Panel: Snap Games, HTML5 & a New Generation of Hypersocial Games

[Music] [Music] but without further ado please welcome a really good talk about snap games h95 and social gaming we all know how important is social please allow our speakers so hello and welcome everybody my name is gracia and i'm a strategic partners in mana year at snap and with me today in this panel are three of the representatives of the partners that have already launched games with us lawrence joanna and maya welcome and pleasure to meet you finally in person like it's really nice to see

people in 3d after so many video calls so i'm glad to to be here with with you today would you mind introducing yourself your company and what you do sure maybe i'll start from from the right to the left i'm lawrence i'm founder and ceo of cool games for those of you who don't know cool games we are now 11 year old company only thing we're doing is html5 games started long time ago with very simple web games for web gaming portals and move to more big gaming platforms such as snapchat trying to build very nice multiplayer game experiences and that's what we're here for today hi i'm iwana i'm a lead game designer for modux module works have been set up about five years ago and i've been working with them for about four years what we do is well now we're focusing on snap games but we started off with just doing

general um web like html5 like cool games and now we're focusing predominantly on snapchat hi i'm maya i'm i work at funday factory um as a data analyst for the past three years and we're game development studio based in denmark we've worked a lot with snapchat we've developed more or released more than 10 games on the platform and still growing our team for snapchat great thank you so much so for the ones who don't know what snap games is snap games is the are the html5 games that are offered by snapchat to it's more than 300 million users globally users don't need to download anything it's all from from our platform games are found or organically through several entry points within the within the app

and it's all friend by friend um communication so um all of the games have chat and voice integrated for a whole new level of uh interaction and um basically it's this is what we call hypersocial when we allow users to do their recommendations and to play games together because they are recommending it to to their friends so today with the three partners what we are going to do sir is their perspective from business game design and data analytics point of view so we're gonna have uh each of their experiences with their games and let's get into it uh we're gonna start with a few uh open questions so i would like to start with the abroad one and any of you can answer what have you found more compelling or successful from your experience with snap so i think maybe i'll kick off here um

as i just mentioned because we're doing now html5 games for 10 years on many different platforms that the specific thing that we found on on snapchat this is really a wii platform so people playing together most of our games you can also play solo or you can play them asynchronous but we really found that the real time either with friends or with random players that we match up is is by far the success formula so this is a very active young you know gen z and millennial user base uh who really like to be engaged in a real time gameplay and we see that much more than we have seen on other platforms so far so i think that's the couple of other things but that's the probably first thing i would like to take out clearly because you know it's a social platform but we see that in the games awesome yeah i think um i think for us the number one thing that i found the most interesting when we started developing for snap is that it's like an entirely new world um so we're pioneering

uh development on snapchat because nothing is quite the same with like the old social games and or like the mobile game so it's you have more space to take risks and try new things and because of this young generation of players you also get to know what the upcoming things are going to be and we like to say that even trends that we see now are going to probably happen bigger later somewhere else as well so i i like this uh foray into the unknown definitely yeah i agree with both of you and i think yeah also like the social part is definitely something that we found to be super interesting and new for us on the platform like how it's the social first not the solo playing first and just learning about how how players on snapchat behave and how they perceive all this

this social environment theirs on snapchat and also the fact that it's like the users come in organically it's something different from us we used to also work on standard or yeah mobile with mobile games um and and that's also a new way to think about building games like it's also a lot about players recommending games to their friends and and utilizing this social environment definitely and even teaching them how to play your games like when you are talking to your friends you already get a good recommendation from from a friend that is telling you hey this is what you have to do and how we can enjoy this game together um actually related to what you were saying my next question is one that is actually very recurring from other mobile gaming developers that are thinking about joining snap how do you approach building social html5 snap games versus the traditional

development for app stores is there any differences or anything that you would like to highlight on this aspect um yeah i think one thing that's very unique about snapchat is that it already has all these tools and these features to incorporate the social things in the games like that's very much in the focus and we've gotten to use all these different features and the way that we develop games is very much centered around incorporating these these tools and using them the best way um which is definitely different for us because on on the mobile app stores it's mostly from our own site like here we have this yeah this all these available tools that are ready for us to use or help to develop with so that's a difference and then also as i mentioned like the way that users find the games and share the games and

