Panel: A Love Story: Essential Strategies to Attract (& Keep) an Audience.

foreign [Music] [Applause] let's have a round of applause for our panel on a love story essential strategies to attract and keep an audience it's going to be led by Jackie Voss from demoso hello [Applause] let me just get my notes up right welcome everybody hello everyone nice to see somebody smiling Fresh Faces after yesterday's libations

um we we've got everybody this is great this is great okay good so um I'm Jackie um the CEO of demoso which is the world's best video games PR marketing consultancy go and see my lot if you want to have a chat about marketing um that's my plug so um moving swiftly on I have a wonderful panel here who can really talk to you about the love affair which is our games production um and how to attract and how to keep your users coming so I'm going to let them all um introduce themselves um but hold your hands up also during the session if there's something you just want to ask somebody to carry on with their point and then at the end of the session we can also ask questions so I'm going to hand over to new Emery you introduce yourself hello hi my name is imria and I'm old and I'm looking around

feel like I'm increasing the backwards compatibility in the games industry but I started in board games I'm that old and I've done all sorts of games and all sorts of genres and I co-founded Bossa Studios which is most known for comedy games like Surgeon Simulator and other um which were claimed to be YouTube paid which I was very proud of and now I am starting a new studio which is still in secret mode and we still can't get that out of you can we no it's very annoying anybody knows come and tell me Robin uh hello everyone my name is is Robin and I've been in the influence marketing industry for my entire professional career and now in the last six years I've been running a company called we hype so we focus specifically on gaming influencer marketing hi everyone my name Alexandra I've been

in the industry for three years now part of Imperial online uh we've been uh in the market for since almost 18 years now uh we were created in 2005 and during this time we have a very big portfolio of almost 30 games and across these 30 games we have about 65 million players we were acquired by Steel front in 2018 and I hope you guys find this panel very useful was always interesting excellent and yet hey everyone I just want to say thanks for prioritizing this over lunch I hope we can live up to them my name is yep I've been in the games industry for a little over 13 14 years by now mostly working in Mobile started out before smartphones and worked with the original producer on Subway Surfers so that's probably my

biggest claim to fame and then I've been at a number of different developers and Publishers over the years and now I work as head of publishing at Funday Factory mid-sized game Studio doing premium games across platforms very excited to be here today excellent It's a Wonderful panel who here is a games developer interested in attracting more players and users Hi Sam I see you at the back there excellent um so when we sort of met up pre this it's a good old discussion about I mean there are so many ways of attracting um users and players to your your game or your your experience so um we kind of came down to the the thought of let's just look at the the game and I think one of the things that we've all agreed on was that it all comes down to Identity which is where I'm going to bring you in and rate how how important do you think it is thinking about

attracting people right at the start because you're right at the start of your your new Venture now how important do you think it is thinking about these strategies right from the start and how do you go about doing that the reality is that and it's such a cliche thing to say that we are bombarded with with entertainment from from you know Tick Tock to Instagram to stay on TV video games everything and and increasingly when you optimize against everyone you you're gonna get no one uh and and you can see this that it's it's a harder user acquisition it's not as it used to be and there's a reason for that and and what stands out is when people feel that they can relate to something and um my personal story was that when I was involved in a success I noticed that it's because those games or forms of entertainment made a statement they were different enough they were they were shocking maybe and so uh big boss we learned into that and we were doing

ridiculous games because no one else was right um and so with my new studio it is the reason it is secret is because we want to get it right so actually we already had I think we're through now 10 12 companies which are State companies with fake games with fake Focus tests and all that just to test the waters of different audiences to be so our brand name is not painted yet but we can test those kind of outrageous statements what we're doing to build the image and that influences the games they make so from the long list of games we wanted to create we're gonna pick the one which fits that uh that that we feel are momentum in the community so for for me it's fundamental you need to make a big statement otherwise you're gonna get lost in the noise but not everybody has a game that is a that is a big statement maker do they I mean a lot of people have different types of games that are appealing to much many different types of people um how do you think you sort of cement that identity to right from the start I I think that

