Session: Understanding The Creator-Driven Growth Engine For Mobile Games

[Music] Up next, I would like to welcome uh Dio from WeHype and Sak from Roio and they're going to be talking about uh understanding the creator driven economy engine for mobile games. So, welcome to the stage. Uh first of all, thanks everyone for attending and it's great to

see a lot of faces here in the room. Maybe I'll kick off uh things with a very short introduction about ourselves. Uh my name is Diego. I'm a partnerships manager at WeHype. If you don't know us, WeHype is an agency and a platform that helps publishers launch, manage, and scale influencer and creator campaigns, collaborations that try to drive growth towards the game. So yeah, it actually is a great placement for this panel right after Marian's uh own panel about introducing the methodology about how to find these creators. I've worked mostly on the mobile side of the business and I've been very happy to work with titles such as Brawl Stars, Subway Surfers, Clash of Clans, Monopoly Go. So a lot of uh work in that space and I'm very happy to be joined by Sarak Mendes from Roio. Sak maybe you want to give a few words to Yeah, I can I can say um Sarak I work at ROIO as the influencer marketing lead. Uh ROIO is the company of Angry

Birds. We are also owned by Sega. So it's you know Sonic everything uh cool all those old retro games and I've worked before in the industry in a bunch of other companies. You can look up that. Nice. And for today's session, we're going to talk a little bit about how can we translate these creator collaborations from the different life cycles of where a game is to building growth and going a bit beyond what's attributable and what is the direct uh effect when it comes to insults and to understand how that can provide a scope for growth in the game. So actually I think I would like to even start there in the perspective of a publisher and you've worked in a lot of cool and great great publishers with a lot of big games. How do you feel has been the vibe towards creators and influencers when using it as a tool for growth in the games? I mean it's fundamentally changed

right if you look at uh YouTube's blowing up in 2015 16 when this you know trajectory took off u in those days people would look at you know ads uh before the YouTuber or having you know YouTuber call out a nodVPN or whatever VPN ad right uh that works uh that may not work uh today uh that's about 10 10 years ago creators were more of you know okay we put an ad in there and we see how that returns now you need to build relationships with them and you need to build that at scale uh there's like 60 million YouTubers right out there 100 million channels Tik Tok onethird of the audience or half the audience or maybe 100% of the audience posts so that everyone's an influencer so it's completely changed from a model where you can't really automate like a UA network versus actually building relationships with these creators but you need to build them at scale which is quite difficult so you need partners agencies uh individually you can't you know have a relationship with a thousand creators so you can build programs around that uh And I think like from experience that I before working in the

creator space, I worked a lot also on ad networks on mobile marketing. I think if you come from like five, six, seven years ago, creators were seen as a very as a source of traffic as another ad network and like okay to the budget that I put in here, how many installs, how the retention I can get. And I think the shift we started to see a few years ago is a more holistic one where creators can not only provide that immediate uplift but can also raise the social awareness and the the space that the game can find for itself and let it create this sort of a growth loop in which by itself it maintains people coming back organically to create content for the game and build it from there. And actually that leads into the other thing I wanted to to talk about is regarding the life cycle of the games. Obviously we see a lot of especially in mobile from pre-registration to launches to maintaining. How do you approach

creators depending on where the game is positioned and how do you figure out what's the best way to take the next step into? So it really depends on the game cycle. If it's a new game, you're looking at discovery, a lot of brand awareness versus an established game. You're looking to, you know, re-engage your users. You're looking at targeted demographics. You know, this game, this works. So, these YouTubers would have that audience. That's more difficult because there's a black box in YouTube. Uh some platforms, you can see the audience metrics, but there's a black box. So, you have to test a lot. I think, you know, Marion spoke pretty well in the last uh presentation. You have to test a lot of influencers, but testing at scale can be difficult. and also you know budget their budget constraints for companies but I think it's important to see how do you test them for established games if it's a new game you need to go all out I mean a great example is rematch I think the game if everyone's heard about rematch is is driving around I don't know 150,000 CCUs in a beta right because of

influencers and a community strategy community influencers are your community I mean your influencers for that game has more followers than all their social media channels uh that shows scale of a new launch. The game launches I think in June. I think it's a very good example in the industry. They have generated around 150 million views with just open beta. There's pretty much very low paid budget on that. But that's shows scale of a new launch. A and I think like based even based on that that's a really good example with rematch. But one thing we've started to see more and more mobile games adopt is at later life cycles. I mean, everyone's seen what Epic has done with Fortnite with creator codes and just keep that wheel spinning in terms of having organic content by having these ambassadors through creator codes that provide this very steady way of bringing new people in while rewarding influencers and creators themselves. And we start to see a lot of

