The Future of Monetisation - PocketGamer.biz RoundTable

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our third ever won this one featuring and focused on the future of monetization so we're going to be talking about current trends in free-to-play monetization the future of monetization obviously the premium market and subscription models all sorts of stuff if you would please unmute yourselves my dear panel and we can get it started with the introductions who's first in my video list I'm gonna get your name wrong is it theis Mickelson that is 100 was incorrect there are few people pull that off in the first attempt yeah please twice introduce yourself well first of all thanks for having me and I am the CEO a founder of no description we just announced our subscription service for mobile games called Unleashed it's focused on free-to-play games we do support premium as well so we're building that and we are launching it later this year so

right now we're just building up the portfolio ahead of that launch cool um taper yeah hi I'm Jay Baer I'm VP of product at thinking ape and we make mobile games with they're making mobile games since 2009 and two biggest games are party in my dorm at kingdoms of hack fire so we have games that sort of appeal to very wide audience and they're both sort of versions of march battlers with a little bit more of a casual appeal and we're looking to publish our next game at the end of this year and we're both 85 people located in Vancouver Canada so it is 8:00 a.m. here thank you for joining us you must be exhausted lots of coffee um Oliver please introduce yourself yes hi my name is Oliver Kern I'm chief commercial officer at Lockwood

publishing we publish one app called a vacant life it's a huge 3d virtual world on mobile with with about 1.5 million daily active users yeah thank you I'm Dave hey my name is Dave rural I've been designing and producing games and running studios since 1994 for the last six years I've been leading a company called mobile game doctor we are mobile game design consultants we focus a lot we we cook we cover a wide range of design disciplines with a focus on system design and monetization design for free-to-play mobile and work with a variety of companies everyone from

Giants like you know king or social pointer Konami on down to tiny indie he's all over the world and yes it's early in San Francisco as well again thank you for waking up so early to join us for this one and Michelle hey I work at rocket ride technical difficulties this morning so sorry about the video I help developers and publishers connect more or less and help them negotiate their contracts as well as help them through a development process I've worked on multiple well I worked on consoles since Time Crisis Digimon world which is quite a long time ago and yet that's mainly what I do and I'm in San Francisco as well normally but I'm stuck in LA right now so hence the video issues awesome thank you very much right so yes we're going to be talking about the future of monetization and where it's all going and where we're all gonna be how we're gonna be spending money ten

years down the line or anything like that probably not that far but you get the idea and but first of all it's always good to ground ourselves and what's happening now a big open question open to everybody what would you say are the current trends we're seeing in free-to-play monetization Rick do you want anybody to start I was letting anybody jump in on that one so okay I'll start so I think what I'm seeing is that as an industry we're still kind of trying to figure out like what actually happened over the last two months and what that actually also means for our business models that's a bit how it feels for me people are certainly gearing up towards like longer-term commitments in terms of like pushing people into subscriptions and these kind

of things I've seen that now in in a few apps and that's why it's great to have somebody from the subscription side also there but I think we were all kind of veterans in the space so we've seen subscriptions come and go so I think it's going to be interesting to definitely talk about that as well and then you know a big kind of challenge has been but it's kind of starting to kind of normalize again has been certainly kind of the drop in ad revenues a lot of people have experienced but yeah it seems to be popping up again that's at least what I'm seeing so people are kind of going back to normal and wondering if like a big recession will will hurt us or not yeah I was going to say I think along with that sort of drop in you know ad revenue from rewarded videos etc um

there has been a corresponding drop in CPI's right which has been nice to sort of brand advertisers have fled and ordered cash it's left a little more room for performance markers right on the acquisition side um at least in our game that we have reasonably published each side we are saying you know some rebound in that CPI but some of that has to do with where the game isn't its life cycle some that has to do with the greater environment um in terms of the larger trends the sort of moment aside um for me I'm just really excited to see that after free-to-play monetization feeling really static in terms of methods right in terms of you know kind of technologies for how we're monetizing users things felt really static for a long time where there was just a endless ongoing refinement of gotcha right so you went from sort of explicit

virtual goods transactions to virtual good transactions with randomness and then it felt like we were sort of painting around the edges of that for years right and in the last year or two we definitely seen subscription come into play in part due to platform policies and perk you to developer innovations I find you know babble Taos is really kind of a fascinating new approach but it just feels like we're in a relatively rapid era of innovation around the technology of monetization that's pretty exciting I can just jump in then a bit about at least what we see from the subscription side is actually going back to 2009 when everything was premium then we went to 2012 where everything will moved into free-to-play of course with Angry Birds and subway service and classic trans all that but now we see the move towards description I do however don't think it will be like it was for free-to-play where everyone

went free-to-play I don't think it will be only subscription the way we see it is that most companies are sort of realizing that their game needs sort of three pillars to stand on one is ads one is in-app purchase and one is subscription of course this is generally speaking that they're not saying this is true for any game if all games would you say but but I think that that combination is something that people are more interested in now than then there were just a year and a half ago yeah yeah I think this question was really fun last year because battle pass was relatively new and you had sort of the rise of the Battle Royale games sounds like a fun question just kind of like either you know talk about how fun battle pass was or crap on it kind of thing and now it's just sort of like part of the design expectations of people so when people come in and they start playing now you have a battle past question later but it seems like we're kind of talking around it but you know people expect it now and so it becomes a

