Why it’s hard to go from building games on console to mobile

Above: World of Tanks Blitz

Image Credit: Wargaming

GamesBeat: Sean, I used to joke with your CEO about how long it was taking to do your first mobile game. At the time it was 1,400 people or something like that on staff at Wargaming. It did take a long time — it was very deliberate — but can you talk about why that was and what you learned that was useful?

Lee: Our experience — the way I’d sum it up is, I do believe there is a certain core DNA in an organization that sits pretty heavily on that culture. The way Hothead, for example, burned the bridges and transitioned over. I also like to use the example of Kabam and how they transitioned completely from browser games to mobile. You need some drastic transformational changes within the organization if you want to transition into or expand into another ecosystem that requires a different philosophy.

From Wargaming’s perspective, even now, we’re still struggling because our core DNA as an organization is still heavily immersed in big-budget PC projects that take three, four, five years. Compared to what the mobile-first studios are doing, we’re still a long way from adopting their mindset, their development cadence, and adjusting the user experience around what’s truly mobile.

Early: While I wouldn’t say we needed to burn our bridges, we did find that we needed to create a Ubisoft mobile group, separate from the regular studio structure. In the beginning, we had a few teams embedded, a few disadvantaged teams that stole scraps from here and there. Once they became a separate operating unit, the focus really was on mobile. We’ve done the same with Ubisoft Motion Pictures. We needed that same focus, not just a piece of a regular studio.

Olson: Sega needed that same kind of focus. Entire companies were created — Sega Networks in Japan and Sega Networks over here after that — to run studios that focused only on mobile products. That was very important — to learn as quickly as possible and get immersed in the business model as well as the platform itself.

GamesBeat: Chris [Early], you used to talk more about the companion games you had for mobile and console. Can you talk about that and how it’s evolved or updated for today?

Early: Our strategy four or five years ago — partly due to our relationship with Gameloft, where we couldn’t develop a direct mobile game, but also because of our focus on console gaming — a companion game would be something that worked with the IP and the console game. Some exchange would go back and forth, some benefit going to the player. Basically an extension of the game on some level. It was great for people who played the console games.

What we’ve done since then is to not necessarily abandon companion gaming because that’s very beneficial for the people playing triple-A games — but also look at our IP and how we can apply it to a mobile-only game, reaching a much broader audience than just the folks who happened to purchase the triple-A game. More of our focus at the IP level has been going into direct mobile games.

Fung: In some of the conversations we have with companies, there’s another strategy in play. It’s going the other direction now. The power of mobile is such that people are saying, “How can we take our mobile brands and extend them onto console or PC?” Not only for return on advertising spend but for other reasons to extend the brand. That transition is happening now as well, and that thinking and process … who would have thought that would happen a few years ago?

Early: As the technology base continues to evolve at a mobile level, we’re going to see more and more of that. You can do more with mobile hardware.

GamesBeat: Chris [Early], do you think there’s a lot still to be done as far as linking gameplay between a console game and a mobile game?

Early: Speaking as a gamer, absolutely. Speaking as someone who wants to shepherd our brands, I think that holds true as well. I’d look outside of gaming, at the number of tie-ins that take place in the movies and other places. People who are interested in a lore or a brand want to continue to experience that, whatever platform happens to be in front of them at the time. If you can only play game X on your console at night when you’re at home, for the remainder of your life you might be missing that. If mobile gives you a way to connect with that — it’s not necessarily repeating the same game experience — but if it’s a way to stay involved with your game and the progression going on there, that’s only beneficial.

GamesBeat: Throwing out the names of some games, I wonder if you guys have an outsider’s view of some of them and what the lessons might be. Pokémon, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout Shelter, Watch Dogs, these have all had mobile versions. What are some lessons we can extract from what some big companies have done in the space?

Ceraldi: I can touch on the Grand Theft Auto example, which is a massive brand, but without the same clout on mobile. Why? It’s a premium game. It’s an awesome execution, but it doesn’t take advantage of the platform.

Above: Kill Shot Bravo from Hothead Games is heading to China.

Image Credit: Hothead Games

GamesBeat: It seems like it’s replicating the console experience.

