Using your game's community to drive ahead

hello how's everyone doing I was dozing off over there because I thought I was coming on stage a little bit later but I'm glad I woke up so it's really great to be here thanks for the for Pocket Gamer for allowing me to talk I'll give a special thanks also to marry auto painting for saga social for helping me get the spot so I'm here to talk about driving ahead with community so we're I'm with the do dreams and we're a game studio here in Helsinki and we've got 17 people working on drive ahead and drive ahead is a gladiator car fight game so the idea is that you get points by hitting your friend in the head with a

car and well as as any other I forgot to ask what I need to do is go for okay so as any other game developer naturally we'd love to have a community around our game so when I started a CEO one of my task was to create a community and we can imagine that there are many kinds of great benefits to having an active community for example let's turn our players into viral marketers so they draw downloads and and no increase engagement and other kinds of benefits and of course the challenge is that consumers rarely behave in the way that we would like them to behave so people tend to have a mind of their own and the main problem there is that for most casual gamers who play a game like drive

ahead it's actually a quite a low involvement situation so they really don't have any motivation to participate in a community so when people play these casual mobile games they're looking for some quick entertainment throughout their day you might play games for a couple of weeks or months but it's very rare for people to want to invest time in their day to hang out with other people who play the same mobile game and developers already now have wonderful tools to make their games more social and so you got different stuff for sharing updates or content from your game and then the problem for the problem there is that this content is not very usually very interesting for other people so for example we earlier had a couple of high score chaser skill

games these minigames where it was possible for you to share the end screen of the game where you have just died and you have perhaps a high score so it might you might feel proud as a player to reach your high score but if you see that on your twitter feed that someone else has received gotten a new high score in the game it's probably not that interesting for you so so the way we we wanted to solve this problem was through drive ahead and as I mentioned drive ahead is a gladiator car fight so you get points by hitting your friend in the head with a car I think the starting point there was that we felt that we have to be a studio that solves a problem in gaming so in order to have any kind of community around your game you have to solve some problem because otherwise people won't care that your game exists so we noticed the parents don't like it when their kids are glued

to these devices or fighting over whose turn it is to play and also when you hang out with your friends going out for beers or coffee or stuff like that there aren't that many mobile games that you can play together so the starting point for our studio was to make games that bring your you and your friends to play together and since we were startup and we didn't have money we have to do this in a very cost-efficient way so local multiplayer games are very cost efficient and quick way to test if a game is multiplayer fun so we started off with local multiplayer games and we're now now with the revenue generated from this game I'm happy to take some time and invest into developing online multiplayer stuff into the gate so we already have a Wi-Fi multiplayer feature and there's more stuff coming later so it is a arena racing game but I guess the real genres for it our family and party so it's not

a real racing game in terms of being like a simulator game or or some kind of other game like that that are popular in in in racing but nevertheless we have now 25 million downloads so so it has how it has found this place in both google play store and the app store okay so how are we then building a community for drive ahead so for us this takes place through video replays so drive ahead is a physics-based game there's all kinds of fun crazy stuff happening in the game so often players might want to see that you know like what happened in the game just now I want to see a replay and if it's fun and entertaining day they want to share that with their friends so for example i was playing drive ahead yesterday and and every time after the match ends then i have the

option of watching the replay and then if I like I can share it with other people this is the basic level integration with every play which is a service organ no on the next level then we figured that well every play in itself is kind of like broadcasting so you're always just posting these videos but we'd like the social experience to happening inside the game so we have this thing called the superstar stadium in the game so every day there's a new racing mission and yesterday its mission was t-bone so you have to defeat for enemies and over there you can see there's a featured replay so we searched for the most recent popular replay clips for a specific mission we scanned through the replays shared through every play and then we promote actual gameplay clips

from our fans inside the gate so that number one position changes dynamically so throughout the day people have different they have you have a chance of trying to do better make a clip that's more popular and be the number one player for today's mission so this is how we want to make our fans celebrities inside the game so it's important for us to not so much have the social activity take place at another pay place like facebook but rather have it happen inside the game so I watched the replay yesterday I felt that I could do better so here's my attempt at doing better so I'll narrate this so here you see me flying in the air I'm the guy in the blue compensator bike and you can only squash name was named that way my

strategy here was to protect my head and by being there under the level sure enough I thought I'm dead meat by this point we got the reigning meteorites and tier X vehicles trying to kill me i'm doing the wheelie all the time to protect myself from that red devil over there I was really scared of getting hit in the head myself but luckily the meteor rain saved me over there I thought this was really awesome it was really important for me and I shared it but I wasn't the number one replay yesterday so we have from 600,000 to 1 million daily active users on iOS and Android combined so with that kind of number it's bound to happen that the fans are going to have better replay clips than I or my team can produce so in the beginning we play the game and we

make our own cool clips of what's happening in the game and then pretty soon we realized that you know what it's better for us to just go through every play and see what kind of clips are popular there or should have been shared recently and let's give something back to the community so for sixty three weeks in a row we've every week went through the top replays of that week and created a collage of them so this so the next clip is a is a best replays of the week and this is our way to give back to the community so we show the kids that that we appreciate that they play the game and we want to you know give them a spot in the spotlight to as gratitude for the wonderful stuff they've been doing

