Yoga dev Gajatri Studio on turning 'authentic' content into revenue

yes good morning everyone welcome to helsinki and today i'm going to address three points with respect to yoga retreat game and maybe give you some ideas on virality and authentic content and how to kind of make that all work seamlessly but we're first yesterday we actually got a new prime minister uh to finland and he's famous

for two things first of all he has most twitter following of any finnish politicians so very suitable for this and then he always has three points so there were some notable similarities with my presentation what i was going to give today so to the first point can i get the slides yes okay demo effect okay i start with this without the slides so um yoga retreat is a free-to-play game which means that uh basically players are given the opportunity uh to start

the game to try out how the product feels to them without paying obviously at some point in time there needs to be a business model for the developer how to make money from the game and and there always comes the first challenge that you know how do you make that work seamlessly you know with the type of a game you want to deliver in our case we wanted to create non-stereotypical game for women so when you look at the women games market you see a lot of fashion a lot of restaurants a lot of very kind of a stereotypical women games and what we wanted to achieve is to give a game which is fun it is a game but it also has a content within it that is relevant and interesting to the women games audience in terms of free to play the challenge is then how how you actually get

and and how you kind of um direct the people also to give you some money uh so find so much value in stuff what you offer uh that they actually are willing to throw in the four euros or the 10 euros in in terms of the gas purchases and i'll talk about that now the game loop in in our case is taking care of customers that arrive to the retreat with different needs they obviously in a yoga retreat want to learn yoga but they have other needs as well and you need to expand the retreat and and take buildings in into your place to make that work so this particular customer is here uh for a balanced package meaning that you know she wants to learn yoga and then you know drink some suitable choosies and increase her balance and once she's happy she then pays the player coins and and leaves the retreat and he and actually recommends the place uh to her

friends which then will kind of join the fun and you'll able to kind of increase the number of customers the more happy you make them i mentioned buildings and i mentioned free to play and and i mentioned business model so in our case we've decided that things start to proceed gradually a little bit lousier from a player point of view after the first 12 levels so then you either need to wait a lot of time in order to upgrade your buildings or buy new ones with cash that help you proceed faster so first we offer paddle board yoga then we offer laughter yoga then we offer actually ability to teach lead classes and then smoothie bar to the players and all of these become available but

in order to really make them perform well for you you need to upgrade the buildings and the waiting times then kind of become longer and longer and and we hope that that's one of the ways that some of the most non-patient customers will then start to give us money in terms of free to play then to the authentic content so together with the normal games loop there is also a yoga loop that proceeds with the game so when you proceed in levels you unlock new purposes to practice and for really really enthusiastic yogis and yoginis there are features such as building your own yoga sequences you're obviously able to watch in the game yourself as well as share to your friends so sharing in our case means sharing via facebook sharing in twitter sharing in pinterest

obviously videos you can't share to pinterest but i'll talk about all of these sharing ways in greater detail but this is really kind of uh the one of the key authentic content elements in our game that all the yoga poses animations related to those all their names they are correctly they are served to you as they would be served in a real life yoga class and you are able to play with that content while managing your own retreat so coming to the sharing part um one of the authentic content elements in addition to the yoga poses not so familiar to the general public is that there are a lot of well-being philosophy elements with respect to yoga uh that you know is part of the whole system of yoga as it is understood in in the east and or partially also in the west so what we've tried to do is to take some of those

elements also to be part of the game so customers have occupations and relevant intentions so why they are actually practicing yoga why they are in your retreat and and through those types of elements we've tried to integrate some of the yoga philosophy into this fun gaming loop that is ongoing in yoga retreat so here you see there is a store keeper and she's there because she thinks health is her greatest wealth and you can obviously tweet this to your friends as well as you know all the relevant guidelines relating to how to do properly a triangle pose or warrior pose or anything that is available in terms of pinterest that is kind of also given our target segment that we are kind of targeting women that are adults uh also a very important way that we hope that uh

players are also able to kind of market our game so we made pinterest cards that also share some of this especially kind of well-being philosophy related elements and here you can actually go check out in pinterest how many of our kind of soft launch pilot players have have shared the content and you see that those ones that are really into pinterest they share a lot per person but it's still uh smaller than you know what people share to twitter but these are the types of things so in addition to kind of yoga poses and and you know these intentions we also have daily meditations that you can complete together with the game so one daily meditation opens every 12 hours and then each of those meditations also has a pinterest card that you can pin to your pinterest page

in terms of what we've learned so yoga retreat game is currently in a soft launch in three markets so finland netherlands canada and in canada we've been doing trial marketing for a few months and raised volumes uh since may so 30 of the daily players actually share something so they share uh either intentions yoga philosophies their level ups uh blah blah blah and uh most interesting to me has been to notice that really this authentic content is you know like 80 percent of what is shared so normally the violent viral elements in games they are kind of glued on top of the game experience so they normally are not very well integrated as to be part of the game's content or really the design and uh you know what the game is

all about so one of the things i challenge everyone who is kind of building virality as part of the experience is to really start to think about that at the same time as you you know really decide to whom is this game made for because in our case if the virality will start to bring us players uh big time it's not because of the level of brags and it's not because of uh you know screenshots how fancy buildings i've made but it's because of yoga it's because of the poses the intentions and really the content that people are attached to and want to share with their friends so that's kind of really um interesting finding and and verification of some of the thinking what we have with respect to the authentic content part what's also really interesting to notice

is that when you have all these analytics integrated into your game and you are doing the user acquisition with different advertising tools and and then you monitor what's going on so organic funnel so basically people that are either uh coming through app store lift or coming through you know this twitter facebook whatever posts people have been posting it follows a very similar pattern uh to that of the paid funnel so this has been really kind of interesting finding for me in in our pilot in canada that uh you know people who invite people they invite alikes who you know play similarly as well as then pay similarly so uh when you market and use marketing funds to a certain target demographic they invite more people who behave in a similar way so there is not big difference between the two funnels okay so those were the key findings i

really hope that people think about already in the beginning that you know how they want to populate the channels and make it meaningful for the players not only how they play but how they share thank you