Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This podcast is about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host Jon Jordan. And joining me today, we have two experts from GameRefinery. We have Teemu Palomäki, who is the Chief Game Analyst for the Japanese region from Game Refinery. How’s it going, Teemu?

[00:00:26] Teemu Palomäki: It’s going great! It’s great to be here.

[00:00:28] Jon: Good. And, doubling up on the Japanese brain trust, we have Milka Paunonen, who is the senior game analyst for Japan at Game Refinery. How’s it going, Milka?

[00:00:37] Milka Paunonen: It’s going great. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:39] Jon: Good. And the reason we have our Japanese Brain Trust on the podcast today is we are talking about a Japanese app. And a very particular Japanese app, Pokémon Sleep. So Pokémon Sleep, I guess, is now, I would say, following in the trend or lineage of a gamified health app from Pokémon.

So, we had Pokémon Smile, which is an interesting teeth-cleaning app for children that came out last year, and now we have Pokémon Sleep, which, as the name suggests, is all about gamified sleep and wellness in that area. So, Teemu, do you want to kick us off with, like, an overview, and then obviously we’ll drill down into very specifics of what’s going on there, but, for people who haven’t used it, including me, give me the rundown of Pokémon Sleep, what are we doing here?

Understanding Pokémon Sleep Gameplay

[00:01:24] Teemu: Yeah, so Pokémon Sleep, it was released, on July 17th, so relatively recently. It’s a game about, well, sleeping. You’re collecting Pokémon, or you’re observing how they sleep. So there are different sleeping habits in the Pokemon world. These Pokémon can have up to four sleeping styles. Like for example, Psyduck, the yellow duck, always has headaches but can sleep with a headache or have a tantrum or yawn in their sleep, or they can sleep on top of this big Snorelax Pokémon.

In the app, that is kind of the centre of your Pokémon Sleep observation area. So there is the big Snorelax there that you level up by sleeping. In the app, you level it up in one-week periods and then move to another island. Alternatively, you can stay on the same island but your progress with Snorelax resets. But the Pokémon you collect, you can update and upgrade by observing their sleep patterns, those you can keep and train and gain long-term progress, and, you know, based on your own sleeping style, you will have progress.

More generally, the app tracks how you sleep. The sounds you make when you’re sleeping, you can even listen to how you sound in your sleep when you wake up if you’re brave. I still haven’t been able to take that step yet. But there are different levels of sleep, whether it’s shallow or deep. In the game, there’s dozing, snoozing, and slumbering. Depending on which of these types is dominant for your night of sleep, the Pokémon related to that group can be observed and then caught.

Depending on how well and how much you sleep, you can catch them. I think for adults, if you sleep eight and a half hours, you can get the full rewards. But if you’re like me and have a toddler, you might sleep something like four and a half hours, and then you get lesser rewards. That’s basically how the base game runs.

[00:03:57] Jon: I guess at a very superficial level, the nice thing about it, and maybe one of the triggers they wanted to do, is it does play into the characteristics of some of these Pokémon. So, we could argue, or not, that it’s a little bit crowbarred in perhaps. Maybe Pokémon doesn’t immediately make you think about doing a sleep app.

But there are elements in there that, if you’re a big Pokémon fan, play into the fact that some of these have different characteristics, and some of them are sleeping all the time. So there is a nice holistic tie-in there to some degree.

[00:04:30] Teemu: Yeah. Completely.

[00:04:32] Jon: Milka, in terms of, obviously, it’s a playful app, a gamified app. It’s maybe more towards children just with the Pokémon franchise. But compared to the serious industry around analysing sleep and various things you can do there, various different apps and hardware like Fitbit, Whoop, or other healthcare apps, where does Pokémon Sleep compare to those things, or are we making the wrong comparison there?

Comparing Pokémon Sleep to other sleep-tracking apps

[00:05:09] Milka: Yes, actually, I use Fitbit quite a lot, regularly. I compared a bit of data from Fitbit to the Pokémon Sleep data. I was actually quite surprised; initially, I was a little bit sceptical about the Pokémon Sleep app. Yeah, it is a game essentially, so can it really be good for this kind of sleep tracking? I was quite amazed at how similar the data was to my Fitbit app data. So with all of these devices, they’re not exactly 100% accurate. You can’t really get accurate data on how long you are in the deep sleep stage or anything like that, for example.

So, in that sense, it doesn’t really matter if it’s not exactly the same. But for collecting data in a casual way, to get a general idea of your sleeping habits, I think Pokémon Sleep is definitely good enough. And it’s free, so it can be an alternative for those on a budget compared to these more precise devices. The looks of it, it’s a cute app with cute visuals. I don’t know if it has a lineage, as some people might think. It is quite catered to casual users and kids with visuals. But I don’t see any problem with the data.

In some ways, it’s probably even better. For example, I know for a fact that I woke up two times last night, and my Fitbit device didn’t track those times, but Pokémon Sleep could actually detect those moments when I was awake at night. So maybe it was because my heart rate didn’t fluctuate that much that Fitbit didn’t recognise it, but the app could. Even the Pokémon Sleep could give me more data about my breathing and stuff, like listening to me and tracking it during my sleep.

I don’t see any problem with it. So yeah, that’s my take.

[00:07:57] Jon: In terms of Fitbit, it is a specific hardware device you’re wearing, and the Pokémon-Pokémon Sleep is basically, you’re just putting your phone near your bed, isn’t it? Is that how it works?

[00:08:08] Milka: Yeah, yeah. And it is a different mechanic entirely. But in that sense, I must say for Fitbit, it is not the core function of the device. So although it is a fitness device first and foremost, it’s just an extra feature, you know, the sleeping tracking. But anyway, I found it surprisingly like Pokémon Sleep data; it was surprisingly good too.

[00:08:36] Jon: Good-good. And the interesting thing, just reading some of the marketing around it, is that it has this idea. You have your phone by your bed, which obviously lots of people say you shouldn’t have your phone right by your bed.

But the point is, when you wake up in the morning, you can immediately see what’s going on in the Pokémon world. So, it is quite an interesting retention mechanic they’ve got going on there. The first thing you do in the morning is check out your Pokémon. But is that the whole point of it?

Pokémon brand strategy and wellness focus

[00:09:03] Teemu: Yeah-yeah, it is. And it can also be like, kind of building the strength of the brand. I must say this is kind of like a style of gameplay that works only with Pokémon like similar to how we have Pokémon GO. It only succeeds in the West, at least, and it’s only with the Pokémon brand. Anything else Niantic has tried has kind of failed in Japan.

They have, I think, Dragon Quest Walk from Square and exist really well. That’s fighting-based, and it’ll be interesting to see how Monster Hunter now does when it launches later this year, which is also kind of fighting-based. Then you have the girl collector, it’s sort of like transformers, where you go around Japan’s train stations and capture these girls that have designs influenced by different trains. That’s also popular in Japan. But other than that, these location-based games are not a thing. But with Pokémon Sleep, the sleeping thing, I suppose you could make a side mode in a game. If you want additional rewards for a game, then you can track your sleep. But other than that, I think this is a very Pokémon thing to do.

But it’s frankly, it’s really just promoting the brand. Like, it’s the last thing you do before you go to sleep and the first thing in the morning, so your life is all-around Pokémon. And then you go about your day, and you play Pokemon. When you go brush your teeth with Pokémon Smile, then, you know, you walk to your work with Pokémon Go. It’s all Pokémon, Pokémon, Pokémon. So, I think it’s interesting to see what is the next wellness thing that Pokémon brings out.

[00:11:01] Jon: I mean, do you…

[00:11:03] Milka: Yeah.

[00:11:04] Jon: You go, Milka.

[00:11:06] Milka: Oh, yeah, I was just going to say that. It’s possible that Pokémon really wants to expand the brand to really be a part of people’s daily lives. Like, all parts of it, outside of gaming, and it’s a great way to introduce these, well, very simple but still probably addictive, lifestyle habit apps.

So, I was actually thinking, this is probably the perfect time for them to release apps like Pokémon Smile, and even Pokémon Sleep because Pokémon is becoming multigenerational. So, the brand is expanding to new demographics. The generation that was there for the original games is actually now having kids of their own, and, like, it’s a great way of introducing the characters through these apps, like, Pokémon Smile and, like, these games. And, well, I was also thinking, like, is it good to make it an app on your phones because it can be used as a reward mechanic for you? Like, if you brush your teeth, you get rewards out of these games. Is it good to make phones your method of reward? I don’t know, but yeah, it’s an interesting thing to think about, at least.

[00:12:28] Jon: I mean, as a parent, I can see the Smile one being a more useful lever because getting them to brush their teeth is just really difficult. You’re either doing it yourself, or they become of an age where you have to trust them. But you never quite trust them, so– And that seems like, you know, quite a nice little app that you could have, and you’re using it twice a day, and that’s what builds a routine around that.

The Sleep one, you know, it seems harder for me to work out, you know, is this a fairly lightweight thing that is, you know, they’re doing it as a very much an experiment, or is this actually quite a clever approach, as I say, to get people to use it. So the last thing you do at night is Pokémon, and the first thing you do in the morning is Pokémon. The fact that your sleep doesn’t really matter. There’s a quite subtle but strong commercial edge to it.

I mean, should we? Sorry, how do you think we should be thinking about this? Is this a serious Pokémon game that has not a lot of depth but has been clearly thought out and treated seriously, or do they expect people to be doing this every day, and being retained, so they can add a monetisation strategy in there? Or is this a bit more of a Smile-type app? You know, it’s an interesting thing that it doesn’t really matter.

Benefits and concerns of Pokémon Sleep

[00:14:00] Teemu: Well, I think this one is more serious. You know, Pokémon Smile it’s definitely aimed at kids. It doesn’t have any ads or monetisation mechanics. It’s just a way for parents to, well, get their kids to brush their teeth. You can think of it from a parent’s perspective, “This is to help my children to brush their teeth and become healthier,” in that sense for Pokémon. It’s like, “Okay, let’s make sure that Pokémon is present in their lives, and it becomes a meaningful part of their life, and then later in their years, we can sell them stuff.”

But, like, this is different. I don’t know if it comes from Pokémon Go’s success. So they have this and are thinking, “Okay, we improved people’s commuting habits and walking, so people became healthier. What is the next step we can do?” And sleeping is something that is often overlooked. If you think about what gamers are bad at, I think sleeping is very high on that list. Eating would be the other one, but eating, there are so many things to consider, like eating disorders and allergies and stuff that you need to be really careful with, and it’s harder to track. So I think sleeping is something that is easier to track, and that’s why they’ve gone for it.

And I think Pokémon is building this wellness brand and trying to be serious about it. And they have used similar monetisation mechanics in Pokémon Sleep that they do in Pokémon Go. For example, you expand your inventories, and you buy these consumable boosts with which you can catch these Pokémon and kind of upgrade them. So, it’s very similar to Pokémon Go in that sense. So I would say it’s a very serious app, unlike Smile.

[00:15:53] Jon: And it’s a good point that you do make there about Niantic, the US company behind Pokémon Go. I think it’s often overlooked how serious that company is about getting people to move. So the fact that they were so successful with Pokémon Go, I mean, that they’ve had various apps before that. The guy who founded the company actually invented Google Earth, or the company he invented became Google Earth. And he’s very active in changing people’s habits. He sees it as a mission to get people moving. That’s very much his thing.

The reason they were doing location-based games is he really wanted to get people out there and exploring. So, I think the fact that Pokemon Sleep is a game, there is a strong social mission that they do have behind some of these things. I don’t know so much about the sleep thing. I mean, there have been some issues with people with sleep becoming a performance mechanic. Do you think it’s just hype, or is it just headline-grabbing stories? I did see there were issues around the gamified process. When you gamify something, you put incentives on things, but sometimes they can overstep the mark, so that cannot be a good thing for a lot of people.

[00:17:23] Teemu: Oh, yeah. I think that’s definitely something to consider. If you’re building the habit that you are constantly kind of gaming, everything is a performance. You can’t actually enjoy anything. Especially if how well you sleep is tied to the rewards you get in the game, that can make sleeping more stressful. Yeah-

[00:17:46] Jon: And then, I mean, I’ve heard stories that people were taking sleeping pills, which just seems to be insane.  But maybe it’s just people who just do the silly thing and that it’s not really the fault of the app, but you know, there is that consideration.

[00:17:59] Teemu: Yeah, yeah. People do silly things, which is one of the risks of the game. Another risk, you know, is people also use these slightly damaged charging cables. Now, combine that with an older phone that you leave on your mattress next to you at night. Personally, I’m just waiting for the first headline that someone’s house caught on fire because of Pokémon Sleep. So I think that is a very real risk.

The radiation part is another risk. Phones emit a small amount of radiation. In modest use, it’s not a big problem, as far as I’m aware. But, like, in the long run, if you’re using your phone throughout the day and then during the night you leave it on next to you, that can cause trouble in the long run, like, decades later or something, you start seeing the impact. But yeah.

[00:19:12] Jon: I mean, it is interesting, isn’t it? Clearly, I think what they’re trying to do is something that is positive for people. As you say, most people don’t sleep enough. I mean, that’s the basic crux of the matter. So maybe we shouldn’t be complaining about all these edge cases. And I mean, Milka, have you, obviously, you’re someone who’s got a Fitbit, so you’re interested in that stuff anyway. Have you found Pokémon Sleep, has that made you think more about sleep, at least in a very passive case, that you think, “Oh, instead of playing another hour of whatever, some game, I’ll go to bed earlier and improve my Pokémon Sleep score”?

Because I guess that’s what they want, is they want that subtle nudge. Over time, it’s different from every day you’ll go to bed at eight o’clock to maximise your score because no one’s going to do that. But it’s just subtle. I mean, do you think that’s worked?

[00:20:00] Milka: Yeah. I actually felt that it did feel rewarding to me to actually wake up in the morning and see, “Oh, wow, I got this Pokémon.” And it actually felt quite rewarding, more so than just, you know, going to see your score in the app, and then it’s that’s it. So I feel like there’s definitely– It’s definitely motivating in that sense.

I was also thinking about the concerns about the game. Like when you have the phone next to you when you’re going to sleep, it may be a distraction in itself. And again, I’m going back to this, like, if there are kids who use it, can they control the urge to just take the phone and start doom scrolling or whatever. So that was something that I was thinking about, but for me, at least, it wasn’t a problem.

But some people may find it a little bit difficult to sleep with their phone next to them, and that’s why I’m quite disappointed that I heard that the Pokémon, the Pokémon GO Plus Plus device isn’t quite as good at tracking sleep, so I was hoping that it would be, so you wouldn’t have to take your phone with you to the bed but, –

Pokémon GO Plus device and sleep tracking

[00:21:29] Jon: Teemu, this is your-your opportunity to shine. Tell us about this little device and whether it works or not.

[00:21:38] Teemu: Yeah. I actually bought one for myself just because I wanted to kind of improve my sleep – Well, I say that I also track Pokémon GO at work as well, and I wanted to try Pokémon Sleep.

[00:21:50] Jon: Can you explain a little bit more because it’s not just for Pokémon Sleep, is it, that’s an ancillary, so what is that device? Why would you use it in general?

[00:21:59] Teemu: Yeah, so the Pokémon GO Plus Plus device is a device that can track your movement with Pokémon GO. So, while you’re playing Pokémon GO keeping the game open, the device is connected to it with Bluetooth, and then every time there is a Pokémon close by, the device starts vibrating and flashing colours. And if you press the button at the centre, then the game tries to catch a Pokémon, you have one chance with this device to catch them. So a lot of the Pokémon are going to run away, but you catch more than you would if you were just walking by and trying to get them on your phone.

[00:22:50] Jon: So effectively, you don’t need to use your phone. You have to have your phone in your pocket, and this thing buzzes; you press the button like automation.

[00:22:57] Teemu: Yeah, and the plus side is that it saves the battery. And it’s really nice in that sense, and it can be used to track your sleep with Pokémon Sleep. For me, the success rate was really low. I’ve tried it like, I think, four nights, and I’ve managed to track sleep with just one of them. So, we’re getting closer to the success rates of getting a five-star character in a gacha mobile game, which is really poor from the player’s perspective.

But it is a nice concept. I wish there was a small screen that would tell you what is actually happening when you sleep. Like, okay, the tracking started now, and this is what we’re tracking. You started tracking successfully, and then when you close it, then okay, the tracking ended successfully so that you would have some feedback instead of just these vibrations and stuff. But this device actually, well, people were incentivised to buy it so that you would get these special tasks in Pokémon GO. And here is the interesting part about Pokémon GO and Pokémon Sleep. Those apps actually communicate with each other. So, depending on how well you sleep, when you can connect a device again to Pokémon GO, you can get additional rewards there.

And then, depending on how many steps you’ve walked or Pokémon catch or sleep, you can get additional rewards for this special Pikachu that you obtain through this device in Pokémon Sleep. So, the apps are kind of communicating and building that lifestyle, the  Pokémon lifestyle, together.

[00:24:54] Jon: I mean, presumably, that device works in a different way, trying to track your sleep. It’s obviously a more movement-based thing, I would think. Would it be?

[00:25:03] Teemu: It is for Pokémon GO. It actually doesn’t track movement. For Pokémon GO, it’s just the app kind of sending the location data and stuff. For Pokémon Sleep, it has a microphone that tracks the sleep. So, yeah. So, it’s a listening device.

[00:25:27] Jon: Yeah, I mean, I guess the other thing is that, as people have had with Alexa’s and all those devices, having more microphones in the bedroom, again, is generally seen as not a positive thing. I’m sure Nintendo is more careful than most when it comes to the privacy of those things. I’m sure it’s not recording those things, but equally interesting that, to some degree, any improvement, any time a company wants to improve one part of your life, it butts up against other things that they shouldn’t, like the privacy of our bedrooms or having more screens in our bedrooms. There’s always this tension there.

Okay. So do you think this can be more than a gimmick? You know, I mean, obviously, you two are probably not the target audience, although you may be closer to the target audience than we think, but, you know, is this something that you think you would be regularly using or more generally, other people would be regularly used as part of their lifestyle tracking?

Market reception and future potential

[00:26:37] Teemu: Yeah, I think it could become an important part of life for many. For me personally, I have a toddler who likes to play with the Pokémon GO Plus device. It has flashy lights, so if she wakes up during the night and comes to pick it up because it’s a fun toy, then nothing is tracked. And, so, for me, it’s kind of tedious yet, but I can see it becoming a big part of someone’s life. I found it really interesting. I was hoping it could improve my sleeping. I know I sleep way too little for what I need, but I don’t know. It has some problems, but it seems to be resonating well.

If we look at my notes, in the US, it’s been high on the downloads, in the top 30 or so, quite recently as it also rose to the top 200 in rankings. Before that, it was outside of it. So, in the US, it’s small of a thing, but if we look at the Japanese market, ever since it was launched, it has been number one in downloads.

[00:28:10] Jon: Really? Wow.

[00:28:10] Teemu: Yeah. So, it is really downloaded there. And in the rankings, at first, it was around the top 30, then it dropped down to the 50s or so for a while, and last time I checked, it was somewhere around 15. So, it’s monetising really well, and people are buying stuff. They’re buying these items with which to catch Pokémon or with which to evolve or train those Pokémon. And, you know, they have a subscription model, they have a sleep pass, which, well, the first two weeks are free, but after that, you get a lot of these perks.

So if you form a habit of this game, I think that it can increase the experience. You can write, for example, notes about your sleep, so you can make personal notes that, “On this night, I did this, which caused me to sleep less,” or “This night was really hot, and that’s why I didn’t sleep well.” If you want to track more, you get more ways to track. And what I found interesting; they also have additional lavish rewards every three months. So, they’re incentivising keeping the subscription on because you get improved rewards every three months, which is something I haven’t really seen that much in mobile games. So, like giving additional rewards for keeping the subscription on. So, I don’t know.

[00:29:50] Milka: Yeah, I also thought that, in terms of, like, habit tracking, lifestyle and fitness apps, there are several titles that have gamified elements. But, in the sleeping tracking market, there are only so many gamified sleeping apps. So, for those people who need that kind of incentive to track their sleep and use these apps, there have been literally no options. So, now there’s an option, and it’s Pokémon Sleep. So, for those people who need that kind of gaming feeling in their lifestyle apps, it’s definitely a good option. So I feel like it has a market there.

[00:30:40] Jon: Yeah, no, it’s just like Teemu mentioned. Maybe there’s a geographical uptake, which is just some cultures will be more accepting of it because maybe they really like Pokémon more, or just the way they view day-to-day existence. It may just chime better. Whereas maybe in Western Europe and North America, we’re more nervous about the use of phones and devices, no matter whether they’re good or bad.

So, it may be that split, which will be interesting to see. I mean, I just kind of think, what will be interesting, I suppose, is if it actually becomes a strong definer of encouraging people to sleep more. But, basically, it will make people aware of that for the first time, and maybe only use it some of the time, but people can start thinking, ‘oh, I can get this app for free; let’s try it’. And when they try it for the first time, they use a sleep app, and they realise how badly they sleep. Particularly if they have children, they can look at the data and think oh ‘that’s shocking’. I mean, I’m quite into this stuff. I have lots of health trackers and stuff.

And when you really get stuck getting into it, you know, you realise that you do build these gamified loops to yourself. So, on the health side of things, those apps tend not to be gamified, but you can see over time, they’ll probably become more gamified. So, Pokémon Sleep is actually part of a much wider trend, I think. We’ll probably see people around all wellness and stuff.

Moving on, does Pokémon as a brand have the ability to do more things? I mean, I don’t know what more things you would do. You could imagine a food thing, couldn’t you? You know, you could. People take all these Instagrammable photos of their food all the time. You could imagine a Pokémon-themed thing around that, could you not?

[00:33:35] Milka: Yep.

Future possibilities for the Pokémon brand

[00:32:36] Teemu: Yes, it could be. That was the first thing that came to my mind. Then when I was thinking more, another one that came to mind, you know, from a fitness perspective, is to somehow incorporate Pokemon doing your exercises or stretching or whatever. They can have you on screen alongside a Pokemon to show you what to do. But I don’t know if that’s something they will have. And it might to even be an app, it could be a game. You know, Nintendo Switch has the Ring Fit Adventure with the kind of controls where you have a stretching circle thing. Something like that could definitely be Pokemon-themed. And depending on what moves you do, you can catch Pokémon if you do daily stretches/exercises. And there would be over a thousand Pokémon to catch now, so you could make a really big exercise game.

[00:33:42] Jon: Mm-hmm, yeah. And, as we discussed, Niantic is really interested in the positive being fit as well. I don’t know how successful the Switch game was, but it was a long time ago now. But yeah, there are lots of things we can potentially look forward to.

Lovely. Well, thank you, Teemu and thank you, Milka, for your expertise. In the next podcast, I expect you will both be looking much younger as you have all these enormous amounts of sleep. We’ll wait and see.

Thanks for watching and listening to the podcast. However, you are consuming it.  In every episode, we are looking at what’s going on in the space of mobile games. And as we’ve covered so many different things recently. We’re really moving around now, covering specific apps and whole genres and cultures and movements. So please subscribe and come back next time to find out what’s going on with the Mobile Games Playbook. See you then. Goodbye.

[00:34:52] Milka: Bye-bye.

[00:34:53] Teemu: Bye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This podcast is about what makes a great mobile game, what is, and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan. And joining me today, we have two special guests. We have Paula Neves, a Senior Product Manager at Zynga. How’s it going, Paula?

[00:00:22] Paula Neves: Good, good. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:24] Jon: Absolutely. And also, we have Karen Chen, who is an Account Executive at Liftoff. How’s it going, Karen?

[00:00:31] Karen Chen: Doing well, thanks, Jon.

[00:00:32] Jon: Good, good. So, in today’s episode, maybe a little bit different to some of the ones we’ve done recently, we’re going to talk generally about women in games. Obviously, sort of a massive subject, and we can only sort of cover bits of it, maybe anecdotal bits of it.

But, I think it may be good to start off with you, Paula, and I think it’s interesting, one of the sort of issues we have, I think, in the games industry, is how women get into sort of the development, you know, industry side of it, so it might be a good starting point if you can talk us through sort of how-how you got into games.

Discussing women’s role in the games industry

[00:01:01] Paula: Yeah, of course, so I’ve always really loved gaming. Like, since I can even remember, I was playing Enduro and Keystone Kapers, you know, like giving away my age, but on the Atari. So, it has always been something in the back of my mind, but I’m originally from Brazil, and the industry there could be bigger and stronger.

I mean, it is strong in terms of, like, we have really talented people, but it’s not very big. There’s not a lot of investment. So, it was something that slowly I just pushed away from my mind, but my first experience was in this really small studio from Rio De Janeiro called Nano Games. And the way I sort of got into it, it’s because I had a friend that worked there, and we were like ten people, you know?

[00:01:54] Jon: Yeah.

[00:01:55] Paula: And they needed someone to help with everything like product development and on the marketing side of things, you know, those startup type of tasks, and I just went for it, you know. Because I was like, “Okay, this is my chance to start here and work in an industry I love.” So, yeah.

[00:02:12] Jon: And was it something that you thought was a bit weird for games to be a job? Or was that something that you just thought, “Well, of course, gaming’s a big industry? People get jobs in them all the time. Why shouldn’t I get a job there?”

[00:02:24] Paula: No, I didn’t think it was weird at all. I just think it was incredibly unlikely that anyone would land a gaming job in Brazil. And then, when I landed one, I was joyous. I just felt lucky. And then from then on, I think I worked in/for (at the time) most of the big companies in Brazil or Rio that were making and producing games, you know? And then, so I’d say I got pretty lucky. And, of course, I’ve now been in Montreal for four years. I’ve gone to a lot of events, and I know how big the industry is, but that first experience with my friend, that was the, I guess, the start of my workings in the industry.

[00:03:05] Jon: Yeah, cool. I bet it was very, well, quite different from moving from Rio to Montreal. But that’s another story for another time.

[00:03:13] Paula: Yes, that’s definitely, another podcast or webinar.

[00:03:16] Jon: Absolutely. Cool. And Karen, how was it for you [Breaking into the industry]?

[00:03:20] Karen: Yeah, I have a different experience from Paula, but honestly, on my side, advertising had never really seemed like an option before. You know, when you kind of grow up, you’re exposed to ads, and the mobile landscape seems a bit daunting. And so, again, I just kind of came into the industry not knowing much. You know, I completed a few college marketing classes that were telling me like, “Hey, this is what mobile looks like,” right?

So I understood the basic acronyms that I’m more familiar with now, but once I entered the industry, I then realized how big it was. And with advertising, gaming’s obviously a huge portion of that. So from there, I gained a lot of experience working with gaming advertisers across the board, from a wide range of companies, you know, from casual to mid-core type gaming apps. And yeah, I would say most of my experience has been exposure on the job, really.

[00:04:20] Jon: Cool. And this is for either of you to answer this one, have you found, and it may be easy for me to say not being a woman, but my impression of having been in the industry for a while is, as the industry’s got bigger and have more sort of jobs in the industry that aren’t specifically about you know, coding and game development, that in some ways has made it, I think, easier for women to get into the games sort of sector as a whole?

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easier. So how have you found it? Well, actually, over to Paula, as you’ve certainly been in the industry longer. Have you found that there has been a sort of appreciation in the companies you’ve worked at that it’s good to encourage more women to be in the industry, or, you know, I guess I would probably say, tell me if I’m wrong, things are probably moving in the right direction? Maybe they’re not moving fast enough. What’s your view on the trajectory in that respect?

Representation and gender in the industry

[00:05:12] Paula: Yeah, that was a good summary. As we’ve definitely seen, there’s been an improvement, but we are certainly not there yet.

So you do see, if you look at, from a general prism of gender within one company, you will tend to see more and more women representing and working in gaming companies, in general. But when you look at leadership, though, it’s still very, very different and difficult. If you look, women are minimally represented (at the leadership level).  And the problem is people talk a lot about companies investing in this (recruiting women in roles). And you see that, especially, like the bigger companies, they put a lot of effort into ensuring equality in the workplace and that women are represented properly, well, most of them. But the problem lies, at least from my point of view, is that it’s a lot like before, it’s only just changed at entry level.

For example, when I was at Gazeus Games, I was a director there, so I had a lot of access to the deciding making process. Interestingly, I was the only female director out of eight and we had a lot of push for hiring the LGBT community and putting them into jobs, and we pushed for women, for diversity in general. But we just wouldn’t get the CVs, we wouldn’t get the women through the door. And that’s because, well, I think, there are several reasons behind it. But once they don’t see themselves represented further up and throughout the industry, they think they need help to work in the gaming industry.

Also, because you go, at least in my time, if you went to university with the hope of getting a job in the industry or for anything that was like computer science, you would be the only girl in the course. And so then it’s something only some survive, right?

