Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2016: The PechaKucha Sessions

[Music] this is like the underground party of Pocket Gamer connects this time so you you you found it it's like one of those raves you used to go to your ages ago you go through the forest and I'll you ended up here this is the show that everybody's gonna talk about afterwards and be pissed off that you went there but they didn't so there is to congratulate yourself and that thanks Chris for making a big fuss about this one so I'm gonna because because with the theme being this underground rave thing before explaining what the hell pitcher kuchi is I'm gonna play you an underground rave song as a result so now they're all gathering it's like the gathering of the tribes without further ado I give you bird storm [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] so so indeed we have answered the question what do you get when the road meets Romeo and that's exactly what you

get you will hear like you now I know everybody's dying to understand what's gonna happen at the end of that song you'll find out tonight because it will be playing hopefully if we want at least once at the party maybe it'll play all night so Pecha Kucha this is I know this is what you've been waiting for all day and we have we have a fantastic lineup of speakers but before that let's answer the question what is Pecha Kucha it's quite simple it's a format originally from the early 2000s Tokyo Pecha Kucha that the word itself is supposed to me like the buzzing sound of a gathering where a lot of people talk and the format came from the architectural or architect scene in in Tokyo where where they presented what the were they presented stuff to each other in an in a relaxed format in a new format and it's quite simple it's 20 slides 20 seconds per

slide and they all run automatically forward so there's no clicking and there's supposed to be no texts on the slides and some people sometimes break that rule and I don't like it and there's also not supposed to be any gif animations that people break that rule as well but you know it's it's actually even more fun like that when you when you know the rules you start breaking them the this the lineup is amazing yet again Martin is really breaking the rules with his mga advertorial very nice who else we have Dante's Kickstarter with Oscar by mark Sorrell [Music] and then what that wasn't supposed to happen and then another by Eric SOI for it's very long very long titles but these these guys have done this a few times they tend to with every

time they tend tend to make less of a fool out of themselves and just it pressure it it turns to be it turns out to be quite fun so without further ado I'm gonna pass the mic on to Martin who will kick things off with his uh-huh beers at the back yeah sorry about that so with with the underground rave theme there are there at least used to be beers in the back they're there now so I do encourage everyone to have a beer relax kick back it's been a long day and again this is what you've been waiting for so Martin get up on stage you his slides so I'm Martin oils founder of imj img' Awards calm so we will soon launch our competition in here in Europe on the

30th of December I started this in 2004 and we I saw the the industry grow from 1 billion to 30 billion and you could you could actually see it growing you know the games are growing everything is growing is driving everybody crazy and right now we're looking at the in speed of 30 billion we've launched four competitions this year imj China MJ West imj South East Asia and Middle East and North Africa it's all happening this year so we've grown tremendously and the industry has has grown as I said to Menace Lee as well 200k games and now there are games coming out that are you know weighing over three gigabytes in 2005 we had 85 entries now we're looking at 2000 games to be judged in tooth sixteen it's true that the number of game releases have grown tremendously

it's it's driving everybody crazy there are too many games and we have the feeling that the gate is closed but we've been in that situation before when the operators were dominating the industry they closed the gate and nobody was going to reach their customers and right now we're in a similar situation where the platforms are missing things help with their app stores and there's an avalanche of games that nobody will ever see only some of them will actually be played and will actually make some money there's also now avalanche of technologies new technologies new challenges game analytics artificial intelligence AR and VR and robots look at these robots the technology is going so fast it's very difficult to to keep up with them robots are running around you know they will be be serving us in Japan the growing the

older population is gonna be served by these robots and probably we are gonna be surfer them as well then Japan by the way there are more diapers for all people salt and for new babies that are born in Japan I read that just today it's amazing what what is happening in the world so this is more than at twenty seconds I'm cheating again I'm cheating again so what's happening in AR is it's very interesting and in VR the the investment that the big the big growth that you see here eight eight hundred fifty two million most of that was magic leaps investments in the beginning of 2016 but actually you see that the investment in AR and VR is already going going down the actual actual new trend is AI so computers are you know the development

