Top 3 Mistakes of Angry Birds 2

[Music] my name is mons and i'm director of monetization and design at rovio i need to stand close to this and i have also is this too loud yeah i have also from okay hello my name is moles so i was for many years the the product lead of this game angry birds too and i have also been called on our biggest fan forums the guy who ruined angry birds now this is this is a horrible thing to say about anyone uh this is not true um but i am the i am the guy who had to figure out how to how to do this how to basically turn one of the most popular premium games of all time and and turn it into a free-to-play game and um whatever things like that tend to piss people off sometimes um but anyways angry birds too is is

um a nice game uh it's our biggest game to date and we really like it i'm today wanted to talk about the mistakes because it's been a bit of a bumpy ride so it's been a lot of mistakes during the road um i had a lot of mistakes i had 30 ones but i had to you know time is a thing so let's go for top three mistakes um here they are overfeeding the goldfish helicopter parenting and all work and no fun so mistake number one over fading overfeeding the goldfish this is not really one mistake it's more like a thousand mistakes that all comes from the same place which would be me so the thing is if we look at the total revenue of angry birds too all the money that we make and then we split this money up by by spending how much the players spend in the game

uh so then we have the the whales of course people who spend a lot of money over more than a thousand dollars and they obviously make up for a really big portion of all the the money we get from this game and then we have dolphins uh people that spend more than five hundred dollars seals this is i'm just making this up like that i haven't been able to find any like terminology here so don't use this uh wales is the only thing that exists as far as i know uh the herrings uh people that spend more than ten dollars in the game and then we have the goldfish up here so the goldfish these are people that spend you know less than ten dollars in the game or zero and me myself happen to be a goldfish in most games that i play i spend less than ten dollars or i spend nothing at least this was the case when i started working with this game i'm more used to this now but anyways i am a goldfish and this is a bit of a

problem because obviously you know you can see we don't really make up that big portion of the revenue me and my goldfish mates so even if there's a lot of us like a lot a lot obviously most people are goldfish it's really a problem because if i spend you know if i don't watch myself really closely i'm gonna end up spending 98 of all my time and energy catering for people that make up for you know two percent of the revenue these are not the guys that put food on the table for my kids so this is a bit of a problem i i used to be able to use my gut feeling a lot i was in tv before i used to write comedy sketches i love watching comedy sketches so you know if i write a joke and it makes me giggle the chances are it's probably a pretty good joke and some other people would like it as well right and then i got into gaming i made this indie cute like

in the puzzle games also all about creating something that i like assuming that other people will like it as well i still with you know in-game stuff when i have time to do things like this in in angry birds too for example still the same i can i can use myself but when it comes to system design meta game design of these kind of games i am i'm a goldfish i can't really use my gut feeling because these are goldfish guts and they they are wrong or at least they are wrong in the sense that they will not really make the the game grow the way that my bosses wanted to do so i need to not listen to my guests anymore and that's kind of hard so let's talk about phone booth stuffing for a while this is i this is not a thing anymore i don't think that anyone in here has done this but phone booth stuffing was big in the 50s people were bored in the 50s so uh this is a thing

where you try to cram as many people as possible into one phone booth and um the the world record is is 25 so 25 grown-up people in one phone booth um yeah this was they didn't have smartphones and stuff uh so anyway let's let's take this phone booth and let's just make some assumptions here let's let's assume that these are perfectly average american males in that case they should be you know about 101 181 centimeter tall and and they should have a net worth of around 33 k this is what google is telling me anyways now we're going to break the world record here today we're going to put two more guys into this phone booth and not any two guys uh we're gonna put these two guys into the phone booth so this is obviously jeff bezos the most uh the richest man alive um the ceo of of amazon and

it's also robert wadlow who is the tallest man to ever live so let's put them in there and see we now have a new world record 27 this is amazing already but the averages are are not really the same anymore so we need to we need to update that so uh first the height this is actually okay it went from 180 to one centimeter to 184 we can live with this i mean if i just grab a random dude from this phone booth chances are that he's going to be fairly close to 184 right unless of course i happen to grab robert but hopefully fairly close so this is an average that tells something at least now if we look at net worth uh it's now 5.2 billion dollars and this is more problematic because no one in this phone booth has anywhere near 5.2 billion dollars one guy has 27 times that and the other

