Superstar Session: Do not Resuscitate - Why Publishing Managers are Life-guards, not Undertakers

our track sponsors crazy labs we've got rotten elder uh coming in our superstar session one of two talking about do not resuscitate why hyper casual game publishing managers are lifeguards not undertakers hi ruth sam how are you hey sofia good to be here how are you doing good thanks good to have you here yeah how are how are things there your way in the world well like everyone we've been ups and downs you know in terms of uh kobe 19. we're just out of the second quarantine so we're uh looking uh optimistic and forward sorry looking forward to the future yeah yeah sound like that and uh in the

company itself everything is really going well we're uh top charts now and we'll speak about that today a little bit yeah we'll give out a lot of tips to our developers and why we're doing what we're doing in order to help and not uh kill everyone's dreams fantastic yeah well like i say you are our first of two superstar sessions and our track sponsors thank you very much for that again and um yeah i suppose i should uh leave it to you but like i say keep to the audience watching keep talking in the chat keep throwing your questions into the q a and i'll be out back at the end and we'll do some questions and answers cool sounds good fantastic i'll wait here until your slides are present uh just to make sure everything's going okay and then i'll disappear off into the background all right let me show my screen it's coming through now it seems there we go give it a minute it's loading i think it's loading for you two there we go perfect right i'll disappear off and leave it to you

all right sounds good all right guys so first thanks uh for joining us uh these are tough times of course and we're doing the best we can to make the best out of this situation um today we'll talk a little bit about how with crazylabs we're not really undertakers but we're here to help you and we're starting off with two great gifts in my opinion so on the left you can see one of the games that shaped my gaming childhood and i'm guessing uh yours as well and on the right you can see acrylic nails which i'm guessing you played for a little bit more than five minutes just to see what you're missing in your games so to be honest and if we're perfect perfectly honest and speaking um i'd much rather create games like you see on your left like doom like starcraft like games that shaped my gaming childhood and games that i still play with my friends and i'd much rather do that than

sit all day and watch videos of acrylic nails but in the hyper casual industry we're publishing whatever works and if simulation games are hot right now and in the beginning of the year asmr games were hot right now this is the thing that will be most interesting interested in working in and i'm reminding everyone every time that we speak that hyper casual industry and publishing the industry is a business and not a fantasy and of course everyone's fantasies to work on games like doom but eventually we're working on what eventually works for us so this connects me to the maybe the what i'm going to speak today and the main thing that we want to convey is that we as publishers as people who are looking it from uh a distant angle if you say so if

you are developing the games you're really motivated and into the game and we're coming out of like a third party and looking at the game we have a much more objective way of looking at the game and we can make better judgment on when to push the game help uh updating iterating and improving kpis or when it's time to say goodbye and kill the game utilize your time in moving to the next project a little bit about me um i'm working in the gaming industry for around eight years and it's been a really real roller coaster uh starting working in hyper casual games it's really fast really uh going really honest on high speed and it's like any other competitive sport that i play watching the top charts saying how am i getting there how am i getting my developers to get to the top charts and eventually as i always say to everyone

eventually it's a business we'll talk a little bit about crazylabs the ecosystem of a hypercasual and we'll deep dive into some publishing tips that we have for you and of course i'll tell you a little bit about our latest success which is acrylic nails we also have time for q a so feel free to type in your questions in the chat and we'll try to make sure to answer most of them so crazylabs is a top three publisher uh we have over 3.5 billion downloads for our games and over 100 million monthly active users we have offices in tel aviv in skopje in shanghai luyang kiev so if you're also searching for your next job you might find it here with us apart from publishing games we're also creating games so we have three studios the first one is the hyper casual lab this creates hyper casual games

like neon on and dentist the other lab we have is a casual lab that creates casual games like jumanji charlie's angels super stylist and so on and we have one other top secret lab that we can't really say what it's doing right now but it might even find the cure for coronavirus so stay tuned as always we have best case scenarios and worst case scenarios and we'll start talking about the development of hyper-casual games so i'm going to start with the best case scenario which is more fun to look at and let's say you find a good idea that you believe in and you really like it you work on a cool video for ctrl for let's say one or two weeks you don't have to have a build you can create a video using unity or using after effects it doesn't matter you test it and you get great results awesome now we can start working on the cpi build of course just

upload it to the store two three levels you don't do much more than that and usually cpi correlates with ctl so if you have good enough ctl uh cpi will follow so let's say you get a good cpi you start working on the actual game around 30 minutes of gameplay to test day one retention because we know if day one retention is there eventually day three and day seven will also follow because we know how to make the game more interesting um so eventually you can create a game with just a few weeks and you you will know if you're in the right direction or not some of the publishers will also pay you for these steps and cover some of your expenses from the get-go like we do what it usually what it does eventually is to minimize risks for you guys and allow your team to be creative instead of just working fast the worst case scenario would be that you fail at some point

