We continue to post videos from the White Nights St.Petersburg 2016 conference. Next up is a report by Matthew Wilson from Rovio Stars. In his speech, he explained why the publishing daughter has not released anything for a long time.
The publishing division of Rovio was launched in 2013. Since that moment, the studio has released only five projects. The last of them – Sky Pank – appeared a year ago, in May 2015.
No, Rovio Stars has not closed and is still looking for new projects,” Matthew assures. However, the studio chooses games very carefully and carefully. The publishing division is only interested in titles with confident indicators. In order to make a decision on cooperation, the company needs figures from the trial run. Moreover, it makes no sense to send projects and reports on them. According to Wilson, Rovio monitors every (!) game released in softlonch. And he knows all KPIs, including projected revenue and the number of downloads.
If Rovio Stars is interested in the project, she will contact the developers herself. “As soon as we find a game that our user base might like, we contact developers and see if they need a partner and if our forecasts match their real numbers,” Wilson shared.
The Director of Business Development at Rovio told us what figures we are talking about. For example, for a puzzle it is:
- retention of 1 day – 40%;
- retention 7 days – 20%;
- retention 30 days – 10%.
“If your game doesn’t have such figures, then it’s not profitable for us to cooperate with you, so there’s no point in us publishing such a project,” Wilson said.
At the same time, there are many potentially winning projects on the market. But all these games fall short for one reason or another. “Developers need to focus on retention, monetization and optimization during the softlonch. And not to release an unfinished fritupley,” Wilson summed up.
Let’s add that of the five projects launched by Rovio Stars, two remain in stores. The latter, the Sky Pank racer, is at the box office on the 860th place of the American App Store in the “Racers” category. Since its release, the game has been able to reach the top 10 in only 1 country.