useful design pattern in that everyone expects it so they're going to look for that that purchase when they install the game and I think fortnight and pub G have created a new expectation for mobile audiences in our in our games and have attracted a whole new audience and rather than like make it more difficult developers it's just brought a whole new set of people into games with different expectations and I think that we're gonna start seeing a lot more games with mechanics that as maybe jaded mobile game designers we didn't think we're really ever going to be possible like I never thought there was going to be a really good multiplayer free shooter on mobile I just didn't think it was possible and now we see that and the audience that plays those games though grew up with mobile devices as their primary gaming device so they aren't like shackled to this idea that like a shooter has to be this super high quality twitch experience they actually are comfortable playing games on mobile and that's something that is completely new so I think you're gonna be seeing

all kinds of new experiences coming out in the long term that have a lot of different monetization models but more than the monetization it's going to be just different formats well I think it's also worth calling out you know some stuff that I I don't want to call this the bottom of the market but it kind of is around you know art down right over the last couple of years we've seen not necessarily interesting monetization technique but sort of interesting new business models floating out in hyper casual right around being sort of super a driven super network driven very little production value I've actually been really interested in the efforts of players like skills to find alternative monetization around those quick hit play right in the casual and hyper casual range through that that kind of you know player-versus-player world winner skill gaming model and it feels like they've been able to get you know some some

meaningful degree of traction around that right as a white label platforms I think that's also a relatively interesting relatively recent development in monetization of free-to-play cool what do you think about you know competing with the companies like gem city let's say that are in a hyper casual space but maybe you know raised like 150 million dollars so there you weigh budgets are gonna be maybe tied to some other success metrics then let's say it's working with like your own recoup period of time right you you're spending your own money so I mean I certainly don't think of dam city as being in the hyper casual space you know in terms of least their offerings that I'm familiar with right there more of you know what I would consider a typical casual game offering right heavy focus on sort of puzzle games some some like builder metas right or saga type metas um so you know those guys I think are going

toe-to-toe with the peaks and the kings of the world right they're not really trying to sort of chip away at you know the the Voodoo's or catch apps or say games right um I do think you know I think it's really hard to be an independent developer making a match 3 game right I think that is a long thin ops funnel spin up funnel more coffee unless you you know you have a game that's incredibly performant out of the gate right um you know the payback intervals that you're talking about I think are always an interesting dialogue certainly between developers and publishers when it comes down to user acquisition strategy a lot of the folks in the core space are operating on you know 360 day payback periods are longer because they can afford to right they know they have those users in

a lot of smaller publishers are looking at you know kind of focus on 90 day or 180 day row ass and you know as an independent developer it's really hard to have the cash to even focus on 180 days I agree but it also comes with like an opportunity in the sense that you know with a with a really really harsh recession I do believe that also kind of rose curves will change their behavior I do think there might be a point where you know banking on the fact that you know I'm gonna make my bunny money back in 360 days or even 720 days like blue usually does is absolutely high-risk if that profile of kind of monetization then starts to change because people spend money on food but not as much on kind of impulse entertainment that's

that bears like a huge risk doesn't it yeah and I mean I think it's a really you know it's a difficult moment to anticipate right because you know CPI's and revenue sort of tend to attract in tandem but when you're placing bets two years into the future and god only knows the last few weeks had taught us that the future is farm were fundamentally unfor castable than any of us had ever imagined right yeah it's a little scary to be that that t7 20 person yeah we certainly had the thought that we we should maybe think about spending a lot more on you a just give me the drop in CPI's and increase in revenue to but being risk-averse think we're kind of like let's just see how things shake out and yeah I don't really know what the

right nobody knows what the right answer is we know people for example in the space who were spending a lot more on marketing because they're trying to take advantage of what they see is a short window yes or it depends on your risk profile when it comes to to realize really yeah I mean a lot of it really hangs on what is your current cash flow and what does your bank account look like right and that'll build your risk tolerance profile and one of the things I do wonder there's a whole you know we're drifting away a little bit from monetization right but there's a whole cottage industry of debt financing for acquisition right that really is focused on the stability of those models um and I wonder you know sort of how were those companies going to be impacted right in this moment and how how are they possess are they positioning themselves defensively right at this time are they sort of assuming that you know in 180 days we'll return

to normal yeah well and you know you said we're kind of drifting off the monetization but actually maybe maybe that's the answer to that question where the future of monetization looks like given the state of discovery is that actually it's all about robust and that means it's all about the combination of products and UA and that's something that we definitely are seeing a trend towards is that you know product teams are becoming highly embedded in UA teams and and the you know sympatico relationship between those two teams has become quite blurred and that's a that's a challenge also right because AG guys don't necessarily think like product folks and so there's some tension there yeah yeah I mean that's actually something we've reflected in the way that we structured our business at mobile game doctor so over the last that we began as a design consulting company because that's you know where my strengths in my background are but over the last year we've also added a marketing consultancy right to help developers find scalable marketing approaches right combinations of