connect with the games um i think it's different yeah maybe to add one thing there which i think is crucial and especially for those of you who are maybe from mobile world and looking into html5 and looking into snap games in order to do this it's actually very easy for for game players so basically if i'm on snapchat i just click on the game and it starts immediately i don't need to download it i don't need to install it i don't need to go through some installation process but even better my friends for my friends it's the same thing so if i invite my friend my friend gets a notification clicks on it game starts immediately no installation no username to connect friends to each other they're already there just click and play basically i don't know of any other platform where it's so seamless basically to play the game and also play the games with your friends you know you only thing you need to do is be on snapchat that's it i think for us especially when it comes to games design we try to we call them social first so when we set up to make a

new game we don't actually think about the main mechanic at all which i know is very out there but we think about the social loop and the social loop is the first thing that we ever do and then we create the game loop around it uh because we know that we have to fit with people's lives rather than them fitting their lives around our game um that's fundamental for us that's great um in connection with what lawrence just mentioned in regards to knowing that your friends are in the platform um another way of knowing it is by seeing their bodies right because you know how your friends look like what are their features and bitmoji is the avatar that basically makes you recognize your friends within the app so whenever you join the the platform you will create your bitmoji with your own features that you will be able to customize whenever you want so um yeah most of the games in in snap leverage the bitmoji 3d as avatar so i'm curious to know what's been your experience building with with bitmoji

so i think we were actually the first third party um to integrate 3d bitmoji um and when we did that we we had a few ideas in mind uh basically we wanted to say oh because it's instant i can already see my friend and it's a it's a presence and it's a connection thing but for us has definitely been a an inclusivity thing as well because if we were trying to make our own like character customization tool we're a small studio we would have never been able to make something so inclusive and considerate as the bitmoji tool is to do all of the like things that allow our players to model themselves how they see themselves so for us it's a it's a presence thing but it's also an inclusivity and diversity thing and i think next to that it's basically it's the avatar right so also on other social platforms you have your avatar usually your photo or something like that here you have the bitmoji as your avatar but a good thing is not a fixed image

uh basically he was giving code to the bitmoji platform you can make the avatar give a few hundred different emotions uh so one of the things we did is in one of our games on snapchat which is battleship i can shoot on the other player if i sink a ship of the other player i can do something like yeah or got you and then i can give my expression of my face like in a cheering mode or if i'm being defeated i can make the expression of my face in a crying mode or angry or confused or something like that there are a few hundred different expressions that you can give and if you just have a photo as an avatar like on other social platforms you will never be able to do that but this is very dynamic and it's giving just a little extra touch i think to to the fun in the game exactly that's what it is and also people love playing with their own subs like bitmojis and what we have noticed as the as the platform is that the engagement is much higher when when games incorporate bitmoji because they feel more represented as you were saying like diversity is also very important for for

snap um okay so in line with what we were saying about other companies on mobile game developers thinking about joining the platform um what what is the the advice that you will give them um if there will be any piece of advice that you will give them before getting into um conception and development of the game what would that be i think for me well we've already mentioned this a bit but i think it's not thinking about how can i take one of my games and making it on the snapchat platform it's more thinking about how can i use these social features on the snapchat platform to make a great social experience for the snapchat players because that's really the key to success on the platform is this social experience and for example we've seen that players who play with their friends they have 70 percent higher day one retention

than players who play alone and of course it's also about getting players into the game and having a great experience also on their own but then incentivizing them to invite their friends and share with their friends and so really use these tools that snapchat have for integrating it into their social experience yeah i think one of the things that we discovered is that the younger generation is loves being involved so if i had anything to say is like get to know that demographic and really like speak to them and speak with them because that's one of the things that really helped us when we were when we're going through concepts and when we're thinking about this thing is making something for them and they really love being involved so um and there's so many ways in which you can talk to them so my my number one advice is listen to your audience which you should do anyway but this this young audience is incredibly engaged and they love talking to you so take advantage of that yeah

