Charlie Moseley, Creative Director at Tap4Fun, shares insights on mobile game monetization, localization, and marketing strategies drawn from his experience in China. He emphasizes the importance of simplicity in game concepts, the necessity of understanding cultural contexts, and the iterative process of developing successful games. Additionally, he discusses balancing monetization with gameplay enjoyment, the need for effective marketing in crowded niches, and the challenges of user acquisition in different global markets.

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

2. Who am I and what is Tap4Fun?

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. Some Quick Numbers on Tap4Fun

7. Today:
500k DAU
30+ Million Users
300 “Tappers”

8. 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

9. Our Games
Island Empire
2011
Galaxy Empire
2011
Global Threat
2013
Galaxy Legend
2013
Spartan Wars
2012
King’s Empire
2012

10. Spartan Wars Imagery

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

12. So now you know about Tap4Fun and myself.
How do we decide which games
will work in China, or anywhere?

13. Creating Concepts

14. 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”

15. Concept Creation
Familiar
New &
Different
Sweet
Spot!
Danger:
Clone territory.
Danger:
Alienating.
Balanced

16. 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

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

18. 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

19. Visual Inspiration
• Familiar mafia setting
• Unique, old school
Prohibition Era setting
• Alcohol-driven game
economy
• Historical reference

20. Why didn’t it work?
Onto a concept that did work...

21. 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.

22. That Movie Is...

23. Finding Roads
The movie 300 planted “the
seed” that made this theme
relatable and familiar.
!
It paved the “cultural road” to
Spartan Wars.

24. The Secret Ingredient

26. 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.”

27. Where Concepts Go to Die
We kill a lot of concepts.
Some of them are great.
Don’t worry about it.

28. 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

29. Where Concepts Go to Die
Try things. Fail. Try again.
Probably, fail again. This is all a
part of the process of success.

30. Monetization
With stories!

31. 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

32. 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.

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

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

35. Punch Quest
Touch Arcade: 100%. “Punch Quest
needs to be on every device you own.”
Gamezebo: 100%. “Fist Place Trophy.”

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

37. 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?

38. Punch Quest

39. 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:

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

41. 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

42. Monetization Funnel

43. 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

44. 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.

45. Marketing Your App

46. Why is this necessary?
Island Empire vs Galaxy Legend

47. 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 Empire
2011

48. 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 Legend
2013

49. 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.

50. 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

52. 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

53. 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

54. 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”

55. 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.

56. Video Promotion

57. 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

58. Game of War Trailer

59. 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!

60. Charlie Moseley
email: charlie@tap4fun.com
twitter: @justcharlie