The Year in Mobile Games

Welcome to GDC 2018. And welcome to the Mobile Games Summit and welcome to our first session, the year in mobile games. Uh I'm Steve Meretzky. Uh in addition to presenter for this hour, I'm also one of the organizers of the Mobile Games Summit. And I have my two long-time co-presenters of this session, Dave Rohrl, and Wan Gryll. Who, by the way, is also one of the organizers of the Mobile Games Summit. Um so, as usual, we'll be looking at a lot of the top topics and trends in the the past year in mobile gaming.

Um but first, we'll start with uh a few of the interesting stories uh that didn't quite make the cut for spending an entire section of the talk on. So, for many years, uh the top social casino games have seemed like they're set in stone. No games leaving the top 25 list, no new games coming on to the 25 top 25 list. But this year, we saw two new entrants in the form of Cashman Casino and Huge Casino. Explanation? Well, Huge Casino has taken a page from the playbook of Big Fish, and they've added social play with strangers to their slot offerings. Just like in Big Fish Casino, you're joined in a slot room by several other players, and you see whenever they have big wins. As for Cashman Casino, this app is from Product Madness, the company behind the successful Heart of Vegas. Product Madness is owned by Aristocrat,

who's one of the largest manufacturers of land-based slots, including the number one machine of the last decade, Buffalo. So, it's not surprising that the marriage of Aristocrat's top-tier IP and Product Madness's expertise in social casino leads to a winning product. After a few years of being pushed down out of its natural birthright of the top slot by games like Clash of Clans or Game of War, Candy Crush Saga regained its top spot in the grossing charts just in time for the 5th anniversary of its release. Happy birthday. And speaking of Game of War, this Machine Zone game, after unflinchingly occupying the top spot for the last several years, has plummeted. This is last year's chart. In the 2017 talk, today it's almost vanished from sight. Machine Zone has

stopped acquiring users in favor of their new Final Fantasy game, but it's still astounding that the revenues of Game of War would fall so far so fast once the mighty advertising effort came to an end. Another important event of last year was the release of the new App Store on iOS. The top grossing chart was removed, but it made no difference as it hardly affected the performance of the games in it. Kudos to Apple for creating editorial content around games and highlighting well-designed games instead of just what could sell. For more information on how about how to succeed in the App Store, stay for the next session. Last year I did a section on how the Russian publisher Playrix has combined a match-three core with a builder wrapper with tremendous success. Since then, they've launched another similar hybrid except that the building component is now an interior space

instead of the garden surrounding a mansion, but with equally impressive top 15 success. Roblox is an online service that empowers kids creativity by letting them create games and environments out of chunky 3D Minecraft like graphics. It originally launched in 2006 on the web and this year burst onto the scene as a fixture in the top 20 grossing charts after a mere 7 years of grinding their way up. The loot box controversy continues. They have been the source of regulatory rambling for years, but the volume has ramped up in the past year. As a result and right before Christmas, Apple announced that is now requiring developers to disclose the odds of the likelihood of players getting different types of items. Instant Games, games played on Facebook

Messenger, are definitely a top story of the year gathering a lot of attention from both publishers and from the press. However, there's an excellent session on Instant Games here in this room during the final time slot today, so we decided not to spend any time covering Instant Games during this session. For our first topic of the day, we turn to the level based progression genre. So in the heyday of Facebook Canvas business, the North American market was divided up by the likes of Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, and Crowdstar. But there was a company in Istanbul called Peak Games. And while they weren't making many inroads in the English speaking world, they were very a very successful publisher across Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East. Well, Peak Games' minimal impact in North America changed dramatically with the 2015 release of a level-based progression game called Toy Blast. This is a subgenre of puzzle progression, which I generally refer to as block removal. The player simply clicks or taps on a group of two or more

like-colored blocks to remove them, and then the remaining blocks fall into place in the resulting gaps. Personally, I first saw this mechanic in a retail box game called Breakthrough, released by Spectrum HoloByte in the mid-1990s, although there might be even earlier Asian precursors. There are three main variants of this mechanic. One, exhibited here in a venerable GameHouse game called Collapse, adds an arcadey aspect. As you click to remove parts of the wall, this row at the bottom of the screen is filling. Once it fills, it rises into the playing area, pushing the wall upward by a row. You keep playing until one of the columns reaches the top of the screen, and you lose. The second variant is more strategic and puzzly, as exhibited by King's Pet Rescue Saga on the right and Pogo's Poppit on the left, in which gravity is turned upside down, but which otherwise is exactly the same game. In this variant, no blocks are added as you play. You just plan your moves to