and again there are different ways to approach it from the most cynical to the most you know um uh wholesome and and from the most creative to the more commercial of whatever you want to do I I can only tell you that my story and our story which is that if you do not plan and do not design against an audience you do I believe you don't know what you're doing and and I just had a rage about it not long ago on Twitter when I heard someone describe Their audience as Millennial man and I was like what the hell is that like I don't what the like one million year could be with a stretcher the parent of another um it's just an insane thing to say and to me when someone says something like that that means you have no idea what you're doing and I as a Creator like to create for an audience um and so whatever you do let's say you don't go for shock I know the Surgeon Simulator the fact that you are elbow deep in someone's chest cavity like that was for the shock value and that created that attention if you don't want to do

that that's fine but just build that relationship with the audience very early on so I I start Focus testing games before we even start prototyping right so on page level and I already have and my view is that I don't want a million fans I my goal at the beginning is to find one Super Fan and then two and then four and go up like that not companies going is oh and I have to have like a thousand I was like no that's not you don't if you have a thousand you don't have super fans you have people who tolerate you and I think that's true for every game find that person find that one individual and then your momentum of your game is that can you increase the number of super fans with a steady rate because that's gonna translate into people who are actually going to spend money on or inside your game yeah I just want to agree and say it's also part of our process right and to try and focus group tests as early as possible you know show very early Concepts very rough outlining of the game that you're trying to build and

maybe have the audience actually try and tell that game back to you right to see how it's resonating what kind of emotions is it generating right we're talking about a love story here right and I think that's also what you're saying in my right is like reducing it just to these stereotypical Personalities in a way is not really benefiting you in the way that you design the game right so I think it's actually bringing in that audience from the get-go right and you're also talking about it on a company level right is what I'm hearing at least oh yeah so it's it's I think it's the game and then the team and and then the whole company and your whole company identity I think it grows from that I I am a big believer on this because without that audience you're nothing right I can be really creative and it doesn't matter until someone plays the game um it's not going to be a success I can make a great game it's not going to be successful until people actually play it and so I I never believed in a self-serving creativity and you do that with your audience and frankly you get to become a better game designer a better marketer a better everything if

you listen and frankly your job is easier and cheaper if you have the audience on your side so and the fact that I also take it that my company identity will be defined by that that's just one more step of an extension on the same idea that I I want an identity that people can look at and think okay yeah that resonates with me what they stand for I I believe in uh but again ultimately it comes back down is it a good game and is that a person who wants to play and yeah and that audience thing I mean I think you know from an audience perspective we say no your audience but um a lot of us have been involved with games that are very broad based and you know how is it how is it best to know your audience I'm going to put that straight to you okay I think there are multiple ways to look at that really right it's uh like for me it comes a lot down to you know are you able to explain your game and does it have like an I call it the shortest possible story in a way like it's kind of like a setup in a

way something that resonates emotionally uh with the player right um I think that's where it really starts that you're able to explain your game very simply like Surgeon Simulator like it's it's in the name it's in the identity of the game right we look at it a little bit I mean it's a it's a complex question right but it's like we look at it very broadly in the way that we work with audiences from the get-go and I think it also comes down to like what kind of players do you have with in your company as well right like what we've tried to do just as an example is try and map the like the what kind of games do we prefer within we're 45 man studio right so not everyone is maybe like wired to work on a specific game that we're doing right so it's also trying to understand like what drives me as a game developer and and as a player so I think that's that's part of it at least Alexandra you know we've talked about your audience your your audience is a very specific kind of audience isn't it I said at Imperia online

um yeah so uh at Imperia for us it's really also important to understand our audience for all of our titles currently we have three main titles and we started actually as a browser company so Imperial online existed so back in 2005 um MMO RTI strategy game so our two co-founders when they met uh when they crossed paths they were both a really big fans of Age of Empires so they wanted to create a game similar to that and um since uh the first launch of the game so it was August 23rd um the community like really grew like day by day and at a certain point I think we didn't have like a player from any like we had a player from every country that existed so um one thing that we really focus on when we um talk about Community as receiving