creative and targeting on which they can acquire profitably and then scale um and a lot of our thinking about how we communicate about what we're doing what our brand is very much about that sort of Union of the performance marketing side and the product side and how they need to work hand in glove to enable your success we're very much believers in that sort of synthesis I'm gonna steer the conversation just a little bit 15 minutes and I'm feeling a bit luckily um I just was wondering so we've covered quite a lot of topics there I'm wondering if there are any monetization options that you feel developers aren't really taking advantage of yet that they should be looking towards I know we've sort of mentioned like a three pillar system of having ads in in-app purchases and possibly battle passes there any other Mon ization ways that with developers and Studios aren't exploring yet that they should be I was gonna say sorry no

no I was gonna say I shall go ahead anyways but I was just gonna say one thing that out when I was working on Kerbal space program that we didn't do but we looked into was obviously there's battle passes there's loot boxes so on and so forth but if there's a way to integrate or mesh that more or less with real-life merch that's something that could be looked into as well because a lot of kids play games or watch people do they play games but they watch people play games but they don't actually play the game like if you for example if you go to like big box for big box stores for example Target Walmart whatever kids buy a you know like something for example five nights at freddys t-shirts but they've never played the game they watched they've watched people play the game so I'm just saying there's a bigger opportunity for real-life merch in the games and a way that that could be pushed would be through loot boxes through you know people I battle past

here's a coupon for a t-shirt or something you could go pick up or we'll mail it to you this that and the other so I think it could be more it could be deeper you do that Oliver in navigator we tried people are when they play games they're not necessarily in shopping mode so like a direct conversion is really really hard but you can definitely create like awareness for for for the brand's for sure but yeah it's they're not in like shopping mode so you know if you would aspire to do some kind of an affiliation with a brand then it's gonna be quite disappointing I would say because yeah people are happy to kind of buy a pair of Nike trainers virtually but they would then they would go off also to the website and check out the same trainers but they're not currently

looking to buy those trainers so then they're kind of just browse around but but don't make then a purchase right it's not adjusted so that I think that one of the things that I think the most most could look at is that I think as an industry we've become a bit desensitized towards these sort of large groups of users in a chance and it's all like cohorts and user groups and hundreds of thousand millions of people and I think we sometimes tend to forget that it's that these are real people that are you know with real lives who are playing your games and maybe I think we could look more into what it is that they actually need and not so much what is that we would like to sell them and I think Michelle's point and all of us point as well as about understanding what what it is and what they're shopping for word now what is they're looking for maybe they don't want if they're like I don't know if they're in a shopping game they maybe they don't want to have a t-shirt with the games logo but they

want some really cool no dress or whatever from the game and maybe it's outside of the game maybe it's closer access to to the dance maybe there's some things you can do there that's there's so many things you can play around with if you if you go across the data and we become really good at looking at data I don't think we have to move a little bit towards looking at people again and trying to understand them and understand their motivations a bit better I do agree on that now one other thing that I would like to bring up in terms of monetization and there are a lot of well not a lot but there are a number of agencies that are trying to solve that is like native advertising so not the kind of disruptive so to say because you have to wait for 30 seconds of your life to kind of get the coins these rewarded videos but actually you know native experiences so like in racing games in kind sports games etc but also in in kind of virtual worlds etc to kind of place advertising there I think it's still far

away and I know like 15 years ago Microsoft era had big attempts to kind of solve this but maybe now attack is also where it would need to be to actually be able to kind of serve the right ads to the right users I don't know but it's definitely something that where there is at least some interest but yeah I mean I think it's because we're Knights doing it right like for net is leading the charge on that they have massive you know brand activity within their their games and they release music albums they have concerts like they're really already sort of at the forefront of that and another game that's doing it really well which maybe Michelle if you haven't checked it out its cup of fashion is really good at this of like connecting people it's specifically designed around that and that's what it speaks to theis point that they're giving a specific audience that's underserved a whole different experience than what as game designers

we expect that they want same with design home that game is incredible because it's not designed for what you would think like you download it as a game designer and you're like what is this they've done everything wrong this is not like they're serving an audience that you just don't think about so like the future of monetization is about serving these underserved audiences and new ways that speak to them and it in a way that's not that nice yep awesome cool and so we've mentioned battle passes quite a few times now I know I had a question of like how important our battle passes and then I get the feeling that it's kind of fairly important across most games are there any sort of genres or games that you feel they're not really well-suited for or is it is this something that all developers and studios should be looking at at this point because the thing that makes me question this is payday pop the soft-launched supercell game which has a puzzle pass which acts as far as I can

