F2P Monetization Secrets & Breaking Into China (or Anywhere)

F2P Monetization Secrets & Breaking Into China (or Anywhere)Charlie Moseley Creative Director, Tap4Fun

Who am I and what is Tap4Fun?

About Me

• 31 years old, from Washington D.C.

• Gamer since age 5, when I fell in love with Mario & Luigi

• In China since 2005, working on mobile games with Tap4Fun since 2010

• In it for the international hit

About Tap4Fun • 3 years old, from Chengdu China (capital

of Sichuan Province)

• Focused only on multiplayer strategy

• The highest grossing mobile developer in China (ranked ~30 worldwide)

• In the words of our CEO Kevin Yang: “An international company based in China, not just a Chinese company”

• Also it for the international hit

What This is About • Sharing our 3+ years of experience, and

our rise to notoriety

• How to create concepts and develop products for China, or anywhere

• How to market your games to international audiences

• Monetization, localization, optimization, and experimentation

• My perspective as an expat in China

Some Quick Numbers on Tap4Fun

Today:

500k DAU30+ Million Users

300 “Tappers”

Product Overview

• Build, upgrade, compete with players, and expand your power and influence

• Iterative development cycle, male-skewed demographic

• Common SLG game themes + one or more unique elements per product

Our Games

Island Empire

2011

Galaxy Empire

2011

Global Threat

2013

Galaxy Legend

2013

Spartan Wars

2012

King’s Empire

2012

Spartan Wars Imagery

Our Biggest Markets• United States • France • United Kingdom • Russia • Germany • China

So now you know about Tap4Fun and myself.

How do we decide which games will work in China, or anywhere?

Creating Concepts

Concept Creation

• Simple ideas. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” - Davinci (1977 Apple slogan, too)

• Evaluate team ability and determine your level of risk tolerance

• Familiarity + “a hook”

Concept Creation

FamiliarNew &

DifferentSweet

Spot!

Danger: Clone territory.

Danger: Alienating.

Balanced

Concepts for International Audiences • What ideas are understood and

appreciated by world cultures?

• What cultural precedent is there for your concept?

• What cultural bias to you bring to your concepts? Examples: China & Sanguo, Japan and anime, me and prohibition era concept

Liquor Empire“Build a 1930’s underground empire and reign as Kingpin over your organized criminal network”

What is the Prohibition Era?

• Believing it was a crime against God, in 1920 the United States made alcohol illegal, causing an underground alcohol culture to explode

• At the same time, Mussolini expelled thousands of members of Italian organized crime, who immigrated to NYC and Chicago

Visual Inspiration

• Familiar mafia setting

• Unique, old school Prohibition Era setting

• Alcohol-driven game economy

• Historical reference

Why didn’t it work?

Onto a concept that did work...

Spartan Wars • Our most popular game was a concept I

pitched in Feb. 2012: a Spartan-themed game of conquest

• The Spartan theme, with Greek mythology, was fresh and suited the SLG gameplay aesthetic

• Do people understand Sparta? They do, because of one movie.

That Movie Is...

Finding Roads The movie 300 planted “the seed” that made this theme

relatable and familiar. !

It paved the “cultural road” to Spartan Wars.

The Secret Ingredient

The Secret Ingredient

“The only way to do great work is to love what you

do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”

Where Concepts Go to Die

We kill a lot of concepts. Some of them are great.

Don’t worry about it.

Where Concepts Go to Die "We have this culture of celebrating failure," explains Paananen. "When a game does well, of course we have a party. But when we really screw up, for example when we need to kill a product -- and that happens often by the way, this year we've launched two products globally, and killed three -- when we really screw up, we celebrate with champagne. We organize events that are sort of postmortems, and we can discuss it very openly with the team, asking what went wrong, what went right. What did we learn, most importantly, and what are we going to do differently next time?"

- Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen

Where Concepts Go to Die

Try things. Fail. Try again. Probably, fail again. This is all a part of the process of success.

Monetization With stories!

First, a Disclaimer

• Our ARPU is respectable, but due to strategies like Player Cocktails and targeting emerging markets, we aren’t industry leaders in monetization

• We’re still learning a lot. Along with basically everyone else in the industry.

• To prevent this from getting number or acronym heavy, I will explain the situation with real-life examples

Zynga

• Revolutionized social gaming

• Then suffered a calamitous fall. What happened?

• Focused too heavily on metrics, monetization, and “psyching out” players

• Platform fell out but they failed to adapt to mobile

• Not fun. And was, in the end, financially ruinous.

Zynga

Lesson #1: focusing on monetization too much can really hurt you.

Punch Quest

• “Pummel your way through dungeons full of monsters and branching path choices”. Simple side-scroller with brilliant design

• Critics said...

Punch Quest

Touch Arcade: 100%. “Punch Quest needs to be on every device you own.”

Gamezebo: 100%. “Fist Place Trophy.”

Punch Quest

Here’s the problem: it didn’t monetize well.

