Vlambeer's Rami Ismail on the State of the Mobile Games Industry

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hi good morning I'm not going to make you shout hey Al together don't worry go on that's good sorry man I'm not American um was sorry I just I just came from the US yes well through R never mind hi my name is Ramy I'm one half of a Dutch independent developer known as vlir uh we are best known for games like super CR box Ridiculous Fishing lift rousers and Nuclear Throne um oh let me set up something here it's very early in the morning we PLC this stuff this ear um we're best known for those games and we're also known for uh tools like d

presskit which is a free tool to help independent developers create presskits do distribute which is a free tool to help developers send build to the press the toolkit which is honestly just a website that has both of the other websites on it and thing called game.or which aims to bring information about game development to every major language in the world starting with uh besides English also Portuguese Spanish Russian uh Chinese and Arabic um so that's what I do um they asked me to speak here at um at Pocket Gamer connect and um I was I was surprised and honored U we're best known for two mobile games in Mobile space we did Super CR box in 2012 that was um a moderate success it saved our company because we weren't doing very well back in the days and then we did a little game called Ridiculous Fishing which is a game about fishing with machine guns uh in case you've never been fishing with machine guns I can recommend it uh we like to call the simulation it came

out in 2013 and um it did really really well for us it was a premium game um $299 it um performed really well financially for a small Studio like ours and on top of that it uh was named best iOS game in the in five years of app store by Dutch iade we won an apple design award we won uh Apple best iOS Game of the Year best iPhone game of the year um and then we kind of didn't do much with mobile for a while we're currently working on a game called nucar Throne which is a game that is available now on Steam Early Access it will come to PlayStation 4 and it will come to PlayStation 3 and it will come to PlayStation VA which kind of mobile and um and it's coming to Xbox One and we've been working on that for 2 years been working on that for a long long time so we kind of lost track of mobile for a little bit but you know I kept reading I kept talking to developers um so I just kind of want to talk talk to to all of you as like an

old friend that you know we haven't seen each other for a while um so how how are we all doing it's it's because I'm not here to talk about me I want to talk about you or or the industry you know I want to like how like I heard something about a a Renaissance of like Indie freeo play like uh Crossroad or something I came up with a brilliant joke this morning like why did the Hipster wheel cross the road and then nobody onbody have liked it I'm s um um I heard something about card games Hearthstone bring a lot of more traditional Gamers over to mobile it's really cool a lot of people are playing that game on mobile even though they could be playing it on their computer that's cool uh heard some bad news about like stocks not performing really well and like layoffs and stuff like that really sorry to hear that um increase discoverability problems that's also really really sad I um yeah wow it's mobile has grown up hasn't it

like when we started super crit box mobile was a new thing like everybody was talking about like disruption like mobile was a new thing it was disrupting everything nowadays just hear people talking about disrupting the mobile industry it's like we're disrupting disruption now like in 5 years I hope to be back and I hope to hear lots of stories about how we're going to disrupt the disruptive disruption that happened in the past 5 years um but I still really really like mobile I look at it I I'm fond of mobile I look at mobile and I see the purest possible expression of games are for everybody like everybody can play a game on a mobile phone and I also see an expression of game development is for everybody everybody can make a game if you want to if you want to make a game just you know get started there's no real walls there let's get going and yes that also means that mobile is completely oversaturated right like it's almost impossible to get a game in the in the public attention and um you know the the big companies that are doing really well they like their successes kind of conglomerated them I

like put them in a position where they're successful because they're successful which is great for them uh really hard for everybody else it's hard for Indies mobile is hard for Indies right now like it's really really hard do you try to name me like five mobile indie games that performed well in the last like what 6 months I I'd have a hard time there's a bunch of them that did pretty well but I get to four almost five close enough um it's not impossible I I I I look at that and I see a reflection of the early games industry it's kind of similar right like it was a gold rush everybody jumped on it then it turned out that you know if you work together you can make bigger games so people started making bigger games and they started incorporating and then they Incorporated and then they got bigger and then the quality went up and as the quality went up the games got bigger it got harder to compete and as the quality went up and it got harder to compete the prices went down and then kind of everything fell apart because you can't keep get like the prices can't

