How the Hidden Object Genre Can Reach Top 20 Grossing | Diana Platonova
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Delivered at Casual Connect Asia 2017. With the success in the Hidden Objects genre, MyTona will share their experience on their journey climbing the top grossing chart, attaining Top 20 Grossing for US iPad. The audience will gain insights while we look back at how the game Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery has progressed from launch till today. This talk will help new gaming companies to define their own formula for success.
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How the Hidden Object Genre Can Reach Top 20 Grossing | Diana Platonova
- 1. How Hidden Object Genre can reach Top 20 Grossing Diana Platonova
- 2. Diana Platonova Business Development manager Seekers Notes, new projects
- 3. Topics • MyTona - Intro, History, Portfolio • Seekers Notes • Goals • What to do to make the game successful? • Summary
- 4. MyTona is a free-to-play mobile games developer and publisher. Founded in 2005 Team size 200 Yakutsk, Russia & Singapore
- 5. Over 10 years experience in hidden objects:
- 6. Released in 2012 with the G5 Entertainment. Top 50 Grossing Games for already 5 years Undisputed hit in the Hidden Object genre One of the first successful mobile games in this genre Top Grossing Chart Position (iPad Games): USA - 13 UK - 15 Canada - 12 Japan - 31
- 7. IDEA To make the best hidden object game! Significantly different and better from the others
- 8. Published by MyTona in 2015. The most successful hidden object game in USA In the Q2 2017 Top 15 Grossing iPad Games in the USA Top 57 Grossing iPhone Games in the USA iPad Grossing(Games): USA - 15 UK - 12 Canada - 15 Germany - 15 France - 15 iPhone Grossing Games: USA - 57 UK - 52 Canada - 60 Germany - 59 France - 80
- 9. GOALS Constant game improvement Be a long term hit To target high and to surpass our targets Success on iPhone version Before After
- 10. What to do to make the game successful? GAME DESIGN Deep Storyline Hi-res Graphics Constant updates Content update GAME ECONOMY Balance Events (microevents) Offers ESSENTIAL PART Customer Support 24/7 Marketing Tech resources Motivation
- 11. Every update: 70 quests x 3 Exciting Plot Unique Heroes _______________ Never ending story book Deep Storyline
- 12. Hi-res Graphics Each artwork is piece of art Fantasy Retina display Parallax
- 13. Constant Updates Event content +30 quests Unique location Unique monsters Avatars Collection
- 14. Quests tree +200 Main storyline and few secondary storylines Content location as a plot extension Players can always play! Content Updates
- 15. Every Update Iteration 30 days
- 16. Analytics Open Analytics Team. Made our own analytic tool (stats) and A/B test system. 1. Users Engagement - Retention, Churn 2. Users Monetization - Conversion, Revenue
- 17. Engagement Magical numbers - 1, 3, 7, 14, 30 Look at daily, monthly.. retention Look at players behavior from install to whole lifecycle
- 19. Offers Segment - payers, non-payers, all Specific filters - each players receives what he needs Trigger - the moment Types of offers -
- 20. Numbers we’d like to share Words - 200,000 Collections - 320 Characters - 85 Locations - 35 Quest - 2720 Number keep increasing every update
- 21. Communication is important Support team works 24/7 Processing a lot of information Talk to every player Working closely with operation team Maximum help to solve issues
- 22. To Sum Up • Great Game Design • Great Team • Smart Marketing • Strong Analytics • Passion for making amazing games
- 23. Thank you! Got any questions?
Editor's Notes
- Good morning everyone! Thanks so much for coming to the talk, today I will be talking on how hidden object games can reach top 20 grossing. I really hope it will interesting and useful for everyone.
- So let me first introduce myself. My name is Diana Platonova and I am working at MyTona since 2015 as a Business Development manager. I’m working on Seekers Notes and new projects. I’m really happy to be working in mobile gaming and honestly I think we all are really lucky to be working in such fun and exciting industry.
- Here is what exactly I will be talking about: First I will make a little introduction about MyTona. Second I will tell you about Seekers Notes and its achievement and what our current goals for game. After that I will tell you what did we do to make the game successfull like this and what we’re gonna do become even more successful. And I will summarize.