so here you can see that a motorcycle is the perfect good vehicle to fight against the steamroller and it's important for us to have these random objects into the arena they provide a great practical element we've updated the game for two weeks since we launched this one and a half years ago see that was from our Christmas update this is a clip from the daily missions in the superstar stadium penguins are really good round the majha oh that was really lucky at the the opponent spawn right there where the penguin was so that was good for the player so you can see my team light loves Mad Max don't tell anyone that it was inspired by then we don't have a license we did a soccer event during the summer so in addition not here you don't hit the other guy in the head you play sports or play soccer

and this is a bit gruesome yeah I love getting baby carriages cartoonish violence it's not realistic right in the head so these are all our actual players from every play another cool penguin trick yeah boo baby carriage ninja flip I don't remember this oh yeah I thought that this was going to be gruesome but it feels so good when you beat the steamroller with uh with baby carriage really good stuff happening there so how has this impacted us as i said we use every play to share the video replays we're the number two game on the all-time list on every play the only game that has more replays than us is geometry dash so if they're number one I

have no problems being number two as I said this is our numbers from the last month we didn't have we don't really do any paid user acquisition and we had some small featuring zon google play and the app store maybe like five or eight countries or something like that so still we were able to have 6.5 million da you and on the best days up to 1 million daily active users so here's my conclusion so when people ask me that how do you create the community my answer is that you don't or you can so we can only provide the tools to our players and if the players love the game if it's important enough for them and you have to have the right tools then they will form the community themselves so but of course you can impact that so it's not it's not just luck so so for us

it's important to make that is a game that is fun for others also and what we mean what I mean by this is that that other people have to enjoy watching the replay clips also so it's kind of like the gaming equivalent for america's funniest home videos or or or some other program you have now on mtv or stuff like that and so what does that so it's physics based so this it's a physics game so you can bump into a tombstone or hit a penguin and it's going to hit five other things and eventually something will fall on somebody's head and it's it's silly it's funny and it's not something that you can really plan nevertheless it is still a skill game so so you you can master drive ahead and become better at playing the gate we as

I said earlier we don't do very much user paid user acquisition so we don't do a lot of advertising but we do a hell of a lot of marketing so we invest quite heavily into our community we have now 17 people on our team and about five of them so a couple of the developers and designers and artists are participating in community management so we answer all the stuff in-house because I want us to have a direct link and feed babloo from the players so the people who are designing and making the game they first hand experience what what the players are why what what feedback they're giving us we do content marketing to give thanks and gratitude to the fans so as I mentioned every week we spend we have one artist / graphic designer doing spending one or two days to make this video collage of the best replays so we

found that that's the best content we can create this most popular for us we also promote individual players and their clips inside the game so some of the most popular Clips inside our gay our game have received about 600,000 views within the month and think of yourself what that would feel like if you're twelve thirteen fourteen year old clip kid and you publish this cool clip and suddenly you have several hundred thousand people who have seen it so so that's that's quite a unique unique feeling and experience for for the players so we we want to promote the gate Clips inside the game and then of course we do create our own content but then that's teasers about the future update so we have this thing called developers weekly so fans seem to love

watching clips where our team is playing future updates and just goofing around and sometimes we shoot them in then finish and just put some some subtitles or something like that so we try to make it really raw and authentic so just handheld video clips you know shoot it with an iphone or something like that then and it has to be done and edited in like half a day so that's kind of like the investment we're willing to make there so for us we've discovered that this community we have really multiplies the impact and effect of if we are featured or if we're doing some other other marketing so for example if we do on an update that is feature then of course you know you see an increase in the daily active users and and revenue but we might see similar similar increases for the updates that we do just with without getting featured

of course if you're featured then it will the impact will last longer but yeah our fans are able to push us into quite high heights as I mentioned we did the soccer update during the summer and so before that drive ahead had no soccer content in it it's just a gladiator glad you toria larina racing game and suddenly I realized in a couple of days we're number 9 in keyword ranking for soccer in the u.s. so that can happen only because of the community and they're there they're driving the Conte the popularity of the game and they're bringing us new new folks also so having a strong community is kind of like insurance or it protects you of these fluctuations so if you get featured it's really great but what if you don't get featured for another three months or six months then then the community will help smooth things out

very good so we have little time left so here's my contact information if you guys have any questions I'm happy to answer them now or you can give me a call or shoot me an email later thank you very much any questions from anyone great can we get a mic over here please hi I'm a yoga community manager from kokori how did you start up with the community when you really is the game in so coach or for launch how did you start with it you just decide that is what we're gonna do or how did it begin yeah our artist sorry I developer yari who

came up with the idea for the game had also seen every play used in some other games and and he he wanted to see how it works so had been playing around it in his free time and he said that you know why don't we give this a shot that let's just put it in there until then we had had some social features like share your high score and we knew that that sucked so we figured that whatever impact this will have it will be a lot better than then what we're doing so far so we like to experiment with stuff with minimum risk and investment then it was more about just putting the tools out there and see what people start doing with it and we were really astonished when we realized that people really like to share these clips so then we had to figure out how do we respond to it and that was then to start creating these collections of that the users replay clips thank you any other questions I'm sure I saw someone else's hand off only got one

gentleman over there in the back black shirt we have seven seconds left so not to put any pressure in how many languages to provide community management well we have english we do finish so not very many with it's mostly english so we're using google translate to understand what people are saying and often we just say that sorry like we don't speak Russian or for some other language and and we've been managed been able to manage so far with that drive ahead is still like a small game but where we want to take it more into a player service so then then it might be smart to have some partner provide support in different languages also but we we do a couple of languages that we know we

hired one person who speaks German so we can do that Shh