What Makes a Game Truly HyperSocial?

with a talk about what makes a game truly hyper social we've got vinton gillespie from snap now fintech do we have you uh here i think just joining the the zoo just to remind everyone that uh that was great we had loads of really good questions there for our first uh talk of the day if you have questions uh for finch and gillespie of snap juice do drop them into the q a box at the bottom of the screen there now then hi uh fintech how are you doing hey how's things good all right thank you thank you for joining this morning where are you zooming to us from today i'm from london today which is oh you are okay i'm just not not far from where i'm at where are you i'll give you a little wave um we've actually got uh people joining uh joining the conference from all around the world you see i do like to ask we had uh something like 75 countries or something joining us it's incredible so incredible so really appreciate that so i'm going to leap out

of the window hand over to you and then at the end i'll come back in 20 minutes or or so and help curate any questions that have popped into the box there so uh in the meantime yeah over to you thanks great well let me just get my screen shared so give me one moment guys well hi everyone and thank you so much for joining our session today my name is vincent gillespie and i lead our international gaming business here at snap my team is dedicated to working with gaming developers and marketers around the world to help them build and grow their games on and off snapchat and i'm excited to talk to you today about why gaming on snapchat is so unique it's different it's curated and we're seeing a new genre of games emerge a generation of hyper social gaming in today's agenda i'm going to walk you all through the snapchat experiences it's a snapchat experience and how our users use and love our platform we're going to delve in a little bit into hyper social this new gaming genre which is super social and unique to snapchat

we're going to talk about personalizing your game with our digital avatar bitmoji and finally we round it off with snapkit your toolkit for organic growth on the platform so before we go further let's recap on the full snapchat experience today simply put snapchat is the fastest way to express yourself and communicate why send a text when a snap is worth a thousand words people on snap are challenged throughout the day whether it's on their way to work at the gym or at home with their family and our camera is so much more than a tool to take a picture it's a starting point for things like location creative tools face and surface tracking audio listing and scanning with shazam and many many more in fact over 60 percent of our snapchat community creates snaps with our camera every single day and our community spends more than half

an hour on snapchat every day and opens the snapchat camera more than 30 times a day to chat with their closest friends in fact over 5 billion snaps are shared every day which makes snap the most widely used camera in the world today i'm going to take you on a very quick whistle stop tour of the snapchat experience today snapchat opens to the camera and you can use all of the features in the snapchat camera across augmented reality filters editing tools and take what you do in the camera and chat with your friends or you can post to the map to share a real-time view of what's happening around the world or you can add it to your stories to keep your friends today and chat one-to-one or in groups with your friends or sit back and watch and learn on discover mobile video consumption is way up amongst young people and we see a massive increase in discover video consumption growing 80 percent year over year we've

also welcomed lots of professional content distributors to our discover platform including many from the gaming genre and finally you can post a spotlight to participate in the bigger world of creative talent this is our newest addition to snapchat and it features the most creative and engaging content from our community while upholding our strict safety guidelines you may have seen recent investments in rewarding the most popular piece of content every day in spotlight as we grow our audiences there in terms of our updated global audience we announced earlier this year in our q1 earnings that snap now reaches 280 million daily active users around the world and on a monthly active user basis that is now over half a billion monthly active users around the world in focus markets like the us nearly one of every two smartphone users now is on snapchat and we really have their attention snapchat now reaches 90 percent of 13 to

24 euros in the us and it's not just all about gen z and millennials over 49 percent now of our us users are age 25 plus quite simply if you want to reach your audience where they are every day you need to be on snapchat snapchat captures an important audience that's hard to reach under their platforms in fact they are unduplicated and incremental to your efforts a unique and unduplicated audience and incremental to other platforms and our snapchatters love to game so there are over 110 million snapchatters interested in casual mobile games and on the platform side we continue to innovate in our camera on snap and this is a very recent example from carnaby street down the road from us here in london where we've created a multi-player gamified ar experiences for our users to play with

