Please, Sir, I Want Some More... Ads | Matthew Hall
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Delivered at Casual Connect Asia 2017. Crossy Road has served up 3 billion ad impressions in 2 years and is one of the most well known “rewarded video” success stories. Matthew Hall, co-founder of Hipster Whale will talk about how Crossy Road (and other successful free-to-play titles) make money from in-app advertising while still delivering a fun player experience.
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Please, Sir, I Want Some More... Ads | Matthew Hall
- 1. Matt Hall, Hipster Whale Please sir, can I have some more ads? Making a great game without ads getting in the way.
- 2. Matt Hall 33 years making games 9 years of independent development
- 3. 1983- 1993
- 4. 2000- 2001
- 5. 2001- 2007
- 6. 2008
- 7. Doodle Find Little Things Little Things Forever Crossy Road PAC-MAN 256 Shooty Skies Disney Crossy Road Seven #1 games on the App Store2008- 2016
- 8. Crossy Road would not exist without rewarded advertising.
- 12. Disco Zoo Showed me that it was possible to make watching ads fun.
- 13. Our goal Make a game that will monetise SOLELY through opt-in video advertising.
- 14. Every player matters The goal was to earn a little bit of money from everyone playing our game.
- 15. Minimal Design Restrictions This is the best thing about building an ad supported game. Just make a fun game!
- 16. Forget about ARPU If we don’t have to stress about optimising monetisation, we can focus on making an awesome game.
- 17. Forget about ARPU… …but we need new KPIs We had two specific targets in mind. And do the best job we could.
- 18. KPI: Retention We did everything we could to get players to have fun today and come back tomorrow.
- 20. KPI: Virality We did everything we possibly could to get people to share Crossy Road with their friends.
- 21. A game worth sharing Fair high score system. “Polaroid” screenshot sharing. Funny characters that change the game. A game that with family friendly purchases. wow much share very friend
- 22. Retention x Virality These two multiply one another. We wanted these things to be perfect.
- 23. A large, engaged worldwide audience A game which few people will play, or that people will finish quickly, is a bad choice for an ad supported game.
- 24. Maximise your eCPM *efficiently* Maximum eCPM requires manual management. For small teams we recommend using ad mediation.
- 25. Look closely at the top grossing games There’s lots of great tricks there! Use these tricks to substitute ads for in-app purchases.
- 27. Make watching an ad an opportunity Random rewards work better than predictable rewards.
- 34. 20 coins
- 35. 5-50 coins!
- 36. “We want ads” Players complained that they had used all their ads, and wanted more.
- 38. First 90 days $10,000,000 overall $7,000,000 (70%) from rewarded video advertising
- 39. 2.5 years 3,000,000,000 ad impressions
- 40. MERGED 1010! ROLL THE BALL WORD COOKIES COLOR SWITCH RODEO STAMPEDE Rewarded Video shouldn’t be your only source of revenue. Study other successful game companies.
- 41. Matt Hall @klicktock Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon! Thanks for coming to my talk today. Advertising, particularly rewarded advertising, is a subject I get asked about a lot. However, I’ve never actually done a talk about it! At Casual Connect Asia this year most sponsors are advertisers and I thought that a talk about this subject, from a developers perspective, might be useful to you all.
- But first I’ll introduce myself a little better. I’m Matt Hall, I was born in regional Victoria among the sheep and kangaroos but I’m currently living in a small city called Ballarat.
- I began writing games when I was 8 years old. Though I lived on a sheep farm in Western Victoria, I was far more interested in the indoors. My parents purchased me a Commodore 64 for my 8th birthday after I showed a lot of interest in the school computers. It came with one game and one manual. It didn't’ take long to finish the game and I very quickly jumped into creating my own games.
- PICTURE: GAME BOY ADVANCE 2000-2001 When I finished university in 1993 I was living in Adelaide, but there were no game development jobs anywhere near me at the time so I went into database programming. I was retrenched from my job in 2000. It was a job I was never really interested in nor particularly well trained for, so I vowed to get a job in the games industry. I put the money where my mouth is and worked every day putting together a folio of games to show studios. Initially on the PC early in 2001 the Game Boy Advance was revealed and home-brew software for this hardware started to appear. I joined the home-brew development scene and released demos.
- PICTURE: TANTALUS TEAM 2001-2007 My experience in home-brew development on the new Game Boy Advance hardware was my foot in the door of the games industry. I was hired by Tantalus in Melbourne to work on games for the Game Boy Advance and later for DS, Xbox and I worked as a mobile development in Malaysia in 2004.
- PICTURE: ORIGINAL IPHONE 2008 In 2008 I became an independent developer. I was excited by the opportunities on the PC to become a “bedroom coder” and make a game just by myself. I was very lucky to go independent in 2008 as major event happened, the first iPhone was released. I made my first game for PC, that something very big was happening in the mobile space. I quickly pivoted to mobile and found myself to be one of the earliest Australian mobile developers.