of of AI is going so fast that they're beating us with games this is actually you know the the the google deepmind playing Atari and beating beating everybody with with video games so actually computers are beating us everywhere and it's got oh this is this is an interesting slide so this is Jesus so this slide explains what is actually happening so one Jesus is everything we knew up until the birth of Jesus it took it - until the 15th century to get to to Jesus right now we have a Jesus every 12 months so it means that the same kind of knowledge is it's duplicating every year and it's you know it's be an enormous acceleration of knowledge of technology and things like

that but you can ask yourself what the [ __ ] what is this guy talking about and what is our industry all about is it about capturing users and getting a lot of money out of them and boring them with a lot of ads is this what what this is all about or is it about something else you know getting them addicted getting them to pay for your in-app purchase or is it about something else is it about you know technology and and and and and something else you know fun for instance or art I think it's something like this you know this is a guy who's putting his robot in a situation that is that is really funny and that's really enjoyable so I think our industry should be about fun about art and about technology and it should be about exploring these three areas

exploring you know new dimensions in art like an artist is doing you know trying out new things checking out all the new technologies using all the new technologies that that is that is available and make our industry fun again I took this from Donald Trump I he doesn't mind but you know bring the fun back into the into the game industry I think it's very important the exploration exploration of new art go to an art show go to a modern Museum a lot of the games that we are reviewing a lot of the 3,000 games were reviewing they look completely alike they're using similar techniques similar similar ways to to use technology I was in Stockholm last week and I discovered this I already knew of her work

Kazuma who is completely obsessed with dots and I walked in her labyrinth and beauty exhibition is extremely inspiring to look at what's happening in modern art look at the possibilities of of artificial intelligence the possibilities of creating characters who can actually you can actually interact with you can communicate with and we're saying something back you can build a relationship with it's really fascinating look at what's happening with Pokemon go now there's a lot of criticism possible of course on Pokemon go but it gets people out there and explore new ways to play video games and I think Pokemon is opening doors for for new exploration like of course location-based games but also other areas it shows that people are hungry for innovation and I think our industry is about using technology for fun and by

doing that I think our industry plays a key role in the future where technology is becoming more and more important there's going to be everywhere thank you very much [Applause] good job Martin um do you want I'm not gonna steal your laptop for you uh-huh so next up we have a gentleman who is probably not a stranger to anyone man with the top hat Oscar Clark actually neglected to introduce myself in the beginning which was a dumb mistake hi there was a reason why Rovio like the durood thing run games in the daytime when I'm not the hosting Pecha Kucha sessions I run games at Rovio pleasure to meet you and with that cue Oscar's slide there go just wait for my notes to turn up that's

not helpful okay Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a within a dark forest for the straightforward pathway before me was lost with Ella Romanus we had decided to take our game the Rocky Horror Show touch me to Kickstarter this was our descent into hell at Hell's Gate we came across Cerberus the three-headed beast which can only be satisfied by preparation preparation and preparation we'd started planning in December and we had content for every day we had a us-based PR agencies PR expert whole bunch of everything was there surely there would be no problem then we hit that stage of Hell known as limbo three weeks before Kickstarter I was diagnosed with emergency appendectomy and stuck in a hospital in

the NHS for 54 hours waiting for surgery we hadn't yet produced our Kickstarter video and two weeks left we managed to scrape everything together but we had to face the next level lust obviously Rocky Horror is a product of passion and we reached out to those people who are devoted devotees of pleasure the Rocky Horror community and of course nothing could possibly go wrong we waited for Charen to come and help us to cross the river Styx and we managed to get extensive press coverage actually a 69 piece of press coverage we even managed to get into gay times as a straight man that is the triumph of my life thank you but great news within a week we had managed to raise all of 22 percent of our target and in just seven days you could make me a game one thing yeah

we had an average of $80 of it no $60 at the time but most of it was friends and family honestly we started to get a little nervous and we reached that level of Hell known as Islam when everything stopped working people stopped buying anything and nothing happened for the next week two or three back of the day about nothing else so we started begging and we started to offer more and more content surely that was all we needed we had to create more and media outreach we had to be busy monkey tears telling everybody how great this was LinkedIn Facebook these will be our saviors wouldn't they but unfortunately there was no conversion on boat was sinking anger frustration we reached that point in hell nothing was working nothing I've ever been trained to do in marketing

