PechaKucha meets the Mobile Games Industry

It's the It's the end of day one powered by Pete Cuchucha. Now I know like all of you are asking yourself, Peta, huh? What's that? So I'll tell you um Pete Cuchucha presentations come from from from Tokyo. Uh that's where they originally came from. It's uh it's quite a simple format really. 20 slides, one picture or pictures per slide, 20 seconds per slide. So altogether that's uh 6 minutes 40 seconds per presentation. Uh the presenters are not allowed to click at all but the presentations run their own course. Very simple. Um uh uh and yeah have a beer because this is supposed to be quite informal, quite nice. Uh hopefully hopefully you have a few laughs. Um and uh without further ado, I want to present the people or the industry luminaries um behind the

presentations here. It's quite a it's quite a good lineup I think. Um Tommy is going to speak about uh the history of mobile games. Dlet is going to speak about free not to play free. Uh Mark is going to well Mark's approach is going to be interesting. He he He'll explain more about it, but he's uh he's going to be talking about basically retention. Um probably a favorite subject of uh of many. Um Oscar, 20 reasons why it's your players games, not yours. Parker, how to be a superhero. I think that's something all of us uh needs to know. Uh Pepe, head of uh head of chart boost, uh is going to speak about the good, the bad, the ugly in mobile marketing. and Rob is going to finish off by telling you what not to do when it comes to approaching Pocket Gamer. So, I I I think the the the lineup is spectacular and I'm I'm

really looking forward to hearing hearing all these presentations. Um that's uh that's me on a on on a on a donkey. If you want to reach me, you can reach me on on Twitter, on on email, or on my pager. Um, yeah, get on with it. So, Tommy gets to go first. Thank you. There we go. A little more support. Here, uh, does mic work? Yeah. Great. So, uh, hi everybody. I'm Tommy Pal and, uh, um, I read that you had to speak some about something that you're very passionate about. So, I'm going to talk about the history of of mobile games. And I start with this slide because I I had to get in the IMGA somewhere, the competition about mobile games that's been around for a really long time. I kind of found the the passion of my life in 79 when I found this arcade machine on a ski

vacation with my parents in in France. And I I I was there for one week just feeding it coins. and and I realized that this is this is what I want to do. In in mid 80s I got a a Commodore and I learned to program basic and uh me and my friends were were playing a lot of games but also making games and I really got into making multiplayer games. It was such an easy way of of making things really fun with your friends. And I I kind of guess my parents were hoping that it'll end out in something eventually. In um 1997, uh one of my best friends came up at the technical university where I was and he showed me his new Nokia 6110 and the multi-player snake on it and I thought, "Wow, this is going to be huge." So I started a company doing just that which turned out to be really lousy idea. Uh back then in

1999 the only thing you could reach the the the consumers with was using WAP. This is a a game called Lifestylers from a Swedish company uh where I'm from. And uh this was popular but there was no way of getting paid. The first game that we did for mobile phone was called World in War. And it was a a multiplayer cross-platform game. And it it came out at the same time as the first Nokia uh handset that supported Java. And that was just way too early, but it was a great way for us to discover Nokia and start working with them. So in 2003 uh Nokia released the endgage which was an amazing idea not 100% executed everywhere as you know uh but it was a great opportunity for me to get paid while learning to make uh games for mobile phones. One of the titles we were

working uh very actively, we would actually release several titles, was a game called Durk Dagger and it was an adventure game series in in the form of kind of like a comic book style game. And it was one of the most fun games that we ever uh worked on, me and and uh my my colleagues. I refer to this time as the dark ages of mobile games because there was basically no way to get these games from a uh game developer point of view out to consumers because of uh fragmentation and distribution problems that that slowly killed the market. So you had to focus elsewhere. This was until the entrance of the Jesus phone. This is the Jesus phone pole, but I kind of like the picture uh that came in in 2007 and 2008, the app store came along and that kind of fixed a lot of the problems that that uh we had as as game developer. Unfortunately, at this

time, the company that I started had gone over more to to gambling products. So, uh Jadestone didn't want to to follow this uh opportunity of of making games. uh it was eventually sold to William Hill. They're still uh working actively with with this kind of products. However, I was passionate about regular entertainment games. So, uh me and Alexander Eekwal up there to the right, we founded a company called Fabrication Games and continued uh to make uh mobile entertainment games. This is from World in War, the second remake of the the same game where we're depicted as the French resistant movement. a small part of the team. We we uh kind of shot with a shotgun and and went in all different directions uh with with many small title. We didn't have any any uh venture capital behind us. So, it was all uh what we could manage to to do on our own and we

