Telling your brand's narrative across mediums: A case study on Best Fiends

[Music] hi guys my name is reka I'm the SVP of game designer seriously worked in game design for 15 years so done a lot of stuff over the times my my profile picture is from the product like prestigious horse if I may app which unfortunately made its downfall and all this blockchain and cryptocurrencies came about but hopefully horse if I may comes comes back again that was the hottest thing in 2016 so when we started one of the things we wanted to do it seriously was basically work our own on our own IP and just make sure that we create the world we create the characters the whole creative side is ours two hours to kind of work with and be something that we can gonna extend into any other medium possible so we're

actually celebrating the is like the fifth year of seriously we have the birthday in like I don't know week and we have around 70 people working in Los Angeles in Helsinki we crossed over 100 million USD revenue some some time ago and not all nicely past that so especially the last year and a half has been has been really good for us best things it's a match-three puzzler slash kind of a fighting game where you can develop your team and fight against the slugs but this this five year has been a really kind of an interesting journey for us but it's been also a really interesting journey for the brand itself and their IP so the story of best win starts in the world of minutiae so back in the day one day in green glades all the insects there are kind of minding their own business until one day this giant meteor rocks across the sky and within the

meteor it carries the strange magical substance and that substance reigns over my new shine it kind of effects all the inhabitants a little bit makes them a bit smarter and more self conscious but ultimately that the ER then smacks right in the flanks of Mount boom the Mount sorry Mount Doom I'm not gonna be sued by the Tolkien corporation here and on the flanks of Mount boom leaves this colony of slugs and they've always been a bit kind of nasty but they have at their own differences with the insects of my news about this pink kind of contained but now when the power of the meteor is unleashed on to the this colony they grow really ravenous they grow bigger they grow hungry and they just they're just ready to eat anything so they basically pour out of Mount boom and spread spread out across my new show under the leadership of their mysterious slug King all the other life-forms in my

news are hunkered down they run away they hide whatever they can do to kind of get out of the way of this massive slug army and after all is said and done these bunch of insects remain they are there not many mostly the youngest but due to the meteor subtle influence they're a bit smarter and they're gonna know that they have to right the wrongs and together they basically have to travel the mount boom rescue their friends see if they can help the slugs cure them right the wrongs and they must become the best fiends so now all of these for the IP development it's really important for us that we have this kind of framework like obviously differs from IP to IP but we we really want to base this stuff on characters who are the antagonists protagonists what is the world what is the motivation all of this is basically as important for us does any other aspect in game development so after four years of traveling you can kind of see where the fiends have been

going at the moment they're kind of going off the map at the moment but luckily the Royal my news and cartographic society is hard at work in mapping the new boundaries of the world so we also have a lot of guests who come over and gonna see what we're doing because we kind of do we're especially the Finnish game it just everyone is doing their own thing so that definitely applies to us so we have a lot of guests who come over and once they gonna see everything we could have done they always ask like so where does this all come from and that is a very good a funny question because well we just creative people and we do this stuff and like how hard can it be so in order to give any kind of wings to the IP it kind of needs that sturdy base to be built on so for best fiends the game revolves around this small timeline that kind of covers the before and after portions of the meteor hitting Mount moon we explore like the past and the future in other games and other mediums but the kind of

best fiends is around like that the inflection point is the meteor hit and we can even though the game has been out for four years but we also kind of treat it like that in game that it's already been four years since the meteor hit so things are changing and times are changing so we did this groundwork we can gonna explore the world and the timelines we have a number of like short form animations out which gonna help a lot and they can of visualize things that we couldn't do in the game we're looking into an s what series we're pretty well known for the YouTube like creative marketing campaigns we've done with influencers a lot of charity work as well and given that we like 90% games people it's really important for us to understand that kind of other aspects of entertainment not just games so we we have these workshops in LA or LA studio and those guys are great because they're

like that's Hollywood then the time in the industry of the world so it's it's kind of nice to go there gonna open yourself up into like these true masters of like who create stuff so one of one of us like we had like Futurama and seems such boys actors we met some really high-class influencers and my personal favorite and also like a surprise was my friend like dig up this out of Drew Struzan book out of his bag and then I was like so why did you bring that over and then the rules throughs and walks in and this is the guy whose posters I've had on my like walls ever since I was like six years old and now this guy was talking the soit's it's like these guys create the best things ever so how do we bring this world to the players all this kind of story all this world all these characters and obviously with the caveat that we obviously want players to play the game and not just like click on cutscenes and stuff so you really need to be kind of smart about how you do this so there's a few ways we have a lot

of these kind of known interrupting discussions going on in the game so for example on this granny's log event that happens in the game every once in a while you can see these earthworms kind of discuss a bit about the past and kind of give a hint to the player that there is something other going on the in distant just like beating levels we use other forms so we have these we call them the hidden object hunts there's like very different kind of ways we do this but for example they're Freddie's lost souvenirs was you were essentially hunting along these different souvenirs and if you're an old player of best fiends you gonna get to revisit green glades and some of the places you started early on they have a bunch of riddles kind of where you kind of need to really figure out like where do you find these items and then when you do find them you are also kind of exposed to the history of my news and all the different characters like you don't have to care about it if you don't but when