feedback from them so and actively engaging with them our community managers are really like close with our users from pure online specifically um because uh it's already a long game that hasn't existed for a very long time so they know our users by name uh we've had we do live streams for our games as well and we often invite users to participate we have really big tournaments such as World Cup Winter Olympics Etc and when we invite those players they really want to participate and feel part of the community you know part of the whole process of the game um so invite them we chat with them really often we try to make them feel acknowledged if that makes sense so um they themselves also I think it relates to what you both said so they themselves also build the community

within our own game when we do these tournaments the Israeli big tournaments for example World Cup which is hosted every year in Empire online um players act really often they from different countries they do like come together and play um it's a tournament that lasts for about one to two months and they come together they actively play they celebrate when they win we had this case where one time Brazil became world champions and they called our community managers on Zoom to just show them how they were celebrating they heard a pool Villa and they were in the boat just with champagne it was really interesting so I think um forming this community around the players that the game is operating for them and that you want to give them a better place their experience is

something that's really important for us and it's interesting yeah that you know you are really building that community and something that we sort of discussed was the fact that these things like building your own identity having a sense of your own mission your purpose communicating that amongst your community these aren't huge budgets that you need to to spend it's it's that thinking time and that working out what your connection is and how best to communicate that and it seems to all come down to authenticity and being really authentic to your game not um and and this has all changed as we've seen technology improve for us and we've got so many different obviously we just um heard about the fact it's so much more difficult to to track your audiences but we have a lot of power in our hands for our communities and Robin I wanted to just move over to you because um you're an influencer marketing so a lot of people associate that with

budgets of spending money on influences to attract users and to retain users now um and I was hoping you to talk a little bit about that but also what about working with people right at the Genesis of their projects yeah sure so I think uh what was mentioned uh prior about like finding early like super users and ambassadors for your game you can kind of apply the same strategy when working with content creators and with influencers so really trying to in the early days identify who are content creators on the different platforms that really would enjoy this type of game and you can look for who's playing similar games if there are any maybe there's a whole new genre and you would have to do some more work but trying to identify that early on and start with maybe one or two and and build a great relationship with those and I think that's a good way to start and on the Community Management side I think it's also a good way to scale

Community Management you can use creators as kind of an extended arm so they can speak to their communities and you only have one person to kind of work with from the game companies he said that you can actually bring in influences to test to test games right at the start yes exactly yeah so so we have seen a couple of our clients to kind of bring in creators content creators early on to really understand kind of their the content creation angle of the game so will this be interesting to create content for us it will only become more and more important for your games to be relevant on social media from a user generating a Content perspective so you can bring them on as early as like prototype phase or like early Alpha phase to test out okay which will this be fun to create YouTube content for or to live stream and so on and you can we

have seen like small changes that can make a big difference so are there any moments in the game that can be fun to create around and so on yeah I actually just wanted to ask you as well like it sounds like even more you're breaking down the barrier between product and marketing in many ways right like you're saying like it doesn't need to be there that Gap right like it's it's one uniform working with your audience across right wherever they engage with it but I also wanted to ask you Robert in terms of like if this comes down to telling stories as well right like I think that's where the influencers like they are trying to you know entertain and work with their Community right like so in in my experience it helps having a game that again allows them to have these moments right it's one thing that they enjoy that particular genre but it's also giving them you know like a game that can can work in that setting right yes 100 I mean when you look at this kind of influencers are like commentary uh layer

to your game so it should be something that's fun to maybe talk around to create content around and and blending as we say the product and the marketing can also make it much more cost efficiently because then you can over time try to work more organically with the creators to have them create as they think it's actually fun and enjoy it rather than only being paid for it because it's a very competitive market then most of the content that is being produced by influencers is organic it's not paid so most of their time they spend time creating content for the game they really enjoy and think it's fun and that their Community enjoys so if you can find that angle obviously that would be the best it's hard at many times but I mean we see a lot of of especially in the mobile space now really thinking about these things how can we early on in the product and in the game development phase bringing these

perspectives so that we can build more efficient building our communities in the long term foreign we're talking very positively about you know hey great we've got all these users this great community and if you've got a good strong identity where can it go wrong who wants to who wants to step up to that one what are the pitfalls with this I'm going to pick on you yeah okay where can it go wrong like you mean in terms of like working with your community that you could do wrong that you've got to avoid I think it's maybe just underestimating the the power of it right like I think in my past experience as well is like you can make a lot of assumptions of what your community wants from the game right and it's actually filtering that a little bit and understanding that right I think that's maybe yeah underestimating uh like the

