Using statistical analysis to predict the success of F2P games

hello everybody hello Helsinki uh my name is Marcus RAR I'm from company called pleo and I'm going to talk about Trends problems and predictions in mobile games business today so I've been in the mobile games business since 1999 when it pretty much started in Finland when Nokia released their first W based phone 7210 and then we started developing games based on that platform a lot has happened since that in 15 years and thank God we are standing here today in in a situation where the market is booming like never before Finland is hotter than never before and I I think that uh it's great to be finished and great to be working in the mobile games industry at the this

very right moment so a company pleo it's an investment and consulting company working with the game developers Publishers investors helping companies to do better products to stand out from the crowd I think that Picture Tells it all you really need to do your thing in a right way differently in order to stand out from the crowd to get people to notice you your company your product to do things in the right way so that's really important and I think there there is a lot of things happening right now in the industry and new companies coming into the business all the time so to me it's it's a it's a really interesting situation and to it's really interesting to work with the new startups and new eager people who want to enter the business and start developing

games so the past year uh I'm partly also here because I'm me working with ker and player on several EU funed projects in Finland boosting The Finnish mobile games ecosystem and helping the startups and I think Kur play are doing an excellent job in in supporting the industry and boosting the ecosystem enable enabling things so that uh new companies have easier to enter the market and do business it's really important and and without that kind of initiatives there wouldn't be supporting instruments which enable these things right now and I think Finland is an excellent place to start your business just because of these different instruments that you have available so I also helped an international mobile games Publishing Company playground publishing to establish their operations to Finland

during the past year then I founded and co-founded tree and invested in one game industry startups so I'm also involved in that sense in the industry so and we are these companies that I'm involved with we are looking to introduce new services for the game industry during this year and during next year and I'm also going to touch the base regarding this later on in the presentation and going to tell you something about predicting the future which is uh to me it's currently one of the most interesting things that's happening so regarding industry Trends uh like I said during the past year I've been working a lot with different developers and Publishers and investors and there are certain things that that are clearly happening the sift to free tolay business has been really painful to most of the companies so

companies who have started working in in the you know traditional premium mobile games business and don't have the free to play skills the pain painful way has been uh ahead and and uh the free topl is also still considered as evil to some companies so some companies seem to think that it's it's only a method for making money with games uh and it it has nothing to do with with the actual you know game business where you develop games which are really good and consumers love to play so there is a lot of debate in in that sense also happening all the time but uh I think last week the the event that was held in hinki the game's first event it's it's but there we had some good speaks about The Games first mentality so that games always come first

of course companies are doing business and they want to do money at the end of the day consumers are deciding which which games they play and uh it's up to them you know to make the decisions we cannot force them to play any games they are at the end of the day also making the decisions where they are spending their money to regarding this game Publishers are still also active in the market but most of the best teams in in free to play games business seem to want to self-publish the games and that also seems to be the trend so they are getting funding they are able to raise funding and they want to self-publish so for games Publishers the market is also getting harder because it's not that easy to sign quality games and to get good teams signed so it's not easy for them either so and regarding this there's there's also a lot of new type

of services entering the market which are helping to build the ecosystem talking about user acquis and services which you can use to publish your free toplay game yourself so there are a lot of companies also entering the market so there are different business models so you don't need to S your Revenue anymore you can pay someone to do the user acquisition do the same thing that the publisher has done before right so there are new models disrupting the market and also the health games and educational games are rising so that seems to be also one Trend uh for example Apple just introduced health and health kit Google introduced Google Feit so The Trackers variables everything the data there's a lot of new data that we can utilize in games so that also helps to build the ecosystem and establish new companies and there is also a lot of talks about gamification

but there are some problems in that sense so that uh there's a lot of talks but only few companies know how to actually Implement those things and it's the same thing also in health and educational games so what I would like to see is that uh we would combine forces from both sides of the table for example people who know what the education and health is and people who know what the games are so that we combine those forces and we will mix them and and then something truly amazing can come up from those because if you are lacking the other side of the table I don't believe that you can do that amazing stuff so we need those both views so that's that's also my advice to new companies in the market so if you don't want to do something different I think these areas are also something that uh worth looking from the investment trends