remove as many as possible. And the third variant, of which Toy Blast is an example, as blocks are removed, more blocks fall in from the top of the screen to replace them, just like in popular match-three games such as Bejeweled and Candy Crush. The gameplay revolves around a goal or set of goals for each level, and then a limited number of moves in which to achieve those goals and avoid a failure. Here's how Toy Blast has done in the approximately 3 years that it's been live in the app stores. Across iPhone, iPad, and Android, the story is quite similar. About 1 and 1/2 years of growth, and then 1 and 1/2 years comfortably ensconced in the top 25 grossing across all three major platforms. Flash forward to about 6 months ago and the release of a second block removal game by Peak Games, this one called Toon Blast. The core gameplay is almost identical to that in Toy Blast. Like Toy Blast, Toon Blast is an

excellent implementation. The core gameplay is well made with saturated colors and satisfying animations. The levels are well designed and balanced. The boosts are well tutorialized. There are plenty of rewards to keep players engaged. The characters are appealing and the monetization is well planned and well executed. Overall, a solid A-level implementation. So, what has changed from Toy Blast to Toon Blast? For one thing, there's the theme. Whereas Toy Blast is set in a child's playroom and focuses on toys and game pieces, Toon Blast is set in a classic animation world of the 20th century, the sort of world where Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote and Tom and Jerry would be at home. These are the main characters, an anthropomorphic bear, wolf, and cat. The theme carries over into the level gameplay with game pieces and power-ups evoking the world of Roger Rabbit in Toontown.

And sometimes the inspiration for the world of Toon Blast is startlingly explicit. But, what's most interesting and even fascinating about Toon Blast isn't what's there, it's what isn't there. Since the introduction of the level-based progression genre with the King games in the early days of this decade, would-be entrants into the genre have closely copied King's saga model, including a meta map to organize the levels. And in fact, Toy Blast had exactly such a saga-style map shown here. But, Toon Blast has no such map whatsoever. The only way to enter a level, and in fact the only way to know what level you've reached so far, is this button on your home screen. There's no map to give you a narrative sense of a journey through an environment. There's no way to replay a level to get more stars. There's no way to see your progress versus that of your friends. It's basically Peak Games acknowledging that the sort of social interactions

that were born on Facebook Canvas are not operant in the mobile arena and never will be. But in subtracting some Sorry. By subtracting something as significant as the saga-style map, have they added anything? Yes. This unobtrusive button here, which takes you to a world of social gameplay. Casual guilds that Toon Blast calls teams. You're placed onto such a team with 49 strangers. No decisions to be made, not even naming your team. You can chat with your teammates. You can give them extra lives and hearts. You can see the stats of the 50 players on your team in a leaderboard-like layout. There's a summary of the team's info and special events like this team chest challenge, which is clearly influenced by the less casual clan gameplay of Clash Royale. All in all, it's a startling and exciting experiment in casual social gameplay with strangers.

And the marketplace results? Within a couple of months of launch, Toon Blast was showing similar results to Toy Blast, comfortably embedded in the top 25 grossing lists for all three major platforms. The first lesson here is that quality matters. As I mentioned, Toon Blast isn't just a random level-based progression game innovating on the meta-game wrapper. It's also a first-rate implementation of a block removal game. Second is that franchise matters. Building on the back of the success of Toy Blast, which reached top 25 territory in about 18 months, Toon Blast reached the same level of success in just two or three months. We've seen this pattern over and over in free-to-play games, with Zynga's various Ville games, King's various Saga games, more recently Supercell with nearly instant success by building Clash Royale on the super successful Clash of Clans

franchise, and Playrix doing the same with the recent release of Homescapes. And the experimentation on the meta-game front in games like Gummy Drop, Gardenscapes, and now Toon Blast shows that lots of different formats are possible when designing the meta-game envelopes for these level-based puzzle games, and that companies are being richly rewarded for those experiments, or at least for the most well-thought-out and most well-executed of those experiments. So, since the dawn of human history, we've gathered together to be entertained. First in a mob, all making music or telling stories together. Then slowly we spawned professional entertainers that would get up on stage, but still hundreds, thousands of us would gather together at a time and a place to watch this. Technology moved us further apart as we

began to record the performers, but still we would huddle together by the hundreds in theaters to see these great performances played over and over. This began to fragment further in the middle of the last century as television came into the home, and the viewing group moved from hundreds of people together to a small family. And then as we got DVRs and VCRs allowing us to watch our individual programs separately, when we wanted them on our own schedule. Now, streaming services like Netflix and Hulu bring the entire history of of film and TV into our homes when we want them and onto our phones as we want them. And it's not just that way with movies. Consuming news has gone the same way. So long where you want, so has music and even games. So I ask you, is this a one-way street? Is there nothing that can reverse this trend of how we consume media? It turns out the answer is