date a single difference so what do we do now we had to reach out we have to reach out and reach that level called despair we've meant back to the investors told them we couldn't make it told them it was time to cancel but fortunately they had faith their faith told us an important phrase straight out of an immortal movie stay on target that literally was what what our Investor said stay on target you know so we kept with it we kept with it and the important thing it's so easy at that point to get hope and to get caught up and we actually managed get some really momentous the UK cast of the tour asked us for t-shirts which we sent them and they got lots of tweets and fantastic really this is gonna give us hope so it's really gonna work for us we were going to make it we were gonna be okay but nothing we got nothing no one was getting into

back this Kickstarter this is hopeless we needed to seek out chair charity we needed charity we needed help so we reached out to the fan community try to work out with them what was going wrong what would we missed surely this was this is an obvious thing it should work the problem was we weren't converting the rocky horror fans to Kickstarter so of course we reached that point where we need patience we created a video explaining how to do Kickstarter we created how to be blog posts we did everything you could we even started setting up a website where we could sell these lovely items that we had on offer so hopefully that will make it work nothing worked [Music] so we're sitting there and we've we're really kind of getting stuck now we had these great offers and we had this high-value items that we we even had photos original print photos from

Mick Rock the kind of classic rock photographer these are just go for tunes online we had an exclusive image didn't work not true it did start working and that's the interesting thing is we started to have some slow momentum and we started to see bigger backers we started to say that actually although it was hard work we actually reached 50% of our target I was starting to have some hope again we're slogging and it was a bigger and bigger effort all the time and actually what we just to do had to make something happen and at some point we were discovered kindness itself three days to go before the end of the Kickstarter and a miracle had happened we passed our target thank you thank you but more than that at the point that this happens you suddenly think hang on a minute it's not

over yet there's still three days to go what do we do we've given everything away we've burnt ourselves out producing video content and all these articles and blog posts of sweet Twitter's and all these other things we're gonna keep this going and we just had to keep pushing and pushing this you don't know how tired you get when you get to the end of the kickstart and this you've done it it's it's and we knew we were going to be completely exhausted but we made it and the end we got thirty nine thousand six hundred and fifty six dollars 5k over our target but of course this is not the end the codecs to our tale as we leave the inferno is that this is the beginning of the next journey now we have to make the game thank you [Applause] emotion emotion so mark Sorrell who

who used to be consultant flying around the world teaching us guys how to teaching us guys all over the world how to make better free-to-play games eventually you ended up at Roby oh and now you're you head up product as vice president of product at at Roby oh well well it's good that I introduced and so I think marks talk is a little bit about the process of becoming an adult and with that cue Mark's presentation please something I know nothing about all right calm down everybody we've got a lot to get through so you know similar you've spent all day listening to talks by people who had genuinely trying to help you provide genuine insight something I have neither the ability nor the inclination to do so it's not I'm gonna talk about the most important video game of all time which is final fantasy 12 I'm also about myself if if you don't know me this is me last year I have every strict methodology for

doing Pecha Kucha talks they're fine as long as you plan them very carefully but that sounds boring so I [ __ ] all that off I just improvised every single one I've ever done and generally it's gone fine this year I've decided not to improvise and to write something because last year my boss Wilhelm taps is I decided to put this slide into the middle of my talk sending me massively just-just-just a dog was horrific anyway since that last picture not this picture who has taken my life has gone completely bananas on a variety of ways I'm gonna tell you about now one of the most important was that Wilhelm tax mighty evil also displayed incredible judgment by making me vice president of product which is an insane thing to do but it's a job that nobody understands what does it mean what is it nobody knows I can be a lambasted or exalted a moment's notice for literally any reason whatsoever but it feels like a lot of responsibility whatever responsibilities I might be responsible for also this year I got married that's me on the left on the this my is my is my wife now me

