Superstar Session: Big or Small: Marketing Must Be Part of Your Plan

[Music] and next up we have a superstar sessions uh we're being joined by digital speaker uh luke duchene from behavior interactive so hello everyone my name is alexander i'll start sharing my screen so you can all see my presentation and we can get this show on the road so i assume you're all seeing my screen now yes you are so hello my name is iggy schein i'm the editor and marketing at behavior interactive here in montreal i'm really sorry i cannot be with you today i was supposed to be there physically

but i tested positive with kovid late last week for the first time in 27 months so i'm doing well but i have to do it from my basement so first thing first like a little word about behavior who are we for those of you who don't know us companies celebrating its 30th anniversary this year found in 1992 we are the largest independent developer and publisher in canada we have studios now in montreal toronto and seattle with acquisition of midwinter recently and we are now a thousand employees so we are going fast when i did a talk similar talk in november i had 800 employees on that slide so things are moving very very fast so we're also the developer of dead by daylight the award-winning asymmetry called multiplayer game that was launched over six years ago that's over 50 million players so far we have a lot of other titles and development i cannot reveal anything at the moment but stay tuned because soon you will hear more about what we're doing

so i did entitle my talk big or small marketing must be part of your plan apart from the joke around my own physical transformation over the past couple of years the message is bored at whatever the size of your studio or the device you're developing for you should always think about marketing from the beginning and i want to talk about changing the philosophy around development and marketing collaboration early in the development cycle because throughout the course of my 20 plus 20 years plus career i encountered two different situations first one a very close relationship with the dev team whereby voice mattered where they listened to me we discussed we shared stuff together and really had an impact and i also saw a situation where i was simply ended content that are needed to market a lot of people will not see the value of having marketing in conception or even in pre-production even sometimes when there is a marketer early on many people won't think about

involving them in the core discussion around the creation of the game for a lot of people marketing equals to just sell the game but we do way more than that for me not having a marketer can truly hurt the potential business success of your game because i assume that's what you want so the biggest question i get when i talk about a being marketer involved very very early on is why why should we do that well i will try to give you my best answer based on my years of experience based on three different angles the entertainment industry the game industry and your game itself so let's start with the entertainment industry if someone was waking up today from let's say a 20-year coma they would not recognize the entertainment landscape things have changed so much in the past 20 years back in the days you had movies you had tvs and you had games the only crossover

you would see would be a license deal it wasn't even a crossover it was simply i'm giving you x amount of money i can use your property in my game and that's it so those three mediums were clearly separated in a way to consume them you rarely saw a movie stars in a tv series for example things that right now you see like there's this new series on amazon prime with chris pratt he's a movie star now but he's still playing the terminal list on prime so we can see those crossovers also it was ile geographically segmented apart from the big american tv series or movies you had very little knowledge of what was happening in other parts of the world but now things are completely different you have shows like quezada papel or money eyes in english lupine from france or squid game from korea back in the days we would not have heard about those shows because they were really localized in each of their countries so the industry is changing

drastically in 2022 things aren't the same like again some tv stars will be in movies so i'm sorry movie stars will be in tv series uh you see tv shows like designated survivor or lucifer getting cancelled by their original tv provider but they're getting a second life on streaming services you see legendary game brands with series like castlevania the witcher or resident evil you have game developers now would create tv series like ubisoft did with mythic quest on apple tv now you have netflix who launched his own gaming service last year so all those crossovers are happening and it brings the people change how to consume entertainment so if 20 years ago tv movie and games were all living in their bubbles the least we can see now in those three entertainment medium are now heavily connected we now have an entertainment offer that

is getting bigger more convenient for the consumers and much more interactive while i needed three devices to consume those medias i can do everything now on my iphone or my ipad everything is accessible from a simple device in my pocket the interconnectivity should impact the development of your game and marketing will be there to research the competitive environment because if you think that your competitive environment is only your game jar on your game platform you are sadly mistaken because a game on iphone is competing against a game on ps5 or on switch is competing against netflix amazon prime disney plus or regular tv or sports game what are the teams that will resonate with consumers right now paris environment through crimes terrorism space exploration now we all saw that right now space tourism has started with amazon and virgin there was a film being shot in space recently will this have an impact

in entertainment or in game what are the big shows that will attract people interest are we seeing trends in entertainment on the street that will impact games are there topics that we use to consume a lot that no longer interest people i remember a time where world war ii games world war two shooters were the big things a lot of companies were doing those it stopped at one point why because this topic became less and less interesting for people your topic are there brands you can collaborate with that you can partner with we see a lot of crossovers right now between different games us at behavior on dead by daylight we do work with other game companies we add a resident evil chapter we had a silent tale uh thereby delight was incorporated into for honor from ubisoft so all those crossovers are opening so you need someone to be there to think about those partnerships early on knowing a competitive environment is also critical to the success of a

