Winning with Creators: How Gaming’s Marketing Strategy is Evolving

[Music] hello everyone and Welcome to our deconstructor of fun interview series I'm your host Jen Dono co host of this weekend games podcast and a strategic marketing consultant at beta hat research and Jaden Inferno Consulting lots of stuff there so this topic today I am super excited for this conversation we all know that influencer marketing has become key to how games launch and maintain their engagement and thanks to what Apex did back in the day in 2019 with their surprise influencer LED launch most game companies have influencer campaigns as the core part of their marketing toolkit I know I have we even see this as part of the new web 3 and I kind of call it web 2.5 Early Access launch of Off the Grid oh Pat I want to ask you about that later that launch has been featuring some of the biggest streamers in Battle Royale genre

you know many of them the Ninjas the shrouds are all playing that game and I think getting a lot of money out of that but as I Look Backwards to what brawstars and supercell did pulling forward the squad Busters uh supercell has really created this compelling program called the supercell Creator program it expands on the OG influencer marketing into kind of what I'm calling Creator programs 2.0 or influencer marketing 2.0 with a thriving and ongoing Creator community that they really are C cultivating into a great space for creators so with any Trend I think that there comes a time for a 3.0 Evolution and I think we're starting to see that with how Creator programs are evolving and and you know during this conversation we're going to call them Creator programs Creator clubs Creator codes all of these can now actually be integrated into your mobile game or integrated into your PC game console to guys can they go and even console so this I think is the next generation of

Creator programs and so to unpack this and really get into this idea of Creator programs 3.0 I've assembled three amazing folks who represent the Triad to pull this off so a Game Dev a Creator and a Creator program leader and so with that let me introduce Pat Carney is Chief Pat who I had the pleasure of working with on TFT when we launched TF on mobile Pat is a mobile gaming content creator with over 2 million subscribers and the founder of tribe gaming it's a mobile gaming content Collective so thank you for coming Pat absolutely super excited to be here Scott Walker who he and I used to work at EA together back in the Dark Ages I don't know like many many years ago Scott is CEO of Ninja Kiwi the makers of Bloons Games Bloons td6 and longtime supporter of organic community and content creators he's been working on Creator programs for two years and has actually been working with our next next guest Justin

saaks who is CEO of nexus. which is a Creator program in a box I love it so your platform allows you know creators and game folks to just really seamlessly integrate these programs so sorry Scott I forgot to let you say hi let's hear from you so we know your voice hello great to be here really really looking forward to the conversation awesome and Justin let's hear from you welcome Nexus G can't wait to talk about it thanks J I appreciate it and [Music] hello you've heard of heroic laps by now and we keep talking about them because you need every Edge to be successful in today's market heroic Labs gam stack is built like a Breck house you got the Nama their backend game server hero their game development framework Satori their liveop service and last but not least heroic Cloud to provide massive

scalability heroic Labs is a battle tested partner and their Tech enables you to be flexible creative and scale for Success focus on your game avoid Tech risks grow your product with scalable liveops and save a big chunk of cheese all with heroic [Music] Labs let's get into it because I have I have just so many questions for you all because this is this is so interesting how we are really watching this just transform in front of our eyes but first before we talk about what's coming next let's talk about some definitions here so the idea of defining what a crater program is and how is this different from like old school influencer marketing I think they're different right Justin yeah so to talk initially about traditional influencer marketing often the way that you would think about it from a mechanical sense is the game

publisher takes marketing budget so they take a bag of money and often they go through agencies which could be a generic marketing agency but often in a specific influencer agency and they say here is money tell me your rate to either make a piece of content like a video or a cost per hour to stream my game and then they send them the money and there's very little knowledge of results or attribution you can get some stuff around like how many people watched it and what was the sentiment around it but it's hard to see did any of the people watching it convert into players or did they stay in the game or make any purchases but traditionally influencer marketing is really focused on that initial pie front acquisition separately Creator programs are more of a holistic aligned incentive Evergreen program so it's a way to work organically with the creators that love your game and who will stay engaged with the game for a really long period of time and a lot lot of the times at least

the ones that Nexus focuses on they're focused around Revenue share and so the way that mechanically works is inside of the game the player can type in their favorite Creator's name so often it's called a support a Creator code and then when they make a purchase that player makes a purchase some portion of that revenue is then shared back with that content creator and we found those Creator programs are really great at more of the growth metrics so things around retention conversion reactivation all that sort of stuff and so that's some of the definitions there's some other stuff in Creator program that we view as table Stakes just around allowing creators to communicate with developers and getting early access to content and other things like that but the core feature is that Revenue share piece I really feel like for influencer marketing versus these Creator programs for influencer marketing you're generally focusing non-endemic casting a super wide net on more condensed time frame specific campaigns whereas these Creator programs they're focused around your core community and ultimately the creators who are the life blood of your

