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thank you very much for showing up um today i'm going to talk a little bit about the concept of life cycle and the concept of user flow which can be depicted in the user funnel in general um i stated it as follows it's theoretically a lot to cover but since we only have like 20 something minutes i'm gonna rush through it and it will be a little bit more high level but the major importance for this talk from from our side today is really to give you an insight of especially how we developed a big point to have this analytical approach towards um game design production everything so if there any questions at the end feel free to buzz it um the talk looks as follows i'm going to start with the intro talk a little bit about me what i've been doing then the prerequisites the business model i think pretty straightforward you can skip through that quite easily and then some underlying concepts that are important if you really want to understand the game's life cycle concept and to work on the final concept which include i sub some of them as a analytical approach in general then we come to the life cycle give you some cases um how the real world should look like and how it really looks like and taken a little bit of an idea of some not so successful products and some successful products and then move over to the user flow and put some kpis behind that but please bear in mind it's all going to be a little bit of high level because we can't dive deep into it very very much because we only have half an hour but i'm very happy to talk about a later stage so let's start with the intro um i started in 79 some years ago and the major part of my career my twin brother and i have been self-employed so we had a few startups mainly in the finance area and a little bit of tech and there was one company that we started working for the only company ever we worked for and that was big point was a tremendous journey i think everyone um hike of being here on the panel this morning and everyone knows around here what happened in the past five years so was was great being part of building this company but after five years our entrepreneurial heart went like okay we got to do our own stuff and we're in the process of forming a little mobile startup and to work on that you'll hear a lot more about that next year and it's called app flag please do not forget about the l in the word so first of all going to talk a little bit about the prerequisites and i utilized some of the older big point slides because they depict the business model quite well first of all what you see here is um on your left side we got the subscription model and it's a good one everyone knows about it but the the not so optimal aspect of it is that you actually if you set a price let's say 10 euros what you do you do cut out the people that are not willing to invest 10 euros only five or one or two years they're not able to play your game that's in terms of active users but in terms of revenue and that's what a lot of people do forget about it is um they do cut out the people that are willing to invest a lot more and uh running big point for five years together with the rest of the team we knew that especially the people in the upper bit are very very profitable and these are your actual avatar bringers so you have to be careful to take care of that the beauty with the free-to-play model is what you basically do you do align your business model to the willingness of the user to pay so a lot of people will never ever pay but they will play and there's some people that would invest a lot of money into it that are like just the top core the top five top three whatever percent of users and this can be quite profitable but in general what you do the business model is um let them pay whatever they want to but what are the basics that you want them to pay for and these are big point slides still but i think they're quite quite i'm direct of showing you what we actually sold we sold um time so if people really are time shorten us so if people really had to play something and didn't want to grind the way through we said okay invest a little bit and you manage it a little bit faster or um i think this is a very interesting way of showing convenience so if you can have this little baby shut up at unite and be up to date in the morning um pay a little bit and that's what we're doing in in most of our games so this basically is the business model i think everyone understands that but the more interesting aspect is as i substant all of these different aspects as analytical approach so i put them in here because it's quite important to have once you engage the user life cycle and the user flow concepts you've got to have the infrastructure ready and what that means i'm going to show you now because this looks pretty straightforward but since i know most of our companies you do need to have the human infrastructure and the technical infrastructure so if you have and most companies gaming companies at the moment they have like one or two or maybe three analytics guys despite the fact that they make i don't know 10 or 100 million revenues and um they don't really pay too much attention everyone says oh yeah it's important that we do a business intelligence or whatever the the buzzword is but you actually don't have people that spend 100 percent of the time on that so what i see in a lot of companies especially in the past month doing a little bit of consulting on the side is that you see um oh yes uh the analytics function is part of the cfo area wrong or the analytics function is part of the marketing area you got a guide taking care of marketing campaigns and on the side should really take care of the the analytics but it doesn't work like that and apart from that even if you have a human infrastructure you got to have the technical infrastructure the technical infrastructure is something that can be very very challenging because there's so much you can