maybe just i mean totally true and maybe add one thing is that of course people who are playing games on snapchat they also play a game somewhere else so they probably play other mobile games outside of snapchat or on playstation or something like that but those are different kind of games so the games on snapchat are really the social games and we've said it now for the last 10 minutes many times but that's what it's all about it's the social part so the game design really should start from the social part from the beginning and then you can think about all sorts of other things that you would do in traditional game design on on your progression and on on your ranking all that kind of stuff but if the social part is not good enough the game will not work and we launched two games on snap uh one didn't do so well and the other one does extremely well so it's not a guarantee that what you think upfront will be very successful and you need to do and that's for all for all games of course also in mobile but a lot of iterations so once you go live iteration iteration iteration and sometimes really small thing especially

again in involving friends and making them come back is more important than i would say on any of the other platforms here yeah great thank you i'm going to address each of you individually but by all means if you would like to participate on the answer feel free so i started by joanna and my words snap games is an integral part of your business and we are thrilled that we announced recently that you go to 100 million users which is a huge milestone in both relative go and trial parties so how does make you feel and and what your words team feel about it this is one of those things where like it doesn't feel real so we keep on looking at the numbers um and for us they almost like became normal because we've seen them since we really started chef go at the end of 2019 initially it was like such a big impact it was so much better than like anything we could have imagined um but as time went by i think everyone

just kind of got a sense of that's that's how it is and then you tell it to someone else and they just how do you do that i was like so the proof is in the pudding i don't know it's just it's fantastic and i yeah i have no words basically that's great um we touch it on the open questions at the beginning diversity equity and inclusion is a key pillar for both snap games and logic works so how do module works align with with this yeah so this is something very close to all hearts and to my heart specifically um so when we started with emoji works the whole idea was that we know we were aiming for a diverse audience so the only way that we thought it was fair to create games for this diverse audience is to be diverse ourselves and actually we'd make we're one of those games companies that have a higher male to female ratio than usual

and we we care about that a lot and the way that basically the way that we build our games to be diverse is to make sure that if we don't have expertise in the company we go out and get it so i mentioned earlier that we use bitmoji because it's this very well thought out very well made character creator and it was something that was way better than we could have done and it gets constantly updated as well so we don't have to worry about that but another thing that we do is uh in our time management cooking game ready chef go we try to incorporate cuisines from different places in the world um and we did this sometimes as an event with uh like different holidays happening and when we do that we usually uh collaborate with different sides of snap to make sure that they're they fit into the cultural background of that area and that the the people in that area feel represented so uh we did

initially the first one we did was this promotion in india and we created the stage called dosadash and we worked with snap india and we polled people in india about what kind of food they would like to see in that like a street market kind of stall and we work with them to make sure that the environment were correct and that all of the references and the music felt contemporary and not like a caricature and we did the same thing when we did the dias de los muertos uh like taco town stage when we work with snap mexico um so we try to when we don't have the expertise we try to go out and find it to make sure that everyone gets represented as they should be that's great i also remember that fun day was part of that seasonal event for color together i don't know if you got any data insights on yeah joanna was describing yeah we also did we have this color by number game um with different content we're releasing for different holidays and seasons and

we did for diwali in india for example and also for dia de los muertos and also in collaboration and great insights from snapchat on how to be inclusive in that and we actually saw like really good improvements in both those regions and with up to 50 improvements in engagement compared to the regular players and also improvements and just the players were playing more and had better retention in those countries during the events so it's been really successful yeah i think live ops is actually another key element of developing games with snap games and also another opportunity for getting your game feature within the app so sometimes we collaborate with marketing when we have seasonal events or regional events and that's when our partners participate by uploading new content or updating their their assets within the game and yeah what you were saying has been really successful so far so we are glad that you are participating on on this