of the final so let's say you failed at the ctl test or the cpi test or even the retention test so worst comes to worst you spent one to three weeks uh creating the the prototype in which level you failed and it's fine so you know you're in the wrong direction after one to three weeks which is very short time and you kill the game or consult of course with your publishing manager and move on uh and just so you to remember it's very very hard to nail it with a great ctr in a video we fail a lot as well in publishing in the team itself in the in-house team every team fails a lot before hitting a great ctl and what we usually tell our developers and try to push them is first not to be afraid of failing that's fine everyone fails a lot no matter what they say and we help them improve we help our

developers improve every time that they fail we try to analyze what's wrong what went wrong what we can improve for next time or for this time and that's why we're we're trying to show that the progress of each of our developers so you start with a very very bad video and eventually once you progress and after you test it one two five games eventually you will succeed [Music] so let's say in eight weeks you can test four or even six videos and of course with the right publisher you might even cover up some of your expenses so we'll dive into it now and we'll show you five things that uh your game needs in order to succeed of course if you follow these five tips it doesn't mean that you're guaranteed a top chart hit but we will increase your

chances significantly this is actually my personal checklist whenever i get a new game to check so we start with number one it's not about the trend it's seeing and learning how big it is uh we have a couple of examples of games we based off of trends of course the most famous one is sml slicing maybe taida even so we need to learn what people love and why it would be even better if it was a mobile game if you check tie dye or even soap cutting on youtube you will see videos with tens of millions views creating game based on this trend almost guarantees you a low cpi you don't have to build the game on a trend it's not like a necessity there's so many games which are not based on a video trend but if you do think of how big it is before you start creating these videos

number two which is very important you need to learn exactly what are the exact steps in the game that you're creating whether it's based on a trend or is not based on a trend and what is the step that people react to the most i'm taking here an example of tie-dye which is based on a trend a real life trend which was big in the 80s now it's coming back for some reason and we jumped on this train we took and sketched every step in the way in tie-dye in order to make it as real as possible and of course fun to the user so we started thinking about the controls and the mechanics of each of these steps and we also wanted to see what people like exactly in these steps in order to make uh cool videos so for example in thailand people want to see their creation so they might even wait for the end of the video or the playable ad

to see what came out in the end and this is something that we learned using facebook's analytics and we saw that people actually stick through the whole video to see what comes out in the end so think about how to turn a cool video into a game and if you're doing it based on a trend i will say the corniest sentence i could come up with it's actually harder than it looks it's not easy creating a game off of a trend but if you do you will enjoy a lot of uh high city hours low cpi whatever you can get because of the marketability of this trend number three as i said before you don't have to create a game you just need to check the video first and it's very important that people know what they do or what the game is in the first three seconds of watching the video there's

the highest churn rate in the video ads is after five seconds when you can of course um and if people don't interact with the video at the first three or five seconds of the game of the video that's it that's you will never get these people again it's also crucial that we don't use any user acquisition hacks or tricks we do it a lot while scaling of course to reduce the cpi while once the cpi goes very high but when we're checking the video we just want to check the video we want to check the gameplay and we want to check that people react well to the game itself that people want to download and play the game it relates the next question next point which is the game success which is on number four eventually data doesn't lie we're uh checking the data and we're looking at it and it's much better than saying okay i think this game won't work or

or i think this game is a bonanza check it test it if the ctr is great great you're in the right direction if it's not then either you have to iterate or kill the game again i'm saying don't use any manipulation on the data don't try to lower the cpi in some unorthodox way once you're testing the marketpoles because you want to check what happens eventually when you start scaling so i wouldn't think about how we can manipulate the data but i would think about how i can make the game better number five and it brings me back to the first slide with doom and acrylic nails it's a business think about it as not as fulfilling your in the game fantasy because it might happen but not in hyper casual hyper casual usually are free to play they can be played by anyone anywhere they're short they're satisfying they have

mass appeal and they usually have one finger mechanic like we heard in the last session people want to play it and they don't want to [Music] put much effort in being concentrated in the game they can watch tv they can talk to someone on the phone they can they're walking on the street and they're playing uh hyper casual games so it's really uh important that you adopt the game into the situation that your players are playing it um and of course don't treat it like fantasy treat it like a business you eventually want to make money off of publishing these games and that's why we are here for and that's what you are here for now let's look at it from a different angle how these four tests that we had uh soap cutting sml slicing tie-dye animes brought success to very talented studios all around the world in a very short time and also demonstrate the opportunity in

