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

At a story level, I would change the question a bit to be about engagement, not just story. Story isn’t the only way to have a long engagement with a game. Clash of Clans is one example among many others. People have played it for years at this point and continue to enjoy it. Does it need to have a story to keep a long-term engagement? I don’t think that’s the case.

Ceraldi: On the tech front — technology, as Terence mentions, is already there. We’re using technology that was used by major PC and other platform products. Our tech tools have merged. As Chris mentioned, the mobile platforms are getting more powerful. On the tech front, the capability is there across the board.

On the emotional side, though, passing groups of nerds and non-nerds clustered in the streets lately, there’s a story there. It’s a powerful story. It’s not the traditional kind of story, a single story told to everyone about a single character. In our game, Kill Shot Bravo, we have a lot of different alliances and clans and a story is told amongst their members all the time as they compete with one another. The events and the fighting that goes on behind the scenes, on WhatsApp and other channels of communication — there are stories being created all the time that way.

When we say “story” and “emotion,” games will continue to explore that but not in the same way as in traditional console development. They’re different stories, and they’re being told and shared in new ways.

Lee: If I take a step back and look at how we consume other forms of entertainment, whether it’s TV or movies or music or productivity — it wasn’t that many years ago when it was difficult for us to imagine doing so much work on a mobile email client or watching so much TV through a mobile device. Not many years ago, we couldn’t fathom interacting with Facebook the way we do today. If we look at those evolutions in our behavior, it’s not much of a stretch to be able to imagine a similar level of experience on a mobile platform.

I could imagine a new developer coming out who’s able to provide the same level of quality and fidelity as Uncharted 4 on a mobile device. I can see lying in bed and engaging for 10 or 15 minutes every day and going through a powerful narrative. It’s possible to do.

Above: The panel spoke on console franchises moving to mobile.

Image Credit: Heather Pond/VentureBeat

GamesBeat: Maybe through episodic content, the way Telltale does?

Olson: It’s totally possible. For now, the mass market, they don’t necessarily want to spend their time like that. But we’ll see games like that, and some will have success.

Ceraldi: Most people play games to pass time. That’s the number one stat there. But there are trends that could reinforce that. For example, in Japan, there was this trend … of micro-stories, these Twitter narratives that were very popular. If something like that were to take off, maybe that kind of bite-size narrative could create a new relationship between players and games.

GamesBeat: We talked a little bit about the cultural disconnect for teams between console and mobile. I wonder about VR as well. Does VR feel like a cousin to mobile or a cousin to console?

Lee: It gets back to the question about story. If, in fact, the small screen or the circumstance … you talk about someone just kicking back in bed. Maybe you put on your head-mounted display, and you’re no longer limited by the screen size or the interaction methods there. It opens up a lot more opportunities. The difference, as far as mobile VR versus head-mounted HD VR, is the capacity of the machine underneath. But the experience is something we’re looking to provide to people, whatever device they have.

Ceraldi: Augmented reality is exciting because it can leverage the power of the handsets that currently exist, and use them in novel and innovative ways. VR, on the other hand, from our perspective, it’s a ways out there as hitting the same mass impact. It could be cool. There are lots of applications in certain industries that could be fantastic. But today, for us, the focus is on the wide audience mobile can reach. AR is a part of that, but VR … it’s exciting, but it’s not going to be as impactful in the short term.

Lee: You’re certainly talking about a vast difference in the number of pieces of hardware that can support it. Many mobile phones can support AR today, but you still need something separate from a VR experience.

Above: A massive crowd gathers in New York City’s Central Park to catch ’em all.

Image Credit: Jonathan Perez/Twitter

GamesBeat: What would you bet on for the future? If you had a few more resources to start a new project or invest in an existing mobile game team, what would you do?

Fung: I’d invest in social. I’d figure out something like Musically. I think it’s a phenomenal app. It would have been great to be the person who created Tinder. It’s so simple but so elegant, so mass market. There could be a game mechanic tied to a fundamental social interaction that really keeps going on and on.

Pokémon Go has elements of that. They clearly got out the sort of alpha-beta version. Their success is going to be predicated on building out a lot of that social functionality.

Lee: From our side, coming from a traditional PC background, we feel really late to the party for mobile. We’d probably double down on mobile-first efforts, from the ground up, to try to take advantage of some of the assets we have. We have a lot of users. We have a very strong brand. There’s a certain amount of emotional attachment that existing users have around what Wargaming provides. We have an obligation to provide a ground-up mobile experience that’s going to cater to a much broader audience.

Ceraldi: I agree with Terence as far as continuing to invest in social. We already do. We were one of the early first-person shooters with a social element in the West. We’re going to invest more in social and put more eggs in that basket. Multiplayer, what it means to have multiplayer on mobile, as opposed to just trying to cut down a console or PC product. We need to make that mobile experience something different. We continue to invest in technology on that front. As I mentioned earlier, I do think aspects of AR and location-based features, how that can fold into the game experience, is another area to develop.

Early: Ubisoft puts a lot of money into a lot of different places. We’re always looking to be a profitable, risk-considering company. I’d look into the VR space. We’re experimenting in some of our studios with social VR — having people in the same place, same virtual space, and letting them interact with each other. It’s surprisingly powerful, even though they’re all just caricatures. You can’t quite read them like you would an actual person, but they move like a real person, talk like a real person.

