Round Zero on how to (not) get your mobile game published

[Music] [Music] so my name's Daniel and I represent around zero the publishing Department of finger soft so basically the company that's best known for the helical embracing franchise so yeah today I'm gonna talk about basically the challenges that developers usually feel when they're trying to find a publisher for the mobile game and the topic is how to not get your game published so please note that I'm gonna say everything like in the exact opposite way before I begin a quick question how many of you are game developers nice very nice how many of you are looking for a publisher for your mobile game I'm

seeing like six to seven heads brilliant okay basically quick introduction to finger soft how many of you know these games so helical embracing yeah I figured so because altogether helical impressing wanted to have accumulated over 800 million installs to make the cost of six years so it's pretty pretty massive absolutely nowadays it's really hard to even try and simulate these kind of success but we experienced the reverse effect in 2000 in 2012 and 11 so helical operating one hit the market at the exact right time and that basically led us to where we are at the moment Nakula pressing 2 was basically published exactly one year ago and now we're going somewhere over 150 million installs and the monetization is working a lot better than in the first one obviously so Google operations are completely developed and maintained by finger soft but then on the other hand we have also published a couple of other game titles for example Benji bananas

with over 70 million installs and failed hard with about 40 million installs so they digits are pretty pretty huge overall and that's basically due to our cross promotion in heelflip ratings so because we have about 50 million monthly active users it's really easy and very cost effective for us to publish a mobile game and then the cross promotion in the game I mean the in compressing games in order to like acquire users very cheaply just about a couple of months ago we actually decided that we're gonna stop publishing games under finger soft and we spun off a completely new publishing label called round zero the way around zero works compared to many other publishers is basically that we don't have any gatekeepers so I don't decide which games to be published and nobody does that but our users do so the process of round zero is that whenever a developer they send their games details and like overall we check out the game and then we do cross promotion in human Racing's in dedicated markets to acquire a small

number of installs to the game that's under review we keep the ad campaign on for about six to seven days depending and then if the data looks good if the ad conversions are high I made the banner ad and interstitial ad CTRs overall the instigate and the ASI was looking okay then we do a second round and we open maybe a couple of like more countries and then we try to get like some thousands of installs if that looks good we are gonna do it on three so a little bit of tweaking some updates the game check out the monetization and then we do the soft launch and of course after that we take the world by storm mobile basically up this far we have gone through about 100 games just like during the past couple of months and we're still were continuously having like five to ten campaigns running for one week and I'm about to tell you some of the basic mistakes that developers usually do when either they contact us or basically when they start across promotion campaign and so on I have broken down this I'm not calling them

mistakes maybe but like issues the three rules of thumb and the first one is so how to not get your mobile game published the first step is to never give information about your game if you read that email a very good game idea I got in game idea and I want to show you this if you want to see my idea please answer me needless to say that at least we never we never answer emails like this because we don't really want to like sign any NDA's because we're a freaking publisher we're not gonna steal anyone's game idea because that's that's what we are a publisher so that game developers can make the game and we can just make them commercial successes anyways in order to repel publishing contracts you should never send a gameplay video under screenshots because indeed otherwise they could be the risk that the publisher might actually like your game also sending in a game summary is like I don't know game mechanic documents or monetization forecasts and so on it's also highly

prohibited third test build could be a good thing so never do that never send an apk or hockey app invitation or test lab invitation or whatever your method might be but then again business plan if you would tell the publisher about your games monetization and if you have actually done some market research that's gonna significantly raise your risk of getting a publisher so please avoid this as a bonus that we actually see quite often if you tell the publisher that your game is going to get 80% table retention and told them like $12 LTV just because clash of clans did you're pretty much doomed to fail of course it's possible but for an example in our case the redemptions that we're seeing this is 18 games that we have actually gone through a during the course of our user base is of course heavily casual but still game number six actually got about forty 40 to 45 percent average table retention so and

that's the game that we just published some time ago actually three months ago and our we just hit 5 million in stats for that overall to the second never use common sense or be independent when you're communicating with the publisher they might send you some materials I don't know for above for example about implementing ad network SDKs or analytics SDKs and or for example cross promotion banner ad sizes and things like that so whatever you do do not read the instructions because that's of course also going to significantly increase your chance of getting published never take notes because it's so much easier to ask like three times and the publisher for the same thing overall never listen to feedback because the publisher might actually then want your game to succeed and that's really bad right also I don't really recommend you to keep deadlines because of course the publisher is never busy and I mean