keep coming down without losing quality and then we've got the advantage here in the mobile space of having all sorts of ideas about how we can deal with that we have like what what do we have we have um we I saw licensed games that was really cool um but we you have free to play now that didn't exist back in the days and you know I was hating on free to play a few years ago but I've seen some pretty decent examples of that um just like just a lot of new stuff we've got the internet nowadays that's not like back in the days we've got incentivized video ad which the first time I read that I'm like what does that even mean um but it exists it's a it's a different sport if you go out of the mobile space for half a year and you come back you don't understand the single abbreviation that's being used uh it's weird because like when last time I was in the mobile space like very focused it was like use your acquisition we're talking about aru and I was making fun about aru or whatever uh ar ar ar how do you even pronounce

that like do we just say arpu then a PPU like I always kind of I always kind of Imagine like an investor like somebody who has to pitch to an investor being like ooh our average revenue per user is pretty low what if we only count the people that do say mhm that number will look much nicer and thus a new abbreviation was born it kind of feels like that every month in the mobile game Space um and then at some point I was reading on on I was reading a pop game. article and uh it it just looked like a mathematical equation uh it's like yeah you know your your LTV has to be used higher than your CP and start looking into what those values mean and it turns out that we are utterly like holy those numbers do not match not even closed nowadays it's it's kind of terrifying it's a different world it's a different world with its own challenges that's actually really exciting to me I think that's fascinating like if it's kind of I go to like big events all the time and I guess there and like instead

of an audience that all makes mobile games I have an audience here of which like a third makes mobile games and a third makes platform games and console games and third makes PC games there's no advice you can give all of them that will work right because it's so so different so I see a lot of people like quote GDC talks about like how they make their games and I think that's a terrible idea because those GDC talks might not be about the mobile space GDC is actually kind of weird like I love GDC don't get me wrong it's kind of weird like imagine we were the music indust right and there'd be one event every year where we all go to like San Francisco or something and like every music died person so you'd have like some like heavy metal like rock band hang out with Mozart just being like which stuff are you going to check oh the one on pop music by Justin Bieber in One Direction it's like that doesn't work it works in no industry but we keep doing it um and everything is got of way like are things okay are we okay are we really okay like I I

I did some I did some math the other day um but that that equation really doesn't hold up like how much you pay for user acquisition versus how much they bring in I think that only makes sense for like six or seven companies at this point I mean you've got enough money you can run with it but you probably don't um and discoverability go waywards like we Ridiculous Fishing just the fact that we made a game about fishing with machine guns was enough to put it on the radar uh but nowadays like every city like city has been done all sorts of things have been done it's really really hard to get any attention at all unless you do word of mouth and Word of Mouth turns out to be really really hard as well because it's unpredictable and then um the growth rates are declining as well it's terrifying because this industry is still growing but apparently the audiences aren't and that equation also doesn't hold up but I don't want to be too there's a lot of cool stuff happening as well you

know like we're looking elsewhere markets elsewhere looking at Asia looking at the Middle East I saw a lot of growth there a lot of interesting things so VR is anybody doing anything with VR VR looks pretty cool I got one of those uh Samsung Gear things those are pretty cool and free to play uh finally not just trying to like sort of get people to pay stuff even though they don't want to well maybe we've got SWOT machines nowadays which are really cool uh Collectibles uh that's really cool uh this is like Pokémon cards all over again I love it um I like a lot of platforms are trying to new do new things um I saw Amazon announced the free topl thing which is basically Spotify for video games which I don't know I don't know if that's a good thing uh it could be um premium is really hard production values for premium right now seem impossible as well you look at a premium game that does well you look at how well produced you have to be to get out the attention that's pretty hard is it anybody doing something with live

