Voodoo's Secret to Reaching Repeat Hits: A Unique Game Ideation Process

[Music] [Music] our next speaker like the voodoo has been in the top 10 forever alexander how many years have been voodoo in the top 10 25 years see like they created this and you guys are so lucky because this next talk not only is with one of the biggest hyper casual publishers in the world he's giving all the secrets he's going to tell you everything after this like it's all the secret sauces right alexander yeah so please settle down and give a really warm welcome to alexander here hi guys um nice to nice to see you all today uh

so i'm here to talk my name is alex um and i manage the publishing team at voodoo there's a few of us here uh today from voodoo so big shout out to the team uh and um yeah here to come and uh describe some of the secret sauce to our uh to our success more um more on point uh so i'm not gonna be divulging huge secrets you have to you have to join us uh to get those but i will be talking about some of the things that we think have been um really important in our success uh to date and in how we see the future so just very quickly in terms of numbers and i won't bore you bore you with numbers for too long and i'll try not to talk about cpi's ltvs and retentions i'll try to focus a little bit a little bit more on studios and on games i also try to keep this quite brief so i'll speak for about five or ten minutes and then i i look forward to to all your

questions uh but starting off with the numbers so voodoo has been doing quite well uh in terms of downloads it's not our focus um we we really feel that the important part of our business and the reason we've been successful and we've been growing our studio base probably much more than other other publishers in our space is that we've been able to work with them and add value on the product side obviously in the distribution side as well but but from my perspective on the product side and that those successes have led to huge payouts it's not really about the money and gaming necessarily but unless there is a big payout then how do you expect to to run a business and so these six billion downloads that you see on screen are great i think they're more of a symptom of our success um and i can't put the margin numbers uh associated with with these downloads but they're quite high and they they've enabled us

to hand out big payouts to studios uh through the years we've grown into a big company and i'll get into what these 600 people plus are doing in a second um but but before we do that i just wanted to go back to what this means for us um so this is a slide of um a subset of our studios they're actually a pretty big share of the studios that we worked with back when i back back when publishing started uh four or five years ago this is actually a big sample of the studios that that we started out with and what all these studios have in common is that they've all done repeat hits with voodoo and that's really important for us as we build the community of studios going forward is we want to make sure that we're mapping out future success for our studios on on this list on our initial kind of studios they've all done multiple hits and and repeatability in our industry i think in gaming in particular is something pretty rare

and if you can achieve it it means that you have a business whether you want to sell your business raise more money off that business or just continue to grow you need repeat success otherwise you're not going to get uh external interest we've achieved this with with these studios and it's quite a big list actually um especially when you consider the number of studios that we used to coach back when these guys started which was not a big number and so how do we do this well we wanna we wanna remain the the top uh publisher in terms of expertise uh when it comes to ideation iteration launching uh and that means nailing all the hyper-casual genres that we know exists today for example the ones you see on screen some of these genres that will be successful in hyper-casual in the coming years are not on screen and we look forward to discovering them we feel that multiplayer true multiplayer not ios will be a part

of that list and we're working on it other genres do exist and they will continue to exist because they're extremely attractive genres and what we're doing is developing product expertise throughout these individual genres because they're very different from each other and you can't actually throw them all in the same bag but what's important is that they all share something in common which is kind of the secret sauce that i wanted to share today uh they share something in common which is how did these studios come up with the ideas for these games um you know right before cpi's retentions engagement become questions the most important piece of the puzzle we feel is actually uh the core of games not necessarily the meta the progression systems all that good stuff whether you're working in hyper casual or hybrid or actually casual or whichever genre you pick uh within gaming we feel that at voodoo we feel that the core is actually the

most important part of your game and so the ideation process to get to that core is is really key so you know whether you're starting from an experience merging game plays uh modeling improving an existing game and in mobile gaming or in console gaming or pc gaming whatever your your approach is out of those three different methods the important thing is that you really nail the core the core repeatable mechanic in your game and so to do that uh three three items we feel are really important to whatever whatever genre you're attacking we feel that these three pillars of your ideation process are key these three uh ideation methods are um the co-exist so you can start from any place you can start from a theme so it's probably fair to say that fashion universe which is our most recent idol arcade started with a fashion theme then applied to the idol

