The Story of Transformice: An Indie Game with 70 Million Players

[Music] all right the thing works okay we'll get started hello everyone welcome to this presentation that is not about Zelda I'm sorry no really thank you all guys for being here I know that there's a lot of exciting stuff on the side and I really appreciate that you come which is my talk before I begin I was told to remind you to place your switch to sign and switch your phones to silent mode and please don't forget to rate the session at the end that really helps us a lot all right so today I will talk about a small game that I've been making for most seven years now that is called transform ice before begin let me introduce you to it with this short video for those who don't know it [Music]

Oh here - that is transformice so true some

eyes it's about now 75 million icons created almost 2 million actively use a month 1.5 million Facebook fans know we didn't buy any and the game is now translated into 20 languages and that is how the team looked like by the end of the last year so how did it get there in 2010 my friends and I were full-time employed the French video game company him as a programmer in Mia it's a graphic designer we weren't very satisfied with all their jobs and we wanted to make a small get on a free time javadi's had a history of creating small browser games for fun and he has to be as for my help - in order to create a new one with better graphics it all came from a silly life experience I was sleeping at a friend's house and

some rodents kept scratching against the wall all through the night and I imagined them climbing on the top of each other in order to get in order to overcome obstacles and then reach a potential cheese I proposed the idea to dramatist where the players would be mice that transformed themselves into planks and crates in order to help the other players and he liked the idea instantly and that's how the name transformed mice was born we realized pretty early on the prototype that when you were too few players everybody would turn into plank and nothing really happened this wasn't very fun so instead of transforming players we gave we have the ability to summon physic objects to one mouth at a time the almighty Shannon knows obviously but the

names just my stuck because we liked it and he it had no results on Google in about three weeks we had thanks to reusing some breaks of code dodging but it's made earlier we had a working prototype that we launched the game on May the 1st of 2010 and we posted the link to a small French video game form the first week was a great success we had a couple hundred players and they were completely addicted we quickly added a knockin system to keep track of all the cheese you gathered and we started to to add hats for your mouse to wear that you could buy against the cheese you gathered but then a couple weeks later a huge forum called something awful they found out about this and the game wasn't even translated in English but they didn't care and

massive amount of players they were yelling omelette du fromage everywhere and in order little server and it was completely melting and the game was unreachable for weeks and that was a perfect moment for the press to write about us and make holes ever die a little more we got featured by critic who publish shot again and again from PC gamer and all the websites the game was completely free at the time and we were praying for the servers out of our own pockets this really wasn't a viable solution because we needed to rent a lot more service to cope with the demand and so we didn't to earn money really fast we didn't have time to set up anything complicated to earn money so we went for the fastest solution we set up an advertising banner under the game because this is a browser game and we opened a PayPal account to receive

the nation's from the players thankfully it worked the advertising banner generated approximately fifty dollars a day for about eighty thousand unique visitors right this made around eleven thousand dollars by the hand by the end of 2010 the donations were less effective and they only generated about three thousand dollars in two years tops Leo's polio but this is going to end badly and this went on for month where every single minute of all free time was taking about the game we took days off from oh jobs to work on it and slipping in sleepless nights to fix the bugs and depression services deal with community management and add more hats obviously at this point we knew we had to make a choice resign and create one company to get to take care of the game or kill it entirely because

we didn't have enough free time to take care of it it wasn't an obvious choice because we had comfortable positions at all the jobs and even if the games started to generate some income we didn't know if it would be enough to sustain the to others and the servers that's how we started to dive into the joys of the French administration we realized the amount of paperwork and knowledge took to create a company and thankfully we benefited from a special program in the north of France that allowed us to get mentoring and chief offices that really saved our lives that's how one year after the game was released we finally resigned from our jobs to create our own studio yayyy I initially drew the slot in the slide like that but really inside it was more like this it was a real scary leap of

faith and I was super scared to let go of my day job but will resign anyway and two days later we were entering all new offices and we started working on the game full-time immediately because we went full time on the game we doubled the number of active players in less than six months from 100,000 to 200,000 players day because we decided to translate the game in every language we saw we had players in we had a very exotic player distribution more than 50% of our overall audience came from Brazil than United States Turkey France overall Latin America Russia another huge factor of the success then was the seasonal events that we made in the game where the players could drop some thematic hats and have some gameplay twists and the players really loved them they became a huge part of a strategy or for