[00:06:52] Jon: Yeah.

[00:06:52] Paula: Then, you know, I’m going to give a long answer here, but the final thing I wanted to say is that there was this study created that showed that before the ’80s, a lot of women went into, like computer science roles. We have so many good examples of women programmers way back. Even Ada Lovelace, the first programmer ever, was a woman. And also Carol Shaw, you know, there are so many examples.

But then, things changed. In the ’80s, the personal computer started being a thing. It started being marketed as something for men, and following that, you just see the curve going down for women making it onto the type of courses and then even fewer women going to uni for these subjects. Then even fewer make it out of the class because it’s so tough on them. Especially when you’re the only girl in the class, so I’d say the funnel (of getting women into the video games industry) starts really early. That’s what I wanted to say, but in terms of companies putting in an effort, it’s getting better- it’s getting much better.

Diversity in roles and leadership

[00:07:55] Jon: I don’t want to be seen as sort of provocative, but I mean, do you think it that there are more women programmers specifically? I mean, do you think there are, you know, sort of specific roles that women should be in? Or is there a general rule? Let’s say we got to a scenario where it was 50% women and 50% men. You know, would it matter where they were working or the roles they were in?

Or do you think they should push women into different jobs, let’s say programmers specifically, do you think that would change the way that the sort of companies worked? Would it change the way games were made? What do you think?

[00:08:33] Paula: Yeah, I think we need representation across the board in every single position. Because if you look, it’s very skewed, right? You have a lot of women artists, and you have a lot of women in marketing but not in game development, right? And it’s important because I’ve been in discussions with developers where they were coding a character, and they were talking about stance and things like that. And, like, they weren’t sure. So, it’s always good to have representation. I don’t just mean only gender but diversity in general for a wide variety of people across all different types of roles, for sure.

[00:09:06] Jon: Great. So Karen, how do you see that? I mean, I guess, Liftoff is probably different because you’re an ad company, so you still have coders in there, I suppose, don’t you? So how do you find the sort of gender split between roles in the company?

[00:09:25] Karen: Yeah, I was just about to comment on the point that you were talking about, Paula. I think it’s important to have a more equitable gender across all different roles. Not just in the marketing and creative space, which I feel generally we will and are seeing more female positions in those roles, right? Personally, when I’m working with other UA managers across the board, I would say the split is pretty even. I’m seeing many women and males, like counterparts in that area. But, to the point of like game design.

From the conception of the game all the way to the characters, it’s important for us to have diversity and inclusion to ensure that we’re capturing a greater scope. When I think about myself playing certain games, some are more enticing than others, potentially, for these instances, right? These games could potentially appeal to someone not like me, and it would be nice to see us moving into that more inclusive culture.

[00:10:45] Paula: Yeah. Sorry, I just wanted to just interject because we didn’t touch on pay equity. I also think that that is improving, especially in the gaming and tech industries, you know, but like other industries, there’s still so much room for it to be more equal. Let’s say the Women’s World Cup is happening, right? And I love football. Side note, I’m trying to watch it, but because it’s in Australia (time zone), it’s tough. But anyway, there’s this football player, Abby Wambach, who was one of the biggest icons of the US team in the 2000s. And she won an award when she was retiring. That was huge, right? And on the same day, on the same stage were Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning. They all got the same award, right?

And while those two guys were thinking about their retirements and what they would do with the millions and millions to invest, Abby was thinking about how she would pay the mortgage that month, right? And that’s a story that I’ve heard from an interview that she conducted, right? So it’s still just bizarre. She’s as big as they are, she got the same award, but that’s the difference, you know? But yeah, I mean, sorry for that interruption.

[00:12:03] Jon: No, it’s interesting because it pulls apart two areas. There’s the pay side of it, as you point out, which is, again, not a sole problem, but a well-understood problem. And there are, well, very few companies in general, but even in the games industry that would have pay disparity, you know, for the same role.

I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but that would be sort of baked in now those game companies wouldn’t be doing that. Whereas I guess the other problem you’re pointing out, the more sort of pernicious thing, there are more people, in the case of the sports players, who have had 20/30 years at the height of their career, and that’s where the amounts of money been.

Whereas other people have had 20, 30 years as high of that career. But obviously, there needs to be pay equality across that period of time. So you sort of have this lagging indicator, I suppose, in terms of that particular sort of example, which is quite hard to deal with because it’s not a company saying, “We’ve want this producer and this producer, one’s a man, one’s a woman, and we’re gonna pay them the same.” But, I think those sorts of things are much harder to identify and deal with. because I guess they’re, what I’m trying to say is, they’re more cultural rather as a society than just individual company culture, and that, obviously, culture as a whole is a complicated thing.

[00:13:23] Paula: Yeah. Correct.

[00:13:24] Jon: So, I was going to talk a little about, more specifically, mobile games. So I think, generally in the video game industry, there are some games that have a skew of very male, and some games, they skew female, but mobile is sort of interesting as  I think, it is a sector that generally is, probably, more female-skewed, if anything. And I guess that would be one area where, I mean Karen is, you’re just sort of more in that space, that you could comment on. So, do you think that given the number of women playing and spending money on games, has it been surprising that there aren’t more women on the mobile game design side, in particular, that haven’t come through more?

Obviously, there are companies that do focus on female gaming and do have female designers. Still, it’s a bit surprising that it hasn’t over-indexed the other way, given how women are such an important audience for mobile games, in particular.

Gender in game design

[00:14:29] Karen: Yeah, I definitely think so given a lot of like the statistics that I was looking into about, you know, almost half, if not half of the women are on these mobile games, I do still feel like there’s a bit of a genre that skews more female. You know, or as I think about it, a Match 3 or some type of like simulation type game is skewed towards women. Or a game that appeals to adventure seems to be more female-driven, and yeah, I do think it is a bit surprising that the industry, as a whole, from the game developers, all the way trickling down, hasn’t been more skewed towards them.

[00:15:19] Jon: They say there have been studios that have tried to focus on women’s games, but actually, it seems to be something that’s quite difficult to make a specifically genre-specific game. I’ve just noticed sometimes that people will often sort of rate. Or not often, but some companies raise money, say we’re going to make games to focus on the female audience particularly, and that seems to be quite a difficult thing to do.

Is that because focusing on gender is actually not a great way to make a good game? Paula, have you got any thoughts on that? I mean, are good games, just good games, and as a result, we shouldn’t maybe worry too much about who we’re targeting in terms of gender or demographics.

Inclusive game development

[00:16:01] Paula: And yeah, I mean, of course, when it comes to UA, you have to know who your audience is and when you’re making games as well, you have to see if the product you’re building has product-market fit, so those things are still important. They can’t be ignored. But I hate, personally, the whole concept of games for women and games for men and for women I just hate that. Like, I’ve played shooters my whole life and all of these things. I go back to the football example, and you said it’s cultural. You’re right, it’s cultural. The problem lies therein, where people perceive that certain things are for boys, and certain things are for girls, when they’re not, right? And you know, that’s where the problem lies, really. And it’s really tough to change. But I grew up hearing all the time, especially growing up in Brazil and where it’s pretty chauvinistic and growing up I’d just hear all the time that the stuff I liked, I wasn’t supposed to like.

And when I was thinking of having a family, I was terrified of having a girl in Brazil. I was terrified. I didn’t want it to be a girl. I wanted it to be a boy. And then I moved to Canada because I didn’t want a girl to go through the stuff I went through it, and now that I’m in Canada, I got pregnant. I had my kid, she’s two and a half years old. It’s a girl, and it’s the best thing you know that it’s a girl, and she’s in Canada, and she gets to get representation all the time, you know? A little example of that cultural thing is when I was taking her to daycare, and she was on the carrier, and there was a renovation going on in the house, like outside. It was five women with hard hats, boots, everything, just women doing the renovation. And when we passed by, she was super smiley. She smiled and waved, and they all smiled and waved. So just right there, of course, she’s two and a half, but she saw a bunch of women doing construction work, you know, and that makes a difference. Construction work is supposed to be for men. So I think I still need to answer your question, but I hope that questions like that aren’t asked for women in the future. And it’s not against you, of course, but I hope that we-we live in a world one day that is not a, you know, a thing, you know what I mean?

[00:18:29] Jon: Again, it goes back to the sort of cultural thing, isn’t it? It’s not these types of things where you need laws for certain things, but there are the harder things to change, which are cultural and just general assumptions, I guess.

[00:18:43] Paula: Yeah, it can be ingrained, you know, like prejudices and so on.

[00:18:46] Jon: I mean, do you think one of your earlier questions, you were talking about sort of leadership, roles, which, you know again, that’s probably sort of a cultural thing to a degree, but it’s harder to do. You know, getting into leadership roles is partly due to the individual.

There may be ways in which you can make it easier for certain types of people. I mean, do you think that’s the main area we need to consider going, in terms of the games companies, you know, as a whole? Is that a key thing, given that there are many people, women joining the industry in various roles? You know, is it more about that, getting women into those sorts of leadership things now?

[00:19:31] Paula: We’ve seen great improvement in the leadership type of things. Looking at it from a general perspective. Of course, we need to continue improving, but it would be interesting if, yes, companies started focusing more on the leadership aspect. I’ve seen that some are much better than others. It makes a lot of difference. In a big company, like Zynga, for instance, in our game, the VP of product is a woman. And it makes a difference because women have a voice in leadership decisions. So it’s important to have people with voices that are mostly overlooked.

So, for me, It would be a big deal if we got to a point where it was almost half-half in terms of leadership. But women tend to think about the whole and not want to hurt people. So they tend not to step on-on other people, so they don’t get promotions as much. They don’t negotiate because sometimes they think it’s not fair. so it’s a cultural thing again, in a way, but companies can and should encourage women to come out more.

[00:20:49] Karen: I was going to say, I think it’s, it’s also important to show those who are younger, and just starting out, that there are people who look like me, are like me, and act like me, in roles of senior leadership. And that’s very important to mould the next generation, so to speak, to ensure that, you know, us women do have a voice and we can be influential in the decision-making process of the industry.

[00:21:16] Jon: It is not necessilary to dip down always to having rules around these things, but sometimes it’s about more subtle changes. If you think about it, crunch in the games industry.  Crunch is going to be bad for anyone who’s a carer or has sort of family commitments, which, in our society, tends to be more focused on women.

So it’s not necessarily that women are directly targeted. They’re indirectly targeted. And they find it harder to do management roles because they just can’t throw 80 hours a week at games in a way that men, who have less responsibility, maybe can because their partner or their wife is sorting childcare. Is that something that’s just going to change slowly, obviously, you know, crunch is something that the industry is dealing with on a more structural basis, so that’s a hopeful sign, I suppose.

[00:22:12] Paula: The problem lies in the women sorting out the kids, right? it has to be both, but again, it goes back to the cultural thing. I think that particular part is changing, at least in my generation, in my small circle of friends, at least.

[00:22:32] Jon: Yeah.

[00:22:32] Paula: Like the guys are dividing the work. With me and my partner, that’s exactly how it happens. And nobody says anything. For example, I don’t say, “Oh, he’s helping me.” No, we’re a partnership. He’s not helping; well, I don’t even use the verb because it’s not about help; it’s about dividing. So if he and I were working in a gaming company at the same point and if he was crunching too, that would have been insane for him to manage our daughter. So yeah, as a whole, crunch is bad, and it can’t be there.

[00:23:08] Jon: Yes, yes, yes.

Addressing toxicity and culture

[00:23:08] Paula: But, you know, the problem is it does affect more the women because not all families are like mine, and my friends and more of them should be equal, right?

[00:23:20] Jon: Yeah. Absolutely. So, you may be in the early stages, Karen, but in terms of your career, how do you see the games industry as a place that is now an industry where a woman can have a career for, you know, 30, 40 years? And is it just like any other industry, it doesn’t matter that it’s tech which, you know, it still probably needs to have a great reputation may be outside the industry.

[00:23:48] Karen: Yeah, I definitely think so, but I will say this is not an industry where you’re exposed to early on, especially when you’re growing up. Well, at least for me, it was not something that seemed like a possibility. Paula, you and I were very different in that sense, as I almost went through the normal gender norms way, where my family would take us to get-togethers, and it was just the boys playing Smash Bros in the game room. And it’s like if I play. The first few times I play this game, I won’t be good. I need to learn the controls. Otherwise will only win against you sometimes. And having those experiences affects how I think about gaming growing up in general.

So, there are certain games that I can play, right? I love Candy Crush. Everyone in my life knows that I love Candy Crush. I’m on level 6,000.

[00:24:49] Paula: Oh, wow.

[00:24:50] Karen: That’s how much I love it. But I think if I had kind of gone beyond those gender norms when I was growing up, things might be different in the interest I have for games in general. I might be interested in all the other types of games that are out there. Gaming seemed less accessible for me or, you know, the group of people I spent my time with. As they would say, “I don’t wanna play with you; you’re not gonna win.” and then say “So I’m just going to play with someone who’s-who’s good at it.”

[00:25:21] Paula: Yeah. The social aspect of it is really complicated. Right? I think maybe for me, it was different. I didn’t have a lot of friends so I would play by myself and I got good at playing them. So when I would play at a LAN house or something, I was already good at it because I was playing most of the time by myself playing the game. But there is definitely a divide. For example, I’ve played games for almost 40 years now. And I still haven’t played one single MMO because when I tried playing MMOs back, way back when it was just horrible when they found out you were a girl online, and it was just a horrible experience.

Although the industry is going in a very good way, the gaming industry that is, I feel that the gaming public is going the opposite way. Every time I play, it’s more toxic, and it’s only getting worse and worse from that perspective.

[00:26:20] Karen: Yeah, I’ve recently been on YouTube Shorts and TikTok, and it’s incredible the amount you hear about some of the horror stories of female streamers out there. And so I completely agree with that sentiment, Paula.

Changing perceptions and empowerment

[00:26:36] Jon: I guess the cultural toxicity is something that is spread across the industry and is not a male vs female thing. I think it’s a wider cultural standard we have accepted in gaming, where there’s an inability to be nice to people online. But let’s move on from that one.

So I want to talk about something when you were talking there, Karen, it was something I thought was very interesting. You were talking about, and I hesitate to broach the question, but as we, particularly with mobile games, and Paula, correct me if you need to. Although I know some very competitive women, women generally do not like, or at least most women don’t like competitive games. And I think having the more cooperative type of games, and more community-driven games like Candy Crush games, which do have strong social aspects in them but are not sort of not  “I’ve just shot you, and I’m gonna like trash talk you” as you do have on consoles-type games.

It’s quite encouraging, generally, to see how games are viewed in culture and probably within the industry. You were sort of joking there about how you’re such a hardcore Candy Crush fan that you have an insane amount of levels. So it’s never been the case that people who play casual games can’t be super hardcore about playing casual games, I think that has allowed a new community of hardcore gamers, who don’t see themselves as hardcore gamers, but they are in that specific genre. And I think that’s been welcomed in some way by women who don’t actually want to play Call of Duty online, for example.

[00:28:21] Karen: Yeah. That’s a very interesting point. So, on the hardcore casual gamer, if you will. I’m not a big user, and I have not spent much money, but anytime I get a little promotion of 99 cents for an hour of unlimited life, I will sit on the couch and play for an hour. And my partner jokes around sometimes because he plays games, mostly on his PC, but he’s like, “You know, you’re a gamer too, right?” and then says, “You like to sit down for an hour, and you play Candy Crush, and you’re just there.” He’s like, “That’s what I do on my computer, just with my friends,” or whatever it is that he’s doing. So I think that’s a really interesting point.

[00:29:05] Jon: In fact, there was a wider point around that where people– I can’t remember which game it was, or just a few years ago. They were doing surveys with people who were playing games, and there was this sort of state where they said to people, “Are you a gamer?” and lots of women would go, “No, of course, I’m not a gamer, I have no console.”

And then they go, “How many hours do-do you play on your phone?” And they’d reply with something like, “Oh, that’s three hours a day or something.” And the research would be like, “What? You do know that’s the definition of a serious gamer”

[00:29:29] Karen: Yeah, that’s pretty hardcore.

[00:29:30] Jon: If they were playing World of Warcraft, then we’d consider it hardcore gaming, you know, so those, I think, hopefully, over time that that’s changing, and I think the fact people don’t call themselves gamers, I think is probably a good thing because now we know, that three billion of eight billion people in the world are gamers, and if the other five billion people had mobile phones, they’d all be gamers too.

We’re all gamers, well, almost. So, that’s maybe a bit more of a positive view towards the future for women in games. As we’re finishing up now, are there any closing remarks you have or anything you think should be important for the industry to be thinking about to accelerate the sort of changes we’re seeing, hopefully?

[00:30:13] Paula: I think that, as Karen said in one of her answers, representation is really important. More women need to see women there to be able to think, “Okay, I can do that too.” So, if, as a company, you have speaking opportunities, and you can send women, send them. Again, as a company, if you have a few women in leadership roles, try to put them there and then try to understand women from that perspective. From the perspective of how women grew up in culture and society, they want to tend to everyone and take care of everyone.

They won’t push hard for it (promotions), but as a leadership team, you have to go and do more of the pushing yourself to see if she’s interested. So, that’s why we don’t see that much out there. It needs an extra, and it needs a female eye to begin with, right? To be able to get those promotions and to get those things right.

You need those strong leaders to say, I’ve been in their position, and I needed encouragement. For example, I’ve been in interviews for companies and was in a position to say something. I wasn’t the person that was hiring like I didn’t have the veto power or anything. Still, I was talking to the person who said, “Listen, we’re interviewing a girl; you need to go this way with your questions. Because if you do, she will give you more information, and she will start self-affirming more and start giving you the answers you want to hear” You know? So yeah, you need a female eye, and companies should be doing that and trying to figure out, “Okay, if she’s the best candidate for the promotion, she’s not pushing for it. Let me push for it on her behalf.”. Representation over and over and over again.

[00:32:11] Karen: Plus one to everything you just said, Paula. I think taking things may be more specific to the gaming community in general. It would be great to foster an open community for kids and girls in general. To show them that you can grow up and understand that there is a community for everyone in this world. It’s sometimes tough to understand, again, from my perspective, that gaming is not male-focused; it’s for everyone.

So how can we combat some of these more innate,  what you’d call, gender norms? How do we break across that so there are opportunities for all of us? I’m hopeful we’re able to see that through the years ahead.

[00:33:08] Jon: Well, thank you very much, Karen and Paula. Thank you for your expertise and for discussing the subject. I hope you found that useful, and thanks to you for watching, listening, or however you are consuming the podcast.

In every episode, we are talking to people in the mobile games sector, so there are different aspects I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, which is slightly different to some of our other ones, but please, come back next time to see what’s going on, in the world of mobile games. See you then, goodbye.

[00:33:13] Karen: Thank you.

[00:33:13] Paula: Thank you.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This podcast is the podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host Jon Jordan and joining me today, we have two familiar faces. We have Erno Kiiski, Chief Game Analyst at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Erno?

[00:00:24] Erno Kiiski: Going great. How are you, Jon?

[00:00:26] Jon: Also, Wilhelm Voutilainen, Chief Game Analyst at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Wilhelm?

[00:00:33] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Very well, thanks for asking.

[00:00:34] Jon: In today’s episode, we are talking about live events, which is something we have spoken about many times before, but we have a particular angle that we are talking about and going to have a bit of a setup in terms of the impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework and how that impacted live events. The particular context for that is GameRefinery’s Live Events Tracker, which now allows developers to get an idea about what’s going on and the big trends and hopefully get some ideas about their strategies for their live events.

That’s the setup for what we’re talking about today. Let’s start off with an overview. App Tracking Transparency framework, what’s that? More importantly, how’s that impacting live events?

Understanding the App Tracking Transparency framework

[00:01:21] Erno: It’s been a topic that’s been talked to death pretty much because, for the past few years– that’s one of the key igniters of the increased talk on live events and engaging users and monetising your existing users. Naturally, the changes in the UA landscape and acquiring of new users and scaling new games are more challenging than ever. For example, if we look at the top charts now, there are fewer new games. The past few weeks have been very interesting because we have seen big launches, like MONOPOLY GO, which has an IP.

Then last week also, the new game from miHoYo, the company behind Genshin Impact game with the new match Honkai: Star Rail scaled– both games have scaled right away to the very top of the chart. It’s super rare to see those nowadays. It’s tougher than ever to scale new games. Naturally, if we think about that, if it’s tougher, then we have to question what we want to do. If you have your users in your game, you want to keep them in your game. You want to keep them engaged, keep them monetised. The honest answer and way to go is to adopt live events and operate the game even better, bringing more stuff and being better at that.

If we think about live operating, first of all, it’s a big concept, and there are so many areas that it entails. From the charts, we are talking about service-based games. Everything, like the content, updates to mastery; you need to bring levels. That’s part of the live ops. You need to bring new features, you need to bring your playing an RPG, you need to bring new characters, or you name it. That’s a massive part of the live ops. This is for today’s discussion. Our focus is going to be mostly on live events and how different companies look at live events and how they utilize them in different ways.

Categorizing Live Events

[00:03:42] Jon: Good overview. How many types of live events do we have? Do you have a list of how many different types?

[00:03:57] Erno: Yes, it also depends on how you look at it. Based on what you mentioned, our new live event tracker tool is in the GameRefinery service. Then, when we were building that, we had to brainstorm quite a lot on how to divide, how to categorize, how to build a taxonomy for different events that also work, like from genre to genre and so on, because genres differ so much based on what events they are running and so on.

Not an easy task for sure. If we start to think about it on a higher level and how I think about live events, I would first put them in three layers. The first layer is all those events that support your core gameplay loop. You need to have a great core gameplay loop already engaging, but then, you can build some events that support that. We’re going to go to various ways that you can do that, but something that incentivises you to engage more with just the core gameplay loop that is the main core of the game. Play more of the actual game by giving this a shorter period of limited time incentives to play the actual core gameplay of the games.

Then I think about it; the second layer is these events that do not directly support the core gameplay but offer something unique and something new. Usually, they’re indirectly then connected to the rewards. Still, match three gets an event with different event levels, so you’re not playing the main core gameplay, more like progression levels that you usually play. Still, they are different levels that you’re playing.

Let’s say it’s a shooter game, then there’s a separate playing mode that you’re playing, so you’re not playing the usual playing mode, but it gives you something separate. Then that is interconnected, usually through the rewards, but a little bigger. Some game-playing modes, mini-games, and stuff like that. It’s not just an extra incentive to participate and engage in the core gameplay loop, but it gives something extra outside of the core gameplay loop. Then, the third layer is the engaging factors and then comes the third layer, which is naturally the monetisation part.

You need to have these two key engaging factors and key things you participate in as a player. Then naturally, on top of that, you can use different types of monetisation factors and monetisation layers. That can also be thought about in different ways. You can think of direct monetisation, which naturally bundles monetising. Whether it’s the event connected somehow to events or otherwise, it’s your economy. You’re offering something for a limited time, and so on, or then you can think about it as indirect monetisation.

Like I told you about the events that support the core gameplay loop. Let’s say match three that you have a task mission or, say, win streak event, then that’s not directly monetised, but it’s indirectly monetising as it gives this indirect connection to your monetisation features and so on. That’s how I think about it on a high level. Three layers support the core gameplay loop, these side activities, and then on top of those comes the monetisation.

[00:08:17] Wilhelm: Yes. Next, we should go a bit deeper into looking at these three high-level categories. Well, let’s start with the core loop supporting categories. The first one that Erno mentioned. Let’s start with the most common actually that we have seen and that we have been tracking. Tracking almost 80 top-grossing games, so the most coming trend is these task events, there are lots of different versions and implementations of how you can implement those task elements, but they range from these really simple solo missions also cold missions with guilds and random players are pretty common as well, but the idea is always the same.

You either do some solo or some of those cold missions, which are almost always related to playing the game’s core loop. In match three, they can have you playing the levels the match three-levels of the game. In Mid-Core RPG, they can have you, for example, participate in this new mode or collect material. Simple tasks like that incentivise you to do, play the core gameplay, whatever it is in that specific game. As I mentioned, they’re really common. The majority of the games, of the almost 80 games that we are currently tracking, use these task elements. For some examples, one goes super deep into these specific implementation examples. Lily’s Garden is, for example, if we look at match three’s Lily’s Garden is a great example of a game that utilizes a lot of tasks. They have on a day-to-day basis some events going through the weekdays. Almost every week, there’s this one-day to two-day lasting sprint event from Monday to Friday. It’s either always Sunflower Sprint or this Zia Sprint. The idea is to have you play these normal match three levels of the game to grow this flower then, and then when the event ends, you get the rewards based on the number of levels you completed during the event.

Then at the weekends, there are usually these beginner luck tasks. Almost the same idea, but there’s a small initiative or actually, you’re getting more points if you complete the level on your first try. Otherwise, the idea is the same. Every day, there is this simple task event that incentivises you to play the normal levels and progress in the game. Then if you look at a completely different genre, for example, if you go to the RPG genre, Diablo Immortal, they have a bit different implementation. Every day, there’s almost some kind of task event going on, but this is a longer length.

From three days to even two weeks in these non-recurring task events, they don’t record daily as they do in Lily’s Garden. Usually, the idea is really simple again, have you complete tasks, do something in the game, kill several monsters in the game or for example, pretty much always nowadays when they introduce a new mode or new feature to the game, they have a task event linked to that which have you participate in that mode. And there’s almost one of these kinds of elements almost active each day simultaneously.

[00:12:29] Erno: Alright. Some more.

[00:12:34] Jon: Yes, there are lots of categories.

Core Loop Supporting Events

[00:12:35] Erno: Yes, we don’t need to go in-depth on the individual ones, but a given idea on different ways to implement, naturally, like an evolution from the simple task ones. You can do it in any way, but the battle pass is the classic one, acting as a progression vector and retention feature but also for monetization. Naturally, it is also built inside in a way that supports the core gameplay, either by the task systems or the direct exp through the levels and so on. About 70% of the top games nowadays use it across genres.

Interestingly, there’s a lot of variation in the cadence that you can use to battle pass with. There are about 15% of the battle passes that we’ve been seeing or on a weekly basis, then from like 18 to 21 days, about 27% easily. The most common ones are the 22 to 31 days. About the monthly cadence, that’s the common battle pass length. Almost half of them are on that length, but there are also longer battle passes, over a month, once, 12% of the game. There is definitely also one very common way to build this core loop supporting event type.

Leaderboard Competitions and Boost Events

[00:14:09] Wilhelm: Yes. And then, those two battle pass and task events are the two of the most common core loop supporting ones, but rare ones, to be more specific. For example, solo leaderboard competitions are a great example of some games utilizing these to differ from the competition. The idea is simple to test missions I mentioned earlier, but then it brings the competition element to it. You’re competing in a leaderboard against other players or together with other players against other players.

For example, guilds for the rewards. The idea is almost the same as in task missions, but there’s the complete leaderboard added to it. There can be different ways similar to task events. There are different ways to implement this, all the leaderboard competitions. For example, in some match threes, there’s this race event. While in a normal leaderboard event, the rewards are the players who have collected the most points at the end of the event. In race events, the player who reaches a certain point milestone wins the event instantly. There’s a different idea there.

About 50% of the market is utilizing this. It’s common as well. Then some examples, King’s and Candy Crush Games, utilize these a lot and Royal Match. Compared to other match threes, King’s, Candy Crush Games, and Royal Match, they differ from the competition with these leaderboard competition events.

Also, if you look at the mid-core, the most commonly used game that uses these easily the most is Raid Shadow Legends.

On average, the game has three different tournament events active simultaneously, basically, which are solo leaderboard competitions. It’s actually an interesting way of bringing this non-direct PvP in a more casual format. Interestingly, Raid is also utilizing this while it also has this PvP. Then there’s one more. This is a bit more niche but a huge part of some games’ live ops. These boost events. These are super simple events.

The idea is that they boost something in the game, some aspect of the game for a certain period, such as cold generation in, for example, Forge Games or Battle Pass Procrastion in some games, or Building Generation and Supercell. They use this a lot across their whole portfolio. From Hay Day to these glass games. Also, most Pokémon Go, the most common event type, are these boost events. Almost the whole live stream is based around these boost events.

They run these three-month-long seasons that boost the possibilities of getting these certain Pokémon types. This is used to keep the gameplay fresh and keep the collection aspect fresh. There’s always each month, each season, and these new Pokémons are boosted. Then you have better chances of getting them, or you can get those during that season.

[00:17:56] Jon: Good stuff. Generally, you said you’re tracking these 80 games at the moment. How many of these events are most games doing? Are there any patterns around that?

[00:18:09] Erno: Yes. It depends on the genre to the genre, type to type. I will have mentioned, especially these, the most common ones, like task events. It’s pretty much like 70% to 80% of all the games have at least some utilization of that. Battle Pass, as I mentioned, is about 70% already in. So many big parts of them, like the competitive leaderboard stuff. About 50% of them are using it. These are especially the most common ones.

