The growth techniques that every game developer should know about

[Music] so a few years ago two friends of mine were working on a game this game was going to be the best game out there it was going to be the next Angry Bird the respect Asians were super high and actually it looks very much like this they were expecting people to come running and knocking down the door with eagerness to play their game unfortunately when they launched the demand looked more like this but instead of giving us an accepting defeat they decided well hey let's actually sit down review the App Store and really see which gaming experience is missing

and what they found was that the experience of mariokart we're missing from the AppStore the experience where you would play together synchronously with your friend on your mobile device in real science so the works of this concept eventually named that fun run and when they launched still look like this but this time there were one thing that was very very different this time their friends didn't just play for one day to be nice they actually continue playing and they didn't just continue playing by themselves they also got their friends to start playing and then realize well if our friends really liked this like even though we didn't get millions of downloads on day one what if we at least get our whole university to play the game so they put up a booth very

creative booth next to the entrance of the cafeteria so all the students at university would see and actually got 1/3 of the university to download and start playing the game but with this initiative and a lot of other initiatives after three months and steady growth as they reach 300,000 downloads they this was the inflection points they asked users to tweet about hashtag fun run for chance to win in game currency that say they saw their download numbers double and with that the next day people continued to tweet about the game using the hashtag fun run and eventually the hashtag got trending worldwide on Twitter and with this and with the synchronous multiplayer experience they saw people

playing in a way that they can only hope for this is what you would see if you entered any high school in the u.s. at the time pretty cool right and if you were seeing people like that that see quickly picked on further so with that and working on a game like that eventually it hits number one on the App Store and since then the game the team has worked really hard to maintain its position with the synchronous multiplayer games and have now reached a hundred million downloads I was lucky to be part of that team doing their marketing business development for a few years and learned a lot about how to grow our youth surveys but the challenge said we encountered was that we had a very social game play it was hard for us

to do pay to win features without ruining the gaming experience we would always look for ways that the users were there to marketing for us because when you look at what the cost of acquiring users like last report from fixes to acquiring a good user a seven and a half dollar and the we were note were nowhere near those numbers and that is actually what we're talking about today like if you don't have a budget that can justify spending like this what can you do and that is the ceases for the ten growth tips these were walked through my spirit based on my experience at funrun working with other game companies now for my new company called mega cool and applying this to today's market so the first thing to think about when

you're going to grow through your existing users is that you need to be able to keep your first users so they will do the marketing then one number that is important to remember then is that 80 percent on average that don't want the game only what opens it once which means that you only have one shot to make them come back and become that evangelist for you then why is this usually the first screen that pops up as you download any game I find this so surprising because if you think about the motivation of a player it's on top when you open the game and then this is this is friction and it just drops forever friction points and at this point you have no idea what they're going to use the push notifications from so a lot of people just click don't allow and then you never have the opportunity to ask them again well as saying stuff your pants is doing a great

job here where they wait until asking for the opt-in to push notifications when it makes sense so they send your gift and then they ask you if you want to reminder for the next gift and and then you're like yeah I'd like to know that and then you hit okay so that is a good way of doing that so thinking about the first user experience try to think differently about how you present them with personification if you're if you're doing that and push put it in later points in the game so next up anyone played Super Mario run anyone remembering this part [Music] anyone remember how much time it took to actually get into the game and play six

minutes you must really really want to play Super Mario run in order for you to stick around through that whole onboarding process and tutorial right especially when you think about the original game that just threw you straight into the game place your character and left of the screen so that you knew that you had to move to the right to get started.this on boarding was two minutes so that's the basic guy we actually when we develop funrun tube we looked at adding a tutorial to the game and through a/b testing we found that the retention of our user were actually longer if we skip the tutorial and just threw them straight into the game and we looked into how many game sessions were with friends and how many were with random people and found that 50% weirwood friends so I gave us the

assumption that once the player downloaded game it would be very high likelihood for that person to be sitting next to their friend that would like to tell them what to do instead of you actually have to play through this tutorial wait until you can actually play with your friends so with this every game is different every game requires a different type of onboarding and tutorial and sign up but just remember that do you need to figure out what makes sense for your game and I highly encourage you to Abe assess those things and remember that your players are downloading games to start to play not to enjoy your signup process and when you actually develop a game when you think about the game design and the colors and buttons and everything as it comes together you need to make it so that a toddler can understand how to do it as well as your grandma and that is

actually a really really good test for you give your game to your grandma and see what makes sense for her where she clicks where she doesn't click and and really like what if you don't have the clear sight like there's so much stuff that you can identify just by having someone that is older or younger or your friends click for so pass the grandma test with your game so a lot of you were probably playing Pokemon go last summer or observing from a distance look at people looking like this with Pokemon go they were able to take what's ingress had already done but really making people play the game outside and in public and make you make your game if you leverage public parts of a game that is wait for you to spread awareness about your game without

controlling it we did this with Fun Run as you saw in the video from the cafeteria another game that is doing this really well is a space team imagine walking by someone playing like that wouldn't you get curious and want to join or let's figure out like what is going on right multiplayer games do have an advantage over single-player games here is obvious but there are things that you can do like think very creatively about how to leverage it like the way to make your game public so now let's get into more the

word-of-mouth marketing it's I like this cartoon here because the bus says I super word-of-mouth marketing just as long as we tightly control exactly what they say which is more or less the opposite of what you can do with word mouth marketing what we found was that you can't really control it but you can help them you can amplify the word of my word mouth by giving your users the tool to do it and they're saying that goes like this images says more than a thousand words when people talk about it and you don't have a graphic graphical and resemblance or what they're talking about it gets harder to remember but with visuals it helps so we'll be found was that with SunRun we could look in Twitter and we would see a lot of screenshots of this scene here the user had then screenshotted the screen acts as a game

