The Hitman Sniper post-mortem

[Music] great so hi and welcome to this it means my representation but we'll talk about our live operation journey that started three years ago but first a little bit about me my name is Jean Francois jjigae I'm the lead game designer as conics montreux I've been in the game industry for about nine years now starting by doing kids games we meet with social casinos and then working in creating successful food type old titles like Tracey powerbuilder and drastic world the game since my arrival at Square Enix Montreal I've been in charge of all the live operation on it made snipers and in case you don't know us we all Square Enix Montreal we'll just you'll be on the great success of the ghost series being it men go whoops all a second do the slight missing yeah so eight men go lark of go and die

sighs go as well as hitman sniper which is a game we're going to talk about today so let's kick this with the trailer welcome to Montenegro 47 your primary target is Marcus crew time to go to work we have Intel that indicates other Conclave members could also be on site observe the line of drift good now move to the next target [Music] [Music] confirming high-profile kills

perfect assignment 47 the money has been wired to your account good work all right so as you saw this was something that Paris had never experienced before here for both triple-a production value with killer graphics and smooth control as well as creative sniping because it may separate the cerebral shooters Cleary's need to analyze and puppeteer the scene in order to complete the objectives and back in the days this was something like the computers were not doing were shooting first was for more important than thinking but the real question is how will this game perform in the premium markets we are great expectation because people love affording to doing these games and the answer is a bit underwhelming it performed exactly like

most other opinion titles and when you start to analyze the premium markets you figure out they all share the same exact curve a strong beginning rapidly stabilizing at a much lower tail that will keep on going for years and years so based on this we figure out it was maybe time to let it man sniper go and start working on other projects which I make a rather small presentation but we start thinking could it be different quit work break free from this premium mindset could we learn from our free-to-play competitors and to building a more sustainable product after all everyone was seeing the same things if your games as room to grow the launch is the beginning so this is where I came in to save the day so a bit of a joke don't be a fan when I came I was in that sure because for Square Enix Montreal I have the free-to-play expertise but for me I knew nothing about my own games so we

had to learn from each other's and where to do it fast because we had to change this slowly dying revenue tails into a steady growth that became the objectives of the project well how how could we do this Square Enix Montreal is packed with highly talented developers but none of them at inevitable experience and we never ran any live ups even better we are no bhai hooks and no dynamic backends as well as well it means sniper is a super finite experience in premium so this talk won't be about changing the overall free-to-play market with innovative techniques rather it's about Humber developers that knew nothing about acquisition retention and monetization but we're willing to change the premium mindset so pretty sure you're all aware

of the a RM optimization loop right so you had acquisition retention Emirate cessation well that loop didn't work for us because as I said it means snipers was a finite experience with no actual retention system after all we're prima games right you buy the games if you don't come back tomorrow we don't really care about it so we had to change it so we spend month trying to boost the retention and it never worked so we have to find something else and that little something was as simple as removing retention and putting optimisation why because it's a cool world it's really trendy and it fits perfectly with it min sniper so again errors or new adapted loops we have acquisition where you need to be at players inside the games and for premium games that can be quite a challenge and then there is optimization you need to understand your players so you can take well educated decision and finally monetization it's all good to have the players inside your games but you need

to find a way through positive experience to let them spin inside so try out this presentation we go on each bit of this loop and we'll share all the information the technique we use to boost them so first let's start with a quiz Asian the first thing we did boost it was to solve celebrating the culture of our tea territories so we changed the whole game into cyclical events that will boost the cultural celebration being Christmas Chinese New Year Halloween full of July name it but when we did this we went all-in we don't forget about putting a Christmas add on some characters no we changed the whole game we are new rifles new abilities we haven't changed the soundtrack and we did a lot of foreign into it because we want to be highly respectful of a celebration and that paid off people were happy about it because they felt include if you look at this graph it shows the number of

downloads I got boost during the Chinese New Year event only in China we triple nerdy tripled the number of downloads but there's another things we as a premium game can do and it's a be testing the price point of the app because surely if we reduce the price of the app you get a better conversion on downloads but the real question is will these new downloads be enough to compensate for the lower revenue share poor downloads and so when you take the game at 5 bucks and reduce it to $0.99 you need 5 times more downloads and when you look at the u.s. in UK we didn't reach that it was way too low for us but thankfully we a be tested this radio and all countries and when you look at emerging countries namely China the result were a bit different reduce at 10 cents the downloads we had 10 times the conversion we were getting somewhere

but with this number we found out something we found out that with this boost of awareness we got more downloads sure but we went on to the list of the apps we got more awareness people's our download the games but first party because aware and this is where you get this circle of Awesomeness the more awareness you get the more Donald you have and so on and that led to a boost in the downloads in China a hundred fifteen times more largely over why was require to get on par with the loss in revenue share thanks to this we also pass into a new things we said well we could try the free-to-play so we tried playing the game as free for a whole week and when you look at the result well we had tons 100 times more downloads but they were low-quality

downloads these players were not staying inside the game so we were not able to recoup from the loss in downloads revenue this was a failure we had to change some things but everything is not that negative you see when I spoke about this circle of Awesomeness well we got a lot more downloads from players that comes in after we were free to play because dinner about our games and so they start downloading the game even though we're back at full price you can clearly see there on the graph the booths and downloads we just got this was amazing for us so when you look at this with cultural celebration with price when they be testing and free-to-play jumps we acquire a lot of new users we were ready for the next step and we'll talk about the optimization well I think we all learn about the frictionless offers the benefit of it and a good practice around it so it's a good time to talk about our

