Panel: How to Optimise Revenue & Retention for Your Games

um we have up coming up next we've got two more sessions and we're starting with a panel session which has got a broad remit of uh optimizing revenue and retention for your game so the whole smorgasbord uh as you as you were um we've got a pretty pretty talented panel here not that we haven't had a very talented already happened a great day so far um and that is being led i believe by the very uh lovely jackie voice of demo so how are you jackie i'm good chris how are you i'm very good i'm very good your panelists are filing in slowly sorry we're a bit late uh i blame i blame me because it's my fault so is i i i was five minutes late at the start and i've managed to add another five minutes as we go forward but it's okay it's okay ignore it morning it means nothing anymore nothing means anything it's in it we're in a post euros world now

um anyway i think you're you're a folk uh faith of coming in from all over the world where you're you're in that london or are you up somewhere you're often chatting around i don't know i'm in that london but we do have people from all over the world which is fantastic i know we've been we've just about just come from dublin there we were in belarus earlier shanghai this morning i'm sure we'll be over in them their americas later on um but uh no italians yet unless you have one of your panels so i think we will say congratulations to there was an italian because i think it's it's only fair we show our sportsmanship uh but enough for football i'm gonna get out of your way and stop stop polluting your panel um so yeah off you go you shoot off you've got a good uh 40 or so minutes you can you can launch you've got plenty of time to get to discuss your topic so i'll let you introduce your panel and i'm here in the background you need me to interject some random chat about football thanks chris yeah i'm so sorry to everybody about the result last night but let's not let that dint

our confidence and enthusiasm for the subject matters that we have today which is all very interesting we have um a really wide panel of experts um and i know all of you and i know you're all brilliant at what you do so i'm very excited to be sharing this panel i'm jackie from demo so demoto's a pr marketing agency of record um but i won't go about self-promotion i'll hand over to everybody to let them introduce themselves first um and i'm just going to go with with my screen so i'm going to introduce you dean jonah kick off yes sure good morning hi um i'm dean i'm the founder and ceo of greenlight games which was originally a indie developer studio that i started back in 2014 with the idea of making mobile games we then push on to publishing mobile games and we're now actually publishing um pc and console games both digitally

and physically so kind of a range across everything and hopefully have some kind of insight into what to do or not to do and low hanging fruit for for your titles great thank you dean and dan would you like to tell everybody who you are hi um my name is dan and horry i'm the head of business development and co-founder of real media now um and we provide free in-game help videos um for mobile and web games that are sponsored by advertising wonderful thank you and over to aladd from dive hi guys hi everyone nice meeting you a lot here and well i'm the founder and ceo of dive and we help game studios all over the world with their data and liveops struggle in a very unique way that we have developed through a platform and a service that we

offer them and back to you jackie thank you and now over to philip nice to see you phillip nice to see you again jackie thank you my name is philip i am the ceo and co-founder of metagames a development studio based in berlin and we create mobile games for esports fans since 2017. thank you phillip and finally to chris from adimo our wonderful sponsor hi chris hi jackie um yes so i'm chris wright i'm cto at adamo we are an in-game um ad technology so my background i've been in the games industry for well over 20 years now previous to to animo i was um cto and founder of delta dna which was the analytics company that acquired by unity so we've got lots of experience of kind of both and in-game monetization and then how

that flows into the the ad tech space fantastic thank you all um and as you can probably see this is a wonderful mix of experience and expertise and knowledge and understanding and this panel subject how to optimize revenue and retention in your games it's a massive subject i mean it is really the holy grail um so um what i thought i would do is just sort of start at the beginning because i think it's a lot of it is about um a revenue and retention mindset um and you know in terms of sort of where we should start as as developers and i know we have a lot of indie developers keen to to get um your advice what's the starting blocks where should people start is it at gdd's stage um i'm going to pass that straight to dean because you're the publisher of many games

um yeah so ideally obviously when it comes to monetization and thinking about growth and scaling of your title it's one of the first things that you put in action when you're designing a game you know everyone generally loves making games and a lot of people get into it because because of the enjoyment of doing so but sadly most people when it when it comes to indie developers don't start with that kind of business ethic you know oh i'm going to make a really cool game how do i make money from it um so definitely you know ideally for us to come across the game is to see that that's been planned from the beginning um but you know nine times out of ten what we see is someone will come across a really good kick-ass game and we really like it and we want to work with it but there's no monetization planned or um the resources get oh yeah we'll put that in later um and that's really not the way to go and it makes our job so much harder and your job as well because you know you have a timeline in mind you have a budget and then it kind of gets completely thrown out the window when you haven't thought this through