- Though Crossy Road is the game that I’m known for today, what you may NOT know about me is that I’ve had success ever since going into the “app” making business. Since starting KlickTock in 2008 I’ve been very fortunate to have 7 #1 games.
- And so! With that, let’s kick it off. I wanted to write this talk today to reveal a truth that many of you might find surprising. That without rewarded video, Andy and I never would have created Crossy Road.
- 18 months before Crossy Road, Flappy Bird was released. I had played all of Dong’s game’s before and was super happy for him when his game became a worldwide phenomenon. I remember however, at the time, his game was free but supported with just little banner ads at the bottom. There was a report, at the time, that he was earning as much as $50,000 a day from the banner ads, and I wondered “wow, imagine what he would have gotten using a more lucrative ad system such as video”. And that’s how the seed for Crossy Road was sown.
- However the biggest single influence on Crossy Road was Disco Zoo. It was the first game I had played in which rewarded video was presented effectively. I knew both Owen and Matt and called them up after the game was released to see if they could give me some “first week on the store” numbers. They were SUPER promising and we were really excited about making this kind of game too.
- This is the way Disco Zoo handled it. The goal was to collect animals for your farmyard and in order to collect animals you’d solve a little puzzle. However a lot of the time you wouldn’t be able to solve the puzzle in time, and regularly with a special animal still hidden inside. At this point you could buy 5 attempt with currency or get “5 free attempts”. I’m cheap so I wanted to see what the 5 free attempt was. The deal was, watch a 30 second video and get the moves you needed. That opening week my friends and I must have watched thousands of videos between us. It was very inspiring.
- DISCO ZOO SHOWED ME THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE TO MAKE WATCHING ADS FUN Disco Zoo showed me that it was possible to make watching ads fun. I’m someone who doesn’t like to pay any form of currency to cover a design shortfall, but - for some reason - I was happy to watch a video. And - given that I almost always got the rare animal after watching the video - I was super happy to do so. It felt like a great trade off.
- And so we had our goal, we’d try to make a game that would make money ONLY through opt-in video advertising.
- It was a way of ensuring that even those players without much to spend, or without an iTunes card RIGHT now, were able to not only to contribute to our game but to ENJOY playing our game. To do this we made our game supported by consumer friendly “rewarded” advertising. We made our purchases small and permanent and spending in the app was capped. We made everything client side as we didn’t want to worry about building a server back end. We set it up so there were three ways to contribute to Crossy Road. Watch an advert to earn coins Purchase a character (or two or three) Tell their friends how much they loved the game.
- This was the thing we liked best about an ad supported game. If you can make a game that lots of people want to play for a long time, then you’re going to do well out of an ad supported game. If you look at mid to top grossing games, most of them fall into very strict design paradigms. Supercell’s games all have a “trophy” system which pits competitive players against one another while all of the match-3 games have a very similar system for monetising their players. We didn’t want to do any of that
- When we started Crossy Road it was just Andy and I. And we were 100% focused on making a good game. It’s not necessarily something to be proud of, but it WAS the reality of Crossy Road, that we did zero A/B testing on Crossy Road before launch and almost none since.
- FORGET ABOUT ARPU…BUT WE NEED NEW KPIs We had two specific targets in mind. And do the best job we could. (Key Performance Indicator) And so, with our small budget we were freed from the constraints of having to maximise ARPU. Whatever we earned from the title was going to be pure profit.
- KPI: RETENTION We did everything we could to get players to have fun today and come back tomorrow. This point, that making people come back later is the most important thing, is quite counter intuitive. 2008 me wouldnt’ have believed it. I was completely focused on making games as addictive as they could be “oh one more before bed time”. But booting someone out (which core gamers HATE) is a very very effective way to get people to return. This can be handled in a soft way (such as Crossy Road making it easier to get coins when you come back) and also in a hard way (out of lives.. get lost and come back later!) but they’re definitely worth pursuing. You find this in Core games too - World Of Warcraft’s & Destiny’s daily quests are very notable examples.
- When we build the Crossy Road prototype there was just one character crossing the road again and again. Though it was a great game there was never any real reason to come back. Another big influence on Crossy Road was Skylanders which my daughter and I used to play together. We’d love to head out to the shops and see which new characters were on the shelf but there was always disappointment when there were no new figurines to buy. This was our key retention mechanic. It was very effective and has been seen in many games since.
- KPI: VIRALITY We did everything we possibly could to get people to share Crossy Road with their friends. It’s difficult to measure the K factor of a game (the amount it is shared) but we kept a very close eye on Twitter and other public social media networks. What were the players sharing? What do they like about the game? Do they have a favourite character?
- A GAME WORTH SHARING Fair high score system. “Polaroid” screenshot sharing. Funny characters that change the game. A game that doesn’t have an eye on your wallet. We had a huge number of character that were WORTH sharing with friends. We took our time to craft a really cool “death cam” screenshot system. And we made the high score chasing very fair - with no pain continues. * Make them feel like an expert. A great score in Crossy Road FEELS amazing. Think of all the games you've played and think of the times that you wanted to share that game with your friends. Follow that feeling.