the games life the advertising Madeleine was performing really great we jumped to 300 dollars a day generating more than $100,000 for 2011 so we made some calculations and we realized we could hire one more person to work on the game we didn't is--it at one moment and we recruited or most passionate moderator ingame to be our community manager so she could answer the thousands of emails we were getting every week and manage the in-game moderators everything was going great and we were very happy about it but the joy didn't last long on December of 2011 we got bad from Google essence we really took a hit at this moment since Google pays with a 60-day roll the Sun in Valluvar account

mint mint done more than $14,000 of click never got paid we were left with three salaries and about 30 servers to pay for an hour main source of income had simply disappeared numbers were I get weren't adding a anymore so remitted I stopped being ourselves for a few months in order to be able to pay for the service and the salary of our committee manager while working to some turn to some salt certainly all hold Amin was blacklisted without any warning or email and not a single form available to inquire to build literally there is absolutely no way to get in touch with the Google ads and staff your only chance is our user driven forum where people usually don't know much more than you about what's going on it's only by tremendous luck that we got out of this a friend of ours happen to go to the same school as one

of the Google employees and a couple emails later she managed to get a someb and it's only then that we learned why the banning occur now when you read Google Adsense policies I mean we do read them right for different clicks and web pages away there's little little paragraph that says this distance between ads and flash games the Google BOTS detected that or banner was less than 150 pixels away from a flash game and they banned us automatically no warning no explanation so so we'll advise when you sign something always read the small print and do not underestimate the power of networking so we will install the Adsense banner by February 2012 but with 150 pixel most of

our audience with low and computers and small screen resolutions weren't able to see it anymore so the numbers didn't add up and we were still pretty bitter about how it had been handled so we decided not to rely on on advertisement anymore and we were getting to go free-to-play we took six-month a six months to develop this with extreme caution and because it was a real shift for us we were very afraid will the players haters for asking for money will stay in the game it was really hard for us to come up with press points because how much were we cook the ball letting people pay within or browser-based cute little mice flush game we wanted external extremely fur and ethic monetization making only cosmetics available and very low prices I completely redo the 200 hats that we

had at this moment so the players could completely customize every color of each item and the new currency would be strawberries opposed to the soft currency that was cheese at this point we was still pretty bitter about Google and we did something very stupid we decided to remove the ad banners completely prior to the launch of the free delivery we thought that players would hate us less if we showed them that we removed this source of income and so they wouldn't think we were sellouts and retrospectively it was a very bad idea we finally released the free version on during June 14th of 2012 and it went quite well the players response was truly astounding they were so enthusiastic to be able to support the game they love and have a four-color the

first month generated more than $250,000 we were completely astonished after 6 months of not being ourselves sleepless nights thinking how we failed only a few months after funding a company this was a real emotional world rollercoaster between June and December of 2012 microtransaction generated 1 million to $17,000 with Peaks that you see on every continent every new content season all update with more hats to buy it was at the end of this year that we broke or all-time concurrent sales record with more than 86,000 users online at the same time yes which doesn't work it was 1 million rows we quickly hired 8 more people develop

Rouge Community Managers chief another chief financial officer interns and with about 3 million active players and 47 to handle we thought it was a good good team skill and it would allow us to sleep a bit better we also moved into bigger and more expensive offices by the end of 2012 2013 started slowly on the money side because we hired so many people we were more often than not close to the break-even these can also be explained by the fact that we ran a huge winter event in December 2012 and we gave away a ton of content like hat title cheese even hard currency for free this was a huge mr. mistake on all parts because players can only wear that many hats at a time and it slowed down all sales for several months as you can see it became even more concerning around November that we decided to reactivate

the advertising banner next to the game but this time vertical instead of horizontal we saw that it wasn't disturbing all players at all and it performed a lot better than before so looking back a year enough of ads even if among badly was still more than 100 thousand dollars and we were really really stupid to get rid of it 2013 was also first time the number of players was decreasing and we lost roughly 15% of our active user base while or overall income was 900,000 euros 2014 start grimly January February being user is low month then we took one of the biggest decision not to give any free hats during seasonal events anymore and sell them instead in against cheese all

strawberries we finally realized that we were basically giving too many things for free during events and while it was very appreciated it was really dangerous in the long term because we had nothing to sell basically the decision was quite unpopular we gave up badges and titles instead of hats but players felt that they didn't have anything worthy to fight for anymore some players were happy about it because they didn't want to play all through the evening to get that nice Valentine hat but mostly people felt that we had become Strauss eventually they'd come down and slowly but surely you can see our sales went up and we were above break-even a lot more frequently and while the number of players decreased again by 15% and 13 we were monetizing a lot better so in the whole 2014 generated around 1 million dollars in