power of the community like it can be in a whole organic thing itself right um I think that's definitely one Pitfall is just like it's spiraling out doing stuff where you're not in sync with the community right I think yeah that would be be my take I think yeah I just wanted to add to that I think what she's saying is completely correct I think that you definitely need to be very transparent with your community and be open with them so um being able to communicate with them like throughout social media or Discord like whatever Channel that you have like since day one is really important and the most important thing is actually like actively listening to them so if they say like you release something and if they say like this we don't like it it doesn't work like please remove it like try to be open with them and transparent and maybe listen to their

like what they're saying because at the end it's this is like this is your community and this is your audience like you're doing the game for them and if they leave because of that it's um it just doesn't make sense I think it's not worth it because you know the panel is trying to keep and retain the players so um definitely this is something to look for uh one mistake that I've seen many times actually is that if you work with creators that you think very subjectively about who you're supposed to work with in the terms of I want to work with this big influencer for example which is not authentic to your game and and what is actually relevant for you so one thing to kind of avoid that is to do your homework first and foremost to really identify who is really aligned with with your game and with your values as a company and so on as well and then supporting smaller creators I think is a

good way of like really showing your community that you're not only going for like the big guys or whatever but rather trying to really go Grassroots level I think that's that's not doing that is a mistake I think already was mentioned authenticity and I'm going to offer you a very uh destructive way on that my grandfather used to say that the problem with lying is lying is one thing the real problem comes you may have bad memory uh and you don't remember what you like and I think that the thing with authenticity is that it's just I'm lazy just being authentic is just easier because you don't have to remember what you liked and and if you either if there's a game you want to build as you said and if there is an audience and and there is a shared love there is a connection that's how Human Relationships work right you meet someone at a party and you start checking and you realize oh oh we both

love that game or we're both fan of that you know a sports team or whatever then you have a connection and you can build on that it's an authentic thing if you made that up that you love that sport team you could be very quickly found out and so that is that if you have that authentic relationship between you and your product and with your audience that's naturally going to happen it's going to be inevitably it's so much easier to maintain that and then the other part of it is that is there's a duality that players without players you don't know what you're building but players have no clue and I think this the reality is that when you listen to players you have to listen to players but you have to understand why they are saying something not what they are saying it's so often it happens in Focus test and see that someone comes back with a bit of feedback and you look at it but you're wrong but why are you wrong uh and and one of my my favorite examples was an action game I've worked on where we got back feedback that a specific weapon was too

weak and the desire and what my producer told me is to make that weapon stronger what I've done because I am that kind of a person is that I said yes I'm gonna make the weapon stronger and I did not I made some changes the game went back to the same Focus test group the feedback came learning is amazing so much stronger wow wow it's really good literally the only thing I changed is increase the volume of the sound effect on the gun wow there was no other changes and that was enough to make people feel like it was more powerful now I'm not saying that to subvert everything players are saying but just understand why they're saying they do that extra question it's like not just only oh make it bigger why and really understand it um if you do that then you can otherwise it's very easy to to get lost and the negativity and the Damage comes that you listen to everyone and you end up losing that personality because if your game is big enough and you have enough people then suddenly it's going to be again you

lose that personality because you're gonna try to please everyone and that cannot be done that's so true you can't be dragged in a million different ways and it's like it's only goes to a Doctrine they say they've got a pain in their foot it could actually be their need that's causing the problem and not anything to do with the foot so it's a bit it is a fine line isn't it it's listening to but it's all about communication isn't it at the end of the day it's how you communicate with your community and what Alexandra said just then which is listening but also responding you don't actually have to serve up and deliver everything a community wants but showing that you're taking them on board what what methods do you I'm going to pick on you um what methods are you thinking without giving away what your games are going to be what best of you thinking of okay how are you going to think about communicating with your players what are you going to use now that we've got all these different um difficulties in terms of