managed to to release a whole lot of games and apps. Uh nothing that really flew. This was at the time in 2010 when there still was a lot of uh students for instance Andreas Illinger who made the Tiny Wings that was on the top grossing chart with uh this uh great game. So, we're kind of uh aiming for for that market and we met with King at a conference like this and we had very similar uh views on where the the future were going. So, we decided to to sell the company to King and and start working with them where they had the the knowledge about making social games that we weren't that good at and focus a lot on on uh what we what we knew best on on making the mobile titles. And the first mobile uh game we made was the the

mobile version of of Candy Crush that was built on on the game engine that we had been working on for many years. And I'm not going to go into details. uh pretty sure that many of you are familiar with this game concept. So what did I learn from these years? Well, my the thing that I learned most was how difficult it was to see what was coming. I was on a panel in the shift of the where the iPhone came and and the panelist was some of the smartest people I know and none of us could see that this shift that we were straight into the shift where the game industry finally started to work. So my conclusion is that it's very difficult to see this disruptive technology when you are into it. It often comes from kind of a blind side where you are not looking if you're working very hard on on doing something successfully in in in the industry. Um, so that's the the two biggest shifts that I've seen is first of course the the app store itself and

then secondly the shift to to the free games. A lot of great uh veteran game companies haven't succeeded in in making that transition over to to to having the games free and and being able to successfully uh pay for things in app. I want to a final this is my final slide. This is one of my favorite pictures. It's installment of the new pope in 2005 and the same place in 2013 and really shows how smartphones have transitioned and now has a a game console in everybody's pocket. Thank you very much. [Applause] Very nice. Very nice. Thank me. Uh, next up, Vleari speaking about free. Stage is yours, V. Go get him. So, yeah, we're here arguably in the freeto play capital of the world. So, I

thought that like everybody's always like, you know, still ranting about freeto play this and free to play that, evil or not evil. So, I just want to think about free for a little because honestly, what's better than free, right? That's that's exactly the right price for most of us. So, it's an unbeatable price for consumers. Free games are just kicking the ass of paid games everywhere. And um unfortunately, there's so many free games out there that how many of them are really making any money, right? So, um of all of these games, because I like my statistics uh very old-fashioned, I have this chart from 10 2013 where you know increasingly the price of apps is free. So 90% of applications is free 2013 I don't know what the number is today but uh according to some sources for any free application free game uh only about 5% of the users of the players ever ever pay anything. So we must be like [ __ ]

drunk on on on this this 90% of apps is free when we still continue to make these free games. So, I've been kind of thinking like what about the rest like the people who make the apps, make the games where the customers really won't spend. Uh how do we how do we tackle that? And uh my answer is goats. It's it's not really, but um how amazing are goats really like feta cheese, bleeding, fantastic smell, and uh I I guess that you could you could even say that uh they make a great subject matter for games. uh such as uh Goat Simulator uh which is which is a fantastic like glitchy ass game and uh and everybody should probably try it. But um but yeah um goats uh don't necessarily make sense sense right here right now. But um if we if we go back to mobile games for a second um here's a fantastic little game

called Breakfinity. So, Game by Phil has a an endless brick breaker breakout style game where you just play through levels of levels of levels and get power ups and advance and has very elegant, very simple free-to-play monetization. So, basically, in the game, as in any game, you will eventually [ __ ] up, at which point you can use premium currency or you can watch a video ad on demand to continue playing. How nice is that? And uh yeah, uh this probably been inspired by goats because turns out that Phil Hassy actually breeds goats. So in addition to making games, um he actually tweeted like like about couple of hours from the game of the release that hey my game has made a bag of goat feeds worth of money from just from video advertising. And uh you know who else who of us can

really say that we're that talented that we make amazing goats sorry amazing games and breed amazing goats like these are some prize winning goats that that Phil has is is breeding um somewhere somewhere in the in the deepest Midwest of of the United States. Uh but if we go back to that 90% uh actually Breakfinity made 90% of its revenue from advertising. So here's a very very very intell uh uh elegant sleek game design. Doesn't pepper with peppered with isn't peppered with inapp purchases. doesn't monetize, doesn't rely heavily on AP, but can still make a significant uh advertising revenue all the way up to 90% of the total revenue earned. You might argue that I'm getting carried away by my goats and advertising here, but uh actually, if you think about it, it makes sense. If you're there, you're one of the 90% of the of

the of the free apps and 95% of your audience is never paying. So, what you going to do? Uh back in the day I used to work for Roia and we launched Angry Birds for Android. At the time Android market was absolute rubbish. There wasn't APS. Nobody was using the uh the Google payment methods. So you had to launch it with advertising and banners was the only came game in town. Huge revenue just off banner advertising. But what is like if you look at what somebody like Roio is doing today on demand advertising. So basically the user gets a benefit. the user is more engaged with the game. Uh the user is more engaged with the advertising and they get like some kind of a reward and the publisher makes revenue. So this is a true win-winwin situation and scenario. Uh even the platform holders are looking at hang on this is a pretty powerful mechanic we're talking about here that it's it's is it affecting like our our charts? Is it gaming our system? Is it uh is it affecting like the

