Mobile indie is dead – Long live mobile indie!

[Music] right being here I know it's almost end of the day so it's kind of hard but thank you all for being here I know that's a bit of a depressing title but I will assure you I will end it with a positive note my name is Rajee I'm the co-founder of lucky cat studios and makes mobile games with a what would Nintendo do philosophy her no my brother he's been creating games pretty much his whole life and since we were younger we talked about

starting a games game studio together but right before Christmas 2014 unfortunately I was struck with a cardiac arrest and I'm super lucky to be alive and be standing here and being able to this story so once I got out of the hospital I started talking again with my brother and saying let's just do this you know I was super euphoric I thought we have nothing to lose in life let's just start a game studio so we started in 2000 we released over 10 mobile games now we had our most profitable year last year we were selected by Apple as one of the most promising any developers and this is definitely a check on win so we had Tim Cook in our office in June 2018 which was crazy alright so that's a bit of lucky cats let's talk about the state of the market for in these being more and

more quality games coming out the tools are easy to use so we're seeing more quality games and it's no surprise that platforms like Apple and Google want to feature both these games and we've seen that with the change in iOS 10 where you have today to have now and a games tab showing off way more content than before so this can affect the indie developer was more deploying on these features though I must say that Apple is actually one of the best or the best supporter of any developers so less exposure of platforms means you have to do more marketing efforts on your own and next to that the last thing is you need to optimize your game more and more before a global launch because you want to maximize to protect each user who comes

into your game now in general we could say that we mobile or we indie developers we are pretty bad at doing our own marketing and it's the competition is there're bigger companies having bigger budgets we all are competing for the same users for the same installs so that's quite depressing and the question then is is mobile indie debt for 2019 I first want to talk a little bit about what kind of mobile marketing efforts you can do with a low budget so I want to talk about create creating a community I've case study from a friend the series called neutralised you can maybe work with an intellectual property I call it a piggyback strategy you're basically riding the wave of a well-known status of that interaction and you could all

obviously do traditional mobile advertising but it requires money obviously but there's tricks maybe to use to do that with a lower budget so this game potentials - it's done by neutralized a very cool indie developer from Italy and he neutralized released a couple of indie dev logs before launching the game and I think it's a super good way if there's any demand for a sequel of super cattails one and having these making these videos he has an obviously an engaged audience and he has now over 5k subscribers it'll period and obviously it's climbing with each update he's releasing and having that having it all centralized on one platform I think it's a perfect way to grow your brand or app even further and remember these

platforms like YouTube or discord it's free zero dollars and you can get zero dollars installs working with IPs that's something that we we have a lot experience with a lucky cats so we started our first game ever we've made it's called Nam cat and basically Nam cat is a super sent a more you tap tap and hold to eat fish and release to avoid the bombs and when we were designing or making the game we were thinking about okay how are we gonna do marketing with this game so we came tragedy to work with all the celebrity internet cats and my job was to reach out to to internet cats so I started reaching out to grumpy cat Garfield you named all the big celebrity internet

cats but obviously didn't know about lucky cats so they said no and once when I was looking further there were other internet cats which also have or have 1 million Facebook Likes as opposed to 10 like grumpy cat but it's still 1 million likes so if you collect all of them you still have an enormous amount of reach and a good thing about these internet cats is that they were much more easy approachable than these other cat managers they just know they want to have a high minimum upfront so yeah they like the game they want to promote the game on the Facebook pages and so once we launched we were able to get between 15 and 20 million reach on day one were able to do 2 million downloads in two weeks and then we figured out that the internet cat world is a very small world and eventually the bigger internet cats which I approached first they started

contacting us again like I said we've seen the game you one actually also in the game so you know grumpy cat girl filled nyan cat they all went straight into Nam cat and again what we did the deal structure was as followed we made a pixel art version of the cat's we did assign revenue share on on the in-app purchase and we had zero upfront dollars investment at the end of 2017 we got a message from buddy we released Beach Street and he just loved the game so you know we had experience obviously with working with other IPs so and basically he already suggested I want to have I want to have my own character in the gate that's just doing creating a character of me and have it as an in-app purchase we did it right away this guy has 5 million followers on Twitter and Instagram and over 10

million likes on Facebook he's well-known for crank that I'm not sure if you know that that single but it has over 370 million views on YouTube I've heard he's again in the news because of some song that got ripped bike so yeah this so there was a fantastic opportunity for us as well and we got more than 200 K downloads just you know by him talking about Beach Street again $0 upfront investment another way to do it oh this is another thing I want to do actually with with the audience why let's do a small experiment why not like if if anyone is interested I would say just try to reach out to YouTube influences well don't have an a celebrity status not like PewDiePie or markiplier with you know millions of subscribers why not look at your own

content if you came and at a reach let's say be celebrity status influenced so we have like 10k subscribers and see if you can make a deal and I'm pretty sure it's gonna work let me know if that works because I think it works you have $0 up front if and you know it's a win-win situation and the other way to do it is yeah the traditional way of mobile advertising obviously one of the biggest platforms out the book you have Apple search and nowadays AdMob Google and a bunch more networks a lot of people think that you need a lot of money to to invest and use acquisition but you also have to think this way like you do advertisement through these platforms it also means that you you can monetize through these platforms so you basically can try to balance if your game makes more than you have to spend basically you can structure deals with these platforms

just make sure that you make an you spend so the these guys are very open to customized deals just just try you know yeah long live mobile India and the reason why I say that it's because we move faster than bigger companies we have more room for experimentation we should have more appetite for risk we definitely should and we don't have angry or managers above us who have to reach KPI so we can basically be very creative also on the business side and this is the optimal situation you want to make a game that you want to make but also needs to be marketable so try to find that spot and most of the indie innovation comes from the game side but nowadays we should be more focusing on the marketing side and this is something

we actually have seen in it with hyper casual it's not an invention by a big big big studio no it's an invention by small studios who were experimenting with ads like a couple years back didn't know it was possible to have a cost per install less than a dollar and by experimenting with ads and trying to reach more people and have a higher conversion rates it was possible to that installs for less than 50 and again it was not invented by a big company but a small team and thanks to that we have more mobile gamers than ever so long live Indy thank you [Applause] kind of action having you know abilities

that have really maximized the kind of the value proposition is it because I wonder if partner is because you've you've really gone to not know hanging through it I think it's the wrong turn but stuff that has good broad appeal not just kind of not the more traditional niche type of content yes they're going for sort of music hip hop kind of stuff for or cats or whatever it may be it's not just as traditional I'm gonna make a 8-bit and side-scrolling long game yeah it's it's something this seems to me to be about an audience not about what we like playing yeah yeah so as I said you need to also think about the marketer you need to find that sweet spot you have your game and then you have mine you really need to find a balance between those two and if you don't think about marketing or whether it's marketable you're actually making game for yourself right so then you can pay

yourself yeah excited exactly you can play all day yeah they're your own thing that's fantastic again I think it's why I keep whenever I talk to people are meant to people there's always who's the audience yeah who is it for yeah and if you don't start with the audience you don't all they need and if we didn't all gank exactly and I'm not know thank you very much thank you thank you so much [Music]