The Messy Middle - From Trend Gamification to a Profitable Hypercasual Game

but next up we have uh olaf from crazylabs who's uh going to be talking about the messi middle from trend gamification to profitable hyper casual game hi olaf how are you hey i'm good how are you doing i was unable to end it for some reason but here i am hello fine it's absolutely fine it's to be honest i would go as far as to say it's normal in zoom world for it to to take a few minutes to to jump in but yeah you feeling relaxed you feeling good uh i feel a bit stressed it's my first time here so bear with me uh but i hope i'm wearing my best don't worry yeah it's dead relaxed it's dead where are you coming at us from where are you based at the moment i'm based in warsaw poland we have several offices around the world and this is one of them so there it is great so what's it there what about 11 o'clock something like that

yeah exactly it's one hour ahead so it's eleven o'clock it's not so great whether today but i'm sure it's better than here in the uk but uh but yeah i mean that's nice 11 o'clock is a good time but yeah don't don't be worried don't don't um you know relax it's fine it's dead easy we've got a good audience here this morning they've got a lot of questions so what i'll do is i'll let you share have you got um slides to share or anything like that i have my slides ready if this is it hit the present button well yeah if you want it if you want to start sharing your slides i'm just going to remind the audience uh yeah throw some kind words in for olaf in the chat keep the conversation flowing and throw your questions in because uh yeah just to let you know i like i'll laugh once you've done your talk don't worry i will reappear like magic and we'll just have a chat go through some of the questions that the audience might have so um looking forward to you again yeah over to you but i am always here in the background if anything happens so don't worry too much

thanks a lot sophia looking forward to this i will see you soon soon all right so uh i'm olaf from crazylabs and i would like to talk about the messy middle which which is a process that we call between the trend gamification and the profitable hyper casual game product so i work as a game product owner of crazy labs i help developers who publish games with us to create monetizing game experiences and to optimize the engagement and monetization kpis to prolong the game profitability time i also love ad testing i do a lot of edit testing i'll get to that part in a bit and a little bit about crazy labs i'll keep it real short we have several laps we have people working on hyper casual games and one of those guys we have guys working on casual games and we have one lab that is under the radar now so i can talk about it yet crazy labs top free

mobile game publisher developer we have over four billion downloads and we cooperate with 350 developers across the world and here you can see some of our titles that we brought to the top charts you can see games like phone case diy tie-dye some asmr games like us asmr slicing also captain amaze getting arcades running around sausage run and one slide oops it didn't go okay now it loaded and one thing i often hear recently that hyper casual actually maybe it's a bit too late to jump on this train but to be honest it's not this is that the genre is going faster than the gaming industry itself has almost 20 percent yearly growth and it's like one third of all mobile game downloads of the industry is coming from hyper casual genre so

definitely you want to be on this train that entry level is so low everyone can try to reach these stock charts so let's think what is the game product that will start with the game itself so so let's start with the game you have an idea for the game with some goal to achieve the mechanics and controls to reach this goal you'd imagine some theme or chosen the art style printed a bunch of levels to test the curl look and there it is but if you put something like this in the app store it will not monetize it you need to build around that game several super important components that will make your game monetize one of those is of course monetization so you need to think where to put those interstitial locations in a smart way so they are not too intrusive and what content to look with reward videos we are trying several new ad

types like non-clickable ads that are not intrusive and they just build brands top of minds we are trying rewarded interstitial sometimes in-apps or subscription models then you have a marketing team that is creating new videos we are always trying to stay on top of trends with doing or implementing custom levels or mechanics to be in those trends you have then user acquisition team to get those videos and adjust the spend budgets and bits according to current our professor so you don't want to spend more money than you're earning because you will be losing money by uh doing so they monitor individual sort of source of traffic you have creating that chasing the backs on both platforms ios androids optimizing low-end devices performance we need to comply with new store regulations and support multiple os versions and then

there is my favorite which is analytics we do a lot of a b testing so we measure engagement apis and monetization apis and for instance in your initial game you probably have just a bunch of levels but we try several level funnels one can be harder it can be another can be more easy and then you analyze as display per user and per level so you can then chirping the good performing levels from one funnel combine it with another level with another funnel and you have that nice engaging and level funnel that will monetize the best you have appstore optimizations in that testing experience icons keywords to boost organic users so basically the ones that you don't need to pay for this is super important to have those organic users share because it will affect the ecpi