obviously you're not busy either so just ignore everything that you decided and as a bonus it's really good to argue with the publisher about minor things and the best thing that we often hear is that the users are wrong the users are bad you should give us better users and then the data is kind of a good so many developers always forget that to be honest it's all about objective opinion it's not about subjective opinions if your friend says that oh this is a nice game it doesn't mean that 2,000 people are gonna like the game so that's why basically we over all decided to create round 0 just for that you know instructions we usually be pretty detailed feedback about creatives for the advertisements and all here you can see the average rate of images of interstitials and banner ads that we're showing and 2 to 3 percent CTR they didn't read the instructions the other ones did so yeah you see why you

probably shouldn't read the instructions if you don't want a publisher overall this is probably the most important rule ignore market research entirely don't check out what is top grossing what is like basically gaining the most traction organically and so on instead do not research any publishers either who could like really sequel with your game an example we are a heavily casual game publisher but then some other game publishers could be like strong in mid core games and/or multiplayer and so on so don't research those publishers because you could actually use that your advantage in order to get a publishing deal also don't study your competitors because it's so much cooler to just like show numbers out of the air and say that so then we're expecting the LTV to be four point five dollars because I don't know it feels like that or the ARP now is gonna be 28 cents because we believe so but really though using a penny or other service is truly expensive but at least for one month it's it you should really like consider about

it if you just have the money because you can use that one most really wisely overall these girls actually a bit to game design and I would like to not talk about that this time but I'm also we recommend to not design your games core mechanics according to like already good cases so instead you should just try and break the markets with a completely new innovative product that has not been benchmarked to be successful before and what I mean with this is basically that many developers oftentimes ignore market research in the sense that they start creating something completely new it could be a good thing but most likely it usually isn't because if you want to break the market and do something entirely new and innovative it's really really challenging to first of all do a/b testing and you really need to like find out find out who your user group is so that is like the problem in this one and also as a bonus don't think about geographical locations so the joke here

is to like create a graphic visual novel game to Western markets or a Hollywood 3d action game for China or Japan where usually it doesn't perform at all so these three rules of thumb are basically to never give information about your game never use common sense or be independent when while communicating with the publisher and of course ignorant market research but if we scrap all of that and actually go to what we should be saying here is to be really open and descriptive about your game so whenever you approach the publisher it's your one chance to like woo the publisher so that they get truly interested in your game if you start asking for NBA's like early on as you saw the email before I have a very good game please reply to me and I will show it to you or for an example hello finger soft here's an NDA please sign it and we might show you our game it doesn't really work that way we want to be like really flexible and really fast in all of the test rounds because it's good for the developer and of

course good for us so just be really open whenever you negotiate with the lab with the publisher secondly be independent proactive and professional even if it doesn't lead to a notch publishing contract for example if the game's data is not good enough or the conversions are bad in cross promotion nevertheless the publisher is probably going to remember you as a really professional team if you act like that if you ask the right questions if it for example if we need to implement an analytical SDK or something don't ask the publisher about it don't bug the publisher about things like that because you can easily find the information from Google and the SDK instructions it's a like really really common sense to try to be as productive as ever possible and that's anyway it's good for the future so even if it doesn't work out with this game title in the future it's like it's a really good chance to overall like raise the reputation level of the company and lastly but definitely not most least study what is hot at the

moment you don't really have to pay for a penny or anything like that but just check out like what games are trending at the moment what are what games are attracting the most organic organic users and so on and then of course get to know the markets so know to which markets your game is being developed for and don't try to like break the market by creating a completely new game if you're not 100% certain to whom you are actually developing the game and of course research the publishers so for an example a casual publisher for a casual game mid-quarter publisher for a medical game we have actually many plans to also expand to other categories from casual and that's also one reason why r10 was founded but um this is just to say that it's really good to always do they do the homework now I think that we're running out of time at least there's many of us from zero and fingers of the guys here in Pocket Gamer connects so if you're looking for a publisher please prep us by the sleeve of course pretty busy but there's always

time for coffee or beer beer so at least I don't know about you guys but we are probably gonna look like this by tomorrow morning so we're going to be eating and drinking tonight so please try to follow the example just kidding overall thank you very much please hi you said that you tested many games I was wondering if you noticed any affinities between Hill Climb and several types of games or game genres like what does your users or most like

in other types of games that's a really good question one thing that you must understand is that 50 million monthly active users is it's really like huge group of people and it's really pretty much impossible to say that 50 million people are a certain type but there's at least one one like group of people that's really like raising its head all the time and that's males from fifteen to thirty eight year old and usually when we see something a little bit edgy for an example like zombie themes or like mild violence and things like that that usually attract like I don't know young adults and especially males those are usually the best like conversion wise [Music]

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