game these creators are generally posting you know multiple times a week if not every game content around your game they're fully incentivized for your game to grows or their viewership grows and their business ultimately grows in the end and investing into that Creator program and to your core Community generally is going to pay in Spades when it comes to yielding long-term results you know with influencer marketing while it can be effective in certain scenarios and maybe something more short-term maybe you're advertising a new game and update something similar with Creator programs you're generally talking about creators who instead of posting two or three videos around your game they're posting thousands of videos around your game and they generally are going to be the taste makers and the thought leaders for your respective community so building an alliance with them making sure you're properly aligned together through a Creator program can yield incredible results which you know I've had the chance to experience head-on you know doing so with supercell so it sounds like for you all one of the key components is a sustained engagement with a Creator and that influencer marketing is kind of that pop and drop of and I think this is the problem that Apex had back in the day is once I think

it was Ninja or shroud I can always forget I always forget which is the one who made a million bucks with his one week of streaming But whichever one it was like once he dropped off and everyone was like oh wait they paid him and he's not authentically actually playing this game I think we all know that players can sense and so they know that if you're just there for that hype moment and you piece out you know that they're not as you're saying like authentically engaged with the game and really staying the the other thing I wanted to ask both of you about was this the idea of codes and Creator codes the joke in marketing is always like nobody clicks on the code so what is it about these programs that makes it different like people are actually clicking on the code so to speak well so it that's a really important question because those sort of things which are like the links that you'll have someone put in like their chat box on Twitch or in the panel below YouTube video those are really hard to get communities to interact with and certainly on the Creator side you want to reduce as much friction as

possible and so a supported Creator code is an in-game experience and so whether you're working with a thirdparty platform like Nexus or you build a first party you need a way an actual user experience so that the player inside of their normal flow whether that's in their settings and Scott can talk about the experience in his games or in the purchase flow so inside of the shop the player has a field that they can type in their favorite Creator's name and then when they hit accept it attaches that player account to their favorite Creator account and then future purchases can be attributed back to that Creator understood so it's it's a little bit of a different ingame system that you guys have built out Scott from from your perspective from the dev perspective how are you seeing the difference between influencer marketing and Creator programs has it really moved the needle for you to think about this differently yeah I mean it it did it did so much has developed in the last really 15 years it has been a c change and as we say we've seen at least a couple of evolutions of

that process ninj Ki is fortunate to have had a long-standing flash game that grew into a mobile game and a PC game with now kind of getting across almost a generation of players um and we worked really closely with our community all along the way and of course Central to that were our content creators who have been making videos on blind's games go back to like 2010 like like it really is really goes really goes back a long way so over that time we've worked more and more closely with with our content creators but there was always that question of how do we get skinn in the same game obviously it's right oh we make the game and you make the videos and we both do well that was fine that went along up until point but more and more it really is about the way that content creators can activate layers around key features and give context and especially as we're sharing data like they're not just entertainers they're inventors they're thinking of different ways to approach the game and they're often coming up with crazy ways to play

that we hadn't even thought of so they C become part of the design Loop and the feedback loop and and looking at what what would modders want to do what would what would Apex players want to do what are firsttime players experiencing and and it's pushing us to challenge ourselves as developers and designers to think about the game in an entirely new way and so it was like we really need to be sharing the business incentives and and then going through Co and seeing how much of an impact many creators that came to GL games during Co years how much that pushed our audiences and and and diversified our audiences uh it was just really clear and it was beautiful to be able to talk to Justin and say we have a program that does that that connects you with your content creators in a business in a business context and that's exactly what we were missing got that now super cool one of the programs that I saw out there and you know sometimes we've been a little critical of supercells launch of squad Busters

recently but one of the things that I just am in Envy of is their creator program how much they really cultivate Their audience and cultivate their fans and they've been bringing in fans to do events in large ways since I don't know 2018 and before and Pat you'll probably be able to fill me in much more on this but I wanted to ask you is someone who works with supercell in their creator program could you do a little bit of you know how it works and what are the benefits to creators and and the pros and cons of that just to understand what does best-in-class look like I mean and are they best-in class I guess I should say 100% yeah I mean honestly it feels like the Creator program it's super humble beginnings for context I started creating videos Around Clash of Clans in 2012 I remember when I started actually was trying to hide my channel from supercell because I thought they were going to copyright strike me and take down my Channel at the time it was a wild west of creators posting content around their games and lo and behold Clash of Clans one day commented under