guys doesn't have anywhere near that of course so this average i don't really know what to do with it if i grab any random guy they will never have anywhere close to 5.2 billion dollars um and this there are really two takeaways here so first off obviously you know the whales we have in the games they screw up the data exactly the same way that that jeff bezos skew up the the nice data we had from this phone booth and this is this is quite unintuitive for me as a goldfish when i think about an ltv of 10 for a game example like the average money we make from a a player is ten dollars i tend to think that some people spend ten dollars but of course no one will like almost everyone will spend zero dollars and then some guys will spend a lot more so this doesn't really come naturally to

me as a goldfish and also of course the other takeaway and actually the more important one i think is that money is very unevenly distributed in this world right so whenever i hear these stories we have these in all games right people whale super whales that spend more than 100 thousand dollars in one game that always feels weird or like i always get a bad feeling about that like this guy has a problem right but that's just because a hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money for me if if if we're talking about the jeff bezos guy here a hundred thousand dollars is nothing for this person right i mean he's probably spending that money when he just goes out to drink champagne with his friends so this is very hard for me to remember again as a goldfish and i end up and i have ended up spending so much time trying to do this trying to

get you know people to make that first purchase trying to make people you know just spend a little bit more and this is really hard i mean for this to make sense i need people to spend maybe three or four times the money they already spent that's a lot whilst if i work with these guys instead i only need them to spend you know percent more every month or whatever and and that will actually make a big difference and also of course these are the jeff bezos of the gaming world so they probably have a lot more money let them pay for the development of the game and then all the you know a lot of other people will be able to play really nice games for free so in that aspect i am a really really nice guy right so with that in mind let's continue mistake number two i really need to drink sorry sorry mistake number two helicopter

parenting so this is the start screen of angry birds 2 as it looked after launch and um if you see that little button down in the corner this one i remember hating this button so much i bitched so much about this button this was the row view button okay so all the games the rover games were supposed to have this button and and it was a button that would take you to you know some central stuff like cross promotion to the other games and review news and stuff like that and and i just hated this button i wanted to get rid of the review button because it was you know it was unclean i wanted a clean experience i was super scared of of distracting the players now let's have a look at the start screen of angry birds to today now you can see that um the review button is gone so i did win the the the war against the

corporate overloads but we have a lot of other distractions in there so um i counted the buttons today we have 25 buttons in the start screen so how did this happen well when we were in pre-production we were before we launched the game the other games the other slingshot games had more than three billion downloads already so that's a very it's a big number of course and obviously we assumed that since we have all these downloads people know how to play these games this is you know this is easy casual games three billion come on right and then we had the big launch uh we launched angus 2 in the end of july 2015 and and things actually didn't look that great so we weren't able to retain the players as as well as we thought we would and and we also didn't make all the money that that that we were

supposed to so this this was a problem and and we started looking at the the data like what what's going on here what's the problem and and we made some discoveries so first off people are really bad at throwing birds we we didn't know that but but they are so i mean do you remember this thing when you tap the screen and you do these abilities with the birds so this is a blue bird will split into three and they do this they have different abilities people don't do that and it's it's very hard i mean the game is supposed to be fun and easy and nice it's not fun and easy and nice if you don't if you don't do these things um then it's super hard so what we realized after launch was that we need to completely turn this game around and make it into something else and and the way we thought about it back then was you know let's let's refocus and and make this game all about the characters instead because people seem to like the birds a lot and and i'm gonna spoil this i mean this

this proved to be a very successful uh strategy so this is the orbital of the game since um since launch and and it's been going up i think like seven times since then um so the way we did this was basically you know we just started adding more depth to the game we added an arena and daily challenges and hats and you know just more more more so many new features crammed the game with more stuff because people you know didn't seem to get enough we had a new birth we even added like a little flappy bird inspired jet pack thing with your little tamaguchi hatchling uh some time ago super popular people like it so the thing is this all went really well and uh we should of course have done this earlier i mean early on i was super scared i always thought that you know we need to unlock all these features as late as possible i was so

so scared of of you know just distracting these poor players too much and and if i gave them too many features too many options they're just gonna leave i've seen nothing of that so if we you know instead of having this at launch we would have had this we had we just lost so much by launching a game that you know wasn't the game they wanted wasn't the game they needed and and this was all because that over protective helicopter parenting thing i didn't think they were ready for something like this but they really were mistake number three so i talk a lot because i'm now getting a bit nervous about time are we cool okay good all work and no fun mistake number three so do you know what this is 6.78 this is a d30 retention of angular verse

