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

It’s exceedingly hard to take a hit game franchise on consoles and make it successful on mobile devices. Pokémon Go has made that seem easy, but it is a very rare title. When it comes to moving from console to mobile, a lot of games with mixed success come to mind, such as Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, Sega’s Sonic games, and Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs companion app.

But succeeding in mobile, which has become the largest game market with $36 billion in revenues in 2016, is a must. Big console-focused game companies are still trying to succeed in the space, but more often than not, it takes “mobile first” game companies to succeed. I moderated a panel on this subject at the Casual Connect USA game conference last week.

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Our panelists included Terence Fung, chief strategy officer at Storm8; Sean Lee, chief strategy officer at Wargaming; Vlad Ceraldi, director of development at Hothead Games; Chris Early, VP of digital publishing at Ubisoft; and Chris Olson, former COO at Sega Networks.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Terence Fung: I’m at Storm8. We’ve been a mobile-first developer since 2009. The company has launched more than 45 games. We have more than a billion downloads. We’re mainly on the casual side. I run the biz ops side of the business.

Sean Lee: I’m the chief strategy officer at Wargaming. We’re a small indie developer out of Cyprus in Europe. We’ve been making PC games for 16 or 17 years. We got lucky about six years ago with World of Tanks. Since then, we’ve been moving our titles aggressively to console and mobile. We’re trying to figure out things as we move along.

Vlad Ceraldi: I’m co-founder and director of development at Hothead Games. We’re a 10-year-old game publisher, starting with PC and console and transitioning into entirely mobile in late 2010. We shipped our first titles in early 2011. We have 175 team members between Vancouver and Halifax. We have more than 250 million downloads of our mobile series. We’re a leader in mobile shooters in the Western markets.

Personally, I’m a former programmer, tech director, producer, exec producer. I approach this from dev on console and business on console, transitioning to mobile.

Chris Early: Ubisoft has been in the publishing business for 30 years now, making most of its name with console and PC games. About four years ago, we got into the mobile business when our partnership with Gameloft ended. Since then, we’ve worked on building a mobile group and studios around the world in the mobile space. It’s been interesting, learning the transition from console to mobile. We’ve had a few games of the year. We’ve had success bringing some IP to the mobile space.

Chris Olson: I used to be the COO of Sega Networks. I left in May. That was my second tour with Sega. I saw a different area of the business working on PC and console. I helped create Sega Networks, which was focused totally on the mobile space, smartphones, and tablets. I was involved in helping transition teams from console to mobile, both on the development and the publishing side.

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GamesBeat: We’re at an interesting time in the history of mobile games. The market

is supposed to hit $36 billion in 2016. Either the last year or the last two years, it’s been a bigger market than console games. We have a lot of mobile-first companies leading in the business. Until last week, it was hard to find any console intellectual properties that were present in the top-grossing games list, but a lot can change in one week.

Our general question for the hour here is, “What can console and mobile veterans learn from each other?” I’d like to hear Vlad talk first, especially since you guys say you “burned your bridges” back to console and moved entirely into mobile. Why would you characterize it that way?

Ceraldi: Partly, it’s because our CEO was a big believer in focus. But it’s also just that not everyone made it. Some people weren’t able to survive that transition. We knew that it wasn’t enough to put a foot in. We had to transition everything — technology, approaches — we had to be willing to fail to learn. We failed a lot at the beginning. A lot of dev guys, whether it be the cycle — how long it takes to make these products or where you put the quality — they couldn’t do it.

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A big piece of it was also just the mentality, especially as we switched to free-to-play. The strategies on how to monetize or how game design changed. The fact that you had to focus on the economy first, which is something we learned as we went along. The first ones did not go economy first, trust me. There was a mindset shift, a philosophical shift, along with a skill shift. It was a bumpy road for people, and some didn’t make it.

Fung: For Storm8, the founders came from Facebook. They saw the opportunity when Facebook games, on the web side, were growing incredibly large. With a population of 3 billion people with smartphone handsets, clearly the opportunity in mobile is one of the biggest.

In the pure mobile space, I’ve lamented the fact that it’s been relatively static in the top-grossing charts. But Pokémon Go has proven that, obviously, it’s a unique case, but the charts can move very quickly. Whether it’s Draw Something or the next Trivia Crack, the addressable audience is huge on mobile.

Olson: It’s not surprising that mobile-first companies got their foot in the door earlier on the platform. Traditional publishers had an existing catalog that they optimized and put out on mobile at first, and that didn’t work as well. If you had companies that were going into mobile first, it’s not [a] surprise that their first wave would be more popular and establish a toehold in the market.

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A lot of companies were funded and started up specifically for mobile, and so when it comes to developing and innovating with their product, it was much different from companies that were already in motion with a history of product, a back catalog, or a different business. They had to go through that act of transitioning and surviving in hopes of thriving one day. That’s what Sega had to do. We had to continue to survive in order to get into a position where we could continue to grow. It’s far different from a startup that has capital. They had milestones to reach, but they could execute against that in a different time frame.

GamesBeat: Does anybody remember how far back that practice ended? Transferring your back catalog to mobile.

Early: Ubi had a very large back catalog of titles. When we started doing mobile a few years ago, that was definitely the thought. “What can we take from there and put on the platform?” And after the first few tries we realized, “Probably not many.” But the key question came to be what mechanics were still fun out of that IP or that lore.