important mindset for us um so leading into um fun day factory and you have experienced a tremendous growth uh since you started working with us so far you have launched more than eight games with us and you have been partnering with big publishers like liburu so um one of the questions that i've got is can you say if you have found a generos that fit better with snap games so are you building games for an specific audience or how did you come up with the data that you will need to use for for building your games yeah so now we've been through many games and we've also released many different genres already on snapchat and i think what we've also learned is even though we also think about snapchat as this platform for millennials or uh yeah young people and it's actually

broader than than you would think like they're also parents and like they're all different age groups are present in the platform so there's actually opportunity for many different genres um so we're trying things out and i think you also mentioned like learning about the players that are on snapchat and that's something that we are continually doing and releasing games have taught us a lot about what these players would want and there are opportunities for many different genres there and of course it's like um yeah a process of getting to know the players we do also use the test trying to talk to the players and get to know or learn about what they would like and what they're missing um and of course it's also about the passion of the team like we always want to develop games with people that are passionate so

if the team is not passionate about it then it doesn't work but it's been really good to see that we can find games that or we can develop concepts that the team are really passionate about and that fits so well with the platform of snapchat like that has all these social features that we can use definitely and with the business growth comes the workforce growth so i know that your team has also been growing hugely over the past years so from three people to almost 50 percent of the workforce right now so i don't know if you can also uh provide us with some insight on how the team has been growing yeah we started out just with a team of four working on the snapchat html5 division and now yeah as you say we're 50 of the company working on that and we've really seen the future with html games and really learned so much about how to develop

great like a live multiplayer experiences that are really complex how we can do that with html5 and play canvas um so it's it's been a really exciting journey for us to to grow that much and yeah we've learned so much about that in the process that's awesome um so personally what is one particular thing that you appreciate the most from from our partnership even from data analytics perspective is there anything that you would like to highlight in that sense um yeah i think one thing that we've been really really happy about with the collaboration with you guys is that we've been able to work really closely with you in developing the tools that we actually use in our games like really early in development we've been using the tools and we've been

talking very closely with you about how we want to use these tools what do we want to exp or what do we expect which features do we expect um so we've kind of been able to also collaborate on making the tools really great and to a place where we can really use them optimally and also yeah being able to collaborate so closely on the tech and also affecting the roadmap of of where this goes has been really great for us and also on the data analytics side being able to i mean it's not very common that you can go and and actu actually like be a part of shaping the platform that you are going to use for analytics so it's been great uh we really love bold developers so if you are up for trying out new features and building what's next for a platform you are the type of people that we are in the hunt for and leading into lawrence cool games has been one of the leaders

and pioneers in the html5 field and having released a number of games in other h5 platforms we are glad to have you here as an expert on on the field your top title you have already released a couple of titles in snap games being the most successful one battleship that leverage a really well-known ip from hasbro that is a battleship what features do you think that have been key for the successful of battleship in snap i think success can be defined in a couple of different ways but let's start with people playing the game uh i think that's the the first and most important probably uh measurement of success and we just learned from from you that you was ready chef go you had already 100 million users or something so we had four battleship game in the last six months alone more than 40 million users that's a lot you know that's that's significant numbers uh but also if you consider those 40

million users were reached without doing any ua so again this is not the app store this is a very different ecosystem so we got 40 up to 40 million users of course some help from from snapchat from being featured and of course very close cooperation just like you just said but without any ua we reach these kind of numbers and i think that's that's fantastic and i'd well indeed being in html5 space for more than 10 years now there are not many platforms where you can reach these kind of numbers in users i've i think that says most of it secondary maybe due to financially you know in the end we also have a really big team on this they also need to be paid you know we're based in amsterdam which is not cheap so we also need to make some money from the game and what i really like from the snap platform is that the mostly based on advertising well maybe some of you here in mobile think oh advertising only and then compared to iap that must be lower well depends on how you look at it again indeed without a ua but also the kind of advertisements that snap is using is