product and you need answers to these questions for your product to be relevant in today's market for me not looking for these answers is the equivalent of going in blind and hope that it will be successful and maybe it will work but most likely it will not so i talk about the competitive the entertainment industry now let's talk about the gaming industry as all again let's take the same person who just woke up for this 20-year coma they would not recognize the gaming industry 20 years ago if we go back in 20 in 2001 so 21 years ago it's when the first xbox was launched at the time we knew that microsoft had money but we didn't know what to expect from them suny and the playstation 2 nintendo and the gamecube they were dominating the mobile market with the gameboy color and gameboy advance and we had pc gamings now 20 years later what do we see well

those big three are still there but now you have apple google amazon epic valve tencent netease in terms of game publisher you have a couple of big ones like activision ea ubisoft a lot of new independent studios also were created in the past couple of years often time by former employees from those aaa studios so not only now we have new players with very deep pocket but the gaming experience gaming experience has changed as well who could have thought that someone on xbox could play against someone on playstation a couple of years ago not 20 years ago five years ago this was a dream that arenas would be filled for esports tournament that game would be free to play that you could play a game while still being in development having soft launches in specific countries for months and months and months before releasing it on a worldwide level that people will watch other people while they play this is a phenomenon that people outside our industry still

have a hard time wrapping their mind around so the gaming business completely changed and is still changing very fast i'm sure you know all about those trends but how does it impact your game are you asking yourself those key questions like how big is cross play right now should you go for it is the investment justified because deciding to have cross play or not will have an impact on your development on where you put your resources is a sport going to be a thing for your game even if you have a multiplayer game are you a sport compatible should you go for it if yes is it for awareness or is it to make money because esport will have an impact on your design and balancing because once you start putting money on the table for people to play and to win they will find any little exploit you can have in your game so you need to think about that the business model was the best one at first on mobile market it was about

premium game now it's more free to play if you and when you go free to play what's your design and is it supporting by a good monetization plan i've been playing a game for over two years on my ipad it's a it's a fairly simple game i haven't spent a dollar on the game so far so i have fun playing the game but the developer is probably making money because of the ads i need to watch once in a while on their game but i didn't spend a single dollar on that games so all those questions i wanted a marker will bring forward when you develop a game so we talk about entertainment industry we talked about the gaming industry now how can marketing help in the day-to-day of game development because now i've been pretty like eye level so let's try to go a bit more into detail first and probably the most important part is to know who the audience is for a long time we were not asking that question for a very simple reason developers and gamers were pretty much

the same people we were making games for ourselves when i started in this industry back in the 90s i was part of the core audience i was a gamer and i was working the game industry nowadays i'm closing on 50 years old i no longer have the same goals the same motivation that my 15 year old daughter has so we need to think about that because right now like the gaming audience grew and changed dramatically in the past 20 years so they're the game makers and we probably are not changing as fast as the audience so we are probably not the best judge it's not because i have an opinion that this opinion will really be the right one for the audience we are targeting let's say you are a game designer with 10 15 years of experience so you're around your mid-30s well just like i mentioned if you're targeting people between 15 and 25 they have different motivations

and expectations that you have and that was nice when i said 30s because i know a lot of designers who are older so clearly making decision basically sold on their opinion will be a mistake so having a marketing thing involved early on will allow to do that research check the market fit between the idea the concept that you have in the audience i had a situation over 10 years ago i was working on a game one mentioned which one and one of the game designer pitched us an idea as part of his pitch he tried to incorporate some market info and the result was this we should make this game because nobody else has done a game like that it was right nobody else has done it and for a good reason because he only took one part of the equation and didn't check the market fit between his idea and the audience i know if you remember but the wii was huge for nintendo

but for nintendo fans and for family and he was proposing an rts game something that is only successful on pc so we did not do this game so maybe it would have been a great game but making a great game is not enough you cannot just make a great game and think people will come this is not like the movie field of dreams when they say build it and they will come now let me give you a second example while developing for honor and preparing our big reveal at e3 2015 because i was the brand director on that game we the marketing team had done plenty of research on the audience what would interest them what would have the biggest impact we were trying to find something special something unique that would make people react strongly and allow our game to stand out during our research we found that the executions were one of those things and went back to the team and said look executions are really really big so when preparing the e3 demo

