Raw Fury: Cross-platform publishing – Why and how

[Music] Hey so I'm gonna share with you my experience about going cross-platform I'm gonna try to squeeze in in 15 minutes quite long presentation so I'm not gonna go into details as much as I would like to that working this is a summary I'm just gonna you know go about talk about like the games about going cross platforms and identify some pains one example and then going more into details about a switch release painting because seems like many people are now very

interesting in this new platform okay these are my contact details and try out three to remember just because I'm a paperless this conference oh I don't have business cards so try to remember my my email raaah fury it's a publisher of booty games indie games all the all kinds of genres we have a very interesting lineup these are the games we've been working on the last four years we do cross-platform games and primarily premium or paid games so going directly into the into the topic of this presentation why why do I personally think across platform is good you know it has its

advantages first of all it's an additional revenue streams every platform comes with additional revenue right then you can reach new audiences with every new platform and new markets Japan primarily focus on consoles so if you if you bring your game to consoles you might go there as well Brazil primarily focused on Android and PC this going through the traditional platforms could open ya new market for you but then also you could reach new new players players that usually don't play on PC or you know the playground consoles more visibility every new channel it's an additional internet page with your game on it which means more impression at the end of the day from my

experience it's very difficult to predict which platform is gonna sell or perform better for your game so by going multi-platform across platform you kind of void the risk of you know missing out on some revenue and I'm gonna share with you Mike our experience of going full cross-platform the first time we've done it was last year in February with our game done Dharam it's a 2d platformer Metroidvania game we released it on six platforms so PlayStation Xbox one switch Android Google Play iOS and PC PC different stores but let's call it one platform and we went to the same price point on all of them for $2.99 on mobile as well just because we couldn't justify at that point why mobile will be cheaper

since the game experience was exactly the same on all the stores and we thought it was very good no matter of the platform because we worked a lot on having very good touch control our second and then console controllers and yeah mouse and keyboard anyone wants to take a guess on which platform perform best anyone else this is the distribution among the six platforms I can tell you it totally yeah it surprised us a lot it wasn't as we were expecting at all this is a game made by a Brazilian team we fought like Oh Brazil is gonna be a key market there is PC Android as I said they're released totally surprised us of which I cannot go too much into details you know sales

number for platform but I can tell you the top two platforms were touch platforms and why this one surprised us a lot because if I look at another month from last year for a revenue distribution across our you know across a platform for our entire portfolio in this case so it's a month in which we had the sales campaign across all stores to some degree and you can see that the distribution the revenue is totally different the trend it's number of games so it's not the performance for platforms so we are on some platforms we have more games but still the the trend does not align at all we've heard and are performed at launch another scenario it's just a random mount from last year as well when there was no release on our end no sales activity nothing special

and the yeah these two months don't overlap at all I need to tell you that this distribution does not match our yearly revenue per platform which is totally different so my conclusion is just that the market is very volatile you can never predict how a game is gonna perform on a certain platform we never had two games that had the same performance but platform you know it's yeah so it's it's very very different from release to release that's why on our end we are gonna know avoid taking any risk and going cross-platform as much as possible if it makes sense for the game of course not all games can you know play we play to start your yeah but then going to the pains I know it can be very tricky of

going sorry I wasn't planning to Sharon you know numbers right um yeah exactly so it's Google Play iOS steam Xbox Sony and switch but please keep this in Tristram trust you okay going to the pains so you if you want to go cross-platform there gonna be a lot of discussions in the companies like was the lead platform price strategy shall go to the same price shall we go a lower price and mobile it's it can be very stressful then also very expensive you know the poor team it's very expensive to bring the games to other platforms age ratings you need to have age rating

for each platform in particular you know that adds a lot of course then marketing which plateau should you prioritize and more than that after release you'll have to support you know if you have updates on your content you have to support all the platforms and it's it's a long-term cost and since I mentioned about porting time and resources I'm just gonna go into details in the planning for a switch submission since time is short I'm gonna focus only on switch but this can be easily adapted for other consoles as well even mobile now because you can have a lot of opportunities with mobile as well you know it's always nice to submit bills before you can have new orders now a lot of things around every release and consoles as well so there is a time a

time grid here as you see some numbers have a minus in front of them and then some of them are positive numbers and why is that because in this scenario in order to take full advantage of the platform features and opportunities we are going to consider a release date let's say May first but what if we want to have also pre-order and a demo available two weeks before and why not even a coming soon page one month before you you might decide to do it differently but in this case we are going to consider and work towards the the date when we are going to have a page on a store this case coming strong page because we need to have everything approved and we need to work towards that date and from my experience it's always safe to start the submission more or less three months before so in this