very different from either in mobile or any of the other html5 platforms it's very short quick six second videos totally not intrusive not totally not irritating and we found also that game players don't mind at all to see ads and even if we started to increase the number of ads we were expecting that game players would be going away or that retention would go down or that ecpm would go down none of that happened actually the player seemed to be liking it six seconds but again this is a unique format to add to snapchat i would love that other platforms also would have this uh this ad format because it works really well and actually you can have a proper business from that uh just add salon yeah that's great and thank you for for saying that battleship also includes a bunch of asynchronous features but also a very compelling ads reward system that is different from from others so can you tell us more about it

please yeah so i think well everybody knows battleship right because this is already more than a 50 year old game it's most people have played it in this the plastic format when traveling or was the parents that you you shoot like a1 and then you shoot a bullet to the to the opponent what we did basically is that we have between every turn we show a little reward video you don't need to watch it and if you do then you have either extra shots or you have like uh bigger weapons so instead of shooting one in in one cell you can do a whole air raid for example with four or five cells and because the sessions are around uh 15 seconds for each player and then the other player is that's a perfect timing for having one ad in between you're waiting anyway for 15 seconds so it's not long enough to go away but also it's not short enough that you cannot show an ad and that works really well to have the ad implementation in this vice versa gameplay and also something we learned by experiencing it and in the previous game

we did on that on snapchat we had a different ad system which worked less and we found out that okay this works really well yeah cool learning from experience you also mentioned uh that the game is working pretty well with snapchatters with with our audience uh can you please elaborate on elaborate on why uh it fits so so well with the audience with uh the unsaid and millennials i think we can all answer but from from from my perspective um i think it's very low barrier so people can start playing it right away i think the benefit we have is battleship is that most people know the game already from some other platform or from the old plastic version basically so that helps a lot so we don't need to take them through very long on-boarding processes but basically you start a game and immediately you come to the battle battle screen and you can start playing and then the only thing you need to do is to choose do i want to play against a friend or do i want to play against random other snapchatter and then we

match up behind the scenes so it's it's very [Music] quick and easy to understand and i think that's one of the reasons why why it works really well also for gen c maybe a little bit less patient i should say so not really long deep but just start right away and that works definitely it's just another way of playing a classic game and we are trying to recreate the living room experience right with snap so pretty on point with millennials and jensen i don't know if there are any questions that we have not covered maybe in the panel that you would have liked to win um question about but um uh i would like to actually add to um what you were saying about why certain games work for snap better than others and actually this was something that we had to discover by trial

pretty much this short format the kind of imagine like a tik tok video but in game format and that's why you have to make in order for the audience to like it so what we actually found is uh ready chef go is basically like a competitive cooking game you play with your friends against another team and for us as seasoned developers and thinking about it we were like that if we put someone into a versus match immediately they're going to get intimidated and they're going to leave no that's the exact opposite so snapchatters want action right away they want it to be exciting they want it to be so easy to understand that i can't make a mistake and even if i'm not perfect at it to begin with i'm going to get better at it but i want to get straight into the action so that's definitely something that we've and we've seen so even when we try to put them we initially tried to stage a match and put them against the

npc and lull them into the game no the best way is to put them against the real opponent and see how they're doing and that's that's the the one that performed the best by far which was very surprising for us that's awesome um i would like to give the opportunity to the audience to ask any questions that you might have so i don't know if anybody would like to participate great um i will do you want to you can i have that it's working yeah so i wanted to have you guys talked a lot about how important is to be for social first how the social features are the key things how do you engage with the community do you use the community to figure out what are the latest trends what do they want to use and how to better engage with them when creating games

yeah actually so we we have a official snapchat page for each of our games and all of the fans of our games come to our snapchat page to like tell us how they feel about it or like whether or not they like it sometimes they're like play with me i want to play with you but through those channels what we found is that we get this we get access to our audience and because they are so involved which is what i was mentioning earlier it's very easy to then uh use that to create your your next games um yeah definitely maybe to add one thing to that is that also we got a lot of help here from snapchat so they gave us a lot of user feedback because they do first-line user contacting and for example when we launched battleship in the in the first release i mean we made i think probably 50 iterations since then but the first release we matched up random players which is the most popular one of the most popular modes because you can