- RETENTION X VIRALITY These two multiply one another. We wanted these things to be perfect.
- The key lesson here is that not every game will bring in big money with rewarded video. You NEED a lot of people which means making your game accessible to a very wide audience. Make sure your game appeals to ALL AGES. Make sure your game appeals to ALL GENDERS. And definitely LOCALIZE. Though revenue from rewarded video in China was soft in 2014 when we launched Crossy Road it can now be a major source of your revenue.
- This is a pretty common question we get “who do you use?” The answer to this has changed a bit of the last couple of years. Initially we recommended that people just integrate a simple system (just one ad network of one of the majors) and see what happens. But unless you have a lot of traffic a single ad network will know and will squeeze down your eCPMS. These days we generally recommend IronSource. The key is that it’s particularly simple to integrate IronSource and add and remove the ad partners based on their performance. If you have a lot of traffic it’s worth manually managing it by heading out and getting deals but for those who like to take it easy (like us), mediation will get you most of the way there.
- There are a lot of great lessons to learn from other free-to-play games. If you’re making mobile games but NOT playing them, you’re going to have a very hard time doing well. Not only are there are a lot of great tricks to learn from them, but also the audience now expects to see them.
- Clash Royale does a great job of making a purchase an opportunity. Of course Clash Royale offers its standard bundles, which sell well. But each time you complete an arena the game “rewards” you with the opportunity to purchase a bundle which slowly escalate in price. The concept of a “sale” has been around well before mobile games, but this is different. It offers you a chance to purchase something after achieving something. “Congrats you got to the next arena! Now purchase this $7.99 IAP to give yourself a treat”. Brilliant.
- Our most important tip is this. Just like Clash Royale and all the other top grossing games, make watching an ad an opportunity. We’ve been guilty of making this mistake with other Hipster Whale and Mighty Games games, but we’ve found that these results work best for the long haul.
- This is the now infamous banner system has been used my many games since Crossy Road. I spent weeks developing and fine tuning this system. The first banner that pops up when people play the game is this one, the famous free gift that refreshes first a few minutes, and then later ever 3 hours. Tapping it gives players a large packet of coins. Enough to win a prize.
- Now they have enough money to win a prize we highlight this here also. Players win a prize, they feel awesome. From this point the banners are not the same each time. They rotate somewhat randomly. We wanted to always make these awesome and so that people would want to click these buttons. And that button at the top is the key! That’s the button for watching a rewarded video. It’s a cool thing. Trade 30 seconds of your time and you get a packet of coins that would take much longer to collect otherwise. But we dont’ show it every gmae.
- In fact sometimes no banners pop up at all. Instead a polaroid may appear to remind people to use the share system. Or sometimes there’ll be nothing at all, so players can “enjoy” their amusing death.
- Maybe we drive them toward the achievement system if they’re not aware of it. Jump on ten logs and another free gift is yours.
- Later, once we had merchandise to sell, we were able to let players know of products they could buy which has also been super effective.
- But, of course, we always come back to getting people to watch ads which is Crossy Road’s major source of revenue. After they’ve watching an ad, we give players a break for a few minutes before we offer the another ad opportunity. And for those who don’t click the ads often, we slowly ramp down their frequency so as to annoy them a little less.
- At the moment when you watch your ad, there is a consistent reward in Crossy Road. You always get 20 coins - ALWAYS. If we followed the idea of random rewards down (and we’re working on this in a future update) why don’t we make the rewards themselves random?
- If we vary the number of coins, players feel great and we can throw in some high value rewards to make them feel awesome even if the average number of coins is the same. We should even make these characters exclusive to the prize box. That way collectors have a strong motivation to watch ads that we can refresh each update.
- The result of this work with the banner system was that we ended up having customer complaints when the ads dried up. When we first started we had just two ad networks. Customers were watching so many ads a day that they were hitting the ad caps, then complaining when their free coins gifts were going away.
- CROSSY ROAD 160 MILLION DOWNLOADS And, in November 2014 (two and a half years ago) we released Crossy Road. It was featured by Apple and quickly climbed up the charts and was the #1 downloaded game that Christmas. Andy and I were very proud that our bet paid off. We’ve since had 160,000,000 downloads from Crossy Road and many more across our other Hipster Whale games.
- We did a talk at GDC two years ago about the first 90 days of Crossy Road earning US$10,000,000. As this talk is about rewarded video, I wanted to mention that 70% of that revenue came from rewarded video advertising.
- And, in researching this talk I dived into our dashboard to discover, surprisingly that we have served 3 billion video ad impressions from Crossy Road!
- We took a unique path to game design as Andy and I wanted zero compromises on retention and virality. We didn’t want an embarrassing ad popping up on a Youtuber’s game video, so we didn’t do it at all. But we are definitely leaving money on the table. Be sure to study games from other successful studios such as BitMango and Gram Games both of which have had enormous success also.
- THANK YOU!