targeting audiences with you know UA and everything else how do you how do you think you can sort of Leverage or put into prep put into first practice structures infrastructures to start working with a community as you build it and communicating to them uh the good news is that when like 10 years ago 20 years ago I would have been much harder to do that right and right now just go where they are right there are communities already exist and if they are on Disco you go to Discord if it's a more open uh platform some sort of social media go there and just try to release your prejudices like I I am not a huge fan of of uh social media in in general but you have to go where the players are and and you just talk to them there I find that there are platforms which are more focused are going to be better because people are on that forum for specifically for that subject so if

you go to a subreddit it's good but also they're going to be distracted by other stuff on your Discord server they are there on that Discord for that specific reason and they're gonna have plenty of other servers right a kind of people who are on like 100 servers I don't know how I can barely manage like a dozen and so but that's great because you have again the super fans and I think that's what you have to separate how do how do you talk to your super fans is very different of how you talk to everyone else and you know your influencers and and everyone else I think they're the super fans frankly you can do it in email if you like or or you know chat messages on Whatsapp or whatever because it especially in the beginning is not going to be that many so you can maintain that and then very soon afterwards you have to build a proper Community Management and the good thing about that is from that point is there a problem not mine um so they can figure out how to do it they're the experts but so but when you're small honestly you can do it with anything it just just and I'm a person who really loves systems and I

constantly have to remind myself not to do that if the way to the text message do it that way it doesn't matter like just whatever work whatever they are already roll with that and then when you have that momentum when you have a group of when you cannot manage them your super fans in that that's when you escalate into other platforms and specific stuff later on in the beginning whatever way you can communicate with and yeah I'd just like to add to that I mean the methods change over time during the production of the game right obviously right but what we try and do is actually try and capture this audience you know like over time so we build up like whatever it is mailing lists or uh just contact information or Discord and try and like gauge what are these players like what are they interested in right and when we're developing a new game we try and separate that into okay who should we try and test this game on right whether it's a very early prototype or just a concept just a picture of the game and a title maybe or different titles have them try and sell it back to us you know like I think it's it's actually that you know capturing like those data points

catching those players over time right I think it's really important especially if you're a studio I mean we work cross-platform on on multiple titles right so you never know like what type of players like are gonna come in handy for a specific project right um exactly and what about cross promotion you know are you you're doing within your within your setup are you when you bring out new titles you cross promoting yeah I mean I can lead on this one in my opinion like cross promotion is a little bit seen like the Holy Grail I think it's because it's like it's the ideal scenario okay I have one big audience in this game I can just easily move it into another game this comes really down to how you build your uh your studio right like if you're building games in all kinds of different genres the reality is like you can't just move a player into another game and actually creating uh like a cohesive

um what can you say message across all your games is really hard you know like I think that's why imris is building it from the ground up right within the studio like within the authenticity of the studio um so in my opinion it can be done but you have to really consider like your road map of games going in yeah it really depends how similar your games are so there are Studios like Paradox or or introversion I might as well pay them a subscription fee because I am gonna buy everything they ever do so and I know because what they do is my kind of game yeah and I am their player and they are my developer and I know blindly I can trust them right and so that would but there are the studios including Bossa games who do very different types of games and there is no necessarily a translation from one to the other uh some people might have an attachment to us because of Surgeon Simulator that might not necessarily work on something which is a completely different genre we are doing so I I

think that even on a more casual easier mobile quicker consumption whatever even then I can see somewhere a game was recommended to me by the same publisher and I was like that's not even close to why and I get it why they have my email I'm gonna I get it but that's for me is a quick way for you to end up on on my spam list because like why are you I'm clearly not the audience for that so I've warned that do it but do it very very mindfully what about investing in tools that help you help you track monitor your your what sort of tools are you using or would you recommend if any to Monitor and track what users are doing other than Discord or you know in terms of no nothing I think what what you said would like doing it as long as you can very manually even like more personal like like WhatsApp or whatever

it might be as long as you simply can I think that's I mean a very good way to go wherever there is like less friction in the start and then you would need to see how you can kind of scale that up and and I assume that most Studios leverage Discord now for for that yeah yeah for us as well we in terms of tracking obviously we do use like uh platforms such as apps Fire but in terms of if you want to know like what your community is actively engaging on And discussing I would also suggest using this card as well so um back like in the 2005 when we started the title I mean it was mainly forums so we didn't have Discord back then social media wasn't that active um so Imperial was um the whole Community was in forums but then we moved slowly when you know the mobile industry boom We slowly moved to

