PlayRaven CEO: We don't make clones

hope I can use this looks complicated there's a big green button maybe that's it so I have a question to you how all this clash of clans does anybody know anybody come on you know it somebody knows it started out three years three years three months if you look at the iOS top-grossing list that's the kind of pattern that keeps repeating these are relatively old games two years three years and their development started maybe four years maybe even five years ago that's a long time in a sort of fast-moving entertainment category that's why we think at play Raven that there has to be room for more this is a

bigger medium 10 the television ever was there are about 1.5 billion TV sets in the world and this you know install base is far beyond 2 billion at the moment my name is luster sep and i worked on games for the past 17 years and i may be best known for sumaya interactive which i was heading with together get together with the ilk upon and in 10 years ago and after that i went to remedy entertainment shipping Alan Wake on xbox 360 as executive producer and chief operating officer and two and a half years ago be founded play Raven a company completely focused only on making fresh new free-to-play games and I want to run you through some of the portfolio we've made so far because this for us when we are taking a lot of creative risk we have to create a portfolio so spymaster we launched a year ago and maybe you have seen it and maybe you've heard about it and this was

kind of a very creatively ambitious project we had a new startup going and we wanted to do everything new so we had a random generated operations in the game it's like an endless single-player board game where there's just things keep coming at you with random generated storylines happening within the little missions and so on so we went sort of overboard with innovate everything and also some of the things we did were sort of counterintuitive because everybody was thinking that you have to be like cartoony and colorful and everything to get a lot of downloads and to appeal to a lot of masses people are saying this is a really really niche game that you're going for and when we launched it it was totally the opposite because it went up the charts and became a top ten strategy game in 99 country's top three in the u.s. top three in the UK you can't really say that that's a that's an issue anymore also very sort of

surprising was the appeal in Asia for instance so Hong Kong India and so on top 10 but we've moved on from this game which sort of validated our strategy that this kind of thing going away from the what the others are doing and doing something completely different it sort of proved our strategy that it works and we raised more money a year ago and we've been hard at work on a couple of new games here let's see so row beside is a game I really am excited about because it's right now in soft launch if you have an account in for it as Finland you can go and download it right now and we would really appreciate if you can give us some feedback because it's a soft launch after all it's going to global launch in in January and this game features a very unique gameplay mechanic so like I said we want to make all of our games very fresh they have to look fresh I feel fresh but also play fresh so this game has like a single

player mechanic where you have like a few hundred little little robots that you're moving with your finger there's also like a bigger Titans that you can then drop on the map and the sort of semi-autonomous so we we tried to make it a very streamlined experience where you can just use one finger and here's a little video about the game wage war with one finger assemble an army of awesome robots leashed devastating special attacks Rollo side so come on can one finger experience get any more epic than that robot side anyway moving on so I spoke about the portfolio approach so we can't

just make one game we're doing all kinds of things in the inner little laboratory and this game is called winter state it's America after climate change so America is covered in snow and ice and people of course get into their cars put on some weapons and then start shooting at each other there's also a little bit trading there but mostly it's gone but this is a massively multiplayer game so all the people are playing on the same map and we do some smart filtering of course based on levels and so on there's weather in the game and all kinds of things and again we took a game at that is about vehicle combat but we discern indeed custom for a phone basically you can play it also on a tablet but this is most importantly for phone as well so what we did was for instance take the drawing mechanic that is very very natural on a touchscreen and make sure we can do that on a phone screen and you can move multiple vehicles during a real

time strategy match here's a little video this is really not a fancy trailer or anything it's just something we captured at the office for this presentation so bear with us but you can see on the right hand side I have a scout and artillery and tank over there and with the Scout I have like an air strike ability and you can see it in a moment and there's this drawing lines that you're drawing in real time let me up right here and then the other side of the game is sort of maybe metal layer if you will is the the map gameplay so playing on the US East Coast nap the weather that's undiscovered areas this resource nodes like the cow and the spare parts which

you can collect in the game and actually you can even convert those notes and they will produce some stuff for you you can sell things in the it sort of trade and then there's weather as well because obviously after climate change you have to have massive storms that will cause all kinds of interesting gameplay effects we will make it affect the combat but also the trading aspect so if Washington is covered in a storm then they of course want some things much more died early than others at that time cool and then moving on because this rather limited time I think the fonts are a bit off here but it should just say the news by master so while the first spy master was very important in this sort of defining the company that we only do new things and proving our strategy we felt that we didn't maybe do the right kind of game for this market from this theme that we could actually do something even more