yet you know we're changing ui as we're changing flows we think about monetization too late in the game even mechanics um have to be changed sometimes so yeah definitely you know immediately think about how you can monetize your title without ruining the experience of the player and you know if you're not self-publishing what you think a publisher is going to want to see within the game for sure i mean a lot of people look at just um you know the straight kind of straightforward monetization techniques um you know there's there is an issue about you know whether you actually go into advertising within a in a in a game or what sort of advertising you choose um you know is whether you actually you know you follow that model at all i mean philip do you have any any any thoughts about that side of things yeah for sure i mean as dean said right like it's a very it's a very fundamental question right at the beginning and it's a sort of sliding scale right where monetization

becomes more important as you go along right as the kind of game matures and you're creating a game that actually retains but it was kind of those type of decisions you know whether you're looking for a publisher or where you know like us you're kind of like you know publish and kind of operate your own games um it's one of the things that at the very beginning you need to really mindful about right because not every monetization is good for every like you know like genre of game like if you're building a midcore game on mobile like going away with only ad monetization right like that's not going to cut it in the end because like you weigh like on the uh marketing cpis if you really want to scale like the the kind of ltv that is generated by pure kind of ad monetization is probably not going to allow you to scale in any significant way and if you're looking right for for a publisher as dean said you kind of want to look out for publishers that kind of share you know and have big expertise and kind of like ltv optimization uh and kind of like uh because this is ultimately what what what makes a success and there you need to be able to understand you know what what they

what they need in order to really provide a game that they want to publish right so from my experience i mean before kind of like you know becoming the co-founder of a development studio um i was in on the publishing side like for for the for all of my career um and it's you know it's been kind of the same story like with dean right you look at a lot of games and they're really cool and like making a game as an art uh making a well retaining game is an art uh but then there's you know relatively little kind of like thought spent on the monetization side um and on this kind of funnel thinking right where kind of like if you build a game you know yes that's an art and like we're all enthusiastic about games but at the end of the identity of the day if you want to scale it if you want to make a business out of it a living out of it you need to adopt like some of those kind of like funnel that final mindset that kind of business mindset uh making sure that your game can become a scalable business and talking about that funnel mindset i think you know that's a good time to bring in a lad because

you know you talking to people all the time about how they develop their mindset um you know from from an early stage how do you do that because i know that you have people that um on your team that not you know with your platform you have customer analytics but you also have people that help and guide through and help people in conditions i'm actually going to spice things up and not entirely agree with them here to make things interesting i honestly think that you know when you build the games and first of all it should be fun and the core loop is like at least the first days that core loop should be should should click in a way with the player and monetization is something that i honestly believe will follow if if you have long tail content if afterwards you incorporate live ops properly those kind of things will follow and yes obviously it depends

whether it's ads whether it's in-apps with subscription whatever it depends on the genre depends on the target country you know obviously whether it's a tier one country or not and whether you can justify the marketing cost but for me um the core loop the game itself should should click it should be fun and and then you can start adding more and more layers on top of it a meta game and and stretch that game economy make sure it's balancing well with the monetization so i would actually prefer this this approach do you want to respond to that anybody or should i uh well i really feel funny but like i think what you're bringing up is true right so like if you have a game that pretends well like you're almost like out of the woods like you can do anything and like you'll find people you can pay people that kind of like optimize everything right but the way of of thinking about as i said like

day zero day one you know the core game cycle like this is funnel thinking that kind of like if you adopt that right you're automatically also thinking about monetization you're thinking of a lot of these kind of like things that again you know in my experience i've seen a lot of people that have created core gamers but they don't know why or how right they do something they love games and like it works but like they don't understand the machinery that they built and like again if you want to scale something you need to understand the machinery because like yeah if you add monetization later on you add live box you can do it but there's a risk that if you don't understand the system you break it right like you have to understand where to place it and in this mindset it's just a question of mindset then automatically you're kind of like almost like already start thinking about liveops and monetization from day zero yeah if you really think very methodically and stringently about the kind of you know player experience you're providing i'm just like go ahead sorry like just go the other way i i'm not totally sure i agree