always do it even if your friends are not there but we matched up first time players also with players who already were level 20 and were unlocked a lot of special weapons and immediately a lot of feedback was hey this is unfair i come in and i'm immediately bombarded by someone who has much bigger guns than than i have and that was all the feedback coming from snap so immediately we needed to change that so the next update we we grouped it into experience levels uh but i think the the user feedback from snap is is very helpful here and also what i have to say is that you know if you guys are from mobile now and you would ever go to snapchat you'll forget about also your mobile kpis really focus on you know snap kpis and then what was very helpful here from snap is comparing apples to apples so we looked at our dashboard and we looked at all the kpis but of course they're snap related and they're not like app store related or they're not steam related they're snap related and snap also really helped us there to compare to other games on average how

that worked out and how we could improve that for the user base how they've seen that in other games so but again that's the direct relationship that also you guys talked about before so indirect feedback through snap from the user base nice yeah and i think also actually i think we've experienced that the players really want all the social features that we can incorporate like we've been doing different things like we've been doing live multiplayer really trying to improve that experience so players can join at different times while playing but definitely like improving that experience but also adding async opportunities so you can send things and just everything like sharing all the opportunities you have to share things with your friends it's just been really real well received so yeah i wonder here's a question there she's getting to you

hello all right hi where do uh snap tokens fit into this i mean when it comes to designing you know how lucrative can this be because tokens clearly are going to play a huge role or not i'm not sure and then are there whales are there snap game whales that you're going to try and capture with the tokens are they just young whales with credit cards or how does it work so the thing is iip tends to be pretty similar to how it is outside but we tend to focus on um on ads right now just because we know that everyone has the time to watch an ad and i'm sure there are young whales as you call them um because of course they are um

every time we we uh attempted something like this it's it's gone well it's just we're putting our foot in the water slowly um because the because we can afford it because the ads are so good to be honest with you so um but yeah i don't i don't think the in-app purchase is much different from from other platforms in the sense of people would pay pay for shiny custom things yeah and i think one thing to add there is that the tokens are only available for android users because only google allows this and apple unfortunately doesn't allow it like they don't allow many things sometimes so for apple users ads only and for android users you can have the combination of tokens and ads but also i mean i can confirm is that we mostly focus on the ads and have a very good ad flow and integrated in the game design and secondary yes also on tokens now more and more but i think i will not give any numbers here but in terms of priority ads have the priority at the

moment by far thank you please it's just because it's also digital so they can listen to you uh i i have a very straightforward question which is why would you choose to publish a game on snap versus other platforms i mean the the first one is visibility right um something that we like to say is that the game is the ad so you see the game and it tells you everything about the game and you go in and you can you're already there there's like so little friction into the game you're already a snapchat user and then you have some time to spare and you don't have to convince anyone that like oh you have to download this and then you have to wait 30 seconds and then if your connection is bad like it's just so instant and so so much there but also just

as i said there's there's a lot of space to try new things and i think that's one of the most exciting bits about it is you have the opportunity to make something exciting and new and it's frictionless so it's great maybe i'm sorry you go first yeah i i i really agree with like uh what i think is really interesting about or there is a lot of things it is really interesting to make games with snapchat because it is this like you can be really innovative and you can create really unique experiences because you have this platform that that has this social environment and i think to me it's just really exciting to learn about these players like we've worked in the mobile market and we've learned about that but this is really like you can create some new shared experiences and it's really exciting to try well maybe then for me to finalize on

this also from the business perspective and something i mentioned before you know why snapchat and again we also had our failures and also some things that didn't work like probably everybody here in the audience had failures and you know that's part of the game business but we also had some success and if you see now that we in like six month period can reach more than 40 million people i mean that's three times the size of the netherlands basically where we are based you know that's pretty significant and that's i think it's a really good reason to be on snapchat it's a big audience thank you so much i would like to wrap up by saying um the team is gonna be here so edgar carlos and myself are going to be around if you have any questions by all means reach out to us and we will be happy to talk to you and thank you so much to our partners for being with me today and i really appreciate your partnership and working with you on daily basis so thank you for coming and all the best [Applause]

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