2. it's it's not that great you you really want it to be higher or i would so obviously when i can sleep at night i lie awake in my bed this is this is what i think about why why why is it 6.78 why isn't it 10 or you know 20 and i try to figure out how what can i do to solve this and when i think about things like this obviously i'm gonna get these kind of ideas you know like we need a daily login calendar we need to give them more better and better rewards for every day they log in and if they log in 30 days in a row we're going to give them an epic x right or you know we need to create a social clan system so they can chat with our friends and and and you know create new clans and and socialize they don't want to do that on facebook they want to do it here in our game so these are the things i'm going to end up thinking about in my bed and nothing wrong with these things

these these are fine ideas will they fix retention no um or probably not so the problem is that these features who are they really catering for these features are for the fans for these guys if you already like the game if you already enjoy the game these are the kind of features that can you know give you a context for enjoying it even more but are these guys really the problem look at them i mean they they love the game they're not going anywhere what i need to do is is is you know focus on the people that doesn't like the game and and the choose to leave the game it's not these guys so saying that people like the game they just want some long-term goals to me it sounds an awful lot like you know she's just dating that guy because he has a more expensive car than i do and it's what do i want to believe it's not the truth he's probably much nicer than i am and

also he has a really nice car so they don't want my epic x because they don't like the game they know they won't enjoy using the epic app x it's it's just a game they just want to kill some time they just want to have some fun here or you know here or here that's what they want so it took me a long time to understand this the first year after launch i think we ab tested like hundreds of different variations of the first you know chapters in the game what happens when you enter the game how do we keep players in the game and every possible variation of you know difficulty settings of the levels and in which order we give you the chapters all these things we tested and of course as always it's quite easy to to to move the needle on some metrics it's very hard to move retention obviously i mean we're not

selling water in the desert here there's a lot of free entertainment around nowadays so um if they don't like the game they will leave most of the time but one year after launch i got this email from the um people that make angular's pop another game uh rugby game and they told us about how they had this new level design philosophy that made all the levels much more fun and how that actually improved their retention a lot and of course i was all like fun is that a thing because i've been thinking about all these other solutions for so long and now all of a sudden okay this we need to test this right so i told oscar lovely guy this is a level designer and i told him just create a fun group make make a test with more funnel levels so he took the first 30 levels fun is you know a relative term of course but just tried to make them more fun and for the first time ever we could

actually see like clear improvements of [Music] of the retention so all the other tests hundreds of tests nothing and then we made the game fun now this is one year after launch so think about that a game like anglers two i think we had 50 million downloads the first year these 50 million people could have had this more fun better experience that would have made a big difference for us uh it took oscar two days to create this group so so this is might be the biggest or like obvious biggest mistake of all i think so in conclusion um there's nothing wrong with me you know thinking about my epic access and trying to catering for for the fans of the game the people that really like it it's very good but i tend to forget that it's just a game it's i start to think that it's

something else it's kind of like when i went here on the on the plane um they have this little monitor uh you know on the plane and and there was a qr code and it said scan your phone to personalize your in-flight experience and this is you know someone has had a meeting with someone and they they've been talking about the in-flight experience i i don't have an in-flight experience it's just a necessary evil right i mean it's horrible does it sit there but but but this is how you start to think about things i'm no better than these people because i i i do the same mistake with the games you know i think about your the player journey or or you know the play experience in the game i um sorry this this doesn't really work so as a conclusion it's very important uh i think to remember that it is a game

it's nothing else play the game every day for the first year i kind of didn't and then you know i realized that and now i start playing the game every day so i have to remind myself it's just a game make it fun and that's it actually that's it thank you very much