fairness of our our uh platform uh in in a significant way? And uh before like anybody should overreact uh you actually shouldn't like get sad about this because what we're doing here with this win-win-win scenario is is really benefiting the user. Advertising on demand is is it's basically the best user experience you can offer when you when you're monetizing with ads in your game. So, if you look at this graph from uh from um Dave Dave Marsh from Nimble Bit, what did we used to have interstitials and pop-ups like disrupting the game flow all the time and now the user opts in to see the ad, maybe get a reward, maybe not even get a reward, but to discover something uh without interrupting the game play. So, it's all about the better user experience. And speaking of nimble bit, they're also making up to 50% of revenue uh on their certain titles from uh from opt-in advertising. So what

we're dealing here with here is a significant revenue stream for indie publishers and developers. So um that's pretty much it. It's all a balancing act. So you have to balance out your APS, you have to balance out your ad revenue, you have to even balance out the platform uh considerations like how what can you do in terms of wherever you're publishing your game and uh yeah I I I I just wish like every publisher, every developer to to to find like new ways experiment with new technologies, experiment with new ways of finding finding revenue streams for their applications. Thank you very much. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, V. Very, very, very, very good. I like I like the goats a lot. So, Mark Surell next speaking about how to retain, how to keep your player floor is yours. Go

Mark. Hello. Hello. Hi. Um, my name is Mark Sorl and I'm uh a game and retention consultant and I feel an awful lot like him. Um, I've decided because it obviously a petroicature talk is very much about being precise. You've got exactly 20 seconds. You have to plan everything very very carefully in advance. So what I've done is improvised the entire of this talk. I haven't planned it or practiced it in any way whatsoever and I'm going to make all of it up. Now, the reason why I want to do that is because I want my talk to be about showing you, not telling you how to retain. And one of the first things I think that's important about retention is making sure that the player has a sense of mystery and a sense of not knowing exactly what to expect. Hence, I'm hoping you guys don't know what to expect because I don't know what to expect because I don't know what I'm going to say. Now, what I do as a consultant is two things. Firstly, I uh give people fish. Here is a fish. Also,

I teach people how to fish, which is a lot like if you give a fish a fish, then it has a fish for a day. But if you teach a fish how to fish, I'll come back to that. So, getting the player to come back, the first thing you need to do about getting a player to come back is to tell them to leave. This is something that people forget a lot when they think about a technique where where you've got a limited number of lives or a certain amount of time that you have to wait. They think that's about monetization. It is about monetization and absolutely telling people that they have to wait will get them to pay. But a lot of the time it will also get them to leave. And that's extremely important. Hedonic adaption behavioral tech behavioral uh economics term extremely important. The more of something that you have, the less you enjoy it. The first piece of chocolate from that bar of chocolate is the best.

The second isn't as good. The third isn't as good. But that doesn't stop any of us from sitting there and eating the entire of that bar of chocolate all in one go. So, make sure that you give your players a reason to leave if you want them to come back. The other thing to remember is that you should never let your player feel like they've reached the end of anything, they've ever achieved anything. You need to make sure they're achieving a little bit, but also achieving a little bit towards another goal and also achieving a little bit towards another another goal and another another goal. If you think about World of Warcraft, I don't know how many of you played World of Warcraft. It's not enough. Well done to everybody who did. We can do a big high five when I get off. But World of Warcraft is fantastic because if you go and kill a thing in World of Warcraft, then you'll find out that you're not you're killing a thing until you gain some experience towards your next level. You're killing a thing and you're aiming some reputation points towards a reputation with these bunch of people or with this bunch of people or this bunch of people. You're getting a small amount of money.

