather than taking a game from one

platform to another but yeah we ended up in a similar space excellent so tongue for first feel you know what you pass the mic over here sorry so obviously you guys are at much larger scale than everyone else in terms of this space what makes you go and invest in something new that you know it's potentially sort of unknown versus continue to focus on what works so I have been observing the Asian markets for quite some time since probably five to six years and I saw message of platforms coming up like Kakao Talk line etc and also having them as a strong foundation of distribution for native games in Asia so I always wondered when is Facebook or whatsapp coming with these kind of combination messenger and apps because it it's more it's really obvious to combine that so when Facebook was presenting to us that they are starting an initiative of instant games it was easy for us to say yes so we were in the first group of developers and

publishers that were starting the first wave off of instinct games November last so it sorry November 26 2016 and approved for us to be quite successful so we took a game coming from web and adjusted it and modified it to make it usable for instant games and immediately within two to three weeks we saw between 12 to 40 million users instantly coming in and that proved for us that it's really it can be really a big platform so if you have a games on a platform and with Facebook behind it this is really a player that you can really push these kind of messenger messenger games forward we see for example that they have the passion education to move things forward on in that direction it takes a bit more time because it's embedded within a messenger group whereas for example with iMessage that's also what we were looking at we saw that it's actually not so attractive and that Apple didn't give it the love and dedication that we that you usually

expect from Apple and I think also the results from iMessage iMessage game is also approving where it's going so that's the reason why currently we focus much much more on instant games we see that it's evolving let's say and not as fast as we would expect but it's also clearly recognizable that Facebook is really serious about it and they just started a couple of months ago implementation implementing ad monetization so I think that can be really really interesting also when they start doing in-app purchases because I think that is for us right now still the missing link because for us it's really an Rd effort so we invest but it's not that we on on the early front we are not the early innovators with spill but really want to see how it's evolving that's the reason why we yeah we carefully observe it but we want to be also in the group that starts or if it takes off so we want to be really at the forefront but with you know in monetization inside where a developer can also start monetizing or

generating revenue it becomes really interesting for a larger crowd of developers and publishers excellent so we've talked a little that touched on iMessage obviously instant games Facebook is quite popular for this group so our folks still interested in iMessage have we kind of done stuff on there and moved away from it how are we looking at both iMessage and would love to hear about any other sort of platforms that you think are interesting whether it's on the open web or native native app so on the iMessage side we launched our game in the summer of this year of course re of 2017 and from our perspective I think what the the killing point for us in terms of the platform was WWE see it was pretty obvious from the UI UX ID that Apple wasn't trying to fix the fundamental issues with installing in the game right actually trying to figure out the flow of sending the game to another player and then getting them to install it almost instantly so Facebook of course

obviously fix that problem by going with html5 and instant and in general we found the retention to be better the engagement to be much better and the the business model in terms of growth on the growth side significant so it was a no brainer for us in terms of the future were other opportunities there our course we'll keep our ears to the ground to see what happens with something like WeChat that if if other platforms open up and other platforms also have a focus on instant and a focus on html5 where we can port over our games rather than say rebuild them for a new technology then it would be attractive to us got it I have a bit of a soft spot for iMessage because it was Apple's announcement of the iMessage App Store for iOS 10 that was really the thing that got me thinking about starting Mogi works and so we launched a very very quickly developed game for iOS 10 I think came out about 10 days after us hand launched

and so we used as an opportunity trying to understand what would potentially be happening with the messenger platform so first of all really understanding about the audience now that worked really well for us and we launched two games on iMessage overall and those were designed as as games that would give us a lot of knowledge so we weren't really looking for traditional ROI from those and particularly as a start-up really focused on what what we think messages can never come over the next two or three years that was fine we had about one and a half million downloads across the to rapidly develop games that we did and we got a lot of days but there was also you know various things that were weaknesses of the platform so first of all one 1/2 million downloads is not the same as well how many do you say see 13 to 14 million on instant games for spill so in case any of you are wondering whether this might be an interesting platform in the future I think very carefully about those numbers

because it's huge so we saw you know not that's not sent the same kind of scale as that and there are also the challenges that Adam talks about where I think it was great that Apple like first of all Apple were the first company or of big scale in the West who opened up their platform and that was great but my message is a very particular kind of platform so the first thing is as I mentioned in the intro I think one of those interesting things probably all of us would agree is the fact that these are social platforms it's all about people playing together of course my messages iMessage is only on one of the mobile platforms so that immediately is a bit of a challenge for that model the next thing is that I message this is just from our data it's very us centric so in the US I think you could actually build a significantly successful iMessage out and the second out that we did which was a kind of a take on ten pin bowling we actually had