arcade genre and so the mechanic is an idol arcade type of mechanic of resource collection resource expenditure and and a general progression system that belongs to that genre and then the feeling of that is uh a feeling of accumulation of of efficiency of productivity which is probably inherent to that genre so if i'm just taking that idea of a game probably started from the bottom right here moved on to the left and and and achieved the the the top bubble but every game has a different story usually it fits within this framework we found if i go back to the studios that have succeeded in uh in our ecosystem and that's what we find is powerful is that actually the studios that make it just going back to uh to this list and we have many more studios that have that have achieved great success this is a sub segment but these guys all have something in common it should which is that they're completely methodical with the way they uh they work they're super creative and uh

and a much larger set of studios are very creative uh probably most studios are quite creative um but unless you mix that with a process away a mindset and a and repeatability it's very hard to succeed in our business so um i want to go a little bit beyond pure hyper casual today uh and leave about 10 minutes your questions in a second because we feel that hyper casual is here to stay it's here to grow and we're excited to be part of that journey with with our studios working with more and more studios we're deploying new things uh voodoo academy is coming shortly to bring in new talent into hyper casual we are also launching a couple of initiatives within uh the company to grow our internal studio base to to help successful studios

through minority investments and flexible publishing contracts so we're getting quite innovative within hyper casual uh with how we work with studios but we also want to go beyond hyper casual and we've started um you've heard that the word a lot hybrid uh i mentioned multiplayer we've got casual teams at vudu now and we're even uh starting to invest in in play and earn we're allocating one or 200 million to to that segment um and the key the key point here is that back to what we were saying in terms of ideation we still believe that the core how you find the idea how you find the framework and the approach for your idea is what will drive success in hyper-casual and we want to bring bring this understanding to all these different segments we feel that that actually we just launched a hybrid game recently which is which is um you know has very strong potential and it started in the same way as uh as our traditional

hyper-casual title ideation and prototyping approach so wherever you're playing right now we find that hyper casual is a good place to start if we do but it doesn't stop there and you can definitely join us whether you're interested in hybrid multiplayer casual titles of course hyper casual titles uh and also player playing earn and on play and earn uh the only thing i'd add is we're very much more focused on the on the play side than on the earn side we want to make sure that you can play and earn in some titles that we'll be publishing either buying titles or investing in them or investing in studios in this space but we want to make sure that they're targeting a large audience because this is where our expertise is and we feel that there's no reason that the technical barriers to entry in this space uh should uh remove from our ability to um to bring this value proposition to the mass market

in any event um i think i'm i'm spot on we've got 10 minutes left which is a huge amount of time for q a but i wanted to just share this stuff as a starting point to uh to your questions and i just want to reiterate so you can sign up to to voodoo just generally just show your interest either using these qr codes or or just going on our website on voodoo.io and uh and drop your interest there we will actually pick up every single incoming studio and and we'll reach out to you um and we'll set up some calls and and we'll discuss what whichever your interest is in uh voodoo we uh we want to talk and uh and the last point before before jumping into your questions uh would be that we so we've become quite flexible there was

a lot of talk in the previous discussion about cpis going up and all tv's going up and all that good jazz um we realize that we've actually created some some flexibility within everything we do so we don't have launch metrics that's a discussion that we have with studios for each game we have systems and analytics to to take the best decision and to bring that information to our studios but we don't have specific launch metrics or iteration metrics we give a lot of power to the studios we're also super flexible in the way we work commercially with studios so we don't have any set contracts the conversation always starts regardless of which segment you wanna you wanna work on starts with what you're looking for as a studio whether it's a publishing contract um a an investment uh that you need in your studio to continue working whether you're going to continue working

