Above: The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth
GamesBeat: You have some easy knobs to turn here as well — beginner packages and the like?
Wakeford: As you think about live operations, there are some easy wins as you’re kicking off a game. Beginner packages are very helpful. The best practices out there in games show that once consumers are starting to engage in your game, incentivizing them and getting them habituated to spend, giving them a beginner package so they can spend for the first time and know that experience, is very beneficial. Make sure that once they have the currency and they’re spending, they get something tangible and feel a reward for their spend.
Other things you see that are relatively easy – how do you position payments? You have your $5.99 package and your $19.99 package. Are consumers getting that much more from the second package? Are they incentivized to go for the larger spend and get much more value? That’s another area where you can easily bring people to spend a little bit more if they get a lot more value. You habituate that behavior.
GamesBeat: The Hobbit is two years old. It’s great to see this last movie coming very soon. You have an update today with Lake-town. Can you talk about that?
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Wakeford: As you say, the new movie is coming out, and a big part of the new movie is Lake-town. The dragon is coming and you have to defend against it. Tying to a film with licensed IP, you want to have content that ties to the IP, that’s timed to the drum beats of the film or TV show or whatever you’re doing. That’s easy stuff.
More important, going back to what we were talking before, the harder kind of update to do is understanding what is happening in the game itself. The Hobbit is two years old. Players have risen in the ranks and accumulated huge amounts of wealth and power and might and everything else. The key question for us is, these individuals who’ve been on top of the leaderboards forever, they don’t want to play anymore because they don’t want to lose being number one. The real question is, how do we encourage them and create another system that will get these big players to engage and go back to fighting? As you think about what happens in your game, as games are two years old and three years old, what are the core systems you need to build to create the behavior that you want in the game?
GamesBeat: I thought it was interesting that in your first number of cities — by your fourth city, you have to actually buy a deed in order to get that. You could try to earn it, but it would take a long time and a good deal of luck. In today’s update, you’re giving away a city. It’s changing the monetization. It seems that you’re thinking of something else producing the monetization for you now.
Wakeford: What we’re seeing is a little bit of a shift. With this city, with Lake-town, if we can get all of the players into this new city, instead of just a subset that pays for it, can we get all of them to start competing there? Can we get them all into the city, build up everything within the city, and then get the alliances to compete? We believe that if we get all of our players engaged, the monetization will come through the inherent system of competition in the game. That’ll generate more money than just selling deeds to the city.
GamesBeat: I bet a dragon’s going to come and burn down my city.
Wakeford: That might very well be the case.
Above: Kabam’s Wartune
GamesBeat: We promised Asia, so we should talk about Asia here. Kabam has a presence in the West, but you’ve also expanded into Asia.
Wakeford: Let me put this in the context of Kabam. Kabam has done a great job in North America and Europe. We’ve started to dabble in Russia and Australia and some other areas. Asia is the key frontier to go after. I say that for everyone in this room.
I read a recent study that said in 2013, in China, there were 358 million mobile game players. In the U.S. there are 161 million. In Japan there are 50 million. China represents almost two times as many game players as the U.S. and Japan combined as of last year. The mobile game market in China is growing. By 2018 it’ll reach $28.3 billion. That is bigger than the game markets of the U.S. and Europe combined. We make games for smartphones and tablets. The install volume of devices in China is going to grow to 1.9 billion by 2018. That’s as big as the rest of the world. Six times larger than the U.S.
If you’re making mobile product, you have to be thinking about the largest market. We spent a lot of time saying, “Great, there’s this giant opportunity in front of us. Which is really frickin’ hard to figure out. So how do we go about it?”
Fortunately, as a larger company, we took a different path. We spent a lot of time in China, talked to all the big players there, and ended up consummating an investment and strategic partnership with Alibaba. Alibaba ended up investing $120 million in Kabam in a strategic partnership to distribute our games throughout China. It took a long time, a lot of work, but the end result of going after Alibaba and building that relationship was, we know there’s a lot to learn about Asia and China in particular. We wanted to accelerate that learning process as quickly as we could with a strategic partner.
GamesBeat: What are some of the challenges in Asia? What’s the hard part about moving to that market?
Wakeford: I don’t know if many people here have spent a lot of time looking at the market in China, but the entire ecosystem there is different from the U.S., in every aspect. People often talk about the fact that in the west there are two app stores, while in China there are 300. That’s a lot to figure out. Carrier billing is also critically important. There’s a whole new social ecosystem and social graph, not Facebook. If you want to layer a social graph into your game, you have a completely different one to tie into. If you’re going to advertise in your game, there’s an entire ecosystem – the equivalent of ChartBoost out here – in China. If you’re going to buy media and support your game, you have new companies to buy media from, and where are you pointing it to? You have 300 app stores. How do you think about creating your awareness, the buzz, and the distribution and marketing for your game? And that’s just at the ecosystem level.
Then there are about six areas you have to think about as it relates specifically to a game or mobile product in China. The first is culturalization. Kind of a weird buzzword people talk about, but it’s real. You have to think about culturalizing your product for this market. Localization is one piece of it, getting the language right. That’s easy. Then there’s art, the visual representation of the characters. Some artwork and some characters will translate easily, but some won’t. For our games, like Kingdoms of Camelot, an Arthurian legend doesn’t necessarily resonate with a Chinese consumer. It should be Three Kingdoms, right? You might have to do something radical in terms of changing your art style and approach.
Above: Lionsgate makes movies like The Hunger Games series.
Another issue is UI. I don’t know if many people here have played a lot of Chinese games, but the UI is so different. There are buttons everywhere! Things fly out of the buttons! They’re big and they flash and it’s all over the place. But that’s what the consumers like. They engage with it. It makes them excited. There’s this thrill of playing just from the UI itself. How do you capture that? If you don’t, you won’t get much engagement.
Another area that blew me away was the tutorial for games. We think about tutorials as a way to get people in the game with enough information to drop them right in there and playing. That’s not how it works in China. China likes very, very long tutorials – tapping buttons, leveling up, getting big rewards and this sense of accomplishment and fulfillment at every step of the way. Instead of getting someone in your game and playing right at level one, you may have someone starting at level five.
Payment through SMS is really important in China. It’s also important once you get into India. Very small amounts. We’re talking about five to 20 cents per day, but very quick purchases. Think about the file size of the game in your tech requirements. Optimal file size for a more casual game in China is 50 megs. When you to core and multiplayer you can go to 150 megs, but that’s it. That’s the cap. When we’re launching games here, we have high-fidelity graphics, lots of pixels, lots of animation, up to 300 or 400 megs. That doesn’t play well in China. You have to think about your resolution size. Think about device type. There are hundreds of different Android devices in China. From a device QA perspective you have a lot more to think about.
For live operations, you have to make sure to do all your events in local languages. Have events that are relevant to those languages. Think about customer service. There’s an expectation as far as customer service in China that the VIPs get treated like a high-roller in Vegas. You can call someone up on the phone and talk to them, or they’ll reach out to you if you’re spending a lot of money in their game. The expectation of consumers in Asia, and especially China, is very different from what we have here.