now you've a little bit more about the snapshot experience on our snapchat generation i want to share a little bit with you about why gaming on snapchat is so unique it's curated it's hyper social our snap games and snap kit offerings help you bring social interactivity and personalization to your games both on and off our platform starting with snap games snap games are html5 mobile games made for playing with your friends and it's who you're surrounded with that makes the most important moments into memories and our snap games platform is still a very young platform launched just over two years ago and our vision is to build a games platform that eases the way snapchatters can play games with their friends we've built a platform with that in mind embedding chat and voice into all our html5 games that launch playing socially is the essence of snap games

and one of the unique parts of snap games is the chat bar at the bottom of the game enabling snapchatters to type and speak with their friends as they play their favorite games and looking at aqua park which you just saw there that has now been played over 45 million snapchatters so far and after the tremendous launch of aqua park with voodoo multiplayer edition we announced a multi-game partnership with voodoo at our snap partners so much earlier this year to bring more of their hit games to life on the platform and as snapchatters spend more time at home over the last 18 months we know they've turned to mobile gaming more than ever to stay entertained and connected with their close friends and we're seeing this trend in real life snot games has seen highly elevated engagement as well time spent player count voice and chat features are all experiencing record usage

and you can see really here the full experience which is chat enables super social and in this experience here you're playing against all your pals in one of our hit zombie games and in fact in just two years more than 200 million snapchatters have played snap games and 30 million snapchatters play snap games every single month 65 million unique players all time when a snapchatter plays with their friends they spend twice as long playing versus when they play solo and in fact bitmoji party alone one of our hit games has seen over 20 minutes of average playing time on snapchat since launch and it really is so simple our games can be found organically through the chat bar there's no initial downloads required and across the whole swathe of our app snap games

are also deeply integrated within the entire ecosystem across all parts of our application from new drop down menu to sharing gameplay badges into our camera to encourage virality and snap games are monetized through ads and we have a multitude of different ad formats within snap games including rewarded ads interstitials and most recently we've actually launched in-app purchases on android on the snap game side as well so help developers further so if you want to make your next game more hyper-social please check out games.snap.com reach out to myself or pedro rodriguez who also works on our international games partnership team and let's make this happen perfect thank you very much moving on i've just got a little bit more up moving forward no problem at all dave uh moving on to bitmoji and personalizing your game with bitmoji i want to talk spend a little bit of time talking about

some recent updates here so with our sdks across android and ios games become more social shareable interactive and personal and we're super excited to partner with unity and join as a verified solutions partner we work in collaboration with unity to make it plug and play to integrate bitmojis 3d and 2d avatars into any android ios pc or console game it's now easier than ever to personalize your games with bitmoji and allow snapchats to play as themselves and become the heroes straight the games themselves just a quick refresher on bitmoji for everyone that might be new to it i'm sure most of you will be familiar but meloji is the world's leading digital avatar and the bitmoji games sdk brings the world's avatar into your game and now snapchat is giving you the opportunity to bring bitmoji into your games to make them more social personal and fun by building an experience that is personal to the

player and when we look at the bitmoji numbers 200 million people use bitmoji every single day not 75 percent of gen z in the us have and use bitmoji and our results show that snapchatters with a bitmoji avatar spend twice as much time per day on snapchat and so through integrating bitmoji into your game players can play with their personal 3d character and making the experience more hyper-social and if we look here two examples from gif smart and game jam bitmoji now transforms gameplay into a more personal social and fun experience it goes beyond 2d emotes and player profile ua elements and leaderboards and also allowing players to bring their 3d personalized bitmoji to life so looking at some numbers from bitmoji integrations it really really works for hyper casual developers

the developers that have integrated such as git smart have seen 20 higher day one retention and 60 higher ad views per active player so these are really phenomenal results in a very competitive hyper-casual market and they're not all alone we're excited to share that more and more developers are starting to take notice from heritage brands such as mattel and nickelodeon to developers like scopely and relic you'll start to see more bitmojis in your favorite games across the world in fact here's the bitmoji edition of water suti which you can download from your app stores today if you want to add more bitmojis to your game go check out bitmoji.com for slash games and again we can talk a little bit in the q a or reach out to me and pedram we can help you there finally we're going to talk a little bit about snap snapkitch your toolkit for organic growth and it's not just about our own platform offering we have a plethora of both platform tools to help you simply and easily make your