hyper casual so you can see four games with very low amount of people creating them the biggest one was tied i did five people worked on the game smallest one was amazed that only two people one designer one developer worked on the game and you can see that it took them between 7 weeks and 12 weeks to reach 5 million dollar revenue that's something that you will never see in your indie game fantasies of course and that's why we're always saying that we consider this as a business and you can also think about utilizing your time when you can spare three people one game designer uh one artist one developer it could be even in two people or even one person if he's super talented um and the manpower it gets it takes you to get to a 5 million dollar revenue so it's all about the core of course and we can

there we check and we can check uh the videos we start testing and this is on the left it's the first video that we created on i can paint um and it's all about the core of the game the core is very intuitive and you can really see and understand what you're going to do after two seconds of watching this video the core itself is very addictive it's very satisfying and eventually we can see it that even when we tested the game for cpi the first test for cpi got us 37 day one retention so we weren't testing day one retention at all the game had only one level and this is what you did this was the game there's no sophisticated ui there's no levels there's no um buyers coins anything that is of course in the game right now but when we started testing it this this

is what it was and it got us 37 percent in day one retention of course when we started adding metagame it jumped into 60 uh day one retention so if it doesn't seem real to you or just too good to be true let's talk about our latest success which is acrylic nails so it actually started from a pitch we had uh about acrylic nails we had it for a long time and we thought about it uh that could be very cool and drive great cpi it's a trend that we see on tick tock it's a trend that we see on instagram and it's uh something that you know this crazy corner virus time uh got one of our studios which is fireschool that while maintaining heavy live ops on soap cutting which is still alive and still making a lot of money they started creating this game acrylic nails and right now it's a top chart since

september which is two months in the charts and it's making a very nice effect on the industry and of course on for crazy labs and we can see um also the difference between soap cutting as a game and acrylic nails as a game in the metagame in the polish level in everything that the studio came to where it's at right now after only one year of creating hyper casual games so when they started creating hyper uh soap cutting it was november last year they failed a couple of tests and they hit uh an amazing trend with soap cutting now soap cutting isn't that sophisticated of a game but it showed uh of course great cpi retention and they evolved in creating many more tests and only and succeeded in july late july on the ctrl test for acrylic nails and you can see the difference and the progress that this studio had in the last year

so it's um started of course with uh a tick tock trend that we see uh a lot on tick tock and yes we use tik tok and apart from making us feel old every time i open this app i feel all of course and it's something that uh you know is will be always weird to me this app but i'm using it because i'm getting so many good ideas for gamification and for trends so if you're not using tiktok or instagram or youtube or anything for uh ideation you have to start today and if you're taking one thing out of this presentation is that you have to start so here start using social media to get ideas from so gamifying the trend was not easy of course and it's something that we had to watch a lot of videos of acrylic nails of how

it's done and of course the biggest challenge is to detect what makes what makes this video so viral is it the outcome is it the process is it the colors is this the amazing work that people do and it will never be the same if you do it at home it could be a lot of things but eventually it's the freedom of creation for the users so we needed to first make it [Music] very close to reality and to create the experience that the users get and the satisfaction that they're getting from watching these videos i mean it's one thing to find a trend to lean on and it's okay to do it but we also have to make it fun whether it's a simulation game or a narrative game or a puzzle or even an action game you need the execution to be good or else people won't play it

the timeline of acrylic nails was different than others hyper casual games that we published because the cta test was exceptionally well so we decided to skip the cpi test and the retention test we just went for an output test and so we spent uh a long time with our ui experts ux developers monetization we took the entire team of crazy labs put it uh together with firescore and they together very quickly working 24 7 on this game uh launched it and it was a huge success as you can see even when we launched the game where the best users should appear we only got day one retention of 37 in ios but the very very low cpi made up for it and of course the organic lift are still making up for it and allowing us uh to be profitable and to become top charts with a

relatively low day one retention so we decided to fully launch the game even though that we knew that there's so much that we can add and so much that there's left to be done so we started heavy live ops work including any amazing painting techniques vip levels and we gave a lot more freedom of choice to our users in what to create and how to create their nails in these simulation games i think that the most important thing to do is to give your player choices allow them to express their creativity if they want to um combine this color with that stencil or with this decoration they should be allowed to do it whether we monetize it through a rewarded video or whether we monetize it by progression and showing them interstitial they have to have freedom of choice because eventually if you direct them to do one thing