tell uh pretty much the same as a battle pass to me that seems like it wouldn't work so is that is that the feeling across the industry or are we all looking at that and going oh yeah maybe this is this is the way Dave you seem you're not mutants oh yeah well no no I mean I was I was gonna mention heyday Poppins you asked that question right it seems like the obvious reference you know I'll certainly say for a game like heyday pop or for a casual game that's really sort of focused on gated progression um I think the level of difficulty and pulling off that little past I'll monetization is much much higher than you know in the battle royale games that they've come out of right in a contest where in a game that is a relatively pure contest of skill we're really engagement doesn't move you forward except in as much as it gives you practice knelt raise your skill and

what you're really selling is the ability for people to badge themselves based on performance we're based on style adding more cosmetics to that mix doesn't really undermine your ability to kind of balance the game or further monetize the user in any way right if you think about something like a puzzle game a lot of what the effort goes into there where it's ordered PvE it's heavily you know engagement an investment based in terms of progression in terms of pride a lot of a lot of time goes into creating a razor's edge balance of difficulty versus flaherty ability right of making sure that that difficulty curve sits well when the player gets the normal set of rewards so figuring out a secondary set of rewards that it's functional that it's meaningful to a progression focused player like that that isn't balanced

busting is a really really tricky artform I'll be super interesting to see how players respond to it commercially but I just see a lot of challenges in pulling off the design successfully I think I think there's a lot of truth to that I think when it when they do pull it off I think it's very successful and I think for personal games I think play ricks is quite successful in garden scapes I think they have a better pass and I'm saying this as a player so I think it's it's working really well and and I think if you look at the reason why paddle pass is working and that's why I think it fits most games is that it fits with the way you engage with games so you sort of you know your mobile games you know you spend some time with them but maybe not years know some games they do but but generally speaking it's a short period of time and they also have this huge loss aversion mechanic built into them that is just like you really feel that you have to

buy into it otherwise you almost it's what's the point and so I think that's that's what makes it so strong and I think I would almost frame it the opposite way of Dave is that if you're if if it doesn't fit maybe you need to change the game it's a pity because it's a it's such a strong model and I think it's just it's a really really strong model for for mobile games yeah I also think like these the the it's about trying to understand like okay what what is it that the player would want in such a service because then you are really kind of treating your your game more as a service and then you know what is what is the benefit that you want a player to have over over a longer period of time and that you know you can't do it the same way for for every game and that's why I think we will will see definitely a lot of experiment around what what is it that you get as extra in these battle passes is this

more something access to certain things which is is more like subscription type of thing or is it like extra you know advantages or these kind of things and I think you need to really figure that out for each game to then kind of make a decision like okay is this the right offer that we actually have for the users right I do believe that or from me personally it always feels like a bit like a subscription light so people are not really willing to kind of go all the way with subscription so they rather then kind of do like a a non-recurring commitment to say but eventually I I feel like okay why is this not a subscription technology sorry the subscription technology didn't exist in the games were they originated at the time right on on console they didn't they didn't they weren't set up to give

developers easily easy access to subscriptions and it wasn't a free-to-play sort of scenario so how do you give cross-platform value and that's the same for everybody with like a diverse set of technology and so this is sort of like their answer of like well let's just make our own subscription light and have loss aversion built in and then 350 million people now play for tonight now we all have to do battle pass that's how I thought of it Jake yeah that's a good point but in you do it is important you have to do it now sorry ty see I interrupted you Oh fine okay great um okay I do have a list of questions I'm trying to think of always a segue into them but my mind is failing me and so I just get a solo throw my throws into this one obviously we saw it touched on on the change to the market that there's brought about by the current pandemic and and potential of

going into a recession have there been any changes in spending habits that you've seen I mean we've heard over and over again that we've had a lot of there's been higher revenues and our attention and that kind of thing have there been any changes and how people are spending that money and how yeah that kind thing or is it just more you already seeing more I mean so we're for example we are spending more but we're much more conscious we we let less things slip so to say so we're much more on the ball there which kind of comes obviously with spending more you need to kind of be then possibly more responsive but I think it's also about like really making sure that you know you there are no excuses because it's it's rather kind of getting the Rose window shorter than longer if that

makes sense yeah and I guess is that one of our partner publishers mentioned to me that they they saw this sort of you talk about the terms of fair how people act differently it's more like they said that they're I think the phrase was you know weekdays is not like weekends and weekends are like holidays so they're sort of just it's the same behavior it's just changed into those different days Michelle yeah cuz we've seen from from fine Tigers numbers we've seen a big uptake in downloads - especially on switch as well as I've seen projects shift from working with other developers to get them on you know to make them partner with hope but some of the larger publishers at first it was a no career the end of December and now as of last

month in the month before people are looking for a lot of larger publishers that I worked with are looking for more games for consoles so there's definitely a big people developed a strong taste for more console and are kind of clamoring for it I would say especially you know since if you go to the store today it's it I can't find a switch anywhere still and that's just one platform I can and also um funny and funny story I've been a Mac user for a long time and uh guess who just built their first tower and five ten years yesterday so yeah there's definitely a growing demand or the and it gets more acceptable play games so more clean more people are playing games than ever so it's the pandemic more or less is just and I'm so going into another question the pandemic more or less I think has made people more more people play games people that I think maybe never played games before now cool yeah and I mean we've seen a large