HQ. It's a recently released game from the original makers of Vine, the 15-second video sharing app. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a trivia game. It presents users with a series of questions. Questions are read out by a live host, and then players have only a few seconds to answer them to prevent them from Googling the answer. The content is very well crafted. Over the course of the game, the difficulty ramps up from trivial to excruciatingly difficult and obscure. The answer, by the way, is Twister. Every question feels momentous. You miss a single question and you're out of the game. You have no more chance of winning. On early questions, this will knock out a few percentage of players, likely some bots. But as the game goes on, questions get very tricky and punishing,

and you'll see devastation like this. It is worth mentioning that even after you're knocked out, the game is still fun to watch. The game itself is presented in a really interesting way. It is a live stream. It uses a combination of extremely simple motion graphics and live commentary from stand-up comedian hosts. It feels very unlike playing a typical mobile game, a world that's available to you whenever you want it, in your kind of private space, and much more like being a live contestant on a TV game show. Because they're concentrating their entire player base into a single time window, it's not uncommon to see millions of people online for a match, and that's some serious technical load. We're not talking about driving two or two and a half million DAU over the course of the game, these guys are pushing two two and a half million concurrent viewers into their stream, and consuming huge amounts of bandwidth

and venture capital to go with it. The game is live twice a day for approximately 20 minutes. For the other 23 hours and 20 minutes of the day, if you log into the app, you just see this UI screen. This really gives players a sense that they're participating in an event that if they don't get there on time, they're going to miss out on a real opportunity. The game offers prizes ranging from 2,500 to 25,000 per session. Because the game draws up to 2 million players, and the prizes are divided amongst all the players that answer all 12 questions correctly, sometimes the winnings can be a little underwhelming, but it's still fun. The game has a light social layer where you can get extra lives by inviting players to install the game. For each new install, you get an extra life that helps you overcome a missed question and continue playing. The writers have done a good job of requiring a wide range of knowledge

to be successful in the game. This creates incentives for players to play together. In the office I work in, four of us gather around every day at lunchtime to combine our knowledge and try to win. It works especially well with intergenerational groupings. There was There's anecdote about news anchor Dan Rather who gathered together on Christmas Day with his children and grandchildren and managed to win HQ Trivia on his grandson's phone. All right, leveraging their intergenerational knowledge pool. The game has a somewhat unusual business model. They are giving money away with literally no monetization in the game. No ads, no in-app purchases, no subscription, no nothing. Right now, their sole goal appears to be to amass a huge audience, build a big brand, and figure out the monetization later. Given the high number of players, it seems inevitable they'll get there with something like pre-roll ads, selling extra lives, maybe subscriptions to one or two more private sessions per day for

subscribers only. There are a lot of ways to get there, but they're not trying yet. Uh aficionados of this series will know that this is the part of the lecture where we like to show the revenue curve for the app in question. So, but despite this lack of current revenues, there's a lot of confidence out there in the game's business model. It's inspired a variety of imitators that play extremely similarly, look very similar, and hope to grab a share of the pie. So, what can we learn from this? First of all, event-based apps can work. HQ is down more than 23 hours of every day, but it's still driving multiple millions of DAU into it. And this could have some interesting relevance for your game. If there's something great to do that people really fear missing out on, it may be interesting to try and plan a flash event that drives all your players in together to share that experience. Do be sure to pick your times well. My office mates and I rarely play the 6:00

p.m. Pacific Time matches cuz we're all on our commutes home. Content matters. HQ has done a spectacular job of managing their difficulty curve and writing their questions beautifully. You need to provide a great experience if you want to drive that kind of mass adoption. The business model looks unproven, but based on the way that they're driving audience and the possibilities that clearly exist in the app, I strongly suspect it's going to get there. And uh I'll see you in HQ at 12:00 and 6:00. Thank you, Dave. I mean, one of my favorite things about uh HQ or how it's has becoming a popular culture phenomenon is if you go on YouTube and Google people winning HQ, there are people doing video selfies of themselves as they answer the last questions, and they're freaking out about winning $5. You should totally watch it.

So, today I'm going to talk about the importance of collectible elements in mobile games. And through my presentation, I'm going to talk about the historical reasons of why we collect. Since the beginning of time, humans have been gatherers. But our history of classification and collecting is only a few centuries old. And most notably, I want to talk about this man, Sir Hans Sloane. Dr. Sloane lived in Jamaica for a portion of his life. And that's where he developed his obsession with collecting natural specimens of all kinds. When he got back to England, he bought a three-story house in Chelsea where he displayed every possible object he could fit on his walls. At the time of his death, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds. It This included some printed books, manuscripts, natural history specimens, prints, drawings, and antiquities from all over the world. Per his wishes, this vast collection was

bequeathed to the British nation, and that's how the British Museum opened its doors. Sloane donated his entire collection to the nation. The British Museum is the first museum in history and today is one of the most important museums in the world. Sir Hans Sloane wanted to be recognized, noted in history books if he could. His collection was what allowed him to do so. And what does he have to do with games you might wonder? Well, almost every successful game in top grossing chart has a collection and it's growing at the newer games are for sure bringing collection or elements first and front. This is a collection. This is also a collection. This is a collection. Even this one is a collection. It's the reason why players like this guy spent $2 million in Modern War. I strongly believe that players who are truly engaged with your game do feel