i think you know we talk about monetization but we've always had monetization in games i mean if you go right the way back to arcade games back in the 80s or even 70s we had monetization there's different kinds of monetization and that defines what the game works and how the game plays so you know arcade games were all about that very quick rapid get people in get them playing and almost kick them back out again free to play has a different kind of monetization so does premium play everything has it you have to you have to decide what type of game you're going to build and make sure that the monetization works from the very start of that or you'll end up with you know if you built a big role-playing game but you try and you know monetize it through the arcade model where you're trying to get you know 50 pence goes then it wouldn't work so i think the two things that are connected but monetization isn't a new thing it's something that's always been with games and you need to make sure that the right kind of monetization fits and doing that early on and building it as part of how you build the game it is a fundamental part i don't think this idea that monetization

and game design are two separate things works you have to have them together well that's an interesting that's an interesting point because there's um as we've seen we've seen the evolution of advertising chris and we you know we've seen how you know we're going from performance to brand and brands are starting to do brand awareness type of advertising and so you say when you're designing your games how do you sort of think about what kind of game you want and how you're going to monetize i mean do you think that we should be challenging um people in the actual fundamental design of the games and how they're going to integrate their advertising well so i think the real big evolution of advertising within games is now becoming a part of the game experience not something separated on it's not it's not like the interstitial or the you know the ad break that you have in tv it's moving much more into something akin to product placement it's a part of the game experience the ads are there just like you'd expect them on a football pitch with ads around the the edge of the football pitch

that's that's how you expect football pictures to look and actually if you watch football on tv and it doesn't have ads around it it looks strange it doesn't seem to work um and the ads the sort of ads that we're doing at adamo are actually putting ads directly into the game so that their billboards or their product placements that they're part of the game experience and that changes how you interact with with people you're you know with with our type of ads it's actually about keeping people playing the game because if they're playing the game they're watching the ads they're seeing them without having to um to interact with them they're ha they're not clickable so they're not forcing them to do something and they're not pushing them out of the game i think one of the big problems with the ad space up until now has been that they have been quite negative in that they force the player to do something that is outside here is an ad that has nothing to do with the game that then forces you to press a button to take you to something else quite often in another game that's a bad experience and that's forcing an old kind of model into an interactive

experience but as we start to evolve we make the ads actually part of the the game experience in the same way as um you know the monetization the in-app purchases are integrated and that was a big change that happened within our purchases they became a part of the game experience you know you do it to progress and to evolve the character ads are doing the same thing and that makes it feel more part of the game rather than as a kind of um an add-on that is driving you away so there's a there's a change but this is an evolution of of the industry as we move away from you know upfront premium pay into something that has a whole set of different monetizations be it um you know free to play and monetizing in-app purchases mixed in with advertising and you have to do both because you know in that purchase will only monetize three four five percent of the user base so you have to if you're going to cover your monetization you have to cover the whole user base you can't just simply focus on on those core players who are going to spend money or you end up with focusing

on whales and you know we know where that goes we do and it's really interesting when you talk about how ads are becoming or and and monetization is becoming part of the whole experience of of playing the game but also that need for non-intrusive or or value that you get back as as a player from the advertising that you're engaging with and i think dan can talk a little bit about the sort of value that you should be thinking about putting into your games to give that that player additional um value as well as um not interrupt their experience yeah um i i completely agree the the um i'd say you know previously when you know free to play first came out there was a lot of issues um you know as a user and someone you know who who develops games um there were a lot of issues with um people just being bombarded with ads and there's no real value exchange there i'm basically i'm playing a game and i'm doing it for fun and just keep getting bombarded with ads

and now in 2021 um users you know even probably five years ago users were fed up of that you need to be a bit more um clever in the way that you kind of monetize your game and a bit more subtle and that's why i really like you know adam with their kind of billboard ads um because they don't interrupt gameplay i think you know retention is a really big um problem for you know pretty much everyone within the games industry especially within free to play and if your ads damage that retention in any way um you know it's probably not worth having that ad system in your game because overall you know you will end up losing money rather than making it and that's why if you look at you know the number of different ad networks and you know different kind of ad placements there are now such as audio mob with their audio ads which are much more subtle us within game help videos and you know like i said without moaning game placements um that seems like the way things are going because they don't seem to um interrupt the gameplay there is a