streaming in the mobile space it's been V Glory maybe I I Saw V Glory did something that's something that's interesting the BC Market is doing that might might be worth looking into I was surprised actually to see none of live streaming none of that uh really in this industry because it's pretty pretty big also um I like sure like it's this is like one of those um what is the word oh yeah the end is night um it's all sorts of that stuff again right like every and we keep saying that the end is nine um it's hard it's hard on mobile and the reality is it's hard on handheld it's hard on Console it's hard on PC right now the industry is in a weird Weir really really weird space uh handheld is nice if you're making mobile games you compareed to handheld right handheld is far less saturated far fewer games it's also a lot smaller audience it's more of a premium Market even though Nintendo might be experimenting with free to play as well it's a closed ecosystem so you have to go through certification it's a lot harder to get your game done there

uh you've got PC games which has way more variable Hardware unless you're making games for for Android uh which games I don't know Android might be more fragmented than PC at this point um but like it's it it it feels open BC feels open but really it isn't right like you've got steam that's it steam is the apples BC um and they're they're all hard they all really really hard spaces to compete in um and I don't know like I've just been talking to people I've been talking to people and trying to figure out like what is what is happening and what are mobile developers thinking about and what are what are things that they're struggling with and um I I heard this uh this one Dev I heard them say mobile is the best place to start and it's not probably not anymore it used to be but right now this is like this is terrified to start out it if you have done if this is your first game you're making your first game you're making your first game on mobile it's got to be

really really really hard to get any attention because there are thousands of first games coming out of mobile does that mean it's going to be easy on PC no no it's not going to be easy anywhere you have to make a good game that's the Baseline and then on top of that you have to flip 4,000 coins and if all of them are heads then it works out and then you can make those 4,000 coins a bit less by doing your marketing right by going to events by talking to people you know if you're here you're showing your first game there's a whole bunch of press sitting here on the front row bun punch them at the end of the show and tell them about your game uh don't punch that guy he doesn't like getting punched um but um yes mobile is easy to experiment on it's easy to make a game for it's easy to develop a game for but um it doesn't make it the best place to start right now what the best place to start is I I don't know V potentially um PC and then uh then I hear a lot of mobile companies that are kind of nervous like a lot of mobile companies

have come to me over the past few few months asking for advice to how to move to PC and they say you know I'll release my game on mobile and then I'll releaseing on Steam if this is a thought that has ever popped up in your head no no you know why because PC Gamers hate mobile games not just a little bit they hate them a lot if you put out a mobile game and then put it on PC you know what they say this is a shitty mobile Port now you flip it you launch a game on Steam and then put it on mobile suddenly it's fine how did you get that to work that game was gorgeous on PC and now it's working on mobile awesome um so don't do that order it's bad order in general and uh I mean it's an extension of something that I hear a lot like we're we're moving to other platforms and uh like like I said it's kind of all a mess right now like you look at mobile companies right and they're saying okay mobile is

too saturated so what we're going to do we're going to take our games and we're going to put them on PC it sounds like a really smart idea but then I asked PC developer asked them what are you thinking about they're like well PC is really hard right now so what I think we're going to do is we're going to head for console because it's easy to get discovered there I then talk to console developers and I don't know if you watched last E3 but all the console developers are like this is too expensive going we're going to make bobbile games Che Cas you miss that's a full loop I don't know what our industry is thinking right now but everybody's hopping to the next thing and all of it is and then when we get there we're like eh let's move to the next thing you know the worst thing about that is it costs you can't just switch like I said there are different worlds it's fragmented you can't take mobile developers and just drop them in a PC World and then they work you can take some of the ideas it's not like don't look at each other learn from each other but that that thing like if you if if you go and start making PC

games you know what you should bring short development Cycles fast iteration that works really well on mobile AB testing that could work well on PC but like just bringing your mobile game to PC that's not going to work like the thing that happened is really simple when you think about it we used to have this we used to have this industry right and it was about this big I didn't make a graph for this this is a terrible idea I don't like graphs it was about this big okay let's say it was this big and and it was split up in basically two parts you had triple A which was one half and then you had uh bit mid budget games so you had like wipe out and they had like this shitty Wipeout knockoff that I forgot the title of right and wipe out would be $60 or whatever and then the other one would be $30 and I'd always buy that one because then I could buy two shitty knockoffs and that'd be great as a kid that was awesome and then uh what happened is Indie started happening so people started making their own games own little small games and the first it