number of downloads as well as that is that true across the board are we seeing more and more people who wouldn't have played games before joining in on games Oliver seems like you yo yeah I mean we've we've seen we've seen look I mean you know running like a 3d virtual world where you know social is like key to the whole application you know in in like in times where people say at home this is obviously great because people then spend even longer time in there I mean we're we're you know in we're somewhere competing with something like tick tock in terms of time that people spend in the app so it's like an hour hour 20 something like that alright so a huge amount of time that people spend there and yeah downloads you know III think you know if you if you haven't received many downloads before then obviously it's still hard because it's it didn't

get less kind of competition but you know those that were getting lots of downloads they definitely did benefit from that so we were always getting like a lot of organic downloads as well and that has just grown or but then also stabilized at a certain point where it's like okay this is kind of you know for us organically what we like what we're kind of getting and then it's again like okay let's do more with kind of you a etc what I do see is that you know even though people spend a lot more time in game doesn't mean that they that they spent exactly the same amount more also we have seen like a huge uplift and in revenues but you know maybe yeah if it were one-to-one it would be amazing well you know which which comes to you you know I think sort of unfortunate

consideration at the moment that we shouldn't lose sight of right certainly you know we're seeing these jumps and engagement and you know we're seeing leaves the client sleepy and more people playing because people are stuck at home perhaps some of the reason that we're not seeing a correspondent you know increase in IEP is there's a lot of people who have you know lost their income either taking significant economic damage and I think it's you know it's important to be mindful of the circumstances in the world that are creating that bounty for us and think about how can we you know how can we give back and offset that alright it's an important moment to contemplate that we actually are seeing an increase in an IEP and I just was pulling some data and it's primarily not in our top tier offenders but in the tier below we're

seeing a big uptick so like one of our mid-range I'm spending players and everyone below that and also an uptick in and installs and so we're seeing you know for example the day that the u.s. got their stimulus check was a really big revenue day for us I don't know if that is you know that's why we also launched a budget problem we have seen that as well no no no that definitely is absolutely true yeah it does make it doesn't make a big difference but you know we if you see like 50 percent more engagement you know we didn't see 50 percent for revenues we saw a lot more but not one to one that's all yeah definitely it wasn't it wasn't one to one but one thing you know of a question actually for Dave because you've been true maybe a moment like this before with the financial crisis in

2009 right and Farva launched in 2009 I got the time was there like sort of also this feeling of uncertainty around you know this business model you're muted your music oops sorry so yeah I mean it was an interesting moment from that perspective right as we were discussing before the before the streaming started right it was a very unique moment in the development of games on Facebook canvas where you know users were incredibly cheap and easy to find right you could expand your game rapidly cast the net very wide and I think the fact that the platform itself was on our rocket ride right sort of made everybody feel kind of invincible right in that window I

think it was a really rough time for small independent shops right it was a really rough time for people to raise money but for established players we could access on the platform and good sophistication around virals um you know it felt like a really easy time to expand even in the depths of that recession and you know it was also certainly a moment where people needed entertainment and we were providing it in a very accessible way games and you know a lot of sort of relatively inexpensive entertainment have typically not Moo not been moved as much right over the the decades that I've been doing it by economic cycles my people still seem to be wanting to still seem to want to be entertained and you know

don't put this in the same category as large luxury purchases so you can you know watch automotive purchases crash and and game purchases grow steadily nothing too little be interesting to see how we write it through this time given that the the platform's been out there for a while and it's relatively stable sorry thanks no no go ahead so I cut you off oh no no I'm I'm I would just piggyback I'm talking about how the environment changed back then and I think if we look at we talked a bit about the premium games but I think that this this global recession has been the I think the last nail in the coffin for premium games and I think looking back at what started back then I think it was Apple had I think with a blockade has sort of killed off premium but also saved them in a sense by throwing out a lifeboat saying this is a blockade jump in or get left in the water and I think

a blockade is a is a great thing in its own right and I think it's doing a lot of good things for a lot of games I think it's not ultimately great for all developers for various reasons but I think that is definitely definitely now with with this as I said a premium I see totally totally cornered I'm seeing one expending that that kind of money on a game upfront and I think looking at the previous recession in 2009 we didn't free-to-play wasn't that big and so it's going to be interesting to see at least a mobile so it's interest is interesting to see how it survives but free is always going to be free and free you can't I mean you can't argue against free and that's so I think I think free-to-play is kind of is very well positioned for for the coming years yeah I mean for me I think particularly once you sort of turn your gaze beyond you know mobile right it's hard to call premium debt there's still a lot of

people paying a lot of you know $60 increments for a lot of I mean noble obviously fo sho yeah and I think even on Apple arcade if you go and talk to those guys now their strategy is evolving right in terms of what kind of products they see flourishing on that platform you know it the initial salvo games felt like a lot of you know very indie experiences like a steam competitor there's a lot of money or stuff in fact a lot of the initial catalog were steam really the excess products right that Apple arcade brought over and had adapted there um from all the rumors that I hear I think the kind of products that you're gonna see Apple funding they're going forward are going to be fairly different and to look more