clear value exchange there and um there doesn't seem to be a decrease in retention in some cases there can actually be increases in retention um such as with you know audio mobile admin mode and us as well um so yeah that's what i would say about that but i mean like it really it really depends on the game right i mean like if you want to like be sophisticated like if you're talking about the casual game where you know like the the kind of like cost per install that you're paying justifies just having like kind of like you know ad monetization you want to monetize via ads and you want to annoy people with ads like people that are about to churn right how do you know you know who is about to turn because like honestly if you're talking about mess three game right like like just certain people just love match three games and they're playing your message free game and probably gonna turn relatively soon to go play the next you know message three game and if they discover that true rewarded video in your game and like that's great like that gives you money that monetizes users and honestly again you're building a

casual game like your attention like 30 days it's not going to be that great anyway right so even if it's the most disruptive sort of like advertisement if you show it to the right user it will be beneficial like from a business point of view right and the user will be like oh you know oh cool awesome next game let's go you get money everyone's happy right if you're building a mid-core game where you know like a lot of kind of like eighty percent of the of the revenue making is going to be like with in-app purchases rather than you know the video is like a conversion tool right you're showing people what they could get the premium currency you allow them to kind of like you know taste a little bit of that like sweet sweet kind of premium content with rewarded video but really like you're not expecting kind of like to make a lot of money out of it and again mid core ltv's just like you know can be for you know five dollars plus um you don't get a five dollar ltv but with rewarded video never ever right so then it really just depends right that depends on the on the game you want to do it depends on if you want to operate that game or not it depends on you know

how long do you want to operate it for if it's just like you know if you want to do short quick games and like pull them out that's amazing if you want to you know create this your masterpiece and run it for years but it just like requires totally different like approaches um actually no it requires totally different solutions but the approach is always the same right funnel thinking ask who you're building this for what is your business model how are you gonna make money with it and who can help you right because again you're not going to know like all the things if you're like a you know like a young indie studio like you know three four five people like an artist a game designer you know you're the founder um you met all these people there's a couple programmers like who of you knows about kind of like this final thinking about you know the business aspects of free to play um i know probably the founder maybe the game designer a little bit right and the question is like who can help you right and then again this is the good thing about 2021 there's so many you know so many actors in the ecosystem

on bi on ad monetization um on you know ua and it's just about like going out and kind of like finding these people and letting them help you right and this is why i also like this fund is pretty great because we have a couple representatives from all these different places um and that and that that's really cool right like those are the people you want to talk to i think that's really really important um actually for companies to leverage the expertise that's out there so there is as i said there's lots of expertise from from analytics companies like aladdin to our company in an ad monetization and we will most of the companies and we will do it as well we have our own consultancy we have our own game design team who will help you to actually integrate look at um look at what you're doing and ideally look at what you're doing at the early stages we find lots of companies coming to us with a finished game and saying we've done the game could we now put your ads in of course we can and we can help you but if you could do it at the gdd stage in that early phase

then we can do it a much better way we can help you really understand what things you can add into the game or build the game in a way that will help you monetize using ours and you'll find that with all the different companies be it rewarded video companies or analytics companies they will help you understand how to monetize the game and use their expertise to help you build it at the gdd don't start and build don't do the kind of the the if we build a day will come model which is great i built this fantastic game and then i'll figure out how to monetize it you need to do that at the start as part of your building in your design phase to make sure that what you're building based on the type of game you're doing like i completely agree with phil if you're going to build a a fast action simple casual game then it's a different experience from building a deep role-playing massively multi-player but either way you have to get the monetization in and it's always been like that it's not as if this has changed you always have to work out how you monetize how do you

make money out of your game unless you're doing the whole thing purely as a charity you have to think that through and make sure that the game follows that model but do it with the expertise that's that's in the industry i mean i think it's really interesting i would actually carry on a lot i would actually want to add what to what philip said uh before dive i was a co-founder of house of fun top crossing game that we ended up selling to platika and i worked in platika for several years and for me they are one of the best in the industry when it comes to data live ops and basically squeezing out ltv and then i honestly think that beyond the game the game genre for me it's also the country that you are targeting and if you can end up with working more with in-apps mainly on tier one countries i would incline in that direction where you have way more control on segmenting on live ops as in ads yes

