The Trailer Park Boys success story

[Music] [Music] usually I do this talk in 20 minutes so I got 10 minutes and I want to show a really cool content at the end so I'm going to do in 8 minutes so there will be no dad joke so for all the dads in the room they're not gonna get any lame dad jokes so see me afterwards I can hit you up with dad jokes just getting a loaded up here how many people here are developers and then just keep your hands up how many are independent developers right a couple people okay so I'll appeal to two people in the room perfect that's usually my audience a little bit about us so we've been in the mobile game space for as long as there's been mobile games before that we're Facebook developers being in the business for

back when there's myspace games actually trailer park boys greasy money is the most Canadian collaboration ever and it's a mockumentary and it's a great show if you haven't watched it it's been around forever and it recently just revived on Netflix for a new audience it's pretty big in Canada it's doing an unique content as well so they're kind of published by Netflix now and some of our game stats right now so we launched on 420 of course naturally and we were really we were able to as an independent studio get to these are great numbers so the big one was number one app and game in Canada and the number four game and in the US both on iOS and the number eight game for Android we made aims of 2000 they go by clicker but I think they're idle as well and the greasiest game ever made so we're definitely making the point of that was we're making a game for a very cult IP a very Canadian IP I

got these from DC games consulting it was at the Pocket Gamer connects in in San Francisco when he did a talk and it's a pretty going shanwa and a lot of independents and big studios are making them so I'm just gonna go through three quick lessons and how we didn't [ __ ] up and but I want to go over some things on what we did right but and then do I would redo so the two the three themes

are be true to the IP you can't over communicate with the IP and engaging the fans and closing the loop so be true to the IP core fans of IPs if you're not red is our what we tried what we did and it failed right to be too clever we thought because we were power users of the Trailer Park Boys @p who hired all this writing team we wrote all these Joe you know didn't like it at all all we found that was really those that they watched a game too now what we do is we take from the old from the first season Ames format and and

here that your game mechanics is in you or naming the smallest details as soon as you screw up one thing it's all over every social media towboat about how stupid you are you didn't get it right and they get really angry about it but that engagement is also really good because it shows their passion and they care probably the best piece of feedback that we got this entire year has been this right up from touch arcade in the top 100 iOS buyers guide it says where it

basically goes into the theme of that they really nailed the game for true fans but if you're not a fan you can get into it as well so if you're gonna make something based on an IP you really have to make sure you have that delicate balance that it makes sense for fans but it also makes sense for people that know about it it makes sense for people that have never gotten into it and now I want to watch that piece so that's the whole thing for less than - this is something that we're gonna do going forward with our new games you just you can't over communicate with the IP for original content so we waited way too long to ask INRI ask and really let the IP know that we need some original content that's based on the game and that's really important because what fans of the IP really want to see is they really want to see if they're playing the game and they've consumed all the content in Netflix or in the movie or the TV series that there's something new here there's a little nugget of like maybe what could happen and I think that opens a door for for IPS being really interested in games

as a new form of reaching their wider audience at the very end I'll show you one of these videos because I think they're hilarious there but they actually starting halfway into the project started creating original content for us including Christmas events the swearing on Halloween was really good and we were able to create after they allowed us to run the game for six months we convinced them that they should allow us to make something new in the universe and they allowed us to make an interactive sort of zombie alternative timeline and the fans absolutely loved it the engagements were crazy last one is just engaging the fans and closing the loop so you want to make sure that when you're working with fan when you're working with you kind of have two partners here you have your fans that you're building the game for

but you also have the IP as well so any little thing that you can do to put the fans back to the original IP is huge so for example on our live streams if they're going if they're going to have drinks with that and drink beer I'll drink the Trailer Park Boys beard or we'll ask them for merch from the store if they're selling it shirt or whatever we'll wear those shirts just to always give that extra push to them in newsletters we'll talk about when their new season is coming up that's where stuff the way you got to think about it is as a fan I think fans think we all live in the same office we have like and I actually if if fans watch this later this is actually true we're all we all live in the trailer park you know Ricky Julian bubbles have their office my game team has an office we make beer in the back can we have that but two fans they actually think like it's it's really cookie so so the more that you could make that seem like not two separate companies in just one big company making the brand the more it comes over office

genuine it and fans really like that so here's some examples of on both sides how we engage fans so we not only do a live stream of our community influencers in-house where we talk about live from Sunnyvale we also will talk about new stuff that they have up and we'll also get them to vote on new assets in the game you can see the engagement on that one's actually pretty high we'll get we'll get 2,000 people that will vote on something and those are really engaged fans so even if you only get 500 or a thousand the first time that you do that those are 500,000 people that are really engaged probably your your top players in the game it's really important to keep the dialogue open with them and this is just something that we always say on the community for branding that we've kind of done since the beginning that you know every small quality piece that you can actually do while working with the Brad you want to make sure you you bring that out every little small piece of polish that you can do to make it good

the fans are gonna see that and the IP is gonna see that and the bonus was get help so since we've been around forever and we've grown to 70 plus people now we're still an independent studio bootstrapped are profitable but we want to make sure that we don't just all that we don't think we know everything because obviously we don't and we [ __ ] up a lot so we brought in some consultants they took a look of what was working in the game that helped us kind of polish it and I think now that's how business is changing for independent game developers is you have to kind of budget that in and we spend so much on user acquisition but we won't spend some time at the end to bring somebody in and that will actually look at your game and be like this is a horrible idea because it's very it's very few you probably have very few people in your studio that are constantly gonna look at the game at the end it's getting ready to launch and be like this is a horrible idea we shouldn't launch this probably nobody

will say that so it's good to have a consultant where they can just kind of look at that and help you kind of fix that in in launches you have going forward if it is a horrible idea [Music] [Music]