like the kinds of cyclical designs that typically work on mobile right maybe just in some harder to monetize frames yes sorry um that actually sort of brings me on it kind of brought me on to the next question of about premium experiences it is I mean we obviously Tyson said that they're dead completely but it does anybody else feel there's any room still in the market for premium or is it we all kind of an agreement that there's is just gone now that has been replaced by apple arcade there hasn't been a meaningful place for premium on mobile for for a while right I mean I think it's the sort of thing where you know you may be able to scrape something together as a small indie team but by and large honestly a lot of the most successful premium games or many of

the successful games premium games that we've been seeing on mobile over the last X years are you know ports from successful indie games on other platforms right so the kind of don't starve sort of dungeons and so on right they're just incremental revenue streams for those developers yeah Premium is really really really hard no yeah they will still be the one or other exception maybe but overall like as a okay this is as a studio to decide like this is what we're gonna do on mobile yeah that would take a take a lot of gun I think the lifeboat analogy is really good with apple arcade and like the people that I know making games for Apple arcade were it may be smaller shops that you know had a few developers working for them and they would put out a game and it would be you know flash-in-the-pan they make some money and then they go to their next project and they were sort of just doing this an apple arcades allowed them to actually build studios where they can maybe have a little bit more

stability for themselves but they're completely you know tied to the Apple development dollars that they're they're gonna get to make the game and you know after the game launches what I'm hearing is that the the KPIs for those games and the profit sharing afterwards is not as important as getting the next development project and then where my friends that you know works for like let's say darkest dungeon or or you know don't starve for them they see this more as an exposure exposure play from from what I hear so you know you stuff to build an audience and Apple arcade gives you access to a different audience and the free market like the free-to-play market does so I think actually for those guys to what I'm hearing is their brand is actually starting to become important because now an apple are okay if you see a game that you like and I go find other games from the same developer and Apple are that's a good way to find games because maybe Apple arcades game discovery is not great I didn't and so people are you know trying to find new ways to find

games and that bread is now really important where I'm free to play nobody nobody knows for the most part what your brand is most players go and download your game and they know the game not the planned the studios I worked with the advocates you tabor were saying this we're saying exactly the same thing that's it really helped them build their brand and even saved where the students we've worked with for almost extinction so cool I guess this is kind of a stupid question but it's something I always am interested in in the premium market is when we typically think of premium games on mobile we think maybe like the top tier is about $5 and anything more than that is it's not gonna happen or you just don't release it unless you're Nintendo and you do super Mary written it's ten dollars and we have seen some developers and it's particularly in Japan where we've seen games like Monster Hunter stories which was released for $20 a few months ago danganronpa trigger happy havoc which released a few weeks ago at the I think

is $18 or something like that so I guess we've answered the question of what was the point in this is in that it's kind of an incremental thing it's just a separate thing for players but is is is the is the market ready for that is there any chance that with better technology people looking for more involved experiences is there an opportunity there for these kinds of super premium and experiences or are we just waiting for free-to-play developers to keep going with their deeper experiences again we probably answered this question already but if you just want to run around and don't call me an idiot then then that works I don't think you're an idiot at all I think it's it's a I don't think the I can't speak for Japan that's bit outside of my comfort zone but I think for the Western market it's it's not the right thing right now and I think the the reason there's primarily actually that people are used to going into the Google Play Store or

the App Store with a certain mindset and that's they're framing when they go in that they're not expecting to pay 20 30 40 50 dollars for a game so you would have to bring them out of that mindset and I'm not sure that just adding more in the game so I think for sure we will see it at some point but it has to require some completed new innovation and in how you frame it it's like if you go to the cinema I heard some guys say you should pay $100 to go to the cinema and then you get like foot massage or something that might be worth the money but you're in the mindset of a cheap cinema ticket not spending $100 so I think that's that's that's a primary reason why it won't work I understand be interesting interesting to see what happens with either of those because for sure the Japanese market is a lot different than the US market they've been buying I would say pretty high quality mobile games for a long long time because when back when brew is popular here they had flip phones with

better screens than anything in the current market but for for example danganronpa which I know I'm mispronouncing even though I never played the game we've quite a lot and we've seen the C and actually if access takes it because axis usually axis usually publishes it in the US or in the Western market to see if they take it as an A something to try in the mobile market that would be that'd be really interesting I don't know if they would do well or not because definitely people that play hardcore her RPGs more or less are all about the game and they buy anything with the games on a more or less with the title on it I mentioned CJ I think the normal player that plays you know for example candy crush is gonna go and buy it maybe not maybe it'll just take hardcore players from console and PC and a new way which I hope it works but I don't I don't know we'll see cool and so just to move on from that a little bit we've talked a lot about