powerful just keeping the idea of you being a spy master and this new game is going to be completely different not a board game not a single player game another random generated game this is going to be a massively multiplayer game of trust and betrayal we we've had a team on it for two and a half weeks now so it's early days but we already started playing the first prototype last week so the first core social gameplay where I can I can choose from a list of other agents and I can choose whether I cooperate or betray them and I call so inform the Gestapo about them which is a point fun button to press ok this game is going to soft launch in q1 a couple of key ingredients if you want to make your studio innovation focused this is very important for us you have to burn the boats when you're small company you

can't be doing everything for us the boats we burn we're first of all we don't copy your clone we make only fresh games so we just have to burn the boat there's no way of going back and just making a clone of some successful game we have to get by we have to live in this new land or die you know that's the basic idea the other the other boat we had to was premium because a lot of us with our backgrounds and experience came from the premium like you know triple-a and whatnot and if you start thinking that okay maybe this game would do better as a premium game maybe that single game would do better who knows but the problem is then your company is not learning anything about making free to play and you're actually giving them permission that all the games can maybe be free-to-play sorry premium and then you're not really focusing you have limited time limited amount of people really have to focus burn the boats then another aspect that is of course very

very key for making any kind of innovation if you imagine you would be setting up an RD laboratory at Sony or wherever where you're making some sort of electronics or whatever the same kind of things apply here we want multiple teams so that we have multiple shots at the market and we can do them in rapid succession but also because they can learn from each other's mistakes so when one team makes a mistake the other two will learn from that and we don't waste time that by then all of them going through the same mistakes all the time we only have 23 people very very concise headcount very important this is it's better to innovate in a small group because having 20 people innovate together it's really hard it's really really hard and we have experienced from these bigger productions like Grand Theft Auto or quantum break and those are amazing games but they have their own special challenges in terms of how then you are able to innovate while you have this large staff to take care of

and if you just completely focused on making a breakthrough we feel that this is a good way of doing it just have a small head count but people who can wear multiple hats having a diverse background in terms of companies really really helps because then they come from different places where they made different mistakes and we can hopefully avoid at least some of those mistakes they made a big point or are you Robbie or wherever and I sure made a lot of mistakes of remedy I can be the first guy to admit that but the most important thing is to learn from the mistakes as fast as you can so time to make a mistake is kind of a factor should be a key performance indicator almost for your company if you want to be innovative the final thing really really sort of makes me happy about player Evan at the moment is that Finn's are now a minority so we only have ten fins and thirteen foreigners so far the furnace are treating the minority well so you don't have to be worried about worried about the fate of fins at least for the time

being of course having North Americans and and Brits on the team is also helpful because those are the two main reference markets where we aim our games in terms of how they feel maybe but it doesn't mean they don't have appeal like spymaster had tremendous appeal in Asia Middle East Africa Europe and so on okay here's another look at the team so of course everybody wants the team to be sort of fun place to work out right but we also have to make our team when we're innovating and we are doing a lot of like hard things we don't know what is the right way to do it we just have to try and we have to we're going to make mistakes we have to build an environment where people feel comfortable about going to each other even in the other team and saying I think your game has a problem this is it a bit similar what they do at Pixar actually if you've read the book creativity Inc it's very very

important to get candid feedback and not have like a sort of politically correct well yeah your your game is kind of cool because in startup you have to break some eggs you have to be able to say to the other person I think your game has a problem let's talk about it another thing we are obsessed about when we're trying to learn as quickly as possible this openness so maybe some of you have met us at a trade show and we are just pushing our game and look at my game and give me feedback right now but I'm kind of in a hurry no no look at my game and give me feedback well maybe not maybe not so aggressive but still you get the point we feel that when we are as open as possible and show our stuff when it's working progress we get the maximum amount of feedback and we learn as fast as possible a couple of examples so last week we invited some people over from other companies basically some people would say these are our competitors let's not show anything to them we felt

that these are our friends and we have nothing to lose how likely is it they're going to copy our spy game or our robot game when we don't even know what the final game is going to look like so we showed our work in progress we share some of the numbers and so on and ask for feedback another example of openness sort of internal is this is from our new office and that's actually meeting room where we didn't build a wall so we have a meeting room with only three walls there because we believe that meeting should be open you should never close the door even if you have a door or a wall for that matter and only if there's a really really good reason to close the door you might do it at the office but then people who are passing by they can hear what you're talking about there can be all you talk about that can I just say comment on that and so on and maybe the third example of openness is our beta program this we established already

like early early this year and basically anybody can sign up for a beta and then they can get access to our games work in progress and all our games at the right time of course when we need the feedback and that's basically all I had how am i doing