Punch Quest • Time: first 2 months of release

through Christmas 2012. iPhone, United States

• Lots of great press

• Phenomenal chart performance in “downloads”

• Looks good, right?

Punch Quest

Punch Quest

• Punch Quest gave away too much. PocketGamer said: “Almost no one is paying”

• Is that even a problem? Rocketcat Games is 4 people.

• Other small F2P teams have won every award and still monetized:

Punch Quest

Lesson #2: design for monetization from the beginning if revenue matters to you.

Data Analysis • “Dive into the data” to find out exactly

what’s happening

• Tap4Fun’s ocean of lost data & our corrected path

• MathWorks’ MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory)

• Brian Devlin and our advanced analytics

• Monetization funnel

Monetization Funnel

Monetization Funnel

Carefully check each step of the funnel, from acquisition to LTV and identify and fix problems. Always

improve each link in the chain.

Endgame = High LTV

Data Analysis

Lesson #3: “dive into data” & iterate your way to successful monetization.

Follow the chain and eat the acronym soup: CPI, DAU, ARPU, LTV.

Marketing Your App

Island Empire vs Galaxy Legend

Why is this necessary?

Marketing Island Empire • Our first release, after a 4-month

bootstrapped development cycle

• Zero marketing or promotion upon release

• 10k+ organic users within the first week alone

• User acquisition costs incredibly low: Free App a Day $10k (20-40k installs)

Island Empire2011

Marketing Galaxy Legend • Our sixth release, after a 18-month development

process

• Limited marketing and promotion upon release

• Positive initial conversion rates, high user acquisition costs ($1.75/user on Android, $2.75/user on iOS)

• Tough competition and slow organic growth - user acquisition becomes a necessity

Galaxy Legend2013

The Lesson: Marketing is a Necessity • Each niche of gaming has varying

levels of competition and opportunity. Our niche is crowded.

• Other crowded niches: card games, gambling games

• Proliferating third-party marketing services worldwide with different specialities

• Attention-deficit market conditions lead to skyrocketing user acquisition costs (up to $20/user in certain conditions of region and platform)

• Would Clash of Clans be Clash of Clans without marketing? Consider the quality of CoC.

Marketing Spartan Wars • Before 2012 public launch we begin

key marketing tests in over a dozen markets and collect data: Retention metrics, cost per user, revenue data

• Identify what works, what fails, and optimize

• Spartan Wars & Russia • Seasonal considerations & weekends:

Christmas and holidays

Developed vs Emerging Economies • The highest value users: US, UK, Japan, Korea

• High revenue but tough competition versus lower revenue and weak competition

• Price differences between Android & iOS platforms

• Cultural differences and finding surprises: Island Empire and Arabic-speaking countries

"Why would you want to go into the US when competition is so great and user acquisition costs so much? You need an incredible product. Most international game developers approach emerging markets in some way, but you really need somebody on the ground or somebody with experience that can make sure your translation is 100% accurate, and secondly, someone who can identify the marketing channels important to that region"."In the US market you have major companies that will help you market your product, at a great cost. In places like the Middle East or Southeast Asia, where do you go? You either have to know someone with that knowledge or learn it through trial and error. User acquisition in SE Asia or the Middle East might be $.50 where it's $3-5 in the US"

- Eugene Konash, Tap4Fun Marketing

Localizing Your Game • Which countries do you localize in? • Investment & development costs • Experimental campaigns in emerging

markets: data analysis • Tap4Fun & Arabic: Island Empire &

Spartan Wars • How Tap4Fun has localized • Our latest localization efforts (moderators) • The importance of support

Worldwide Support • 11 localizations for Spartan Wars: English, Spanish,

Russian, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Traditional & Simplified Chinese

• Up to 3,000+ tickets per day shared among multi-lingual support team

• Constantly hiring language majors for support team

• Why this is important: the kind of players who create support inquiries & supporting “whales”

Player “Cocktails” • What we learned from Global Threat: placing players from the same

regions together for World Chat • What we’re doing now: creating cocktails of high and low value

players from disparate regions speaking the same languages. The cost advantage: filling a server with 10k US users is expensive.

• Examples: UK & India, France & North Africa, Russia & Ukraine, UAE & Egypt

• Creating an ecosystem of “predators and prey”. Non-paying users supported by paying users. Balancing revenue & retention.

Video Promotion

Video Promotion Tips • Keep it short (60 seconds, in our experience)

• Assume nothing about your audience: describe your game in simple terms (avoid using industry acronyms)

• Highlight the visual “hooks” in your game (think about these from the beginning)

• Accurately represent your game, same as with App Store preview images

Game of War Trailer

Breaking Into China • The most popular mobile games in China:

usual suspects • Why break into China? Numbers & usage:

subway example. • Cultivating partnerships in China • Plug: Tap4Fun Publishing. From

concepting to design and development to localization, optimization, and marketing.

• Contact us!

Charlie Moseley email: [email protected] twitter: @justcharlie