As I mentioned, if I think about the two categories of events, like the core loop supporting events, they are; usually in terms of resources as well. If you think about the boost event as well as an example, it’s a lower resource type of an event to do than a new mini-game or new gameplay mode with an event loop or new limit time mode and so on. Easily the more common one.

Managing Live Events for Optimal Results

[00:19:25] Jon: Do you think the one thing that always strikes me with these things is it ends up being a temptation as you have more of these events in different games, and then some developers will just have a little bit of an approach, “Let’s try everything.” Then I wonder at what point you get diminishing returns. It won’t be as obvious as if you had ten events; that would be overwhelming in terms of the user experience. I’m curious because no matter how you’re doing these events, the result is retention and engagement of players and, at some level, monetisation. Those things are fixed aspects. People might be playing multiple games, but there’s a certain level at which you can’t, people can’t spend any more or engage anymore, or you start to become much harder after a certain level to get them to play much more if they’re playing like two hours a day. The stage could be quite a lot to get them to play for two and a half hours. Did you get any thoughts on some of that?

[00:20:24] Erno: Yes. It’s actually interesting. I was talking with one developer last week, and we talked about this discussion because it’s a topic that comes up. That was interesting. The day said that very much you cannot because you always have those hardcore players, and you think, “Oh, this is going to be too much.” Then, after all, they’re still chewing out or chewing through the content and so on. To be honest, it’s so important to think about how you implement them.

You don’t just slap things on top of each other, but if we think about the best operators, let’s say, play risks, for example, how they do stuff. One example comes to my mind; I’ve been using it multiple times; I like Township, and how they operate, and they have a lot of different mini-games and other types of events. They have a Battle pass and skilled wars, all that stuff. Everything is very cleverly interconnected.

It’s not just a feature or event on top of each other that are their entities. They are a little bit interconnected, which gives more reason to participate, for example, in their mini-games as it’s connected to their battle pass system. It’s bound to their guild, and guild force system, and the ecosystem works more holistically than just slapping everything, every possible imaginable event, on top of each other.

[00:22:09] Wilhelm: Yes, I think that connecting events and having these overarching things in the game, especially if the live Ops is, and let’s say you have a more complex game, you have added lots of features, and there’s lots of events going on and lots of stuff. Having these interconnections and stuff like that can make it way less overwhelming. Some games utilize this, what we like to call these overarching events. That’s a great way. We think about, for example, top shooters and free fire; they have massive events going on simultaneously.

Lots of content and everything, but there’s always basically all the events connected with the same team. Let’s say there’s this Christmas event that consists of multiple, let’s say there’s task events, there is the side game blame mode, which has limited time PvP modes, but they’re all interconnected. They’re all also for the player, and it’s much simpler because there’s this cool event calendar that shows everything, and everything is easy to find. That’s for more casual players, that’s manageable, but there’s lots of content for the more hardcore players.

[00:23:24] Erno: Yes. Especially also on the casual side, more and more common, well, in slots, it’s been a very commonly used feature for now, for a long time, already became popular like two years ago. Still, these seasonal collectable albums in some form mean that you are collecting some items; usually, the event lasts for two to three months. As an example, June’s Journey, a Hidden Objectives game, has many of these core loop-supporting events and this site gameplay mode, all that stuff.

Then they introduced this new event type called Memoirs, a three-month-long collectable album. How you collect these memoirs into the collectable album is actually playing all the other events. The whole system is like a glue between the events and gives this connection from event to event, rather than just having this Gazillion individual small events.

[00:24:27] Jon: No, exactly. It has to be; you can’t just have events for their own sake. It has to be, and you must create some framework or scaffolding around why people are playing these events. Which is it, I guess that again, that goes back to these games becoming much more complex in terms of all the resources you can collect, and then the live events have to have meaning around, which means the things you’re collecting have to have meaning either in the call game or something around that.Collecting stuff in a game like June’s Journey makes sense because it’s a hidden object game. You’re looking at objects all the time. Collecting things like that makes sense, which maybe wouldn’t in other games. In terms of the live event tracker, what are your hopes around how that will help developers get a feel for what’s going on and help them think about their strategies?

How can game developers benefit from Live Events Tracker?

[00:25:22] Erno: Yes. The idea is because, as game finders, we’ve been tracking games for a long time, but our focus has been mainly on features and feature design. We have always had this kind of event data as well, we have different implementations and so on, but cadence has been more not on a daily basis. If we think about these events nowadays, how many there are, how many things are happening daily, and how long the different events are, and what are the cadences?

Do they have frameworks? Are there patterns in how they’re running specific recurring events, for example, and so on? It’s basically this research tool that gives you a fast pass to try to understand your competitors, understand and get ideas on what kind of events they are running, and then, even more importantly, when they start to run a new thing. They added a new event type. Okay, how do they run it? Is it active all the time?

Is it a daily event, is it a two to three-day event, and then it comes from every Wednesday to Thursday, for example, and so on? Then naturally, you can benchmark that against the performance estimate and then analyze the competition. That is the key value proposition of the tool. Going even deeper, going on a day-to-day basis, going on an event level when you’re analyzing your competition, that okay, what are they doing, what kind of things they are doing? Are there any interesting implementations on our different categories and so on?

[00:27:21] Wilhelm: What I personally really like about the tool is that it helps you to understand the reasons behind this, let’s say, for example, daily revenue spikes in these super complex games with lots of going on, and then there’s massive revenue by. Easy; for example, Star Wars Galaxy Of Heroes is a great example. If you look at the lineup striker, you can see that every time there’s a massive revenue spike, okay, this event, they’ve offered this panel with it, worked really well. There was a huge revenue spike compared to this other event, and you can see these things. That’s a massive value in that.

[00:28:03] Jon: Sounds good. Let’s take away from the episode, then go and check out the live event tracker and make sense of what’s going on with all these big spikes. Thank you.

Thanks, Erno, and gratitude, Wilhelm, for your expertise today. Thanks to you for listening or watching the podcast, whoever you are consuming. In every episode, we look at the mobile game sector and all the dynamic stuff going on there. I hope you’re finding this useful, and I hope you will come back next time. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends. I’m your host Jon Jordan and joining me today, we have Yahsir Qureshi, who is the VP Head of Studios at Sandsoft Games. How’s it going, Yahsir?

[00:00:26] Yahsir Qureshi: Hello. Hello. Very good to be here.

[00:00:28] Jon: Good to have you on the podcast. We also have Teemu Palomäki, Chief Game Analyst at GameRefinery. How’s it going, Teemu?

[00:00:35] Teemu Palomäki: Doing great. Great to be here.[00:00:36] Jon: Good, it’s good to have you back. In today’s episode, we are going to talk, generally looking about bringing new talent into the industry and specifically about some of the stuff that Sandsoft Games is doing, but maybe Yahsir, to start us off, maybe if you give us a brief introduction about Sandsoft Games for people who haven’t heard of you yet, that might be a good starting point, and then we’ll kick into Press Start, your initiative.

Sandsoft Games

[00:00:59] Yahsir: Fantastic. Of course. As you introduced me, my name’s Yahsir. I’m the Head of the Studio here at Sandsoft Games. I’ve been in the industry for about 14, or 15 years now. [I’ve had] various roles at EA, on FIFA, at Zynga at CSR, and Dawn of Titans, and Need for Speed back in the days. I’ve had my fair share of experience across console and also mobile development. Sandsoft Games is a really interesting company. We started off probably about three or so years ago with different guys. We are owned by a Saudi Arabian-based company called Ajlan & Brothers, which is one of the most successful private-run family businesses in the Middle East. They essentially wanted to capitalize on the new vision of 2030, and that meant getting into gaming for them.

As you’ve seen, there’s been a massive investment in the region. Most recently, you’ve seen and heard of a lot of acquisitions happening as well. Beyond that, the government has really invested here quite heavily to the tune of about $38 billion that has been committed to gaming just over the next three or four years. Sandsoft strategy as a part of that is threefold. Firstly, it’s to develop studios. We have a studio that will be opening up in Europe, hopefully by around June time this year. We have a studio that we’ve just opened up here in Riyadh at the beginning of the year, and we are heavily recruiting for that.

Then we also publish games, and we’ve published several different games as well. We originally started off with a couple of licensed IP products with Rambo Strike Force and Pacific Rim, and now we’ve also moved on to publishing international games as well. We recently published Dodreams, Drive Ahead, as well for the Middle East Legion 2, that’s got about 200 million downloads so far, and we’re doing many other things as well that are going to be going up in the year.

Then the final pillar is that we also invest. We invest in game studios and also into games as well. Most recently we just invested in a game studio out in the south of France called Tiny Digital Factory, which focuses a little bit more on NFTs and is known for a couple of racing games, one being Duty Manager and then the other one being Infinite Drive, which is launched this year as well. We do a lot of things, but we’re really into gaming full stop.

The final distinction that I would make is that while we are headquartered in Saudi Arabia, we have international offices, and we’re a worldwide gaming company. We aren’t making games for the Middle East region necessarily, we’re focused on games for everyone.

[00:03:28] Jon: It’s interesting you mentioned that. I think that was something that a few years ago was the first stage of people in that region. It was to develop games for that audience, and I guess that got them to a certain level of development, but now that seems to be removed, and now all the companies in that region are now much more internationally focused And there’s much less focus on specific regional content because obviously, that’s a very small market. Anyway, so you guys are super busy, it sounds like you’re doing everything, really.

Let’s talk a little bit about Press Start. I guess this comes from, that there have been game developers in that region, but I guess up to this point, it’s been maybe slightly ad hoc, so entrepreneurs have started stuff up but didn’t seem like there’s necessarily been a strong focus on that. I guess when you’re trying to build big companies, and I guess you’re trying to build a big company there, you just don’t have senior people in the region because the industry hasn’t been around for that long in there, I suppose, to build up a big company. Is that where Press Start comes from, or is there something else going on there?

Press Start program

[00:04:35] Yahsir: Yes, so a lot of things to wrap there. Saudi Arabia, while it has the ambition and it has definitely the resources to build things at scale, as you alluded to it as well, it doesn’t quite have that established developed talent base because this hasn’t been an industry here at all, so it’s in its very infancy stages as well. Our strategy for that was to essentially try and understand how we can help develop the talent within the region, but at the same time also knowing that we’re a commercially minded company and we’re looking to make games for people all around the world, how do we best achieve that?

When we sat down, and we thought about this, one of the key insights that I really formed the program around when we were pitching it internally was that we didn’t want to just have an intern program. We didn’t want to have something where you could come and shadow somebody who would be brought in from another part of the world, who’s got 10, 15 years experience, and you can see what they do. For us, it was about making games developers, and there’s this adage that you learn from 20% of what you hear, 30% of what you see, but 80% of what you experience, and so what we wanted to do was to push people into the deep end.

We always assess people on passion and potential, and we went through a heavy recruitment process to figure out how many people out there we felt we could bring in for this first program. We recruited eight people into the program, a mix of designers, artists, and programmers, and we essentially said to them, “You have one mission, which is you have six months. You have all the resources that we can provide. You’ve got a lot of the experience from the team that already exists here at Sandsoft, but your mission is to create one game at the end of that six months.”

Learning by doing, learning by working within that small team environment, which is something that we pride ourselves on in terms of the culture of the studio that we have as well. That all was really important for us, for them to get to know how to make games in the style that we like, so working with small, nimble teams and scaling from there. Then also for them to learn about how to work in a professional games company, professional games environment, learn how to communicate, talk with each other, and share all these ideas as well. It’s really a baptism by fire, but it definitely feels like it’s the best way to learn as opposed to necessarily just sitting on short-training courses and so on as well.

The other thing I would add is that it was very important for us to assess people’s passion by what they’ve already been doing. It’s amazing because, as you said, most people in this region, certainly in this country, haven’t had the opportunity to work at a games company yet that hasn’t stopped them from working on games. Everybody that we have on the program currently has already shaped a game themselves, whether it be on Steam, whether it be on mobile.

These are people who are studying or maybe have a job, and a hobbyist or doing things with friends. When you have that appetite and that energy, where people are eliminating any chance of an excuse to say, “Hey, this is why we can’t do it,” instead they’re focusing on the reasons they can, it makes you want to work with them even more and understand what potential they could fulfil if they had the right resources around them.[00:07:50] Jon: Yes, I guess it’s also very important that it’s not just a program where people do some learning or something like that; they have to create something. There’s a focus on, “You’ve got this six-month period; at the end of it, everyone in the company’s going to sit down and play your game, and it’s going to be pretty embarrassing if that’s not quite what you want it to be.”

That’s quite a good incentive, isn’t it? Teemu, obviously, you’re not running a similar program like that, but you are involved in having involved as a game developer doing this, do you think the industry, more generally, is good at bringing people on?

Is the mobile game industry good at bringing new talent on?

[00:08:26] Teemu: It depends on location, of course. For me, my way of coming to the game industry was through studying it. I was studying in Kajaani in Finland, and the school there had basically a similar system that you are actually making games, you’re focusing on creating games, and learning by experience, where 80% of the learning comes, as Yahsir said. I’ve experienced this kind of system at a lower level. There wasn’t a business aspect related to it, but it really works, and creating this opportunity for people is really beneficial.The fact that they have the resources, they had the passion for creating something on their own time, but now having the resources to actually create something and get the help to things that they might have been lacking before, that’s definitely a boost, and it will most certainly help the game development in the region for sure. I wish these kinds of programs were more common.

I’ve seen in Finland, Supercell was making the Hive Programming School, that’s a school aspect, not a training for the company per se, but there is also peer-to-peer learning and industry experts giving resources and help, and many Finnish companies are then picking the best from there when they train to their specific needs. This is definitely something that is really good for the industry.

Importance of understanding the complexity of game design

[00:10:28] Jon: It’s something that we’ve really seen you over the years. It becomes easier for people to make games, certain things like Roblox and obviously mobile. It’s a very open thing. The interesting bit, and maybe we don’t use any more game developers per se, I don’t know. But the interesting bit is getting the professionalisation right. Anyone can put together something but learning the very difficult bit, I suppose is not necessarily the business side but learning exactly what level you have to operate at in order to have a product that can be seen as being a professional business product that can be taken seriously.

That’s particularly something that you guys are doing with Press Start because you’re embedded in that industry. That takes it to the next level.

[00:11:14] Yahsir: Yes. I think you pick up on some really, really good points there, which is the majority of the time, when people begin to make games themselves, they make games that they want to play. Usually, the problem is not many other people want to play them. You end up with a very indie outlook. Sometimes it can be very culturally relevant, sometimes, it can be just a purely personal project. Part of what we’re trying to do is inject more of that commercial lens. You can say, that’s a dirty word for a lot of purist game designers, but I mean it more in the sense that you want to make games that people will play. You want as many people to play your games as possible.

You have to almost disassociate it as away from just being your own project to now thinking about what’s relevant in the market and what type of audiences you want to attract. How do they play? How does that help inform your decisions? How do you remove as much of that individual subjectivity, which you do need at certain points, obviously, otherwise, there’d just be robots making these games. How do you manage that with all of the other considerations that you need to take into account?

It’s very clear that already on the program, we’ve had the people on it for about three months or so now that their mindsets have shifted very much from when they first came in wanting to develop their own game ideas to now realizing while it’s not just me working by myself, I’m working within a team, but also then I’ve got to find a right fit for this game that I’m making. I can’t just make it for my friends and me as well. They’re learning very quickly, and they’re learning by doing, which is ultimately one of our key aims with this program is to make sure that by the end of it, they can look back and say, I would’ve changed X, Y, and Z knowing what I know now as well. It’s a really important part of the learning process.[00:13:05] Jon: The moment you’ve done the first one halfway through and you say to six or seven people, I think that’s so obvious, that’s great for those people. Does this thing stay that small? Does it scale up? The overall broad plans for what there’s obvious of a wider vision. Is it 2030 vision for Saudi Arabia is over the entire country, but I guess big scale is something that they’re quite keen on. How quickly does this scale up? Can it be used by other companies? It’s quite difficult to say that, maybe because you’re in the very early stages of it.

The future of the Press Start program

[00:13:48] Yahsir: It’s something that we thought about absolutely. Our ambition for us Riyadh Studios is to grow to about a hundred or so people by the end of next year. We’re recruiting quite heavily, there are other studios that have been popping up in the region as well, certainly within Saudi Arabia. They’re employing their own methods of scaling up the population. It’s an interesting question because in the country at the minute, you have a lot of government agencies who are enabling a lot of courses.

You’ve got game founders, you’ve got the Ministry of Communication and IT, which is running lots of certification courses with Unity, with Unreal. A lot of this stuff is happening at that scale, but that’s mostly teaching people the basics, getting them up to speed. It’s the challenge they have is that you have these hundreds of thousands of people that have gone through these programs, where are they going to go and work? What we decided was that for us, it made the most sense to start off on this basis. Then our goal with this program is to have two or three of these running potentially by next year at the same time. There’s no reason for us to just have it restricted to one.

It’s also a really good way for people on the program to identify what type of role they would want to really be in because they might think that they want to be a designer when they’re coming in, but then realize actually they’re probably better suited towards art or also programming or something else. We are able to scale but only up to a certain extent. There’s enough initiative going on with the rest of the country that I feel a lot of the standards within gaming will increase quite a bit.

There are lots of internal targets as well for the government in terms of what they’ve set in terms of the number of native game companies that they want to start. I think it’s about 150 of those by the end of next year that they want to try and encourage. There are things that are going on at scale across the entire Saudi Arabian Peninsula. For us, it was about quality over quantity and giving people the experience that we knew they could learn from but at a scale that would make sense. We are just using a lot of our own game development philosophies to apply that to the team as well.

Building teams based on autonomy and freedom

[00:15:59] Jon: I think, as you say, it’s already reminded me then when you’re talking about it, I used to be involved with some student projects very similar to that. It is interesting because everyone plays games now, everyone will go and work in the games industry, that’ll be brilliant. Everyone wants to be a game designer now because, of course. That’s like being the centre forward in soccer, isn’t it? It’s the high profile role, but then you get into this section, and you realize actually what a game designer does and how it’s really hard and making a good game isn’t just like, well, let’s just add some more guns or a bigger boss or something.

There’s actually the subtlety of doing it.

I think that what you’re doing with Press Start is interesting because that’s the eye-opening bit where people will go from you, and you need them to have the enthusiasm. You need to have, like, a love for games. Wouldn’t it be great to be involved in making games but then also to understand, these could be games, some games involved hundreds of people working for five years. This is not a back-of-an-envelope type of stuff to make a really high-quality game now. That’s the interesting dynamic that’s going on.

[00:17:01] Yahsir: Maybe I’m going off on a bit of a tangent…

[00:17:06] Jon: We like tangents. That’s good.

[00:17:09] Yahsir: I think it all comes down to a couple of questions or a couple of insights that we looked at when we first decided to really build a studio. I’ve been around the block enough to see what works and what doesn’t. It really came down to me to like two things. The first one was that 95% of mobile games commercially fail. That was the first insight that was clear. Secondly, I don’t think there’s anybody in this industry that has more than a 10% success rate at best with the games they release. We looked at those two insights, and we said, experience helps, but it’s no guarantee of success. Far be it, so from us, it wouldn’t be right to employ some chief product officer or creative director and have that as a bottleneck.

Usually, in my experience in those types of roles, people have made their reputation in one or two genres or focus on one or two titles, and beyond that, there’s a limited value that they can really add. If you’ve been working on match three your whole life and now you’ve got an RPG game in your portfolio, it’s a little bit difficult. From our perspective, the way that we’ve organized a lot of our development teams is in that mode of what we call tribes, which is similar to what you were alluding to as some of the things that sort Supercell are doing. We felt like that was the right way to go. We give those teams complete freedom and autonomy so they can kill whatever idea they’re working on.

They can start up a new idea if they want. There is nobody in the company from a CEO level, from my level, who can come in and say, you’re not going to make that game. You’re going to make something else. As much as we might have had past success, there’s no guarantee of anything successful in the future. We applied that same mentality to this group, which was you get to choose what you want to make. You’ll have to do your research and do all the other things as well, but ultimately we want you to work in the same format as we would have anybody else work.

Now, one of the interesting things that we did was that we sat down with the team when they first joined, and we all watched the Golden Eye documentary that was released, and it was earlier this year. It was to really give them more confidence because when you think back to the team that created that game, none of them had any experience in gaming. They hadn’t shipped a game before. It was a game which they were just thrown to rather than a game that anybody really wanted to work on. You see what they’ve managed to accomplish with that as well.

It’s more about resetting their expectations of what to expect from themselves and not just thinking that they’re going to release a hyper casual game in six months but rather to say, “You can do what you want, and you’ve got no excuses as well because everything’s available online. You can find what you want, you can learn skills as well. It’s really down to you as individuals wanting to really push yourselves as well.” That’s also where you find really good. People who are willing to push the envelope and really try and maximize their own potential as well.

[00:20:09] Jon: Go on Teemu.

[00:20:12] Teemu: Yes. Just thinking, when people are given their freedom to try out things, do their research, try maybe something a little bit unconventional, that’s where lots of great ideas come in. That’s why some Indie games are really popular, and on mobile games, the recent trend we’ve had of the mini-games popping up it’s because they have been really popular, like small-scale projects and in the hyper-casual space where people have tried different things. That has also bled into advertising, mobile advertising, and fake ads.

Those have been coming to the bigger games than as well as site modes or events or these mini-game modes. Small teams can really bring new innovations to a bigger picture as well for bigger companies, even if they make it in their smaller team.

Embracing failure and the research and development nature of the industry

[00:21:21] Jon: In general, as we’ve seen with hyper-casual, these new subgenres, they’re always very exciting, to begin with. Then they become, everyone works at the equilibrium, so you just end up where everyone’s doing it, and then it saturates and then, but the engineering of it is quite interesting. It stands out. They don’t know how much you do this, but it is interesting to have people not be working on the same game at the same scale all the time because that’s what burns people out. When you move between smaller things and then bigger things, bigger projects, that allows people to learn different ways of doing things.

There have been people on the console side of things which basically work for 10 years for a game that gets cancelled before it comes out. Then there are only so many games you get to make in your life. The nice thing about mobile is there is that movement, and you can move in and out of different projects. As you say here, it’s not anyone’s fault that mobile games fail. It’s just that’s baked into the industry isn’t; some games fail for bad decision-making, but most of them just fail all because that’s the way we are.

[00:22:27] Yahsir: Ultimately, all we’re doing in the games industry is research and development. Until you find something that resonates on a scale that makes it worthwhile working on, all you’re doing is research and development, and it’s akin to the pharmaceutical industry. You may have all the intentions to create a drug that solves cancer, but the likelihood of that is very small. Along the way, you have progress. You might find different things that you didn’t expect. It’s getting the Press Start team, getting all of our developers engaged in that mindset, and also knowing that they have the psychological safety to be able to do that.

That we’re not sitting here expecting success from products one, two, or three at all. In fact, we expect 75% of what we are going to be working on for the next couple of years to not be commercially viable. The question is, are you making progress in getting to what it is that could possibly resonate during that time? We don’t want to be following trends. If you’re following trends by definition, you’re always behind. If you’ve got a six-month runway to get something out by that time, the market’s flooded with hybrid casual, whatever you want to call the latest trend as well titles.

It’s interesting because people work in different ways. Some people really like restraints, and other people like a lot of freedom. Once you have a good group of people together who can respect each other, who can trust each other’s capabilities, and buy on that thing that I mentioned at the beginning which is that nobody has the right answer. You can’t come in with this attitude that this worked for me in the past it will work in the future. No, you’ve got to be humble enough to know set your ego aside and know that this is a journey of discovery, and all you’re doing is research and development.

You will expect things to fail, that’s what you should be doing, but out of it, you should be getting learnings and working towards something as well. This is a great program we’ve found for really ingraining that in the people that we’ve got on it as well.

Feedback and reception of newbie developers in the studio

[00:24:32] Jon: Has there been any feedback from the professional developers working there? I’m sure they’re all really lovely people, but you don’t always want newbies just flowing in. That can be disruptive, maybe for other teams, or have they found it quite inspiring that get these new people in?

[00:24:49] Yahsir: Yes. It’s not been something that’s been disruptive because our entire recruitment philosophy is centered around that idea that if you have an ego, if you come to us and say, “Look, I really want to make this game, and I just need some people to do it.” This is not the place. We’re not running a one-man shop or one-woman shop where you’ve got an idea, and then we’ll just instantly finance it. For us, it’s coming to this with the right mindset. Everybody that we’ve got on the team on the development team is fully appreciative of that. It starts from the top down, obviously as well.

We haven’t had any resistance towards it at all. It’s been the other way around. It’s been very interesting for other people to see how talented some of the people really are despite some of the obstacles they may have had. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m fairly sure when you find people that have that passion, that have that potential, you want to work with them, you want to inspire them. I always say as well when you’re first joining a company, and you don’t have any experience whatsoever, there’s not much you can bring to the table other than that passion. Maybe you’ve been working for 10, 15, or 20 years and are maybe a little bit more jaded and perhaps have some scars.

Then you’ve got all of this youthful enthusiasm coming in, which is injecting some level of hope or whatever it is. It’s really important that anybody coming in has that in order to drive things forward as well. More importantly, to help challenge convention. One thing that we absolutely ban in the studio is, oh, I tried that before it didn’t work. It’s like, no, no, no, that’s the easiest way to kill something that could work in the future. Having a lot of people who aren’t used to traditional development practices who haven’t been in that environment, they ask questions which most other people take for granted and never ask.

In that way, it’s a very egalitarian way to work where everybody sitting around the table has the same level of input. Nobody’s more important than anybody else. Of course, you can’t make every decision by committee. You do have to have leaders in place that will drive things forward. That’s what leadership’s really there for. For us, it’s to help drive things forward rather than to tell people what to do. We make that very clear. Everybody who’s part of the company is reporting on that from the very beginning.

[00:27:16] Jon: Cool. Very good. Well, thank you very much for giving us an insight into what you guys are doing at Sandsoft. Thank you, Teemu as well, for your insight. Thank you to you guys for listening to and watching the podcast; however, you are consuming it. Please subscribe. Every episode, we are talking to people in the mobile game space who are building out this incredible industry and are always dynamic, always new things changing, new games, and new ways of working. Please subscribe, and we will see you next time. Goodbye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile GameDev Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is, and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends.

I’m Jon Jordan, and joining me today, we have two familiar faces. We have Erno Kiiski and Wilhelm Voutilainen, both Chief Game Analysts at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, guys? How are you doing?

[00:00:25] Erno Kiiski: Hi, Jon. It’s good. We’re good. How are you?

[00:00:29] Jon: Yes, good. I see the sun in Helsinki.

[00:00:30] Erno: Yes, finally. That’s only one day of winter, almost.

[00:00:37] Jon: Sun in Manchester as well.

Anyway, we’re going to talk today about– I don’t think as we’ve not discussed it recently, I think. I think we’ve got plenty of stuff to discuss. We can talk about what’s going on with mobile shooters. I guess it’s one of those genres that took a bit of a while to get to grips with touch screens. Then, there was a big explosion, obviously, PUBG, and then later, Call of Duty.

A whole bunch of other stuff going on and some interesting trends, so we can dig down into that. I think, Erno, you’re going to kick us off with what are the headline trends that have been going on in the market.

Shooter market overview and trends

[00:01:09] Erno: Of course, what we want to discuss, or maybe the most recent topic or big, big topic, is definitely what EA did with their mobile shooters. The Apex Legends game, which was less than a year old, they decided to cancel it and close it down. Then, they had the Battlefield Mobile under works and totally cancelled the whole project. We’re going to discuss maybe a little bit more on the future, or the upcoming topics.

That’s definitely, if you look at the big news, big trends in terms of the shooter market, what is been around, and probably, actually, one of the reasons why we wanted to have this discussion because, overall, the market is tough, but in the shooter genre, it’s no different, as we can see for these games, big massive IPs, big projects, but still they decided to can them overall.

I think maybe a good starting point just to get us started would be to talk a little bit about what the market actually looks like at the moment. Of course, we have discussed this many times, and the big changes, there haven’t been that many big changes.

Let’s kick it off with the market-level overview. If you’re looking at, especially, the Western shooter market at the moment on mobile, it’s pretty much three games dominating the market. About 80% of the market share in the West is now going to Call of Duty, PUBG, and Free Fire. The top three dogs own a big, big majority of the market. Then, the rest, behind that, about 20% of the market is much more evenly divided. There are few percentage market shares for some games and so on, and down from there. There is a clear categorization of the big three and the rest.

One actually very interesting factor is when we look at the current market, and especially now when Apex is now out of the picture, is the type of games, and especially, the business model of these games. These top three, of course, are these competitive PvP shooters with cosmetic monetization, cosmetic economy, selling skin, and selling all that stuff.