free to play mobile is obviously dominating the investment market right now so that's obvious because those are making most of the money in the market so why wouldn't be and Senior teams who have background from very well-known uh successful existing companies don't have hard time on raising funding right now at least in Finland so if you are finished you have worked for supercell or Roo uh and you are establishing a new company uh and you have a team of like three people in there it's not that hard to get funding I have seen companies closing funding rounds in weeks so it's happening still so but that's you know because there is a lot of money who wants to be invested in the game industry they are

eagly looking for new sources and Finland is hot it's it's hotter than ever but still many investors also see games as a lottery and that's partly because they don't know they don't understand that's always the problem if you don't understand something you you don't want to do it you fear so I think there are a lot of things still to be done because there is money that wants to enter the game industry and we need to build new mechanisms for that money to understand the industry and enter the companies and there are also several game industry funds bubbling under in Finland during the past year I've been talking at least to five different funds that are not yet public that are looking to invest in game companies some funds are going to be focusing totally on games and some partly but but there is new money entering the market also from

there so to me the investment scene doesn't look that bad we just need to be able to connect the products the teams and the investors so that's the biggest problem so then a couple of words about Market problems from game developers Perspective game Publishers perspective and investors perspective of course developer problems uh biggest problems how to design and develop successful mobile games duh That's obvious the success is different depending on who you ask somebody says that success is uh developing an excellent game that gets excellent reviews and and uh 10,000 users and people love it and that's that's enough for someone someone thinks that it's a good way you are making 1 million per

day so the beauty is in the eye of the beholder in this one so it really depends on who you ask this question from one big problem is also how you test the market and the commercial success for your game already in the development phase so there has been a lot of talks on that recently and and uh a lot of companies are lacking that knowledge and ways how to test that there was a good panel on testing just a reason but that was mainly focusing on game testing but in there also there were talks about monetization how do how you test the monetization how you build the monetization how you build the features so that you support for example the free to play model how do you make sure that you have all the current things implemented it in the game when you don't have the exact knowledge a lot of companies are still learning this business so those are also big problems right now there aren't enough people in the game industry to support the need for free to play

games that's that's just a fact there are over 200 companies in Finland and if all those companies would self-publish free to play games I don't know where we would get the people that's maybe we would need to hire all the free to play expert from us and bring them to Finland to to fill those gaps but that's just the reality of course the one problem is also how you convince the investors and Publishers of your game's potential before the soft launch I will talk about that bit more later on and how you spend less time on the road or more time on the development because that's also required if you are looking for investors or Publishers you need to visit a lot of Road shows have a lot of meetings but from my perspective it's also a good thing you get the pitch your game you get to meet people you get feedback so I think it's very valuable and all the companies should do that then from publisher problems Publishers don't want lemons lemon is a bad product so nobody wants lemons so public problem is how do

they find quality games uh without going through hundreds of poor games so I I've been working on the publisher side too and I know this problem this is a huge problem so how do you validate the game H how do you determine the potential before you have the soft Lo metric and how do you find the hidden gems in the market the ones that are not so obvious but have a great potential on on becoming the next big hits and then from the investor side how do you find quality games again without going through hundreds of games and teams and how do you do a proper DD on a game there are a lot of investors also focusing on the games business and you know can who who have the knowledge in there but but uh they don't necessarily have the knowledge on how do they go through the game design and know if it really has a heat potential or not they mainly invest in teams and that's why a

lot of like Finnish game companies have been able to raise significant amounts of funding already before they have anything launched because the investors they have invested in teams and of course investors are thinking how do we predict the future and get rid of the lottery so can we predict the future what do you think is it possible is it possible to predict the future something that has not yet happened nobody has the answer okay I think he has yes we can there is a possibility to predict the future and this is extremely interesting and something that I just also joined uh we found a way to predict the future

in games business so I'm going to talk a bit about Predictive Analytics so here is the current sweet Po in the market so that is the place when you have your game over there you get the analytics you know what your retention is you know your potential in the business that's what investors are looking for that's what Publishers are looking for they are looking for sweet spots from there they are looking the soft launch products and they are trying to find the ones that have the potential to be on becoming the next class of clans that's the thing that's also the place where the valuation and the risk profile cross because after that when you have a hit product the Val valuation starts