track this is just to provide a little bit of an example if you are able to set up an analysis function there are so many different stakeholders and that's what we experienced at big point because once we we institutionalized this analytical approach and people really got to see the value in in this department they were i mean of course us as management but everyone really wanted to have numbers to support the decisions because at the end all of this is just to reduce complexity to reduce in transparency to have more engaged people and at the as a consequence make more money this is just an example how the overall analysis function could look like and you see if you have just two marketing guys that do 25 percent of uh and analysis work there's no way that they can really take care of all of these different aspects and unfortunately i can't dive deep into it because every aspect here could be an own talk so what you basically need is two things you need to have a technical infrastructure if you can if you're not able to have this in-house i mean there are a lot of great companies like games analytics contagion or whoever there is that could provide you and support you but you got to have at least some internal lobbying and people that really could help you to do that internally and overall it got to be a holistic approach for over all of your company because it could really boost your revenues another very important aspect is the so-called analytical creativity it sounds a little bit esoteric or whatever you call that but the guiding principle to that is that when my brother and i had at the production at big point we told our producers and game designers build whatever you want i don't care if it's a hello kitty or gray and white or whatever update but please base it on some numbers because the main reason is if you and maybe you're 20 or 30 man team spends a month or two on something and the community will not like it it will not make money we are in kind of a deep in trouble so base it on something based on numbers to support you and that's basically the concept behind it have something you base it on but do not let the numbers overrule creativity it's just a supportive function in general that's one principle the other principle is so-called iterative innovation and the people that you've been in the industry a little bit longer like two three four years and uh know what we especially big point did with poisonville know that this concept failed tremendously because we try to innovate on more than one or two fronts we came from the 2d browser space and we tried to do a shooter in 3d with a front end engine that we had no idea about and did not know how to monetize so build on what you know focus on it and then from time to time innovate if you got 10 projects have two projects that are really out there that are reinventing the wheel but the the other projects be a little bit more conservative because if you've already built a successful game do not try to really reinvent the wheel another very important aspect that i think the industry is just now understanding or trying to understand is as easy as cohorts it basically goes down to the to the concept of segmenting so think in segments think in cohorts and there could be chords i mean it's very straightforward the concept but the application to the real world is a lot more complex i mean geography a turkish user behaves a lot different than a german user and on the other side um traffic sources just because you have people coming in i mean was very interesting in the panel before he was seeing oh yeah it all comes from the app store it's just one one type of user that goes in i think it's a lot more fragmented that we've seen and people from media partners or from tv stations users they do behave a lot differently than for example viral traffic and especially when you think about the user funnel of how they behave within the game or the life cycle it will have a different consequence but we'll come to that in a minute just as straightforward as this this is a life cycle just out of the textbook put it on the slides because this is how it looks like but the real money is going to be made if you're able to prolong this maturity phase and this maturity phase for some of the games like see fight.orbit ultima online the world of warcraft things people are able to stretch this maturity phase and that's why i asked earlier class casting how how loyal the users are but if you're able to stretch this maturity phase over a longer period you'll be making a lot of money but the kpis and the management you put behind this type of phase is totally different than in the decline or in the growth phase but all can be very profitable but i'll come to that so this is how the real world should look like and you want everything over time to grow and be a lot more successful unfortunately this is how most of the games since we're into business will look like so despite the fact that they start sharply and grow they might fall down as well we internally called it um the kpis don't hold so if you have a cohort of viral traffic i don't know 10 000 users first month you think oh great you have a good conversion good rpo and everything good engagement it's great buy a lot more marketing or be featured on the on the um in the app store and everything so if you really open the lever and see a lot of traffic coming in and the engagement goes down and everything then it can go down again so let me come to some cases this is one big point case as well we've already had this up and on a lot of conferences so i'm not really showing something new but in different contexts what's important about here is the time scale so we launched the game in december 2010 we kind of killed it not even a year later because what we did is we had it growing to nearly a hundred thousand active within two three months but then the kpis did not hold and it killed it kind of looks a little bit like a normal life cycle but instead of