Things like Just Dance or Star Trek Bridge Crew, where you’re interacting with four live players in the bridge environment. Or Werewolves Within, where you’re playing Werewolves around the campfire with other people. You see their motions — their hands, their head — and you realize there’s a real person guiding that. It’s too random to be A.I. There’s something about us that naturally recognizes the behavior of another real person, rather than a construct. That’s really powerful. I’d put more money into making that work better, hopefully on mobile and on HD.

Olson: I’d say VR, personally. Social has been mentioned, but the powerful thing about VR is that you’re literally in a virtual reality. In reality, we’re social creatures. Deconstructing that and building a virtual environment is super compelling and interesting.

Above: Rayman

Image Credit: Ubisoft

Question: Can you address the differences in managing your audience? With Ubisoft, a Far Cry player is likely very different from a Rayman player.

Early: We look at “audience” as a very broad term. Our Just Dance audience is very different at some levels than our Far Cry audience. Now, it’s still a Venn diagram of gamers, and we have a number of people who play both. But the way we look at it is we approach it from a brand-marketing perspective. We try to get the message out about a particular brand and where we want it to be. Sometimes that works well, to overlap them, and sometimes it doesn’t work so well.

Fung: At Storm8 we founded the company as a network-first company. The way that I think about it nowadays, if you think about the Bravo channel and the Real Housewives of Orange County or New York City, clearly they’re extending that brand and moving that forward. They know their demographic, and they’ve leveraged that brand into other things. You can tell I know way too much about reality TV. But they’ve extended other Bravo shows into a male demographic with real estate shows and so on.

With respect to Storm8, we’re not going to have Kill Shot Bravo in our network any time soon. That said, there are natural extensions we could inch into moving forward. If you look at the world of media in general, it’s great to be Disney and have multiple overarching brands that target certain demographics.

Above: Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, gave a heartfelt talk at the close of his press event about the need to take risks.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Question: About Assassin’s Creed Identity, one of the things I thought was best about it was that for a very clear purchase price of $2.99, I could get additional missions. I wasn’t required to buy virtual currency. That worked perfectly. I’d spend much more money on mobile games if I had more opportunities to just directly purchase content, without having to use virtual currency. How did that work for you, and is that something you see as a possibility for drawing customers with different purchasing profiles?

Early: To be fair, it was an experiment on our part, an extrapolation of what’s been working well for the franchise on the console and PC level. The right answer in the long run for us, I think, is going to be a little of both. The episode packs that you’re talking about will be available at a known cost, the right price for a good experience. And then, you’ll have the ability to use microtransactions or virtual currency to enhance that experience, whether it be with customization or gameplay enhancements, exchanging time for money. It’s worthwhile for us.

However, as you might expect, it’s a limiting feature as well. You can only buy an episode one time, whereas in something like Clash of Clans, you might spend a lot of money to accelerate your progress through a particular series there.

Ceraldi: It may sound like I’m criticizing the question. I’m not. But that’s the exact same question our devs were asking in 2011. That caused a lot of internal conflict over whether we should ask for money and in what way. What’s a virtual economy? Why sell virtual items for so much money? It was a pretty fundamental shift to overcome, understanding that we’re creating these game services for millions of users, and they may spend in many different ways.

Olson: That’s ultimately the point. Players spend in many ways, and you want to accommodate as many of them as possible, giving players as many ways as you can to enjoy your game.

Question: Specifically, when you go from console to mobile, for those of you who have these huge fan bases that love certain products, what do you do along the way to interact with those core console fans to help them learn about the experience or set expectations? It’s going to be a different game. It’s not necessarily going to be the same experience. I’m curious if you did anything specifically with your player base.

Olson: You have to tread carefully with your core enthusiasts. In Sega’s case, the advantage was that a lot of our core IP is pretty mass market, relatively speaking. Sonic, Crazy Taxi, Super Monkey Ball, these are our most recognizable brands, and they tend to move pretty easily over into the mobile sphere. We had a pretty easy time as far as starting a dialogue about bringing our core IPs over to mobile.

Above: Just Dance Unlimited, Ubisoft’s upcoming music subscription service, hopes to remove all barriers to entry for the franchise.

Image Credit: Ubisoft/Dean Takahashi

Early: Some of our key successes in doing that … we took our player councils, or key community folks, and opened up in the same way we’d think about creating a dialogue between our dev teams and key fans at the beginning of the next triple-A project or whatever. We did that same thing for mobile, and it worked. Not flawlessly every time or not smoothly every time because there’s a lot of inherent bias. “This is a triple-A game, and you’re going to dumb it down for mobile.” But those are the attitudes that we needed to hear, so we could effectively address enthusiastic fans as we made a new version of the IP.

Question: How do you resolve that creative tension that exists between different stakeholders in a brand? When you have something that may be coming out of the back catalog, how do you determine who should be authoring this new direction for the brand?

Early: For Ubisoft, I’d say it’s actually harder to do the more successful a title is. Success breeds a bit of a protective attitude that goes along with whatever’s created that success. The way it goes within our company, all of those titles — whether mobile or console — are pitched to an editorial board. You might have some brands shaping the ideas and the mechanics, but in the end, there’s a central group of folks who focus on the products that Ubisoft is making, whether it’s console or mobile. That’s how we look at balancing what we’re doing with our brands.

Olson: It’s a case-by-case basis. A lot of times, there’s a directive to make a mobile game, and so the mobile game gets made. But at Sega, well-known brands typically have owners. You have to abide by their rules and deal with their input. A lot of the time it’s great input, especially when you’re trying to adhere to the core pillars of the brand. But again, it’s a case-by-case basis. We have an in-line process that vets each stage, and the brand steward will be there to help it along.