Stumbling Into a Multiplayer Hit Downloaded 2 Million Times per Day - Christof Wegmann, Photon.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] so we're now going to talk about stumbling into a multiplayer hit with two million two million downloads a Day Too Many engagement too many times a day it's the phrase I've got here and I've got Chris from Photon who's going to tell us all about that so Chris come on up good morning everyone so I thought about changing the topic to Unity pricing fees just was reading my slack this morning it was um yeah I'm Chris founder and CTO of exit games we built

a photon which is a multiplayer technology we are around for quite a while so this year we celebrate 20 years of exit games so that's I feel really old I think so we started basically when Nokia was still a thing and I see a couple of faces here which I met really uh back in the days so worked with Rovio really early on before they actually did Angry Birds and so on so what I thought on really quick so we make multiplayer simple so in fact multiplayer is not super simple but we try really hard to make it simple so we have net code or or multiplayer sdks which we give we do not build or publish games so we solely focus on Building Technology we are used by we just crossed the line

of 800 000 Studios so that's really fun well it's developers right to be to be clear it's not Studios necessarily um so and when I explained to my parents what are you doing I'm saying I'm I'm uh so we build the best travels for the gold diggers right so everyone needs shovels so this is how we uh are successful but only a few Studios actually find gold so uh what is this talk about so we stumbled into this title and I want to tell the story how uh how this happened so it was stumble guys was the top downloaded game uh last year or one of the top downloaded games only Subway Surfers had more downloads so we were even one one place ahead of Roblox which was really nice

so uh how did this thing happen so I go through different faces and different acts so we started the project in August 2020 we did the partnership we went live we iterated for about a year the game became humongous and eventually we sold the game so how did the idea came so there was this game uh which which inspired us which was Fall Guys of course um so it it was hugely popular on PC and console so we thought oh we we should try to build a mobile version of that game and uh by incident we had a product called quantum which was perfectly suited for this game so uh four guys if 32 players

multiplayer on mobile phones I was supposed to work on Android on iOS basically on really crappy phones and still have networked physics and everything so we had the right product to do the job so we said okay let's let's try this out and build a tech prototype so and the tech prototype as you see on the right picture was really looking super ugly so it was horrible and this is what we used to do is really building ugly uh Tech demos but um it really worked brilliantly on a mobile phone so we thought wow this is cool so I uh so okay before we give this to our developers as a tech demo let's see if we could launch this game just for fun so I went out and called a couple of

friends and partners and basically the conversation was like this hey I have an idea and then the answer was oh yeah this sounds cool but um this is too risky for us so we don't think this will work this will work so and I had a call with a with a guy in in Finland Ollie so he had a very tiny studio called kitka games and I had the same conversation with him and and he said yeah sorry um interesting but I don't think this will work so the next day he called me and said hey I thought about it so what can we lose right so let's let's do this and try it out and we can always stop so kitka was basically Ollie and two artists and one back-end developer so

from our side it was just myself I'm mostly overhead let's say and a couple of very good Developers and we launched the first version of the game in uh six weeks it had six levels 32 skins it has a custom background so if you would ask me if you are a new studio or launching a game and you build your own backend I would say you're nuts so you should definitely go with playfab or or whatever any technology out there but I said yeah whatever you guys will know and and very simple Analytics so and we launched the game it had basically no monetization so we didn't make any money but day one rotation uh they they won retention was 55 so it was like absolutely mind-blowing so so we knew we had something and the game was Break Even after two weeks already

but as I said the monetization was really horrible and we thought okay this is a great game super success but we don't think we can make this game really monetizing well so Ollie was starting to talk to his friends in Finland which is very well known for good developer connections let's say just to see okay where could we go and then we started to iterate and iterate so we built new levels and skins I say we I have to say it's mostly kit car games right so we were just the guys building Quantum and the technology behind it so the guys added video ads pre-rolls and post roles and colors and emotes so initially you could basically buy every character in the end of course we had the booster packs and let's say all the tribal knowledge if you build a mobile game you basically always do the same

stuff and we eventually um build a PC version because we thought this could be really interesting for uh for a cross-platform playing so um and then so this is a bit what happened so we were already in the beginning we were break even or the money coming in let's say was covering the cost so it was not really a huge team um and then at some point streamers started to pick up the game so the game was built in a way that you could easily so it was streamer friendly so you could start the game and then you would have a code there where you could join the streamer in his play basically to play live so they were and the good streamers the games were full in milliseconds basically

and then this took completely off so it was uh in Brazil a couple of release streamers with millions of subscribers were pushing the game and I have to say the game we we didn't do any user acquisition so it was really um ridiculous and at some point so we went uh number one in a lot of countries so it started in South America Brazil Argentina then it went from Brazil probably because of the language and the streamers in Portuguese it went to Portugal so then it kind of went inside Europe the game became more and more popular so we became number one in a lot of European countries India picked it up initially so we were super popular there it went down but we went up again and eventually in in July so pretty much one year ago we were