really good numbers in the US I'm really pretty high retention by higher than you would expect to see from our standard mobile game the problem is is that it didn't work anywhere else in the world so we actually got really good featuring in Russia as well but we had no localization and it turned out no one in Russia understood what I message was so I was running around twelve okay localization team getting support replies done in Russian to try and explain how our message actually worked and so that really told us that iMessage which was about very specific audience in a very specific place whereas instant games and I think the html5 platforms as they open up they are they're global the opportunity there is global so our goal is to be the one of the leading messaging companies across the whole world so that means Facebook but it also means the Asian platforms as well and that just gives us the opportunity at least for a degree of reach that we're not going to see on iMessage got it and so for gamy so you're at this

point exclusively focused on open web or how do you look at these platforms versus having total freedom on the open web we have also tried iMessage app and we had very similar experience even though it was featured I believe worldwide it didn't got it didn't get the traction it was mostly people didn't really understand what I message is how to use it barriers of being on just one device like iOS based device and also having to install it having to set send every single conversation like manual is just like there are so many barriers that at this point I think it's like really on Apple site to make this move to improve it of course we would like to see a bot platform in I'm a city site I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon but I would be really awesome to bring any html5 content through BOTS directly into AI messages if there is

anybody from Apple you can take a note but but otherwise we're looking into platforms that are of course opened and that they allow any developer and to use the ball platform deliver content there are so many of them that I grande viber Skype messenger hopefully whatsapp is also coming that's going to be big cool so for quick save do you do you worry obviously you know there's a lot of people building content in this area how do you look at obviously discovery is a huge problem on native native app stores as there becomes more content instant games potentially we could end up in the same place what's your kind of perspective on that obviously building as a smaller company that doesn't have like a you know Angry Birds or some top IP like how do you think about that issue yeah certainly I I do think that the platform will be quite full of games not even in very far future but in the in

the near future I mean right now the discovery is helped by there being less games than done in the App Store but how I see it is that it's still a different type of mechanics that can can kind of capture the audience it's a very social platform there's a very big viral protein so so just bringing existing game from App Store would need to adapt for that environment and now that we are building kind of natively for the chat we're thinking that kind of things from the beginning like how to make it a dynamically multiplayer you can play a load but it's better with friends and then you know how to make it communicative so that you know the messages that you get it's not just like in your App Store game you would have notifications but they usually like single player notifications what if the game is it's notifying a group that's a

bit different situation you know that the messages have to make sense it has to be part of the game so there's a lot of things to kind of consider that are inherently chat issues for the games and I do see that's an opportunity to as Matthew said be beyond the top even even as a smaller player coming through the field yeah I was just gonna answer that that this is when this pops up it felt very similar to the original app store and Facebook app so like I remember in 2008 being at GDC and I wandered into a into a talk by this guy called Mark Pincus they were about 10 people in the room because it was 9 o'clock on like a Thursday morning and I wasn't really paying a lot of attention and he started talking about the numbers that were coming through from Mafia Wars and I was kind of vaguely nosis the you know he's talked about millions of users and of course I actually totally forgot about them for about 18 months and then realized I should have paid more attention to it at the time the way

that the most successful companies are going to start here is by starting well probably six months to a year ago hopefully and in the next two or three years that's when any of the companies that will be successful as focusing on messaging or html5 that's that's when they're going to be successful in three or four years time you'll see a situation not dissimilar to the more mature markets got it yeah and there are you know clear differences in in the map platforms like if you look at some other like user acquisition metrics from from app store versus chat or then like retention metrics I mean that's the difference is that you have to kind of take into account and and built upon yeah that was tongue I wanted to ask you you know you obviously VAT on a web and mobile like you know that just we talk retention and how is it right I think

you're gonna assume that it should be higher right it's a social platform but there's also no friction so everyone comes in so what are you seeing around retention and engagement from web and mobile versus the instant games and let me come to the dance right after I make an adjustment to my previous statement so the instant success that we have with Facebook instant games there was also quite a surprise for us we expected maybe a million maximum and then all of a sudden it takes off and theoretically Facebook instant games has the potential but for example if you would have only achieved only I don't know let's say a couple of hundred thousand probably stop that we would have stopped immediately and so for us I think having that having enjoyed or enjoying that for success it's obviously also a good signal for us to continue and yeah so that's the reason why we think it's a great space so retention which I'm sorry faster

retention so we see that retention is is lower then on what we see on native mobile mobile native but it's close but still below what we see on web so I think that something what we have to also figure out on how do you make use of the platform of the of the features that are there I have to add that and the sake which is the most successful game that until now we have on instagrams platform is a single player game so it's not really made for social so we're gonna adjusting that but I think once you have tweaked that out of figured out then it has really good success but until now retention numbers are quite low for us all in compared to other mobile native games that we see for example you have games that have between 40 and 50% they want retention and we see we don't see the friendly on on the instant games for the games that we have got it what are other other folks seeing around retention is this expectation it should be lower and