so cpi states the same this is what you pay for install but ifcpa considers all the organics that you don't need to pay for and if you have a significant amount of those guys you can increase the bids and you have the legal department that is chasing the copy because because if you hit the top charts for sure there will be clones and we need to remove them from store and the game itself it becomes a bit more complex apart from primary goal you need to think about secondary goals to boost retention like missions you want to build progression system with some meta game with unlockable content to balance economy and overall it becomes a little bit more complex but without the that very first simple game that you started with building those components around won't make any sense so it all starts with the good game idea and the and the player engagement so now let's talk about the messy middle

you always probably will start with the prototype and a good performing video so you got those uh this nice video with cool game idea it has a low cpi and this is a great kickstart it's fairly difficult to get a profitable cpi but this is not enough by its own to monetize the game you need to reach engagement apis and that will be the messy middle part that will only monetize your game so this session is a bit short so i decided to put just four guides you may want to follow to handle your messy middle process so one controls must feel good this will boost your session length two you need to allow exploration and creativity to boost retention free keep the levels short it will improve the level flow for monetize player desires in order to boost your videos so now i will go one after another

controls must feel good otherwise the show won't go on this is super important i think this is the first place those hyper casual games are relatively small products let's say and everything matters really really much so if you have this great video the player engaged and downloaded the game but then the controls feel clunky not responsive there is a big chance you'll get the instant chat so this is something you really want to polish put across in more iterations to make it look good and as the example here you can see on the right and this is our game so captain this huge hit that was in the top charts a while ago and it's still crushing the app store it's the image on the left is initial version of controls we've launched the game with and we designed the game to be played very slowly and

actually when you played it slowly it performed very well all the blocks were cut and cleaned but the players will not work the way you designed the game they will play all the ways but the one you design them to do so so players played fast and as you can see it becomes a bit dirty and tedious to clean each level you need to perform several strokes or that to clean the level and then we've tried in an a b test the version of the improved controls by the way don't mind the different knife visual is it doesn't matter in this kpi test it's just the video i created but in the new version with improved controls ruby we improved the physics collision you just needed to perform a single stroke to clean the layer and it improved number of runs by a half in day one by rounds we mean how many players the player has played so basically the

better controls the more players the player will play and it affected the airport and by 20 from day one so this is super important then you want to boost your attention so you should allow some exploration there if you want the players to come back to your game there must be something more waiting for them to discover so you want to diversify the levels look the mechanics feel introduce new objects new mechanics or many games but also keep in mind that the players came to your game from the ua video for a reason they liked this video so if you go too far from it or over saturate the initial part of the funnel with those fancy mechanics because you put so many efforts in them and they are so cool you put every level to be a little bit different it can work the other way around and the player can turn more faster so the sweet spot is to prepare those new mechanics here and there in the panel just so the player knows that if he or

she plays a little bit more another level more there will be something more to discover also you can okay the slide stack again let's wait for it but i'll keep talking so also you can allow creativity so of course it doesn't apply to all game genres i'm still waiting for the site to load but if you have some diy game or creative game you can literally start with putting just a single level of course it skipped okay this is the slide i wanted to show you guys and you want to you can always even look one single level and if you allow the player to alter it in different ways so it looks very different from level to level even though it is a single level you can still get a nice retention out of it but as i said probably it's not applicable in all genres so when you can something to consider then

you may want to keep the levels short the levels should not feel tedious to complete and by levels i don't necessarily mean the levels from level start to level end screen because for instance in simulation games like young scalp people in tie-dye or phone case diy you have several steps to complete the level but every one of those should feel snappy and there should be like a nice flow that doesn't feel tedious for the player to complete you want to reduce number of taps required in ux so if there's some process that is completed by the player do not require him to hit next button because every button in the level in the ux flow will cause a little bit higher chance in the funnel and the side effect let's put it straight this is a business model the side effect of it is showing more interstitials because if you finish the level or steps faster