they see an opportunity to do something grand. So, let's let's talk about why do we collect? Understanding why will help you creating the next hit game. Let's look at the reasons. A collection brings significance. In the 12th century, engineers figured out the high arches commonly seen in Gothic cathedrals today. They allowed them to build taller structures reaching up to 150 ft when a regular house was only a few feet tall. So, then everybody turning Europe wanted to have their own Gothic cathedral because it was going to put the town on the map. In a similar way, well-designed strategy games are those who allow the player to build significance in their land. Collections are important because they make their owners proud. From the early times of the Crusades,

every Christian kingdom had an obsession with obtaining a piece of wood from the Holy Cross. The cross Jesus Christ was crucified on. Here's an example of a piece of the Holy Cross in a church in Vienna. And here's one piece in a church in Spain. However, this church in Jerusalem wins the award for be the biggest ornament around a little piece of wood. And by the way, at some point researchers did a counting of all the pieces across Europe and came to the conclusion that an entire forest would have been need to fulfill all of them. But back to our point of our games. Rarity and unique items are a key element of game playing collections in successful games. Exemplified here are some of the rarest combat combatants, the cards, that you can have in Clash Royale. In the next set of the slides, we'll see why collecting rare items goes beyond being proud. A collection is valuable for not just the player, but for whomever admires it.

One of the most successful art dealers of our time is this man, Joseph Duveen. A Londoner who famously said, "Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money." He made a connection and was instantly rich. He sold paintings to the richest Americans of the time, like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. But he built a very special relationship with this man, William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Citizen Kane and the first media mogul. The first time Hearst visited Duveen's shop in London, he he was made to wait 30 minutes. Once he came in, among all the works of art in the office, prominently displayed was a Rembrandt. Hearst inquired about it. Instead of a price, Duveen inquired about what other pieces of art Hearst owned.

To which Hearst replied that he didn't know many. So, Duveen flatly refused to sell the Rembrandt to Hearst. "I cannot possibly sell it to you. This Rembrandt will be lonely." he said. So, for the next 2 years, Hearst proceeded to purchase many works from Duveen. In fact, we should thank Hearst for because many of the Renaissance paintings that we own in the United States were bought by Hearst in the first place. So, then and only then, Duveen agreed to sell him the Rembrandt. And Hearst finally got his legendary card. And Duveen made both lots of money. Going back to Clash Royale, they do a good job differentiating between common cards and legendary ones. The shapes are different and the characters in those cards have significant different and memorable actions in the battlefield.

However, the one thing that it's very successful is Supercell makes great use of online media working with influencers and fans react creating additional content that makes the rare cards well known. Search for Clash Royale on YouTube and the first thing that you're going to see is Clash Royale legendary cards. It's the most important thing. And in the game, there's a clear path to obtain these super rare items. You can see how I'm scrolling through the cards I own. And then right after it shows me the cards I don't own. And after that, it shows me the cards that I will be able to obtain once I reach a certain level. So, it's super clear what my path to progression is and that is super important. You need to tell people how to get the Rembrandt. In conclusion, for years we have always evaluated viability of a game by analyzing its core gameplay.

But we need to evaluate this. Not just about what is your core game mechanic. It's also what is your collection mechanic. Because your players want to invest in something that has value, that makes them proud, and has significance in their lives. Like Sir Hans Sloane, who today should be considered the first whale. Thank you. And one more tidbit of trivia. If you were wondering, yes, Sir Hans Sloane is also the inventor of milk chocolate. Um there's been a growth, some might even say an explosion, of interactive story games on the App Store.

These games are to some extent the spiritual successor of the sorts of choose your own path novels that perhaps some of you grew up reading. The app that started this trend was Episode from San Francisco-based Pocket Gems. It's not really a game. It's not really a story. What it is is a platform for creating and dispensing any number of interactive stories. Thematically, these stories fall into the soap opera or romance novel category with high school or college settings and lots and lots of dating drama. Almost every story begins with you customizing the appearance of the main character. This part of this is the part of the story with the greatest amount of interactivity. Once you're past that avatar customization, the stories tend to have long stretches with no agency and with no interactivity beyond just tapping to get to the next line of dialogue or to the next scene. Occasionally, on average, I'd say less

than once per minute, you get to make a choice that will actually have some kind of impact on the story. This is also how Episode monetizes. Some of these choices have a cost associated with them. Typically, the most dramatic, most salacious, and most revenge fantasy oriented of your choices. The choice displayed here would cost you roughly $2. These are almost like pay-to-play moments because the choices are so stark between do something exciting and do nothing at all. It's as if when you're approaching Emerald City, the choices were enter and see the wizard or just continue to wander aimlessly around the forests of Oz. The game also monetizes by selling chapters using a currency called passes. Like energy in Mafia Wars or hearts in Candy Crush, you get a trickle of free passes over time. A pass can be purchased for about 30