four ads or ads are something that will complete to monetize the rest of the pack the rest of those players that do not uh monetize well with the you know with in-apps but i think that i i understand i mean obviously i agree with what you guys are saying but for me the the and again i'm not talking about not hyper casual not talking about premium games that's like different world for me i'm talking about you know free to play games that focus a lot on like the long tail a high ltv high iap model or whether it's ads but something that you know goes over time and and this is something that you know rooted in in in a good quality game economy a live ops that follows that and and it's a process that that that takes months i mean we work with game studios that are sometimes you know nine months in like you know soft launch and

polishing kpis to stabilize the ltv and justify the cpi costs that's really insightful and it's interesting um we were talking about um you know the fact that you're looking at those sort of long tail games those um you know multiplayer games um and we're going to have a lot of different indie developers watching this panel right now um developing all sorts of different games and i'll come back to that kind of like and something that chris just said about bringing in the expertise and i know a lot you have a expertise that you give as consultancy to to start off with but let's just look at the you know on on the basic side of things i mean you know if you're just looking at um getting the basics right just before you sort of go to market there's a lot of um resistance to sdk integration um and um you know and and partnering early

doors what do you feel about that almost uh i think almost every game developer whines about having to integrate sdks it's like something whatever like everyone in the industry hates the case i think um on our side our sdk is super light it's open it's completely open all the code is open so and it's native to whatever platform we work in so it's there are no hidden things inside but i i completely understand i mean it inflates the game it can cause unexpected crashes i've spoken so many times with developers that are like oh man that plugin of whatever ad or whatever you know company is like crashing my game it's so annoying and i think everyone that works in the game industry experienced that i guess it's you know finding that balance i guess of whether those sdks

uh give you really like an advantage or are beneficial in that sense and worth the trouble would be great to see hear like feedback from everyone i think i think the funniest like especially like if you work with the unity as a development engine for example right there's like always like issues with like incompatibility and then you need to upgrade unity and then like some sdks but it still all beats doing it yourself like like in the end of the day right like if you want to build like your own analytics system uh build your own like ad monetization system i don't know like you know um and i think there's like some some basic stuff that really works really well for everyone right so um you know between like you know having like a firebase sdk and then like your choosing analytics platform and you know like of course no one wants to integrate like the facebook sdk because it's horrible for sure but really to make a good game you don't even need that right so again when you think about like what

what makes sense to build yourself and what makes sense to integrate you always end up kind of on the same side right you always end up kind of like bi for sure analytics um you end up with like some ua stuff um you know some ad um ideally you know something that kind of like aggregates you know different providers but again this is this is really like like depending on what you're doing right depending on the game that you're building you always want to be ideally on the side of building a bespoke and cool game that is fun to play um it is true that especially the last couple of years there's been a lot of kind of low quality game with you know based on kind of like super aggressive you know ad monetization that just integrated like a billion kind of ad networks um through kind of like some mediation and try to squeeze the last cent of ltv and this is kind of yeah mobile games for some people are just a business right they're looking at this kind of like an arbitrage solution they don't invest in in wall street they do mobile games because they're hurt is the latest very thing

and they don't care about the gaming they're going to care about game quality sure they exist right but we don't want to build those kind of things right you want to build cool games that have fun that retain well um and there yeah of course you need to think about monetization really early right and this goes to one of the questions that i've been asked um already in q a right like what is that like you know if monetization kind of like is dominating the direction of a game more than it should like what does it mean right more than it should like there is no right it depends on you as a gaming company or someone who builds an experience to like determine how much money you want to make with it right if you're saying hey i just want to pay the rent you know when i build like a company with like 50 people that can build games because we all love building games well yeah of course you don't need to over optimize on ua and ltv and if you're finding that you know you build a cool game that is kind of generating some return and you can pay the bills and that's it sure then you can take you know less pressure on

lte that's totally fine right and if you go to like about like a publisher or you want to become rich and then you want to squeeze kind of every last cent out of people i mean you can do that right it's kind of a free world but then of course you know of course then it would influence the game and it wouldn't be a good experience but we all know that right like that's not kind of like some some dirty secret i'm grateful to you phillip sorry carry on just just to kind of go back to your your question about sdks i actually so i think that's the wrong question um because actually sdks of course you have to integrate you know you're going to use an engine more than likely be fairly unusual nowadays if you didn't use unity or unreal uh and you're going to use sdks and this is the same with the rest of the software industry you know you have to integrate various technologies and you have to keep them up to date and you have to look at the dependencies and that's just part of software development and so moaning about that seems a strange thing to be looking at what is really important is more to make sure that they all work

