The growth techniques that all game developers should know about

[Music] five years ago to my friends were working on this game it was going to be the next anger bird and they were working really really hard for several months and when they launched their expectations were super high they expected people to run like this people would go crazy because this game this was it unfortunately what happened was more like this but instead of giving up they were going back to looking at the App Store and seeing like what is really missing which gaming experience experiences not anyone fulfilling today well the answer was pretty clear to them after a while it was Mario Kart and with

Mario Kart you were able to play with your friends we're sitting in front of a split screen and encouraging each other to mess up and the winner would then be very much up in your face and tell you hey I won they build up the concepts of game called fun run where you were then racing in the forest as for cute forest animals combining with with some blood and gore but distinct this multiplayer experience was really really good and when they launched their expectations were super high and what happened was still not a lot of people but in in comparison to their last game this time their players were continuing to play day after day they were thinking like what if we were able to bring more people in they didn't have any marketing budget but they did go to university with 30,000 students so they started putting up a booth and had people join them to play and slowly they were able

to get some more momentum and they even got the local candy factories to sponsor a lifetime supply of candy for a winner of the local competition so through a lot of growth tax after three months the inflection points came they had enough users in the game so when they launched a competition where players could we're encouraged to tweet about hashtag fun run in order to find more friends to play in the game it went viral so it started trending worldwide on Twitter people were going crazy at through through high schools people were giving up the no phone rule and playing all the time eventually it hits the number one spot on the USS door today the team behind fun run is still small and lean but has reached 90 million downloads I was part of that team for two years struggling to make

our users come back and acquiring more users but it was really hard because the cost of you start position is just rising and back in November fixes told us that to get a good user you have to pay almost $6 and not almost no casual games are able to do that especially not when they're social because if you are having a multiplayer experience you don't want to do any pace to win features where someone is being able to buy winter race right so you're very limited to what you can do and doing paid user acquisition at a profit it's very rare usually marketing meetings looks like this so when with this is what your stacks against what can you do if you don't have six dollars to spend per good user well you need to look at your current

users how can you encourage them to do the marketing for you whether the trade said where you're leaving potential out on the table well that is what I'm going to talk to you about today based on the experience from fun run as well as experience working with other game developers since then this tip will be highly focusing casual games but there will be elements that you can drive towards mid core and hardcore type of game and the slice will be available if you want them so if you want your players to drive the installs for you you need to make sure that you have players but that is really hard because 80% of users downloading an app is only looking at it once like we said you have one shot to really prove that this is the gameplay for them then why is this usually the screen that you see you're being asked to opt-in to push

notification as the first introduction to the game it sucks there I always think that this is going to cost the developer too spammy I don't know why I'm opting into this so if I'm being presented with this up front I get so mad and I strike then click no and sometimes you get really pretty and after then what you should do if you are going to ask for push notifications move it later to the space of the game wouldn't make sense one thing that step offense is doing really really well so in step depends you get a gift and you can get a new gift every twenty minutes so they ask you right after you open the first gift you want to be reminded and if you're really like I guess then you can hit yes then it's okay you know that that's the only time they're going to ask about that and if you like that

stuff then of course then we know so the first tip for you today is that if and when your movie asking for push notifications you need to give your users a reason and move it away from the very very first screen so with with most gameplay who here have played Mario Kart yeah and whoever played the Super Mario run the new game cool so I also play that and I downloaded it and it looks like this five six minutes I wonder how many people they lost on that way yeah what you really really want to play my Super Mario run if you're sticking for that long like I want to play the game I don't want to give them all this information and tell them which country

I'm in which they can already find from my phone so what's really good with castle important for casual game is to throw your users into the gaming experience as soon as possible in a guards doing this really really well like they're asking for your name which should be whatever and then you hit play and then you're good you may not understand everything that is happening in the game but if you're playing for instance if a friend recruited you and they're going to tell you which fund run we actually found that players were more likely to stick around and enjoy the game if they would skip the tutorial and for your game this might be different it's all about how complex the game is but for most casual games it's pretty safe to throw their straight in but you should definitely a be test this and figure out what's what's working for your game or not the most important thing is that a player is downloading your game to play not to sign up and do

a lot of hassle and when you're when you're doing the whole onboarding experience it's so important that it makes sense that it's working it you're never really stuck it needs to work for toddlers as well as grandmas and the best way for you to really test if your onboarding experience of working out is to give it your grandma if she gets stuck then you know exactly what you need to improve like she needs to see that the play button is there it's not there among 30 other buttons so I call this a grandma test it's very easy to to do as long as you can access some grandma in amongst yourself another thing that is working well for games is to find a way to make it public make the gameplay experience public pokemon go did a very good job with that this

summer or last summer when people had to go out and about to really get the full experience then people were looking at what what everyone doing like why is everyone running around I want to take part of that in that one thing that works well for fun run all if we get sound [Applause] should we try again oh it is very very visible it sink there's multiplayer experience there's a lot of time giving you that so make sure that if you have the opportunity to create some public awareness about your games when people are playing it utilize that use it for your advantage to make your game public or visible so when people are playing

your games there are elements of it that when you're talking about it it's not really convincing anyone but if you show images it's just so much more compelling an image is describing better than a thousand words is the same and I think that stamps is doing a really good job at this they're making you attach your personal image of how you're capturing animals while you are stamping around another one that is allowing you to capture constants in the game and sharing that us it's across the road is being great when your impact on impact but another way to do this even better is that an animated gif is saying more than 50 images who here is saying gifts and here is a jiff it's very religious saying it's okay if I go for gifts all right so with a crust road for instance