you have the opportunity to show the interesting show it doesn't it doesn't mean that we show those ads every time absolutely not we don't want that we don't we want to engage the players but this gives you the opportunity to show it so then you can find you finding it remotely using some app profile to show interstitials in a soft profile that even if there is some location don't show it because this will for sure get your usage down and you need to be careful and consider the end result of it but you can also try and compare with more aggressive profile profiles and see how it performs so in the example here on the right what we did is we matched two steps of scalp people at the bottom you can see that there was initially a step where you needed to drill the eyes first and the mouth and confirm it and then only you could scalp the whole head so we've combined it combine it together

you could do this at once and also we've removed the delay from the tool itself so this is something about controls i mentioned before and as you can see it got nice improvement in our pro it just felt more snappy the players felt more in control it felt more creative and less tedious to complete this level so definitely try to keep keep the levels strong and then monetize player desires this is something to consider when you are thinking about rewarded videos so you always want to create the content the players wants to unlock for another v it shouldn't be brute force it should be never mandatory to complete the level but it's just something like an and meaningful addition to the gameplay so something that you really want to unlock and you're not forced to do this so as you can see in this example on the right there is a target image and of the sculpture i need to sculpt absolutely not a celebrity i have no idea who is this

and there is a very characteristic critical prop that you can obtain you can apply it to your sculpture but you need to watch an rv which is a rewarded video and players don't mind absolutely watching the rvs in such scenario that this doesn't have any drawbacks in engagement yes actually otherwise if it's designed in a way that it's meaningful for the gameplay the players watch those surveys and it's completely fine as something that doesn't engage it doesn't have the engagement one thing to note also that is that if you make this content for reward videos make sure it is visible in the level in the ux flow so you may want to add some full screen pop-up overlay over like here make it discoverable very well in the bottom part across the other props

to select from scroll view because if you put it somewhere in the shop in the second tab nobody will discover it and pursue it will not affect the rpo neither and one extra point to talking about i didn't put it in the initial form because i know it's not available to everyone but when you can try to a b test everything a hunch is good but data is real and only if you ambi test new features you can clearly know if there has been some improvement over the previous version because there is something like seasonality effect even on a weekly basis you have this data fluctuation which is like a season like on a micro level so when you compare the versions with different time frames it's pretty hard to make conclusive results so we always try to keep the control group exactly the same as the previous version just to measure the new features within the same time frame

and then we isolate the features per group because if you start with the combo then actually you don't really know if teacher b was affecting the kpis or feature c because they were together maybe actually a feature c put down the feature b so it's always do uh it's always good to isolate those features so having said that you need to consider how big cohorts you you collect every day because you can't just put 50 groups and acquire like i don't know 100 100 players for this group because it will be very noisy data we also add the second controller because if we measure two control groups together then you can see that the data is noisy or not if they are showing the same results so this is something to consider when you can and if i would like to summarize with a simple single headline i would say first

engage is then monetized so don't think about money don't think about i mean of course it's a business it's uh you need to think about money let's trap that but in the first place you need to think about how to engage those players because if they are not engaged you will not get any revenue out of it so you want your game to feel good with good controls that will increase long create longer sessions increase usage time number of runs the players will play you want to diversify the content you get higher retention you may want to get the levels short it will improve the level flow and the player will be most likely more likely to play another level in a row and you want to have desirable locked contrast content that will boost your rv impressions and so that was all i got i think i got it within 28 minutes

sophia i think we can go to sure yeah let's dive into some questions we've got quite a few here so we'll like with the last talk i will do my best to see how many we can get through uh but first of all thank you for such a fascinating talk so uh thank you all thanks for having me no thank you for being here and the first question uh i've got here is um how can developers balance the creative side with the practical and financial part of the game um and how would you answer to the people that think hyper casual games are 100 focused on financials uh i would say always going with the publisher i know i'm going from the publisher side so it doesn't feel ldg but it's always easier to jump on the market with the publisher because it's us who help you acquire the users it's us who help create create those videos so if you go alone you need to cover all expenses by your