number one in the US um initially Android was dominating later on we were super popular on iOS as well so the success was overwhelming for us so we did our job so we added at some point we had to add servers like crazy because at Peak the game was downloaded two million times a day and then which resulted in 25 million daily active users in the game so it was very very big across and then we had the crisis so not sure if you remember so it was covet that time and then suddenly you couldn't get machines anymore so it was a bit a

challenge let's say to add servers worldwide which is a so that's our job so but kitka the studio was overwhelmed big time in terms of support and everything so we started to say okay what are the options we have so either you guys scale and do proper Community Support or we just experiment and say let's let's sell let's try out and see if we can sell it um so first decision you have to make do we involve Bankers I'm not sure how many people have been involved in m a processes usually you have this Banker guys a very corporate but really well connected to kind of get you a lot of offers eventually get you into a bidding thing but we decided okay no we just go to our favorite Studios and just

offer to sell it and we do it as entrepreneurs so from Photon side and from kitka side So eventually we had a very famous companies interested also with a couple of them we already had good connections and relationships so uh we eventually went with scopely signed a term sheet exclusivity six weeks and the uh we signed the deal and kind of went off it was a special deal because um not the team was sold with the product it was a pure game sale um which is a bit tough because you have a team which is really performing well on the game but the um the studio kitka in this case was not willing let's say to continue in

in a huge Studio to continue work there so we had a long transition period I think of one or two years where we kept helping and and we are of course we are still powering the game so it's still our biggest game from the photon side of things and I have to say what scopely has done with the game so all the Partnerships with Mattel and everything like they built first person shooters into the game it's really impressive but you have to say so we had a team of let's say maybe 10 people and and scopely has now a team of hundreds of people feeding the game dealing with uh community and so on but of course the game is making um yeah quite quite a lot of Revenue so uh what are the takeaways for me um so so one is fortune favors the the brave so this is definitely not

something you can repeat so it's it's I think it's a great story it's a cool accident but of course I would repeat stumble guys if I would be able to repeat it I would instantly say yeah sure bring it on right where we we are like masterminds in taking something and making it successful so we can so we cannot repeat it but you have to try a lot of things basically to to find your fortune let's say and that's what we found right we do 10 things and maybe one thing is successful so another thing here on your intuition and um do things your way so we decided not to take a bank right everyone I asked was saying hey you guys need to have Bankers you get the best price out of it blah blah blah but we said no we want to have a very uh uh down to earth let's say sales process and we want to be involved and then it's our game and we want to find a good home for it long-term relationships so everything

you saw here we work with teams we had a long year relationship we were we sold to a partner we had a long-term relationship so it's about trust and working with humble people and this is what I personally enjoy in the games industry so you usually meet a lot of humble people and and it's really you are not fooled basically and another nice side effect was we all were a lot of the time we hear our photon is so expensive basically from people who never paid us so and I I can say our pricing totally works which was a free to play game with millions of downloads and um and I use actually stumble guys this morning just quickly to iterate on the new Unity pricing so just to throw this out there for food of thought so so they charge per install I'm not sure how much you've you've read and the um

so this game definitely would be across the line of of paying per install of course the line is pretty high so if you do a normal game you wouldn't even have to pay something but here you would pay if you have you would go for the unity Enterprise version which would be one cent per install so per day it would be twenty thousand or so two million downloads per day right times the one cent so that would be uh you guys correct me if I'm wrong that would be twenty thousand dollars a day in fees times thirty so it would be around half a million to six hundred thousand cost but only if you have 60 million downloads right and the game is making a lot of money right so I I I think it's kind of makes sense but the problem is

you don't have I only have Unity you have Unity you have Photon maybe you have play fair maybe you have quago uh the the cheat thing maybe you have talks mod for whatever you have to pay all these Partners so I can see that because you have all these little things it may add up to quite a bit cost but um I can see that charging or Unity has some value so I think that's up for discussion so it's it's interesting I'm I'm not yet decided um yeah I think I'm done I have another minute or so for questions we'll get into the debate on Unity thing later but that's another subject uh anyone uh got any questions do we have any questions on stumble guys which is obviously such a profoundly important

I mean it is an interesting one I think particularly looking at the style of play and the immediacy of it because you've got so many people in a in a space how I mean it seems to me that the way that that game works so well is because of the the way that you unlock the ability for streamers to bring people into that game and therefore getting critical mass for a good playing session became something that was very very easy to do do you think other games can learn about that critical mass problem from what stumble guys did so from the beginning which was one of our key features is we added bots so you could be in a stumble guys game with 32 players and you would be the only real person in there and you would hardly recognize it because the Bots were really and I think they're nicely built potential but I think it's something different about when a real person turns up and I think that's why for me this number guy's thing about being able to bring people into it so even when real people played uh people were claiming it's full of bots right yeah so

players are really weird so you heard it here first players are weird but you need bots so we see a lot of our customers fail uh because of um having empty games right so that's definitely a disaster and I've been there done that got the T-shirt so I know that pain on the Note Chris thank you so much [Music]