together that you can get the data in a way that actually allows you to do what you want that they're not these um closed systems that feed their own system and feed their own data you want to have a single view of what's happening in your game you want to be able to look at the data across if you add monetization across your analytics across the whole spread and you want to have a single view of the world and that's the most important thing that these things are working together to build you a solution that actually allows you to push your game forward and they're not their own little islands of data that you can't get access to and you're putting something in but you can't really see into it and you can't see what what it's generating because then you have lots of problems in how you build your game so getting that is really important and making sure that when you pick solutions to help you to build your game you can see how they all work together in a way that allows you to optimize your game going forward thank you chris um i i was thanking philip for pointing me towards questions because we're getting a lot of questions into into the room right now and the

first one that i wanted to go to is do you think there's a risk where some games offer premium to get ad-free causing you to lose out on money how do you balance that um and that dean i think um you were yeah so um you know we we saw this i think about two years ago it started as someone had like a lightbulb moment and and they threw it out there and everyone went oh wow that's a really cool idea and everyone did it and then i think there was actually a report that someone did that weighed up the pros and cons and then the revenue saw that they saw from because generally this this purchase was like a dollar two dollars don't get any more ads um and someone sat down and crunched the numbers and basically at that kind of price point under four four dollars or whatever your currency is it's not worth it um you know for the player it's great it's a quick buyer you get that four dollars but long term they found that the ecpm was on you know as long as we're integrated correctly you would generate more revenue if you retain that player and continue to push ads their way and have their mocked in on ads rather than taking two or three

quid quickly from them whereas if you've got a low retaining game then yes i suppose go for it if you don't intend on on fixing your retention um but if you have a game that retains players i would i would say that the data has shown us previously in our games ads were the way to go over that single in-app purchase um you know combine both uh long out the the opt-in ads because they're always the ones that pay best you know have the player interested in yet not on the ad specifically but interested in watching the other clicking on that and interacting with that for the reward or the double the points whatever you give them and then back that up with other in-app purchases for other content and such as hell for skins or whatever it ends up being but yeah for us if you have a good game trains world good players keep the ads don't sell them off cheap cool it's really interesting another question that came in is have any of you had a light bulb moment when you were struggling to get that engagement and growth and at what point did it click and the real growth start anybody light bulbs um the difference

ingredient again from from the final point of view like if you if you kind of like start building a game right and you see like you look at like day zero you look at the tutorial funnel you look at day one right if you're already struggling to get like engagement and growth or like engagement just at that point um there's something really fundamentally you know that that the game needs to be worked on so at that point you know like does it click you know that's the game design question right like if your game is kind of struggling already early on just just make a better game that sounds easy to say but like nothing about like monetization or bi or whatever will help you really like you're going to make a better game right um if you're building a game and it kind of like you know like this this question basically assumes that you can build this whole game and then start looking at it and then you realize well you know there's like some inflection point where things are not going well and then fixing that is almost impossible and it's it's basically again you know i'm a big like methodology guy like the outcome doesn't matter right like methodology is what matters like

maximizing your funnel maximizing your shots you know making smart decisions broadly speaking that kind of like restrict the decision space of what you all think you need to think about you know and then kind of like start really like looking at the players looking at funnels building like a great you know a game that retains well which as we all agree is the key to great monetization it is retention right um you need you know have that kind of like really like close you know touch with your players what they're doing from the first moment when they play your game and again with that you know go out you know go to ella who's like service is amazing you know if you're using unity go to delta dna like it almost doesn't matter which one you use as long as you use one and as long as you're learning like you know like to do it also yourself you don't just like say like hey i have a tool enough there's like some dashboard all my problems are sold it's like no right usually like broadly speaking every dashboard you see from every analytics company that you're using is very superficial and it's great and

some are slightly better than others but at some point you want to have access to the raw data because at some point you'll come across a question that you can solve with like an online dashboard and so you can continue to understand what's behind all this magic right so learning you know really early on start understanding you know like what is all this stuff doing how's it all like kind of like coming coming together um you know that is the light bulb moment and then at some point you don't need a light bulb moment because you have like just this chain of like good decisions that you made and you can always understand what is going on in your game and what's the problem and then there's a lot of people that can help you solve that yeah i couldn't agree more about the learning and keeping up with everything that's happening in the industry and making sure that you're across it and across you know how your players are going to be wanting to to consume any kind of monetization models i mean there was a question here and it sort of conflicts with the point i wanted to make but do you feel that monetization of games