- MyTona is international free to play mobile games developer and publisher, it was founded in 2005 by two brothers and I should admit that our entry into game industry started with Casual Connect, precisely we have sent our first game to Jessica Tams, got her support and we are really grateful for that. Currently the whole team consist of more than 200 people and we are expanding quite fast. Offices in Russia Yakutsk - the coldest place in Earth and in Singapore - one of the hottest place on Earth. Planning to open offices in SEA and other cities of Russia. We also have remote work for some roles.
- Our company has over 10 years experience in creating hidden object games, here is all our games we have developed. They were all premium games for PC. Since we’ve started we always focused on high quality, so all of them were well-developed. These games were released with/by Big Fish Games. And I wanted to highlight these games: series of Strange Cases because it was the beginning when MyTona reached TOP charts and ever since we’ve been successful. After that in 2011, we decided to create new hidden object game but make it free-to-play and move to mobile.
- And we made The Secret Society. With the completion of the whole development process, since we were really new and not experienced on mobile, we released the game together with G5 Entertainment and it became undisputed hit in the hidden object genre with highest rank Top 13 in US for iPad Games. This year autumn the game turning 5 years old and it is still generating good revenue.
- After that we had an idea to make the best hidden object game which would be significantly different and better from our previous and others in the market.
- And here we go! Our new game Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery. It was published by MyTona in 2015 and its latest achievement is top 15 grossing games ipad US. It is doing really well in other Western markets and you can see some numbers in the screen. You can see game’s revenue growth from released date till now, this is iPad - ___ This is iPhone - This graphs are both iPhone and iPad for the last 9 month and you can see that iPad (it in blue) progressed from top 100 to top 20. It was going up gradually if you compare with iPhone’s rapid growth. This great progress is definitely not the limit so let me tell you which goals we have for Seekers Notes.
- Always improve the game. We always monitor new technologies and features, if we think it’d be good for the game we always add cool ones. - for example apple watch, parallax, 3D Hidden Object games has a great protential to become hit in long run and our previous games speaks for that. So we’re working on making SN. Actually there is no any limits in game development, so we will always find ways for improvements. We can do better and reach higher. AND Make it even better on iPhone. Seekers Notes was developed for iPad from the beginning of its development process and it was actually a huge mistake of us. Don’t make the same mistakes. Here is before and after screenshots. We have optimized GUI and build package to 100mb recently and see great results already! The game reached top 57 grossing last week when just a month ago it was quite far from top 100. So I will now tell you reasons and ways how to make game the HIT.
- There are two main aspects which you have to make together. Game Design and Economy. Of course there is a lot of other Essential parts in it, few of them i listed here, but today i will focus on Game Design since the track is about it. Hidden object game starts with enthralling storyline which should capture the players into the game. Surely deep storyline has to be visualized - amazing arts is a must. You should never ever throw your game away and make it live alone - constant update + content update. Why I divided these tell in you in few slides. But without good balance and monetization it will never be successful, that’s why there is these three points here. I wanna tell you more about offers today. So basically to make our game design profitable you have to work on your economy. Lets take a look at each point separately.
- First of all everything starts with deep storyline. Short description of Seekers Notes is: the player wakes up into the cursed city with no way out. He has to help its citizen so he becomes Seeker, and must deliver the city from its ancient curse. When player is captured into this deep world of Darkwood he starts revealing its exciting plot, he meets with each unique character, they all revealed together with the plot. Each character interacts with another, they have their own history and behavior. They start to have some conflicts, intrigues, so its like another world. One time in 3-4 month we come really close to plot decoupling so players are keep excited about helping Darkwood’s citizens. Basically our players are immersed deeply in never ending story book.
- All our artwork is piece of art. And the secret here is not only about beauty but also in uniqueness - the fantasy of our team. For example these unique monsters were drawn from scratch. This is one of the location’s. New technologies, i.e. retina, parallax allows us to ensure that our players can fully enjoy the game.
- Every month we update the game with new event, which is main event with its history, we give to players a problem which they have to solve. 30 quests are revealing the history of the event step by step. Each event’s essential parts are unique locations, monsters, avatars and collection. The new location is a place of incident and its seamlessly added into the game permanently. Monsters are helping you to reveal the plot and assemble collection to take unique sticker. For all quests you receive unique chest. And the key is avatars. You can’t buy these avatars. They are the most desired part of the events.