longsword 2 issue sitting at the end of a lengthy carousel players are to swipe over 15 times in order to see it so as you can imagine this gave us the worst conversion on a rifle which is the best rifle on the whole game we had to change this and so aware of this we start to promote this rifle everywhere you were stuck in emissions we got the longsword there were celebration we also had the longsword and so boosting is view also led to players having worse one-click access to it which which we can guess booed is the conversion nearly four times more conversion on one of the best rife on the whole game we were really fixing our things but when you start analyzing all the players inside it and their behaviors you gather a lot of data

now don't worry it's all gdpr compliant but with delta DNA what we were able was to start to doing specific segments and we're not talking about spenders versus non spenders no because when we look at segmentation there's three main pillars do you have Geographic psychographics and behavioral and so if you take some groups using one or more of these pillars you can really tailor your campaigns does boosting your your awareness and also the effectiveness of these campaigns so we're going to look at two main campaigns that we use indepence library that use that system so the first thing we start doing with our campaigns was to have this this rifle sells so it was analyzing the mission appears went in and if he failed it will propose up to two things the first thing was a rifle he already home that will make it this mission much

easier or trigger a cell and this cell was really specific to this player so we knew that it will probably buy it because if we make a good deal 12 players they might just go for it and they did one on every five players that studies converting rifles basically bought it so that was really great now when they get these rifles well they do need to upgrade it and so we did a second a second campaign that was really aimed to this rifle and to the players that just purchase it and with 27 percent of conversion on this pop-up we knew it was working but something else happened because now tears were buying one rifle and then they were buying a soft currency pack we also boost our conservative monetization impacts which led to a better average and repair paying users up to 80 percent of the boost and so when you look at

this by analyzing your players and creating frictionless offers and our scores dynamic campaigns we're really trying to optimize our games already for the next step Merl cessation not we require a lot of players who need to find a way to let them participate in to our success and the first thing we start to visit was to revisit the story pack because a good way to boost your attention is to convert your players really early because an engaged player day 30 is three times better than normal players and nothing convert more than a well-designed time limited starter pack so we go through the bitter learnings we have with our starter packs first the content not to not to big contents because if your players feel full did you start stop purchasing things and also the price don't put it too high because the main goal of the story pack

is to convert players so you want the more conversion not to make them more cash out of it and also putting a lower price only only means that when you put the pricing of your sorry packs maybe like 80 bucks with a 95 percent off on it so it's really feel like a good deals add on this a small timer and you get all your ingredient for success story and we I be tested a lot of things in sorry story pack the value is the content up until were able to nearly triple its conversion rate we were getting somewhere but what happened when players have all the rifle and saw the game because you see it means sniper when we launch players could purchase all the rifles with only 19 bucks and that was it we needed to way to expand our spending cap without being too limited by the content and so last year we introduced a new feature the rifle

master is no longer pure gorgeous owner rifles and home the leaderboards no they add to home every rifle inside the game's upgrade them and master them in order to benefit from the highest score bonus so the grinding runs real clear is that to grind and for that we introduced also well our soft currency because they were not able to purchase them before which sorry to make some deals out of it and that worked you see we went from 15 million in soft currencies sink into 225 fifteen times more in soft currency thanks to this our soft currency pack became our second source of revenues it was great but because people needed a lot more soft currency we started to be more generous about it and this is we're adding the ads came in with the ads who were able to give while also receiving

and so we're going to look at some of the rule of thumb we use when designing our ads first the number of ads appears can watch per day it's important because if they watch too much your a CPM will drop and it may even cannibalize your balancing so you need to find the right and run numbers and for us we a be tested these value per countries until we find the optimal numbers per / players also it needs to be linked to your core loops because if it's outside of it people will really use it and it needs to be beneficial for repairs if a little 50 watchin ads and get the same things as a level 5 you won't watch your ads it will skip it so it always need to follow your balancing and keep in mind this you need to find the right balance from what is good for your economy and what is good for the player using ad mediation we were able to boost our revenue globally up to 20%

more thanks to the ads and so based on the starter pack modification the addition of rifle masteries and reward videos we were getting somewhere add to this the free-to-play weeks and we're getting less and less dependent on download revenues we have a lot of things to learn where love things want to try and it meant snipers but to be honest 36 updates later were really proud our first stage on live ops on it meant snipers we're finally getting rid of this premium mindset and if you remember this graph where I'll show you are dying revenue tails and now we really wanted to work our and to make it a steady growth were three years later trying to build the best snap experience on the market we did it and it was one hell of a ride thank you thank you very much this was

super insightful I think we have time for one more question depending on how long the answer is yeah here so you mentioned that you were using dynamic price points are based on the region's yeah of course but regarding the first time offer or the target admission offer were you having like a dynamic price point for that one as well or was that static we did some try because we are the BI teams that started to do some some testing we did it per country yes we did it for the type of players they're worse and we tried to figure out what was the best so depending on their conversion and depending on also the consecutive conversion they were doing so it was region based it wasn't like per player base was it was both [Music]