You can see what I'm doing where the slides are about what I'm talking about. and you're getting a little bit towards this, a little bit towards that, you've earned another couple of uh gold towards the thing you're aiming to buy. What you've basically trying to do when you're constructing a retention technique is you're trying to give the player an infinite number of of of pint pots. Imagine they've got all these pots. And what you're trying to do is make sure that every action they perform is filling up this pot a little bit. This pot a little bit more. This pot a little bit more than that. This pot the tiniest amount imaginable and this pot is almost full. So you constantly they constantly want to be like, "Oh well, if I do this then this pot will almost be full." But while they're concentrating on this thing over here, all of a sudden this pot has filled up and they're like, "Oh, wait a minute. I just leveled this thing up over here. That's brilliant. Now I've done that. So, if I I'm going to go and use the thing that I've got over here. And in using the thing they've got over here, they've suddenly filled that part up. But in filling this

part, they've also almost filled this part up. So, they're back over here. It's extremely important that whenever you're thinking about your leveling system, put more hidden bits in. Players must always inadvertently be filling this pot up when they fill this part up. But possibly the most important part of all of this is retention is about your players thinking about your game when they are not playing it. That is absolutely the most important part of getting retention into your game is not while people are playing it, it's while they aren't playing it. So how are you doing that? The biggest problem I see with retention in almost every game I analyze and look at is that people are thinking about is that people are trying to explain everything. They're trying to make sure that the player is never confused and never upset and never scared and never worried. Not

for one second. And that isn't how you retain players. You retain players by making them go, "What? But does that mean It's that lack of understanding. It's that what is that mystery? What is that thing? Why is that thing there? When I get back, I'm going to try this new technique when I if I if I put three of them in there and two of those in there and I had this one and that that's how I'll get around it. It's about confounding them. It's about giving them difficulty. A game doesn't retain because it's easy. A game doesn't retain because it's going in one ear and out the other. It gain retains because it's going one in one ear and then sitting that and then getting to the end. It's like when you give a fish a fish, then if you give a fish a fish, it'll eat for a day. But if you teach a fish how to fish,

then it will kill other fish until it becomes the lord of all the fish. And I've got 34 seconds left. [Applause] Very, very, very nice. Thank you, Mark. Oh my god. Um, next up, Oscar Clark

telling us why it's our players's game and not ours. Before I start, go Oscar. I officially hate Mark, you bastard. How do I follow that? Okay. Um, so I'm going to try and explain why it's not your game, it's your players game. Your game doesn't exist except in context with your players. And I know that seems obvious to some of you, but we have to get to under understand. We got to get underneath the bonnet of this. Otherwise, we're going to fail at making any game. This is me firing this jet, firing that missile, and killing that enemy. I did that. That's about success. That's about the experience, the emotion, the joy of success. I want that. I experience I play games because I want to experience that moment of success. But that success is meaningless unless that success is in the context of something. Unless I have adversity. Unless I can see the potential of those

gems far away in the distant tunnel. Unless I can see that potential, that opportunity, that joy that I can get, there is no point in that success. But games are also about rhythm, about pace, about timing, about having moments of difficulty that are balanced off by moments of joy and relaxation. We don't always need to have the intensity of that missile clamoring down on my enemy and smashing him into smitherreens. Sometimes I need serenity. Sometimes I need those moments where I can relax. But I also want that kind of idea of escapism. I want to be able to throw my friend with their Facebook image on secret exit down onto some crazy machinery. It will smash them to pieces that I can then show them and look. Haha, look what I did to you. Stamp on your head. Mark Sorrel didn't sell her. Um but but you know you need that kind of principle where these things are meaningful where they're joyful. They need to be about creativity about creating moments and special entertainment. games which like this

Cuba game from guys in Poland. Well, they make a joy out of the process of making games themselves. Games become something different when they become about an expression of ourselves, about our identities, about who we are. Is they've got to tell stories and those stories have to be meaningful. There have to be something that takes us on a journey that tells a narrative that gets us through the hero's journey where we can tell the tale of how we refuse the challenge and yet we still found ourselves on the way to defeat and def and fight the hero because at the end of the day games are also about violence. You know, let's not forget there's there's something about the escapism, the the the joy in some ways of being able to frag the hell out of that zombie because I want to blow their head off and see the money come spewing out or whatever it is in the particular game. There is something about the passion, the motion, the the thrusting and the failure driving along and smashing myself into the back of a lorry because I screwed up. Failure is as much a part

of this as success. This game is about me. It's about what I do with the game. It's not about what you did with the game. It's not about what you tell me I should be doing. It's about the experience that I have, the joy that I have and the things that I do. I want to dominate. I want to be able to have my gunship smash away all of those zombies and rescue those those humans are trying to get back away from the zombies. I want to be in control. I want to feel like I have something in my life that makes me worthwhile, that makes me powerful because I can do that. But I also want beauty. I want art. I want joy. I want something which makes me cry. I want something that makes me look at the potential of the world. And games can do that in ways that are personal, that are joyful, that are important because they're about me as a player and the way that I persist and persevere despite all the failures, despite all the attempts to make that trick work, to