title more hyper-social on snapchat so this is the whole suite of snapkish you have one-to-one visual sharing with creative kit where you can create badges and allow users to share them with their friends enable true deep links you have story kit to make your app more social and more fun with stories uh from snapchat you have logging kit a way to authenticate in a safe and frictionless way and you also have monetization with ad kit which is now rolled out globally so looking at creative kit here are some of the experiences that we've already created but with snap games and all platform so as you can see here you can create amazing badges featuring your high scores your gameplay you can actually integrate those share them in the snapchat camera and then when your friends see them they can actually swipe up and go and play that game making it super social

moving on to logging kit that allows players to authenticate and store progress and it's a really great complement to user acquisition solutions making onboarding into your game more seamless and cost-effective right after the download in fact highly who are a dating app that we work with saw 20 improvement in registrations and a 44 reduction in cost for active snapchat user on the user acquisition side when they integrated with logging kit over 180 million snapchatters engaged with the camera and aor every single day which is up 37 from the previous year aor is no longer a novelty and we want all the developers in the world to share the creativity and the utility that snapchat camera can build there are two main features in creative kit stickers and dynamic lenses stickers can be applied to snaps post capture to give friends more context about what they're doing and where they are and dynamic lens is our newest feature provide a way to share variable information like live scores

leveling up in a game or even local weather through easy to build ar experiences so the camera really is the future of sharing and as you can see here we're seeing tremendous engagement and improvement from integration so far using the camera finally i wanted to show you some updates on connected lenses do

uh so that's connected lenses i think it's a super cool new project actually developed by engineers in snapchat and london and uh you can see we've partnered with lego there and i think it's a really cool way to bring collaboration into the camera and interdogmatic reality so the future is really right there so rounding it all off rounding it all off we really want developers to bring the best of snapchat to your game we've got multiple toolkits and platforms available for developers now and we'd love you to come chat to us and explore opportunities together so many thanks for your time and looking

forward to the q a wonderful thank you very much vincent really really interesting there um i apologize for interrupting you earlier on but that's great we've had a number of questions there from from people there i see we've got sort of uh five questions which are which i'll put you really really great uh uh really informative there some stuff i didn't really realize about i don't know if anyone's asked a question but i the um the what you just showed there about connected lenses that the ar stuff that's i mean that looks amazing right now and an ar yeah we're talking a load about that at the moment and really really exciting you've got that that lego integration that that's that's wonderful also did you say right let's start the five billion snaps are shared every day it's actually the world's most used camera and more than the native ios and android cameras which is just astonishing actually wow wow wow that's amazing so let's let's get through some of these um these questions we've got time we can we can probably get them all yeah let's do it so we've got um i'm going to grab these from the q a box if anyone has any more questions for things please drop them in there but let's grab them here so we've got here um

one of our attendees asks is it fair to say that snap is strongest in the us and what would you say the second and third largest markets yeah i think um you know if you think back to our history we first developed an ios app and and so you know we naturally followed developed markets where ios was stronger but about two years ago our engineering team took on a project to rewrite write our entire android application from the ground up so it now loads like 4x faster and that's really helped us become more global as a company so actually you'd be surprised to hear that beyond the us india is now our second largest market a super super exciting market for us and led by that android development and then we're also really strong across all of northern europe and so outside of india and the big markets to call out will be france and we reach over 20 million users in the uk reach over 17 million users and then in the middle east and saudi arabia which i think is super interesting and