you kind of dig into it you can you can see a lot of kind of a foreshadowing of new worlds new characters and so forth we could give a bit of limelight to some of our fiends so they have like single solo quests that are kind of in the world itself and again you get a bit of story here and there but it doesn't really interrupt you in any way one of our kind of most liked events is the thing called the my newest most wanted so as an idea this basically started as someone wanted to hunt a criminal in the world but because we want to like have that kind of fantasy or fantasy of the familiar in the game we're gonna want it to do the like whole nine yards on this so is essentially we randomized a slug criminal for you you random name random crimes depending on how well you do you get different criminals you keep track of everyone

you've captured in the bounty board and the nice thing is that it starts developing on its own so when there's only one criminal jailed he's just kind of like hey I didn't do it I don't even have arms like how could I be a criminal but then when you jail more and more of those slugs they start talking among each other they refer to them sale of something you can gonna eavesdrop on the conversation so you kind of know how the criminal gangs of them ionisation underworld operate so it's it's kind of funny to just just look into it so it like this has an interesting upside when we try the animation stuff into this so inspired by the my newest most one in our la for looks got an animation shot together and that works really nicely bit marketing because it kind of Drive seems those engagement because it's an event of its own it gives some really unique beats outside of the typical like Christmas season and summer and all that stuff so we can kind of define our own marketing beats and it's also very

differentiated in this gonna sea of sameness and speaking of animations so we did a few last year there's two coming out this year maybe third we'll see how it goes it took a few tries to kind of get this kind of this this working right in terms of what do we do in game and what do we do animation wise but currently they have like a total of 15 million views already so it's it's been quite popular and on that note we kind of gone over like we have over 600,000 subscribers on our YouTube page and we link our video content in-game so you can kind of see all of this stuff happening and as you're playing the game so you don't really need to go anywhere and like we have this kind of running show called the best best fiends show so that has seen like ever since we see a really nice increase in how many people and how fast people update to the newest

versions of the game and it's kind of funny like the marketing in general has kind of shifted a bit like just for this classic performance and user acquisition into this kind of always-on media like Instagram and there's a there's this trend of going back to the some of the traditional forms of media in addition to just doing like Facebook and Google bias so all of this is a really pretty positive impact so we're quite close to top 50 US top crossing games all of our marketing is highly efficient too so return on adspend is roughly around Taino indeed a hundred and twenty so kind of I'm approaching this bit of and I have a surprise for you guys so earlier in the year we had this unfinished animation script rolling around in the dusty floors of the Los Angeles studio so we didn't know if it's happening or not because you know the creative types like they kind of flip flop all the time like waste is funny or nothing can we get jokes working and so but but in any case our game devil

doesn't think what kind of inspired about it so this was a the idea was that the fiends find a baby's log and that they need to take care of it so this has already been a few years after the meteor hit so we start seeing some of these slugs who are necessarily as corrupt as the ones who were at the Ground Zero at the time some fiends get a hold of this and now you have to kind of take care of it and see if you can kind of grow it into being one of the like better slugs and maybe you're gonna turn the tide a bit so it was important here to tap into the fantasy of the family layer so you want to grow the baby slug into a kid and then on to a teenager if you do a really good job and you kind of send it off its way it kind of grows up and you get to see its story this like a few dozen stories involved in what actually happens when it gets free but if you're gonna screw it up it grows up as corrupt as all the other slugs in the world so you've done a bad job but even that we're gonna give you a story of like what what what happens next the animation itself is actually ready so the guys managed to kind of

squeeze it together it actually premieres tomorrow but you get to see it right now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] hello

I think we should wait two Sluggers our own I wanted to be a father for at least three minutes now I think we should reconsider this it's a slug after all oh it's just nature versus nurture well I'm bad nurturing is not a competition [Music]

we should name the baby we can't call it baby slug forever how about amber Junior I was thinking Gordon junior had such a better ring to it as de facto leader of the group [Music] [Music] beautiful spot up here we can get a very family photo who do this parenting thing would be so easy one pushing this tram up the mountain because you need to bond with the baby your dad number three after all the enemy just look at her evil dad dad

number three we could name you Howie jr. that's a strong name [Music] [Music] [Music] well couldn't see that coming I don't care if she was trying to kill us angel so if you are interested in

joining our little journey do get in touch we're a happy creative bunch of people we work on our own stuff in a good environment and I think for our Testaments are kind of incredibly good staff retention and we'll all kind of turnover kind of points that we are kind of doing know stuff in a nice way thank you very much thank you much time for questions I saw people charts just quick one it's not a quick question well anyone I'll ask it then the thing for me

the crux of it is you seem to be trying to kind of use the stories as a focal point that then builds layers upon layers but then yes you deliver in each media is that that is true your honor we are kind of delving into the questions that the IP itself is starting the race with this background how well the challenges you faced with that though just making sure that we are going on brand and IP in terms of like all the stories we tell us so yeah it's it's like it's it's tricky sometimes keeping it consistent consistency is key yeah exactly but see you guys have got a contaminant of delivering quite high quality I hope with all that as well so that does have some yeah on that note thank you very much thank you [Music]