subscription services and which talks a lot about apple arcade and its place in the market one thing that I don't think really gets talked about a lot is the Google Play Pass so I was kind of wondering what people's opinions on that were because I mean does anyone remember the Google Play Pass cuz it kinda it was a it was announced kind of like a couple of weeks after Apple arcade and then seems to just disappeared out of existence I mean do it has it made any impact on the industry is it something that developers should be looking at tabi you're making a lot of faces well I think if you google stadia and maybe read some of the articles around it's a success you can kind of see what's going on with the streaming games from Google like a lot of these services are gonna depend on either the way that the platforms handle the discovery or it's gonna depend on what kind of exclusive titles they get and what Experion if you go back to the premium question like the

games that are gonna be successful or ones that already have an audience and come to the market like there are people that will pay like Blizzard for example trying to do a free-to-play diablo mobile game i think they didn't misread their audience if they would have just released diablo on mobile as a full experience like diablo 2 even and made it like expensive to buy people would have would have bought it but the pokemon came out with a you know premium game those fifty dollars on mobile they people would buy it but there's there's not like a good spot for people to enter the market or create new experiences and i think the same is true for most of these streaming platforms if you aren't part of that discovery from the platform itself i would say it's a virtue if that in fact diablo title came out i would be all over it that is my favorite yeah they just miss they just misread i mean you can see right well they're well they're on stage like but we're bringing you diablo and mobile and everyone's like no you keep doing it wrong like

they just read everything about their audience like yeah i guess another thing i i've always been wondering is like apple arcade as we mentioned had a huge launch where now i can't do math but about eight months after its launch and it seems to have died down does it still have potential as a market for developers who wants to make premium games or is it time to just sort of move on and kind of forget it Tice do you have any any opinions on yeah I do have opinions I think ever locate is is good I think it's it's a good for players which is the most important there's some really good quality games at a very low price point I think for some developers it's definitely a viable option but I think for those developers who want to really scale their business I don't think it's a viable option at all and I think we have to remember that capital

is not in the market to necessarily help game developers they're in the market to sell more phones and they do that by tying consumers into the ecosystem whether that's through a blockade album news say Apple news whatever and eventually sell subscriptions for the hardware this is still predominantly hardware company so I think that's that's their focus and a thing that is what you'll see but I think you also see I mean it has been successful but then again compared to how many people actually considering that they own the platform and own the distribution it's not that successful them that's maybe more a sign of how much Apple cares about it and whether or not this it's good games to be honest I also I mean I think Apple is trying to make a meaningful transition not that they're gonna stop being a hardware company but they really want to make these you know subscription revenue streams viable and important right in their you know in their business mix and I certainly think

that they are going to uh aggressively push money at trying to make it viable for the vast majority of devs that have been participating right it's really the advances rather than the royalties that make the platform interesting at all so on the one thing I think it's still viable it's still interesting for some period of time so long as Apple is willing to kind of continue to overpay and make sure that there's a meaningful profit margin on the advance then you know that's you know as as ty said I think a good business for an indie where you know you can sort of build one game for the price of two and be you know ensure that you get another bite of the Apple right now your way to try to make something big and you know if you get some some royalties I'm out of it then you know all the more

power to you and I think just adding to that I think what would you agree to what you're saying and I think the Challenger see with is that is that games are becoming could become a commodity and I don't I'm not sure we as an industry are interested in that we see some of the largest companies in the world most powerful companies for sure entering our market which they've been eyeing our revenues for a long time and we see the likes of Amazon doing collaborations with singer for Amazon Prime or you get in-game content for one of the games they have done this with twitch prime for let's say another segment before and they're more they'll be entering soon but this is not to help developers this is to sell their subscription so games are becoming that commodity so think that once people start realizing that they'll maybe shy away from it and I think that's where I think publishers will have to they will start working together much more than

they do today is lots of more Gardens and just loving sort of uses from one side to the other and not helping anyone I think publishers of all sizes when will come to work together either because they wants you or by sheer necessity when these big guys come in and turn our industry into commodities for their own subscriptions yeah that's that's my that's my hope and at least that they will do that I think also if you just open the app store and try to find a game that's interesting to play either on like a free-to-play game or an apple arcade you can see that maybe you know I don't get trouble but the App Store redesign that happened a couple years ago is not being very great for discovery I know it like decimated a lot of studios who relied on getting featured and now features do not get you in the installs I could speak it like about that but I don't want to get in trouble so let's just say that I think that Apple has a huge opportunity

to rethink how they allow studios to get discovered I'm actually really surprised the studios don't become king makers more to diversify the platform that they don't maybe do what they did with some something like the vainglory I think is their MOBA title that they got really far behind right and like that game maybe didn't necessarily do that great but it's sort of propped up by the exposure and I think that all the platforms could do a lot of be interesting to see if they maybe took that approach of like okay here's some studio something of good experiences like let's feature them more but they only do it in sort of an editorial style and I think that that's like damaging to discovery and also damaging to our kid because um arcades not competing with these like huge you know editorial things on the today page that are done are driving engagement so I don't know I don't understand how yeah they're just pretty yeah they're pretty there's been like this for a long time and they haven't addressed it so that tells me that they don't really have an incentive to like