my video saying nice video chief and it was the biggest sigh of relief knowing that you know we could be in this together and you know we were mutually aligned and wanting to make Clash of Clans the biggest game possible so you know from there almost the very beginning was this eight person Skype group where they actually would fly us out to Finland for the latest Clash of Clans updates back then we couldn't access the the dead build from across the pond so you know it felt like every three months I would fly out to Finland they would give us sneak peeks for the new updates and we started to build a deeper relationship and then obviously you fast forward to today the creat Club covers hundreds of different creators all of the different supercell games and there's so many more features and Perks to Being a supercell Creator now more than ever it's one of if not the best-in-class program for being a content creator ultimately in the end so how it works right now is for creators you're going to apply for the supercell uh Creator program depending ultimately in the beginning based off your F following and different Milestones you've reached on your social media channel so whether YouTube twitch Etc depending on how many followers views subscribers Etc that you've gained you're going to be placed into a tiered program and have access to a number of different perks so those perks could be

like the very beginning for me getting a chance to access exclusive sneak peek content for upcoming updates for the game which obviously is really beneficial because I want to get the newest content out as soon as possible my audience wants to watch that you know getting something exclusive in a super saturated audience of of YouTube content is ABS absolutely incredible you're going to get access to developers directly through the Creator program to be able to chat with them oneon-one understand what's coming out within the games ask various questions and tie yourself back into the community and then obviously as you know both Justin and Scot have mentioned finally is the the Creator code so being able to promote your creator code players being able to enter into the game make an app purchases of which you receive a percentage of obviously is incredible you know for many creators this can make up a serious double- digit amount of their revenue for their business within the revenue mix all for encouraging Their audience to purchase various an app uh Goods for the game whether you know with new updates or even just purchases that ultimately that they're they're making already in the end so you know I feel like this Creator program

relationship is super beneficial on both sides first of all for the creators as we mentioned already you're getting access to a new Revenue stream through your creator code which is incredible you're getting that exclusive content to post on your channels you're getting access to the developers one-on-one to make better informed decisions and videos across your channel and you're even getting a chance to collaborate with other creators whether through you know Discord or slack or any other exclusive commun Creator communities but on the developers end I feel like there's just as much value first one thing that I've seen a lot of and one maybe less obvious benefit of the program is by getting everyone together on the same page through a Creator program and giving your creators access to a one-on-one relationship with a developer it solves a lot of I would say like PR related issues for the game and builds trust with the publisher and the developer directly take take an example I'm a Creator playing you know Clash of Clans Clash of Clans releases an update that misses the mark the player base doesn't like it all of the sudden my viewership drops by 30% you know if I don't have access to the developer directly to be able to

understand that maybe the decision- making behind the update or why it is the way that it is if I feel like I'm in an island and my business is cratering my views are down and I don't understand you know why the decisions were made the way that they were it creates this this disalignment between Creator and publisher to where that's when you generally see examples of of maybe creators start to panic and freak out or you know become overly Critical with what's happening but having a chance to access that developer one-on-one to be able to talk to them and understand the rationale behind the decisions that they made agreed or disagreed has done a a lot for various communities who've implemented these programs because ultimately you feel like you're on the same page with the Creator as well as the developer so I think that one is absolutely huge when it comes to this I think for the publisher obviously as we mentioned getting a chance to drive you know revenue from potential firsttime purchases through in purchases and and just generally the benefits of using the code in general I think getting the access to feedback from the creators directly whether for new games new updates coming out to the game you create this this you really create a loyalist of creators who want you to succeed who want to do well and who you can leverage to work with you on these

things genuinely because they want to in the end you know that can ultimately Galvanize for releasing new games for releasing new updates and ultimately being ambassadors for your community because almost emotionally they feel like they're on the same page as the Publishers and developers and then obviously you know through the Creator code as well they're incentivized for the games to do well so that's my YouTubers feel hopefully gives you an idea of both sides of the spectrum and why it's been a big success I love it because I've lived it on the publisher side both at scopely on a lot of the games it was my job to kind of run in a sense what was a Creator program before it was called a Creator program we called them VIP programs and so I did the same thing at Riot as well because at Riot it it is one of the places where we were very community-driven like you know I think many people know player experience first is the core of how Riot views it and the way that we transparently would communicate with players and creators was was amazing and I think you know you gave a couple great examples of giving that early access

having open and transparent communication and making sure that you're really empowering the creators with the right information one of the things I averted many of spending boycott at Riot but at sculle once we would bring all of the creators in and we would explain hey here's what's going on here's the feature they became our best Advocates and they in a sense were our army that went out and took the bullets for us it was amazing to see the people who were yelling at me want once I brought them in and and really brought them you know into the fold and made them family and gave them all of these assets they really became part of the army yes I think that's been a big I I think the example you just gave it is perfect just it's just as simple as having an access even without the code to the developer and publisher directly to be able to chat and give that feedback and not feel like you're yelling into the void on Twitter or through your YouTube channel but to get a really understanding of why these decisions are made or feel clued into that process at all and that the community feedback is I think solves 90 to 95% of that flak