was really small then at some point it started growing at some point it started growing so much that it started pushing away that middle the middle segment the middle segment of nowhere to go because you can't compete with Indie because they don't need food apparently you can't compete with tripa because they've got too much money so the whole middle segment fell out and then the M mobile was coming up and mobile was coming up and instead of pushing into those two it just started pushing out so instead the industry was like bigger and bigger that was awesome at some point it turns out that this thing can't keep growing it doesn't just keep growing we're seeing that right now that growth is slowing down and in the meanwhile what happened between Indie and tripa is that a lot of Indies are now feeling that sort of like that oversaturation so they're pushing up into what used to be the middle Niche so you get you're getting a new middle Niche so now we've got four groups that are all growing but an industry that is not growing I don't know how anybody thinks it's sensible to hop to another thing and then that'll work out cuz

that's not how it works out if it works out we're going to have to grow this entire thing and then suddenly looking at other places in the world it's a really smart idea but moving between platforms that's not going to help you I like honestly like the end is always nine like I've heard this same conversation if you read back to the history of if you just watch tops from like 10 years ago the end was n 10 years ago as well and it was n 5 years ago and it was 9 7 years ago it was 9 3 years ago everybody always keeps saying that we're utterly utterly destroyed and this is not going to work I'm not saying that I don't want to say I'm just saying it's hard going to say not everybody's going to succeed some of us are going to succeed some of of us are going to find new interesting things but it's hard and the other thing that I that I that I really want to to um want to say haven't given like quite a lot of talks is there is a danger to

talks right there's a very big danger to talks and it's really simple this industry moves really really fast not just a little fast like really fast so by the time somebody can pull together their thoughts and figure out what went right and like vocalize that in a talk that information is kind of old the stuff that we talk about here on stage today are things that worked when they worked they might not work now so the information you get today I'm not saying it's useless I'm saying it's very useful find the trends see the things that work see where things are developing don't take them for truth they're not true they're on one truth for one Studio they're the truth for the people that are there on the stage that's the thing that happened but that's the thing that happened a while ago today is not that while ago if you give a talk when I gave a talk about the press a few years ago he get talk about the press in 2014 I

didn't even mention at that point live streaming and I'm in console computer where live streaming is huge Because by the time I gave the talk you know when I when I started thinking about the talk live streaming wasn't the thing that's how fast it goes now it's the biggest one of the biggest things you have so there's this great interview that Matt from hipster will let's loop back to what hipster will uh did where he said that a lot of Frosty road is inspired by Flappy Bird right but not by Flappy Bird by the ideas behind Flappy Bird they looked at the game and it didn't look what did Flappy Bird do and then copy that they looked at what is Flappy Bird trying to get at like what is that thing that made that work and how can we create a game that is like that but not that how can you make a game that is built on the same foundations but isn't Flappy bir and that's what I want you to do with the talks today I want you to go to the talks and not listen to them I want you to like flat out ignore everything anybody says I want you to

take the information you get and in your head build a new framework and then work with that because if you're just going to listen it's not going to work because the people that are here honestly are probably going to be people that had a success they're probably people that did something right at the right time and it might have been luck it might have been hard work it's probably also hard work but it's probably also luck it's probably also being at the right place at the right time if I started today if I made super CR box today I would wouldn't be standing on a stage in 5 years nobody would give a 5 years that's it so also keep that in mind the industry is not in a spot where it's worth worrying about like it's not we're not like we're not doomed right but you have to realize that if you're starting out today that a few years ago it was possible to go from zero and just kind of like grow upwards and it was nice nowadays if you want to do that there's a jump if you want to make it you're going to

have to take a running start and jump anyway there's there's not a lot I mean people ask me for like what is like the one tip right what is the one tip for people in the games industry and there's not a lot of there's not a lot of things that seem to be Global advice or advice that applies to everybody so I've been looking at the industry and I've been trying to read up and I've been trying to figure out I've thinking what seems to be the biggest Trend right now and uh I figured it out it's uh make slot machines I heard Konami was doing it they're making Pinko machines Destiny is doing it CU that game is a slot machine and cross the road also slot machine apparently the big secret is make slot machines but then again maybe that's a f too thank you

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