come to Twitter uploaded the screenshot type in some text shared exited Twitter open the game continue play we're like alright we have so many players doing buy it already like super manual process by on their account what if we could make that smoother and easier so we added the the screenshot button up in the corner and we saw tweets coming in every minute after that it was the way to really like booth such momentum that we already saw also things like rust Road have been doing a great job as this at this from day one where they you can share the impact when you hit a car and share that with friends and oh we need to do we need to settle something once and for

all is it called gifts or just connect your race of hand of who here says gifts all right and then just sorry drift it's going to be good all right so gift says more than 50 images or whatever amount of frames could put in it but taking the cross road example if you reach if you receive this you get curious on what does happen but there's also an elements where you can actually show what happened and this is a way to show the strategy leading us and how I'm lucky you where like it wasn't your fault at all that you were run over by the car right the ability to share this is very strong and then if you look at dots there if you

make an awesome move you can then share that on with friends and by default they would allow you to share just the game over screen or like when you and when you finish a game that doesn't really tell recipients what was going on like yeah you understand that they won and how many starts they guys but this is where you can actually learn the strategy behind it so when you're talking about sharing stuff from your game in making that easy not just lesson share anything to think clearly about what would make that the sharing moments personal to your players there is a lot of generic sharing content but that is not giving me as the user a reason to complete sharing like I want to share the things that are unique to me and something that I am proud of so the next

tip is then let your players capture and share those personal moments and I think that Stephie Pat's another game is doing this really really well because not only are they allowing you to share but they're making it relevant when you're sharing it so when you die and you hit a new high score that is when they prompt you to share it's not just like they don't tell you the share all the time this is only happening when you're reaching your high score so when you're thinking about how to allow your users to do the word of mouth for you make it relevant when you prompt them and next one is from cross road again so in crossroad they knew that you don't necessarily know every time your user wants to share so in addition to only prompting them when you know it's

relevant you should have these subtle share buttons in your game so that when a user think that's this this is the moment that you have the opportunity to go ahead and share those moments so make it easy for your players to share remove the friction so what we found was that 60% of all sharing happens to private channels and most popular one is messaging secondly is email which is surprising to a lot of people third comes Facebook and then comes Twitter and see so many games where there's like a share to Twitter and shares the Facebook button in the game but that isn't necessarily what your user are wanting to do so this may vary from demographic to demographic somewhat but the trend is definitely that people

don't want to share to public channels as much anymore they want to share where it's also relevant for the recipients over social many the media and another thing is that if you keep metrics on which channel users are sharing too you can actually allow to optimize for that so for instances order all your players are choosing to share - or the majority of choosing to share - iMessage what about skipping the staff of choosing a channel and then sending rather sending everyone to messaging because that gives you a better conversion and in most friction from that choice process so you should find a way to optimize which channel is working for you so next

up is that for the one thing we found work really well for a fun run game was that when you hit the share button we actually didn't just like give you a generic marketing text like having a blast we actually went to Twitter and analyzed what are our users already writing what is the language they're speaking with and we would find that they say all those guys just could washed get a mind level son these were when these were actually triggered when you won a game and then want to catch an L is something we triggered if you if you did not win since their fourth I just beat a golden fox which was relevant if you beat the the rare character in the game which was a golden Fox and we had several others but these were all triggered based on what just happened so imagine that you're thinking oh cool I want to share something but

you don't want to like have to write down something creative and then this pops up and you're like yes that is exactly what I felt this moment and then it's just like making that whole process so much more easier for you so highly recommend that be creative about a pool of predefined text have it triggered based on different events in your game and next stuff games are so much more fun if they're played with friends so for for Super Mario run you would if you were inviting a friend the for instance messaging or email it would look like this to get this email no mail started messaging and you click the link and it opens up this website asks you to open up the app store and then you open

the app store then you go through all the six minutes steps and then you're like hey yes let's play with or then you have to send another friend request which is not very smooth so a way that Super Mario run could have done this way better is that they could send a message that includes for instance a gift and then when you click the link you have to go through the after if you're a new user but then once you download the game you're done straight taken into the and the session with the opponent so you can start playing right away and if you're if you already have the game installed you should totally just skip the middle set when you click the link it should open the back directly and this is all possible with a new linking technology

called deep linking there's different variations of it but essentially what it does is that when you click a link it should add context to the link click experience so you can be rewarded if you're doing referrals you can be matched as friends automatically you can add like hey aurora what's the one inviting you to this game if you didn't add context to that which makes it very powerful so I highly recommend you to if you're not already using deep links to do that so to summarize you should give your users a recent - often to push notification if you're using that and move it to somewhere later in the game a be test on boarding figure out what really works for you you should make sure to pass the grandma test for your game and if there's a way for you to make it public then you should do so and find a way so that your users can

capture personal moments from the game and when they do you should make it rel prompt them as relevant places so they're more likely to complete but also make it easy for them to share if they want to share outside of what do you think is relevant and find out which channels work for you and optimize for that and find a way to understand how your users are talking about your game so that it can be even more engaging to do the sharing we actually found the users clicking the share button a lot of times just to see which different texts they will get until they found the right one and then completing share and then you keep looking to improve the whole onboarding and reengagement process so with this I really hope that you are are able to create this type of demand for

your game because that would be really really cool and if you want to slide please email me and we're are as mega-cool we're opening up our beta soon so if you're interested in trying out that let me know in otherwise when I'm is cruel mistress keep doing this to you a product thank you very much lowers yes you [Music]