PlayRaven CEO: We don't make clones

[Music] [Applause] [Music] complicated there's a big green button maybe that's so I have a question to you how old is Clash of Clans does anybody know anybody come on you know it somebody knows it Shout It Out 3 years 3 years 3 years 3 months if you look at the I top Crossing list that's the kind of pattern that keeps repeating these are relatively old Games 2 years 3 years and their development started maybe four years maybe even 5 years ago uh 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 than the television ever was there are about 1.5 billion TV sets in the world and this you know instal Bas is far beyond 2 billion at the moment uh my

name is Lan and I've worked on games for the past 17 years and uh I'm maybe best known for Su interactive which I was heading with together together with ilap 10 years ago and after that I went to uh remedy entertainment shipping Alan Wake on Xbox 360 um as executive producer and Chief Operating Officer and 2 and a half years ago we founded play Raven a company completely focused only on making fresh new free to play games and I'm going to run you through uh some of the portfolio we've made so far uh cuz this for for us when we are taking a lot of creative risk we have to create a portfolio so spy Master we launched a year ago U 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 where random generated uh story lines happening within the little missions and so on so we went sort of overboard with innovate everything and uh 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 to get a lot of downloads and to appeal to a lot of masses people were saying this is a really really Niche game that you're going for um and when we launched it it was totally the opposite because it it went up the charts became a top 10 strategy game uh in 99 countries top three in the US top three in the UK uh can't really say that that's a that's a Nicha anymore uh also very sort of surprising was the appeal in Asia for instance so Hong Kong India and so on top 10 but we moved on from this game uh which sort of validated our strategy that this kind kind of thing going uh

away from the what the others are doing and doing something completely different sort of proved our strategy that it works and we raised more money a year ago we've been hard at work on a couple of new games here let's see so robosa is a game I really I'm excited about because it's right now in soft launch if you have an account in for instance Finland you can go and download it right now and uh we would really appreciate if you can give feedback CU it's a soft launch after all uh 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 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 can drop on the map and the sort of semi-autonomous so we we Tred to

make it a very streamlined experience where we can just use one finger and here's a little video about the [Music] game wage war with one finger assemble an army of awesome robots Unleashed devastating special attacks [Music] Robo side come on can one finger experience get any more epic than that robot side anyway moving on so I spoke about the portfolio approach and we can't just make one game we're doing all kinds of uh things in the in our little laboratory and uh this game is called winter State uh it's America after climate change so America is covered

with snow and ice and people of course get get into their cars put on some weapons and then start shooting at each other there's also a little bit of training there but mostly it's combat uh this is a massively multiplayer game so all the people are playing on the same map 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 that is about vehicle combat but we designed it 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 uh 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 an artillery and a tank over there and uh with the Scout I have like an air strike ability and you can see it in a moment and there's these Drawn Lines that you're drawing in real time the here and then the other side of the game is sort of maybe metal layer if you will um is the the map gameplay so you're playing on the US east coast map there's weather there's undiscovered areas there's resource nodes like the cow and the spare parts which you can collect in the game and actually you can you can conquer those nodes and they will produce some stuff for you you can sell things in the game and S of trade and then there's uh weather as

well because obviously after climate change you have to have massive storms that will cause all kinds of uh interesting gameplay effects we we will make it um affect the combat but also uh the trading aspect so if Washington is covered in in a storm then they of course want some things much more darly than others at that time cool and then moving on cuz there's rather limited time I think the fonts are a bit off here uh but uh it should say uh the new spy master so while the first spy master was very important in sort of uh defining the company that we only do new things and uh 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 um just keeping the 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 and not a random generated game going to be a massively multiplayer

game of trust and betrayal we we've had a team on it for 2 and A2 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 um I can choose from a list of other agents and I can choose whether I cooporate or betray them and I can also inform the gapo about them which is a quite fun button to press okay this game is going to soft La in q1 a couple of key ingredients if you want to make your studio uh Innovation um focused this is very important for us you have to burn the boats when you're a small company you can't be doing everything and for us the boats we burn where first of all we don't copy our clone we make only fresh games so we just had to burn the boat there's no way of going back and just is making a clone

of some successful game we have to get by we have to live in this new land or die that's the basic idea um the other the other vat we had to burn was premium because a lot of us with our backgrounds and experience came from the premium like you know AAA and whatnot and uh 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 uh sorry premium and then you you're not really focusing you have limited time limited amount of people you really have to focus burn the balls then another aspect that is of course very very key for making any kind of innovation if you imagine you would be setting up a an R&D laboratory at Sony or wherever where you're making some sort of uh 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 them all of them going through the same mistakes all the time we only have 23 people very very concise headcount very important um this uh 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 experience from these Bigger Productions like Grand the auto or Quantum break and those are amazing games but they have their own special uh challenges in terms of how then you are able to innovate while you have this large staff to take care of and if you're 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 make different mistakes and we can hopefully avoid at least some of those mistakes they made at Big point or or Rob or wherever and I sure made a lot of mistakes 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 a mistake is kind of a factor it should be a key performance indicator almost for your company if you want to be innovative the final thing uh really really sort of uh makes me happy about play ran at the moment is that fins are now a minority so we have only have 10 fins and 13 foreigners so far uh the foreigners 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 uh in terms of uh how they feel maybe

but it doesn't mean they don't have appeal like spy Master had tremendous appeal in Asia uh Middle East Africa Europe and so on okay uh here's another look at the team so of course everybody wants the team to be sort of fun place to work at 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 a bit similar what they do at Pixar actually if youve read the book creativity Inc it's very very important to get candid feedback and not have like a this 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 uh 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 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 Feb or maybe not maybe not so aggressive but still you get the point uh we feel that when we are as open as possible and show our stuff when it's work in progress uh we get the maximum amount of feedback and we learn as fast as possible 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 and 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 internally 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 they going be oh they talk about that can I just say a comment on that so and maybe the third example of openness is our beta program uh this be established already like early early this year and uh 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 feed and that's basically all I have [Applause]