“There are more companies that earn (on mobile) from $1 million per month in Russia than in the whole of Europe”

They told Mobio founder Sergey Konovalov about this at the White Nights Conference Moscow 2017 as part of the Mobio Talks program.

Sergey Konovalov, Mobio Executive Director: At the beginning of our conversation, I would like you to share your successes. Perhaps with beautiful figures, for example, how many apps are there in the Russian Google Play now, how many new games are released on Google Play per day?

Dmitry Martynov, head of Google Play Apps and Games Russia of Eastern and Central Europe: If we are talking about games, then everyone is interested only in the whole world.

Games are an international story. Applications, on the contrary, are usually local.

There are not so many applications that are made in one region and are popular all over the world. As a rule, these are social networks, messengers.

But games are exactly a global topic. All game developers want to succeed not only in their home market, but all over the world.

Accordingly, it is more interesting not how many new products appear in the Russian Play Store, but how the developers who are in Russia and Eastern Europe feel.

We have very good data here. Our region is growing very fast. In terms of growth rates, it is similar to the Asian one. For example, in Europe, our region is the fastest growing.

The number of people who have become, let’s call them millionaires, that is, companies that earn more than $ 1 million a month, we have more than in the rest of Europe. Moreover, we are the largest both in absolute numbers and in terms of growth rate. The potential of developers does not decrease, but only increases.

The market leaders are known to everyone. Look, for example, at the sponsors White Nights. This is an indicator.

The largest partner from our region is Playrix. He has grown many, many times in two years. All people in the industry can see how much Playrix earns. For example, you can see this in App Annie. This is a pure example of success.

But Playrix is not the only one. It is backed by a huge number of companies that have been present in this market for a long time, for example, Game Insight, and those that have recently entered the mobile environment, such as, for example, Kefir!.

There are quite a lot of companies from our region that are active and earn well. About a hundred. That’s a lot.

Even more than a hundred companies strive to earn a lot of money. And another thousand on the way.

Is it Russian?

Dmitry: Yes. But sometimes it is difficult to distinguish here: a Russian company, not a Russian one.

Business is usually arranged in such a way that studios can be located in Russia, Belarus or on the territory of Ukraine.

The scheme is known to everyone in the industry. People organize businesses where it is more profitable, but where production takes place is another matter.

But if we talk about our companies, then, as a rule, production also takes place here. That is, the developer’s potential is very large. It is very good. This is objective, these are not inventions, not abstract things. Everything is confirmed by numbers. Everyone can go and see: the market is transparent, all incomes are visible.

We are very glad that we are involved in everything, that we can somehow help people here a little.

Roman Mardo, Google Play Games Business Development Manager of Central and Eastern Europe: We are, in general, very creative. We have a very large number of games of those genres that were not very popular before. That is, they help us to dilute the catalog, to call new users.

Dmitry: By the way, yes. An important point. Our developers are not just able to cunningly monetize projects. We have those who are the first to achieve success in various genres. For example, the first successful competitive games shooter on mobile appeared here. Modern Strike is one example, but you can also remember Guns of Boom and Pixel Gun.

Their developers have really found out how to make games that a large number of users like. At the same time, the games are successful in terms of business and look very good. It’s not just any crafts. These are serious products with synchronous online, which in itself is technologically not such a simple thing on a mobile.

ROMAN: We are sure that the next hits will come from those who own similar technologies.

Unique developments are cool. China is already suffering a little bit because it doesn’t know what to copy. Everything that could have been copied has already been copied.

Dmitry: The copy paste worked at one time. Now it has become harder to do copy paste. When there is online, when there is PvP, there must be a depth of content, a certain story. You can’t just copy it. It is necessary to do almost completely from scratch, or modernize. But when you start upgrading, fine-tuning is lost.

ROMAN: The problem of balance is always there.

Dmitry: Exactly. When there was an offline mode, for example, three-in-a-row, it was possible to resort to binary copying. It’s hard to do that now.

If you look at the traditionally popular genres that our friends from Asia love (say, strategies), then so far they continue to operate in this genre. We don’t see, for example, competitive PvP shooters from there. Even attempts to copy, in my opinion, there is not much.

Roman: They’re mostly focusing on MOBA right now.

Dmitry: Yes. But MOBA is a slightly different format.

On the mobile platform, there are absolutely all categories of users who can play whatever they like, and everyone can find something for themselves. Our task is just to have different content. We do not focus only on making money, for example, we do not look exclusively at beautiful projects, although this is important.

What we want is diversity. This is the whole ideology. This, by the way, allows a large number of indie developers to try themselves in new genres. Otherwise it would be…

More boring.

DMITRY: There would be three companies that would capture the entire market, it would be very boring. But here the user decides.

ROMAN: By experimenting with our developers, we managed to bring almost all genres that were on other platforms to mobile devices.

As I understand it, this is a reflection of such a global strategy, including Google. Expansion.

DMITRY: The idea is to have a lot of different things. At the same time, we are developing the region, our goal is to help a developer who is located, for example, in the Eastern European region, to make his product globally successful. In this sense, we have exactly the same goals with the developers.