social media and Discord so for all three of our main titles currently we use this card and one thing that we've seen is that uh firstly being custom and uh What uh all of these guys said to customization to the players is really important and showing them that you know them so for example for one of our games crush them all on Discord we have like um the moderator there which is one of our community managers we have separated different like sub-channels which where players for example new players can discuss this players which are played for more than a long time than average players you know it depends how much points you have in the game so we have open discussion channels we have um questions channels we have announcement channels and all these they're probably more than 20 so all these players can go and uh discuss whatever they're interested in find new

interests and then you can actually see I think it's easier to see the from the community the management side from the studio to see what the players are discussing what they want what their um you know just end the game or what their interest is and with that we also besides that we also do um newsletters for our uh players for our browser titles we uh send out newsletters to them for example um custom ones if they like because we have players who engage in specific tournaments so not uh of each one of them because they don't find that for example they found more interesting uh besides the other so we try to also um go custom with them with these nudes letters because of the player base at our browser titles are a bit older than

our mobile games so you know as I mentioned it's different so you should go custom for them it works uh just communication via email and for our mobile titles Discord works really well yeah I just wanted to take a step back again and here is actually a pitfall in my opinion like there's a misconception that just because your audience is all interested in the one game that you have that there are also all of them gonna be interested in you know the next game that you're building and I think a lot of us as game developers we know this ourselves like for example okay I play a lot of strategy games uh for sure but I'm also a huge player of very colorful simple match free games and I don't think a lot of people would have profiled me like that and I think that's also what Emma is saying like Okay if you profile me I'm yeber I'm 37 years old I love strategy games you can't just show me any strategy game right and I think that's just coming down to like actually understanding what kind of

games like they might have shown up for that for Surgeon Simulator for whatever game right but they maybe have a variety of different other types of games right and it's actually understanding what other types of games are they also playing in order to be able to show the meaningful game in the future right so that's why cross promotion is very very difficult right like it's people's player personalities like like maybe there is a genre but I think we need to get away from just looking at genre of course you can do Market or audience testing early or Market Assessments in order to understand like the size of a certain genre but there is like underlying emotions that actually drive interest into games we're coming right back to emotion the thing is that if you believe if you listen to your super fans and again beginning you have one and then two and then at some point 100 right there is a if you are recruiting in that angle and at some point if it doesn't work you change direction but but when you know your direction and you and that's what

the type of person you bring in the opinion of a thousand people is not going to be that different of opinion of a dozen that there will be a lot of echoing and so what happens when you get to bigger one of course there are sentiment analysis there are various ways that if you manually cannot keep up um and that are know that there are various AI tools which are coming to match virtual influencers you're going to have virtual community management is that they are following up and they understand you can see how the transaction changing and all that so I think it's not that different the principle is the same is that you listen to those people who whose opinion matters about who for whom you are creating this game then that's not gonna change right uh if this is a bigger Community you need different tools but fundamental is the same metrics collection inside the game it's the same idea as me talking to the first Super Fan it's just a different tool set to do it yeah and it's interesting as well to see all the different I mean we talked about Discord and being able to you know create different channels on Discord and work with them and listen to people there but also we got different

um groups of and then I know you hate the the term Millennial man but we've got different groups of people coming through who are used to communicating on different platforms as well new um younger Gamers who just you know who literally sort of have the attention to spanner than that when it comes to short form communication you know it has to be noun it has to be immediate and I want to be served up everything I expect right now in terms of being managed by the sort of community and I'm within um so you sort of mentioned you don't like social media Emory but you know social media does play quite a strong force in something some of your games doesn't it in terms of the people playing uh yeah we you so besides the Discord what we've spoken about we use social media to also as an alternative channel to communicate with our players so I think Imperial online has over half