sales and advertisement and after paying for charges and taxes over benefit was $40,000 in the beginning of 2015 thanks to networking again we managed to get accepted into steam directly we launched the game on January 30 and it was a bit chaotic at launch we wanted to launch on a Friday afternoon so we could sit on the popular new releases all weekend long everybody does that and we had everything prepared but as we push the button at 4 p.m. France time there was something missing like that this button wasn't here whoops turns out it was a burden on steams and because the game was free it didn't have a set price so the system didn't display the button that usually says buy this game because 4 p.m. France time was 7 a.m. valve time they didn't

we didn't get help immediately and the game could not be download for more than two houses but it got better eventually and since we put some incentive in the Steam version for all play used to download it a little badge so they could download the Steam version we were able to sit in the popular new releases for consent for quite some time Ong on Steam also allowed us to get some nice press reviews a thing that we didn't get for the previous five years all the press the game ever got prior to the steam launch was the full article at launched in 2010 and releasing on Steam was like a new launch for the game with youtubers making videos about it and the press writing nice articles it it bothers a lot of credibility people acknowledged it at a real video game you know not just a flash toy that you play for five minutes I'm not allowed to show numbers here but at the end of 2015 we

got a massive amount of charge back true steam since we never had any problem with paper or mobile mobile partner we weren't prepared for the amount of fraud the fake credit card can generate suddenly all players were they were they were generating they saw an opportunity to get three free strawberries with a simple method and it spread like wildfire so so very quickly for a moment we were the single game with the most fraud of all steam this is not a record I'm very proud of we had a huge amount of we had to add a huge amount of rule and checks in order to stop the disease and we banned over 7,000 accounts including a lot of almost dedicated players in the process this was immensely popular but we really had no

choice here overall I can tell you those numbers we had over 25 million icons created through Steam and 16% of those played for more than an hour which is superior to the browser version so we are very satisfied with the team as today it makes a good part of your revenue for 2015 or income was roughly 1.2 million euros for benefit of 50000 for 2016 we decided to go all in France on dice we wanted to favor a mechanism that although play a lot of the seasonal events we wrote and planned 52 Evans one for each week of the year that would cycle the next year on and for the good part of the first treasurer it seemed like a great idea we never had first three months so good in all of transformice is history ladies engagement was high and monetization was

good it's everything we wanted right actually not really I don't make a small digression here but I think this is a common trap with free-to-play games we made those little Evans and they weren't very complicated to complete because they were so short so we gave them and we gave them some great rewards for them and but if you look back a little they will like small skinny boxes where you did a silly thing that was hardly related to the game and you got a great reward at the end of course such a mechanic makes your stats look good you have a great retention rate good concurrent user picks but ultimately the players get highly frustrated because if they miss an event because they weren't there or if the newest even doesn't have as many good rewards as the previous one and although they only do the small things the silly thing in order to get the rewards and then the the game until the next event why would

they keep playing as the rewards are not so good after you completed the islands it felt like an old cranky deli reward system where you log in only to collect the rewards and you cannot miss a single day because it's going to break your streak and frankly a word that was not doing what the players were here for we had a solid gameplay and we were driving players out of this gameplay with that so by the end of March 2016 we decided to stop making 111 per week we wanted to focus more on the original gameplay within longer events we added new currencies for other game modes so the players would get an incentive to play the actual game in its entirety and we also started refactoring a lot of code so we could focus on more core features like the ability for someone to change the username opening the authentication system so we could accept

the API from other websites and the steam launch converted us to invest in order to get the game on as many portal as we can like congregate and more games games often ninja Gaussian and so on well this will bring us a nice additional stream of users allowing us to reach out out of the word of mouth strategy that we currently only have so it's time for the word when right and wrong one room right physics back in 2010 that was same for physical flash games like fantastic contraption co-op and stuff they were all very fun solo but none of them included multiplayer twist people love to mess with the physics but it's becoming hilarious in multiplayer real-time multiplayer of course 2010 was a great year for Facebook games but they

were all in synchronous and a real-time multiplayer game that could still be played in your browser before it was a great alternative and one of the only ones accessibility the game the gimme splash the game weighs less than one meter and can be played on all computers thanks to you the Flash Player it has a guest mode so you don't have to create an account the registration doesn't ask you for an email and all of this make it very frictionless and made it spread like wildfire and such low specs also allowed us to reach more developing countries which leads us to the next point localization we translated the game very early to brazilian version spanish polished education and so on and this helped us a lot because some countries not have as many games as we do and even if some countries don't monetize as good it doesn't matter because it only makes