drive volume of players to specific games and that's happy with that yeah for them it doesn't really matter that much like they they're making their money it's growing and then you know whatever they are featured as long as it's not total crap you know it's you know okay it goes to this developer that developer in terms of revenues but that's that's about it cool we're just coming close to time so I'm just going to turn we've got a couple of questions in the in the Q&A section so just gonna take time out to read a couple of those for a wrap-up so Andy cow asks okay and the hyper casual monetization model expand to deeper experiences so I guess that's a lot of hugely ad based model can we can we transplant that into deeper experiences that have more than the hyper casual gameplay loop they tested I

mean to kind of survive it has to I mean we've seen these kind of I feel like okay we it's it's been you know it always goes in waves but you know it's great that kind of arcade-style games have found a way to make money on mobile which is great they were always the underdogs and always struggling to kind of make these and up dolls etcetera and they've found a way but now obviously they also have to then kind of you know develop further depths in in the question in the in the content because otherwise yeah yeah otherwise it's just a marketing machine which it is currently well that said though if you talk to you almost anyone who's really playing actively in that space and focused on hyper casual right um they all tell you that a lot of the key to their success is effectively really really low development budgets right they'll work on something for less than a month push it out to the market right

see if there's you know good user response and sort of you know rapid-fire essentially a bunch of prototypes out there um just because the the hit rate on these is so low and the amount of revenue that they're able to drive out of turn ad strategies is so low right that they just have to get a ton of stuff out there and see what sticks and I think that's a really hard spiral to you know break out of um you know we we've seen the beginnings of that I'm actually working on a little mini talk for another conference on the ortero metagame right and sort of how that has impacted the outcomes for that product um but yeah it's hard you you have to have something that I think really takes off before you can build the kind of investment that builds depth cool yeah I don't know I'm a bit of a

pessimist here I just think that so much of the hyper casual fuel is people selling VC money back and forth through you a like all these companies are highly funded and they're all trading users back and forth through the same monetization channels it's the same traffic it's they're buying the same traffic they're just passing the same set of users back and forth and gleaning pennies off of each other and they're the deep monetization that comes from IEP is that creates value for players comes from deeper experiences and so unless they're getting brand dollars and bringing that advertising revenue in from outside of the mobile market itself then they're really just passing that money back and forth between them and then you know companies like Apple Evan or just like Oh taking their chunk every time yeah I mean I think a lot of the the best and most successful players there at this point has four large networks that they can cross they can cross promote across right so they sort of pay for the nickel once and then you know gather a nickel here and nickel nickel here ultimately it stacks up

cool and just one final quick question from the audience if you are will Steve asks if you offer a free to play game with AI ApS is an end user that plays hundreds of hours without spending in your game your worst nightmare or is it still good to broaden the install base depends on the game mechanics and the genre for us we build sharded hyper hardcore strategy games like march battle games for example and so for every person that spends a lot of money they need a target to attack and they need like a realm to play with and a social experience and so actually for us it's the opposite those people fuel and really good experience for everybody else and they really piss off high spenders when somebody is really good at the game because they just spend a lot of time on it that actually is really really important for ecosystem of all our games yeah same for us I mean we're we're somewhere between a social platform in the game so you know every user there that kind of

participates in in the community inside the app is super valuable regardless of if they spend or not yeah I don't think that's it's a it's a it's a god-sent gift because that's a person who is I bet willing to spend on the game but you just haven't found the right thing to sell them yet so there's an opportunity to learn and going back to my point from earlier about looking at people instead of just looking at data I some hard times here publishers talking about and labeling guys like this one in the example as non-payers but I would say I pretty sure they pay for something at some point in their lives so it's just you not offering them something that they're interested in buying right now so find out what it is and bring that product to them that's you have someone who loves your game I'm pretty sure they'll go pay for it I would say to you Samir plays that that many hours probably has their friends playing the gamer has encouraged somebody else's download video as well so there's never any bad players in anything I would say we all have a get

one game that has trade which allows people to trade goods and so a lot of times like lower spenders are actually spending a significant amount of time generating products for other people to buy I like to trade for so they're going out and grinding for things and doing you know non valuable activities but that actually creates like an aggregate value within the economy as a whole awesome great thank you very much everybody I think we'll wrap up there because we're a little bit over time just to quickly say that don't forget Pocket Gamer connects digital number two is coming next week we will have several of more roundtables there as well as wonderful talks and panels if you haven't got a ticket do please get one it's going to be excellent we're revamping the meeting system but all the great content will still be there it's going to be magnificent I will be there a lot so if you enjoyed me then I will see you there we will be continuing doing our roundtables fault

following that we're a little bit up in the air still about when they're going to be but do you keep an eye on Pocket Gamer dot biz for more information on those and with that I think it's just left to me to say thank you to the panelists for joining me and thank you to the audience for watching and we will see you next time thank you Rick thank you what's fun about Eli's everybody yeah you you