what are the sort of key drivers for that they some like from the design and just user behavior yeah in terms of retention we also agree we see lower compared to native mobile and I think everyone can kind of expect that when you've got a app store within an app store right and that if you don't have the icon on the home screen and you're not getting those notifications you don't have that same kind of trigger point to pull players back in so the one trigger point that you do have to drive retention is the bot and that is really the driver of retention making sure that those notifications are not just there or happening daily but also that they're social that they contain content which relates to other players playing the game and there's plenty of great examples on messenger of using the fact that your friends are playing using the fact that your friends beat your score using the fact that you know you you want to help out your friend gift your friend these types of notifications are quite well from the bot level I think

maybe adding to that and the instant games platform is still early stage I would say if you compare it for example with the App Store I mean we see quite maturity and I would assume probably retention rates or the retention kpi's were probably a waste in a way similar back in the early days of the App Store and so I expect that a lot will happen also as the platform will involve and also as we as developer publisher figuring out how we can make best use of the features of the platform and to embed it because also that's something you know what at least you have to do in order to make the best or to get the maximum out of the platform yeah I'd strongly agree at that point we've seen better attention than we necessarily will respect it for this kind of stuff we've been doing we've been really focused on group behavior so that's slightly due to some of the stuff that we learned when we were passing and we're looking at with

friends games and so we learnt then quite a bit about design choices you can mate that can be good or bad for retention I think if you think about this platform as being completely social and it's not just social between two people is social between ten or a hundred or a thousand people that leads you to designing slightly different types of experiences that can then have much much better attention that you would see in a normal single-player mobile game so some of the data that it's not freely available but it's not that hard to find will show you that retention in groups is is extremely good so I think focusing on as you said you know focusing on world what understanding the platform and getting the best out of it is going to be the way to make something that's better than normal mobile oh so soon that's nodding my head yes yes I agree okay cool so in for gaming obviously have a ton of content is there any types of game experiences or game mechanics or stuff

that you seen have higher sort of engagement from your audiences any sort of insights you can share from what you've been seeing I thought it was interesting to see that there are differences in retention there are also probably differences and especially in the early stages of people expectations how the gaming is going to work and look like to be very specific people open their messengers for various different reasons maybe they were just received message from a friend so there they open it to do all sorts of different things and it may also happen to be a game so it does not necessarily mean they opened it for a game which then probably has an impact on the retention because maybe they just don't have that much time so that took us also to look into shorter different sessions or more closer to snackable type of content so rather than building deep immersive gaming for chats we looked into launching series of many games that would fit those moments those

windows when people open the chat and they have minutes to play at the same time because they open chat for various different reasons they may also happen to discover your game so that's the positive part of it so you can still enjoy if if done well if the flow isn't well and if if there is a reason to share then people are still willing to share which on social media that has almost disappeared right so the virality of getting shared on Facebook or Twitter it's almost gone it still does exist in in messaging apps so there are two sides of it I do think the context now is different than the expectations is different what people expect and change it chat but it may change over time as it gets more adapted more mass-market so it may get actually closer to the data we see in native games awesome create a time check do I have five minutes or more just five minutes okay six minutes alright so I want to jump into more of that we're kind of moving in the direction of sort

of content design and development so we talked about group designing around groups is there any thing in the market that you've seen is really interesting or innovative in this sort of design and content design specifically for this platform is there any stuff that you're excited to explore around the content in terms of the design and feature set that you think will work really well on this platform well what we are currently experimenting with is is some type of user-generated content things so like in our first game which is in soft launch you can kind of create this custom polls for your friends it's a it's a game around polls and answering these silly comparisons and trying to guess what others have voted and and so we have a bit of something that you can you can just send tailor-made to your friends and that's that's something that the platform is quite well-suited for

another thing that we've seen there's some kind of asynchronous multiplayer mechanics coming out for example in ever being that is that is in the platform they this crew bus is where you fight against the boss it's too tough boss tough to beat on your own so you have to kind of enlist your friends to fight the same boss with you and that's not synchronous it's like asynchronously fighting together so that kind of a cooperative mechanics I think that's going to evolve a lot more as well cool any other thoughts on folks yes I have something kind of this does not interesting lockstep turn-based games are not interesting because you can only but each player can only be as engaged as the least interested player so don't do that think of I would be thinking about