jump off that that that jump, that ramp, and I will fail, and I will continue, and I will persevere, and I will come back because I'm constantly thinking about how can I make that move better? How can I make that experience more joyful? I'm going to discover something about myself, about my potential because I can try. I can fail. I can see new things. I can find new experiences. I can see new stories because you've helped me. You provided me as a designer with a vision, with a story which I can follow through and make my own, make something that's passionate for me. I can make choices how I decide to play these games. I can choose to sit in there and be the gunner and blow the alien away, or I can set the right strategy up to make sure that my approach to defending my base is important to me. I make choices that makes the game, but games are also about pace. It's about being able to keep and punctuate every moment, the thrill, the

desire, the anticipation, the thrusting to make sure that my car overtakes your car. to be able to win, to be able to choose, to do my best, to be able to fail, to be able to choose, to be able to do things that I never thought possible. And in the end, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I'll win. If I persevere, I'll get the right move. I will do the right throw. I will continue to succeed. I will get the score. I will find the thing that will make that success possible because I will persevere. I will find ways to make this game mine. I will make my stamp upon it. And I will progress. And that progression allows me to see what I've done, allows me to challenge my way through this game and challenge myself because it's challenging myself that makes this game relevant to me. And relevant to me is all that matters. Because if you want me to spend money, if you want me to want to tell other people about this game, if you want me to care, I need to show my achievements, not yours. This game is about me. It's not about you. This game

is about me showing you what I can do with the playground that you've created for me. This is about my achievement. Games are not about you as designers. Games are about me as players. And then I'm going to choose to share that with other people because at the heart of play is sharing. At the heart of play is an expression of who I am because I've taken the toolkit available to me in a gaming experience and I've expressed myself. I've enjoyed myself. I've divested myself in this experience and I've decided to share with other people. And that's what makes games joyful. It's a mixture of emotions and joy and and experiences that I chose for myself by expressing it through your game. If you don't make games that do that, you'll fail. Games are about passion. Games are about sharing. And all of these games use every play. Very,

[Applause] very convincing. Very, very convincing. Um, thank you, Oscar. Amazing. I love passion. Passion is how you spell it, brother. Um, Barker, teach us how to be a superhero, please. Go, Parker. Hello. Can you hear me? Great. Um, I wish that was me. I begged my parents for a picture of me in my Batman outfit, but you know, they didn't send it to me, unfortunately. Um, so I'm left with this random kid. Um, want to talk about what we all were like when we were kids. We all had a superhero. Everyone asked you, "Who do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do? How do you want to change the world?" And as kids, you you have an amazing sort of idea that we can do anything and we and we and we want to do anything. Um,

but you know, that doesn't always happen. We live in our our comic books. We live in our, you know, our whole world. And I have to say, this is the longest 20 seconds of my life. Um, I I think I'm the only one that's not clicking through. Oh, there we go. So, you know, we have our comic book heroes. We have everyone that we want to be. And, you know, you've seen the explosion of, you know, the the Marvel films with with amazing success because I think it it taps into something that, you know, we want to escape. We want to do something. We want to do something that is bigger than ourselves. I mean, this is a picture of Bat Kid in in in New York uh in San Fran where they, you know, made this wish and this kid got to run around saving Gotham for a day. This is everyone's dream as a as a 10-year-old. Like, you're in a Ferrari, you're running around, you got the coolest bat thing ever, but then life gets in the way. You know, at some point

in time, we have to grow up. We have to, you know, in the gaming industry, this may not be true for everyone, but you know, for your average person, you got to go to work. You got a you have that really tiny boss that screams and yells at you and slowly these things start just getting pulled away from you. You have kids. I have a five and a halfmonth-old. Um I feel like that girl um by most of the week and just feel completely shattered and yes it's a rewarding experience and I obviously love my child to death but that it's exhausting. what happens is going on lay on the couch that doesn't exist and you know it's it's things that keep taking over our lives and you know you you have to go to school and you know you have your job you have your school you have you know the family and all these things just start to make us want to grow up and and and we're forced to grow up and it's and it's challenged and and that that little bit of I want to be a superhero for adults just kind of kind

of goes away. Um, I do feel like a backup boy band singer with this outfit on. Um, but there is no training camp for superheroes when we're old. We get lost in the world of of life and responsibilities and and doing things that, you know, we really wanted to do when we were a kid, like save the world, you know, do something that is bigger than ourselves or to do something that has an impact. And and you know, we want to be that superhero just kind of standing there. You know, most of it was just in our pants when we were kids, you know, the Superman pants just like taking over the world. And you know, maybe you save a cat, you know, we can start with small things as a kid, you know, or even as adults, you know, you can save the cat. Maybe it's not the world. It's it's it's a cat and and but you've done something good for your neighbor, maybe, but again, life is in the way. you know, you gotta pay the bills. You You know, you want to save the dance in distress where she's