case it's gonna be 11 with I said few months yeah so in this case is going to be 11 weeks before the coming soon page which is the first you know the zero moment in our scenario but before we start the submission what things you need to have done already you already apply for a product code like months in advance because you cannot start developing for switch without this product code you already have a dev kit and you are already pitching and you are in touch with the account managers turn Nintendo you are talking to them it's like do you have any events where I can in maybe them on my game always good to have a demo as a switch belt they are not gonna demo or PCB out or another platform you are satellite for age ratings for you know for all the regions

you are a launch or gain in so if you aren't Japan in it zero rating Australia all old for all the ratings and it can take like five to six weeks to get this and you need them before or during the summation when you do the summation you're going to request assets from your developers you I kind of start you know working with these raw assets prepare a very nice trailer I expect then you're going to get also release candidate for the developer that you're going to test so you might get some tokino like from a publisher point of view but this could be applied so far right if you are the developer in your self publish you start working on the draft for the store page the description and you start working very early because you need to localize that in several languages I know force which is mandatory to have Dutch for example and that takes additional time of course since we talked about the demo

we are gonna you know start planning the demo submission as well that mirrors the summation of the the belt and we are gonna so 11 weeks before where Alyson meet the belt you know our first summation for the game from my experience most cases especially is the first time you or your first build is going to fail it usually takes like one week for switch for Nintendo to to to go for certification of be also one week after you find out your first bill bill failed developers are trying to fix the issues at the same time you maybe you started making the demo build the week after eurosam wrestle meet the main build felt again happens quite often while they are working on fixing this

issue you are looking into marketing opportunities what you can do to maximize your release and I don't know if you've seen on Nintendo every game or your users can subscribe to follow that game so it has a new news section but in order to have forgive me you need to apply to Nintendo you need to to set up that channel that takes time as well so you are estimating the build but maybe you know about some issue that weren't fixed they don't affect you know the stability of the build so you are going to request a waiver you are gonna bag a Nintendo stay like I know about this issue I promise I'm gonna fix it before release can you please accept my bill so that I can you know release my game in time sometimes they say yes sometimes no you know but for that you need to have also a patch submitted soon

after and you want this patch submitted quite fast because it should be available and approved before your pre-order starts a Nintendo if the game is a priori the pre-order starts the users can download the game they they won't be able to play but it's downloaded in their device and you want it to be downloaded with the patch at the same time especially there might be like cloud saving issues or things like this so and yeah the page is approached the build order pro sorry and then at this moment you submit the store thing it should assets for the store another thing you can do when it comes to marketing awareness so on on the issue there is a news section separate and the news section in the game following the game that is owned and controlled by a Nintendo but you know if you send them good pitch about your game they might

actually feature it there for that you need to submit these this article a couple of weeks before your event and that needs to be localized as well in all the languages they support on the store so yeah you you are gonna submit this the suggestion for meand our case about the announcement about the pre-order after that after make hopefully the store page has been approved in one week you are once that happened you are gonna request kids for influencers for reviewers you cannot request these kids before your page has been approved so everything he see like it needs to be very well scheduled and planned yay coming soon page has has been made available on the store according to the plan the day patch day one patch has been approved as well if you have more

games released maybe you are going to look into a conditional discount so users who own another game of yours might be able to get a discount for the new game things that you need to submit a few weeks in advance as well and at this point you can send also the kids to influencers and medium there so they can it's very important like one thing I wanna mention is like these keys can be activated only once you after you have a page approved on the store so if you don't have coming soon page if you don't have a pre-order just go directly with the release then the in the media is gonna be able to play the game only after the release something and that is not exciting enough for them is like why would I review a game if the game is already live that's why it's I recommend you know considering pre-orders coming some pages you might send the suggestion for our article for the release the demo

he'll be made available and the game is on pre-order and the release yeah this is like how I'm not sure how if it's readable enough but okay so in the end but I feel like one platform strategy cannot fit it all always add for minimum four months for additional porting and summation take advantage of platform marketing channels each and every platform you know they appreciate these they have YouTube they have their own social channels they are eager to promote your game but let them know in advance quality is key no matter of the platform users have less forgiving when you make them pay for a game so for premium games especially quite expensive game and forget everything and just follow your heart in the end yeah that's all

[Applause] [Music] you