you're talking about when it comes to creators in the end and naturally you know with them understanding and feel like the developer cares about them and the state of the game um they become your best Advocates through that in the end and we've seen through supercell games someone like kyus for an example is such an incredible Ambassador for brawl star and he's been so empowered by the brawl Star team when it comes to giving feedback to the game understanding the decisions that they made and him being honest on his YouTube channel about what he thinks about these things but I think ultimately we've seen best in class communication from brawl star through the Creator program to where they've been you know one of the most bulletproof games through community that I've ever seen within mobile gaming simply due to that fact yeah on the podcast a couple weeks ago I was like if you're not watching the community channel for brawl stars like those guys and I think they are all guys are just best inclass on how like they come with with humor but they come with information they do it in a really fun way that I haven't seen done before and I think that's community again like 2 or 3.0 now is bridging that Gap but so

Justin I think as you came and saw all of this kind of best-in class work that supercell was doing what really LED you to create nexus. G and how do you take you know everything that's already out there and turn it into what's become your platform yeah we were super impressed and remain super impressed with what super supercell's built and I think a lot of it is one they've put in the time so it's been half a decade of of maybe even more of building out the program but also the resources I mean they have not just like best in the world from a community and Creator ecosystem perspective of these like Evergreen supporters and managers and partner relations folks but they've done the engineering work to make the in-game experience friction less they have a whole website that's like best practices to help a Creator make better content and you know grow within the program and often overlooked but critical for this they put in the energy and time and resources on the financial and

accounting side so that the creators can get paid on time and know when they're getting paid and how much and all sorts of stuff which all of that is a lot of work for a publisher and so when we saw what supercells built we're like this is awesome every game should have this but they should not have to build and manage it themselves and so that's what we set out to try to do our best to become is that platform that can help a game have a creative program without having to build and manage it but to be world class and be unique to their own community and to their own creators and so part of that Journey was reaching out to some of those world class live game operators and one of those was Scott and he can tell you about the experience of working with us but that's what we set out to try to accomplish oh that's amazing so Scott you took the Creator platform in a box which I guess is a white label tool set and integrated it to Bloons td6 I can't believe there's six of them I feel so old so how was that process for you and all the stuff that was to I think it's both from the

development side but then also from the business side and the administrative elements that that that tr's mentioned like it's all hard it's all really difficult and there are specialists in all of these areas that have spent years developing tool sets and expertise to be able to do things well uh doing things by yourself really hard having a distributed intelligence and experience to work with other people lightens the lift so so as we're talking about within a developer our community working together is better for everyone it it actually we're all lifting really strongly but we're doing that in a coordinated supported way so that that player coordination is massively important then the business and administrative and operational infrastructure elements that Justin is talking about is is just something I mean Ninja Q is not at the scale of of supercell we literally would not have the financial infrastructure to do that probably the technical infrastructure to deal with yeah tax and payments and and all of the wallet elements and all the

security elements that have to come from payment and pii that is a mountain of work it wasn't that that kept us away from these programs but to be able to have that instantly so that was the phone call it was literally like we've got this it's working right now and we were so ready because we'v been building our community so we had all the things that Pat was mentioning we' had our private discords we've had our basically our green room for the people that have been are Bloons tubers as we affectionately call them is that not the most adorable yeah bons tubers so anyway and they're not embarrassed uh be called that but but it was a really important process as well because we had folks that we've been working with for years and talking about the way that so giving preview access and doing all those those kinds of things getting feedback that team is instrumental as again as Pat mentioned it's like being able to avoid those 30% drops because of about as often because we share previous builds with our creators and they're like this

is going to be a problem and we can get in front of it before it even goes public so that's massive but but we were ready to go with a group of people and the most important thing that we did before we even started this was talk to them about what is this going to mean how is is this going to affect your channel is anybody sensitive or wary of of these things because alongside there has been this again the the influencer marketing was starting to develop and then we were getting all sorts of cold calls about you know pay me and I'll make videos pay me and I'll make videos and and we were never comfortable doing that but that also our balloon St was like well maybe I should be doing this because I can make some money and I could pay some bills and that's like it's reasonable people are trying to support their own growth and they need to do it in some viable way um so to be able to have a program and share with them is this going to turn me into a p um to like now I'm going to have to Huck iip is this what I have to do I was like no this is your channel it's all about