doesn't seem that in distress. I don't know what website I got that off of. Um, but she seems to be enjoying it. But, you know, it's these there's these things that, you know, we had them and we and we wanted to do bigger things and, you know, and not all of us can be real superheroes. Just for the record, this is kickass in real life. This is the superhero project in the US. All these people are real. They go around US cities doing good things and they do it in these outfits. None of these are made none of those were made up and they go out and do it. But we don't all don't have that ability or confidence to to to really be that. And there are things in this world that we need to be doing better and we need to be trying to make it happen. There's, you know, some levity to this conversation that, you know, we don't live in a perfect planet and, you know, we become very

individualized and we try our best to to hit those work goals, those family goals, those school goals and there are things in this world that do need our help and, you know, we should try to inspire to be superheroes again. Um, but it's not easy. And then you get guys like this. This guy played I and now it just went directly on my head. He was on Twitch. He played the same game League of Legends for something like 14 hours and he raised a silly amount of money for Save the Children. And all he did was he took his power, he took his audience, he took what he was passionate about and said, "I'm going to do this and I want to make a difference. who will support me, you know? And it's the same thing with Bat Kid. And and and they did. His his user base rallied to him for playing a game for 12 hours on Twitch, raised over $100,000. Then you take the guy like PewDiePie,

who arguably could have the one of the most powerful user bases in the world right now off of YouTube, and he does a campaign for Charity Water. He's almost raised a half a million dollars. He's taken the thing that he has, his most powerful thing where he's making more money knows what to do with and done something good with it. And then we have High School Story who has raised almost $300,000 by using inapp purchases to prevent bullying with a charity called Cyber Smile. And he's Oliver of High School Story has given up so much of his revenue, but he he had a passion. He wanted to do something different. And this is obviously um Captain Planet where we all have our roles, we all have our things and we have Captain Planet. He's right. No, no one. Okay. Different generation maybe. Um thank you. Um where it it he captain Planet didn't come in

by himself. I mean he did he you know he did it all but he had his he had his people. He had the things that made it made it better. And I believe we all have that ability to be able to take what we're great at and and to do something important with that. Now, is that in gaming? Is that in whatever we do? I say yes. Is that a is that a campaign in your free-to-play game? Is that using your user base to to raise awareness? It's something. And as a gaming industry, we have a lot of power and influence, and I think we need to be using it to do good. So, that's how I think we should be superheroes. Thank you. [Applause] I agree. I agree. I agree. We should all We should all give back. Very nice. Very nice. And next up, Pepe. Yes. Teaching us how to do mobile marketing. Correct. And how not to do mobile. How not to do mobile marketing. Go Pepe. Perfect. Thank you. So, I'm Pepe Angel. H. My

accent is from Barcelona, but I'm based in San Francisco and I lead the international efforts at Charoo. I love working with so many game developers, but unfortunately advertising is full of crap. And this is why I'm here to tell you good examples, bad examples, and very ugly examples that I hope not to see anymore. I hope I can change the world with that. It all starts with the game. You're very passionate about the game you've created, the the the experience that you're you're you're generating, but obviously your team is excited about the launch, but you need players that get as excited as you are about your game. and more importantly that they spend a little bit of money on it. So this is uh obviously you start with referrals. If you have a cousin like this, let me know because I want to talk to her. Friends and family will play your game. They will they will have a fun experience. They will tell their friends about about how awesome you are. But we all have limited networks, right? Even Oscar Clark has a limited network. And this is why we need to do paid acquisition. We need to to acquire

users. And because there's a cost, we need to be efficient. And we have all sorts of KPIs to be efficient. You know them. CPC, CPI, CPM, art, DAO, DAO, MAU, all this [ __ ] that helps us to be efficient. And uh so so I mean good marketers and sorry and when it comes to ad units, the top the top KPIs are click-through rate and install rate because they help us measure conversion conversion into installs. And these actually move the needle of cost and volume. But come on, I mean, what am I saying? If we think about what we do, we're in the entertainment industry. We're making games that are fun. We're having fun with them. And how do you measure fun? How do you measure thrill? How do you measure tension, failure, all these great stuff that we've been talking about? They're are very important aspects of our games, but they're very hard to track. So good marketers from my point of view are

those who are able to connect with people from anywhere and generate those emotions, those feelings that will help us or that will push us take action. Now the problem in mobile advertising obviously is that the real state is very limited. We need to encapsulate all these feelings, all these emotions in a very limited space. It's an interstitial, it's a video ad, whatever it is. So, it's very hard and only good people can do that. So, I brought some good examples, some bad examples. I'm going to start with the ugly and the bad because it's always most fun and um and hope you enjoy it. So, first, super bad and super ugly. I don't know if you can read this, but Obama or just homeowners to refinance blah blah blah blah blah blah. What the hell has to do with me and dice with bodies? Context matters and you need to find users that will get excited about your game. This is not a good context. If I'm looking for players, look for players in the right place. Second