a million um uh so followers on Facebook uh then we have the other uh two channel uh two games which we have uh Facebook and Instagram channels for um we try to uh be active on social media because players engage in it they post comments and um Etc they obviously Express their needs um with some either changes or new things they want to see um one thing we also uh strive to do and we implemented this um December was for our games each World War II so we it's our one of our mobile titles we um talk to our game designers and we wanted to create an event calendar for our community for them to enter and for example we put some instructions how they could enter and the idea was that

we during the this countdown that we were doing for Christmas we wanted to make them feel you know um reward them in some way so we were um each day we were doing this countdown where we were revealing some information about what we will be giving them and Etc and we actually saw a lot of um more um engagement that what we usually see so it worked out really well for us at the end we packed like 15 users we asked them if they could give their ID through messages and they were really happy and even on the scored laser and on the same social media they were asking if it's going to be more of this so this is one thing that we try to we did that and we will also do in the future to retain the players that we have

because they really really like the communication with with us and I think it's important to what we mentioned earlier to respond like do like make them make them feel that you understand them and that you could also take over to working with influences as well so you know you could have that kind of cross that joint promotion um I think um so with influencers uh it's um what Robin said it's um yeah it's you can build brand awareness and you can reach new audiences but I think it's really what uh worked for us and what's important is to Target influencers which understand your games and your community we've had some so back in 2019 uh Imperial online mobile we have a mobile version of our game was celebrating a

10-year anniversary and what we did actually was to we reached out to top YouTube influencer gaming in influencers in Bulgaria so biggest YouTube gaming channels we reached out to them and we said hey we wanted you to would you be interested in promoting this game like this with your portfolio most of the gaming influencers do like more RPG strategy games from my perspective and it was a good fit for us uh because in for online strategy so we reached out to them and we said would you be interested and doing uh and doing videos for this game and most of them that we reached they said yes so we had this uh pile of influencers which we did some planning organizing and our idea was for influencers to create for those interests brand awareness for our game

um specifically in Bulgaria to create this hype so when we planned we wanted for the influencers to release their videos on that specific date for when we were celebrating the 10-year anniversary we also besides that did some um talking and applying for a featuring for Apple and Google on the same specific date right yeah you came together oh came together and we it was a success so creating this brand awareness for and actively like engaging the audience of the influencers YouTubers um for our game was a success and I think um this all came down to the idea of them being open wanting to you know explain this game and be actively engaged in it uh so because they were really interested in the game we created

like a separate server for them and we uh we gave them the opportunity to engage with the players so it was a custom server only for them only for the players yeah which I think we're gonna have to sorry Alexandra I think I'm getting a little Flats down here but thank you very much if we're going to take a question from you always we should do it now before we reach the top of the hour so let's uh let's grab that one question over there hi there hello I'm an OBS student uh my name is Yuri I have a question you've touched upon it a few times uh about scaling from super fans to the general audience um and I'm still apprehensive about this idea where you show it to your super fans 10 12 people I think they might want something very different than the general audience um can you maybe talk about the times where it didn't work and why you think

it didn't work or do you think it works all the time where you just you know try to build the game around hardcore fans and then everyone else likes once you scale thanks I'm gonna oversimplify this it's either you go for a huge audience and then you're gonna count your daus and Maus and your return rates and all that and there is established metrics for that you don't have to Google much and you can present it your investors and if they're high you're going to be successful just perfect right if you go with the Super Fan idea what you measure is the momentum of the growth of the number of super fans and it's there are games that is true that build it and they will come if you follow the superfan route it's different continue building it because they came and stayed right and so that that's the moment in that one that's what you measure that if you can see and those are highly targeted games uh uh a game like ring Birds is not for everyone right and it's a huge game with millions of sales right and it's a completely different category

to Farmville and they can be perfectly successful games and huge games on their own rides um and not every methodology is going to be true for every single game if you're making a mass Market match free game then it's very unlikely you're gonna the superfan model is gonna work although I am a super fan of Mastery games like you are but nonetheless it might not work the same way because it's harder to reach your audience Etc thank you that's great nice I think we'll leave it there okay because that was a fantastic pattern one of those topics that we could obviously do for loads longer but where they are at the end of time so if you have any questions for our panelists there's some great Insight grab more meter match or find modders or find them out in the in the hall um as we head out for lunch so thank you very much

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