you promote it as much as you want or as little as you want it's an opportunity you can you know your audience better than we do we we're so not setting any structures other than best practices and we share with the whole team what we've seen doing well and we've got a couple of our I guess our model creators who we say this is how they do it and this is where they mention the opportunities to enter codes and and and and why it's important to them to to be supported how it helps them as a channel and content creator and those are great models and we share that and then we we talked with Justin they like if there's any examples that Bloons is doing well please share that with others because this is absolutely a rising tide so we're happy to share both data and process on what's been successful for us so that others can be successful so the integration was actually brilliant um it was a very low overhead uh very little technical lift from our team we were in the program within a week and we were able to we

basically started work in August and and we were tracking Revenue in September it was it was try oh wow it's amazing I can't tell you how many times as a marketer I go to my Dev team and I'm like I need you please to integrate in SDK so that we can do paid UA so that we can you know drive all these players to your game and the dev team stares at me and they're like we can fit you in in 3 months or something like that and you know I'm like oh but it only takes a day to integrate the SDK and they're like there's no way so it's great to have a Dev on a podcast saying that the integration was fairly simple and that you were able to move that quickly and that you were incentivized to do that and you know the other thing that that really my ears picked up is you know in the web 3 world we hear this you know play to earn right axi Infinity you know that a bunch of people were playing a game to earn money web 3 wise but this is kind of like a a web 2 version of play to earn where I'm already playing your game I love it I can create a video

of me playing the game I love and talk about it and make money for the thing that I already love to do and I think that's the element that we probably need to push a little bit more is this is giving people an outlet to express their love and actually make a little bit of money doing the thing that they already love and that's what I love about this for for you [Music] guys step into the future of game monetization with exola the premier partner for game develop velers seeking to expand their reach and revenue exola provides a robust Suite of tools designed to enhance user acquisition demanded subscriptions and streamlined Payment Solutions worldwide unlock new markets and maximize profitability through their customized secure payment architecture and dedicated support team exola powering game developers to achieve Global success [Music]

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supporter do and and the way that the games industry as a whole continues to give and to be open and to share but I want to be conscious that yes there's a lot of Executives that that are deconstructor fans and followers but I think it's really important for new people new developers young teams or or fewer years under their belts not necessarily young but yes the junior folks that are uh coming up in the world of game development yeah but basically people that don't have scale and you can't take on a number of things they've got a limited amount of time and resource and need to make things work so it's really important for smaller groups smaller developers to hear that this is an effective program and that and that creating something that can allow smaller content creators to just add a little bit of reach to your audience and can make a difference in maybe you know $1,000 $2,000 $5,000 to them that is huge and it can move them to the next

level in their ability to buy some good equipment and and increase their production quality and and to spend a little bit more time doing it because they don't have to work it's three other part-time jobs like those are really meaningful things so I I always want to keep scale when we talk about supercell and other these big companies it's important to say that this all sort of starts at the bottom and it's that developer or that content creator who might be the next Apex Creator or developer but they've got to start somewhere so I love that this allows small teams and small groups to get to get into this but yes to the numbers we were incredibly I mean again so in terms of pros and cons our worries were oh it's just going to cannibalize revenue that we would have gotten anyway it's going to why are we giving away some of these things but as we this that was a really quick conversation at ni because we're like who cares if we're giving that money away we're giving it to the people who deserve it we're keeping that the ecosystem so yes we're not receiving

those dollars publicly traded company you know it's like so our bottom line matters but we think our bottom line ultimately is lifted by the fact that we're sharing this money with our content creators it's still in the Bloons ecosystem because these are players who they already know and love the game so the fact that we were able to see that the videos that were produced and and streams produced where the Creator codes were shared we saw a 40% engagement from people who had never purchased before so these were players who you know sometimes some were new some had been playing the game but they'd never spent before so that ability to just cross the line that is a massive massive number so 40% of people who purchased through using the Creator code were firsttime Spenders and then we saw another 16% of people who had been historical Spenders but had left spending they'd stopped spending so that so they' either re-engaged with the game or they'd found something through the Creator that they felt worth supporting

or maybe it was even that act of kindness of like I am going to make this purchase because I can support a content creator who I believe in and want to support so there is a there is an altruistic aspect to this that I don't think should be lost in this as well anyway we were really impressed by those numbers and even though we didn't have concerns about giving money away we were pleased to see that this has actually brought money to the table another great number that we're happy to share is that as it we're closing in on $2 billion of total spend that have come in through the content creator program in just two years uh anniversary no the Creator program also spans btd6 and our balloons to battles 2 game and we're just about to launch in our third game BL card storm that's coming out next week but that's $2 million of Topline spend and our top content creator has has made in their revenue share over 150 Grand oh wow so that that's a meaningful number and we're pleased that we've got 10 I