cents, which lets you play one chapter or read one chapter. I'm not really sure what the right verb is. There are original stories, but there are also plenty of stories that use branded IP such as movies like Pitch Perfect or celebrities like Demi Lovato. The platform also allows for user-created stories with mechanisms like voting and contests to surface the best written and highest quality stories to the Episode community. These user-created stories feature information screens and author profiles, so authors can even start to develop their own following. These user-created stories allow for a much broader sets of experiences and interests, such as this user-created story that features a character who is a mute Muslim woman. And what is the performance of Episode in the App Store? The results on Android and on the iPad are only middling. The game has rarely

broken into the top 50 grossing. But it's a totally different story on iPhone, where the game took a while to find its market, but since late 2015 has been consistently in the top 25, peaking as high as seventh. Clearly, the younger-skewing audience for this game is a much more phone-oriented than tablet-oriented audience. Then in mid-2016, Episode got a major competitor in the form of Choices: Stories You Play from Mountain View-based Pixelberry Studios. Choices is closely modeled after Episode, with similar multi-story home page, a similar intro to each story chapter, similar start of game character customization, similar pacing of linear dialogues interrupted only occasionally by actual decision points, and an identical monetization scheme via paying for the juiciest decisions or currency to unlock new chapters. One difference is that Choices lacks the branded story content of Episode.

It also has an achievement system, which can give the app a somewhat stronger feeling of of a gameplay experience. So, how is Choices doing compared to Episode? The grossing charts look almost identical. Middling results on Android, which combines smartphone and tablet numbers onto a single chart, and unimpressive numbers on iPad, but excellent numbers on iPhone. As with Episode, Choices has been firmly planted in the top 25 for the past year. Of course, while it took Episode a couple of years to work its way into the top 25. Choices did it in about 6 months. This parity in performance is pretty startling, given how imitative Choices is of Episode. In the past, we've seen imitative games come in and dominate their predecessors, such as World of Warcraft over EverQuest or Candy Crush and Bejeweled. But in these cases, the successor games were clearly improvements on the games that came before. Choices doesn't seem to be

a clear improvement on Episode in any obvious way. One possible explanation, Pocket Gems, in addition to their Episode business, has also been working on a major mid-core mobile game called War Dragons. It may be that this divided focus caused them to take their eye off the interactive story ball, whereas Pixelberry, with no other focus, took advantage. In fact, Pixelberry parlayed the success of Choices into an acquisition by Korea's Nexon this past November for an undisclosed sum. And with Episode and Choices both making good money, the ranks are swelling with similar offerings. First up is My Story from Nanobit. Then Lovestruck from Voltage. As you can see, this game is in landscape mode, which in this category counts as rampant innovation. Ludia released What's Your Story? Then Chapters from Crazy Maple Studio.

And most recently from NTT Solmare, the not at all subtly named My Shelf, My Choice, My Episode. So, the easy success of Choices seems to indicate that the market for these sorts of interactive story games is still far from saturated. Although, that might be changing with the flood of post-Choices clones. As a designer, it's amazing to me how much affinity there is for games like these that that so little interactivity and so little player agency. Not Not just a willingness to play games with such a low cadence of interaction, but a willingness to pay for games with such a low cadence. I wonder what other genres we could dial down the cadence of interactivity without affecting player satisfaction. And finally, more of a prediction than a lesson. Uh we've seen very little variation among the games in this segment. All of which have pretty much been blindly following the original

episode formula. But, as this market gets more crowded, publishers are going to need to innovate to differentiate themselves. And I predict that over the next year or two, we're going to see some pretty interesting developments in this genre. All right. I'd like to say a few words about Golf Clash. Now, this may come as a bit of a shock, but Golf Clash is a golf game from a company called Playdemic, recently acquired by Warner Brothers. In the main mode of play, you choose a course and get matched up against a random opponent to play a single hole of golf. As you start, you're taken to an overhead view, and you have an extremely intuitive shot making interface. You drag the targeting reticle to aim your shot, tap the take shot button,

and then you go down to a golfer's eye view, you drag the ball backwards to set force and a little bit of additional spin, and then try and release your finger just as the bouncing arrow goes over the center of the target to shoot it as straight as possible. The physics feel great, the graphics look gorgeous, the game plays well. It's a great experience, and that continues onto the putting green. Where once again, it's got the best putting interface of any golf game I've played on any platform. Simple and direct, drag the ball down to set direction and to set force. The blue vector comes out the front. When you're going to get it in the hole, the whole lights up, the flag pops out, and then once again, you play the bouncing arrow game to try and get it straight in. The player who gets the ball in the hole in the fewest shots wins the match. If you tie, there's a one-shot playoff. Whoever hits it closest to the hole

gets uh some gold that's contributed from players' entry fees, some soft currency. So, why is this game worth talking about? We've seen casual sports titles before. Eight Ball Pool from Miniclip has been a fixture in the top 50 for years. And they had some reasonable success with Archery King and Bowling King as well. Well, what is it that makes Golf Clash worth our attention? It has a very interesting meta game. So, in Golf Clash, when you win a match, you gain trophies. When you lose a match, you lose trophies. And you unlock access to new courses based on the number of trophies you have. To play the game, you need to decide which clubs you're going to use. You need to make the right collection to shoot to suit your play style. And you get access to different clubs by