examples in that regard in the mobile space as well. Not only Supercell has their creator program very built across all their games but I think like when we are working with mobile publishers we start you know from the agency perspective we start to see a lot of this interest like how can when's the right time to build a creator program into the game and how can we kick off that presence I think it's always it needs to be combined like first sparking the interest by having the influencer campaigns bring in see the entertainment value making it worth for the audiences and for the creators and then sustaining and providing this road map that can keep creators motivated and engaged throughout the game's uh life cycle whenever there's new updates, whenever there's something new and cool to talk about so they can keep their audience engaged. So, it's about giving these tools that facilitate for that. And that that actually brings to to to another question which is measuring the upside

of influencers and creators. You know it's very tempting to take it as another traffic source or like what's directly attributable. But the other day I actually saw a statistic that a lot of the impact when you do creator marketing, influencer marketing goes largely not directable attributed because you can only assess it when you look at it as a whole. I wanted to ask whenever you launch creators uh campaigns with creators and collaborations, how do you look at success? How do you evaluate what makes it a win or when something is falling a bit behind? Sure. I think the number one is metric is install right people want to get uh installs that is not very easy with influencers you would have to have a very big scale and and if you see viral games it breaks that model right so if you look at stumble guys look at I don't know clash of clans brawl stars the way these things scale uh if you only track by installs then your campaign may not may not look very uh

successful but drop in the buckets right the organic value right that that evergreen content is going to be where an individual will see that and then go install or re-engage. Now, you can't really calculate that. There would have to be certain models you can calculate it. You can build data models around it, but there is a lot of uncaptured value when you have an influencer and a creator strategy that's at scale. A few influencers, sure, you can test and if they don't work, then you you compare that to a future campaign or you stop doing those campaigns, then you know, it's not going to give you a holistic data of how that you know, scales incrementally over time. And and typically one recommendation that we make for you know whenever a publisher is wanting to test creators for this side of initiative is while it's tempting to usually go for the largest markets to you know get because if the largest markets are there it's because they have the more impact but it also might imply that with smaller budgets or even medium budgets it's very hard to assess the upside that that brings in

the market as a whole. Typically what we suggest if that if uh direct impact is a main uh objective for a campaign or for collaboration is to test it with a isolated market and here by isolated we mean something that you can directly track even in terms of language that doesn't create spillover with other regions and if possible pause other marketing initiatives to understand okay in isolation what is the impact of doing something with influencers would creators and then observing what's the uptick, what does this translate to and how can we isolate it be beyond the direct attribution and uh I think one thing that we always get the question is you know it's easy to get creators on board for campaigns you know essentially from their side they put a price onto it or they they gauge by mo their motivation by you know you contract them

for this but we always here specifically on mobile that authenticity is a big concern because if a game like GTA or Elden Ring is coming out it's not hard to see that creators will want to jump on that. However, for a mobile game, especially if you go for platforms such as Twitch, where you know that that presence is limited to or a few titles, how do you think like we can ensure that the content does have that authenticity behind it that doesn't feel like, you know, an ad, like it's reading off a script or reading off talking points. In an ideal world, we always want them to be authentic, right? The the challenge is uh you're going to work with influencers who are probably not going to be authentic, but the audience can tell, right? They they have a parasocial relationship with the audience. And this is why it's good to work with someone who actually matches your genre, who actually is going to do something uh who does similar games or similar, you know, kind of uh kind of content. If it's way off their content, then it may just not work. It may may it could work if

there's a audience or demographic you're targeting. But say if you're doing on Twitch and say you're doing Marvel Rivals and the guy is playing Fortnite kind of there is a match over there but they're playing I don't know a cozy game like Animal you know crossing it may not work right and the and the creator may just get on your campaign but may not be really interested. So how the create creator reacts or the influencer reacts to your content and the campaign really matters because if it's not authentic the audience picks up on it. You're not going to see a lot of performance on that. Sure, you'll get a piece of content, but it's not uh great for for long term. And I think there's like you mentioned, I think like there's a big aspect on that about, you know, finding the right fit of creator, not only on the games they play, but also on the tone they have, like how they speak with their audience, how they engage, and that the beauty of that is a lot of that is actually measurable. But then I think on the publisher and the agency side there's actually a big responsibility in you shouldn't just put something that is

leaves everything on the creator to know how to engage with the audience especially if we're talking about mobile games in which you know they they might it might have a different entertainment value than those games that are usually uh used to promoting or used to talk about. One thing that we always uh make sure that we pay a lot of attention to is how can we make the content that the creator is going to talk about feel fun. So if you have for example a match three game and you want to promote it either on Twitch or on YouTube that by itself might be hard to keep the entertainment value going but then you can add a community layer. can have community challenges in which by have not the gameplay is not necessarily the main hook but it's how the community approaches it and how they interact with each other is the one that uh provides really a lot of a lot of value on on this and uh in terms of creator programs