they will get bored and if they are not satisfied with the outcome or if it's not some the same outcome that they were hoping for once they started the level it just the users will just not play that so we keep showing uh progression to our users we keep giving them the freedom of choice and they have to keep discovering new things to keep them engaged by the way if you feel like you have a great team but you're just not sure how to start or if you have an amazing idea and you just don't know how to gamify it uh you can try joining one of our hubs we have one in india and one in israel we will open a few more very soon so keep following on that and our hubs are training the team we're helping them injecting all of the hyper casual knowledge we have into them and they're like going uh some sort of a hyper-casual boot camp if

you will and if you didn't find a hub that is relevant to you or your location uh you can always get in touch with myself or one of the other publishing managers for mentoring and coaching they'll do whatever they can of course to help you publish your game i think it's a good opportunity also to introduce you to our new click dashboard [Music] it's actually a great opportunity for you to sign up check it do everything self-served upload your game upload the video test it um of course you don't have to have a lot of hassles on on your end you just upload a video test it get the results so to sum it up um if you'd ask me what the most important thing i'd like to take from this talk apart from using social media and social networks and tick tock for especially for ideation is to stop being afraid of failing afraid of taking

your first steps in hyper casual start more build a small team or hook up with some talents from your industry and start exploring once you start developing hyper casual games you might just find yourself having the best winter you've ever had and this goes to show of course with acrylic nails and a lot of other games that we published over the last year from studios that it's not their main business hyper casual games or games at all and they're just creating it because first it's fun to start exploring and you will have immediate results think about that about working on a game for seven days that's it two three people working on a game for seven days on a video shooting it up there checking the ctr and cpc and already after a couple of hours you know if you have a huge game on your hands or something you need to kill and redo sometimes bigger companies smaller

companies they have dead weeks or dead hours in a day and this is the greatest time and the greatest opportunity especially in these times to catch the next uh hyper casual hit and of course the turnover and the breaking even point is so quick that in the same quarter you will start gaining of course the revenues from this game so guys i want to thank you all for coming i hope you stay safe crazy labs of course is still accepting peaches videos games so feel free to contact myself or any other publishing managers on the team um we are with you at these tough times well thank you that was a fascinating talk um yeah we've uh we're nearly at time but i'm gonna try and sneak in a few questions if that's okay of course um so yeah so um one that we had come in is let me just find it uh yeah so joel johnson asked what is the typical success rate in hyper casual games that

you look at in order to publish for example is it one in every 500 games or you know yeah so it really really depends there's no like magic number that i can pull off and say okay it's one of the out of 50 games that we test because there's a lot of there's a big funnel where you tell you can fail the city outs and you can fail the retention test uh higher quality studios and lower quality studios to the game 3d games but it's going to be hard for me to say one out of 50 games succeed but if you take a ballpark it's something like that if you're an average developer yeah and another question we had is um what percentage does a publisher get from the sale price for hyper casual game i suppose is it set or does it differ from game to game i suppose some people might not know yeah so uh there's a of course it's a net revenue share for most of the publishers out there it starts from 80 to the publisher goes

to 50 for some of us we try to be as honest and fair as we can because we do see the this this hyper-casual gaming industry and the publishing deal as part of uh mutual effort and yes uh we're do we have the the same um responsibilities and we have the same uh you know difficulties as the developers have we're trying to be as far as fair as we can our revenue share is 60 40. and that's how we work um yeah great and uh one last question we've got in here i think we can fit in is uh from joel again when doing the acquisition tests uh you know for example during acrylic nails uh was this significantly due to paid advertisement you know was the success significantly due to paid advertising or organic morality i don't think anyone can uh succeed

these days only with organic traffic yeah i mean these days passed when flappy bird uh passed away i mean everything right now in the in the market maybe except from longest is paid advertisement yeah the greatest uh deal about acrylic nails is that first the city house were amazingly high making the cpi very low you saw it there it's a load lower than five cents yeah us ios and there is there was a huge organic cliff we also did the pre-registration so we had millions of users coming up free because they pre-registered they really liked the trend but eventually we have to keep it up with uh paid advertisement of course yeah fantastic yeah i mean that's uh all the time we've got unfortunately but like say um are you in the discord by chance um yeah well like there we go then just uh once again to all the audience if we didn't get a chance to ask you a question

then uh rotten you'll be in the audience and we will have crazy labs back again at 11 20 when um yeah when you guys not yourself but crazy labs will be back talking about hyper casual live ops so obviously there'll be another chance to grab you guys as the day goes on yeah it's uh going to be a very fascinating one by michael uh yeah oops so uh stay tuned yeah definitely yeah so uh thank you rotten and uh yeah that was brilliant and like i say if anyone wants to ask you any more questions please grab you in the discord amazing thanks uh everyone thanks sophia thank you bye bye you