grinding your way through different courses. Each club has a variety of statistics that make it play quite differently from the other clubs in its class, and you can upgrade them to increase their performance using the soft currency that you win from winning matches and currency you get from opening chests. Where do these chests come from? Why, you get one when you win a match. And then you insert it into one of four chest slots where you start a timer to open it later, and you can also get free chests every 4 hours, and you know, every eight holes that you get it in, and I don't know. It all seems oddly familiar somehow. Where could I have seen this before? Could there be some game where you win and lose trophies through play and use that to unlock new, you know, new battlegrounds and assemble collections of units to suit your play style that you get by reaching

arenas and upgrade them with money and cards and get chests and put them in chest slots? Huh. Yeah, Clash Royale. I mean, come on, people. They actually took half the name, right? Just the meta game wasn't good enough. Now, that's not to say it's completely derivative. They did some really smart things to adapt the meta to their golf game. They have golf balls, which are consumable goods. You use a a ball that has extra power or wind resistance on a hole, and then it's gone. They have a nice multi-round tournament structure that emulates the structure of real-world golf tournaments. You have to qualify to play in the opening rounds to play in the finals. They do a great offer of constantly surfacing great value deals for cash to add to monetization. They also threw away the mid-core clans of Clash Royale and replaced them with simpler and more casual social structures.

Like Facebook-style gifting of soft currency and golf balls and a few gems. And also every week they place you into a league with 99 random strangers at the same level of accomplishment. At the end of the week, the 25 top players get promoted into the next highest league and get better bonuses when they open their chests. But really, at its core, it's extremely similar to the Clash Royale meta game. Now, this is not the first time we've seen a meta game lifted on the App Store, right? How many puzzle games have shown you a reskin of this exact Candy Crush Saga map? Dozens, if not hundreds. How many RPGs have shown you this exact hero upgrade screen from Heroes Charge? Answer, all of them. But, these guys have had huge success within their own genres. Golf Clash is one of the first examples we've seen of a

complete meta game transplant from one genre, real-time strategy, into a completely different one, casual sports. And it's been done to great effect. As you can see, after a period of growth, the game has stayed in the top 25 on Android and on iPhone. It hasn't performed as well on tablet, perhaps because the game is so friendly to those little two or three-minute windows you find yourself with throughout the day with your phone. So, what can we learn from this? We now have a second proof point for casual sports taking up habitual residence in the top 50. This is a category that the App Store has some appetite for. Number two, the Clash Royale meta game has joined the lexicon of highly portable meta games. It belongs belongs in every mobile game designer's toolkit and has shown great resilience moving from genre to genre.

And third, the market doesn't really seem to be punishing this adaptation because of a few things that Golf Clash has done, like build a great core game with fantastic usability, great physics, really fun and satisfying to play. They've integrated the meta game very smartly. It's meaningful. It works in the context of the core game. The progression makes sense and is relevant. And they've added a few clever twists to make it their own and make it really shine. The last part of our presentation, I'm going to be talking about a few games where the game mechanic was something interesting and worth mentioning about. First game is called Flipping Legend. And in this game, basically, they thought about how can we make a a runner style of game, but instead of just making about avoiding enemies, we're talking about fighting

them. So, as in many runner games, you have three lanes. And in this case, your goal is to jump over the enemies and kill them. But in order to add a sense of agency and urgent like runners do with the scroll the constant scrolling, in this case, your life bar goes down the more time you haven't killed anybody. So, the game continues and forces you to play as dynamic as possible. And as you move forward, they add new elements of gameplay such as objects being thrown at you. And you can move from one wall to hit the wall on the left up here on the right and vice versa. The next game I want to talk about is called Race Kings. By the way, tomorrow at the Indie Game Stories session, the maker of Flipping Legend is going to do a postmortem. As well, the makers of Race Kings.

So, this in this game, basically, it's a head-to-head online drifting game. And the left side of the screen allows you to press the handbrake and the right side of the screen allows you to accelerate. Combining both actions allows you to turn the your car and drift. And you have to keep your gas pedal around the blue zone of the accelerometer. And like I said, this is the game is always head-to-head. You compete against other players and there are multiple cars that you can purchase and upgrades that you can do to the game. Next game is called Faust. And Faust takes inspiration on on old style arcade games. And basically, you have this white character and your left side of the screen allows you to jump towards the left. Right side of the

screen, jump towards the right. It's gravity. Your your character is constantly falling. Uh the way that you combat against fight against the the enemies is to by jumping over them in order to kill them. But the one thing that I was really engaged with this game is that every time I kill somebody, I earn one coin. And there are permanent upgrades I can buy. So when I buy an upgrade, this is a a video of a level much further ahead. I for example now have a bomb and also a homing missile. So now my mechanic is not to get closer to the enemy, but rather go farther away. It completely changes how I play the game. And as you continue upgrading doing permanent upgrades, it also changes again. I thought it was really clever. Next game I'm going to talk about is called Talking Tom Pool. And Talking Tom Pool combines elements of basic arcade play on mobile plus color