is dominating the direction of the game of games more than it should but conversely we come across situations where there is no monetization and you want it there as a player you know you want you want to earn some more money or you want to get you know and you're kind of like looking and waiting to see um so how do you feel about the sort of those kind of like big impact that big imbalance over or under um i have a couple examples for this because um personally i've also felt that frustration in regards to a game not having the monetization that i wanted to throw my wallet at um and two examples were when um when apex originally launched i was playing that um and i think i said as we were discussing earlier i actually churned from that game before they introduced their season pass system which i think came two or three months later down the line and i was interested in you know spending and customizing their character et cetera and that their mechanic just weren't in the game upon release which was you know madness for me was a global

release for the title it was a big title big publisher um and then the other one um which is a game i'm still playing but i'm ready to churn on is um hunt showdown which is by cryotic by cryengine and this is you know very competitive fps game it's a very frustrating and you know intentionally kind of slow driven gameplay um but there's a there's a mechanic there where you you earn these dollars which you use to purchase the the good weapons when you go out into the battlefield and if your character dies they die and you lose all of the weapons everything with them and there's no way of buying those dollars in the game um the only way to earn them is to win games or to um to prestige your character to reach level 100 prestige and then start again with no weapons and it's the most frustrating game loop i've ever come across i'm still playing it um but you know i would happily for hundreds of pounds at this game to get all the stuff i want so yeah definitely and whether that's i don't know intentional or not on their part because this game in particular has been out for i think a year now it's floating on

consoles etc um i just feel like they're missing out on so much revenue um but yeah that for me that frustration is there and it has made me churn um from games so definitely you have two sides of uh of the scale there and i think a lot of what we've spoken about so far generally um has been about mobile and there's a lot more out there in regards to kind of pc and console titles um where a lot of this crosses over then there's other stuff you see um and to go back to the question in regards to um kind of monetization dominating games you know if you went back i know five six seven years and looked at a call of duty game and you wanted this weapon or this skin or whatever it ended up being you know you would work your backside off to hit this this record of this achievement and to get that and you would be happy and proud and you would retain for that for dominating that skin or whatever it ends up being you know unlocking the sticks and now it's like i'll give us 20 bucks and it you know it's the mechanics have been taken out of the game um i feel that that affects retention

you know the game i'm still playing one warfare i think it's a year you're in a bit old and i feel like they've they've already kind of they're done with it i think the new version of cody is out now and the game runs like oh rubbish not to slate them but it runs like rubbish and i feel like it's intentional like they've palmed it off now the next game's here and it is just a massive monetization churn and that as a player is really frustrating to see you know if i'm buying a game playing a game i want a game that's going to last and i can go back to in six months and it's still available kind of thing you know it's still the same game um so yeah definitely monetization kind of driving these big aaa games i think is becoming an issue you know the same way we saw loot crates becoming an issue this now is is really starting to be an issue i think for the for the industry absolutely and understanding your game in those in those um in those moments as you as a player so beautifully and eloquently um expostulated is exactly what

you know we've got services like dives um and platforms like tonight to really understand where people really do want to to get to that stage and um yeah but equally you know there is coming back to this understanding and knowledge and there are so many people and experts out there to help people um get is there any any other place of knowledge i mean some people on the the chat here are asking have you got any models that you can give as you know great examples and um is there any models that you could give as great examples or any case um histories that you could give as as great examples of how people have worked it well i think if you i mean a lot of the companies um post a lot of stuff about this if you go to certainly go to adam's side i know a delta we used to do large amounts of case studies and postings and

information and you know at animo we have um we're producing guy um design guides for how to integrate our stuff all this is all this is um it's free because it's all available on our site um and you can just use and pick up without actually having to necessarily even talk to us um so there is a lot of information out there there's a lot of sites talking about it but a lot of the companies will post a lot of this information because it's good for us all to you know to demonstrate our expertise but also get people using the right technology i think you know the key to this has been said before is that you've got to integrate this technology and then use it just integrating an analytics tool or an ad monetization tool doesn't solve your problem it's just step one and actually how to make this work and so all the companies are you know putting out a lot of free information so go out do research there is a lot of stuff out there on you know on websites and on blogs and through different routes but it's all available through the companies because they're they're doing it and pushing that information out and also dan