this is the impact this is what I'm sharing but personally I want to see what more is happening until that point like what tactics did I use was this actually a smart move maybe not but it's showing so much more it's more engaging and it's good alternatively I there's a lot of people playing adult coloring books these days and this is created by candy writer and it's a beautiful picture for Valentine but I'm curious to see what how he was made a lot of details went into this so if you're sharing something images are great but if you can add some more conflicts to that in form of a video or a gif that's very very good but it needs to be personal it can't be

something generic that everyone is passing up you want to share something when you put some pride into it so for the next one people are more likely to share if they get super happy or super sad or angry and a way to encourage your users to share content from your game those awesome moments I think Stephie pants is doing a really good job here you're playing and then when you're getting a high score you're prompted to share otherwise do not then it doesn't feel spammy at all it feels more natural to that experience so when you want to encourage your players to do content sharing for you you need to make it relevant you need to prompt them on those specific moments in the game where it makes sense for them to share and those are that moments where you're either on a high or very very low however when you're reaching a high score like this you're probably really

mad as well because you could have done all of the further if you do this drill when you're doing constant sharing for instance with with a guard you're so in the moment like you're getting that high score I take great pride in reaching number twenty fourth but if I want to store that and show it to my friends I need to let loose of the controls my hands to decide and screenshot that's valuable seconds I might be eaten by them so one recommendation to a gameplay like that is to actually add a camera button that you can click just right next to the moment in case you want to capture those moments without disturbing the gameplay and then you can share them off later and cress Road is also doing this really well like they have these sub dual share buttons all through the game if you want to share it then you can so if you want people to make it

easy for your players to show their friends how awesome a gaming experiences make it easy for them have these subtle share buttons through your out your game but when people are sharing content we all know the horror stories from candy crush how they made you spam all your Facebook friends I know I blocked a lot of my Facebook friends because of this they even auto selected it for you so if you just press through to quickly you were probably banned what is a lot better is is if you can allow you users to choose with channels that is relevant for them the trend now is actually people sharing to iMessage and whatsapp and messenger like it's a personal challenge channels that are more applicable to users you will only want

to share things when it's relevant for the recipient you don't want like there's so much space and games being handed up to share to Facebook share to Twitter people are not using that anymore so let players choose the channel they prefer to share to we see 60% of all shares are being shared to messenger channels secondly its email and then Facebook and Twitter comes down the road going back to an example for from fun run in beginning people were sharing this high score screen a lot we started making it simpler for them to share ease by adding this camera button it's subtle is there if they want to when it hit it they would be able to share and here it's Twitter and we had predefined set so here is having a blast and then we also went to Twitter to see

how are people communicating about the game like what's wording are they all reducing and they would say that I just beat the golden fox which is some elements in the game then we would trigger that automatically if they beat the golden fox they would also reuse the wording like get on my level son very foreign for me but that's the smack talk that were using and then one catch an L another one is all those guys just got washed and these are all triggered there based on how you performed in a race which means that when a player was like I want to share this they hit the share button and then they didn't it felt personal to them to share this type of text so they didn't need to spend time editing it but if they want to do they could so if you do want to have your players share confirming game it's highly recommended that you have a pool of predefined types to trigger based on relevance from from the experience in the game when you when you're sharing

this and gaming experience is so much more fun with friends and an example for Mario Kart is that you're able to share in addition to spamming Facebook and Twitter you can just to use iMessage and email and when you share that the recipient gets a text like this if you click the link you're being taken to their website you're either then are sent to the app store if you don't have it already and then you download or you click open and then you open the game and then you ask to send a friend request which is totally weird because you already click the link receiving from that friend what they could have done which would be a way better experience for users would be to show the player what's the experience with slice like if I would receive something like that I would be more compelled to try it out you can all see how I'm missing the last part there sucks but if you click the

link you should enable Universal linking and deep linking just put the player directly into the game space that the person inviting you from where at so here the me is one of playing I want to play book logo right away it's super simple it's removing friction so for your game the best onboarding experience for a new user is when you're taken to this situation in game that you were presented with which you can do with D plug-in Universal linking so in summary you should always give a reason a reason for your users opt into push notifications this will improve the first-time user experience a B test which onboarding experience works for your game you should always try to pass the grammar test you'll find some friction points which is really obvious in retrospective and you should try and make your game public in and have people

talking play play it in public if you're doing concentrating make sure that the players are capturing personal elements from the game so much better to share those and when you're sharing make it relevant to share encourage players to do those sharing be sharing when they feel like sharing because they're either on a high or very low and make it easy to share you don't really know when players are likely wanting to share so don't restrict them able to do so and then let's players choose what channel to share to that is relevant to them and use the pool to predefined text that will ease the friction of sharing and then if you use deep linking and your universal linking for improve onboarding that helps a lot so you're not stuck at different afraid of the game so if you want this presentation you can email me I hope this helps you from this to this

thank you very much during every place so at unity where does every play system which allows you to record the gameplay because people don't remember the bits that they want to share until they've happened so you can't predict what's going to happen it's going to be interesting so it's been really interesting because we also record so that's an important thing to think about is how are you going to make sure that you catch at the moments the players has just had rather than having them guess what's gonna happen so thank you [Music]