Above: KingsRoad
GamesBeat: When you’re doing this and you’re watching the rest of the mobile gaming industry grow, what are some things you’ve learned? What are some observations you might have about the larger market?
Richardson: It’s been an interesting year in mobile. The games that were king of the hill in 2013 are still king of the hill at the end of 2014. We’re starting to see this situation where the two most valuable skills to be a successful business in free-to-play are, one, having the ability to drive really high lifetime values out of a user base. That’s all about long-term engagement and thoughtful monetization. It’s pretty simple math. You want to keep people playing for months or years and you want to have those people see a lot of value when they spend money. That’s what Game of War, Fire Age, Clash of Clans, and on the casual side Candy Crush have been able to do.
The second piece is you have to be a marketing machine. You have to be thoughtful, analytical, and well-capitalized to be able to take advantage of those high LTVs you’re driving with your game, spending money to continue to feed and grow the business. That’s created some haves and some have-nots, people who have the war chest and who don’t. There are people who understand how to build games that will retain people for a long time, and there are those who don’t.
GamesBeat: There are games with great gameplay and games with great brands, and then there are games with neither that are feeling the pain of having to spend money on user acquisition.
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Richardson: Let’s talk about that a bit. It’s funny. You’re really trying to solve for two things. First, let’s try to solve for user acquisition. How do I make user acquisition less expensive for me than for other people? First of all, I build a really good game that Apple and Google want to feature, that the press is excited about, and that people tell other people about. That’s an important component.
Second, I want to brand. Do I have an existing brand, a licensed IP brand, a brand I bring over from the console or PC world? Is there something that gives me recognition and creates a bit more excitement in the user when they go to download the game?
The third piece, which very few companies have taken advantage of – I think we’re going to be the first at any scale with a mid-core game – is cross-platform. King used the virality of Facebook to create an incredible virtuous cycle for user acquisition when they launched on mobile. If you’ve seen the charts for the last few weeks, you’ve seen SGN do a very similar thing with Cookie Jam.
We’re just about to embark on that with KingsRoad now that it’s launched. We’re lucky that Apple has put us in the Best New Games feature. We have a web audience of millions of players that we’re going to engage on the tablet side. We’ve been lucky in that we’ve bought less than 10 percent of our installs. We’ve had about 6 million installs of KingsRoad on Facebook and the web. We’ve had great word of mouth. High user rankings have helped us. Facebook offers some strong innate virality. We’re going to leverage that to help us grow our base on mobile, without necessarily having to spend huge amounts of money.
Above: KingsRoad
GamesBeat: I don’t know if King has described it quite that way. What they used to say was that you couldn’t really update that often or independently on mobile, while you could do that in a complete self-serve way on Facebook. They would launch a game on Facebook to get all the bugs out and optimize and get it in great shape, and then once it was growing well there they could then consider taking it over to mobile. Facebook was almost a proving ground in that way.
Richardson: That’s fair. We’ve certainly gotten that same value. Patience matters. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Game of War took three years to build, and likewise KingsRoad. Vainglory took quite a while to build. These explosive, genre-defining games require patience. King had a huge advantage starting Candy Crush on their own portal and on Facebook before they started on iOS. They could polish it and iterate on it.
The reason they’re not talking about this is, telling everyone that cross-platform is their secret sauce isn’t a smart thing to do competitively. But you just have to look at the numbers. Go through their financial filings. They did about $40 million on the web in the quarter before they launched on iOS. Of course iOS grew within two quarters to I think $120 million that second quarter. But here’s what’s interesting. The web business went from $40 million, a stable number at the time, to $90 million. Not only did mobile increase the overall size of their business, but it drove their web business higher. They clearly got huge advantages in user acquisition because of the virality they had and the ability to drive users on Facebook over to mobile.
GamesBeat: How does this different kind of acquisition come into it now with television advertising, which we’re starting to see more of?
Richardson: That’s a reflection of companies that have really high lifetime values in their base. They can afford a higher cost per install. As I said, it’s the haves and have-nots. Being on television can really help those companies take advantage of high LTVs. They can reach a broad audience and turn those people into a handful of high lifetime value (LTV) customers going forward.
There’s something else going on with video and television. I think you’re going to see, in 2015, more new genres introduced, or games that define genres, that are very much more reminiscent of PC and console games. They’re also going to have high graphic fidelity. They’ll appeal to gamers. Vainglory is the first example of that, I think, in the MOBA category. You’re going to see others. Those games will get outsized interest from Google and Apple, the press, everybody. They’ll play really well on Twitch and other video apps. They can be successful on television. We plan to do some television for KingsRoad, probably in Europe. Certainly something we’ll experiment with.