Playground experience – Best practices for reducing friction to play live mobile games

[Music] hi guys so I'm going to talk about some of the things that you can do to reduce friction to play together while you're playing lie mobile games and there are some things that you can do to make it so much easier for friends to play together people to meet new people and even like offer new capabilities for eSports and live operations so we're calling this internally the playground experience right because as you're building a product one of the things that you got to do is like understand who your users are and how they're using your product and one other thing that's really interesting about live mobile

games compared to more hardcore PC games is that a lot of the people who play these games tend to be younger genzou kids so all of the kids who play prefer to play things like fortnight and guns with bluem on their phones compared to like a large screen on PC tend to be like the younger gems the audience who want to be interacting with their friends or their clan mates anytime anywhere and optimizing your user experience with this in consideration can do a lot to improve engagement and bring people back more often with their friends so but before I'm gonna do some shameless self-promotion and own up to the minute advertising because how many of you guys knew about bunch oh yeah so we're group video chat for live mobile games so we are based out of New York City we have some awesome folks

that investment company and what the application does is it's kind of like FaceTime meets Game Center or like you can think about it as like discord meets house party so you can jump into your camera and then you can say like hey I want to pick a game to play and then what we do is we generate a link that you can share with your friends jump into a group video chat and then jump into the game together so think about it like a land party on your phone right so it's like the most fiction's way to jump and JE game together with your friends and even meet new players who you would enjoy playing with communicate with your clan share content and all that stuff and one good example one good interrogation example of is our integration with space team do you know space team how many of you know in this game it's pretty fun if you don't know I recommend you play it if you just get it on the App Store's it's

like the main way to play it you have to get together with your friends and you kind of yell codes like sets aero puffer to one and like your friends have to kind of do that before your ship blows up so it's a really fun game but the problem is you have to a lot of the fun is like the laughter and the yelling and the banter that you have with your friends right and then how many times are you sitting next to your friends so we want to play a game with what you can do though is that if you're using bunch you can jump into the game session together and you can actually see your friends while you're playing together and then you can actually just push a button to not only open the game but jump into the exact same game session together without having to share usernames without having to create a game code and do all sorts of complicated stuff right so let's skip and platform let's people do some crazy stuff too so Comfort for example even render video chat inside the 3d world do some crazy things if you like to build

crazy things but I'm gonna get back to you essentially what we're doing like what is the playground experience like what is it that I'm gonna be talking about right a lot of us grew up playing video games with our friends and land parties or internet cafes or like essentially playing multiplayer games like counter-strike and Starcraft than others and today people don't need to bring their computers together they can use things like this court under PC on their consoles to talk to each other while they play these games but over the past year with awesome contents like guns of boom and like fortnight coming to mobile and minecraft we've seen a major shifts and an expansion of live contents on mobile right before in mobile the types of games we used to play where things like candy crush where you play by yourself or even multiplayer games like worries those friends who are not in real time right you make a move and then your friend makes a move and what we know

those that people like to laugh together in real time right you can't really have like a presence experience with your friends unless you're doing something in real time and with this shift we built this application that enables people to play together on their phones anytime anywhere and then we thought that people like us would use this to do that anytime anywhere well let me go to market we realize that it's teenagers that love to do this stuff so the way that teenagers and Gen Z gamers behave while playing live mobile games is very different than like like a millennial behaves because they're much less camera shy they want to be live with their friends anytime anywhere and look at the data it's actually interesting to see that like they're like 13 15 like Gen Z type users and it's actually skewing reasonably even male-female in terms of like the folks who engage in these types of games and we have this data but one thing that we saw that was an interesting quote of data is we have

this feature where I kids can shake their phone and submit bugs and we got this bug one time saying my teacher took my phone and threw it in the trash and we're like unlocked we're pissing off teachers all across the United States so kids do this stuff in school right so so one of the difficult things about this though is that it's kind of painful to play these games with your friends on your phone because playing with friends is important because like content and games can get boring over time but there's a reason why we still play Monopoly right people get less bored from their friends right it's a good tool to improve retention and create a long-term engagement in your but then the problem is since you're dealing with a small screen on your phone it's really important to make it a very frictionless experience right what happens is if you want to play fortnight today with your friends you can say like hey let's play fortnight and then you have to ask for their username right and