example, banners. Banner ads. Not good. I'm sorry, but it's very hard to convey a message to establish a value proposition with a 350 by or 300 by by 50 banner ad. You we all know size matters. So, it also matters here. Please don't use banner ads. Not good. Oh, I love this one. Can someone tell me what's going on here? I see a banner ad, an interstitial, a popup. What the hell is this? I don't know what to do. Um, don't bombard your users. And this apply to advertisers, to publishers, to everyone. We need to get generate valuable user experiences. And be clean, be clear. I want to know what's going on. And less is more also on this. Come on. We don't like reading. We have books for that. What is this? This is a It looks from the 90s, but this was running recently on on some advertising networks. This is not a good way to attract your your users and generate passion, failure, excitement.

I love this one, too. Free app of the day. That's wonderful. But can someone tell me what's the difference between the okay and the continue? I'm confused. I only have one second to to generate the the action. And if I need to think too much, I'm not going to do it. So, let's switch uh to the positive. There's also some positive actually and some good practices that I see out there. Farm Bill 2, for example, actually AB tested the creatives with older characters and this hot cheek right here was the one that scored the most. And in our language, in the advertising boring language, it's it means a clickthrough rate of 15%. But what what I want to say with that is that you have good characters, good assets, just play with them and see which one performs the best. I'm not specifically happy with this interstitial, but basically what I wanted to say is that color also helps. Be colorful. We all like colors. Actually, bright colors are are proven to be more effective than than any other color. So, have red or something bright

on your call to actions that will help. Obviously, we're talking about communicating with with users, with your players that will get excited. Speaking the same language is the best. It's the first step, actually. So localize your your message. Superal is doing a great job in Asia by by communicating in different in different ways and tailoring this message. And then because we're creating fun and we have an exciting gameplay, you can you can actually show it on an ad unit. Uh Jellyplash, I think it's doing a great job on on giving a sneak peek. We get a little bit of an idea of what the game is going to be about. Not too much because I want to still be curious and and go there. But show what what the game is about. And because free, as Villa was saying, is so important. It's good to have it on the ad unit, too. Just show that it's free. It attracts the the audience. We all like free, right? And we're in the premium era. Put it there. Free download, freeto play, whatever it is. It helps to attract attention and increase conversion. But

then, I mean, you don't need to do it three times to be honest. We're not stupid. I don't want to see free, free, free, free, free. We're not stupid again. So, I guess the main message I want you to live with is that creative and matters. They matter. But it's not only it's not only the the the graphic asset, it's the message. It's the the the the perception and it's the emotion. This right here, sorry for the cheesy picture, but this right here is the deadly combo. Babies and puppies. We all love them because they generate tenderness in us. So, when you're putting together your creatives, think about what moves you, what excites you, and this is how you're going to get the attention, and you're going to be successful. Thank you so much. [Applause] Oh, we all we're all learning something today. Um, last definitely not least, uh, Mr. Rob Hearn speaking about uh

actually telling us how not to approach him and his crew at Pocket Gamer. Go Rob. [Applause] Hey, this is actually the second uh thing, but I'll carry on. So, this is me. I've got 16,000 unread emails uh as you can see in the corner there. If you've ever tried to get in touch with me over the last year or so, there's less than a 50% chance that I got back to you if I if I don't already know you. Um It would take me uh about two weeks to go through these if I spent one minute each on them. Um I sometimes I feel like it's we're on we're we're on stage uh at a concert where uh we're on stage and the audience uh are all singing at us and we're trying to make out all the different um voices and all the noise. Uh and it's very difficult. It's more difficult than uh being a fireman or a soldier or something like that. Um, and one of the ways that you can make it more difficult is uh uh by calling us square brackets editor uh square brackets. And when whenever we get an email uh using that kind of

salutation, uh we have a basic response to kind of just reject it and ignore it just like you would uh if you got a letter addressed to the householder. Um and I was going to take a picture of the junk mail in my house to illustrate this point. Uh but I there wasn't any because I chucked it all away. uh I hadn't bothered to look uh to see whether the envelopes contain money or or medical information or anything like that. So that's why you've got this picture of Battlecat from He-Man. Uh he's a he's a warrior tiger. Uh so uh another sorry where am I? Uh yes so by putting your assets in the zip file um journalists are juvenile people and we wonder off and we look for kind of uh childish images when we get distracted. If you send us uh stuff with a zip file, then we're we're bound to go off and do that. Um I spent about 45 minutes looking for that Batcat image. Uh and then I spent another um 45 minutes looking for the next image that you're about to see after this one. Uh I also looked for a karate monkey and volcanic