the stuff that really excites me are the things that allow players to play at their own place but still play together and that's really what we're focusing on actually we were really inspired by a game that Alena and her co-founders made pal Ringo which was this pirate ship game where you could you it was really easy to play because what you were doing is you were just going in and kind of triggering actions to help out your friends as you're kind of journeying the seven seas to battle stuff and thinking about those sorts of games where we can come together to achieve something there's probably competitive against there all the other groups there in the world that's the stuff that we're really interested in yeah thank you about it from a game design perspective I would also mimic the same comments from the group play in everyone right is one of the shining examples and I think what I like to see happen is eventually get some group play that it is a bit more competitive that players are going back and forth between each other in a chat

saying betting on sports things or engaging in the group chat in a bit more competitive way but currently what it looks like in terms of the best retention best games currently on the platform are ones where the group rate feature is cooperative and everybody's working to optimize their own rewards right and optimize their own progression their own single-player progressions everybody is kind of working in their own game but then the most beneficial path is one which you play with other friends so that's that's kind of the the best example now but I'm looking to try to figure out how we can make things a bit more competitive in the future excellent so want to touch on BOTS a bit more because I think this is really interesting and some of the companies have been talking to you I've been doing a lot and I've heard things like where people actually more engaged at the BOTS of the game than the actual game itself you know for spheal are you guys looking at you know did you have you leverage

boss at all in the platform or how do you look at that no not interested okay okay and how do you from gaming side how have you looked at odds for and how is that influence and impact retention for the game and what we see is a 80 80 % of the gamers in chat they do play in groups there is only 20% of people who want to play with about or engage only with the bots so as I have mentioned earlier the boat does really work best as like a facilitator of any entertainment among humans so this is what what we've seen working and maybe adding to the question before it's less the design is routed technology but it's it's super important it's because we're talking mobile web and we don't really want to do games only for the high end devices on iOS and one market right so we have to think about the size of the game and the loading time and this that just really

limits the creative capabilities or what we can actually design in the game so if you can get below one megabyte with a really cool experience then I think that's must so the the speed of loading does have a big impact on on the success of the game cool yeah I definitely agree on the speed of loading it has to be fast people don't people want instant games to actually be instant and so it can't load long but that being said of course you need to be technically savvy you can do things on the background and you can load more once the person is already playing so but you have to it's it actually can be technically advanced a lot of people think it's it's you know it's mi5 it's easy you know it's just but but you have to have to have technical capabilities cool alright so I want to get to questions is somebody ready to take questions yeah okay cool

so questions for the panelists really okay one over here yeah hi the Facebook games when they're at their peak and you had a lot of game invites and you had a lot of what many people class spam took a lot of criticism and then in the end they slowly started to roll back from that do you think the the facebook messenger games especially the social multiplayer ones you may get to a point especially as they're on your mobile which is a lot more personal where you could just suddenly get inundated with we game invites that might frustrate users and can you see Facebook if they learnt from the web days and they'll do something to restrict that especially when there's a lot more games on the actual platform well I'm kind of

counter-question like a lot of people that come to me as well and say that you know is it too spammy and then I ask them like well have you received any spam I mean that it has been there for a year the whole platform how much spam have your cotton and they haven't gotten much so so yeah I do think Facebook is also doing it a bit differently this time yeah it's been quite hidden at the moment hasn't it the Facebook game the instant games I a lot of people I know yeah I think that's I think that's honest there is it's not really hidden but because people haven't heard about it it hasn't actually been spamming anyone you know to too much but it's it's something that the games also when you when you are playing with your friends you're usually playing with some of your friends not with your you know hundreds of Facebook friends yeah I mean I think that's intentional that it is hidden my guess is that instead of starting with everything open we're gonna start with everything closed and slowly add yeah

that's why it's not spamming yeah so I think they're gonna be very cautious so hopefully more will unlock but it'd probably be a slow progression yeah um what I know is they're very careful about that based on the experiences that they had during the singer times so they really pay attention to that but it definitely poses the danger that you can get over spammed definitely so you also I think we as developer publisher have some responsibility do not overdo it yeah I think that's that right and I think Facebook I have definitely learned from the last time and so they're doing in completely other way that being that's not enough is much more restrictive and their various thing like they have a lot of control over that and they're going to optimize developers who do a good job of that because it's not making very easily measure in terms of what happens after someone receives a notification so we're not that concerned

about you just being turned off by that book whose Facebook really really care about the user experience yeah especially with this sorry with the Facebook spam stuff it's actually very very simple for you to turn off messages in any of these BOTS and that's the sole kind of source for retention that we have as a developer so actually it's very much in our interests as a developer to not be spamming because as soon as we do we lose all connections to the player we can already see that in our retention so I think Facebook's already set it up quite well where it's both restrictive and we get some transparency over when we're being too spammy are we done more yeah we're done okay cool thank you very much people have other questions sure you can track these guys down afterwards thank you thanks [Applause] [Music]

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