think now 10 people that have done five figures and heaps of people who have yeah who have crossed the 5,000 Mark Scott when do I get code pad anytime you want it's an open program oh that's amazing and I think um again when I was at Riot we noticed that if you can get somebody over that Tipping Point to make their first purchase the opportunity for that person to continue purchasing was dramatically higher and then it sounds like you actually have re-engaged purchasers as well because of the altruistic nature of of the program itself so so from a game perspective and a business perspective it's also great for you as well as the you know the $ million of total revenue you've generated for and five folks probably almost ready to quit their jobs to do this full-time like that's that's pretty cool Justin how does this track against what you've seen in maybe some of your other partners and other games and I think Pat you might be at a little bit of a different level but how does

this track and what you all see yeah I I think when we initially wanted to start an Nexus to be that creative program in a box the idea of how we were going to communicate with developers and Publishers was you should do this so that creators make more content which is like a really squishy vague thing that it's hard to tie back to numbers and certainly tie back to the the bottom line but we've been really proud to see a lot of the stuff that that's got mentioned where they created a programs directly and meaningfully impact things like conversion from a free player to a paying player for reactivating churned players for significantly increasing retention we've seen in some of our games players that use a Creator code will end up playing the game more than twice as long as the average player that'll play much more sessions that end up spending more if they're in the top Court tile Spenders a bunch of great things on like the growth metric side of things and also just to speak to what Scott mentioned around keeping your most engaged creators in the ecosystem I

think that that can't go under talked about like the idea of sharing Revenue with your most engaged creators really and literally what you're doing is you're directly retaining the way that your most engaged players will stay in the game so by retaining that one person that one content creator you're further retaining your most engaged players the players that are playing the game the most spending the most bringing in their own communities and audiences like they do that because their favorite Creator is playing the game and so if you have a chance to get that person to make a living and to focus on just making content for your game like that is the big opportunity and it's it's hard to see that past the you know the fear of cannibalization but like you want as much spending as possible to be flowing through those creators because the more that you incentivize and engage and retain them like the the better you're going to see your game if you are the sort of game that cares about really highly engaged players if you're a hyper casual game you know a lot of this is going to be a lot less effective yeah I

think jumping in on that Justin real a real life example toay of like the Loyalty that it built I I remember I think this was maybe 2017 2018 I should have looked back at this convo but there was a time with supercell games in particular where viewership was going down across all the titles in the end from Clash of Clans to clash Royale and for the creators obviously with viewership going down and maybe some updates that were hitting the mark there was a little bit of a panic in the end and the Creator program at that time had been a little bit less built out but at the time we had seen some competitive games enter the ecosystem I won't name names but there were some games coming in who were willing to offer creators paid fixed monthly fees to cover their games in the end and as a Creator hey my viewers ship's going down hey you know there's not really maybe a more evolved version of this crater program this other group's coming in and just offering paid fixed fees like there there was Panic that was happening at that time in the end and I remember sitting outside of a Motel 6 at LAX and talking with someone on the phone was super solid I was like guys something needs to change ultimately end and it's not like I had the idea of what a master

construct would be at the time to fix that relationship between you know developer and Creator but lo and behold four to five months later Ryan lighten shout out to him and his amazing team at supercell flew eight of the biggest supercell creators out to their San Francisco HQ and unveiled the version the first version of what it looked like with Creator codes within the game and an enhanced version of the Creator program in the end and it it was this pivotal moment where creators for maybe the only time I can remember were almost thinking of mutiny to where now more than ever they were bringing us in and aligning us with the journey not only from a financial perspective from the code but with a communication perspective as far as when new updates are released and things are happening with the game you guys are not only going to be in the fold but you're invested into this game success as it pertains to going forward in the end and that you know turned into a certain amount of loyalty no longer was it you know looking the other way when it came to competitors releasing games or wondering is this the game I should attach my boat to for the next three years in my career in the end because if the game go goes down I'm going down is there fresher pastors out there you know

supercell found a way through their creator program to bring all sides onto the same page and to bring everyone in together again not only through the code but purely from a communication perspective that led to the amazing success that they've ultimately had through the program and why they have some of the most di hard creators uh in all mobile games I love that story how excited are you that brawl Stars has had this Resurgence this past year because I mean I think when we found you for TFT it was because of what your work was on brawl Stars yeah I mean brawl star is incredible brawl star is easily the most well-managed mobile game that I've ever created content for in the end maybe the most well-managed mobile game ever except for of course balloons tower defense shout out to Scott um it's it's incredible how they have not really missed I mean we take a look inside of internal Creator chats and we really expect honestly in the end everyone's going to make mistakes whether through updates or Communications like something happens not everyone can bat a thousand but brawlstar truly has done an amazing