Then, if we look at the rest, the top 20 shooters. Basically, the rest of the 17 shooters that are in the top 20 performing in terms of the IAP revenue, in terms of the shooters, actually, all of them have some kind of a power progression. There are different ways that it has been implemented. There are some things that you either collect characters, or you upgrade them, some lightweight, Brawl Stars and all that stuff type of, like a lighter power progression meta.

Then, there are games like War Robots, which is actually currently the biggest shooter after this top three in the US iOS market, at least. The game has about 3% market share. If you look at that game, how that game works, it’s all about collecting the robots, collecting the equipment items for them, and upgrading them. Pretty much an RPG type of meta with the upgrade layers, and selling the power, so to speak.

That is, of course, how the market is. In order to make that cosmetic economy work– Well, we’re going to talk about LiveOps in the second part, but there is a crazy amount of LiveOps. Then, overall, crazy, crazy big audience, because if you don’t have any power progression, if you compare revenue per download numbers, even for these top shooters, they’re actually– Like Call of Duty, it’s much lower than, let’s say, War Robots, for example, because of the nature of the business model.

It’s interesting that we have the top three that are dominating the market. Then, similar cosmetic monetized games really haven’t found their footing, or haven’t been able to operate the game as efficiently to make that business model work in that market.

Free Fire’s hybrid approach

[00:05:36] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yes, I agree. I think the big learnings here are that, if you are a shooter, if you want to make a shooter with just cosmetic economy, it’s going to be really hard to compete against these three giants called PUBG and Free Fire. Then, maybe it will be better to try to find learnings from the shooters in the 100, 200, and 200 to 500 grossing range. The games Erno mentioned, like War Robots, are a really good example.

Many of these old masters have been there in the quite high grossing ranks for a long time, Games like Mech Arena, War Machine, World of Tanks, Sniper 3D, the top sniper game right now, and also one of the top pure FPS games, Pixel Gun 3D is also a really old game, but still doing pretty well, and almost in the top 200 grossing ranks as well. Zooba is another example.

I think out of those top three games, the top three giants, Free Fire is a really interesting case because it’s like this hybrid between cosmetic monetization, and this power progression that the rest of the games have because it has a similar monetization, really super heavy LiveOps cadence, cosmetic monetization similar to the COD and PUBG. On top of that, it has this character collection layer, and this power progression too.

You can upgrade those characters as well. That’s a really interesting hybrid. I think when you look at the revenue per download numbers, Free Fire is not getting nearly as enough or nearly many downloads as COD and PUBG, but it’s still in the making the same amount of, or still in the same grossing ranks as PUBG, for example. The revenue per download is so much higher in Free Fire. Maybe one reason could be that they are utilizing a bit of this power progression as well.

[00:07:44] Erno: It’s interesting.

[00:07:45] Jon: Yes, it is interesting.

[00:07:46] Erno: I just wanted to mention, on the Free Fire, like Wilhelm mentioned, it’s this at face value. It doesn’t even unless maybe for the super casual player, it feels like any other PUBG or whatever type, where it is totally cosmetic. Then, for the hardcore players, it actually starts to matter. Then, there is more a reason for conversion for the skins.On the other hand, like I said, that might push a lot of players away as well. This is why games including Call of Duty most likely have, especially in the West, a much, much bigger audience, and they’re doing okay with the smaller revenue per download. It’s interesting. Totally, at the face value they’re similar, but then if you go a bit deeper, they’re a little bit different in the way of operating the game.

EA’s decision to kill Apex Legends Mobile

[00:08:38] Jon: I guess one of the issues here is, you have to be very careful how you position yourself in these games when it comes to play to win. Obviously, in battle royale, the whole point of it is the purity of the skill. If you’re taking that battle royale element, which obviously, PUBG does, then it’s much harder for you to build those power progressions into what’s going on. Obviously, you can do it, but that’s something the audience is going to probably a bit more sensitive to than some of these other games.

There’s one thing I was going to say coming back to EA’s decision, how much do you think the trends you set out will play into their decision? Obviously, I get a little bit is, what’s happening within EA, and how they want to allocate their resources to the various different games they’ve had.

I wonder how much of it is to do with Apex and Battlefield, and how they fit into this power monetization versus cosmetic monetization. Do they feel like they can’t compete against the big three, but they can’t get the monetization that they want to as well? It’s not really about those products, it’s just about the market, rather.

[00:09:17] Erno: Yes, it’s tough, and it’s hard to say what are the very, very underlying reasons that when to introduce them, why Apex never really was able to be the same type of success. If you think about Apex, for example, at first, the idea was exactly the same monetization model as Call of Duty, the same type of things. If we think about Apex, first of all, a hero-based shooter, you’re selling skins for specific heroes, which already restricts your possible monetization of the cosmetics already quite a bit.

Then, naturally, the second point that we are going to talk about, it’s LiveOps. Of course, I don’t have specific numbers of LiveOps for Apex actually, but in terms of the crazy amount of cadence that these top three are pushing, and then when these are already established games that people have bought the skins, and they are connected to the games.

A good example could be, PUBG, Krafton who tried to make the PUBG: New State, which didn’t work out at all, almost. I think it’s still live, the game, but it’s nowhere near PUBG Mobile. Krafton tried to make their own thing. In my opinion, the core gameplay is a polished version of that, but it’s not enough in these types of games. How do you get those players out from the PUBG Mobile that have been playing for years and years, and have already got a lot of skins?

If you look at their live operations, how they’re pushing content and collaborations, and all that stuff in PUBG Mobile. In comparison, the New State, that it’s a much, much more stale type of experience. It’s tough. It’s a good question, in terms of what’s the reason. I’m sure Apex and Battlefield are both big IPs. Apex also, they went for full cosmetic monetization.

If you look at the revenue numbers, especially, if I look at now US iOS, Apex Legends never made it over $1m, for example, which is very, very, very, very tough. They were never ever able to crack the monetization, even though they had a similar idea, similar mechanics, similar gacha mechanics, and all that stuff. Whether it’s then the number of contents, the content cadence that they were pushing, didn’t they have enough engagement content, limited-time game modes, types of things to play around, and show off your cosmetics? That’s a good question.

It is super tough, especially for it to compete against these top three that are already established, and have an audience. Actually, Apex is also a little bit different with the hero approach, but it is still a battle royale shooter, like all of these top three. Call of Duty has a little bit more emphasis on the other type of shooters as well, but still very, very similar. If you look at it on a high level, what kind of a shooter experience it is.

[00:13:21] Wilhelm: Wasn’t it that Free Fire‘s revenue per download was $30 right now?

[00:13:27] Erno: Yes. Of course, it’s been around for so much longer than Apex, but it’s interesting when you look at a side-by-side grab, how Free Fire is so distinct even from PUBG and Call of Duty Mobile. Is it the business model that definitely has something to do with it selling the small power, in terms of being able to monetize more strongly? Then, like I already said, it doesn’t work out with some specific audience, and I think the Call of Duty brand wouldn’t have worked out, so.

[00:14:07] Jon: No, and I guess from that point of view with Apex and Battlefield, both being quite Western-focused brands, you can’t leverage that power mechanic in there. Obviously, Free Fire is much more Asian Pacific emerging territories, where they’re much more open to that thing. That’s a good analogy. Probably, a sensible move by EA to not be wasting money, because it can never get the audience of the other three. Obviously, EAs broken, so even if they had tons of money to spend, they can’t grow the audience, so let’s just wash their hands of that, and move on, I suppose.

[00:14:36] Erno: Exactly. Most likely, definitely those points. As I said, the amount of money that is required to operate, we’re going to discuss next the LiveOps. The amount of money required to push the amount of cadence of content to be able to compete is super high, and then if you are not able to get that money back, it’s quite clear, only one decision can be made.

[00:15:04] Jon: It’s just somewhat ironic that EA has been trying to make Battlefield mobile games for around 10 years until every time they get cancelled. Anyway maybe in the future. Let’s move on to LiveOps then. LiveOps is the bit where mobile games really work. What do studios have to do? What’s the same, and what’s different to other genres?

What does the LiveOps of top shooters look like?

[00:15:26] Erno: Well, if we start with those, which are basically the market at the moment, over 80%, those top three. We are actually– Our recent product, it’s going to come really soon. Been under work for a long time. It’s actually about on GameRefinery, it’s about LiveOps, and actually LiveOps tracking, and doing competitive research on, especially, LiveOps. We’ve been now following these top three shooter games for a couple of months, and I can give you some numbers, in terms of how insane the amount of content is.

[00:16:05] Jon: The inside scoop.

[00:16:06] Erno: Yes, exactly.

[00:16:08] Jon: Cool.

[00:16:09] Erno: If you take Call of Duty as an example, what do we have in terms of the operations in that game? Of course, we have the ranked seasons, which all games have, which brings the competitive ladders, where you compete and there are unique rewards for rising high in the rank seasons, and so on, and they are all three months long.

Then, there are of course one-month-long battle passes, and tons of content from there. Every month, you can progress. Every weekend, they have a specific tournament. They implemented it about maybe a year ago. This a tournament mode, which has also its own seasons every week, and you can play specific modes, and earn specific rewards.

Then, if you look at just limited-time game mode, so different items, lots of twists and stuff like that to the different gameplay modes, and then you can enter from a different playlist to play those. There are usually three to five active at once, and usually, they are only a few weeks long or something like that usually. Then, that’s supported with tons of tasks and events, and you can earn cosmetics from there.

Then, that’s just the engagement side. Then, if we look at the monetization, in Call of Duty Mobile, there are usually around 10 limited-time gachas at once active. They are usually about three to five weeks in length, and then in one gacha, there can be from 10 to 30 different unique cosmetic items. If we start to count the amount of cosmetics, first of all, that they are pushing on a weekly basis, and of course, the gameplay engagement content. All those looping things like the ranked stuff and so on, but also the limited-time gameplay mode should bring some variety. The amount of work to operate this game is insane.

[00:18:10] Jon: I guess it’s worth pointing out that. Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but most of that LiveOps, if not all of that live, is happening out of the Chinese developer, is it not?

[00:18:19] Erno: Yes.

[00:18:20] Jon: That’s, I’d imagine, well into three figures in terms of the amount of staff running that. Probably, maybe more than a few hundred maybe, but certainly that scale, it would be almost impossible for Activision to run that in North America.

[00:18:36] Erno: Exactly.

[00:18:36] Jon: It’s pretty scary.

[00:18:38] Erno: Then, if you compare, I have had one data point from Apex Legends, we did this, it was maybe three, four months ago, so it’s not super fresh, but as an example, in terms of the monetization content. Apex Legends also had three limited-time gachas, usually at once, with about the same amount of content per gacha available. Still, in terms of the pure amount, it’s much, much less than in Call of Duty Mobile.

Of course, it’s just the volume, but still, it already gives a little bit of data point, in terms of, was there enough, they couldn’t operate. It was interesting because EA was working with Lightspeed & Quantum, and Tencent Studio which made PUBG Mobile in terms of their live operations. You could see a lot of correlations in their live operations as well, but still, was it too expensive? What kind of a deal they had?

We don’t know what’s behind the scenes, so to speak, but it never really flew out, or then overall, just the amount of content for that type of basic core loop that they had for a hero-based shooter didn’t just work out. They are interesting things, because, yes, these games, they’re all about LiveOps as you can see from the amount of content.

[00:20:02] Jon: I think they did point out when they cancelled it, there was mention of a few things, but one of the things was the whole future content pipeline. They just felt they couldn’t get it to the quality they needed, which maybe talks a little bit about that. There is a quantity thing that, if you do these things properly, you just have to put out a ton of stuff.

Then, obviously, if you have that at a very high level of quality, and if you’re doing a hero shooter, that’s slightly different, because heroes are the focus, rather than the skins, as it’s a slightly different thing going on. You can’t just be creating and releasing new characters all the time, because that messes up everything. You end up in a difficult structural position.

Understand the game you’re making and how that feeds into LiveOps

[00:20:35] Erno: Yes, exactly. Especially, for this type to try to compete against this top three, and if that’s the LiveOps machine you are trying to beat, it’s a tough, tough, tough job. Then, what is the way to do this? Is it maybe try to bring something totally unique in terms of the core gameplay maybe, or then a different approach, like what Brawl Stars did, like make a little bit of casual shooter, and this kind of game, It has a power progression, but it’s not that heavy that it would feel super unfair, for example.

[00:21:05] Wilhelm: I also think the Zooba that we mentioned earlier. Of course, it’s not in the top 50 or top 10 grossing ranks, but it’s still doing quite well in the on and off 200 range. We are also tracking LiveOps of Zooba, and it’s nearly not that heavy in terms of that. Zooba is similar to Brawl Stars, in that it’s more of this casual kind of battle royale game. They have found success that way. Making a bit more of a casual type of shooter. They don’t need absolute massive LiveOps cadence to be successful in that sense.

[00:21:46] Jon: I guess, obviously, the more people you’re putting into LiveOps, the more you’re dragging down your profit. The PUBG, Call of Duty and Free Fire people, they’re always, “Oh, how can we get more LiveOps up in this?” They’re always adding more people, so there’s, I guess, there’s always an equilibrium of profitability where people think, “Oh, we can invest some more and make some more money,” but then everyone’s doing the same thing.

They end up in the same situation, but definitely as you’re saying, Wilhelm, picking and choosing, and understanding what you’re trying to make and understanding the game you’re going to make, and then how the monetization, and how that feeds into LiveOps.

Are your LiveOps teams going to be 10 people or 100 people? There’s quite obviously a massive difference there in the scale of operation you want to do. If you only got 10 people to run your LiveOps, and then there are some sorts of games you just can’t make, then you just have to admit that and choose your battles. We’ve set it up as there’s these massive two or three giants fighting out, and everyone else is scrabbling right in the bottom. There are always new games coming up, there’s always people with clever ideas of how to solve this.

How do we see the next year panning out? There are obviously some fairly big IPs that are coming. Maybe not this year for some of them, but where do you see the opportunities in this?

What does the future of the shooter market look like?

[00:23:01] Wilhelm: Definitely. We’ve been talking about these three top shooters, and they were all battle royale games. There could definitely be space for other kinds of shooters and finding success that way. When we look at, for example, in the West in the PC, we have hero shooters, we have extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov, a really successful game, more of these tactical FPS games like Counter-Strike or Valorant, and then we have these RPG like looter shooters.

Possibly, especially, when we look at the upcoming shooters, we could definitely see some interesting new mobile shooter sub-genres merge on the mobile as well, and find success that way.

[00:23:49] Jon: Do we want to throw out some titles? To entice people with games you want to be looking out for?

[00:23:55] Erno: Yes. Well, for example, talking about extraction shooters, I think Arena Breakout is a really interesting case. That’s a game right now in the China market. It’s actually in the top 50 grossing. It’s been doing quite well. It was recently released there. That’s like this extraction shooter game. It’s basically how those work exactly like in Escape from Tarkov on PC.

You already know it’s not about royale, it’s not like this FPS shooter when you die, and then you respawn instantly, but basically, you go into this area for, let’s say 30 minutes. You shoot other people, you shoot other players, you shoot PvE mobs, you loot stuff, and then you need to extract with the loot that you gained there, and then you keep the loot. The Arena Breakout, and also it’s coming– I think it’s right now on the closed beta in the US as well. Apparently, it’s coming to the US soon.

What I think is really interesting with this game, as we’ve talked about these monetization models, is that we have the cosmetic monetization, we have the power progression. Arena Breakout actually has totally unique monetization model. You basically purchase stuff, you can purchase equipment items, and you can purchase upgrade items to that equipment, but the thing here is that you basically have to take that equipment with you to the matches, and if you die, you will lose them.

Basically, you can actually lose the stuff that you purchase. Now, that’s also used to monetize these inventory boxes. You can rent this inventory box, you can take it with you to the match, and you can put stuff inside there. If you die, then you will not lose them, and there’s also this subscription plan tied to it as well. It’s been working quite well for the game.

[00:25:45] Jon: I think also they have a marketplace, don’t they? There appeared to be a marketplace where people are trading stuff, including items as well. They’ve thought quite a lot about the economics of what’s going on. Sorry, I know I interrupted.

[00:25:58] Erno: No problem. That’s actually interesting. I haven’t got really deep into it yet, but that’s interesting that they have peer-to-peer as well. Because, in a way, that’s one of the strategies. It’s like selling insurance, so to speak. Insurance monetization for a game. It’s an interesting way.

It’s working quite well, at least, so far in China, but then of course, again, talk stuff to pay to win and all that stuff in the West and how well it’s received when it comes, will remain to be seen. Especially, now with the constant talk also about gacha monetization, which these top shooters are relying on cosmetic monetization, that game doesn’t have any gachas, for example, in their monetization model, which is an interesting thing to study, in terms of that as well.

Overall, I think those extraction shooters are interesting. To be honest, they have been talked about for a while already now; when they’re coming to the mobile? Are they coming? Do they find success, and so on? The most interesting thing for me about them is that, if you think about these competitive PvP shooters, it’s match-to-match. Of course, you have maybe had a Battle Pass or ranked season that gives you this little bit of a long-term progression.

Then, in these extraction shooters, you actually have, not necessarily power progression in the same manner as RPGs or some of these shooters, but it has some kind of a long-term progression vector that ties the match together and brings that connection for the players that might also work as extra retention push for the players, which has been lacking a little bit in these top shooters.

It’s very, very interesting to see when finally these games start to come out. Like Arena Breakout, it’s a very, very high production-value game from Tencent. How is it received in the West, or is it still? Escape from Tarkov is a relatively big game on PC, but it’s still a niche compared to Call of Duty, for example, so it remains to be seen how that genre pans out.

[00:28:00] Jon: I guess going back to one of our original statements was, it is going to be relatively niche, although you can’t judge exactly how. It could be a big niche or a small niche, but obviously, the monetization for the people who like those hypercompetitive risk-reward games is going to be, probably, off the scale. It’s whether they can balance monetization with making the audience as big as possible for them.

It’s very interesting. I was looking at it. It’s a very complicated setup, where you can customize the entire UI of all these different moves and weapons and things. You can really see that some people are going to absolutely love the level you can get into to customize your loadout and your UI and stuff.

[00:28:39] Erno: Definitely.

Upcoming releases to keep an eye on

[00:28:42] Jon: We’ve got, obviously, Valorant, probably not coming out this year, or it seems definitely not coming out this year, so that’s maybe one to park, but I guess everyone is going to be excited even if it’s \coming out till 2024.

[00:28:53] Erno: Yes, it’s an interesting game. Yes, I could go. Well, as Wilhelm mentioned earlier in this podcast, the top three competitive shooter games, they are really from the same formula, so to speak, even with the nuances and differences, but then there is a little bit of room, at least in terms of success.

I don’t know. It might be. There had been some games that had tried a little bit this type of shooter, but then maybe this was a little bit slow-paced tactical five-versus-five, more like Counter-Strike, Valorant, this type of an approach. How well it works on mobile? We’ll see. Is it a little focused mobile audience, which is maybe a little bit more casual in terms of their gameplay maybe, than most of the PC audience, for example, so will it find its audience? At least, that is the thing that I don’t see Valorant being as a direct competitor to let’s say PUBG Mobile, than for example, Apex was.

[00:29:03] Wilhelm: I think as Erno mentioned, the sort of those Valorant Mobile, and these sort of more tactical shooters being more slow-paced. I personally see that as a possible strength when these sorts of tactical slow-paced shooters come on mobile, and I think Arena Breakout also. It’s more slow-paced. It’s not like it’s a super hectic battle royale, so that could actually work pretty well on mobile. If you make it even more like it, a little bit may be a more casual way.

I think that it’s good that there could definitely be a success for Valorant. For example, I’ve analyzed Critical Ops on mobile, and I personally think that it plays really well because of that more smooth and slow-paced tactical combat.

[00:29:44] Erno: Yes, it’s interesting because it’s an old game, but of course, coming from a very small Finnish studio, which doesn’t, of course, have the LiveOps capabilities of, let’s say, Riot maybe. With what they’re able to do, for example. Of course, on mobile, it’s a different world than on PC in terms of operating the game, but it’s a very, very interesting game.

I think in the little bit same box goes Ubisoft and them launching Rainbow Six on mobile. It’s a bit similar type of an area of a shooter, a bit more tactical, maybe a little bit more slow-paced, five-versus-five type of a shooter. Then, maybe some other games that I personally find very, very interesting, and I find it to be a big, big open area, still that something no one has yet cracked on mobile properly, is the looter shooter genre.

We have Destiny Mobile announced, I think. I don’t remember if it was obviously announced, but still, that’s very, very early, but it should be coming. Then, from Ubisoft Division Mobile, it should even be coming this year, maybe, so basically, this type of shooter, where it’s more of a like MMO aspects intertwined with the shooter mechanics, than actually a competitive PvP shooter only.

Then, of course, a good question is like, that type of a game, what’s the monetization model going to be like? Because in, of course, mobile, it’s free to play. If you look at the PC side, pretty much all of these games have been– Some of them, like Destiny nowadays, it’s free-to-play, but the monetization is based on the expansions, selling expansions, and then a little bit of cosmetics.

The main thing is selling, is it once half a year, or something like that, I don’t remember the cadence, but they’re selling the expansion, that’s the main of the business model for them. On mobile, well, as we all know, it probably won’t work like that. Then again, a game like Warframe, which is quite a popular PC/console game, it’s this kind of looter shooter type of RPG, and it’s also free-to-play, which has been doing quite well.

Very, very interesting space, because I think on mobile, we haven’t seen much over here. I remember there was a game called Shadowgun Legends, I think, some four years ago, something like that, never really took off, but especially when these big AAA companies are trying their hands on it, are they able to crack it? There’s at least a space for this type of experience open still to be taken, compared to the competitive PvP, which is super competitive now with those top three mega factory games.

[00:33:53] Jon: I guess what’s interesting about all those titles you mentioned there is, they are mobile versions, or mobile incarnations of existing big franchises, so that it will be that sort of solves some of your UA problems, at least, in the early stage, or at least it gives you a chance to go, “We’ve got these many people who’ve played our franchise on PC and console, and so there’s something to work with already without us having to worry too much about UA in the initial stages,” which is clearly for the whole mobile industry a bit of a problem at the moment.

[00:34:22] Erno: Yes, definitely, and that’s the whole thing. It’s a trend, looking at the games that have been scaling. Many, many big amounts of them have an IP, so it naturally helps on that organic boost to the UA side as well, but yes, it will be interesting to see how they adjust these in this space. There are a lot of IP-based AAA console games coming, but will there be surprises that are new mobile-first experiences that come out of nowhere and surprise everyone?

Most likely, they will need to have quite a big new core idea twist, something like Marvel Snap style. Of course, they had an IP as well, but in terms of a genre kind, they’re being a little bit of revolutionizing how it works and how the whole model works and bringing this massive audience behind them.

[00:35:20] Wilhelm: Maybe there could be, in a way, we have the Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile coming soon, of course. It’s super similar to the three big giants on mobile right now, but I think one really unique element that it has is it has this cross-progression between PC and both mobile, so that’s a really unique kind of case, and of course, a bit similar with what Fortnite did with crossplay, so you could play on PC, and on mobile as well, so.

[00:35:53] Erno: It’s interesting because, yes, of course, crossplay is one of these hot terms that a lot of the industry is talking about, and then Warzone is the first game that introduces this. They have different skills for console and PC, and then for mobile, you’re not cross-playing against them because especially, for a competitive shooter, it would be quite an unfair setting, but when you’re playing the mobile version, you are progressing in the Battle Pass.

Then, you go to your home and play on a PC. It’s the same Battle Pass you’re progressing through, so kind of like creating this ecosystem around the game. First of this type of cross kind of like a platform, crossplay approach that we have seen, so that is also interesting to see.

[00:36:44] Jon: I guess, also, in that stage is, you’re not worrying maybe so much about the pure mobile monetization because you’re using it as a retention mechanic to hold people in the ecosystem, where you know you can monetize them on the PC, so there’s a slightly different view of success when you’ve got that model, compared to just putting out a mobile game.

[00:37:03] Erno: Yes, definitely, because, yes, like we’ve been talking in the whole podcast, if they would come just for mobile, and just mobile, are they able, look, first of all, same like what happened with PUBG: New State. How much does Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile comes in? How much they’re actually getting away from Call of Duty Mobile, which is operated by Tencent, even though it’s published by Activision, so will be very, very interesting to see.

[00:37:30] Jon: Yes. Lovely. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground. That’s some really good stuff. We’ve got some games to look out for over the coming months as well, so thank you very much to Willhelm and Erno for their expertise.

[00:37:40] Erno: Thank you.

[00:37:41] Wilhelm: Thank you.

[00:37:42] Jon: Thanks, guys. Thanks to you for watching or listening, however, you’re consuming the podcast. In every episode, we are looking at the mobile game sector and seeing what’s going on. We’ve been around for, well, getting on for 10 years now, the biggest part of the gaming sector, of course. There’s still plenty of innovation, and plenty of new things coming, so I hope you come along to see what’s going on next time. See you then. Goodbye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile GameDev Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers at the moment, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and joining me today; we have the brains trust. I don’t know. I think that’s what I have to call you. We have three chief game analysts. Good to see you all from GameRefinery by Liftoff. We have Wilhelm Voutilainen. How’s it going, Wilhelm?

[00:00:30] Wilhelm Voutilainen: It’s good to be here.

[00:00:32] Jon: Sunny in Helsinki, by the looks of things.

[00:00:34] Wilhelm: Yes, that’s rare here, but cool, I don’t complain.

[00:00:39] Jon: Teemu Palomäki. How’s it going, Teemu?

[00:00:43] Teemu Palomäki: Going great. Great to be here.

[00:00:46] Jon: Good, and Kalle Heikkinen. How’s it going, Kalle?

[00:00:53] Kalle Heikkinen: Very well. We’re very much looking forward to this podcast episode; so good stuff.

[00:01:01] Jon: This is funny. This is like we’ve been building up to this. In this episode, we’ve talked a lot about gacha in the past, and now we’re going to talk a lot about what happens post-gacha. I guess this has been one of these trends that have been bubbling for at least six months and probably for longer than that as well. Gachas, you guys might have a better description than me, but gachas, I basically see them as we call them, loot boxes. I guess in the West, gacha is more like the Japanese term, but with randomized rewards, you get them in various ways.

For various reasons, some games are moving away from these, even though they’ve proven to be very good monetization methods over the years, particularly for certain types of games. Let’s actually talk to the experts rather than me, or have we forgotten about them? I think we’re going to get ahead straight into examples, aren’t we, of games that have had gachas and are now moving away from them. Teemu, are you going to kick us off? I guess Supercell is the best-known example of a high-profile company with very high-performing games that have moved away from this, but I think you’ve got some other examples as well. Do you want to take us through that high level of what’s going on there?

Brawl Star has moved away from gachas

[00:02:08] Teemu: Yes. Brawl Stars is their multiplayer battle arena game. You have different modes, and you have different characters you collect and play in those modes. They’ve had gachas as an important part of their monetization. As the way you get characters, but also how you unlock new skills for the characters, these power-ups, and how you get experience for the characters. Gachas were really in the system. They were fair. The things that you have obtained are removed from the gacha pool, so it’s not like it was what gacha haters would call predatory, but the system felt fair.

The drop rates would increase if you didn’t get a character, but they were still underused. You would get those gacha boxes from various sources, but you wouldn’t necessarily go out of your way to buy them. With that in mind, they removed all the randomized mechanics from the game late last year. Around December, I think. But what they did to replace the gachas, is that for characters, there is now this star road. There is a linear path to unlocking characters. You’re always building towards unlocking some character. You always have a goal to go forward.

The path is the same for everyone, though you can customize it a little bit. There are points where you can choose between three characters out of which you can choose which one you want to focus on. That’s the way to unlock these basic characters. The main way still to unlock new characters is through Battle Pass. That was not a gacha-based system. What you would do is you would have to buy the Battle Pass, and then halfway through the progress of the Battle Pass, you would unlock this new character. This kind of pay track only, unlocking characters, is still in there.

As per the skills that I mentioned before, you could get those through gachas. Now, it’s just you choose which skills you want. It’s like you have the freedom to choose what you want to get to fit your playstyle. I think in Brawl Stars’ case, it’s going quite well. Now, the bottleneck is not so much. Do you have to lock to obtain the characters, but do you have the coins to upgrade them?

[00:05:29] Jon: It’s interesting your description there, between gacha haters and the fact that this is a fair gacha, which I guess is pointing to the fact that, over time, there has been in certain games, at least in some communities, this backlash or this feeling that some of them at least aren’t fair. I guess that depends a little bit on how the gacha systems are used in the game. It sounds like, from what you’re saying, that Brawl Stars actually had, I don’t know if lightweight is the correct terminology, but it wasn’t like, compared to some games maybe we’ll talk about, gacha wasn’t the main focus on all the monetization. It was one part of the monetization, so maybe it’s easier for them to take it out.