matching mechanics. So the goal here is to drag my finger on one of these cute animals and have them slide towards the other animals of the same color. Looks very simple, but interestingly enough, as the levels as you progress through the game, the levels start adding new elements of gameplay. And with these new elements of gameplay, then it comes it becomes a lot more interesting. So, for example, this is an example of a level where we have frozen animals that we have to hit and also power-ups that allows us to get a boost. And because of the limited elements in the in the screen, you have to plan strategically what your best move is. Lastly, I love this game. It's called Battle Golf Online. It's a head-to-head game where you basically have two actions that you need to do. Number one is to tap to find the the right angle. And number two

is tap again to set your strength. Your goal is to shoot the ball in the hole before your opponent does. So, there's a little bit of prediction of when the next hole is going to be here, right? But also, there's precision in terms of what where you have to shoot the ball. And it's a game play to five. And you get to upgrade your looks as you earn coins and stuff. And that's it. So, before we go, we want to say that please helps us if you fill your evaluation forms. We get your feedback and know what we did good and what we didn't do well this year. And we're open for Q&A. So, please if you can get to the mics, that'll be great.

No questions? Quick Dave, say something embarrassing. We got one. Hi there. Hi. Go ahead. Thank you for your lecture. Um for me it was strange that the Sorry, it's my first question on GDC ever, so I don't know the whole procedure. So, as for me, uh this year was a lot about how to put PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on mobile. Mhm. Uh and strange that you didn't mention that. So, what are your your thoughts about all this race of PUBG clones on mobile? I didn't even know it was already

available on mobile, so Yeah, I'm not very up on my PUBG. I mean, it's an interesting game, but it's not available on mobile, so why would we talk about it? Well, yeah, there's there's 2 weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and it's a 2-week old release, so basically it's going to be 2018, probably will be the year of PUBG if if Battlegrounds if it it will be, right? But not in 2017. I already played like Mhm. 12 clones. Yeah, I mean, I think it'll be interesting to see what the results of those are, right? Obviously, there's a huge appetite for those kind of Battle Royale games on PC, right? They've kind of crushed the charts in terms of viewership and sales, but we've also seen historically a lot of genres that work really well on PC or on console, right? The demand kind of long sessions of focused attention really struggle to break through on

mobile. I feel like we're still waiting for the first great mobile MOBA. And folks have been pushing on that for quite a while. So even though we're kind of seeing those direct migrations, I think it's going to be some number of years of kind of iteration and adaptation and really thinking about what that means to have the right Battle Royale game for MOBA before we see that same kind of huge crushing success on the mobile charts. Sounds reasonable. Thanks. Sure. And good question. Thank you. Thanks for your lecture. Um for me HQ is probably the biggest surprise for 2017 and very interesting. But still it's um company who has a lot of funds available to make this happen. Uh and generally um the success of mobile seems to be only possible nowadays

with a lot of money basically. Do you think there could be success without huge funding just because of the gameplay is so great or do you see any game that you have seen in 2017 where you expect it to grow further in 2018? Well, define define huge budget and define success. I mean one of the games which is in the top 20 of the app stores continuously throughout the year which hasn't been there before and is not backed by like a established publisher and very big IP, something like that. Yeah, I mean I think it's very hard at this point to crack top 20. You know, particularly on the the grossing charts without some significant source of funding. Although, I suppose the inverse question is you know, if you don't have significant

funding in your company and you don't have to please investors, but rather generate a revenue stream that works for supporting your team. Do you need to target being in the top 20? Right, I worked on um you know, a very successful project that launched I think in early 2016. Um Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money. It was a kind of low seven-figure budget in part because of a restart. Like, had we had the true course, the game probably could have built been built for half that. And, you know, it's been in the top 100 intermittently. Uh stays within the top 200 and does really, really well for the company that built it that has, you know, a few dozen people. Right, it's a huge financial success for them. There's also the, you know, the question of do you have to have a giant hit right out of the gate or can you slowly build a business over time? You know, and I think we see examples like Playrix, the

makers of Homescapes and Gardenscapes. You know, they didn't have that mega success at their first time out, but they gradually built an audience, they gradually built up expertise and and as in the case of Toon Blast Mhm. um you know, building on the success of Toy Blast, you know, with with each game, you know, you can kind of like build on the foundation that you've already created and over many years you know, get to that point. Well, not only that, but the original uh Toy Blast, I think took two or three years to reach that kind of top 25 grossing Right. And, of course, that wasn't Peak Games' first game. They were, you know, building that on quite a many years of expertise. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you, always. Yes. Hi. My question is regarding the choice-based narrative games, um because I've noticed often that all these choices are aimed towards the younger

female audience demographic, and yet your slide that our familiarity with the '80s genre of the choose-your-own-adventure weren't skewed that way. And I'm always trying to find that explanation. It's whether because there's the RPG world that has the male audience demographic already, but why are these choice-based games mostly female audience driven? Um well, certainly Episode is the first one out of the gate was aimed that way and achieved success, and and therefore, you know, everyone else has been doing that. Um you know, could the same format be appealing to other demographics? No one has tried yet. You know, my guess is that that you know, Episode, uh you know, kind of hit the sweet spot out of the gate, and that um you know, while other demographics might have some, you know, success, it wouldn't equal the success that uh you know, that has been with the younger and and primarily female audience of of