Ceraldi: Right. When we look at shooters — like in our Kill Shot Bravo — it’s a shooter where you don’t move. We move you. The previous version, Kill Shot, had limited movement. We went the other way. We took that out. Every other shooter in the market has free motion, free movement, and yet we’re the leader because we approached from a perspective of what makes shooting in this era, this time, on mobile. It will mature, and it will change. We’ll merge production techniques and quality and everyone will continue to push. But we approached it from a perspective of what we thought the market would want as shooter fans.

It’s quite a different thing from taking Grand Theft Auto and just putting it on a device. They didn’t take time to figure that and didn’t have the same measure of success around a brand like that that they could compared to something like Pokémon Go.

Early: Talking about a couple of those titles … regarding Fallout Shelter, as a Fallout player and someone in the industry, I’d lamented that there was no connection between what you could do on the phone — many people spent a lot of time in the game on their phone and a lot of time in the game on their PC or console. That was a great example of … people were so interested in the lore that they were willing to play two separate things. Could there have been some benefit going both ways? Absolutely.

You mentioned Watch Dogs. That was well connected as a console and a mobile game. Unfortunately, though, with a new IP, the lore wasn’t particularly strong. The title on the mobile side wasn’t marketed as anything more than a companion for the game itself. So it suffered from a smaller audience, just a conversion of a percentage from the console, as opposed to something marketed and promoted as a stand-alone game. It was dependent on players in the console space.

In between those two is probably the sweet spot, a game that’s fun to play and can be played independent of the base console game but still has some kind of tie to leverage that.

Fung: On Fallout Shelter, it’s a great example of a game that did well, phenomenally well, because of the brand. The marketing went flawlessly. That being said, it fell flat because they never soft launched. They never got the data. They never fine-tuned the game. In mobile games, what’s new is what’s old. It’s a service, like the MMOs back in the day. A lot of MMOs were soft launched for years.

If you look at success in the industry — Pokémon Go is an example. It’s built on the back of Ingress, which had three or four years of R&D and testing and location-based data attached to it. There’s a reason why that game was an overnight success, besides just Pokemon.

Lee: Adding to the conversation on Fallout Shelter, when I look at that, I see an immense lost opportunity. … I could easily see it as a half-billion-dollar franchise on an annual basis, based on the level of engagement and retention the title had.

GamesBeat: Making as much money as the console game or more.

Lee: Absolutely. I see this as an immense lost opportunity. But hopefully, they and others will learn from that and be able to check the box in the right way.

Above: Todd Howard, game director at Bethesda Game Studios.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: I had an interview with Todd Howard, the director on Fallout 4. We talked about Shelter in particular. He noted that during the development cycle, he felt like he had three or four jobs at certain points. They did want to apply their own unique take to mobile. They didn’t want to use what they saw as more “evil” free-to-play tactics. They came around to the gacha opportunity, selling packs of stuff.

I got the sense that they were at their limit as far as what they could manage. They had maybe 30 people working on this, subcontracted out to a different company. They eventually acquired that company after the success was already there. But you can see that they might have considered it madness to expect or bet that this game would be as successful as it was, with 12 million downloads in one day. He said, “Anybody who manages to expect that result would be insane.” Yet they got that result, and from there, they had to sprint as fast as they could and catch up.

Ceraldi: Talking about live operations, it’s the difference with some of these games that came across from console as almost a packaged good. Not only was the game design not mobile first, or the economy not mobile first — maybe there wasn’t even a free-to-play economy. But there was also no real plan to realize that this is a service and that the real work starts when the game launches.

You have to extend the game. You have to add to the game. You have to engage and retain those top spenders for a long period of time. You need a road map, a life cycle for the service that you expect may last for many years. When we approach a game, we’ll always be thinking of that next version.

In our case, we did create a sequel, but it was for other reasons to do with the platform itself, trying to create a social platform versus what the previous game was.

Olson: I’d consider Grand Theft Auto or Fallout to be brand or marketing extensions. They weren’t really fully considering the business model or the platform itself. Pokémon Go is mobile first from the ground up, built on top of an already-proven mobile game. That’s a significant differentiator.