job from Moment One not only with their game but the way that they manage their Community the way they speak with the creators the way that they're open they're honest and they balance you know the business side of what they're building with brawl stars with ultimately the player base and the creators that they're working with and because of that the amount of Goodwill that they've now you know purchased through the actions that they've made has led to even when some smaller updates some updates have ended up missing to the smallest degree people are still like like hey this is the best mobile game I've ever been a part of this is the best community that I've ever been a part of there is no Panic in the end and it's been amazing to be part of the brawl Stars program and to fast forward now five years later after the game has been released and heck Clash of Clans 12 years after I've created my first video for them to be doing so amazing as they've done today I think it's a testament to the people at supercell and you know for us creators a huge Testament to the team that they put together to make all of us into huge supercell fans if I can just underscore that is it is it you know especially for for decision makers and and leaders out

there it's because we want to look at kpis and we want to look at those hardart stats but that time and that trust that's built over time it's very hard to measure but it is palpable having a tenure of working together for five years for 10 years it is so meaningful we are that much faster to make decisions we're that much faster to share things we're we're completely completely open and understand what that dynamic is going to be so it gets better every year it is compounding investment on that time and those relationships those Communications and our ability to be creative and so I do I just I just can't Echo Pats words words it's enough it really matters every year it's almost like what you do in your personal relationship if you can start from a foundation of trust and Goodwill the Money Follows because you build that one of the final topics I wanted to get into is you know we hit a lot on some of the like blocking and tackling obvious stuff but what people don't realize and I've I've realized this is trying to do the

administrative or the executional work of working with creators all around the world with different tax structures and the tracking and all of these things Justin I wanted you to talk a little bit about how you think about other benefits of these Creator platforms or these Creator programs where you've got a platform kind of running it you've got an SDK you can plug into your game that allows you to help with all of the I'll put that in quotes all of the Tactical administrative stuff can you talk a little bit more about that side of things like the unsexy but important side sure yeah I can talk about three pieces so one is onboarding so how do you choose which creators can join your program and then how do you manage that if you're going to do it yourself you're going to probably end up with Google forms and a really angry Community manager but that's a big piece is like you know when you establish one of these programs you're going to have a lot of people will sign up and some of those are not going to be folks you want in the program and not because they're

too small of a Creator but probably because they're lying and they're pretending to be someone else and so you're going to have to build Tools around how do you authenticate that they are who they say they are and so that's something that we do where like you have to sign up and authenticate your YouTube or your Twitch or whatever platform you're saying you know you're from and who you are the second piece is all things that have to do with mass communication so how do you communicate with dozens hundreds or thousands of individuals at the same time especially if you want to send them keys well today if you're just going to do it yourself you're going to again have that angry Community manager because you're going to tell them you're going to send out individual keys on Discord to hundreds of people and they're going to be annoyed at you or have them all sign ndas or send over builds it's to do that individually is really challenging but if you have some sort of like first-party platform that you build or work with a partner you know you can do that more easily and then there's the whole financial side which is everything from payments to dashboarding to taxes so dashboarding is is really important you want the feedback loop for the Creator to be as short as possible

meaning from the time that they make content to know that you know that Their audience cared about it and bought something that has a lot of value but obviously them actually knowing that they're getting paid has a lot of value so seeing those live dashboards is critical and then the actual piece to make sure those creators get paid on time every time those payment rails are really tough to make if you're running a studio that has like 90 developers you know how to do payroll for that and maybe you have a handful of contractors but suddenly adding 1099s will make your accounting team unhappy and then at the end of the year you got to handle taxes for all those people who are in dozens of different countries that probably sounds like a lot of unsexy awful work and that has been my life for the past five years so thank you um but yeah those are some of the pieces that you need to build if if this is something that you're excited about and what you want to do and some of like the bling and tackling that's important and we've talked a lot about traditional content creators which are YouTubers or live streamers or Tik tokers whatever but

what we found especially for mobile games is if you have some sort of in-game community system so Clans or groups or something like that those sort of community leaders or we call them like ambassadors they can be really powerful here as well and this is a good way to work with them and incentivize them and keep them excited and then Scott's also done some really incredible work on the player Creator side which is when players are making content which is traditionally you know called ugc like how do you keep those folks excited and engaged and how do you work with them at scale and a bunch of the different mechanics that have to do with this Scott go for it talk a little bit about this ugc I mean it's a big deal these days but again on the Light Lift This is just something that that we explore so this is this is really a project that we built with Nexus and got a lot of Great Tech on the ninjak Kiwi side and and really strong engineers and and thought leaders because it's not just a technical program but it's a safety security and and administratives but we extended our content creator system to