[00:06:10] Teemu: It was still really tied in there, like the way you opt-in, everything was randomized. Now with the change, it is a huge change. It’s essentially revamping the whole progression system. That’s a big thing to do on a live mobile game, but I think they’ve done it quite nicely. It could be a bit of a shock with these kinds of changes, but for endgame players, like I’ve been playing this pretty much daily since it was released on global. For me, I’ve had all the characters unlocked before, so I can just continue the same way.

I can still keep the resources piling up from the Battle Pass and then instantly purchase if there is any character coming outside the Battle Pass. Not much has necessarily changed for the endgame player experience, but now, people can unlock the characters they want. They know when they will be unlocked, and they know how the progress goes. Then they can spend on different things, like, they can spend on the skins of the characters that they like.

How has the removal of gachas affected Brawl Star’s revenue

[00:07:42] Jon: As we come to the end of every game we’re going to talk about, do we have any idea if it’s changed monetization yet, in terms of the money Supercell is making?

[00:07:49] Teemu: For revenue, I think when the change was made there was a spike in purchases. People were excited, but I think that came partly because the downloads also went really up at that point. Interestingly, for downloads, the average or the baseline for downloads seems to be higher now than it was with the gachas, but spending seems it’s roughly the same as it was before. We’re talking about fairly recent change, so it still remains to be seen [long impact].

Diablo Immortal has moved away from very heavy gacha monetization

[00:08:35] Jon: Cool. Wilhelm, you’ve all got some games you’re going to talk about, so rather than just go on Teemu, we’ll move around. Wilhelm, what games do you want to highlight first in this context?

[00:08:47] Wilhelm: There are definitely a couple of interesting ones I want to go through. First of all, we are going to start with Diablo Immortal. Of course, it had a really. I would say controversial launch due to the game’s meta element, the legendary gems being really heavily gacha monetized. Basically, those coming exclusively from this rift gacha. Now actually, after the launch, I’ve been following the game now a bit over half a year already. With each update, they’ve actually launched or made changes toward moving from that super heavily gacha monetization, catering more and more towards both free and low-paying players with different changes.

A couple of those really, I would say, biggest changes in that have been that these premium gacha keys that you need to use for the gacha, free players now also have chances to get those. You have lots of events running where you can get those for free. Also, you have these weekly purchases you can make with the free currency that you can purchase. Also, they have been moving not only making that gacha more attainable for the free players and the low payers. Also, moving a bit away from that randomized gacha mechanic, which is new materials called telluric pearls that you can use to then craft these most powerful legendary gems, which before that were only attainable through that premium gacha.

Now, even those out of the lower spenders and the free players, slowly but surely, can collect these telluric pearls. It takes like 40 to collect them, so it actually takes quite a bit of time. How you get those then is basically through, first of all, participating in live events. Now every player is super incentivized to participate in pretty much every single live event there is. There are also these monthly purchases you can make with free currency, but also, you can directly purchase those through bundles. There can be a player who doesn’t want to rely on that randomized mechanic of the gacha.

They can just directly purchase 40 telluric perils through these bundles, or how many they still need after participating in all the events and craft those legendary gems. When you think about it, that’s actually a huge change from completely randomized premium mechanic to this option to craft those as well.

[00:11:59] Jon: In that case, I suppose it’s not like a Supercell decision to take out gachas because that Diablo Immortal is a game where clearly gacha is going to be absolutely a big part of monetization, but I guess it’s smoothing the onboarding to it.

[00:12:11] Wilhelm: Exactly.

[00:12:12] Jon: In a sense, it would be interesting. I don’t know if you have a view on this, whether that’s a change they have made because of audience feedback or whether that’s they wanted to go in hard and make that premium material seem very valuable. Once you make something very valuable, and then you allow people to get a bit of it, then they’re like, “Oh, I’m getting this stuff now.” It’s very hard to make something that’s very cheap and valuable. You have to start off with this thing being super valuable, and then you can slightly unlock it. Then, as you say, it’s feeding into retention and events and stuff, so it’s actually helping the whole economy. I don’t know, it’s not to say they couldn’t have thought that as a mechanic, but maybe it’s a bit more the reaction of the players. I don’t know.

Player feedback

[00:12:49] Wilhelm: Yes. I think the player feedback has definitely had an effect on this because even the players who want to spend money, many of those, especially many of the Diablo Immortal’s players, come from PC. They are not used to loot boxes and randomized gacha mechanics of their mobile RPGs that usually have those. Now they have the option to purchase those directly instead of really relying on this randomized mechanic. Also, I think this kind of switch caters more towards a larger player base. If we look at, for example, the revenue graph of Diablo Immortal, the daily revenues have been dropping, I think most of the months ever since the launch.

Now actually, after the release of these telluric pearls materials, and after all these changes they have done, actually, their daily earnings, they have stopped the decline completely, and it’s more steady now. Also, I’ve noticed the latest Battle Pass plan; for example, the Battle Pass, it provides super cool cosmetics in the game and other materials, and it has nothing to do with gachas there. The latest Battle Pass actually had a massive revenue impact. I think it was one of the most impactful Battle Pass revenue spikes the game has had.

What they have attained with that is they are not super reliant on the players spending thousands of dollars on spending money on the gacha. Now, players are more involved. They can buy these telluric pearls, and that way, they get more involved in the game, so they want to buy more cosmetics. The game has been bringing lots, and lots, and lots of cool cosmetics to the game as well.

[00:14:55] Jon: It underpins the fact that for any of these successful games, you have to have multiple layers of interacting monetization that, I guess, maybe five years ago now, or at a certain point in time, you could just basically make a game around a gacha mechanic and that was it. You didn’t have to think anymore. That’s, for all these reasons, clearly not the case now. Kalle, what game do you want to highlight?

Arena Breakout and its interesting monetization strategy

[00:15:20] Kalle: I want to bring the Chinese twist to the conversation and talk about a fairly recently launched shooter game in China called Arena Breakout on Shoot Away. This is not a game that would have actually pivoted away from gachas midway, but this is a game that has been designed not to have gachas from the very start. I wanted to highlight this because it’s an interesting monetization strategy when thinking about the genre that it is in. Arena Breakout, it’s like an Escape from Tarkov style of a first-person shooter game with survival mechanics and a realistic art style.

It’s from Tencent Studio, launched about six months ago, and it’s doing really well in China. It’s in the top 50 grossing, sometimes peaking even to the top 20 grossing. Basically, players participate in these PvP matches against other players or bots. There are two different modes, either with pre-equipped items or without those equipped items. It’s basically a survival game. Meaning that during the match, players need to consider their health levels, find the equipment, and items to loot, kill all the enemies, and then evacuate safely within the time limit.

It is the monetization scheme that is interesting here. It really differs a lot from many other shooter titles that we have been accustomed to, especially in the Chinese market. it doesn’t focus on gachas, limited-time offers, or stuff like that, but rather it focuses on direct purchases of the items that players need during the core gameplay matches. I’m talking about different kinds of weapons, gear, and other items that you need to take advantage of when you are in the core gameplay sequence. One interesting fact about the game is that there’s actually a possibility to lose the items that you have purchased permanently in one of the modes in the game. That’s really interesting take on how to set up the monetisation framework for a shooter game.

[00:17:54] Jon: In terms of that being a top-grossing game, is that just because it sounds like it probably wouldn’t have very high ARPU because the randomness of gachas is often what drives players to spend a lot? Is this just that lots of people are playing it, and they’re spending a bit, or are there mechanics in which players can spend more to get certain things?

[00:18:21] Kalle: The genre definitely is not one of the most accessible or widest, so that definitely set up some constraints already. Yes, I said it’s doing really well. Definitely monetizing off of that audience that it has extremely well. In my opinion, it comes down to the value of the items the players need when they go to the matches and how well they are able to monetize off of those items. That would be my answer.

[00:19:01] Wilhelm: I think a good add there, at least how I feel because the game also has this quite clever limited-time boost chest and the subscription plan as well. Correct me if I’m wrong, Kalle but isn’t there this subscription plan where you can basically purchase the plan or these limited-time boosters, which can then basically give you this chest where you can then store these items, and if you die, then you actually do not lose those. I would assume that if you are really big, I don’t know, breakout player, it will be a no-brainer to purchase the subscription plan. I feel like that’s probably one of the main revenue drivers of the game as well.

[00:19:47] Kalle: That’s exactly true. It’s attached to the subscription plan, and according to my understanding, you can also buy it as a separate purchase as well. That’s definitely good that you added that there, definitely, and very interesting addition to how they monetize as well.

[00:20:00] Wilhelm: I have not seen a first-person shooter in a while. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a high grossing ranked one that does not use any gacha, so that’s really interesting. I think the game is going to be released on the Western markets as well. That’s going to be interesting. Call of Duty Mobile has huge competition with Call of Duty, Free Fire, and PUBG, all of those games that are super heavily gacha monetized. This game, Arena Breakout, is from a completely different FPS subgenre, this Escape from Tarkov. There is no competition there. They don’t have gachas. Western players,, compared to Asian players, do not prefer gachas that much. Arena Breakout could also attract PC players because they don’t prefer gachas either. It’s going to be super interesting to follow if and when the game gets released in the West.

[00:21:07] Kalle: Another difference is, of course, that most of the other shooters are very heavily focused on monetizing cosmetic items. This is an interesting alternative for any developer who is exploring different options to monetize shooter games other than the very heavy focus on cosmetic monetization as well.

[00:21:29] Wilhelm: This gives me the old-school vibes of playing RuneScape and the fear of, “Oh, I can’t die now. I’m going to lose all of my stuff.”

[00:21:38] Jon: Maybe we’re doing a podcast about the insurance policies in monetization options. That’s what everyone is doing now, insurance policies. Cool, so yes, there’s your alpha in today’s podcast. That Arena Breakout is one to be checking out. Okay. Wilhelm, I think you got another game you want to discuss.

Games that have replaced gachas with Battle Passes

[00:21:53] Wilhelm: Yes, I could go just a couple of really quickly, two of my last examples.

I think, keeping in the shooter space, of course, is not a mobile game, but just a quick because it’s been so interesting. Overwatch 2, the PC game, basically moved completely away from the gacha-based monetization of Overwatch 1. Now actually, they removed the gachas in Overwatch 2, and they added a Battle Pass plan and this direct purchase monetization. What they also did is they moved from this exclusively cosmetic monetization of Overwatch 1 to actually also monetizing those heroes through the Battle Pass plan.

Similarly, they worked on some of the top mobiles, like League of Legends or Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and those. In the Season 2 of Battle Pass in Overwatch 2, there was actually this new hero that got released. The only way you get that hero is to purchase the Battle Pass plan, and you get the hero instantly. Although there were this new super high-quality of cosmetic skins as well released, the old highest quality was legendary skins, they added I think it was called ultra or something, with this super detail and fancy effects on the skin, similar to what the top mobiles are also doing.

They changed the monetization model quite a bit. I think they’re reading through player reactions. Of course, players, I think were overall pretty happy with the removal of the complete randomized mechanics. Also, for many of the players, the game does not release new heroes that often, so a hero is locked behind a purchase, and from what I have been reading, many of the players have not been too happy with that either. Especially I know it’s a tank hero. I think it’s quite strong in the game’s meta,, so important character to have. That’s definitely an interesting shift.

Then another example is, again, a game that is super heavily limited-time, gacha monetized still but is beginning to shift a bit away from that. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, which I just actually mentioned, is the highest-grossing 5v5 classic MOBA game in the US market, that’s, as I mentioned, super heavily limited-time, gacha-monetized usually. They run these huge events, and they’ve released these super cool skins, which are only attainable through these limited-time gachas. Actually, they just had their M3 Esports events. This point of these big events in the game.

Of course, with that, they released a set of these super cool skins for these heroes, which, in the past, would have always been monetized through limited-time gachas, but actually, the first time they tried these limited-time Battle Pass monetizations, the events are revised, and they’re basically monetized two under additional limited-time Battle Pass plan. That’s a huge shift and also goes into the trend of these event-monetized Battle Pass plans. We’ve seen those in merch management using those. These developers are seeing that there is actually huge power in the Battle Pass plan, so why don’t we just slap these, on top of events as well to monetize them instead of having those gachas?

[00:25:50] Jon: No, and it definitely makes sense. I think from a psychological point of view, it’s funny you saying Overwatch, in that, even though– How much is the Battle Pass there? I don’t know. $10 or something? There’s a really cool character behind there, and people have said, “Oh, I can’t pay $10 for a character that says–” Someone is always going to complain about something, but obviously, compared to having to spend on average $100 to go through the gacha to get that character, the Battle Pass system is certainly psychologically much clearer about you spend this money, and you get it. There’s none of this randomness stuff going on.

I guess, probably we’ll end up; maybe people will be complaining about then. Now there are too many Battle Passes because you have all these, a Battle Pass, then you have event Battle Passes. It’s a way, I guess, for developers, you’re trying to make a certain amount of money, and it’s just you don’t really care how you do it, but you’re trying to find a sweet spot of making money, what you need to run the company and the game, and feeling like your players are getting a good deal and, they’re enjoying the process as well. I guess that’s the trick in development.

[00:26:45] Wilhelm: Yes. I think the way Overwatch 2 if you think about it, it’s quite clever that they add the new hero as the first purchase. Also, you get it instantly when you purchase the Battle Pass plan. Then players purchase the Battle Pass plan because of they want to get the new hero, and then there’s the huge grind to get other rewards, which, again, acts as a huge retention driver for the players. I think there’s really nice synergy in that.

[00:27:29] Jon: Imagine the complaints if you had to buy a Battle Pass, and then grind out to get the hero at the end, but we won’t go into that.

[00:27:33] Wilhelm: I think that would probably be a bit too much.

[00:27:35] Jon: Okay. Teemu, I think you’ve got one last one we want to talk about more specifically.

Mario Kart has received mixed feedback from players regarding the removal of gachas

[00:27:40] Teemu: Yes. Just to mention quickly, Mario Kart Tour removed gachas earlier in 2022. They didn’t remove the gacha element completely; they removed the monetized  gachas, so to speak, that you can spend money on. The gachas are still present say, as Battle Pass reward or as daily login rewards, but you can’t really just keep on spending on them. Maybe it is Nintendo trying just to be more family-friendly or just to go with that image. For them, looking at the numbers, the revenue is stable, but I think it’s lower than what it was with gachas, and there are fewer purchases on days that are in between the releases of content.

It’s not as stable as it was before. For gachas, you can go for them at any point, but for new flashy stuff, you get excited about it the first time it appears there. That’s interesting.

As for the downloads, and announcements of removing gachas, tend to give you a huge download spike. Since then, it has stabilized to where it was before. Interestingly, looking at what are the players reactions to this change, I did some searching in the Reddit world, and that’s, of course, a bit of an echo chamber always. There’s only the most active or the most hardcore players.

A Reddit user had made a poll about this topic, like, “Now that the gachas have been gone for some time, what is your reaction? How did you like this?” Out of 1,400 votes, it was 50/50 whether they liked it or not, or it was half was positive, and half was negative. Then it was, there were also people who were like, “It’s neither good, nor bad.” It’s really interesting to see how the player reaction can also be very split.

[00:30:39] Jon: We’ve gone through some examples. I’m guessing this is a trend, but it’s not a trend that everyone is ripping out gachas and replacing them with other things. With all these things, it’s certain companies make decisions about certain games, depending on the lifespan of those games where they are.

Do you think we can say, for 2023, gachas are going to be less important at the end than they were at the beginning, and we’re going to start to see these other Battle Pass-type things coming in? Is this a thing that anyone with a gacha mechanic in their game should be, maybe not worried about, but thinking about?

How legislation will affect game monetization in the future

[00:31:26] Teemu: Yes. I would say it’s something that we will maybe keep seeing more. There’s the legislation stuff going on. The EU is thinking of legislating the loot boxes.

It’s something that companies definitely should be thinking about. What are the alternative options if we lose all of Europe because we have gachas? I don’t know if it’s something that we see a lot of experimenting on the already released games because making a change in them can be massive, but maybe on the new releases that come out, just experimenting more, trying different things. MARVEL SNAP recently released– They have a different type of approach to monetization. I think the new releases are the most interesting trendsetters to pay attention to.

[00:32:39] Kalle: Yes, to add to that, I would say that we’re still in the observation phase where we are looking at already existing examples like Mario Kart and Brawl Stars, and closely examining these cases and following their performance. Still, the number of these examples that we have, I would say it’s still relatively small. That is something that we have to remember, but then if we think about the different drivers that play a role here, pushing games to think about maybe either switching to a non-gacha monetization, or then if they are still in the design phase, then thinking about finding an alternative monetization solution than gachas.

I think there are three things that come to my mind, at least. The first one is IDFA. Obviously, we all know this, changes in the app store user targeting landscape have just made games that have traditionally been very reliant on effective use targeting show some weakness. This group of games includes many of the gacha-reliant games, where the LTVs of the top 1% of super fans can be really, really high.

There are a lot of games that are in this new landscape. I’m trying to find more healthy and more balanced monetization approaches.

That means, for example, Wilhelm mentioned the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, experimenting with different kinds of Battle Pass mechanics and stuff like that, and subscription options, and so on.

Then the second thing is regulation, which Teemu already mentioned. There’s a constant flow of news coming in, where loot boxes and gachas are compared to gambling, and there are discussions on regulations. For some companies, this might be a way to make sure that they are not hit by the potential banning of gacha-based monetization.

Then the last thing that comes to my mind is Teemu; you mentioned this as well, player friendliness. You can always call me naive, but I want to believe that, at least for some of these companies, might partly also be an act of benevolence and an attempt to distance the company, their games, and their IPs from loot box associations and these discussions altogether.

For some companies and IPs, especially if their games have a younger audience, there is a risk of damaging the value of their IPs because of this. As we have already discussed, is this really what the players want? That’s totally a different story, of course.

[00:35:34] Jon: No, I think it’s a very good summation that, as is always the case, there are lots of moving parts on that. It’s not, for different companies, there’d be different parts of those three issues that you raised that are going to be more important than others. Combined, they’re a general trend obviously. The legislation has been around for, I don’t know, Belgium five years ago or something, they brought that in. That’s an ongoing sort of thing, but it is interesting Supercell; that’s the headline news. Clearly, they’re a company that I think takes its role very seriously in terms of being a mobile game leader.

It’s an interesting point of view. Then the IDFA stuff, if you have a particular mechanic that is targeting a very small number of people, and you can’t target them anymore, then there’s no point having it in there, is there?

Even if you love gachas, if you can’t get the right audience who love gachas into your game, then you’re going to have to do something else anyway, no matter whether the legislation changes or whatever, so, a case of all three. Very, very good summation, Kalle. You should be hosting maybe. You should be comparing the notes.

[00:36:34] Wilhelm: I’m curious, actually; now that we have Teemu and Kalle here are experts in the Asian markets, what do you think? Is there any chance the Chinese games will drop their gacha monetization?

[00:36:49] Kalle: It’s really hard for me to imagine a scenario where that would happen. It would need a really substantial shift in how all the other companies and developers are skimming their monetization frameworks and also big legislation rollouts in various different geographical areas.

If that would happen, then I could see it happening, but I’m very skeptical if that will come to reality. Actually, if we look at data on how important gachas are in different regions, we can see that, for example, having more than five gachas in your game in China, if you look at the top 200 grossing in China, 43% of the games have that.

In Japan, 54% of games have that. Then in the US, it’s 38%.

Not that big of a difference anymore, but still speaks of the importance of gachas in Japan and China. I don’t know. Teemu, do you have anything to add to that?

[00:38:16] Teemu: No, I think you summarized it pretty well. It is going to take a lot to get gachas removed from Japanese and Chinese games.

[00:38:31] Kalle: Yes, it’s also the genre landscape, especially in Japan, there are so many hero collection RPGs that are so much, like, it’s in their DNA to have gachas in their system design. I don’t know.

[00:38:49] Jon: I guess it’s wider in the culture as well. Gacha comes out from those little physical machines when you get the rewards in the Pachinko thing. It’s ironic Japanese don’t have gambling. It’s illegal to gamble in Japan, but they basically invented something akin to gambling. They don’t see that as gambling because they know gambling is banned. It’s insular there, but we would just say they have a ban in Japan.

[00:39:14] Wilhelm: I would assume a huge part of the mobile RPG experience, especially in the Japanese RPGs, is getting to pull those gachas. It’s almost like another mini-game experience there.

[00:39:29] Jon: Good. Excellent stuff. We’ve covered a lot of stuff that was really good, really enjoyable. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your expertise, and thank you to you for listening, and watching the podcast, however, you’re consuming our content.

Every episode we are looking into the world of mobile games, and despite- what are we now?- well over a decade into the mobile game explosion, the biggest part of the game sector, there’s still all this change happening, extremely dynamic new games coming out all the time. Please subscribe to the channel to find out what is going on in the world of mobile games.

Come back next time, and thanks for watching.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile GameDev Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan. Joining me today we have Chief Game Analyst Erno Kiiski from GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Erno?

[00:00:23] Erno Kiiski: Doing great, Jon. Thank you.

[00:00:25] Jon: Good. Ably assisted we have Joel Julkunen, the head of analytics at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Joel?

[00:00:33] Joel Julkunen: Great as well. Nice to be here.

Why should you play Marvel Snap if you haven’t already

[00:00:34] Jon: Good. We’ve got a good topic to discuss this year, one of many people’s games of the year for 2022, which is Marvel Snap. This plays into a lot of the things we’ve been talking about over the last 12 months about the use of IP, how game developers balance accessibility with the depth of play and monetization, and how all those things come together in a particular product. Should we explain to people who still need to play Marvel Snap? Obviously, everyone should have done it. If you haven’t, stop the podcast, download it, and play it. What’s Marvel Snap about besides being a game based around Marvel characters?

[00:01:21] Joel: As we all know, it’s a collective card game, and just like in any other CGG, you’re playing real-time matches against one opponent. That’s basically where all the superficial similarities end because what makes Snap different from Magic The Gathering or Hearthstone is that you have a much smaller deck. You have only 12 cards instead of, for example, 30 or 60 cards. Then the only card type you’re using in the card game is, at the moment, at least, characters. There are no instant spells, sorceries, magic, or secrets like in Hearthstone. Then instead of killing or attacking your opponent, the matches are all about trying to control three different areas in every match. When a match starts, there are three areas, and you’re deploying your characters to these areas in your turn. These three areas have different major effects that affect how the cards work in that match. As I mentioned in the beginning, these areas inject a lot of randomness and tactical dimension to the game, which is needed, as you have a much smaller deck. There is less randomness, like in Hearthstone, relating to the cards you draw in the game.

As you have these areas that are revealed and cause these major random effects, you have to focus on a tactical level to react to how the game changes every turn. If you have to wrap the core gameplay experience up, that’s how it is. I’ve been playing Hearthstone since it was beta launched. My first game of Magic was probably in 1994. This is different and fast-paced and doesn’t feel repetitive at all.

Marvel Snap is a mobile-first card game

[00:03:23] Erno: Another aspect is that it’s a mobile-first game, whereas the other card games originated elsewhere. Hearthstone was mainly a PC game and then came to mobile. Then Magic, of course, the origins are in the actual physical card game. In contrast, Snap is a mobile first-in-mind developed game. Another factor in the core gameplay that pushes the game towards that is, for example, the set number of rounds. Because in Magic or Hearthstone, the matches can go quite long and take quite a bit of time, depending on each game.

The length of the match always varies. In Snap, you always have six turns; somebody wins or loses. It forces players, and it’s always short and easy to go. You always know that you can play one game and how long it will take. It forces the matches to be quick. Then another aspect which is innovative and exciting is that the core gameplay brings the snap mechanics, which is in the name already. How the snap mechanic works in Marvel Snap is like a betting system. Every match you win, you get these progression points for your rank or these rank points.

You can bet on any point of the game on any of those six turns. You can say that “I’m going to bet more. I’m going to win this.” It’s the psychological difference: “If I put more of my ranking points into the table and if I win, then, of course, I get more,” so I have that thing. There’s always the risk. Then that also brings a little bit of the bluffing side that you’ll see, “I’m probably not going to win this, but I’m going to bet still.” It’s almost like a poker element that comes into play: “I’m not so sure, but maybe I’ll try the bluff.” Because if you don’t accept the Snap, you can retreat. Then you’re going to lose the game. Then you’re not going to lose as many points as you would have if you had accepted the bet, like poker betting. That’s also short-paced, and that snapping betting type of system brings an exciting and unique twist to card gameplay.

[00:06:02] Jon: Absolutely. It’s a good overview that you guys have pulled out some key parts. Not being an expert in this genre, it is clear that the problem with most of these trading card games on mobile is they have very much seen, “This is how Hearthstone does it, and we are going to tinker around the edges, but we’re going to make a pretty hardcore card game where we have loads of cards.” For mobile and me as a player, when you start one of those games, you are immediately overwhelmed by what’s going on, what these cards are, and what they all do.

In most games, you have a good few hours of work to get a basic idea of what’s happening. Marvel Snap tears that up and streamlines accessibility into a few little pockets. They all work together well in terms of layering how the locations work. You only have to win two of the three locations. You can choose where to place your cards so that you can go, “I’ll lose that one, but I’ll win these two.” There’s quite a lot of exciting decision-making that players have to do, but it’s not based on a very complex understanding of the cards themselves per se, which is the real innovative thing.

[00:07:15] Joel: Definitely. I added one thing you mentioned: the game is like you said, straightforward to get into. As you said, there are only so many cards in the game. They are, of course, introducing more and more cards. For example, the pool is much more limited than with Hearthstone and Magic. Erno also mentioned that this is made for mobile because the games are rapid. You can quickly start a new one. You can retreat if you want and then play another one. If you compare that to Magic, which was originally a tabletop card game with physical cards, Marvel Snap wouldn’t be successful if it were in a physical form because the games would be so quick.

On mobile, it works wonderfully. Then as it’s easy to get to, and we’re going to touch it later, but there are no packs to purchase. You get cards in tiny increments. You get new cards. Eventually, you’ll get all the cards if you play enough. You slowly learn all the cards. It’s not like you’re opening ten packs, getting 50 cards, and trying to learn all of the cards and mechanics, but you’re getting them one at a time, and that’s plenty of time for you to digest everything.

The importance of well-known IP in the success of Marvel Snap

[00:08:37] Jon: You spoke about it being developed mobile-first, and it’s all interesting because the team is a US team, come out of Blizzard, it was. They were PC developers, but they’ve come at it as mobile first. The first surprising thing for me when downloading it is, “Oh, it’s a portrait.” You supposedly play it on your phone. Every other card game, I’m sure some others haven’t, but when you think about Hearthstone, you think about landscape. You have the cards laid out at the bottom of the screen.

This takes it on its head. Cool. We get many other things to pick apart as we go through it. Traditionally, these card-based games have typically been quite a niche. We’ve mentioned some very successful individual products, like Hearthstone and Magic. There’s a surprising amount of games developed for this genre, considering there are few successful games. Those successful games differ from the number of people playing something like Call of Duty. This has always been seen as a profitable niche.

It’s a market that has a capped amount of players. Do you think that everything we’ve spoken about regarding the accessibility that Marvel Snap has broken that argument? Also, partly because of the IP, who doesn’t like playing with Spider-Man and Hulk? Have we seen that this has addressed a different audience that just brought people who wouldn’t play Hearthstone into what would’ve been seen as this collectable card niche, which may not be niche anymore?

[00:10:18] Erno: Yes. As you already mentioned in the beginning, the way they made the CCGs genre, which has always been this niche, hardcore, small audience genre, into a mass audience. All those factors, the quickness of the gameplay, the IP, the appeal of the IP, and also something that we still need to discuss is the meta layer of the game and the progression systems of the game. That is also unique in how they have done it. I’ll explain it quickly.

Progression system

Erno: In the game, you earn cards by increasing your collection level. It’s a linear level that you grow all the time. Then how do you increase the collection levels? You earn character shards or boosters every match you play, and then you upgrade those cards visually. Let’s say you have a Spider-Man; then you play a game with the Spider-Man in your deck. Then you earn, let’s say, six shards of Spider-Man. Then you can upgrade it to a higher level, and the card’s borders change to green, for example.

Every time you do an upgrade, you earn collection level XP. Then you go further and further in the collection level, like a linear line, and then you get to the different reward thresholds. Then you unlock currencies of currencies, which are used for the upgrades, for example, and the new card. All the new cards are basically distributed through the collection. This is a unique loop for the CCG in that you play the game. You are only able to purchase a few of the cards. Once you play the game, you instantly get those shards, upgrade the characters, and unlock new cards.

