GameDev Days 2016 – Vladimir Funtikov: “There are not so many good games on mobile”

Hi! Let’s start with a story about how the company works.

Everyone more or less knows the Supercell model. At least, how it is presented to the outside. We have something similar. We make prototypes, we conduct these prototypes through the stages of internal playtest, external playtest, soft launch, we work with analytics. Then we mostly kill.

We don’t have any rigid goal to release a certain number of games of any genre. We always look at what interesting things are happening on the market, what mechanics can be used, to try, what kind of setting and with which brand it is possible to link, to establish a partnership in order to differentiate from the rest. And, based on all this, we act.

What are you developing now?

Now, by and large, we have three products (namely internal ones) in active development inside. Two of them belong to the same Nitro Nation franchise. I’m talking about Online and Stories.

With Nitro Nation Online, everything is clear. It moves along its trajectory. In most markets – in the top 10 grossing in its category, with plans to reach the Top 5 / Top 3.

Nitro Nation Stories is a different kind of product. He just recently came out. Based on it, we are currently doing a very interesting project with a popular American rap artist. We will have a reskin of the game with real characters and licensed music. That is, we are doing a brand project.

There is one product not by IP. Born from an internal prototype. We liked it. It is in the soft launch stage. We are looking for a balance mechanic that will give us the right combinations of depth, ease of entry and retention.

Are you talking about the farm that is being demonstrated at the Game Village?

Yes, this is our farm with a secret bottom.

She has a long history.

We had a game called “Genetics” that we made many years ago. It was built on the crossing of animals.

We decided that we would take the basic mechanics of collecting animals and put it on the farm, try to link it all beautifully.

Initially, it was linked well. Cute art immediately appeared.

The original lacked depth. People came, gave good grades, even invested something, but it was difficult to keep them. This mechanics (crossing species to obtain new ones) is limited in its scalability.

Now we are trying to build the mechanics so that everything works harmoniously together. And we perform iteration after iteration.

When we like the game, then we can say that there is a full-fledged product. In principle, this is the approach we apply to everything we do. We try to be very demanding about what we spend our time on. It’s not even about time, but about money and expertise.

We don’t have any specialization in genres.

And why isn’t there one? You have a hardcore audience.

Let’s say midcore is hardcore.

Yes, but the midcore one, which is still closer to hardcore than casual. You have 370 million downloads. They are mostly generated by midcore machines.

By 2/3 minimum.

Why, having such a base, do you go to the casual segment?

We also continue the midcore theme. We have products that are constantly evolving. Nitro Nation. Two games. They are very relevant. And if we talk about Nitro Nation Online, which is our flagship, then we are constantly trying to reinvent it, add something new, go beyond the design that we originally did. We have a development plan for this project for exactly five years.

The bottom line is that she has a good position. And if we start making Nitro Nation 2, then they will then cannibalize each other.

To date, we have released a large number of racing projects. They are easy to find in the tops of the racing category. Not all of them are in the Top 10. Many below. But they consistently bring several tens of thousands of downloads per day. The audience is blurring between them.

But the most important thing is that our focus is blurred if we work with several products. Therefore, it is better to choose one good thing, invest all your efforts there and make all the features that we believe will lead to the state that the project is worthy of the Top 5 \ Top 3 in turnover.

Let’s talk about games a little bit. About yours. There are three entry thresholds in Nitro Nation Online. The player, in fact, does not have to understand the game deeply in order to have fun. He can take a ride, change the color of the car, buy discs and be satisfied. If he wants more, he can start watching the stuffing, putting the engine on, picking up the brakes. And if he is completely hardcore, then he takes up the adjustment of details through an almost black-and-white interface. Did you consciously go to the three-step entry threshold when developing?

Yes. We see the project as a funnel in which, ideally, everyone should find something for themselves. And then, depending on his preferences, he stops somewhere and leaves the game. It is clear that it is impossible to make a project that will please everyone, but you need to at least understand what exactly we want from the project.

The first task is always to keep the player. That’s why we try not to beat hardcore, graphics, complex calculations and the need to drive thousands of races to achieve something in the game. For this reason, we are trying to make the entrance easy and relaxed.

Then people themselves determine how much time they want to invest, how far they want to go, including in competition with others.