support our player generated content so cd6 you can make maps and and challenges and then we created an iip that was specific to those elements so that you could gift or give a badge to any of that player created content and that IP was tracked separately so we used the Nexus platform to build our player Creator content creator Revenue street so we are now for players that that build content and that that is liked Enough by other players that they're that they're paying to give them a badge we share a percentage of that Revenue through the Nexus system the fun thing that we did with this as well is that we we stacked that with the content creators so if you're a content creator so they're basically there's a player creator player generated content creator Revenue share and there's a content creator Revenue share and if you are a content creator who creates player content in the game you get to add those those pieces together so that becomes quite meaningful because we see we see the value in the content creators we see

the value in the player creators we think these are trends that are good for business and they're going to be growth Trends as we've seen very successful games with those with those programs but we're also really interested in the next generation of game developers giving that teenager the ability to make their first money in game development in their teens while they're still in high school because they built some content inside L's TV6 that's magic and maybe now maybe now I will go to that I will take that programming class maybe now I will study marketing go into art do something maybe I can do this because I've made that I've got that little boost of confidence and then the more that we can get people into these conversations as we're talking about with patl like get them into these Loops get them into the Green Room let them see behind the scenes so that they're not scared and that they understand that it's accessible that it is sustainable that confidence is massive and could be the fuel for the next generation of game developers if that's lights that fire and I'm happy to

be a part of that oh I I'm I'm very inspired by your passion on this and I think you are touching on a trend you know what's going on in Roblox Minecraft and ufn with the ugc 3 is that a number of inexperienced folks are creating their own content whether it be ugc items whether it be game experiences and we're not seeing a lot of that in mobile games or in game you know obviously most of Roblox creators play on mobile but there there aren't a lot of mobile games doing things like this and to have a platform that kind of facilitates that for you makes a lot of sense Pat last word to you is there anything about you know these kind of programs in a boxes or these platforms that we missed or any last words you want to leave from the voice of a Creator to the game industry nerds out there yeah sure I mean I feel like for me obviously maybe I'm a bit biased in the end but I feel like having a Creator program and a Creator Club is just going to be essential going forward if you have a game that's built around content that's spectable that has any

quote unquote YouTube value as I like to call in the end and really the I mean the last thing we touched on this at the very beginning but if you're developing and deploying an influencer marketing strategy obviously that has its place and there's been some incredible campaigns even that we've done here at Tri but supplementing that with a Creator program is absolutely going to amplify the success of any of those programs I mean think of running an influencer marketing campaign you take some of the biggest Mobile gaming creators or creators more broadly you show off your incredible title after that campaign is done and those creators go back to the content that they were pre creating previously where does that audience go from there they're going to look for natural content on the Chanel on YouTube or whatever platform to continue enjoying content around that game I mean you know for me when I looked at Clash of Clans back in 2012 no one was posting content around the game and I was like huh I guess I'll you know take a break from steadying accounting and post some videos here and fortunately for me as the game grew you know players were able to funnel to my channel and help you know grow my channel and and everything else but I think now with influencer marketing campaigns you need to create somewhere

for player for people to go after and that truly is going to be the lifeblood of your community through these crater programs where even if someone you know is getting a few hundred views of video but if you're running UA and all of the sudden they look up and they find this person's channel that person is going to be the next thought you know leader and taste maker for your game going forward in the end so compiling those two together you're going to get dedicated influencers you're going to get dedicated crators ultimately it's going to pay off for years and and even you know over a decade to come uh with me in supercell ultimately as an example in the end so it's it's definitely a worthwhile investment love it well thank you so much Pat where can people find you uh you can find me on YouTube at Chief pad Twitter at Chief pad or Pat trib gaming. feel free to say hi do you want to tell do people know the origin story of your name or is that a secret oh well Clash of Clans I downloaded it again procrastinate for an accounting exam and it said what is your name Chief and of course the brilliant strategist that I am I wrote Chief Pat because that is my name there we go so that's how I it's that simple uh Scott Walker thank

you for joining where can people find you my place um yeah I don't know Scott at ninja kii I'm old school so email works email oh got it all right and Justin Sachs where can people find you I'm on Twitter orus X Justin and then 2or sax I'm terrible coming up with usernames or you can email me Justin nexus. all right well thank you very much guys and see you next time you did it you made it to the end of the episode as a fan of the show it would help us out if you subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice more importantly are you a member of the deconstructor of fun slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fun.com slack and apply to join join the games industry's best professional Community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fund content creators thanks for listening [Music]