more players in your game and this is the most important parameter in multiplayer game and free-to-play games multiplayer use the funnier and more competitive you can get and the food the retreat we all play use for to help us with the translation and they were more than happy to deliver graphics don't want to be too self congratulatory here because i meta graphics but the choose of q little mice getting cruelly killed turned out to be a good part of our success never underestimate cute please feedback even if all players kept yelling on your forums that we never listen to them but we actually do a lot and we did so very early on the development of the game we iterate a lot based on the players feedback and 20% of our workforce is dedicated to community management today and two people team from HSN i are very

complementary and we max the different skills while minimizing the number of persons involved and that allows us to develop and iterate very fast now why we're wrong two people team of course there's a downside to being only two people when you have to age multiplayer multi-million player MMO I mean we missed a lot of opportunities because we weren't able to come up with the initial rush and the bugs and stuff our reasonable print obviously retrospectively or Athens been transformed into a good thing but at the moment it certainly wasn't and it puts a lot of physical stress on us we have been careless with how we generated money and when your business model only relies on one single source of income you got to make sure you know exactly what you're doing never try anything shady and think you'll get away with it

in the easier either because this is the best way to screw everything up I ring too fast and management when the free-to-play took off we were so relieved that we could finally scale the team up to more reasonable standard that we didn't pay as much attention to the hiring as we should have we grew from three to ten in less than eight months and we weren't prepared for it some we made some mistakes and some tensions arose and suddenly employees management had become a thing without us realizing we always try to provide the best working conditions to all workers but we shredded off project management entirely relying on everyone to find stuff to do on their own without setting proper goals and this is something we're getting better at lately but it took us a very long time and very painful

experience to realize how important that was this region mobile mobile we were so busy with the PC version we never took a mobile app seriously especially knowing that our game was slashed and it was best used with a keyboard a mouse and so we made a couple strides with Adobe AIR on Android but we never invested enough to be for it to be meaningful and that's probably a missed opportunity here monetization we had no idea what we're doing when we decided to go for to play we didn't pay much attention to what others did I runners to as you could only do free to play in two ways the Fair League of League of Legends way and the horrible farm their way and we were so stressed out that the players would hate us that we went for the most fair we could but that also meant under-under selling more products and once there are sets it's always easier to go down on your prices

but you cannot raise them after we didn't do or homework and we had no idea about our piu break even and all that kind of jiggly business thing and we are very very grateful for the free-to-play model because the game wouldn't exist without it but it was just a ton of work we weren't prepared for and if you want to do this get prepared know what very quickly we've been working for two years now on or biggest production after somebody called in it's a massively multiplayer survival game with zombies loot crafting but everything cooperative and not player versus player think of Project Zomboid mates don't starve in a massively multiplayer setting the game is currently in a private alpha state and we hope to release an open beta for the first half of 2016 between May 13 sorry-ass elapses here and we read it or not but let's flash to

know what every time I say that all game is /i get the mandatory response like but now haven't you heard flash is dying and yeah I'm quite aware of that was me today yes there is a trend in the Metro web browser companies where they are slowly but surely removing the use of Flash Player plugin into their systems but the Flash content is still overwhelmingly present on the web so most of them are also working on a replacement like Google for example as an ongoing project integrating flash clean cyclone that is called pepper API and some modular programs are trying to implement pepper tie to Firefox so there are workarounds we think that for long period of time flash will be disabled in browser but can still be activated manually with a single button which is okay for us even if there's a total

block one day we developed a standalone version that you can install and we can advise advertising on the website so that would definitely cause a huge drop in acquisition but the game won't die because of flash obsolescence a little place in the industry it's a bit unconventional we have a project that allows that allows us to live for more than six years now but we are still what you can call a one-game studio really because all of all the give all the games failed to generate significant revenue and transom eyes is still 99% of our income overall I feel there are more and more triple-i studios with very professional production and also there are more and more of one-man game with hobbyists that already have a day job and do a game on the free time and this less and less of studios in the middle I

feel thanks to transformice we are closer to the triple-a side of the spectrum in terms of budget and production that that means we're competing with very professional teams and all games need to be quite ambitious and this is a bit stressful but whatever happens we will keep making multiplayer games because we love it and we really believe that playing together is the funniest thing ever thank you [Applause] I was reminded to please rate decision at the end and I will be in a rubber room I don't know if we have time for some question do we we don't know all right I will be you know rabbit poop right by the hole thank you everyone