Rogue Games | Publishing 57 Game Titles!

[Music] everybody mobile game publishing is one of the most challenging businesses in the world and yet Mike the Lapp the CEO of rogue games has been quietly building a very sizable game publishing business which now represents 57 game titles in their publishing pipeline how was Mike able to sign so many titles how is rogue differentiated from other mobile game publishers in the market and what was the motivation behind starting the game publishing business well today we get an opportunity to speak directly with Mike DeLaet in our video interview with him right now everybody I'm here in Calabasas at rogue games with with the CEO of rogue Mike DeLaet thanks for

having me here Mike before we talk about rogue I thought we could first start by just having you talk about yourself because you've been in the game industry for quite a long time so maybe a little bit about your background yeah so I started my career in games at Sprint back in Kansas City where I'm originally from yeah so I was running games in the future phone days after Chris Davis he was also a guy used to work for me a command was running games at sprint sprint I did it for about three years and so I worked with EA and Disney and Sony much of the company's back in the day and then after that I went to work for Glu Mobile moved out to San Francisco Rehana global publishing for Glu for three and half years shift kind of led their effort from shifting from paid kind of feature phone games free to play smartphone games and all the monetization and retention of those products worked with a lot of amazing people during that time that and was recruited to come to Caban and help build out commands publishing organization so I was a Caban for a little over four years until we sold the business to you netmarble and then Fox and then at that point so I left and founded Rho games about over two years ago great and then let's now talk about

rogue games so what does rogue do and what was the motivation for starting the company yeah I mean originally we started it as a consulting business working with NBC Universal and and jam city too much other companies and ultimately we decided over and over again we found this need in the market for publishing expert expertise and really helping companies grow their games take the games from good to great so we decided to pivot the business around III of 2018 into an actual publishing business and since then we rebranded the company to road games and have been purely focused on publishing sense right and can you talk about in terms of the scope of what you do with developers and what the differentiation is between you know you mentioned NBCUniversal but other publishers whether it's like a scope lee or with IP based publishers like whether it is an NBC Universal or a sky bound or companies like that yeah I mean in general we take the gifts of good to great so we work with the developer prior to launch yeah approve first time user experience retention and onto zation game design fun factor LiveOps etc and take these

games in the soft launch and ultimately to worldwide launch and what we're building is a rogue network of users that kind of resided above the App Store's themselves we're trying to build out this platform if you will of rogue it's above console it's above PC it's above mobile and it really building up this network effective users that we're going to use traffic for cross promotion etc and then in terms of the current slate or pipeline of products that you're going to be publishing now or in the future can you talk a little bit more about that yes um we've signed 57 games to date so we have a massive catalogue of products across free-to-play paid premium subscription games we're going to be doing permits all platforms switch console pc and obviously Bulbul yeah so let's kind of deconstruct that a little bit so 57 titles that that sounds like an incredible amount of titles yeah and your team just kind of walking around the office doesn't seem like it's that big can you talk about you know well

first of all how did you get 57 titles and then how are you gonna manage this this workload yeah we're very efficient as you imagine you know we have ten people in the company right now we're hiring more staff kind of week in a week out so we're definitely grow any truly fast right now we had when you Space Camp as a tool to kind of manage the projects we don't do dev we just work in a hand with the developers so it's not like we're doing dev 457 games that would be insane right but we do working inhale these dough's to improve the games and iterate on the products constantly during soft launch and ultimately worldwide launch okay and then how did you even get 57 titles to sign with roguelike what was that business development process like or how did how did you reach out or how did they reach out to you to get get these title sign yeah early on you know little over a year ago we were definitely reaching out the devs just sign products for the company since then we've obviously de stablished amazing relationships with these developers they have told their friends about us now we have tons of games coming into the pipeline you probably get 30 to 40 games a week that come into

our inbox you say publish these games and we probably take one of those because our quality bar is extremely high for the companies ok and we want to make sure that whatever we launch is gonna be an amazing user experience it's gonna be a fun game that nothing else right and they come in through your website or how do they come various LinkedIn website email like you name it relationships that we have in the past like other developers like there's a million different ways to come on got it yeah and in terms of like when I think about the external game publishing market especially for mobile free-to-play there seems to be a lot of dead bodies could you talk about like some of the complexities of running a publishing organization and why perhaps some of the the previous companies that have tried to do external publishing haven't been so successful in how you guys are gonna be successful yeah there is a lot of complexities to it but you can either business model was a bit when the biggest ones so a lot of companies they do upfront mg is they pay a lot of money for these projects that commits that multi-million dollar marketing spoons yep before you have any idea if the game is going to be successful or not okay and that's a quick way to get