Rayman, for example, has done a great job making the transition into the mobile space. It’s not exactly the same games, but the key mechanics of jumping and flying around — the platforming side of it works. We’ve expanded with Assassin’s Creed into a few different types of things — a card game and a game that looks very much like Assassin’s Creed where you’re climbing walls and things like that. With Assassin’s Creed Identity, the team tried to make it so you have the total freedom you have in the console games, and it just didn’t work. It was too much control to simplify. But if you’re just saying, “Oh, I want to get to the top of that building,” that works, instead of finding where you’re going and climbing all the way up.

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We’re learning as we go. It’s more a case of don’t take the exact game, but look at the IP, the brand, and see how that can work on the platform.

Lee: As far as “when did it stop,” unfortunately, just from our perspective, Wargaming is still on that path. We have one title, World of Tanks, which we started working on for mobile five years ago. When you talk to our CEO, he doesn’t refer to it as a mobile game. He says it’s a PC game that happens to run on a mobile device. From that perspective, it’s definitely not a mobile-first experience, built from the ground up to cater to the patterns of mobile users.

That said, we got a bit lucky in the sense of … we landed on a specific niche, a high-quality immersive experience that’s more console or PC like but still found a decent number of players who enjoy those kinds of experiences. There’s some relevance to the topic of today’s panel there.

GamesBeat: Do you guys think everyone has learned free-to-play at this point? Is that still a hurdle?

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Ceraldi: I think everyone’s still learning. There’s a wide gap between those who are just beginning to understand and those who have nailed it, but even then, what’s going to work six months from now? It’s going to continue to evolve.

GamesBeat: So maybe the companies with data are the ones that understand it better.

Ceraldi: Analytics is a tool that helps accelerate you. It’s needed, but it’s not … you have to learn how to interpret it and implement it. That’s a whole different path there.

Early: There’s an element just beyond learning, though. I think there’s still an element of aversion to free-to-play monetization, especially if you look at Western studios, studios that were traditionally based in a console background, people who value high-quality game experiences. That sentiment is changing, but if you look at East to West and the perceptions around free-to-play in different regions, there’s still a long way to go in terms of the change in attitudes. By consumers as well as developers.

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.

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.

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.

GamesBeat: Sean, I’d hazard a guess that of Wargaming’s fans, every one of them is a mobile user. What do you think they want on mobile? Are they the same audience you can target on mobile?

Lee: It’s important to understand that the same physical human being can have different profiles as a player, whether they’re sitting there with a PC or a console or a mobile device. You can be an extreme hardcore player on PC, but when you’re in an environment where you just have a mobile device, you don’t necessarily bring that hardcore-ness to that interaction.

Extending from that logic, our players love the historical authenticity and the immersive experience that our realtime battles provide on PC and console. Where we’ve failed as a company in the mobile space, we’ve provided them with a port, a replication of that experience on a mobile device. It’s going to be satisfying to a small percentage of that audience. The rest of the audience are looking for the essence or an element of Wargaming’s entertainment value that are built for mobile from the ground up. That’s what we need to [do] and what we’re trying to do as we continue to explore and expand our mobile efforts.

Ceraldi: Sometimes, we look at a brand that has that hardcore or mid-core audience on other platforms that you want to address. We want to make sure we attract them. But the real challenge is, there’s this whole other user base that may never have tried the product on other platforms. They’re the bigger piece of the pie. They are the pie. That’s the real opportunity. It’s also making a translation that can attract them while still attracting the core audience. If you’re just going after the core audience and creating a companion product that can live outside it, you’ve missed that bigger market opportunity.

Lee: One interesting thing I’ve seen recently — I’m sure all of you know Witcher 3 and CD Projekt behind it. They have an extremely immersive RPG experience. What they’ve recently announced is that a good number of their players within Witcher 3, the core PC and console game, they’ve been spending a lot of time playing a card game called Gwent, which is a fictional game inside the game. They picked up on that data point and announced they’re going to build a separate game out of that pub game, Gwent.

That’s a good example of taking the core brand and extending it out in a way where you don’t necessarily have to replicate the core experience. You don’t necessarily have to replicate GTA or replicate World of Tanks. If you can take certain essential elements and bring them to another platform, that’s a great strategy. Hearthstone is another example of that.

GamesBeat: How do you anticipate ways in which mobile games could reach the same emotional heights or narrative depth as console and PC games? Do we want to get there? Is that going to happen in a few years when we reach some kind of technical parity? What do you anticipate down the road?

Early: I think mobile games have already hit that point and then some. There are plenty of passionate players enjoying mobile games. A friend of mine’s 10-year-old plays Clash of Clans and meets together with other players in all these groups. The emotional highs involved in playing that game — the emotions are absolutely there. That’s been taken care of.

With respect to story, the question becomes … you could even have a short puzzle game, like Republic, that has a great storyline. That game’s been ported over to the console and PC side. That being said, I don’t think it’s the most successful of mobile games for a lot of reasons. It’s a game where you have to be immersed in it. It’s not the typical mobile experience.

Olson: Scientifically speaking, the pleasure and the emotion you get is the same, whether it’s a console game or a mobile game. When you’re playing a match-three game, that moment of matching gems is the same chemicals in your brain going off when you rescue the princess. There are different types of fun. Some things take a bit longer. But the emotions and what’s happening physiologically are the same.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.