and that's where we're reaching i think 17 million uh users in saudi and and i think saudi's super exciting and we work with some amazing developers like tomato who help with culturalization of games into that market i think it's a really exciting opportunity for developers yeah that's interesting we um we do some work in the uh in the middle east and north africa region as well we had a pocket game at connex jordan we've got some strong ties there you're right it's one of the fastest growing regions isn't it so really interesting um let's try another question here we've got um how can indie developers start working with snap uh do you have any programs to support indie developers who are interested in the platform yeah absolutely i mean we're a very small team right so it's you're either talking to me or pedro on the partnership side and then we're actually building out like technical and solutions engineering support to help you onboard your snap game and we're you know we we have our play canvas engine that we that we have within snap as well that makes it super easy for developers to onboard and then as i mentioned the partnership with unity really makes the experience in creating an avatar

ecosystem much more plug and play and and easier to to to on board so i think that really helps us get going now you know he's put a lot of effort into making the platform a bit more democratized and giving tools to developers to to build so i feel like the evolution is strong and pedro and the team would be more than happy to chat to any indie developers in fact we work with many already that's great and um someone's asked what game genres are the most popular in snap so yeah do you have a sense that any any particular genres do do well there rather than over others oh gosh well i think one of our big hit games was aqua park and i think many of our games like if you look at aqua park that was actually redeveloped by voodoo for snap to make it social so you could actually play against uh friends and also um other people on snapchat anonymously so makes it super super social and it's a kind of a relaunch of an existing rockstar hit but new probably to many of

our snapchat users and they absolutely love it so i love the idea of collaboration and social games i talked a lot about hypersocial i think they're the sort of casual genres that really and are are doing really well on the platform but you know our goal is to basically build uh a game for every genre on the platform because we know there's lots of different snapchat users out there who like all sorts of different games and so it's not just about social games now you can play solo games uh and leaderboard-based games so we're kind of thinking about all different angles um to make the game experience more interesting and then i'd say with tokens on android and in our payments we can start to go into more core focus gameplay on the android side as well which is super exciting um here's a question here and i i obviously you you have a vested interest but someone's asked would you advise new developers to focus exclusively on snap for their games or is a developer advised to develop for multiple platforms of which one is snap i think like what

we're trying to talk to developers about we've yet to see a developer that launches on the app store and on snap games at the same time using bitmoji and so we would love to partner with the gaming studio to do that because we think it's super exciting we're seeing this fear of platform diversification particularly in hydrocasual gaming and i think you know the smart hyper casual companies are the ones that are thinking about all these different platforms that they can actually bring their games to and adapt to so i'd say that's what we would be excited about and but look we're willing to partner about with what's not on platform games or work with developers on their own app store games to make them more social with bitmoji that's great if actually on that someone's asked here do developers need any particular special skill to be able to develop games for snap and to use bitmoji is there is there anything that they additional skill that they need to have be on what they what they already have for developing games i think major proficient proficiency in h5 and if you build games for h5 again our

teams can work with you to to you know work on the subtle differences but you know they're h5 games and then our avatar ecosystem uh takes a bit of getting used to but that's um relatively straightforward as well and we can guide your teams through though brilliant thank you and i'll tell you what um i think we've got maybe just take one more question here we've got um sure uh okay so did the pandemic make the need for hyper casual games even stronger do you foresee any shift in the market now that things are opening up we saw a big growth as i mentioned in my presentation and engagement in the lockdown and i don't think this is unique snapchat i think across the entire global games ecosystem look back to q2 of last year there was simply an explosion when the world was knee-jerked into lockdown and people didn't know what to do and had a lot more time in their hands so i think naturally games have just had the most incredible uh year in the lockdown and we certainly benefited from that on the snap game side as well so we've seen increases across engagement and usage of snap games throughout the update

perfect well look we're we're at 10 o'clock so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna wrap it up there folks if you wanna get in touch with uh snap with finton and his team then i guess they can uh they'll find you you put some contact details on the screen but we'll also find you in meet to match or discord or whatever i'm gonna give you a round of applause that you'll have to imagine coming from all of us thank you very much for joining us today really informative presentation thank you very much many thanks dave all the best all right wish you the best of the rest of the week thank you bye you