no matter what she might say she is my wife now I got married three times once in New Zealand once in the UK and then again in the UK which makes me kind of wedding wail I guess I've got a lot of retention for my and this piece of [ __ ] happened to me last year as well this is I turned 42 weeks ago right and you know thanks I'm not trying to say this led to prolonged periods of introspection and fear and the father all these things happened together in the same year means that I'm undoubtedly at the peak of my entire life and it's all downhill from here but my life feels less like a rich tapestry more like a dangling thread but to add to that I turned 40 during the Olympics closing ceremony and I'm exactly 10 years older than Usain Bolt we share a birthday on the last day of the Olympic close of the Olympics which just feels needlessly crews like Oh same ball only exists to taunt me and point out yeah this is a games conference so this is Strider which when I was 13 my parents

let me go and watch a movie on my own the first time and I went to see Ghostbusters 2 it was [ __ ] but this was in the lobby and it was the greatest game of all time I was completely amazed by by a but by it in every way but now it's not and this is much better this is final fantasy 12 and from the fantasy 12 it's no I'm going the wrong way on my nose oh this is it war [ __ ] we're [ __ ] now I can't I can't get back it's the greatest thing of all time people don't believe you when you said the 12th or something is the best but in this case it genuinely is and basically the vision is insane this is a single-player MMO that's what it is is exactly what it is doesn't make sense but that's what it is and it's about you don't directly control the characters you just tell them what how to behave the player uses series of boolean logic strings to tell the characters how to react in any given situation you don't kind of fight with your hands you fight with your brain you develop an app all right yeah so this is the midpoint in the there's no kind of symbolism to this at any point this is

halfway through the talk and you know there's less to come than has already been I could have spoken about anything good night but I've chosen now and I have to talk about this because we're halfway through through the so it's gone already it's moving so fast so this is this is magna carta - the only game that ever stole from final fantasy 12 my cards - is the third in the series because of [ __ ] course it is I really I think the idea of like teaching people rather than directly doing is something that makes enormous sense in the mobile games industry it's something that we should generally be doing I apologize to be very sincere but um here's a game that does that this is nonstop night we all recognize that right yep well done good perhaps this is Diablo without you having to press buttons and [ __ ] just explodes anyway there's two things really well one of which is that all the cool things happen when you're not playing the game and the second of which is that you just tell it how to play this game farm away we all recognize that as well right um this game is all about what happens when

you're not there right I mean they made this in 25 minutes it's extremely brutal but it's horrific addictive and it's a game very much about you just like making some decisions then coming about later and finding out how much money you made as a consequence and then this is dungeon rush this is the actual gameplay from dungeon rush this doesn't have any this is just you turn up you you claim your daily prize you you set up your team and then you go again there's no combat it's just a matter game you just tell it how to play and then it comes right later and tells you what happened it's a have a call it don't have a core game it's just matter and then this is you can tell this is endless frontier this is amazing it's a Korean games completely insane it's the best idol game ever played it's got 23 percent d30 retention so uh suck it all of you and me and everyone that's insane nobody has that um it's completely brilliant and I absolutely love it into tiny pieces that is my sister now and that's my sister with her kids those are her kids

by the way just declare hundred some kids are her kids I don't have kids my own yeah I literally only just got married anyway I'm working on it give me time okay but I know that they're gonna become massively important to me massively important to me in it and here's all the people I work with every day and that kind of cool this picture was taken at our summer party this year to celebrate how we're doing something I can't probably talk about because revenues good it's good um but it's like these are the people whose success I care about not me but but them right so what maybe I'm trying to say is that the people who play games now a parents and managers and how leaders apparently no not really and games too can grow up and give us these experiences of to see our successes playing out in the lives of others rather than our own and in by giving direction instead of achieve this is the by file size black and there's nothing it doesn't mean anything I'll be fine

[Applause] there's an X I guess an explanation is in order for the Hat the the the Hat is going to it's funny and it's going to remain funny until [ __ ] really hits the fan in the u.s. at that point we're actually we've decided if that happens we're gonna have a little bit of a bonfire outside of the office and get rid of the joke because you're drunk it gonna be funny anymore so that the Hat is funny until that point let's hope that that point doesn't come next up is Eric SOI effort he runs now Eric herakles Heric Herakles you a