independently or with voodoo um as a as a publisher so you know you name it we're super flexible that's why you don't see any specific terms here is that we we work with um you know very many studios in the world today and practically each studio has a different contract different terms and we're proud of that it means that we have we have the bandwidth you know we have the size that is required to treat every uh every studio in a different way that would be it from me and uh please feel free to ask as many as many questions as uh as you can hey um how involved in the ideation process are voodoo when it comes to their third party um studios do you guys like actively brainstorm with those studios or give them jumping off points or is it all

done by that studio then they bring their interesting bits and bobs to you with you know maybe some like really early prototypes or whatever cool yeah that's an excellent question uh so typically what happens is uh once you start working with food you'll you'll start working with the publishing manager occasionally you'll start working on our on our platform first to to get an understanding of it but but then very quickly uh you typically start working with a publishing manager and usually that's where the magic happens so you know no matter how many frameworks we might have as the one i i showed you it's very hard to actually implement that framework properly and it takes a real uh coaching relationship more of a publishing and studio relationship uh to to implement these frameworks so we very often provide inspirations and guidelines by genre by type of game within that genre two

studios we we help them on mindset on approach and on strategy and then it becomes a conversation about the idea itself every every time so every every prototype we test that comes out of publishing you know six out of seven times because studios choose to it results from a discussion with the publishing manager about the idea first the ingredients of the idea you know does it make sense um does it uh yeah does it have legs have we tested it before is it is you know is are you going to waste your time on something that has been tried well before or hasn't been tried poorly and there's a there's an improved idea um so all those things are really critical for studios because you can you can save weeks or months of time by either not developing prototypes that you know will not work or by refining an idea that is only half baked or by just getting full uh you know full confidence in your

idea because it is innovative it is deep and uh and it kind of follows the broad guidelines that we've set out hey uh thanks er for foodies go into that more flexible contracts i think that's brilliant but like how much do you allow the studio that you work with to um explore more of the theme that they have found so if they found a successful mechanic with you that has addresses a certain audience but they may want to address a different audience how much do they have to continue working with you to explore that idea can they launch independently or does it have to are you locked in to voodoo but so we're we're very much about not locking in uh studios and the simple reason is that um

lock-ins just don't work i mean we we want if if a game is not right for us we want studios to succeed on that game uh we want to just succeed generally we're just better off you know so we release games all the time sadly i have to say that the games we release intend not to perform and so our biggest worry is actually your time and five times out of six you're better off killing a game fully um finding support in another way from from voodoo and carrying on um and fast prototyping is one of the hardest things to do um especially today where you know you might be getting in these these high cpi's every every time every time but it just takes one break and that break can can fund a studio for years so we do release games chances are the audience that you mentioned that might be a bit different from what you think we're interested in chances are we're

probably addressing that audience already because we really are working on all these different segments you know hyper casual we're already publishing casual games that are mass market um and then soon multiplayer and hybrid so and sorry and and play to earn soon that's the less mature project so far but chances are we do want to address that audience we have different uh growth teams that are dedicated to these different segments we have a question from home and from online yeah you know they're running out of questions when they're rolling out the questions from the computer yeah just just bury me because i can see like it's it's tiny i'm gonna get there so this is a very impressive framework i really want to know how you work with digital media platforms and what frameworks work for you there and what do you like or dislike about current media platforms you leverage okay what's the digital media media platform do you know um like facebook or

like acquisition channels okay yeah exactly cool that's a good that's a good question actually so what i didn't mention is that um we do address new segments within within mobile gaming but we've also developed new channels for distribution and some of those channels include html games so if you take facebook instant games or snapchat games those are just examples of how we've extended our reach and we've created strong partnerships to make sure that as soon as a title comes through our door we're maximizing all those channels uh so we'll take care of for example developing a um an html version of your game so we did it first with aqua park on snap it then became very quickly the the number one game on snap games for quite a while and and that's the benefit of obviously voodoo and more importantly of our studios because

the reach that you get outside of the stores that reach is something that's baked into your contracts regardless of which kind of tailored contract you have with us we make sure that when we extend uh the reach of your games that you know the broader market is reflected in your payouts perfect cool thank you very much thank you thanks for having me [Music] [Music] you