The cards are pooled into these different tiers. The first group is from collection levels from 1 to like 200. Also, you are not getting matched against players who have played so much more, especially when you don’t have access to those cards. It brings this exciting loop in the meta. All the time, you get the small incremental progression, which is common for mobile games. If you think about Hearthstone, it’s a ranked season, but you don’t get the progression in every game, which is also quite appealing. Also, that comes to monetization. Because all the CCGs have gachas loot boxes and card packs, and Snap doesn’t have that. That also, for a certain audience, definitely makes it much more appealing.

[00:13:47] Joel: Yes. I agree with Erno. This could take CCGs to a wider audience. Erno mentions the frequent progression in thresholds you are crossing in Snap. Like Erno mentioned, you have the collection level almost, let’s say, after two or three games, especially in the beginning, you are unlocking a new card or getting new boosters in the reward track. Then you also have many daily quests, a weekly quest, a battle pass season, and seasonal quests.

Every quick match you play, you can see that you are progressing in either these quests or the collection level. Matches are speedy to play. You get hooked on it. You want to play another one and another one, another one. Compared to Hearthstone, which only has one daily request, you can have three at a time. You get one every day. Then you have these three weekly quests. It’s so much more. They will find this more appealing if you’re thinking about more casual gamers or more mainstream, not CCG lovers. As Erno mentioned, this is much more familiar to other mobile games; these mechanics give you a reason to play another round. The reason is not only the fact that you get, let’s say, four more ranking points. That’s one thing.

[00:15:23] Jon: I think, indeed, at the early stages of free-to-play mobile games, that idea of being quite generous with rewards and getting people into the loops of understanding how these deeper meta-progression systems work and everything you do, you feel like you’re getting over rewarded: “It’s great. I’m going to keep going, keep going.” That’s very important, the first 7, 30 days of retention. We’ve painted the scene of this being a very innovative game, well thought through in terms of the game design and how it fits into mobile.

A phrase we always use for games as seen as being good game design for any game is easy to play, hard to master. Still, maybe you say fairly early, but the easy-to-play bit, indeed, they’ve succeeded on the hard-to-master thing and the complexity, which is really as the games as a service work because some of these games have been around for almost a decade now as free-to-play mobile games. Early stages, where is it for that? They over-indexed on they get people in, and it’s cool; there’s always stuff going on.

You have these exciting poker mechanics. From my point of view, who has yet to play as much as you guys, it’s going to have to be slightly under-indexed on the deep complexity because not one product can’t do everything. Is that a fair argument, or are there things they can do as time goes on to increase the things that hardcore players playing every day do? We always know in free-to-play mobile that there are people who max out content. Because of the way that it’s played, they play games faster than developers can create new content, which is one of the big problems. Where does Snap fit in terms of that?

Marvel Snap has to start bringing more horizontal content at some point

[00:17:14] Joel: I can go first. It’s true that in the future, Marvel Snap, like all the other mentioned mobile games, Snap has to invent more, bring more content, and keep end game players engaged. They are very well built to last in terms of core gameplay and the game’s mechanics. Because you have these areas, they introduce new areas that spice up every match, which helps keep the game interesting even though they don’t have 10,000 cards like Hearthstone or Magic. Even with the smaller pool of cards, they can keep the game fresh because they get these areas.

You can bring fewer new cards to keep the deck meta interesting. That is helping them a lot. As I see it, Marvel Snap has to start getting more horizontal content at some point, whether or not it’s additional play modes. For example, it doesn’t have any social element at the moment. You cannot even play against your friend. There are no teams or guilds or co-op games or bigger tournaments. There definitely will be, though, but that’s one area. Maybe I’m just talking about my experience playing Hearthstone and Magic for a while; I’m also looking forward to Snap bringing new types of cards. Of course, they have to bring new characters and heroes, but they should bring specific spell mechanics or enchantments to increase the tactical depth or the game’s strategic depth. Even though you have only 12 cards in your deck, it might get stale if you don’t bring new keywords, for example, as the other games have done. Those two areas are the ones I’m looking forward to new things in Snap.

[00:19:29] Erno: Yes. You mentioned the strategic depth compared to the more traditional CCGs. It also adapts to what we discussed; this game is made for wider orients and more appealing casual mechanics. That’s why also I don’t see more Snap becoming an eSport, because there’s so much more randomness with the locations and so on, and like you said, the deeper depth is necessarily not there. This super hardcore eSports type of aspects that Magic and Hearthstone have are not there.

Then again, it’s a game for different purposes, and the location system is the key, as we discussed. Every match is different, bringing these new weird moments when a new location is introduced. Then something happens, and it changes each match even though you play with a small deck of cards, it changes the way you have to think every time. That’s a more hardcore, competitive eSports landscape, which could be much tougher to pull off. That’s why the game is a more fun, appealing card game. It could also have a few problems on the super highly competitive side.

[00:21:16] Jon: Given how embedded stuff like Hearthstone and Magic are, if you’re making a game, it’s almost impossible to build a product that will compete with those because they just have been around for so long, but you wouldn’t bother doing that. Interestingly, the developer’s seconding a US developer, but the publisher is part of a Chinese company, ByteDance, which has TikTok. I would only read a little into those two things. Obviously, TikTok says a little bit about being very accessible and just having fun with it rather than being a deep social network; you can also argue, as deep as Facebook.

[00:21:59] Erno: Definitely. As you mentioned, it taps into all of these things discussed in this podcast, especially the post-IDFA era, the more casual going from hardcore to taking more casual elements to widen the audience. You have the IP, which helps you with marketing and monetization. It’s not so whale-driven like those because you cannot target them anymore so strongly. It’s a perfect example of these trends that the industry has been talking about recently, and it taps into those boxes.

Monetization

[00:22:39] Jon: We’ve been very good; we’ve not mentioned monetization until you just did there. We’ve been very, very constrained. We have it as a question clearly, and this plays into this mass market, not so deep, lots of stuff getting for free. Indeed, when it came out, one of the criticisms was, how will this monetize? There’s been some numbers put out. I want to know how official they are, and we start seeing some updates. What are your views on how it’s monetizing and how that will play out in the future?

Is it going to be the basic way of monetizing, like “Let’s find the biggest addressable audience and make it easy for people to spend small amounts of money”? Or can they play into more of what free-to-play mobile people do, which is finding people who want to spend a lot of money and be completist? How do you think it’s playing on that score?

[00:23:38] Erno: I can start on that. When I spoke how the game works, there are no card packs and no gachas, which is the key for many mobile games and CCGs. That’s the feature that brings the spend depth. That’s the feature that brings monetization for the most hardcore users. In Marvel Snap, you cannot do that. There’s little value to spending a lot, which is the key question about that game.

How they monetize is that they’re selling the currency you need to upgrade because you’re going to run out of it at some point. You can buy more of that currency, so you’re indirectly speeding up your progression in the collection level, even though you still need to play to get those boosters. You’re indirectly helping you to acquire cards more quickly, but it’s different. It’s not the same as buying randomized rewards, for example. Then we have yet to discuss the variants, basically the skins for the cards.

The interesting thing about how they work in Marvel Snap is that they are individual cards. You’re not putting variant skin on top of the basic version, but it’s its own card, and it has its own progression and level-up system, so you are also leveling that up, and it also helps you acquire those variant skins. At some point, especially during the higher levels, you need to obtain them because you need to get more of a progression in the collection level; more than just acquiring the basic cards is required. It’s another way to help you go more linearly through the linear collection level.

They just recently added limited-time bundles. They didn’t have much of that yet, but now they have started making bundles like “Buy this variant, this skin of this card, and then the currency, and you can upgrade them.” Then the key thing where I assume 80% of the revenue or something like that comes from the Battle Pass. It’s Battle Pass-heavy. It’s a basic type of battle pass each season, I think about one-month-long seasons; each Battle Pass brings one new card, so there’s an incentive to get a new card that you’re not able to get without the purchase, and you progress through there. That’s easily the key monetization mechanic in the game at the moment. Then if you look at the game’s performance, of course, there was the mega-mega splash in the launch with the mega-mega amount of downloads, which also increased the revenues. The monetization model shows there’s less spending depth than the other CCGs.

When we looked at the revenue per download, it was lower. It’s been a couple of months, a couple of seasons in, and we have seen the spikes of new Battle Pass releases. They always bring a new spike. The downloads are still high, but they have gone down quite a lot. The actual amount of revenue, and the baseline of the revenue, at least yet, haven’t declined that much. If we look at the graph for revenue per download, it’s not as high, at least yet, so the individual spend or the LTV paid user has yet to be high, but it’s steadily still growing. That indicates that even though the downloads are slowing down, the game has retained shares quite well, and the existing users have bought the new seasons. So far, it looks pretty healthy.

So far, it’s been growing all the time. The players have been staying in the game, but then that’s the question, how long will that last? This game can convert more users more widely compared to some of the other more hardcore whale-driven monetization models, and the revenue per download is growing. That remains to be seen. Will it plateau at some point, and when will it?

[00:28:36] Joel: Good points, Erno. Looking at the game and how much they’ve been active in bringing new content, Battle Pass seasons regularly get introduced along with new exciting cards, avatars, and profile pictures. Also, they have brought a token shop, a new way of purchasing specific cards, not just variants, in the shop, which is one way to monetize. Then they had this collaboration event in December. They are bringing content to the game because they know that now they have hit core gameplay, and the players love it, and they’re bringing in new cards to retain these players and trying to increase their LTVs.

Now, the next three to six months are crucial. I look forward to new play modes, not just new cards but new playing modes more on the competitive and social side, some tournaments, some challenging aspects, and playing against your friends. Erno, you know something about this, there’s been rumors on what’s coming. Like so many other games, they need to keep the product new and refreshing and keep innovating; otherwise, they will lose momentum. It can drift down to being considered a mediocre success after two or three years.

Friendly matches in a tournament format

[00:30:23] Erno: Yes, Joel mentioned the new content. That’s the way. As I said, its core gameplay is so great at the moment. It’s so fun to play. It still retains as well. At some point, of course, to some players, it starts to get stale even though new cards, meta changes, etc. What are they bringing to bring a fresh twist to the game? Just two days ago, they released the latest Battle Pass season. They also announced their first new gameplay mode, a friendly match mode. It still needs to be made live, but it should be coming this month.

You can now play with your friends, connect with them, and play matches against them. What’s quite interesting in that one is that it’s not just an individual game, but they created that friendly match in this tournament format. You play three matches against your friends. You start with ten health each. You’re not playing for the rank points but for the health for that individual set of three matches. Let’s say you win the first match, snapped, and your opponent accepts, then let’s say five health points go away from that player who lost.

Then you go to the second game. Then another player starts again with ten health, but another already has five health. It brings this tournament game mode, which is then now, of course, for the community. They can start to build this type of our own tournaments and this type of a thing. Interesting to see how is it received, and then are they going to scale it like a proper mode? Because now, you need to have a code to connect to one player, and it is like a friendly mode. This attractive new way of playing and this new mode is already coming this month, which is great to hear.

[00:32:39] Joel: Yes, it’s fascinating for a game like Snap, that quick tournament mode, at least in my opinion, hits the nail on the head. It would be perfect because I’ve been playing Hearthstone for years, and it still misses that quick tournament mode and more competitive aspects. Yes, you have different modes like battlegrounds, mercenaries mode, ranked and casual and whatever, but there is nothing more significant like weekend tournaments. Yes, you have the Fireside live tournament stuff; at least you used to have that.

If Marvel Snap can pull this off well and then, as Erno said, expand this beyond just friends, using some brackets, some tournaments, some co-op matching of eight players versus eight players, and you have some admission fee. There, you would also have this additional monetization option. Put some gold or hard currency admission fee to one of these tournaments. Then you have great prizes combined with Snap‘s thrill-infused gameplay mechanic. At least I would play this.

[00:33:57] Erno: Yes. That’s interesting because like some other very widely appealing even more casual games like Stumble Guys. It was a hit Fall Guys type of battle royale platformer; feature-wise, it’s straightforward: you play, always go to the match, progress in the Battle Pass, and so on. They have this type of tournament system. Like Joel mentioned, you have to pay a little bit of premium currency to get into a tournament, and then it’s this thrill of multiple games. Even in battle royale, the basic idea is to be the last man to survive. Then combined with the multiple phases, it gives even more of this thrill in the tournament format. I also see this more casual tournament type of feature as something fitting for Snap.

[00:34:50] Jon: Good. They’re still in the early stages of focusing on all that retention bits or getting people in and then retaining them. I think regarding monetization, there are always things you can do. Still, your biggest audience makes it much easier to tweak monetization than if you have a tiny audience. You have to go in this whale-type monetization, which they don’t have at the moment. It’s positive that it’s still focusing on retention. As you’ve pointed out, there are some self-evident things they can do that will grow the retention of other players. Then monetization can change over the months and years. There’s a focus on engaging players and retaining them in the short and long term.

Cool. We’ll see how it goes. Lovely. Thank you very much for your expertise there—lots of enthusiasm about trading card games and CCGs. Thanks to Erno and thanks to Joel.

[00:35:46] Erno: Thank you. Thank you.

[00:35:47] Joel: Thank you. Thank you.

[00:35:47] Jon: Thanks for watching or listening to the podcast, however you consumed it. Every episode, we talk about the mobile games industry and these great new products coming out even a decade into the sector, now by far the largest single part of the games industry and still come up with very innovative ways of engaging audiences and monetizing them and retaining them. I hope you subscribe to the channel. Come back next time. See you. Bye.

[00:36:10] Erno: Bye.

[00:36:11] Joel: Bye-bye.

Introduction

[00:00:02] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile GameDev Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working from our game designers and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and in today’s episode, we are looking forward to what’s going to be happening in the mobile game space in 2023, so that’s going to be fascinating. We have two experts to help us with their top-level views on what’s going to be going on in trends and what games we should be looking out for. We have Wilhelm Voutilainen, who’s a chief game analyst at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Wilhelm?

[00:00:35] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Doing good. Thanks for asking, Jon.

[00:00:38] Jon: Good. Obviously, you’re full of the Christmas spirit with your lights going. Also, I have Teemu Palomäki. How’s it going, Teemu?

[00:00:48] Teemu Palomäki: Doing great. Great to be here.

[00:00:49] Jon: Good, good. As you point out, you are also a chief game analyst at GameRefinery by Liftoff. We have many Chief game analysts there because you’re all experts. I will kick straight into what’s going to go on. Many trends are always going on, but the things that drive trends are the products coming out. What games should we be looking out for in 2023?

What mobile games to look out for in 2023?

[00:01:14] Teemu: I’ll start with some exciting RPG games that I’m looking forward to, as well as from the professional side. To begin with, Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis. Final Fantasy VII is, obviously, one of the most famous console games out there. What they are doing is they are remaking that game and all the Final Fantasy VII compilation stuff into a mobile game. That’s relatively unheard of. It’s a mix of art styles and a chibi art style on the map. Final Fantasy VII remakes graphics, so it’s a weird combination, but it’s going to be interesting to see how that turns out.

That’s one to look out for. Then currently released in Japan, is a mobile game version of Fullmetal Alchemist, a popular manga IP released in Japan to celebrate its anniversary. It’s almost the 20th anniversary. It’s a high-quality, high-production value game. Since that was launched late this year, it should be coming about a year later in the West if their usual patterns apply here. Then from the western side as well, with a Chinese twist, there’s an open-world version of Assassin’s Creed in the works. It’s an open-world mobile RPG taking place in 215 BCE China. It looked high quality when we last saw the content of it. It’s interesting to see if that will make it to next year’s releases. Wilhelm is more into these, but Warcraft Arclight Rumble is also a beautiful game.

[00:03:40] Wilhelm: Yes, it’s exciting. It’s mixing Clash Royale mechanics but having PvE and other RPG stuff. I’m personally really looking forward to that one.

[00:03:56] Teemu: One last game that comes to my mind, something that I’ve been playing in soft launch, is Clash Mini from Supercell. It’s the last one standing of the recent Supercell soft launches, as they had Everdale and Clash Quest, which got buried, so it’s interesting to see if this one will end up standing. It’s been one year now since the soft launch. It’s quite a fun game, but interesting to see if it’s good enough for Supercell.

[00:04:41] Wilhelm: Yes, and of course, those were just RPGs. Of course, we have lots of other examples, like shooters. Lots of new shooters are coming in, possibly in 2023. Of course, everybody knows Call of Duty Warzone mobile is coming. It’s interesting as it has this cross-progression Battle Pass and the PC version. It’s also interesting to see how it will do compared to the Call of Duty mobile already in the market.

Of course, from other massive shooter IPs, we have VALORANT Mobile possibly coming, bringing a different kind of more tactical and slow-paced gameplay compared to rapid and fast movement shooters that we have right now in the mobile. Rainbow 6 Mobile is likely coming, same for Battlefield Mobile. Then another interesting one is from the developers of Garena Free Fire. We have Garena Undawn, which is an open-world zombie survival shooter.

We have seen some successful open-world zombie survival games in the Asian market, but this is interesting to see how these will do within Western markets. Now you have this shooter gameplay to that as well. Then we have Sausage Man, one of China’s most successful Battle Royale games. We have that also coming to the Western market, so it’s interesting to see if we see more goofy casual games will work in Western shooter markets. Of course, we have Avatar Reckoning, which Teemu knows more.

[00:06:35] Teemu: Yes, I recently watched the first movie of the blue Avatar characters, and it’s entertaining. It takes me to a new world separate from what I usually see. I’m curious to see this game since it’s a shooter game where they are wearing tactical vests. It’s the guns that are the selling point of that IP. Interesting to see how that lands, especially after the new movie comes later this month.

[00:07:17] Wilhelm: Yes, and then, of course, the racing genre is finally getting some action as well. We have Racing Master, a stunning-looking racing game from NetEase. This could be something that revives the racing genre on the western market. Of course, we also have Kart Rider Drift, a sequel to the successful Kart rider games, which are incredibly successful in China. There’s also some location-based stuff like NBA All-World coming from Niantic. Interested to see if there could finally be some successful location-based thing other than Pokemon GO, but yes, we’ll see.

[00:07:59] Jon: Cool, that’s quite a list. Some other ones will be either known or unknown at the moment, but most of those we categorized as midcore type games. As we’ve discussed in other podcasts, 2022 was generally tricky for casual games. There may be reasons for that. How will that change in 2023 for those games that are always very popular, always will have mass appeal, and go hard on monetization? Where do they go this year?

2022 was a tricky year for casual games. How’s 2023 looking like?

[00:08:40] Wilhelm: Yes, that’s a fascinating question because, as you say, most of the new top 200 grossing games this year were mid-core and not casual. There were few casual games. If there were new super successful casual games, they were something new. For example, it just hit the top 100 grossing, Match 3D. It’s a unique Match 3 game. There could be some new genres that could grow, like merge, that could be something we could see growing.

Some exciting games that haven’t hit the top-grossing charts but appear a lot in them, and are more ad-monetized, are these idle arcade games that combine hyper casual with RPGs and these title crafting mechanics. Those are super unique, and I like the gameplay in those games. We could see hybrid genres like this moving more from ad monetization towards IP Monetization.

The problem is in ad targeting. In 2023, the most successful new casual games are these hybrid casual, idle arcade games. Of course, we have seen the significant current trends in casual. I’m yet to see somebody try to make a similar game to, let’s say, Match Masters, which has been a massive success. This game is a pure PvP Match 3. Could we see games like that? Maybe. Of course, mini-games have been monumental in casual. We could see more mini-games focused games, platforms for mini-games or games like Township, where half the game is a crafting game and the other half is just playing different mini-games and mini-game payments. For example, renovation is saturated already. I need to see that more new renovation games could be that successful. Tapping on those other trends could be the way.

Shooters have been a hot area over the last year or so

[00:11:10] Jon: Most definitely the last year, we spent a lot of time talking about hybridization and games becoming entire platforms and all these mini-games, but nothing to do with the main game coming in. That trend may continue. Some great designers could come out with something from nothing that makes it a big success, but over time, it becomes harder to have new things because everything’s been done in some way.

You’ve got into detail about shooters, which has been one hot area over the last year or so. How’s that shooting market going? Is that very competitive? Are there a certain number of people who want to play shooters, and all the games compete for the same audience? Or is that an audience we still think is growing in terms of the people who would play shooters?

[00:12:03] Wilhelm: Successful games like PUBG Mobile and COD Mobile brought new players to mobile and made the whole shooter space bigger. However, just pure battle royale shooter games are not highly saturated, and only a few new battle royale games are coming to top-grossing genres. Call of Duty Warzone could be one carried by massive modern existing IP.

Looking at the success on PC and mobile and other markets, we have seen many different kinds of shooters. We still have space for RPG, Looter, and PvE shooters in the Western markets, one of which is Garena Undawn. That could be successful, in terms of that there’s space for that.

Moving to hero shooters, so games like Overwatch, a game called T3 Arena released in the US market. For a short while, it reached the Top 200 Grossing. That could mean that some big studio could make a hero space shooter, maybe even Overwatch mobile. That could work well. Then these more Counter-Strike style shooters and the VALORANT style shooters will still be based for those as well.

Then lastly, the extraction shooter, so Escape from Tarkov-like games. We have recently seen this with new Chinese games whose names I cannot pronounce. It’s in the Top 100 grossing in China markets, and it’s an extraction type of shooter with a different kind of gameplay compared to the other shooters. You enter that match, you loot, and there are PvE mobs and other players. If you die, you lose your loot. It gives this rogue-like vibe. There would also be space in the western market for this kind of shooter.

[00:14:21] Jon: What tends to happen, especially with that last example, is you have games that are hits, but they bring a new atmosphere in. They start with very niche audiences, and then over time, people work out how to take what is a shooter. Still, it has this new tension. Do you want to keep going into the level to get more loot but risk dying and losing progression, or get extracted earlier?

[00:14:50] Wilhelm: The monetization aspect in those games is also really interesting. For example, this Chinese game is the only mobile game where monetization works like you make in-app purchases for items, then enter a match, and you can lose the item. No other mobile games can lose items you have purchased. It works for them. They’re monetizing super well in the China market.

IP trend will continue in 2023

[00:15:15] Jon: Underpinning a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about so far is either external IP or leveraging existing game IP. Again, in 2022, we’ve seen a lot of big games using existing IP and being quite successful around that. That trend is going to continue. Is it almost impossible to have a starting-from-scratch mobile game with no IP attached, whether it’s an external media or coming off an existing game franchise? Is that space just being squeezed?

[00:15:55] Wilhelm: Looking at, especially the last six or seven months of this year, the new top 200 grossing games, a massive percent of those, especially in mid-core, are IP-based games. We went through the list of the hottest new games coming in 2023. Almost every single game was either an IP-based game or a sequel to an already existing, big mobile game. It will be hard to do well in mid-core without an IP. It could be easier in casual and is in casual casinos, as well.

[00:16:44] Jon: Part of that plays into what we discussed last year: the inability to target and find the people who would monetize your game. IP makes it much more manageable. You’re paying a cost upfront, or there’s some, whether internal or external, giving you leverage to widen your immediate audience, which helps you on the marketing side.

That was the top-level stuff, and we’re going to dig into some feature-level trends. One thing that every business wants to know about monetization. We’ve got quite a few bits on monetization. I’m going to kick off with gacha, which is ever popular. Where are we going with gacha? Indeed, there can’t be any more complicated gacha mechanics. They’ve all been done by this stage.

What does the future of gachas look like?

[00:17:47] Teemu: It’s going to be interesting to see where it evolves because, just a week or two ago, we got news from Australia that they will possibly make loot boxes or gachas adults-only content, so completely prohibited from minors. Belgium and the Netherlands already have some limitations and some bans there. It’s interesting to see where it evolves. MARVEL SNAP was recently released, and it has more transparent monetization. They don’t have gachas at all. It is interesting to see how that game can succeed if others will copy similar monetization models.

We’ve recently had a few games removing gacha elements, which is rare. We had Mario Kart Tour that took out their monetized gachas. There are still randomized rewards as part of Battle Pass and daily rewards, but you can’t sink your money into the gachas. There’s a daily rotating shop, and you can choose what you want to buy. Similarly, Brawl Stars and other better-performing games removed their gacha mechanic from the end-game level-up system.

Then just recently, they announced that they would be eradicating gachas or boxes and have this massive campaign like “okay, now is the last time to get these boxes and then they will be gone”. They have yet to announce the replacement, but it was some progression system. The more you play, the better characters you can unlock. It will be interesting to see how that works out for them. If this is a trend, that will continue to the following year because gachas are getting hate from players and governments. Interesting to see where gachas will evolve.

[00:20:40] Wilhelm: Yes, gachas will probably be one of the most interesting feature trends in 2023. As Teemu already mentioned, many gachas are getting removed. However, possibly going into the following year, we have also seen the trend go the other way. Some gacha types are becoming more popular in some games and genres.

Talking about casual games, we have also seen the special gacha mechanics coming to this genre. For example, Coin Master has often used these event-tied special box gachas. Box gacha is a gacha where you have a small pool of items. Each time you pull something out of the gacha pool, it gets removed. You only have to do a certain amount of pulls to get the gachas. Then the price points get big at the end, so it monetizes efficiently.

Playrix’s games have also started using gachas, like Homescapes. Then talking about the new gacha types. Each year there seems to be one huge gacha trend. This year we saw preview gachas emerge. This year, we’ve already seen engagement gachas becoming more popular. Engagement gachas are tapping into those same benefits that Battle Passes bring. It works as an engagement feature but also as a monetization feature. We have games like Pokémon UNITE, Diablo Immortal, and Hearthstone, all bringing this engagement gachas. For example, Hearthstone brought their new gacha. You have to purchase the key to the gacha, and then you have to win an Auto Chess match, and then you get to open the gacha. There’s this engagement in the middle. These will probably become more popular as more big games utilize this.

[00:22:52] Jon: That’s interesting. Going back to your initial point, Teemu, it was interesting. Yes, you’re right. Belgium brought in laws saying that gachas were gambling, so you could do it, but you needed a gambling license. No gaming company wanted to deal with that. They pulled it all out of Belgium. That was a few years ago now. At the time, everyone was going to start pulling it out and not have it restricted to the Netherlands and Belgium. It’s always the thing that if a big market starts bringing in legislation, then everyone has to make a change.

What we see is that Mario Kart probably wasn’t monetizing very well for the players of Mario Kart. In that case, it makes sense for someone like Nintendo. They’re not making much money, so they position themselves as “we’re against gachas”. The problem for most people is that’s the critical part of your monetization. That’s just that mechanic, or that random mechanic is so powerful psychologically. I think legislation will only ban them if you can see the tension in there.

Maybe you’re saying, Wilhelm, that having an engagement gacha means you’re protecting yourself because people aren’t just randomly throwing money. You wouldn’t buy loads of keys if you weren’t going to do the work and then play through it. In that case, you’re getting the best of both worlds because you’re getting the committed players who want it. You’re stopping people who may not have such good self-control and just buying things for the sake of it.

It’s a fascinating interaction between game design and social, moral, and ethical thoughts, and all this monetization. I want to keep an eye on it. Good. I think probably maybe even more prevalent in our podcast series last year, Battle Passes. Surely, again, what else can be done with Battle Passes? Have we yet to see every iteration possible? Clearly not.

Have we yet to see every iteration of Battle Pass possible? Clearly not

[00:24:55] Wilhelm: Yes, Battle Passes are so popular already, so I see them becoming less prevalent in the next year. Different iterations, similar that there have been other unique gacha mechanics in gachas. These new iterations of Battle Passes will become more popular. We’ve already seen a lot recently, like in Lily’s Garden, one of the top Match 3 games. They added this new gacha mechanic to their Battle Passes plan. In some Battle Passes rewards, you have a specific time to play to get to the reward, or you will lose it on the premium tiers.

You have 15 minutes to get to the next level, and you will double your reward if you can play that progress at Battle Pass in the required amount of time. In Call of Duty Mobile, they added that you can purchase the old Battle Passes you still need to complete. That’s a unique and exciting way as well. Making those items feel more or less rare, some players might think, okay, if they are adding old Battle Passes, should I purchase the next Battle Pass plan? It’s hard to say if that’s a super good way of implementation or not, but definitely a unique and interesting one.

[00:26:21] Jon: It’s interesting. It’s like putting in like we’re just discussing with the gachas almost, you’re building what was a hard monetization feature, and you’re building engagement in there. You’re encouraging people to go from the free Battle Pass to the paid Battle Pass because you have more optionality. That’s going to be an underlying trend to all that stuff.

What else have we got? Okay, so avoiding App Store fees. Everyone wants to avoid App Store fees. That could be quite a big thing here with all the ongoing still epic stuff and Apple and Google having to dismantle certain parts of the App Store. What should developers consider to get their audiences to avoid paying App Store fees for buying stuff?