the team thought about how to incorporate executions to maximize the impact we're not only involved in that decision but also in the realization of the execution to make sure we would match a consumer expectation based on the research we did it was not a gut feeling it was backed up by research and just for long story short the execution is a it was a beating on one of the of the character at the end was swinging sword chopping the head off of the other one and we had two choices either was a clean shot or it was a shot and there was a bit of resistance in the neck area we went for the second one where when you see the move like that earth so those are two examples where marketing played their role in advising a dev team in the game content why it's important to have marketing because when you make a game you think about the game mechanics the art direction the animation the storyline but we will think about how to package it how to promote it how the audience

will react you can do these things in parallel and don't talk to each other but when you do it in conjunction it will benefit from each other when we hear about certain features it can impact our plan and when you hear about our plan you can decide to push certain features because you will see that okay this one has a very good impact so there are some mechanics that you need simply to exist if you work on a shooter don't try to change a basic shooting mechanic it exists it works focus on something else some features you won't have won't make a difference so try to find the features that are unique that we can use and market our job in marketing is to amplify the uniqueness of your game in some occasions certain features could become much bigger and more important if we work together to amplify them so we talked about how marketing can help create a game by bringing some market insights now let's look at how early involvement can contribute to the communication of the game so since the beginning i talk about

like i advocated about having marketing involved from the beginning now about to talk about reciprocity so by working with the development team from the beginning the marketers will know the game inside out we will know the why the essence of the game living it with the dev team is not the same as reading it in a briefing document we'll know what's unique and we know what the audience expect and the stories to tell and they will know about the general threat in the market and entertainment industry so we'll propose a much stronger branding so this is going to be true for the name of the game logo key art announcement trailer and all when the collaboration is established early on it will usually continue the promotion phase of the game as a marketer i will always look for developers feedback in what we do are we capturing the essence of what they're trying to create these stories will be built together be much more powerful and genuine and it's important because nowadays gamers have a very good bs meter

speaking of gamer like this core group of people is really important the core audience because they will become ambassadors for you in promoting the game that's where you will see streamers emerge they will defend your game when you encounter difficulties because you might you might have network problems like we did on for honor and we use that core audience to really eradiate the people around them so secondary and tertiary audience will come in if you neglect this core audience it will have a domino effect and everything will come crashing down so by working closely we will be able to create an ecosystem that will engage players around the game or the brand for the long term a couple of minutes ago i was talking about being genuine in the stories we tell being transparent is a key element you need to talk to people gamers nowadays are much more educated than they were 20 years ago they know about network problems they read they go on reddit they go on twitter they go on everyone's social media to find out this

information so you need to make sure that you communicate with them and you interact with them because we are fighting for their leisure time again the competition is not only games you're competing against an entire entertainment ecosystem so to conclude as you said today to develop and market a game in 2022 is much more complex than it was 20 or even 10 years ago the general entertainment offer is bigger more diversified and more accessible the gaming industry has exploded in terms of offering possibilities and the audience is much more knowledgeable diverse and demanding so i want to leave you with a final thought as a gaming professional i can have an opinion about game design art direction it does not make me a designer or an artist marketing is an expertise everyone can have an opinion about it but it does not make them expert so thank you very much and now well

i know how much time we have left but i can take questions thanks luke uh we have about [Applause] i think we have precisely 15 seconds left but i don't want to call wow i don't want to end i don't want to call this a close i tried to go fast i'm sorry no no problem that was that was fantastic but i'd love to get a question from the audience uh just before we close this up um for smaller studios what would you say you know you can get overwhelmed with the amount of things you have to think about what would you say would be one of the most important things to focus on starting out i was one of the most important thing and obviously now i gave a very full spectrum but is to is the audience is to try if i have to focus on one thing i think i would say what is your audience because entertainment industry in gaming industry i think you can get a good understanding but to have someone to look at who the audience is who you will

target is very very important because that's where it will help you acquire people to actually retain them the monetization part the ua parts if this is neglected you will target the wrong people in every aspect of the game so at the end of the day you might have very good games you're targeting the good people they won't stay in your game and you you won't make any money thanks sorry i've just got a follow-up to that um let's say you you know you've gone you've tried to approach the audience um you've made a mistake you've misunderstood them do you kind of have to start from scratch and try again or how can you recover after you know making up no you you no i think you can you it depends it depends how big the mistake is it's uh it's like if you're going the i was in the wrong direction and you realize that after 10 kilometers versus 200 uh you can you you can recover sometimes it will take more time to recover and

you might need to invest a little bit more if the mistakes is of a very big scale but it is possible to recover unless you completely mess something up and you just ruin the brand appeal and people and people lost trust in your brand but if you're transparent it can always help i mean that's a great note for us to end on again everybody uh behavior interactives luke duchene can i please have your heartiest flaws for him thank you very much everyone