i mean i think you said something we were discussing but try try them try them all you know try these different all the different things that are out there for you yeah i mean um this kind of goes back to the point that philip made those kind of it completely depends on the game whether it's a hyper casual casual mid core hardcore um now if you're looking at kind of a hyper casual casual model which is kind of primarily ad funded i would look at um trying obviously it would depend on the type of game as well um but i would look at trying as many different ad networks as possible and as many different ad placements and just constantly a b testing them to see which one drives the most revenue for you um without impeding retention of course um but you know i think everyone will agree there seems to be like more sdks than there are games at the moment there's a huge variety of choice um and it can be difficult sometimes for people to choose which one is right for their game um so i think maybe if you you know you

tried a couple of different ones um and trying to just keep maybe testing them and seeing what you get um hopefully you know that should yield really good results i'm sure if anyone else has anything to add to that yeah so i mean personally right like i i tend to not trust these kind of like articles on kind of like you know websites too much because like of course everyone writes what's good for them you know like i mean so and especially if you look again at like you know like kind of like some early studio right like just starting off and having you know this great game idea maybe doing some prototyping um my my personal approach would be um like think about you know getting a consultant in for like a day or two right like it's a relatively limited kind of like expense and if you tell them right like what what kind of game you want to make you know what your kind of situation is where you want to go with it they'll be able to like create like some

sort of kind of you know like plan for the next let's say you know like year or so right like what to integrate when when to look at what um just give you a kind of like a really you know kind of neutral neutral view because again you know as as dan said there's like more kind of sdks and kind of like you know actors in the in the ecosystem uh between you know ad networks and bi and like all this kind of stuff and there's like really good ones right and then there's like some that are like not that good they just don't really care about the individual developer they just like go for you know for mass they don't care um if you have a question to them they're not gonna answer right so you don't wanna you wanna avoid them but not knowing who they are right it just really makes like some you know uh you know makes it difficult like it's it's a question of market and transparency like very classically right so again i i would really say like from the fundamental point of view either you know you can you stick with one kind of like one or two big companies and their ecosystem right so take unity and google right between admob and firebase and

then unity has like you know delta dna if you wanted so you have everything you have crashlytics you have like kind of like you know over-the-air uh customization you have like push notifications you have bi you can have everything and you know if you just trust those they're probably gonna be well but don't expect too much help from these companies right or you know maybe uh maybe just like get like some like consultant in one or two days relatively early right so you can tell them what you're gonna do and they're gonna give you helpful pointers um and it's definitely worth the expense right of course you can learn it all by yourself as well that's always the third option it just requires a lot of time right and and like the question is how do you want to spend your time are you building like a gaming business to learn then by all means right like read all the articles you can figure out things by yourself try everything um if you have like you know some good co-founder who's doing all the game design and you know caring about all this you can do it totally legitimate right like these three things are mostly kind of what i would really recommend

right you know stick with the company um you know ask the consultant for one day or two um or just learn and do everything yourself but just picking one randomly and then integrating it and then another like random ad network and then they don't interact there's like silo the data's off like it's basically useless you can as well not do it i know we're short on time but i want to squeeze this one in because it's it's an important one and we we rely on data heavily all the time but for me by the end of the day we connect like with games like any other product and obviously like being said you know the ones that we love we don't we love spending money on them as well uh i personally always recommend gaming studios to try to contact or communicate with the players in the community as soon as possible because that is a valuable tunnel that gives you a ton of information that sometimes data do not and it helps iterate in

in building better products it helps them connect with the game developer it's something really important that i saw i saw many game studios that you know with very like you know like very few tools managed to to build their way through a community and iteration and like that chain of good decisions that they made like philip said and and reach a generation of revenue thank you i've seen chris take a beating i'm gonna have to wrap it there it was fantastic i really enjoyed a bit of friction as well i like the location on the panel there's some uh there was some good uh some good juking out earlier some good uh some good back and forth so um we are we are over our time now um so i'm gonna have to say thank you so much for all your insight and being very open and sharing and being very honest and direct which is great love your chair chris makes me feel i need i need something with a bit more gravitas behind me i'll have a full game of thrones swords

next time i'll do this um but yes thanks so much to you jackie to you phillip to elad uh chris dean and dan i think you um i'll let you go and enjoy your afternoons wherever you may be in the world now i know we've got international