Episode and Choices. Um but I certainly hope someone tries cuz it'll be interesting to see the results of that. We have time for a couple more questions if anyone has a Oh, yeah, here comes a question. Either that or he's going to rush the stage and do violent things. Hello. Um Yeah, it's kind of leading on from the first question, actually. Um something that I've noticed is that um the shorts, yeah, we've we've always thought for mobile games that short sessions are the winner are the are the only way to only way to do it, but actually there are a few exceptions to that, like Pixel Gun Pixel Gun 3D, uh Rules of Survival, and Fortnite's now doing amazingly well. Mhm. Um so, I think things are changing, and you have the 5 v 5 mobile game up there. I'm I'm curious to know why didn't why why you didn't mention that, because that that movement away from short session Yeah. seem and, you know, console games and PC games coming to mobile and succeeding. Lineage 2 is another one.

Yeah. It's an interesting one. I I feel that uh yes, there's a trend. Uh Pixel Gun 3D is a few years old, not necessarily a new game. Um and uh but I see that there's better success in games that are uh different game mechanics specifically made for the phone. And I'm going to uh always say that Marvel Contest of Champions is probably one of the best arcade games ever designed for a mobile phone. Um and uh it's the reason why it's still in the top 10. And I believe that your success your long-term success is closer to creating an arcade game mechanic or action game mechanic that is specifically designed for the mobile phone rather than try to cram what the console or the PC gaming experience is. But I would say that's a still short session game. That's still short session game. Contest of Champions Yes. is 5 minutes a day. Right. What's interesting is that there

are games emerging where you can play them for hours on Yeah. And and the survival kind of games where you can like PUBG um you know, you can play that game. Those sessions will be very long, and you can really get into it. Right. But I think I think there's an interesting distinction there, right? So, one of the The There are certainly many games on mobile that you can play for hours, right? And that have had some success. So, take a look at for instance, Hearthstone, right? It's not that hard to have a a 90-minute Hearthstone session. Uh I've had many. But, it also sort of allows you to get through and do something meaningful in 5 to 10 minutes. I think watching the the progress of games that demand really long session times, right, in order to do something meaningful, and seeing what they can do on mobile, will it'll be really interesting to see what happens with that over the coming year, right? I think it doesn't

necessarily play to a lot of the strength of the platform, which are its kind of ubiquity and its ability to slot into those little dead moments that you have, what I sort of call the Starbucks factor, right, games that you can do something meaningful in while you're waiting for your latte. It'll be really interesting to see if developers can bring a critical mass of players over. And I think the coming year is going to be a super interesting test lab for that with these Battle Royale games coming in. I think we have time for one last question. Yep. Go ahead. I was wondering if you had any more insights as to why the stranger mechanic actually works. Uh I understand it reduces friction and maybe getting a group or clan of like-minded people together, but couldn't that just be bots kind of posting things to each other? Why What drives that uh kind of as a long-term mechanic that works? Well, one thing that we found in a lot of the sort

of social research we've done, um you know, especially, you know, more recently compared to kind of the early days of Canvas gaming, is players have grown to be reluctant to bother their friends. Um other than, you know, perhaps a very small handful of friends who you know are really into the same game that you're into, players feel, "Oh, I'm you know, I'm I don't want to hound my friends. I don't want to feel like I'm irking them. Um and also another thing that we hear a lot is I don't want to um I don't want my friends to know how much I play games. There's sort of a little bit of embarrassment or a little bit of feeling like, you know, I'm you know, I'm not doing something I should be doing by playing so much. Uh whereas, you know, this sort of play with strangers, you know, because it's the same kinds of light interaction, like I need a life. Um it's not like, you know, the fact that they're strangers is that big a deal. You know, the the interactions

aren't that deep. And yet, you know that, you know, you're not bothering a friend in those sorts of ways. Yeah, I think we know that, you know, the social component of games motivating people to compete, to collaborate, it's really important to a huge segment. Um and we also know that, you know, uptake for most games on Facebook Connect, where it's offered, is usually sub 50%. So, you don't want to take that, you know, majority of your player population and not enable a social experience for them. So, using that kind of random group of strangers within a competitive band gives you some social interaction, something to do for the rest of those players. All right, thank you all so much for coming. And uh have a great GDC.