We have very dedicated players. We have people who have ridden 100 thousand races in the game. That’s not bad. I’ve been playing since 2013, I’m one of the developers, I have about five thousand races there and things are going well. But there are people who have 100 thousand races, they play very, very much. They cannot be left without content and without competitions. On the one hand, this greatly complicates everything we do, because we have to do any features so that they do not break the game with one and do not make it too simple with the other. But who is it easy for now?

Have you measured how much those players who only like painting bodies and those who roll 100 thousand races bring?

We don’t have cohorts for the love of bodies. But we have other different cohorts.

There is a very strong stratification in the manner of the game and in the manner of payments, as in any sufficiently deep shareware game. There are people who have paid more than $10 thousand. There are people who have driven 100 thousand races, there are people who come for two days and leave $1,500 in the game. At the same time, they do not discover even 90% of the game content.

And what is the most favorite purchase that brings you the most income?

We only sell in-game currency. And then we have an attribution system that allows you to highlight in-game purchases made for hard currency earned in the game or purchased in the store. And you can also track by soft currency: he bought a car for the currency he bought, or for real money.

We track which cars are bought separately for which type of currency, and by whom. Interesting relationships are found.

For example, customization is less than 10% of the total turnover of the project. But at the same time, customization is very important for users to join the game. And we deliberately do not tighten the nuts here.

We know that if a person came into the game, bought a Subaru BRZ, put some kind of body kit, spoiler, some parts and custom discs, then he automatically becomes ours, because he created his brainchild, his work of art. From the point of view of financial analysis, this may not be so important, but from the point of view of retention, it is critically important.

Creative Mobile is not only a developer, but also a publisher. How does this component of the company work?

The system works in such a way that we consider a lot of games.

The obvious result of the “look” is the subsequent publication and commercial success.

Naturally, this happens very rarely. Partly due to the fact that we have a very high bar, we are not interested in taking someone else’s game, pouring traffic there and watching how with 110 million downloads we have no sense.

Therefore, we are looking for games that are well monetized, which have good retention. We are looking for games that we can really add something to.

There are teams that have managed to make a game with good monetization, but at the same time – weak infrastructure.

That is, the guys are not very well versed in analytics, they are not very well versed in attracting users. They don’t know how to tie it all together. They have a basic idea of which KPIs to link. But how to take an array of one and a half thousand variables that are monitored in real time, and from this take out the action that needs to be performed – they don’t have enough focus for this. But we know, we have this trick.

A less obvious result of the work is an understanding of the market.

We communicate a lot with developers. We see a lot of ideas, concepts. And through this communication, we feel what is working, what is not working, where the market is moving now. This is such an intelligence. No matter how strange it may sound, but this already justifies publishing in principle, even if it did not bring any money.

We are not a very big company, we do not have the opportunity to have 20 parallel projects in certain niches and keep our finger on the pulse. It is their projects.

We are afraid to get into a situation where we focus on something, and then this market will die. Or some very strong competitor will come there. We try not to put ourselves in such a situation, constantly being in contact with different specialists, developers, platforms.

That is, publishing for us is getting information.

Since they started talking about it, what trends do you now single out for yourself as the main ones?

When we make operational decisions, we don’t think about what the main trend is now. The main trend now is VR, everyone is pissing boiling water about VR, but no one has really earned on it yet.

The decisions we make based on this: we can buy hardware, or we can participate in some case, or make a demo. But we will not rush into it with our heads, simply because we always think, first of all, about what the mass consumer really needs.

And what does he need?

The best games!

Not many good mobile games have been made. I, as a player, am still not satisfied. We have such a situation – Clash Royale is out now. Everyone is right in awe of him, everyone is playing him all over the place. They play like it’s the best game in the world. But it’s not like that.

Clash Royale looks great, the guys from Supercell did everything very talented. There’s a brilliant interface, there’s a very bold decision not to reward players for gameplay (you don’t win anything from playing, everything comes from the boxes). This requires a certain amount of courage, and, of course, competence. There’s a lot done right, but it’s not an absolute top of what a game designer can do. And this is not the absolute top of what I want as a consumer. Even these games I want more!

Why aren’t there at least 20 games on my phone that would be as addictive as Clash Royale? Why doesn’t every game have such a well-designed interface? Why doesn’t every game have the same harness? I’m talking about quality.

The market has not yet reached its goal. Individual studios make very good projects and earn a lot of money, but what they are doing is not yet a flight into space, the limit is far from being found!

Thanks!