Everyone wants to avoid App Store fees

[00:27:03] Teemu: Well, web stores, those are interesting. Those have been popping up ever since the court battles that Apple has been having. Some more prominent companies started going first, testing the waters a little bit but then increasing their presence in the web stores. For example, Supercell started with just a Clash of Clans web store. You could buy the clan Battle Passes there. Then they saw that it was good because they added Hay Day, and with Hay Day, you can purchase a foreign pass and premium currency.

Most recently, they added Brawl Stars there. You can buy premium currency in Brawl Stars. It’s all done through the Supercell ID. You can also donate what you buy in the web store to other players in your friends’ list in the Supercell ID. It’s cheaper for the player. It’s 10% cheaper to buy from the web store and for the developer. If Apple takes a 30% cut, it’s a win-win situation if the players find the web store. Another interesting one is that State of Survival recently added a 4X game where you can buy premium currency. Usually, you can only buy up to a hundred dollars in the game. But, their web store had something for almost $900.

If you want to invest in the game, web stores are best. Though for them, it’s only 5% cheaper in the web store compared to the game. It’s more than just a mid-core thing, as the last example, YAHTZEE with Buddies by Scopely. Their Web store is next level. The first time you log into the web store, you get a gift for your game. The store also has a loyalty system that is just web store exclusive. The more you buy from the web store; you accumulate these loyalty points that you can use to exchange for additional items in the game. They’re going hardcore into the web store thing.

[00:29:48] Jon: It’s fascinating. When I heard Supercell doing it, I was surprised because this is just developers just doing this and not cutting a deal with Apple to do this. This seems to be people just doing, “Well, we can do it.”

This seems to be the beginning of the end for the App Store’s 30%. Even if you’re getting 5% off, 5% for someone spending thousands of dollars a month will be significant enough for them not to do it through the App Store. That’s the saving money versus the ease of use.

[00:30:32] Teemu: For the most committed players, web stores will be a great deal, but most players probably end up purchasing impulsively through the game.

The popularity of subscriptions in mobile games has grown

[00:30:47] Jon: Similar in terms of the App Store monetization being taken down brick by brick, we’ve seen quite a lot around subscriptions, in general, for the last couple of years.

[00:31:00] Wilhelm: Yes, this is a similar subject to that. There were web stores and not avoiding, but reducing, those App Store fees. These auto-renewing sub-plans will definitely gain popularity. Of course, games already have, at least, what they like to call sub-plans in the game, like monthly cards. You make the in-app purchase at one price point, and then you get benefits for the whole month, but it’s not renewing. It doesn’t go through the actual system, the app stores or the Google Play existing sub-region system.

For those subscription plans, almost 50% of games in the US use these monthly card systems. Of those, only 17.5% of the top 200 across the US are utilizing these auto-renewing subscription plans. The huge benefit of these auto-renewing subscription plans is that Google takes only 15% of cuts on these plans. For Apple, it’s the same, 30% for the first year, but it’s only 15% years after that. There are massive benefits to utilizing that auto-renewing subscription plan. I think that will also gain much popularity in the next year.

[00:32:23] Jon: It’s not rocket science to combine the last two things we discussed. Subscription plans going through a web store are great for the developer and potentially suitable for the player if they save on the fees. Cosmetic monetization, what do we mean by that?

As games become more social, cosmetic monetization grows in popularity

[00:32:45] Wilhelm: The things to monetize within the game and what is actually monetized. Focusing a bit on the core gameplay and the pay-to-win monetization, I see cosmetic monetization gaining more popularity in the next year.

There are two types of this. First, we have games that add cosmetic monetization to their existing core monetization. Like Match 3, that are monetized with boosters and retry/continues. On top of that, they are adding some cosmetic items that they can monetize with.

Also, games are already heavily monetized with cosmetics, such as most shooters, for example. I see them adding more ways to monetize with those cosmetics and boost the value of those cosmetics inside the game. I’m going to give you a couple of examples here. Garena Free Fire, for example, is primarily a cosmetic-monetized game, but recently, they have been adding this more value to watching those cosmetics through this. For instance, they added this Trend Plus feature, an in-game collectables album, which makes these cosmetic item sets and these bundles into actual in-game clothing brands. You’re collecting these cool in-game brands, tapping out to this sort of real-life fashion trend as well. Also, they just added this new cosmetic item type.

I will see these new cosmetic item types getting added more to this. They added this customizable cosmetic item. First, you purchase that, so that the skill for your character and then additionally collect and purchase different styles like different colors and stuff like that. You also get rewarded for completing those different collections on top of that. Also, an excellent example of Match 3s where core gameplay monetization-focused game adding more cosmetic monetization is Lilly’s Garden. On top of their core gameplay monetization, they have added these cosmetic character skills that you can purchase directly or through the Battle Pass plan.

Also, they just added these renovation element schemes as well. Usually, you can choose from those three different renovation elements when you are playing the core game. Usually, those are free, but there are only a few to choose from. Then you can get additional unique ones to the Battle Pass plan. Of course, you are also boosting that Battle Pass monetization through those. Those are two really interesting examples, and I see that stuff gaining popularity in the next year, for sure.

[00:36:15] Jon: Generally, buying digital items was seen as very odd five years ago. You might do it as a funny quirk to buy a hat in a game, or there’s a whole thing of you buying Christmas hats or something for a dollar, whereas, now, it’s not weird. For a younger age group, that looks pretty normal. They spend a lot of time in games or online universes.

Why wouldn’t you have spent tens of dollars buying the things you like in those worlds? That’s playing into that as well. Interesting, you say about collecting fashion, you’re building up sets of that, then completing the set and getting more rewards. All these things are tied to the overall progression of the game and the in-game sort of experience.

[00:37:09] Wilhelm: As all of these games are becoming more and more social, adding more social features and becoming just more and more social experiences, that itself also boosts the effects or the strength of those cosmetic items. If you tap on that with monetization, that is an excellent way to success.

In-game event trends

[00:37:32] Jon: Cool. Okay, so that’s monetization done. Next, we’re going to look at event trends. LiveOps events are the things that drive people to stay in games and stay retained, and come back and engage. What are the big trends there? We’ve already spoken about mini-games. Every game has mini-games. Where do mini-games sit next year?

[00:37:59] Teemu: Well, mini-games are, of course, very popular. Many companies try out fake ads and implement the most popular ones in their games. We have all seen those, and many games add them nicely, and people enjoy them; X-HERO was doing pretty well with mini-game style content, first in their ads and the game. People got into the game that way. That will continue, and I don’t see that going anywhere.

We’ve seen a lot of these mobile games restating the same events over and over again. You have the same mechanics for Christmas, Halloween, or Thanksgiving. Recently we’ve seen more games try to be unique with their events. For example, to illustrate the point, Cookie Run Kingdom, what they’ve done with their latest collaboration with the Korean Boy Band BTS, brought in a new rhythm gameplay infused with their normal core gameplay. That is something that we had yet to see in the game before. Now that they are celebrating Christmas, they brought in a cake decoration event. Something that they haven’t done before, it’s unique, and characters are coming in; they tell you what kind of cake they want, and then you decorate the cake according to the instructions to get the rewards. To avoid players getting bored or finding the game too repetitive, more and more games will try to mix things up and bring new events now and then to spice up their calendars. That’s one bigger trend.

[00:40:30] Jon: Key to those things is knowing your audience. From having BTS in a cake decoration game, I assume that Cookie Run Kingdoms is skewing slightly more female, but this could be wrong. The point is that you’re engaging your core audience.

[00:40:51] Teemu: The core audience might be surprised by what they like. I’ve been playing the game daily. The cake decoration might be a miss for me, but I never knew I would be this invested in BTS. Cookie Run Kingdom has surprised me.

[00:41:08] Jon: Seeing a new side to you, Teemu. Okay, alternative gameplay elements. What’s going on there? What does it mean even?

[00:41:18] Wilhelm: Yes, it is a similar trend to these mini-games, but I would not categorize them just as mini-games. It’s basically bringing this alternative gameplay from other genres to the game, usually not permanently, usually just through events. A perfect example is League of Legends: Wild Rift. It’s been bringing in a couple of bigger events with these light RPG mechanics, where you collect these story event characters and develop them.

These light RPG mechanics make those events feel different and feel like they would have much more depth than just having simple task events. Homescapes just had this merge event. If players love merge games, why don’t we also have a recurring merge event in the game?

On top of those trends, competition events in casual have been trending for a couple of years. That trend will continue in the next year as well. The Candy Crush games have been bringing lots of direct PvP elements and stuff like that. I think I talked earlier about the Match Masters direct PvP game; we’ll see this in more casual games, probably in events. Events are a great way to try out new mechanics and see what your players would like.

[00:43:17] Jon: We mentioned IP earlier on in the podcast, but one thing about IP is it is very flexible. We have games based on IP, but also we have this collaboration between IP, which has been prevalent in places like Japan for over a decade. We’re seeing that more globally now that IP is not seen as a fix; here’s a box where the IP has to sit within that box, and you’re very inflexible. IP is now everywhere.

[00:43:52] Wilhelm: IPs have been trending heavily; collaborations events and IP-based things in the game have been trending heavily. The trends themselves and also the game developers have noticed that it’s just super beneficial for both. For the games, it’s either a great way to boost engagements, monetize with or even both.

We have seen games like Garena Free Fire bringing this permanent, so instead of just having collaboration events, they have been bringing permanent IP-based characters to their game. The game has almost ten different IP-based characters, like Justin Bieber. We have Cristiano Ronaldo. Recently, they just added a famous Thai actress there as well. Of course, the game is huge in Thailand, so that’s quite clever.

Of course, from the brand view, more and more big brands want visibility in the games. Roblox is a great example. Many of the biggest brands in the world already have their own worlds and games inside Roblox. To them, it feels like a no-brainer that they want to have this visibility inside games. Games are massive.

There are games like Roblox with so many players and stuff like that. Of course, it’s different compared to, let’s say, you are running an ad in a game compared to having an actual world that the players can interact with or that the players can see that, okay, hey, this person is playing as this super cool version of Justin Bieber, for example. Of course, that boosts the Justin Bieber trend as well.

The biggest blockchain game teams have been silently developing their games

[00:45:56] Jon: Yes. Cool. Good. Then I hesitate to mention this last point because it’s been going on for a while. I’m going to keep my mouth shut. I’m going to let you guys talk. It’s been around a little bit in 2022. We’ve not seen it have any eventuality or massive impact. Where do blockchain and Web3 sit in mobile?

We’re not sure about the most interesting bit: Apple has formally released some terms and conditions about how you can use NFTs in the App Store, which we didn’t have before. Some people are very excited about that, and others think Apple is doing it all wrong. We have yet to find out because we’ve not seen any great examples. To finish up quickly, is that going to be different? Is it just going to be one that we don’t know how it will pan out?

[00:46:48] Wilhelm: 2021, of course, it was the hottest trend ever to make a blockchain-based game and have blockchain mechanics in your game. 2022, of course, has been silent in terms of new releases. The biggest blockchain game teams have been silently developing their games. 2023 could be interesting. We could see some at least big-name games already getting released in 2023.

Well, it’s also fascinating to wait and see. First, the first genuinely successful blockchain games or games that utilize blockchain technology will not be these play-to-earn games because, as we have seen, those can be hard to sustain with the market situation being super bad and stuff like that. It will be more, especially the successful ones; we use these play-and-own games where it’s a gameplay-first blockchain games.

You can play the game without ever knowing it has any blockchain. You don’t need to interact with it if you don’t want to. I think games like that. Then it’s just a normal game, but you can own your assets if you want to. One good example I want to throw, for sure, is Highrise. It’s a mobile-first game, which has added NFT technology on top of that. Grossing-wise, it’s doing extremely well. It’s still in the top 200 grossing. You can play the game without ever touching that blockchain stuff, but if you want to, you can own your own assets and sell them whatever. Highrise is an excellent example of a successful blockchain-based or blockchain technology-utilizing game.

[00:49:08] Jon: Some of the stuff we’ve been talking about on the monetization side is interesting. It’s a small jump, particularly now Apple have put down some formal rules about how they want to deal with digital assets. You can see that potentially being another monetization layer for particularly engaged audience members. They can get some of these things for free or work their way up and buy some of these NFTs now using in-app purchases. It just becomes another layer. You have the free layer, the paid layer, and the blockchain layer. We will see. Certainly, yes.

Publicly, there are quite a lot of the big mobile publishers that have announced strategies in this field. We’ve yet to see much actuality, but we will see. It will be something to keep your eye out on in 2023, amongst everything else. We’ve covered an awful lot of stuff today. Wow. Well done, guys. That’s a lot of research. Thanks to Wilhelm and Teemu. Thanks for coming on and kicking off 2023 in style. Thanks, guys.

[00:50:10] Wilhelm: Thank you.

[00:50:12] Teemu: Thank you.

[00:50:13] Jon: Thanks for watching and listening to the podcast however you are consuming it. In every episode, we’re delving into what’s going on in the mobile game sector, which, as you can see, is extremely vibrant still. It’s still the biggest sector in gaming, still growing first and underpinning all these different technologies and different layers on how to make games and build mass audiences. I hope you come back to every episode. I hope you are learning as much as I am from all this expertise. See you next time. Bye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile GameDev Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends. I’m your host Jon Jordan and joining me today; we have two experts, of course. The first expert up is Sergey Neskin. How’s it going, Sergey?

[00:00:23] Sergey Neskin: Good. Glad to be here today.

[00:00:25] Jon: You are the CEO and co-founder of Neskin Games. Also, another guest, no introduction required, is Kalle Heikkinen, senior market analyst at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Kalle?

[00:00:41] Kalle Heikkinen: Very good. Very good. We had the first snow here in Helsinki yesterday, so it’s wintery and setting up the scene for Christmas.

[00:00:50] Jon: I was going to say I was in Helsinki last week, and it was just getting a bit of snow, but not quite settling. I’m glad winter has finally come. In this episode, we will be talking about Sergey’s game EverMerge. It’s interesting because we’ve spoken with Kalle and other experts over the last few months about the merge mechanic and its importance in the casual mobile game market.

This is an opportunity to look at some of those trends again, but Sergey will also give us in-depth information about how he’s designed his game, so we go into more detail. That’s the plan today. Before we start, Sergey, do you want to introduce yourself and the company and fill out some background for us?

[00:01:39] Sergey: Yes, sure. I started my career as a software developer, creating websites, web services, and business applications. I worked for an outsourcing company during the last few years of my development career. There is nothing wrong with being just a developer in an outsourcing company, but I’ve been dreaming about making my own products and doing something for self-realization. The game dev industry was desirable in terms of creativity and self-realization.
I decided to attend the first Game Dev Conference in my life in Minsk and felt all the swipes, that was amazing to see people like me, people who wanted to entertain other people, and that’s where I met my partners, Val and Alexei. In 2011, we founded a company called Neskinsoft, and later we reincorporated this company as Neskin Games. I’ve worked in the merge genre for over a decade, and EverMerge is the latest game we released.

EverMerge

[00:02:49] Jon: Let’s talk a bit about EverMerge. The official title is EverMerge: Merge-3 Puzzle. You made a whole bunch of games. What was the idea to do a merge game? Did you have an idea you wanted to do merge games, or did you have a specific vision for what you wanted to do in a merge game?
[00:03:09] Sergey: We’ve been in merge games since 2011. We’ve got lots of insights. We did many experiments and learned what works, what doesn’t, and what the audience wants to see in the game. We released about 14 products, almost half of which were merge games. The idea is that game design is the set of solutions you want to try. We didn’t have a particular idea like “we want to create a merge game with fairytale creatures”. It was different. As a game designer, you feel like there is potential, the scope of thoughts and things you want to implement. That’s how we created EverMerge.

Three things to know about Merge genre

[00:03:59] Jon: Cool. Good. We’re going to get into more detail. Before we do, Kalle, can you give us a high-level view of what’s been going on in the decade in which merge as a subgenre has been emerging, to not overuse the term?

[00:04:14] Kalle: Yes, for sure. There are three things that I’d like to highlight here. First is the trend for, let’s say, more than narrative-focused merge games. Two good examples are Gossip Harbor and Love & Pies, which have especially recently risen in the ranks. We’ve seen some merge games experiment with narrative in the past, but not like these games have been doing. I’m not only talking about their quality but also the amount of quality. In these games, the narrative beats are a novice retention mechanic as well, as players want to know how the story and the characters develop in these games.

Then the second one is that compared to many other genres in the market currently, the merge genre is a relatively active space. There are lots of new games coming in, and overall, it has been difficult to scale new games in the market. Merge is an exception to this. For example, if we look at the top 10 merge games, all the top 10, except Merge Dragons and EverMerge, have been released in the last two years. 6 out of the top 10 merge games have been released in the last 18 months. There are quite a lot of new entrants to the scene.

Third, we see merge as a mechanic used more and more outside merge games. It’s used on the product side and in user acquisition activities. Some examples include a very successful slots game, Cash Tornado Slots, that has some merge elements in one of its recurring events, obviously Top War for a strategy game that utilizes merge. Gardenscapes just recently had a merge event. We see merge in Tower Defense, in idlers; Golden Goblins, for example, is a successful idle merger game. That’s been interesting to follow as well. It’s not just in merge games; other games also utilize this mechanic in events and other features.

[00:06:40] Jon: It followed the trajectory of match as a gameplay or a mechanic that people easily understand and seem to like doing repetitively.

[00:06:54] Kalle: It’s very accessible. You pick up a merge game or play the merge feature in a game. It takes you five seconds to figure out how this mechanic works. Yes, for sure.

[00:07:11] Jon: Universal thing. Okay, cool. It’s a good overview there. Sergey, you have this company where you’re experts in merge by now. You made some mistakes and saw successes, but with EverMerge, how did you filter those previous experiences to develop your best idea of what would work? Please tell us about that process and how you have all these possibilities. How do you end up with the first stab at the product with which you go into soft launch?

Filtering previous experiences to create the best new idea

[00:07:48] Sergey: Yes, for us, it was the next step in our long journey in the merge genre, and we moved forward to EverMerge. We wanted to reinforce the exploration aspect of the game from the beginning. We experimented with it in our previous games called Robin Hood Legends. We split the gameplay into levels and tried to monetize this game with auto moves like in classic match three games. This didn’t work well, but players love opening, moving forward, and opening new levels. Then we thought, what if you’ll provide the player with the ability to unlock fog, and there is some mystery going on under this fog?

It was the concept of a single game board where a player has some freedom to move forward. Of course, the game is linear, but we wanted to experiment in this direction and know if it would work. We saw Merge Dragons on the market, and it was a good example that it works, but we had to convince our partners as well, like do we want to put time into this or not. I’m glad that we did this.

Narrative in mobile games

[00:09:13] Jon: You’re saying you decided to focus on exploration as one of the main themes there. Kalle was talking about narrative being a theme. Did you have a lot of narrative in there? Or should we think of exploration as something different to narrative? Because they could be the same thing, or they may not be.

[00:09:33] Sergey: Well, it was not our primary focus, so we tried to keep the narrative as simple as possible, but I saw many examples. Some other games do this well, which is why they resonate with the audience.

[00:09:47] Jon: I guess the problem with narrative is it’s pretty expensive on the content creation side because you have to create a lot of specific content, whereas exploration, depending on how you structure it, can be a bit more open in that you don’t end up having to have a lot of artists just churning out this long narrative.

[00:10:08] Sergey: Yes. It adds additional complexity to the game that you must never forget. It includes the cost of content production and so on. In our game, it’s simplified, but you can find well-known fairytale characters. This works exactly as a good IP, but we use folklore. We use things that everybody knows well from childhood. This was a good thing as well. We combined this with exploration with non-characters and only needed to put a little work into the narrative aspect.

[00:10:52] Jon: The nice thing about that using fairytales is it is established IP, but you don’t have to pay a license because you say it’s almost like open-source IP that just historically has been there.

[00:11:08] Sergey: You need to be very careful, though, because some Disney movies have their own interpretation of IP. If you want to draw Sleeping Beauty or other characters, be cautious with this because, yes, it’s IP that we know that comes from fairytales, but be careful. We did special legal checks with our partners. I appreciate they helped to manage this.

[00:11:35] Kalle: To add to the narrative stuff. Having a heavy narrative focus might work better in these Merge-2 games. Merge Mansion specifically doesn’t have a heavy emphasis on the narrative.
Gossip Harbor, for example, a Merge-2 game, does it, and it is natural that after you complete a specific task, you have that narrative bit. Whereas in Merge-3 games like EverMerge, as they are slightly more open-ended and more about the exploration, the narrative isn’t the thing that you can fit into the pacing and the core loop, as well as in Merge-2 games. I might be wrong in this, but it’s something that comes to mind.

How to ensure player progression?

[00:12:35] Jon: Yes, that’s a good point. We’ve gone through a bit of the genesis of the project and you guys as a company, and how you chose your thematic fairytale exploration, that’s a good overview. But then, when you start to drill in a bit more, the gameplay is about merging, but then when you’re thinking about progression and those more mechanical gameplay elements. Then obviously, that feeds into the more meta structure. How did you come up with the product from that point of view? Because obviously, you have gameplay where people are merging stuff, and they’re getting new elements, and that’s cool, but then how are you keeping people in there for a week or a month?

[00:13:25] Sergey: First part here is that the merge gameplay is good at entertaining players and retaining them. The gameplay itself is addictive. It provides you with enough goals. You don’t need, if you know how to make your first merge game, you know what’s next. First are games we released in 2011 and 2012; they were really simple, just game board, merge gameplay, and all you have to do is to merge, and it worked. Just pure concept of merge game works well. On top of this, you add exploration, daily objectives, quests, and additional goals. Then you get the game where you have a variety of things to do and a variety of things to play.

Then on top of this, you add events and all those activities that you can find in EverMerge. In this case, you get EverMerge. This game gives you lots of goals and directions to progress in. You have enough freedom, but it’s linear enough not to get lost in this. If we look at the first experiments with EverMerge, no one will enjoy playing with our early prototypes. It was a game board separated into two areas. The left area was supposed to provide the player with farm merge gameplay where you merge carrots, crops and so on. The second part was about the building aspect.

Players were so addicted to the merge gameplay they ignored anything else. We had to find ways to force players to leave the merge gameplay and go to the city builder aspect. It was a nightmare because if you, as a game designer, are doing something like this, stop and then maybe you’re doing something wrong. That was when we decided, no, we needed to have everything in one place and provide players with the city-building aspect and merging pieces in one game board.

How Neskin Games worked out who EverMerge’s audience is?

[00:15:46] Jon: Can you talk a bit about your audience? Because for people developing and running games, there are lots of things you can do and do some of those things well in terms of game design, but often once your game launches and you have an audience, it takes time to shift that audience around. Because some people have chosen you and like what you’re doing, you have to give them more of what they want rather than some clever idea that your game designer wants to provide them. Please talk briefly about your audience and how you worked out who they are.

[00:16:17] Sergey: Yes. The appearance of the game is essential. It works as a funnel for the audience, of course. We saw many male players who were playing our game. They complain, “I love it, but I’m not sure I like it because it’s a game designed for little princesses?”. We have some limitations. I refer to them as the DNA of the product. Some game design decisions and visuals restrict what we can do in the future. We have freedom with newer products. We will be able to cover more people, more male players and so on in the future. The focus is clearly on the female audience, and we work with them.

[00:17:15] Jon: Because you’ve made a lot of merge games before, that wasn’t a surprise to you that that casual audience is likely to be predominantly female.

[00:17:26] Sergey: That’s what we saw in our previous game. In Robin Hood Legends, we also came up with Robin Hood as a woman going on adventures against the Sheriff. We noticed that in Robin Hood Legends and the games we released previously. That’s because there is something from Merge-3 games and hidden object games. After all, in merge games, you have to find two similar objects, and then you have to collapse them. It’s part of Merge-3. These games were, again, targeted at a female audience.

Are Merge games mainly targeted at female players?

[00:18:14] Jon: Kalle, have we got any examples of merge being used in a more predominantly male audience? Does anything come to mind?

[00:18:23] Kalle: Yes. The first thing that comes to mind is the example I already mentioned, the Top War example. Top War is a 4X strategy game for those who don’t know, but it also has incorporated some merge elements where you merge, for example, certain troops. Then you create something new. Top War also uses that as a mechanic in their user acquisition activities. If you’ve seen some Top War ads, you have also seen some merge elements.

Post-IDFA, all the titles, especially in 4X strategy base, consider how to enlarge their audiences. Using various kinds of UA assets to introduce new types of players to the gamer base is something that these games do. At least we’ve seen Top War doing that, so that’s been interesting.

[00:19:27] Jon: That would be an outlier because we do not see widespread adoption of merge at the moment.

[00:19:35] Kalle: That’s true. Another genre that isn’t quite dominant, but we’re seeing a sort of sub-genre in Tower Defense, where games like Rush Royale are using it. The entire gameplay is based around merging things and then using that in the PVP core gameplay. That’s another example.

[00:20:03] Jon: This all makes sense because in Tower Defense, generally, you’re levelling up as you go along. You can imagine instead of levelling up; you merge up. It fits into the flow that’s already existing there, but yes.

[00:20:18] Kalle: That’s true.

“Successful mobile games now are as much about liveops as the foundation they launch with”

[00:20:19] Jon: Perhaps we’ll see an opportunity in a future episode where we’ll talk about the explosion of merge in hardcore or mid-core. Sergey, let’s focus a bit now. We’ve gone through the process, and you’ve taken us through some design considerations. Something like soft launch is something that’s key to mobile games. One of the reasons mobile games are so big is they now have this period where they can put out a product in certain territories and gain this audience feedback, then use that to iterate and hone the product or come up with something different. Was soft launch a big thing for you guys? Or because you’re experienced, you knew what to expect? Or did it throw up any surprises?

[00:21:03] Sergey: When we released the game in soft launch, we saw great metrics, and it proved that our hypothesis worked, but along with this success came responsibility because we knew that players, especially those who are paying aggressively in the game, will be progressing through the content rapidly. We had limited time to develop suitable event types for the game. Then we had limited time to test different AB tests, a sample game economy, and some features because we came up with numbers, but we needed to figure out if these numbers were correct.

Some tests took about two or three months to see results and then be able to fix this. We worked in a constant rush to release the game in November. This didn’t happen. I appreciate Chris Mahnken; he was a producer of this game and helped me navigate several challenges. His advice was to wait to release the game in May because we’ll have more events, features, and content. We experimented, developed new features, and experimented with existing tests like any other company. But we felt like there was something big, and we didn’t want to fail.

[00:22:30] Jon: The extra six months of development was a fairly significant extension of budget and everything. It’s one of those clichés that a bad game’s always a bad game, but a late game’s only late for a short period. That’s the freedom: if you think you’ve got something that’s doing well, then you need to spend the time to invest in the processes that you need to fulfil that potential.

[00:22:57] Sergey: Yes. You have no right to fail. You need to support the game and get out as much content as possible. The biggest nightmare was after release because we were naive and thought it would be easier because we had so many events and things planned. It wasn’t. Later, we had to come up with short-term, midterm, and long-term events and other types of events. Now, we created an R&D department in our company, and we’ll be working on new kinds of features and events where we connect different genres. We should have thought about this more. Small studios need to scale up and manage their success.

[00:23:44] Jon: Kalle, we’ve mentioned many times that successful mobile games now are as much about live ops as the foundation they launch with. Unless you have an extensive department doing live ops, live ops is a real challenge for people who make games because it’s the beating heart of a successful game now.

[00:24:09] Kalle: Exactly. They’re just getting increasingly essential tools to create excitement, engagement, and, thus, monetization. That applies to merge games as well. For example, I recently looked at merge’s performance at the Halloween event. They just had helped the game reach record-high revenues and end up in the top-grossing position. That’s interesting.

Monetization in Merge games

[00:24:33] Jon: Actually, you raise a good point. We’ve yet to go into monetization. We skated around it a little bit, but sometimes in the casual space, that’s the challenge. Because billions of people play casual games, you can always get games downloaded and played. The monetization bit is tricky because these people like to play. There are many of them, and you need monetization because of your business, but how you balance that is tricky. How has that changed over time? Has it not changed over time? Were you always sure how you wanted to monetize?

[00:25:12] Sergey: Yes, our approach for monetization in merge games is slightly different from other genres. We can be softer than other games because gameplay in merge gives you better retention, and we rely on this audience who is in love with the game and who plays with us for a longer time. That’s why we focus on this type of player. We don’t force you for short-term monetization, and then later, if you feel like it’s the right thing to do if you want to boost your progress or if you want to get more items, you are free to do this.

Of course, events work well in terms of monetization, which makes a big difference in any game. The longer the player stays in your game, the better service you have to provide. You need to come up with a variety of events, and you need to entertain this audience to monetize. This is how it works. You put in events and long-term monetization features; that’s it.