own and this is why there is this rational deal between the developer and the and the publisher because we put lots of cost on our site so we can have a win-win situation in vm okay great and i'm going to just go through them in different orders here so jonas has asked in ua for hyper casual games how important is the roas in a specific campaign versus the creation of hype getting up the ranking lists and getting high amounts of organic users inc and this is all in comparison to mid core and hardcore games okay so i can speak about hyper casual to be honest not that much into higher mid for user acquisition and always we when we measure new videos to be honest in the first place it's always about cpi so return on ad spend of course but you

hyper casual games you usually don't have such big revenue as midcore or hardcore games so all you always want to get the cpi very low and this is the main benchmark and of course ross are important and this is the key but usually you know what rp you have and you try to get around i'm not sure if i can talk about these kpis to be honest in the stock but there is this sweet spot we are setting for ross and this is the benchmark to get the cpi according to the airport that we get in the game so yeah we have like a set ross goal and then cpi has to be accordingly lowered to the arrow fantastic okay and like i say anyone who's seen me on panels or something likes things uh um knows that i like actionable things and there's a question here that i'm sure will be of interest to a lot of uh developers who are in the audience who might be thinking about working with crazy labs so someone has asked when developers

reach out to crazylabs to be their publisher are they expected to have the controls and gameplay balanced or is this something they can work with work together with the publisher in this case yourselves so we always collaborate with developers it's never brute force and i when i discuss new features with with the team of external developers publishing developers we always discuss it together so it really depends to be honest on the developer because i am working with several things and there are developers who are coming more from gaming industry and they have like lots of ideas to put in the game and most of the time there are very good ideas and to be honest if you don't a b test it you can have a hunch that it's gonna be better or worse but it's just the opinion before you get the data on the other hand as i mentioned this is so

low entry level that everyone can try this and we get also some games from people who didn't read the games at all before so they are looking forward to us to propose some features or solutions so it really depends i never or nobody in my team tries to brute force anything uh it usually comes from developer if they expect us to to take it away and propose the features or we discuss it together so yeah definitely there is a big impact and input from the original developers on their game it's their game we are just publishing yeah and i'll try and fit in maybe two questions but uh one of the ones i want to fit in definitely is uh this one about so someone has asked you mentioned diversifying the levels adding new mechanics etc how can we do that and not become just a usual casual game is there a sweet spot that keeps the game hyper casual whilst adding a deeper level of gameplay

and i would say that yeah of course adding complex meta game that would rely on adding a naps would be like chasing this hot hybrid casual thing that everyone's trying to to chase in on the market so it's although it looked like the complex this power slide i showed we've met a game and all this stuff but it's to be honest very simplified version of casual games so you always want to stick to the core of the game this is where the game is successful but even the most satisfying core it's getting monotonous monotonous over time so to break this monotony you want to justify right here and there with some extra stuff and then come back to the to the initial core loop of the game so yeah i would say it's something that is even we don't even require this for initial like they want us for instance because

if you get they cannot they reach day one thresholds without metagame it's no good it's something that has to be reached with the core without all this fancy stuff added on top of the game and only after we meet day one we try to focus on the three day seven apis and that is the problem where those extra times kick in yeah and the last question i'll fit in uh apologies to everyone else is um chris has asked the imminent demise of hype of the hyper-casual market has been predicted almost every year but each time it gets bigger and stronger what do you think uh the future of hyper casual is is there a lot of growth still to come do you see interest in evolutions uh yeah what do you what do you think about the the future of the hyper casual market yeah like i said it's growing over time it's ridiculous growing so uh i would expect this is my assumption that it's not just just something i'm guessing that

probably will see some new platform that then we can we could be able to support same kind of hyper casual appeal to the masses but maybe it will not be the phone anymore it will be something else like vr glasses that look like ray bans or something like that i'm pretty sure there is coming uh new platform that will be utilized for gaming as well but until this comes hyper casual all the way because this is a genre for non-gamers and most of the world are non-gamers just want to kill the time we are competing with netflix with consuming news it's something that people want to do in their spare time and most of people have some spare time to do this fantastic well thank you olaf that was a really interesting talk so uh yeah thank you for joining us and being with us here thanks a lot sophia it's been great being here i hope

i just shared some knowledge and looking forward to the other sessions definitely well thank you so much thank you and yeah enjoy the rest of the sessions in the day and the week you