RedLynx on taking Trials from console to mobile

hello uh my name is Justin Swan I'm the lead designer on Trials Frontier and this is Ki silin amazing I can say that as an American uh and he is our business intelligence lead and uh David just gave a great talk about all the things you should think about when you take a PC game and you take it to mobile and uh hopefully we just did all those things I think we did and so we're going to kind of talk about in a more detailed way about Trials Frontier specifically and uh what we thought about and uh the keys that we took with us to success whenever we were bringing that game uh from Trials HD Trials Evolution to mobile uh but first car's going to talk a little bit about red links a little bit about trials and kind of hopefully convince you guys why uh we're worth listening to yeah so um the name of the talk is from consoles to mobile and that was big trans transformation for us at railings because we have a like Justin going to get the next look uh we have we are a proven game maker like we have been here for 14 years down over 100 games

on all platforms that exist basically like from engage to PSP Xbox 360 and uh now we have move but we also have like mobile uh background we have done over 10 titles on iOS on Android uh over 30 million downloads from these titles alone uh Edge has listed as as one one of the top developers in the world a Pocket Gamer tells that we are a top mobile developer and we have been above the nominee last year like draw race two nauy fluffies I think some of you guys here know these games but uh we we plan to really ramp this up this year when we brought the trials our trials brand to NextGen and to mobile trials is a motorbike game uh it's often said that it's one of the like Gamers game G the game that's

like like Dark Souls considered a little bit difficult like hard game but it's it's it's critically a claimed it's just a really highly engaged fan base uh we have like user generated content possibilities in the game and uh on Xbox 360 on Trials Evolution we have over 600,000 uh user generated tracks on the game this is pretty insane and on Xbox 360 we are number three in a lifetime sales after Minecraft and after Walking Dead and that's pretty awesome and uh now for uh now it's Justin's turn to really explain what Trials Frontier or mobile free to-play game is and uh I think the best way to start is to show a video of the game play yeah let's do video the next slide

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all right so that's trial Frontier uh there's a lot of stuff going on there it's a huge game uh and we've been pretty much living this game for about two years and uh now that we've shipped it it's been quite a good success for us and I want to talk about four of the keys to that success and I'm not trying to say these are the only Keys there's many keys uh but here's four that we have time to talk about uh right now so the first is to know your game and we have both strengths and weaknesses or as some like to call challenges and I'll go through a few of those uh we have of course have a physics based game and I really love physics games because you're instantly being able to give your player a complicated rule set and you don't

have to teach them anything uh there's no tutorial that you need to know how something leans forward is going to fall to the ground uh on the opposite side of that though our game is very hardcore skill-based game and while that works great on uh on Console where we have hardcore players and I really enjoy that challenge uh it's kind of a hard thing to bring to mobile and you actually won't see very many top grossing uh free-to-play titles that are really skill-based games they're usually focused more on the metag game uh our game is very easy to pick up which really helps uh we we use this to a great Advantage at the beginning of our game where you immediately jump into game there's no tutorial there's no splash screens you're immediately racing your bike and people seem to pick it up and get it really quickly on the other hand it's hard to master and usually might think uh easy easy to pick up hard to master that's perfect but uh I would argue a little differently in the mobile space uh what you see is not that players really seem to want to master a skill set but they want or a game play but they want to master a meta game uh whether you look at a card collection game or a village building game these players aren't mastering how to play the game they're mastering the meta game wrapped around it uh so that's one thing that I think doesn't work quite as well uh on mobile

also we have a very engaged fan base that came from our Trials HD and trials Evo group we've been able to leverage them greatly during the soft launch uh their feedback was really really great for us and helped us improve the game massively on the other hand those same fans that are so adoring and loving become ax wielding mass murders when you tell them you're going to put an energy system on their bike racing game so we've had to be really careful about the way we message the users and talk to them and kind of manage that Community uh we also have a very strong brand uh the trials brand has been really good for us on both PC and on uh console uh but it's not on mobile and uh that's something that we really had to work carefully to change the game in a way that works on mobile but still retain some of the great things that make makes stals what it is uh second is to know your market so we have uh core Gamers and casual gamers this is something we always talk about and uh David actually mentioned a little bit that a Casual Gamer doesn't mean they're also not a core gamer so we're try to make a game that works for people that are both a core gamer but then they're on the bus maybe and uh they're now a Casual Gamer they want to have shorter sessions they don't want to get involved as much uh they premium Market to free to play

again David mentioned this also we had to go free to play it's it's a truth of the market and that ended up changing a lot of what we could do with the game and how how we had to make it all of our systems had to be built around this concept of yes we want to make the most fun game possible but it also has to monetize uh then the living room versus the bathroom this is kind of a just a kind of note on how people play the game uh from short long play sessions to Short play sessions uh but even if you're uh like my boss Auntie whether you're in the living room or bathroom you still have exceptionally Long play sessions I would say uh and then there's a mature market and the growing market so we're we're bringing all these new players into gaming and there's this common uh lexicon or or vocabulary about gaming that your your console Gamers know they know all these things that you can just assume but now that we're bringing all these new gamers in with this growing Market you have to be much more gentle with them I would say uh and this is confused often with simplifying a game or saying that the game must be simple I just think you have to be gentle you can make a very complicated game but it has to be introduced in a slow and and nice way and then Metacritic versus user reviews U Metacritic can have a huge impact on

console sales but doesn't really matter so much for phone games uh and also the difference between what you get with a Metacritic score and what the user reviews are saying on console is far smaller variance than what users might say for mobile and what those same critics are saying about the mobile game so then what what do we do with these things uh or sorry um it went the wrong way sorry so what do we do with these things what's kind of our secret recipe that we used uh once we knew these facts we wanted to build Trials Frontier well first let keep the core we knew that we had an amazing piece of core gameplay so everything about our game all the different systems you might have seen little robot characters and slot machines in that video uh bike upgrading all these different things it all feeds into riding though you always have to race your game for everything you want to do so we always Force the player back to that core Loop but then we need to wrap it in delicious metag game because I I've always argued that it's not the core gameplay that actually is going to monetize or retain your users it's the metag game that's what's keeping players around that's what's getting them invested so we had to find an interesting metag game to wrap around that core but at the same time keep

driving players into it and then I say bake for 1 to five minutes and this is another thing David mentioned also as as well is uh you've got to keep your Loop short you've got to have those short play sessions I don't I can't think of a single game in the top 100 grossing that has a play session over five and it's probably more like two minutes you can get in there have a meaningful play session and get out uh with our game we tried to Target one minute and with that you saw shorter tracks our tracks on average take about 30 seconds to complete where on our console version of game it can take anywhere to 3 minutes uh and then decorate with monetizing a and what I mean by this is give players lots of ways to spend money we don't just have as some might say pay to win you know you can't upgrade your bike and you can pay to upgrade your bike more quickly but you can also buy vanity items with outfits and things like that or you can uh pay to more quickly progress to the game so we really try to give all different kinds of players different ways to monetize on the game and I think this has actually resulted in profit we've done pretty well and uh here's the results after just two months being out we've seen 12 million downloads lots of other fun facts there lots of bike crash she says the game's

pretty hard but uh yeah that's uh that's a quick little presentation on some of the learnings we took from bringing trials from consult of mobile and I hope you enjoyed it thanks