dinosaur, but those searches yielded no useful material. Um so here we are. And this man obviously he's he's he's miserable. He's weighed down by these files. This uh here is a picture of a cat which is holding a golden pistol and it's riding on the back of a fire breathing unicorn. And you can think of this as your enemy in your battle for coverage. Uh if we have to click on a link uh rather than just kind of having the information and this guy is going to come and get you. Uh meanwhile we'll be off looking for more amusing images or uh writing about somebody else's game. Uh yes. Um so you know we're very busy. We get a lot of information. We're kind of picking up from lots of different sources. We we're like hummingbirds. That's what this is about. Uh kind of flitting across it all. Uh and and because there's a lot of rubbish out there, we're kind of primed to to expect rubbish rather than good stuff. Um so if you're So pick your time and your audience. If if you're going to tell us about your children's app, my first seahorse alphabet farm on a Tuesday, uh

we're much more likely to ignore your arcade game Shuriken Hurricane Volcano on Wednesday. Uh because we've been primed to ignore you. And that's a shame because actually shuriken hurricane volcano sounds really good. Uh, another way to get ignored is by imposing embargos that don't make sense. Uh, we respect embargos, but as soon as the information becomes public because it gets leaked or whatever, then we reserve the right to to ignore them entirely. Uh, we get into a lot of ridiculous arguments uh with people where we're just fighting for our right to kind of point towards things which are exist in plain sight. This is particularly important with reviews. uh we can be persuaded to disclose information uh according to embargos uh if that's the only way to get the information but if it's with reviews we really want to be able to tell people what to buy because we are after all warriors of truth braver than firemen and search and rescue volunteers and Edward Snowden there. Uh six, another way to get ignored is by bribing us with nice things. Uh bribing journalists with nice things is is a mainstay of any industry that relies on press coverage. And I've

actually never met a journalist who hasn't been bribed with a nice thing like an expensive trip or a mug. Um, and I always feel like a failure if I don't come back from a conference with a t-shirt or a USB stick or something. But but Twitter has created an age of uh heightened scrutiny. As you can see, this is Jeff Keley being lambasted uh for hawking Doritos. Um it's uh and there are there are trolls on the internet who will kind of pick people up and be they're very sanctimonious and they'll pick people up for any kind of breach of editorial ethics and it's very risky. So if you send somebody a gift uh you you know or you offer a gift you could just sort of unnerve them. Uh it's been positive on the whole Twitter. It's it's instilled an an ethos of property in journalists but it's also made a villain of PRs. Uh, and here we have a villainous uh, PR. Uh, and and there are people who just have accounts that are, you know, just for, uh, exposing people. So, yeah. So, you probably want to know how not to be ignored. This is a picture of James,

Chris James, not ignoring some people in a game studio, uh, terrifyingly. Uh, so here's a couple of tips based on my kind of half a decade's experience of being cajolled and bullied by PR people. Uh, one, say the right things quickly. So, if you've won an award for something, uh, tell us so we know how great you are. Uh, if your game could be boiled down to the phrase Halo meets Grim Fandango or something like that as here, uh, put that in the subject line. Uh, because journalists spend hours crafting artful headlines to draw in readers. And if you think about it, journalists are your readers really, if you're a PR. Uh, be surprising. A couple of months ago, I got an email from an obscure developer and the subject line was simply, "Good morning, Pocket Gamer. Here's a picture of a horse." Uh, and it was silly, but I couldn't resist giving it a seven out of 10. And a bond was formed then. And in retrospect, I I I don't know what game he was talking about, so it wasn't successful, but I I like him. Um, three, be cool. Some of the best PR people I've dealt with uh never seem to talk about work. They just take you out and they

gossip and they uh buy you drinks and they pay for lunch and then they say goodbye and then a couple of weeks later you get an email asking for a story and uh it's really hard to fight the impulse to kind of do your friend a favor. Um, and also be really uncool. Uh, interrupt private conversations, uh, uh, events like this and shove your games in games in our faces. Uh, ask personal questions and email so that we can't ignore you. Uh, and and ring us up if we give you a bad score and shout at us. Uh, we won't like you for it, but the best PR people uh, people, the ones we like the most and the ones we like the least. Thank you. [Applause] It's a lot of unread emails. Very, very good. So, this has been uh end of day one powered by Pete Cuchucha. You can find out more about the presentation format and all things Pachukucha on pachukucha.org. Uh, next up is, if I understand correctly, is mobile mixer, which means

basically getting tanked with uh with industry friends. So, I I hope you enjoy that part of the show. Thank you very much. [Applause]