[00:26:29] Jon: Am I correct in that you also have a battle pass system?

[00:26:32] Sergey: Yes, like in any other games, you can find a battle pass in our game. We have two options. This is one of the biggest differences between us and Merge Dragons because we have timers; you have to skip timers if you want to get gems. That boosts gem sales as well.

[00:26:56] Jon: Interestingly, you’re saying “of course, we have battle passes”. Is that something that every game should be having now? We have had many games use it, but some games still don’t. Are battle passes now understood by the audience as something that should be in there? Because that’s an obvious way of monetizing in a big way.

[00:27:16] Sergey: Yes, but it’s not a problem for players to understand how battle passes work. It was a prerogative for mid-core games, but now you can see more and more of this stuff in casual games, and that’s fine. Other trends as well are coming to casual games. That’s interesting to see.

How to keep the right content balance for players just joining the game and elder players

[00:27:39] Jon: EverMerge has been around for a while now, over two years. You’re not a new game anymore. You’re getting to that middle level. You think it’s going to go for many more years. What do you think about that product now? It probably needs improvement; you don’t think of it as mature, but you still hope it will grow more in terms of users. How do you match that?

Because sometimes, you get to this stage with over two years in, and some people have played you since day one. They know how to do it. They want more complicated things, but many new people are still coming in. Some games get very complex for new players because they come in, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on there. They’re like, “Whoa, this is really complicated. I thought it was a simple merge game.” How do you work at that balance between existing players who love it and have been playing it every day for two years and new players who are like, “Let’s try this out”?

[00:28:25] Sergey: As I mentioned, keeping the right balance for players joining the game is crucial because we have plenty of them. We also must remember that elder players have their own needs and need to be entertained. Our company has a game design department, and they work hard on any additional feature that will appear in the game to ensure that it will maintain the two-year and first-timers’ experience. It will not negatively affect any part of our audience, but we need to feed the elder players as well.

[00:29:09] Jon: The good thing about free-to-play mobile games is you have all the data about, you can look at all the cohorts and see very clearly how the changes you make impact differently.

[00:29:21] Sergey: Yes. Even some features that we release work for some players and don’t for others. We have to decide, do we leave this in the game as it is, or we go to another iteration of AB tests and rebalance this feature. This is a part of our job as well. With every year, it’s more and more complicated because, as you mentioned, the product matures, and then you have to double-check every aspect of every feature and so on.

The market is full of new games and new titles. It’s a pleasure to be in this market. Of course, we saw many unsuccessful clones because they just tried to rip off the game without thinking, but some games look promising. I’m playing some clones of EverMerge and enjoy doing this because games like Merge County iterate fast on events. They were braver and more creative in this aspect of the game, which worked well. That’s one of the right approaches. So now we have to be fast, hence why we have this R&D department.

There is constant competition in other genres, but it’s a pleasure to see because when we entered this genre, there was no genre. There were just one or two games, a few hour games and nothing else, just silence, but now we see lots of games, and there is a promising future not only for EverMerge but for new products on the market as well.

The future looks bright for Merge genre

[00:31:08] Jon: Kalle, do you want to take that one on with your looking into your crystal ball? How do we see merge? Is merge already a very large subsection of casual? Is that going to grow linearly, or is that going to jump over and become a key gameplay option for almost every mobile game?

[00:31:31] Kalle: I agree with Sergey that the future looks bright for merge. As we already discussed, new entrants are constantly coming to the scene, some finding their way to the top charts and sustaining them there. There’s also a fair amount of innovation. For example, it was in Playtika’s build and battle merge game. That was quite interesting. There are some makeover merge games that I’ve seen in the scene that could be something that we will see more of in the future. As I said, we see merge also in non-merge games. That trend is going to continue. One thing that needs to be added to the market is an IP-based merge game. At least I haven’t seen any. It would be fascinating to see the merge gameplay combined with some exciting IP.

[00:32:30] Jon: There we go. Your prediction, will Kalle be right over the next six months? I’m sure somewhere someone is working frantically on some IP-based because, boy, wouldn’t they be. Good. Something to look out for. Lovely. Thank you very much to Kalle and Sergey as well for their expertise. Thanks, guys.

[00:32:49] Kalle: Thank you.

[00:32:49] Sergey: Thank you.

[00:32:51] Jon: Obviously, your homework is to immediately download EverMerge, check it out, and see how Sergey and his team have been getting on. If you still need to do your other homework, I’m sure you have already subscribed to the podcast. We’re available as an audio podcast and as a video podcast as well.

Every episode, we talk to people building out this mobile game sector, the largest single sector of the games industry, and still very vibrant and still new. We talk about the hybridization of what’s going on and these matters, gameplay elements being put together like little Lego blocks and these fantastic products being created. We hope you are enjoying the podcast. Come back next time, and thanks for watching. Goodbye.

Introduction

[00:00:03] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile GameDev Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is, and is not working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and we will discuss trends. This is a big trends episode. We’re looking back at 2022. We have our experts, Kalle Heikkinen and Erno Kiiski, both chief game analysts at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How is it going, guys?

[00:00:31] Erno Kiiski: Going great. Good to be here again. It’s probably the last episode for me for the year. Interesting to look back at what’s happened.

[00:00:42] Jon: We have an important milestone before we get there. We have a little celebration if we can be so bold. The podcast series now has over 25,000 downloads. So, congratulations to us and everyone who has been downloading, watching and doing things with the podcast and videocast. Thanks to everyone for that. It’s good to know that we’re not just talking into the ether and that people are getting valuable data out of that. Let’s move on now. Yes, end of the year. It has been a pretty eventful year. We’re going to focus on mobile games.

As our overall broad theme, we’ll look at various things; the main thing shaping quite a lot of what’s gone on is scaling games, so taking games and making them more popular and profitable. Erno, you will lead us with how that has shaped the mobile game trends in 2022.

2022 mobile game trends

[00:01:40] Erno: Yes. Of course, if we talk about the whole game industry, especially the mobile game industry, the biggest topic in everyone’s thoughts has been the big changes in terms of scaling the game. So in terms of the UA, Apple changes, ATT, etc. That can be seen in the market and in the games that have been able to scale and find audiences. If we need to pinpoint any bigger thing from the market in the past year, that will probably be the one.

Or everything else that is going on in the world, the macroeconomic stuff and so on, but if we talk about specifically the mobile games industry, that has to be the main topic to start with. Then how it affected the market and in terms of especially the new games where the, of course, UAs are important for the whole lifecycle of the game, but especially if you bring out the new game, how you can find the audience, so more crucial than ever.

If we look at the data, for example, for the iOS US market now, we can see that if we look at games launched in the past 365 days, only eight games are currently in the top-grossing 200. Only a few less-than-a-year-old games have been able to scale among the top 200 grossing games, so there is quite a big difference. For example, if we compare it to the games that have been released in the past two years but are older than one year, there are over 20 games. This is not counting the games released in the past 365 days.

Between the 365 days and 730 days, there are over 20 of those games. If we look at that, there’s a big empty space in the newer games in the top-grossing 200 currently in the market. Naturally, the most significant thing over here is the difficulties of scaling, UA, targeting, finding new audiences, and scaling the latest games. Of course, as mentioned, COVID has gone away to some extent, and people are doing many other things, including macroeconomic stuff.

If we consider the ATT-driven factors and look at what games have been scaling over there in the past year, eight games passed, and five have some IP slapped on top. We have, of course, Diablo Immortal, Marvel Snap, we have Apex Legends, The Office Idle game, the MLB basketball game, and so on. Most games have utilized an IP’s strength to scale and find organic users and downloads in this changing landscape.

Quite an interesting factor that I want to highlight also, if we look at, for example, Dislyte, it’s a brand new IP from Lilith, a time-based RPG. If we go deeper and look at what kind of a game it is, it uses mythological gods like Loki and Odin. It’s not specifically an IP, but it can be thought of as a soft IP, so to speak, that they are using well-known things but then reimagining that. If we count that, six of the eight games have some existing connection for the users and the players in the market.

Overall, I would say that is a big commonality; the toughness of scaling games to the very, very top nowadays and the strength of organic or the impact of an IP is bigger than ever, I would say, that we can see already in the market data.

[00:06:28] Kalle Heikkinen: Comparing that is very interesting. Because if we look at the data in the Chinese market and see how many new games have been released and have been able to sustain in the top 200, it’s a pretty different story. There are 44 new games in the top 200 there. Various reasons behind that. One of them is that after the stringent regulations for releasing new actual IDs to the market, the floodgates have opened a little bit. There are a lot of new titles coming to the market.

Also, the Western games that used to use the same app IDs that they use in the West have now been forced to use Chinese app IDs. That means practically that these games have had to be relaunched in the market, so they show up as new games. That’s been interesting. Then another one relating more to the Western market is that while it has been tough to scale new games, there’s one corner that I would like to highlight as being very active in the sense that a lot of things are going on, and that is the merge space.

If we look at, for example, the top 10 merge games in the West, we can see that the first two are, Merge Dragons! and Merge Mansion. Both have been around for a while, but the next eight games are new games released during the last year. One specific trend we see in the merge market is the rise of these narrative-focused Merge 2 games, such as Gossip Harbor and Love & Pies, which have recently been doing very well. That’s been a new shift in the merge games regarding what kind of merge games have succeeded. One final note on merge is that it’s also a mechanic that, in 2022, we saw utilized more in non-merge games. To name a couple of examples, Cash Tornado Slots. That’s a slot game that has a pretty exciting merge event going on there. Then, Top War is another example of a strategy game that utilizes merge. Then Gardenscapes just recently launched a mini-game event that is all about merge. Exciting things are happening in the merge space.

[00:09:19] Jon: For people who aren’t up-to-date with it, Apple changed how you could target users. That was important because mobile game developers are very good at identifying the right target. They wouldn’t necessarily know the person, but they could accurately target a device. They could target advertising on people who loved hardcore RPGs. That was good for mid-core developers looking at these highly monetizable games to find hundreds of thousands of people who liked those games.

As soon as you lost that, those genres tended to do worse because they had to do more general advertising to everyone, and they couldn’t find these people who liked to play and spend in those games. That’s the broad trend that’s happened. The interesting thing is Apple led up for a long time about how these changes would happen and had lots of debate. We all had opinions about what would happen, and then we’ve seen over this year what has happened, and it’s been as bad as all the pessimists suggested it might be. We’ve seen roll-on effects on companies like Facebook/Meta. It has impacted them more generally, but it is interesting that even in that space, what you find is the landscape changes, giving you relative winners and losers even within that.

Hit launches of 2022

[00:10:48] Erno: In that also, actually, if we go a bit deeper in the individual games, it’s quite interesting. If we talk about the most recent ones, like Marvel Snap, there are the IP and organic benefits. But also, if you go into the game design of Marvel Snap, first of all, it’s absolutely a great game.

I love the game, but if you look at the monetization model, it’s quite different from this traditional CCG gacha-based monetization. However, it has a much more player-friendly monetization where you play the games, and you progress through an XP bar where you get XP for upgrading the carts where the upgrades are just cosmetic, but you’re just unlocking cards. You’re not able to buy gachas, and there isn’t a similar spent depth possibility as for the gachas. That game has gathered a big hype around it.

Even in the more traditional Western hardcore, PC and console players have been loving the game, and it has gathered a lot of attention. They are going for a bit lower revenue per download type of model. I’ve been able to get crazy amounts of downloads with all of those combined, but it’s interesting to see how sustainable that model is. That’s the big question because when the initial hype dies down a little bit, how will it sustain? That takes us to another similar low revenue per download type of game that scaled in the past year, Stumble Guys.

It had big viral hits and crazy amounts of downloads, but if you look at that game now, when the download virality peak is going down, the revenues are going down on the same scale. It has been declining quite a bit. If we look at, for example, from the last couple of years, there was Among Us, which had the same kind of graph. Nowadays, it’s a much tinier game than it was during the peak of COVID and so on. The performance graphs of those two games, Stumble Guys and Among Us, look similar. Now, they got acquired by Scopely a couple of months ago. It’s interesting how they can turn it around by operating the game with more muscle.

[00:13:37] Jon: Good. Okay, so that’s interesting. Again, you’re playing into how the marketing landscape has flipped the way games are made. A game like Marvel Snap wouldn’t have worked so well a year ago because it would’ve been competing with people who could target their audiences better and make more money, but we’ll see how that one plays out. Let’s move on. Let’s talk about a game design type trend: mini-games. We mentioned it a little, and Kalle said it, but where are we with mini-games? Is this going to be the next thing for next year?

Are minigames the next big thing in mobile?

[00:14:13] Erno: Yes, it’s an exciting trend that has been happening. To some extent, for a longer time, it has increased based on our research. It has been increasing quite a bit, and the interesting thing is that there are a couple of different motivations with this approach and a couple of different ways it has been utilized. If you start from the simplest form, we have these UA creative mini-games that, for example, Playrix has been doing for a while.

I don’t have exact data for the actual gameplay and retention. Still, because they are the same misleading ads implemented in the usually early player funnel to some point, they pop up. They are just there so they can say, “Okay, we have these mini-games in there.” Then if we go further, that’s happened this year and found big successes. This is an interesting case for a game called X-Hero. X-Hero is an idle RPG that has been on the market for almost two years.

The success, especially in the West, has been low, but what they started to do a bit similarly is that they began to experiment with different hyper-casual mini-game types of advertising. Then they made these Save the Doge ads, which probably everyone has already seen. Then if we look at the performance, that was a thing that skyrocketed the downloads. Then how it defers from the Playrix approach, it’s a permanent mode nowadays in the game, so you’re playing this Idle-character-collector-RPG, that’s the main game.

Then you have these hyper-casuals mini-games, Save the Doge levels, then you play those, and then you get some resources in your main game, but it’s a permanent mode. It’s going further in terms of thinking of how to do that. It’s an interesting case to study. As mentioned, if we look at X-Hero, we see a massive download spike. Then also, the revenues followed quite a bit, but then if we look at the revenue per download, it went down because the conversions of the players that they were able to get those Save the Doge ads weren’t as good as before. If you look at the margins, they are seeing a much better performance after all. That’s an interesting, next step UA-driven approach, and then we see a couple of examples that did that.

[00:17:15] Kalle: We see these games in China as well. There are at least two similar games in the top-grossing. It will be interesting to see. Will we see more of this in the West as well? On the topic of mini-games, of course, everyone has their definition and opinion on what a mini-game is. I think slots are one genre where there’s a lot of innovation going on when it comes to mini-games. Currently, at GameRefinery, we’re tracking the top slots games for the live abstracter tool that will be released later in the following months. We can already see that approximately half of the top slot games utilize some mini-games.

For example, we have some games, such as bingo and working mini-games. I already mentioned the merge one was quite interesting. There’s this lottery chatbot thing going on. That’s one way they are trying to freshen up the slot gameplay with various kinds of side core game places to have at least in an event format in this game. I would follow that space for exciting innovation.

[00:18:50] Erno: Yes, exactly, and that takes us to if we talked about people doing for the UA purposes. We have the slots genre, in which the mini-games are still a bit simpler, but the main idea is there. Of course, some are purely monetization disguised in a mini-game format, but then we go to retention-driven and engagement thinking. If we think about acquiring new users, it’s more complicated than ever again. Then you want to keep your players in as well. That is also an approach that we have seen. One good example is what Playrix has been doing with their game called Township, which is a tycoon game.

They have been doing this for a long time, but nowadays, if you look at their events, the core events that they have, most of the events they have always have something active, or there’s what I would call a proper mini-game. It’s actual gameplay, whether it is a platformer. They have added, for example, Match 3 mini-games into the Township on top of the Tycoon core gameplay. Many other Tycoon games, like Family Farm Adventure, have these approaches, but it’s different with an energy-based exploration game. They have had merge games, and they have had archery mini-games.

Then with all of these events, mini-game events are then intertwined into the whole gameplay loop of your game, so you’re getting benefits to your main core gameplay. For example, in Township, you get Battle pass progression by doing quests, you get progression for your Guild War, and then you get rewards for your main core game plan. This is a different way of thinking about mini-games, adding something refreshing for the player, and some new core gameplay is also on the mid-core side. Shooters have been doing it for a while, especially Garena Free Fire; they have had, for example, Stumble Guys, Among Us modes.
They recently had a 1v1 brawler-fighting Mortal Kombat type of gameplay mode. These mega games are adding these things to bring variety to the players, which is interesting. Then as the last example, which is a bit different as previous ones have been done in an event format, AFK Arena has now added a permanent mini-game. They had a Match-3 mini-game they implemented just recently. Survivor.io scaled quite recently like a hit game from Habby with their gameplay. And now AFK Arena has added a similar gameplay mode, which you can then play, and then get variety for the player in terms of different types of gameplay. This is a different approach than, for example, Playrix does with their UA creative mini-games. It’s a more retention and engagement-driven approach, but we have seen both methods much more during the past year.

In-game events are a good way for developers to try out new things

[00:22:24] Kalle: Yes, because these are in an event format. Apart from the stuff that Erno just said in the end, there are good ways for developers to try out new things because you don’t have that fear of messing up the core progression and gameplay. You can have it as an event for, let’s say, seven days, and then if the metrics need to improve, move on to the next thing.

[00:22:54] Jon: They have to be very careful with what everyone wants is something to be so synergistic that the mini gameplay or whatever you are adding into really already appeals to that market. Then you can bake it more permanently, have a better product and be very nervous about one’s exact opposite. Some of the ones where 95% of people care less about it and don’t play it, but 5% care about it. You’re also using it as an internal funnel for different monetization. Again, we’ve discussed this with some previous podcasts, a game within a game.

It shows how some of these games started as very simple mobile games, and now they’ve become this enormous great gargantuan metaverse; maybe metaverse is the wrong term, but a whole entertainment super apps. Super apps are quite an exciting concept, but games are becoming that way. You can have all manner of games within a game, and if people are stuck in it, then keep them in there. Something else we have discussed previously, but good to get a 12-monthly overview: we see a lot more competitive gameplay in mobile games across all genres. Why is that happening, and have we got any good examples?

Why are competitive gameplay elements gaining more popularity?

[00:24:19] Erno: Yes, especially, what I would tie this into, especially in the casual, and especially in the puzzle game market, which is a big part of the casual market. Of course, competitive elements, depending on the genre, have always been part of the game, and we have seen increasing in games like puzzle games where the competition naturally hasn’t been a big thing. It’s always been about just playing your own games, completing levels, and so on. It’s been going for a while, but it exponentially increased in the past year due to different competitive events and features in these games.

What is important here is to differentiate from direct PVP games and stuff like that most of this, 99% of these are indirect competition. It’s done with the event. A classic example of this is the leaderboard-based event that has been used for Match 3 games for a long time. I don’t know, two-day, three-day event. When you play your primary progression levels, you get a score for the event, and then you’re placed in a leaderboard with, say, 50 players. Then after the event ends, you might get a reward if you play the levels the most. That’s the classic traditional example, but this has been expanded.

Especially if you look at, for example, Royal Match, the mega-hit of the past two years and how they have been scaling their event framework. Over half of the events they have now running are if someone is unfamiliar with Royal Match; it’s a Match 3 where you complete levels one by one after your classic Match 3 game in the gameplay loop. How that game has been evolving is since the launch, pretty much everything has been concerning events. Over half of these events they have added to the event framework have been competitive.

Different twists to this same idea that, okay, they have added, for example, the Lightning Rush event, which was this event that you player trigger yourself, and then you have one hour, a leaderboard competition. Again, this is the one hour I will play competitively, but if I don’t want to, I can play by myself. There’s also that extra competitive push for me that, okay, I’m close to the rewarded positions, then that pushes me to play a few more levels, and then naturally, that drives me to do the monetization part of your game. For the puzzle games, nothing has changed.

It’s the extra moves, it’s the boosters, but these competitive events give the extra push for players to play those primary progression levels. It gives them extra incentive because, for a long time, casual players didn’t like competition at all. They didn’t care about it, but when it’s implemented in this indirect format, it’s easy to not care about it. If you don’t want to compete, you can easily skip that. If a player gets that sense of “I want to get a little bit further, get that rewarded position,” it gives an extra push. With that variation from different types of race events, I will go to individual examples. Still, many twists around this, a fundamental idea of creating an event and adding a competitive side to it, has been increasing. If we look at the events that different puzzle games have been adding to their event frameworks.

[00:28:37] Jon: It’s interesting the users choosing to opt into it. You might be interested, then you go, “I’m going to be sitting in a queue for two hours or something or waiting in the air for something.” Using it to fill the time that you know you have available. You’re already incentivized to be more competitive.

[00:28:54] Erno: Exactly, and if you look at those direct PVP-type features or games in that space, few examples have worked. Match Masters is probably the only game in that space that has found relatively big success. That game has also been scaling in the past few years. In that sense, there’s demand for a competitive element in these games. Then if you look outside of that, there has been little; for example, in Candy Crush Soda Saga, they tried to make a more direct PVP feature. In terms of performance, we didn’t see any significant effects, and they have yet to scale it across their portfolio, for example.

This type of direct PVP, I get that for this audience, it’s not necessarily, or it has to be a specific type of an audience, or there might be less overlap. Still, this more indirect little bit of extra push utilizing that competitive motivation has worked because we have seen to scale in a big manner in the past year.

[00:30:10] Kalle: I only want to add that it makes total sense as games tap into an extended set of competitive and king-of-the-hill motivations. What we see here is the same as when casual games started expanding their meta layers, and through that, we’re able to tap into new motivations related to those. This is not a puzzle game, but if we’re talking about just competitive elements getting more popular in casual games, Stumble Guys can also be linked to this conversation. Of course, it’s very casual and party-like but also very competitive by nature, and that’s also one example of a very competitive event-casual game.

[00:31:09] Jon: We get to Battle Royal as a similar thing where many players never get their chicken dinner, but they’re still quite happy to play within that role. You can be competitive and force your way through it, or you can play more casually, even though it’s a very competitive game, so that’s down to the individual. Cool, okay, so renovation and construction, what do we see with those? They’ve been around for a while.

Renovation trend in Casual games

[00:31:40] Kalle: Yes, we’re talking about the progression visualization where players have to fix, renovate, or decorate. Maybe it’s a room, a manager, a garden, or a garage. All of us have been engaging with these types of games, and this is nothing new, but we are seeing more coming up in event format, also in games that don’t have these scape styles renovation methods. But, to answer why these events are so popular, especially in the last year, if we deconstruct these events and go to the deep end of this, we can see that they are task-based events with a progress bar. Just in renovation events, the progress bar is visualized more compellingly. Cleaning up a house or renovating a garage feels more satisfying than watching a progress bar grow.

That’s one or even the biggest reason why we are seeing more and more of them. Just a visually engaging way to give players a concrete sense of progression. A more specific trend related to this is that in certain games, we also see permanent features related to renovation events. For example, Lily’s Garden has this; what was the name? I didn’t check the feature’s name, but maybe Design Home was the feature’s name. The idea was that you play these recurring events in Lily’s Garden, get these tickets through engaging with those events, and then use those tickets to renovate this permanent feature you have in the game. Similar kind of feature I’ve seen in, for example, Solitaire crews as well. It will be interesting to see if these kinds of permanent features that are renovation-related support the recurring event frameworks. Will these get multiple in the future as well? I’m interested to see it.

[00:34:10] Jon: There’s a little like what Erno was saying about if you have an hour leaderboard, you’re opting into that. It may appeal to a certain mindset of people who like to complete it and get everything nice and tidy. You choose the right psychological cues you know your audience will be interested in. Probably it could play better in more mid-core games, but you can see a laid-on process.

[00:34:40] Erno: It’s like Kalle said, it’s interesting because it’s nothing new. Playrix escape games are almost ancient already. They’ve been around for a while. For example, Toon Blast, which, again, didn’t have any meta. Just play level after level. The background picture changes in the menu, and then you have events, and so on. They started to implement a more permanent meta layer, where you have a similar view for a limited time duration as in Royal Match. You have the permanent meta layer, and then you know you can renovate the castle in that game, so tapping it through their event framework is interesting.

What Kalle mentioned about this Lily’s Garden one is also quite interesting, and we have seen it in other games. The difference is that Lily’s Garden has this permanent meta layer. It’s like a Gardenscapes type of game, but they added another renovation that is progressed by playing any of the events in the game. This feature ties in all your event frameworks and gives even more extra incentive to participate in the events, and they give this a connected progression vector for all your events. Royal Match added a similar type of feature as well. They added this collection. It’s not a renovation, but you collect cards and complete albums, and it’s a permanent one. It’s not limited time, but the way to get those cards is by all the game events, giving this extra push for the events. These types of things wrap up the whole event framework together. It’s also an interesting one to follow.

Out-of-app monetization

[00:36:33] Kalle: This was also discussed in some previous episode, but it would’ve felt wrong to omit it from the list of the top trends we’ve seen in 2022. What we’re talking about here is that we are seeing more and more games utilizing out-of-the-app purchase options for developers to bypass the Apple Store fees. We have seen developers such as Supercell, for example, using external stores, but the most interesting example of this has been from Game of Thrones: Conquest, which is a strategy game. They added a completely new currency. It was called Gems, which is used to buy offers in the game nowadays.

I assume you can still use real money, but you are incentivized to use Gems as a player because it’s cheaper. It’s only sold outside Game of Thrones: Conquest. You can only get it from a specific website or occasionally in some of the in-app offers in the game. As I said, players get a significantly better deal when they buy the Gems from the website versus just buying offers with real money. This has been a hot topic in the industry, and we have seen it implemented in some games. The Game of Thrones: Conquest example has been the most interesting.

[00:38:23] Jon: Do you think that Warners, a big media company, has been in a stronger position to negotiate those sorts of things with Apple as a separate thing or is this something that, over time will become available to everyone? Because clearly, the more of their revenue they can get out of the App Store, which is 30%, then that’s what they’re going to want to do. It’s interesting. How are people being allowed to do it now within the App Store? It seems very open.

[00:38:53] Erno: Yes, it comes back to the epic Apple lawsuit case and the verdict. You can have these outside app monetization stores, but the funny thing is that you cannot advertise inside an app that’s not allowed by Apple. That’s why as Kalle mentioned, the Game of Thrones example is quite interesting because you have the currency inside the game, and then when you go and try to find out where can I get this, it’s just like, “Find out more somewhere else” in their website.

This is playing around with the rules. Is it allowed? Is it not allowed? Either way, it’s still part of the game. It’s increasing more and more, and some companies are helping different developers to do this type of thing, so more and more of this type of store. Of course, we see it first in the big companies like Supercell, which have the resources to make their own web stores. However, looking at the top-two grossing games, which is naturally most of the big companies, or mostly big companies. We’re seeing it increasing more and more.

For example, Supercell added this one for Brawl Stars last week. Now, they have Clash of Clans, Hay Day, and Brawl Stars, and you can get better deals if you go to their web store and webshop to buy the deal compared to buying in-app. Then, it’s harder, especially for the casual genres. Mid-core or hardcore players will find the way; they will figure this out, but for a casual player who plays casually, how you will get them guided into your apps outside the app web store is much more difficult.

We have a list of these games among the top games that are utilizing it, and, Yahtzee With Buddies from Scopely, it’s the only casual game, well, Hay Day, of course, is a casual game as well from Supercell, but those are the two only casual games, and all the others are mid-core, mainly these hardcore, mid-core type of strategy and RPG type of games, and so on. Definitely, a bigger trend over there, not so much in the casual. Then these big companies with a wide portfolio already have this infrastructure ready, like Scopely have a store for all of their games nowadays. Yahtzee is up there as well.

Yes, as Kalle said, if we look back at the more prominent trends of last year, it has to be like I mentioned. Not yet super widely used, but it’s increasing over the past year. I’m 100% sure that in the next year, we will see it even more.

[00:41:56] Jon: I guess, yes, as you pointed out, but for someone playing a casual game and occasionally spending $5 once every couple of months, the friction of going to a website and putting in your credit card doesn’t matter versus someone who spends a thousand dollars a month hardcore gaming, they leave a 30%, it’s going to be worth your while doing that. Cool. We’ve covered quite a lot of stuff there. Thank you very much, Erno and Kalle, for your expertise. Also, in this podcast, we will look forward to what will happen in 2023.

The time never stops on the Mobile GameDev Podcast, so remember to subscribe to the channel through your podcast channel or subscription service. Aso, if you’re watching on video as well, please subscribe. Every episode, we’re looking at the mobile game space, which is still, as we always say, the biggest single sector in the gaming universe and growing fast globally. We are providing these insights that will keep you informed and come back next time to see what’s happening. Next time we’ll talk about 2023, so that’s a good one to tune in. Till next time, see you then. Goodbye.

[00:43:14] Erno: Thanks. Bye.