like a after we go through the hump of actually pulling people in getting it reach getting it visibility okay we got the installs how can we keep the social engagement for that game high instead of okay we put budget into it we put a campaign creates a peak but then it goes back into a valley again how are we able through programs codes to sustain it a little higher how does your experience tell about it yeah so I think creative programs the the word program can be paid or organic right so paid is you do a campaign and then the organic part is something what epic has done pretty well with creator codes in Fortnite but then supercell has done it and scoply has done it and a lot about other companies. Capcom has done it and I think it's really important to look at long-term relationship building with the creator. Okay, you pay the creator to cover your game, but can you give him a monetary incentive to to work so that when he covers your game or someone of his audience buys something in the game, that creator gets a kick back as an

affiliate program, some kind of commission. Yes, that that's very successful model. It can it's directly tying your game's economy now to the creator economy. So, that requires a lot more. It requires a development team to actually build content updates. You need to actually have early access. You need to build, you know, teams who will manage relationships with these creators because it's not just, you know, you put a button and they're all, you know, doing their campaigns. You have to talk to them, give them early access. And creator codes really work well because it's directly tied to your inapp purchase. If your inapp purchase, uh, imagine uh, I mean, you can go read up the public information out there. Uh, Tim Sweeney said it, right? 400 million is generated by the creator economy, but that's also creator maps within the Fortnite. That's a huge incentive because now you're not just getting new installs through your influencers creating content, you're also getting monetization, which is huge. If if the creators can increase your monetization by a percentage, now that's a very good business case to build. Yeah. And I think it all comes down to how can we build this sort of loyalty. But we have

to be mindful that this loyalty ultimately no matter how much you, you know, if you pay the creator, if you keep the audience coming back, it's very hard to fake it. You need to create the instruments and the levers that do actually make it sustainable in the long term so that the creator does it. Sure. by having if he has a creator code and you can get something from when the audience does it but then the content will just reach a point where the audience will not enjoy seeing what it is. So I it's very important from our experience that game teams, marketing teams and then the influencer teams that work together with your game actually work very closely and not in in islands. So everything can be part of the same initiative because one of the the aspects like whatever is in the game will actually feed the interest that that you have on it. Actually, a really good example that just happened a few weeks ago is on Clash Royale. There's this massive streamer called Jinxy that

for a long time, he said, "I'm a huge fan of the game. Like, I I love playing this game a lot, and I I believe like he has recently got a creator code for Clash Royale. And since he's just been streaming Clash Royale organically on his own because the passion for the game is there and because his audience is something that keeps want coming back. So that is the perfect scenario where it didn't even take activating him through a paid campaign for him to be interested in in in having this. We always hear about like when I'm talking with publishers that attention is rented and it's not owned. meaning you have to keep giving reasons for the audiences to to care about it. I see that we have three minutes left. Just want to have one more question, one more uh discussion point and then we can open for one or two questions. How do you see it coming next? What do you think is uh the next

step when it comes to creators specifically for mobile games? I've seen a lot of enthusiasm, for example, with creator skins as something that is making people like some publishers incorporating the creator experience directly into the game. How do you view this? Yeah, I do think creator skins work. I've done it in previous companies. Uh it's really great. It's very the creator sticks on for a long time. Uh it's a lot of development resources. So, we have to actually think about that uh to plan that. And again, if you have a 10,000 influencers, you can't make 10,000 skins, right? the economy will break. So we have to think of macros but also micros. I think there's different strategies you can have for macros and micros but I think uh a bigger picture is can we work with micro influences at scale cuz 90% of all influences are there micro. If we can actually build a model or some kind of creative code or not just creative codes but some kind of incentive based program for these micros at scale and also you know build this massive you know army

again of influencers you're going to be the that brand will be successful. Very few brands are able to get to that point. Uh you have to have a paid budget. You just can't expect this to grow, you know, magically overnight. If you're an IP brand like Angry Birds or like Sonic, yes, it's easier to build it, but if you're not, then you really have to go and spend or build that community yourself and then in build incentives or a loyalty program so that they stick around for long term. But I think the micro creators have a much stronger parasocial relationship with their audience versus, you know, the mega ones. The mega ones everyone knows but you go to social media for news and in the feed of Tik Tok doesn't mean you follow someone. It's your feed could be anything what interests you or related interest. So how you build strategies around related interest uh with the algorithms it's a challenge. I I don't think everyone's trying to figure it out. We're trying to as well. Uh hopefully we get there but that that I think those companies will be the ones who will be in the forefront with this. Perfect. Thank you so much Raj. I see we have 50 seconds. Good for if anyone has

a question they would like to share. If not if not perfect we gain 40 seconds. Thank you so much for your time. [Music]