then maybe one of your friends doesn't have the game installed on their phone and you have to search for their username and do all that stuff and people just get bored right they don't end up playing together because there's so many steps involved in playing one technology that really helps with that is deep linking how many of you are familiar with what deep linking is it's a pretty helpful technology and our friends at guns with new uses already there's awesome games like roblox on minecraft at all it uses deep linking so what you can do is instead of requiring your friend to download the application and search for your username and add you as a friend and start a game party and invite you they can just share a link with your friend any messaging app it could be discord it could be bunch it could be iMessage it could even be an airdrop on iPhones your friends get this message right hey hey let's play even an important thing is this is so much better than like a facebook notification because remember

those games like we're good friends we can send a facebook notification to your friend it sounds like spam right and like screw this one's on me face notifications I don't want to be a vampire right this is cool because it's a conversation alright he's like hey dude let's play fortnight after class cool let's do it it's it's a conversation and a chat application that you're doing ok and then if you don't have the game you install it and then the cool thing is you not only open the game you jump into the exact same game session because the link that you're sharing can include the context for the party if they're following the same link now we're following the same game session so so yeah what I meant to show you is like if your friend doesn't have the game installed already it actually drives uninstall for the game right so it's not only an awesome way to re-engage users and bring them back it can actually drive installs because what better app and still add then your friend wanting to play the game with you right or your favorite streamer streaming and say like

hey join my game right and some of the applications of this is you not only can enable people to play together through any messaging application you can even play with streamers right ninja could be like hey guys let's play fortnight together and he's a deep link right so it can be to take interaction with a live stream it to a whole new level another thing that could be interesting is sports and live operations right so maybe there's a game mode for the gunso from season 2 that you want people to join in instead of having people opening the game search for the main menu and find the thing you can just follow a deep link and jump into the eSports contents so the way we're seeing the evolution of live mobile games is that everything started with like a couple of friends on a couch playing Nintendo together right because that feeling of laughing together in real time was the thing that we that is excited about games and then the live streaming

applications like twitch ticket to the next level where we couldn't only play a game with our friends we could actually watch awesome people play video games but the next level is a lot of the younger gamers Gen Z gamers want to be with their friends anytime anywhere on their phones so then we think the next level of interaction is to bring it back to that couch where we were playing a Nintendo 64 with our friends on our phones anytime anywhere and there's tools that you need to consider like deep linking or optimizing with messaging and chat applications like punch to enable that in a much better level so thanks for listening every Bunch I can take any questions if we have an entire does bunch is just a platform for a matchmaking or is it like family yeah so we kind of like a matchmaking I don't want to get to advertising so I

didn't talk too much about it but feel free to reach out to us and happy to share more about what we're doing what do you think about it is like discord but really built for live mobile games that is a much more efficient less matchmaking and jumping into the game party experience right so hatch is doing some cool stuff but it's basically this game streaming platform likes like Netflix for games we're not hosting the games right so we're basically letting people jump into their favorite games with their friends wall enabling them to communicate with each other so I know your main audience is the 13 to 15 I would say make the Jen's make 18 19 year-olds are fine which have you considered this technology on PC like webcams and stuff like that rather than just sure I think mobile deserves like a particular attention like just like we have amazing content like guns of boom that works perfectly like mobile first experiences

we think chat needs to follow like a mobile first approach to do right but we also see an interesting opportunity on PC as well because what we like to do is watch our users I kind of follow what our users do and to make easier what they do right and one of the things I've noticed our users do is they play Minecraft on their PC or L or console and then they use bunch it's like a second screen right cuz even when you're playing a game on your console your PC yes you'll have your mobile phone in your pocket so we think it would be really cool if it can create like a cross-platform chat experience independent of the platform you're playing be it an intend like it could be like a Nintendo switch or a console or a PC so that's why we see the opportunities like as your phone as a center for communication don't run we need you I I can see that social experience of it and all the cheering on that is there a mode there you can play for example people there

are in Japan people stay hours in the subway going home and going home or going to work but they use this kind of application also for that even though they can't cheer and scream but they get to share with friends I think it might be a little more challenging if you like on the go we think that might change with like 5g and stuff right I would like more accessibility connections and like wear ear pods and stuff like that so we think that's gonna make more sense over the next few years but the way we like to consider these types of experiences is basically things I candy crush or like I'm a laid-back experience it's like you just chill while you play something like Kendrick and coach but like a high fidelity mobile game like guns with more fortnight we considered them like more like a lean in experience right as you're playing the game you want to talk to them and you want to engage more so we see that there's kind of like a mixed mode where you don't need to be in front of your playstation to visit to do this but you can do it when you're at school or when you're like at work right but

subway might be a little more challenging [Music]