GAMES VS MONEYMaciej Mróz

CEO Ganymede

WWW.GANYMEDE.EU

TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS DESIGN

GAMES VS MONEY!

GAME LIFE CYCLE

Greenlight

Production

Operations

Sunset

GREENLIGHT

It's a game, so we have to ask:

Is it fun?

But it's also business, so the second question is:

Why should we build it?

GREENLIGHTDo the homework

Who is the game for (target group)?

What is the target platform?

What is the unique selling point?

IP licensing opportunities?

GREENLIGHTDo the homework

What our competition is doing?

Do we have any benchmarks for similar products?

What are alternative projects we could do?

Do we have the resources?

MARKETING PLAN

What is the marketing budget?

How are we going to acquire users?

How are we going to keep them?

How are we going to monetize?

DEVELOPMENTKeep it short!

If you keep it under wraps, you are:

• Not learning about your realusers

• Not validating assumptions made at greenlight

• Not adapting to market changes

• Possibly just burning money

Canceling project early can be a success!

Validate your game idea first

•Everything else usually can be deferred

•MVP is probably half of what you think it

isEvery game

is a learning

opportunity

Be prepared for the

unexpected

Careful about future

proofing by developers

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS“Lean startup” approach

Team dedicated to

a game may

actually grow post

release

Users expect new

content/features to

be delivered on

regular basis

A lot of effort

spent on

optimization

• A/B testing

experiments

• Exploratory

analytics

Successful games

are serving

players for many

years

11

DEVELOPMENT PROCESSRelease is only the beginning...

F2P- DOMINANT BUSINESS MODEL

F2P is nothing new - Dropbox, Evernote, etc

Revenue opportunity vs marketing opportunity

• Top spenders/hardcore fans vs casual players vs non-spenders

• No such thing as "average player"

• Value perception is subjective

BEING CLOSE TO PLAYERS

Focus groups

Community management

Customer support

Data analytics!

VALUE OF DATA

Provide actionable insights

Provide great content recommendations

Provide more accurate ad targeting

VALUE OF DATA

Optimize pricing

Make operations more efficient

Improve categorization/tagging/

sentiment analysis

BASIC KPIS

Basic metrics and their meaning

• MAU/DAU

• Retention (D1/D7/D28)

• Avg. session time, Avg. sessions

• Conversion, ARPPU

• ARPU

o Incorporates other sources of revenue than direct payments

• Virality, social interactions

LTVOne metric to rule them all

LTV - Life Time Value

LTV for users who already left is definite, but not really useful

We have to predict!

There's no such thing as universal LTV formula

• Too many moving parts

• So we build models

OPTIMIZING PLAYER LIFE CYCLE

LTV is an outcome of massive and never ending work

• New content

• A/B testing of game features

• Funnel analysis

• User segmentation/classification

• CRM systems

• Community management

USER ACQUISITION

Game will not be successful without great marketing

o Don't bet your life on being one of the outliers!

CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost

If LTV > CAC, you're good

Organic traffic is not really free, CAC > 0!!!

USER ACQUISITION

In reality it's a bit more complex than that:

• LTV varies by user cohort

• CAC varies by acquisition channel, targeting, even time

• LTV vs CAC is predicted and tracked per campaign

• Can even be predicted per user (RTB)

ADVANCED TOPICS

Recommendation systems

Classification/clustering of players

Fraud detection

Cross promotion inside portfolio of games

• Optimal path of player

• Indirect acquisition

• Amortizing CAC across multiple games