sideways in a hurry if you pay millions of dollars for the project they don't deliver the company goes out of business you just lost all the money you commit to five million in marketing you launch it the metrics that look terrible you don't want to spend five million in marketing but you're committed to legally there's a lot of things like that you can do that really mess up your business so what we do is we don't do that okay we effectively do licenses for the game can't commit the spending if we just been oh so profitably on the product but we never tell a developer you can spend a million bucks or a five hundred thousand bucks or whatever because frankly we just don't know right we might solve on the metrics look amazing and we'll spend all day long on it yeah fix me you look terrible then we go back into the process how do we iterate the game to get it to a point where we can spend possibly on the game right and then in in terms of iterating the game one of the things I know we talked about a little bit before is you you do provide a lot of feedback in terms of getting the product to the point where it can be successful so could you talk a little bit about that because I do think that is an important point of emphasis in terms of the team that you've been able to put together that can actually you know help the

developers or Stu's that you work with improve their product yeah I mean the first thing we do once we sign a game is we usually give them about 60 pages of product feedback everything you've on first time user experience retention and monetization gameplay even platform support like are you supporting the devices correctly yeah and then the developer goes back and usually spoons thus you have several months like fixing a lot of these issues okay some developers are faster than others as you can imagine yeah and then as we go into self launch we continue to give them more and more feedback okay now we're seeing this with analytics we're seeing this we need to fix that the two is too long and only 50% of people complaining to the TUI those kind of issues tiny really possibly want to iterate on that process until we launch the game okay and in terms of can you talk a little bit more about your specific team like how big is your team what kinds of people have you hired and for anyone in the audience you might be interested in joining roguelike what kind of people are you looking for yeah we're 10 people now we've been building up based on need at the entire time right so obviously there's tons of

great people out there that I would love to have but at the same time you can't just hire your buddy this because they run yeah really gonna hire what do you really need right now its economy and that's the most important thing so at the time we hired a game designer then we hired live ops and then we've hired you a we've hired data science yeah we're getting me to hire a finance person we just hired a BV person kind of focused on platform relationships ain't we hired a studio head way back in the day a tech director so really just a bending of what we need at the time is based on who we're kind of pulling it to the company and we're constantly looking for more staffs posting jobs on LinkedIn as we need to grow the company and based on what we needed at that given time right and kind of shifting gears a little bit thinking more about like future trends and we're publishing is moving and certainly I think there's been a lot of changes in the market in terms of App Store and all sorts of other things where do you think the market will be going or what do you think are key or emerging trends in the next let's say three to five years for for publishing yeah I mean we've seen it even now we're dead SIF itself published their games for

years and realize that are frankly not really good at it right yeah it's not through experience they even if they hired somebody to do this deck this kind of work for them they wouldn't how to train them properly so now they're leaning on companies like us more than ever to help them scale their games or grow their games and how do I take a game that maybe is going to make a million dollars if they self publish it how do we make it a hundred million dollar game right by breaking through the noise and getting hundreds of millions of downloads into this product okay and then in terms of like based on where the trends are going and who's in the market who do you think are gonna be like big winners or losers and like the next three to five years yeah that's a good question you know I think scope Lee is doing some pretty amazing work right now we kind of view ourselves as a probably close competitor to what they're up to energy obviously Tencent is always a big player in the space and it's really just a matter I think of more M&A like who's going to be acquiring who's INGOs doing so a lot of things right now yeah they're constantly buying studios and stuff so I think there's a lot of consolidation happen great and then just one last question for me so for you as a CEO of row what

what I do you have any specific goals in terms of where you want to take rogue or what your ambition for the company kind of longer term yeah but you want to build a massive brand for the company that when you see rogue it's kind of like when you see the a or Activision or something that you know five or ten years from now of course ultimately we all want to have a lot of fun and work on some cool games but some people write that times what all it boils down to but if we have a exit down the road or something that's obviously nice as well but you have to get to that point we want to actually work our rear ends off and get it also company that has tons of tons of downloads okay yeah great well there you have it here with Michael at CEO of road games if you are interested in a publisher he's right here so I'll put some links to contact Mike but thank you very much for your time like [Music]

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