going up and the equity based Investments are getting harder at least you you won't get that big of a share of the company but also it's because the risk is going low so more decision making tools are needed before the soft launch in order to make those decisions in order to find the products that are really good because they're really are no ways right now to do that so there is a new company and startup in Finland cor game Refinery so game Refinery has created a method for predicting your mobile games success and top Crossing position even before the soft launch already in concept phase if you want it can be utilized during the whole development process

and getting feedback from the market getting feedback on how your game is going to behave if you would launch it right now it will test and optimize your game's commercial potential so how is this done here is an example we are talking about game Power score analysis so game Power score each game is analyzed during over 100 different variables each game there are hundreds of games in the database so we know where the market is standing right now we are doing a game Power score analyses based on those facts and then we are also able to tell what the potential us top graning position would be with that current setup of the game it has different factors fact like

analytics uh monetization re-engagement brand a lot of stuff included in there so it reveals the areas of improvement during the development process you can estimate the commercial potential before the launch which is exactly what is needed today and you can also adapt to the changing market and optimize the game after the launch so recuring power score how does it look here is an example of the game Power score for class of clans so the maximum power score is 100 so it's it's pretty obvious that class of clans gets a high power score it's 91 so it's obvious it's it's a top Crossing game so it's divided to different game elements like synergies inner purchases retention elements mechanics and playability audio visual and story and all these different things

remember plus 100 different variables in the game give you your game's power score so it correlates highly with commercial success of games and over 80% of games with power score of minimum 85 have reached top 100 in the US top Crossing chart the base value depends on the publisher brand and the game type and it's more modified but based on the analysis of game elements and each theme consists of multiple Elements which importance is determined by statistical analysis methods and the weights differ based on the game type that you are having for example class of glans and Candy Cross they have different different weights in the games obviously because they are different centers and based on this one we also able able to do scenario analysis with the power

score so we can test different scenarios for your game so if you would like to implement certain things for the monetization certain things for the re-engagement uh playability or whatever we can test those games and we can test how they affect the power score of your game how they effect on the success of your game and your potential you top ranking position so it enables you to do fact-based decisions how to improve the game and reveal the hidden potential in the game so your game might have all the needed things in place but you just don't know what to do next in order to take it to the next level and this will tell you that so here is an example of scenario analysis for Trial Extreme Tre so it's a game from App Store uh the current

situation with the current setup the power score is only 42 and if you remember class of clans it had 91 so it's pretty low power score but it's it's it's not a bad game it's a good game uh certain things are in place it's it's uh it's okay but there are just some things that would need to be fine to in order to make it commercially successful game so for example Trial Extreme 3 the biggest weaknesses are in progression and re-engagement what we did for this game we did an analysis added certain things to the elements and then made a scenario where the game would have a power score of 82 uh I'm not going to go into details here but uh we can discuss those privately and we can show you more info about that one but that's that's

something that we can do for the game so if if if the game is not performing we can show you what are the different ways that that that can be done for for making the game successful and what are the things that should be implemented in there and with this you are also getting the estimated top ranking position in the new scenario if you look at the current it's somewhere in 300 and with the scenario one it's going up significant significantly and there you can see the potential for Trial Extreme 3 and how much it's increased after the changes in the scenario analysis the gray tell us the current situation so it has 10% possibility to have a ranking below 50 but after the different things have been

implemented in it it has a 68% possibility to have a ranking below 50 so that's something truly amazing and I think this is a kind of a tool that is missing from the industry right now here are some top Crossing findings from the games that we have found doing the an analysis so 95% of top 20 games can be played with one hand that's a lot 80 game 80% of games in top 20 the game play is somehow slowed down for example you need to wait until your buildings are completed in 70% of the games top 20 you can gain XP and level up that's a lot outside top 200 it's only 19% and 63% of games have daily rewards outside top 200 it's only 15% so

there are a lot of find Lings like this in in our database so if you want to win a free Power score analysis you can sign up at gam refer.com so so there is a site and you can leave your contact information in there and uh you will get more information how this system works there is also wellip from game refinery in the audience if if you want to hear more about it so you can also have a discussion with him all right thank you uh any questions looks like a quite a silent crowd you got there but yeah uh amazing stuff um a lot of uh statistical analysis I suppose in in that power score yeah yeah looks very interesting uh

let's give a big hand to Marcos thank you