consultancy performance mark marketing consultancy and he's been he wrote the book about freemium economics he's isn't known gentlemen I think to to pretty much everyone in the room and he also does stand-up comedy sometimes in his free time so with that cue Eric slide here we go [Applause] [Music] members of the board an executive management everyone knows how important that game launch is is where we decide whether it will live forever in a state of permanent luxury or whether it will dwell in obscurity and wretched destitution this seven-day launch period is critical and I'm proud to present my team's launch plan for happy fuzzy match II soda swap free puzzle clash game we labored long and hard on this launch plan and if I do say so myself it is bulletproof which brings me to step one featuring big time featuring ten million users minimum and you can

take that to the bank step two is Twitter it turns out you can pay celebrities to tweet about your game I don't have a Twitter and I don't know how to Twitter but we found a celeb with ten million followers who will tweet for three hundred thousand dollars ten million more downloads for us you can take that to the bank now these numbers are starting to get pretty big in fact the calculator on my desk can't even compute that high some geek in the UA Department sent me some boring spreadsheet but that's not how you plan a launch I have bands spreadsheets from the office we need communication leadership in a can dude can-do attitude not some complicated spreadsheet oh I forgot to mention the other thing we need creativity we actually outsource that who knows our users better than a 26 year old who wears a fedora and funny yet still office appropriate socks they told me they're gonna take us viral

whatever that means the agency suggested we film a shot in Thailand a spot I know what you're thinking sounds expensive but at six hundred thousand dollars it's a steal and I'll be there the whole time to supervise and ensure that they stay on budget to keep costs low I rented a beach bungalow instead of the four seasons one of the nerds in the analytics department mentioned something about retention and I couldn't agree more we need we need to retain our commitment to getting 300 million installs in seven days if we don't do that we are doomed so as far as retention goes I fully retain my enthusiasm for this huge launch and speaking of analytics can we fire those guys already when I was at McKinsey covering a dairy sector I didn't need some sweaty crew of number crunchers to tell me how to tell people to make more money sell more eggs in our case sell more happy fuzzy soda swap

free puzzle clash game and how do we do that boom TV commercial for just five million dollars we can run our Thailand spot in the u.s. 26 times in major markets and we have a heavy hitter directing the Thailand spot remember those Budweiser was off commercials we got that director his brother-in-law you know what else is a big market India how big 1.3 million people now picture this every single one of them installs our game and pays us 10 euros you know what happens next we upgrade the executive jet and do what we've had on our management goal list for two years gold plate the toilet China covered we have a local partner who says we're gonna make a ton of money you know how big China is neither do I but it's big I read an article about it on VentureBeat

okay I didn't read that I had my secretary read it out loud to me while I was doing push-ups branding you know what's better than money mine share we hired a think flew in sir to handle our brand eruption for the launch he seems smart he wears glasses and his name has an accent in it he cost us $70,000 and delivered his report on a leather scroll he said we should do some events to drum up installs you suggested Comic Con because those people love superheroes and one of the characters in our game wears a cape I didn't know much about superheroes so I watched Batman vs Superman and I was blown away awesome movie buttes not awesome there's free-to-play thing I read a polygon article about it and it sounds like a total scam so I suggest we make everything in the game free and just charge one dollar to download it ok I didn't read that article in polygon

my secretary read it to me while I was doing push-ups but hear me out if we add up all the people in China plus all 1.3 million people in India plus the 50 million people that see our TV ad we can do the second thing we've had another management goal list which is to make it rain from our executive jet but before we do that we need to discuss the game name happy fuzzy match II soda swap free puzzle clash game it sucks so we paid an ASO consultant 90 thousand dollars and he gave us this royale strike uber HBO game of war matches in Pandora's tinder toy blast after we changed the name will of course need to film a new TV spot to produce what Donald calls a brand apocalypse singularity event I'm not sure what that means but he delivered his plan by painting it on a canvas

he also explained how game launches work in a beautiful metaphor when you hang glide you start at the highest point you'll ever be at and slowly descend [Applause] he explained that to me on a six-day marketing team hang-gliding off site but that metaphor gave me an idea we should go Android only do you know how many people have an Android phone neither do i but i read an article that said it's huge i like huge stuff elephants Mount Everest jumbo jets Jupiter Andre the Giant but you know what huge thing I like the most huge money and we went and when we make huge money on this game we can do the third thing we've had on our management goals list toilet paper made of money

[Applause] Wow very good with that big round of applause to all the Pecha Kucha pros [Applause] [Music]