livestock like this it's just like this this kind of looks the same but it's a very successful game and the difference is let me just go back once here you see 80 000 users here you see 80 million users and it's not one year but it's three years so this is a life cycle that works quite well and this is just for active users but if you compare that how does it look at in terms of earning the money the life cycle can look a lot differently so if you have games like farmville some of the big point games from the game forge games whatever online games that are around there for a few years the revenue distribution doesn't look like this but it looks a lot more like this so have a look on the green slide like the green curve which is more the active users and then have a one on the blue one where you see that even though you're at a later stage in your life cycle you're able to hold the revenues or even below the revenues and that is because your thinking about the life cycle significantly changes and like i said earlier the different cohorts this is just one example of cohorts i'm going to talk you through and i think it's pretty straightforward it's a cohort of traffic which can be broken down into a paid and unpaid users well you could pay beforehand or after and in terms of unpaid of course you got all the viral traffic so i know they're not good looking this these slides but bear with me um what you see here you can buy the user up front so you have some performance-based marketing i don't know if you go like google keywords and all that stuff pretty straightforward or uh you do partner up with media partners and have something on a rough share basis all of these users that come there behave totally different that's something you got to keep in mind when building the funnel so let's come to the funnel and it's another ugly slide but it's about the message so don't be alarmed um the main concept behind this is that you got to be able with your human and technical infrastructure to track the different steps of the funnel and the funnel the principle or the concept of the funnel basically means that there are some users that are not even part of your network until they churn out and you try to get them in but how do they behave in these different steps and i just put some some some example steps in here so you have the view register first time active first payment next payment then they turn to pay and someday they will churn to be active you could reactivate them all over time but you got to be aware that um in the process of view you got to be thinking of what you can optimize in terms of every step or in in in the step of how active they are and that's just one level of complexity now think about it adding the chord thing so you could do that for every traffic channel and now think of a turkish media partner user in one of your games and so on and so on so this can become very very complex even though the concept looks quite easy but it can be very very complex because the user experience could be something different for every cohort that's something that especially at big point we've been working and we're spending a lot of time on but once you have identified these different steps and at big point we put four to six hundred kpis key performance indicators behind these different steps in total and try to measure everything to get a lot more transparency once you do that you will be able this is just an example of different kpis that are just part of the measuring the active users how they behave how they are once you do that you will be able to combine this concept of user flow to the concept of the principle of the life cycle and that's what really becomes quite interesting if you know in which stage of life cycle your game is and now i'm going to talk a little bit through the different stages of how we had a look especially in each of our games um in terms of of which stage of the lifecycle there are we basically broke it down into three different tiers to say so first one was the growth i mean there's a lot more to it but we totally at the moment leave out the production bit because this is basically what a live product a live service is to be run so first of all you got the introduction growth phase you have a lot of people joining in then you get the maturity phase which i just talked in then you get a decline phase what i basically did here is just as an example again is how do how does the kpi focus changes how does the market focus changes or um what type of updates you do you have to develop in each stage and especially in terms of marketing spending and everything so what you see here quite easy the main goal in this phase is really to learn learn from your users learn your game because whatever you write down beforehand once you put it out what we've seen sometimes it behaves totally different um tweak and adapt so focus on the growing of the game of making a game that's engaging and then we already come to the first kpis is um as we see the highlighted ones here it's it's about conversion it's not pay conversion but keeping the users in the game letting them become engaged i used to do this on conference and the former pr department didn't want me to do that because it was like become addicted it's basically this get the people in let them play let them love it but since you still have to learn a lot uh maybe do not focus on your core market because if you burn your core market with a product that might be eighty percent ready but not a hundred percent especially the viral users are not very much forgiving so um if you have an international audience benchmark different markets that you already know so maybe take a um high rpo good conversion market like netherlands or somewhere in north europe and bench market and have another market which you already know like a low converting less loyal market like i don't know turkey hungry or poland and once you've mastered or perfected the game in these markets have another rollout in