- Every update we renew the quests tree and add 200 quests. We have few main storylines and several secondary. We update all of them. And here we add one more content location as a plot extension. Its unexpectable if players don’t have anything to do in the game.
- And after all each update development cycle looks like this. Can you imagine that we complete all these work in 30 days and it is every month? Yes that’s literally TONS of work. Every month we translate update to 11 languages, test the build , order new sound effects, test the build again, objecting,, . New characters, 2 new location should be drawn from scratch of course unique monsters and avatars. So volume of work is indeed tremendous. Hidden object games need a lot of resources and we can’t save on resources. Here I must add that from the beginning we had development team and producers, and in one year we grew 3 times. We set up new departments such as Marketing, QA, Analytics, Customer Support. It is really important for us to grow people inside the company as we don’t look for great people, create great people, i.e. our marketing lead is ex QA, our lead producer is ex programmer, senior producer is from QA as well and so on. One of the key moments in the creation and support of a top project is good management. That is, there should be a clear structure that works like a clock and really really good communication. Every MyTonian is really essential part of the company, everyone is heard and every opinion is really important for company.
- As I’ve mention we open analytics team recently. So these guys analyze all game moments. We made our own analytic tool and recently AB test system. Analytics team is focused on analysis of user engagement and user monetization. These are essential for game’s success. I will tell about each point.
- Please remember all these magical numbers and always check your KPIs these days. 1 - 3 is the beginning of your game, 7 - it’s your first week and you might change smth, 14 is mid or month and 30 is end of month. We’re looking not only daily retention but monthly, quarterly, six months etc. that’s important to evaluate the game in long term perspective. You should look at players behavior from start to end, or the whole lifecycle. We noticed that players who read the text of quests and dialogues are much more involved in the game than those who miss them. Therefore, we pay special attention to our storyline.
- For monetization side we look at these indicators. Every day, monitor the performance of the game, in order to respond in a timely manner to a particular situation, to study the behavior of players and draw conclusions on improving monetization Of course always remember the rule that your LTV should be higher than your CPI. For conversion we always do AB test, usually offers. For example, recently we have indicated top offers with the best conversion and it was all about image. Beautifully designed offers with three big rubies conversion was really high even if another offer for the same price but with better deal, conversion was way lower. So? UI is important. And AB test. Before everything was team’s decision, without any analytics. Now things have changed, more success more responsibility.
- So for additional monetization we use offers. We target offers by segments, special filters so that each player gets the most suitable offer to him, here are some examples. Also, all players get offers for a specific trigger, that is, exactly when they need them. For example when you run out of energy you get offers with energetics and when you lose 10 times you get offer with hints. There are also types of offers you can see few in the screen - bonusx2 - 2-3 times more coins and rubies in the bank, starter pack - any bundles with rubies, there are also one time offers, we show them only 1 time, limited time offers - everyday 24 hours, bank bonus - its bonus for buying IAPs. etc. Payers get special great offers. Non-payers less, but they also get special ones often - also get special. It has positive effect on sales. Виды офферов: - дополнить Bank bonus (bonus for buying iaps) LTO (limited time offers - every day for 24 hours) OTO (one time offers - like LTO, but show only 1 time, after closing this offer - it disappeared Bank sale (30-50% sale iaps in bank) Starter pack (any bundles with ruby) Ruby pack (offers with only ruby) Bonus x2/x3 - 2/3 times more coins and rubies in bank
- Here are main numbers of our game which we would like to share with you. From here you can see that how much work we’ve done and these number will grow and grow.
- Also I would like to highlight our Customer Support team which works 24/7 they answer and solve the problem mobily and operatively, know the game as their own five fingers. They work in close relation with operation team. They send daily reports and talk with every player. Even if they send just empty message.
- Game always starts with Idea. Develop your idea. Team - grow your team. Don’t look for great people, create great people. Great marketing is of course really important it is equal with first two points. Tomorrow my colleague Elena will give a talk on how to make marketing for casual games. Please visit her lecture, it will be really interesting and useful talk. Analytics - you should always analyze all game changes, features. Without any analysis you will never know how did impact on the game. And of course really important is passion to make amazing games. Always players first.