Bhat's Notes

Mobile Gaming industry has grown 5 times from $13B to $65B in last 5 years.

Every time a GTA game comes it breaks all the records. When people buy a game, they have expectations. In case of freemium, there are no expectations and they put money for the aspects they like in the game. 83% of all games are freemium. 92% of the money is made by freemium games.

Engagement, retention and monetization have inter-play. Retention is the other element. Idea is to get positive ROI.

Nintendo Dev kit took 5 months to get shipped from Japan few years ago. Now everything is open. Plan your content so there is certain progression in the content exposure.

Kingdom Rush: Pirates, Dragons, Aliens and more.

Kingdom Rush 2: Now there is $300 worth of content.

Gardens of time is one game.

Cadence cycle is the key. 6 people built the Farmville game, but the team has 250 people. One guy just looks at monetization. Another one look for attrition or retention. There are product managers like this. Take Christmas season and Cadence cycle is tuned for this season. Get the audience back to the game and Cadence cycle has to positively impact the game. They have to do some community management and check the interest of the users.

Supercell got a run rate of 2.36B and is valued at $5B when they were bought.

MZ built a gaming platform and no one used it. They built a game using its features and it has gone vital. The company is valued at $9B.

Users acquired first. Then they go viral. Virality  factor knows game is good enough. Have good retention. A small percentage of them will be paying users.

Good gaming company invests in lot of time in pre-production. Hugh level GVD, turn based multiplier, single player or not and so on. There are 650 gaming firms in India. They have production capability. We need to figure out how strong is their pre-production and post-production are.

Premium cycle starts when the game got launched. This is when fun starts.

Pre-production: Wireframes and so on.

Post-production: Content cadence cycle (push content every fortnight based on holiday season or an offer and so on)

People buy virtual goods for:

1) functional(a special weapon to help win)

2) Social value (in oriental world, you get clans and friends)

3) Emotional value (connect with the  character based on preferences)

4) H1 and H2 (Put money to play as hello not as a sidekick)

Players identify with the core piece of the game and they play. 30% of them become regular players. Magic play game of hours got 20% regular players. Then the top of the funnel are super fans and they drive monetization like crazy.

These people expect others to pay too. Superfine drive monetization like crazy. Two clans fight for few seconds but the prep and formations are for hours. Over 24 hours they pooled up 10 lakhs units each. One fine morning, we send a cloud and the  heap of weapons are hone. Production managers are happy as 9 lakh power worth $10000 is wiped out.

We create offers based on what user wants in run time. We analyse the moves of the player inside the game. Understand what the gamer wants and unlock that feature. It could be any of the aforementioned four motivations.

We use lean plum for A/B testing.

LeanPlum. GameSparks. PlayFab.

Offers are based on

1) In-game state

2) Game play style (power Booster)

3) Activity of the player (need frequent shields of small duration)

4) Holidays

In an offer, they give 10 times the values worth of goods. These kind of offers these MZ guys do very well.

Someone wanted to put money they can go upto  $150K worth of content. Lot of planning goes inside here.

Game goes to last ball, cricket gets exciting. We use AI to take every game to the last ball.

KIIP platform is what we use for marketing and monetizing.

Cadence Cycle: it is content pushed on at regular intervals. Pre-release marketing and planning is important. Every Wednesday new content comes out with teaser. Pay to unlock the fill content.

Chinese games have Asian warriors and so on. Noengamers are thinking of putting indian characters for Indian audience. Culture plays a big part.

India is only a half billion dollar market as against the topper China at 38 billion.