The mobile is cool because there are no borders, you can work all over the world and interact with a global audience.

ROMAN: But other platforms continue to set the trend. The same PC. Let’s say now you can be sure what the next successful project on mobile will be. The next one who makes a convenient PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS on mobile will succeed immediately.

Dmitry: Yes, whoever first comes up with convenient management wins. Madfinger Games studio was one of the first to come up with how to make the management of the shooter comfortable and immediately opened a new horizon for everyone involved in such projects.

Nuances are not always obvious, but they play a big role in success.

Why is game development such a complicated business?

It requires a lot of attention to detail.

In principle, nowadays every extra second of content loading affects business. Recently there was a Performance Marketing conference (you may have heard), and at it your colleague Martin Loss, a specialist in Google mobile solutions, just touched on the topic of content loading speed and set some kind of benchmark for the industry – a page on the mobile web should load in less than three seconds. Google has an AMP tool for fast page loading in the mobile web. Let’s tell you in more detail what kind of work is currently being done in Google Play from the point of view of optimizing resources, downloading content, from the point of view of optimizing resources on the developers’ side.

Dmitry: Here it is necessary to dive into the details. Here it is necessary to divide:

• native mobile games;
• non-native games (for example, web games);
• native applications;
• web pages.

The situation is different everywhere. In applications, the situation is more advanced. Instant Apps technology is applicable to them, which allows applications to be divided into small pieces almost on the fly, without downloading to a smartphone. It’s just about seconds there.

It is similar ideologically to AMR, but from the point of view of technology it is different.

Firstly, it requires the developers to refine the application.

Secondly, it assumes the possibility of switching to downloading the full version.

The main idea of Instant Apps is that a person can instantly start working with the application.

I emphasize: it works only with applications. The technology is not suitable for games. Games, as a rule, use a graphics engine and draw everything themselves, and applications use system methods for drawing buttons and so on. Therefore, many things can be optimized there. In games, everything is much more difficult to optimize.

Continuing the topic of technology. Again, your colleague, Emre Dogan, head of customer relations at Google, shared his vision of how machine learning affects advertising optimization. Are any algorithms used? And how are machine learning algorithms used in stores?

DMITRY: Here, of course, we can talk about how something is built on the side, for example, Google Play. But, in my opinion, a more interesting story is how a developer can optimize his own business with the help of technology.

Recently, we have been actively discussing the topic of predicting various business parameters, for example, lifetime. This is a key point for developers who are going to invest in mobile advertising or some other promotion channel: in order to understand how much you can spend, it is important to understand how much you can earn.

Here we are talking about predicting future possible profits and losses. And the industry is now waiting for solutions that will make it possible to predict LTV more accurately.

When an advertising campaign is underway today, the developer has a lot of questions. Is it worth continuing to attract through the same channel? Is the price of attraction adequate? What exactly will he get at the exit? At this stage of marketing development, there is no answer to these questions.

But we are actively working on it. This is the future of all these stories.

As I believe, the first one who comes up with how to evaluate, for example, user behavior in games at an early stage, using different signals, calculating their business indicators based on this, automatically optimizing advertising attraction and aspects related to correctly targeting the user in the game, will achieve a giant breakthrough.

I understand that serious work is being done at Google Junior Labs Companies, which is working in this direction?

Dmitry: Yes. Sure.

I think that in this sense, the Universal App campaign (a type of advertising campaigns promoting mobile applications on all Google sites – approx.editorial offices) will be more in demand. Many partners note that they are working very well now.

Roman: The Play Store runs on algorithms that machine learning uses.

Dmitry: By the way, yes. I’ll add it too. Those developers who carefully look at traffic sources, look at where users come from, see that a lot of organic traffic additionally comes from our store.

Why?

Because we have recommendation services that show content for you. When users open one page in the store, suitable similar applications are shown next to it. This is, in fact, the result of the work of these algorithms. They are improving all the time. Often, the traffic coming from these sections exceeds all other traffic.

I think many of our viewers are interested in the history of feathering. I am an indie developer or studio. I made a great game, but there is no feature. Who should I go to?

DMITRY: This question is a bit outdated. People overestimate the importance of the promotion received from the site.

Imagine, there is a publisher. For example, a large company that publishes someone else’s or its own games. How does she work with her studios? She’s not talking: “I’ll be fitching you all the time.”

There’s a lot going on there. There are many stages. Consulting stage, development stage, design thinking stage, balance optimization stage. Promotion in the app store channel is the last and not the most important stage.

We have come to the conclusion that it is now more important to advise all our developers in different areas. This gives a greater effect than the feathering itself.

There are several aspects that young developers need to take into account:

First. In general, it is necessary to objectively assess your position in the global world. Any game – it competes with all the games that exist at once. Therefore, it is necessary to do it qualitatively.

Many people think that it is enough to make a pitch correctly. It’s probably possible to behave like this in a venture environment. We have a real business, a lot of money is involved. It doesn’t work here.

The second point. Still, you need to evaluate yourself in terms of business. It is necessary to understand what you are in terms of business.

Dmitry, Roman, thank you for the interview.