the in the next phase um focus really is on growth getting the people in and built around the core loop that's very important that we've seen this um there's so many things you want to do once the game is out really focus focus focus because if you are able to keep the users in at the first stage there's so much more content and stuff you can go on and build a later stage in terms of marketing spending um no hard return invest goals should be there i mean you should not be throwing out money but if you are able to achieve a good core loop you'll be making money after you have perfected that but in this period especially in the beginning the marketing spendings will be a lot higher than the revenues but after just like you see on the on the lower right side after the like at the end of the stage um marketing and and and revenues should kind of level out if not you might have this ponyrama thing the kpis don't hold the next thing we see here is the maturity phase and there the main goal really is to expand and potentially refactor your game rework your game earn and what's very important reinvest we invest in terms of of um of resources of head count of everything because it's a service just like michael miguel charles said earlier um it's not that you have a game and you put it out and that's it but you have to constantly work on it over a longer period even on mobile it's not like that and in the web-based space if you think you're done after pushing it out having your gold master it doesn't work like that so the kpi focus have switched from just getting the user engaged to now you already have the users and they like your game well start making money with them and getting engaged a lot more so think in chords like i said earlier um build something for every cohort and start selling them i mean the people that are willing to invest two years or three years or 10 years they might be willing to invest 10 30 or 100 or even a thousand over a period of time so that's one thing in terms of market go over fletch go all the way if you have a product that works if you have a money printing machine keep applying it to every possible market um in terms of um powerpoint update focus on really growing the game make a big game i mean it's like the world of warcraft i don't know panda thing or whatever you can come up with because keep the people engaged and and be playing it and um comparing the the marketing spendings they should be significantly lower so do you will not be able to operate a game where you have i don't know 70 of revenues will be re reinvested as marketing if you do that um it's not going to be a success because then it will be dead if you turn off the marketing now we come to the last phase which is a decline phase which can be very very profitable if you do it right because a lot of companies neglect this phase they just kill a product but what we did at big point we put a lot of product into the so-called maintenance mode we have games that have not been touched apart from a happy hour or an event trigger not been touched for two years and still pulling a lot of money with no team on it no one absolutely honored so the main goal is to manage and prolong the game and as i put it down that milk the cow just make money out of it the main focus here is reduce churn try to keep him in as long as possible it's just a little bit like an old car as long as it runs keep it going keep it going keep it going um because it does its job and can be very profitable focus on viable markets so if you have community management and i don't know we sometimes said it in 30 different languages focus on the core markets people will be okay to just answer in english even though it's not the native language um manage the decline like i said in terms of revenues they're slowly declining what we've seen is somewhere it really depends on type of game but between 15 and 25 30 per year that we are losing so if the other costs are not too high um it can be profitable over a long period and what's important is um do not waste marketing money the marketing money you save here should be reinvested in some of your your stars you have there so the overall idea here is that i just wanted to give you a little bit of an understanding that despite the fact that it's one game and it's one user playing it and it actually is a service and the stage of life cycle a game is in really has an impact of how you should look at it see first of all you got to be able to measure it you got to be able to have the infrastructure in place which is a challenge in itself with a lot of companies and what i've seen in the past a lot of companies do not really realize or recognize that there's so much uplift potential of doing it because they're happy with the revenues they have but they do not understand that if they have a cohort approach for example they could be saving a lot of money and they could be on the other side making a lot more money so it's very important that you do have the infrastructure in place and if you can't if you're not able to do that on your own because you're too small you don't have the viable size of i don't know 7 800 people in the company um consult people that already done it and could help you with it because it will eventually pay off but once you've mastered the infrastructure really work with it work with the user flow concept on one side and work with a life cycle concept on the other side and the games that grow and fall down quite quite fast kill him it's okay to fail i mean we've under my brother in my tenure i think we've released 30 something games and not 30 something games were all million sellers so it is a hit driven business no matter how good you are you will fail and have the guts to fail and kill it and move on and learn from it and just have the next game out there but know when and what and how and have the kpis or the numbers the metadata to support you that's basically the core knowledge about it thank you very much pretty fast you