Introduction

Jon Jordan: Welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook in association with Liftoff. Join us as we uncover the latest trends in user acquisition, monetization, and mobile game design. Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, John Jordan. Joining me today is Kalle Heikkinen, Chief Game Analyst at Game Refinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Kalle?

Kalle Heikkinen: Very good, how are you?

Jon Jordan: Yeah, not bad, not bad at all. And Erno, Chief Game Analyst at GameRefinery, a Liftoff Company. How’s it going, Erno?

Erno Kiiski: All good.

Jon Jordan: Good, good. So, we are over halfway through 2024. So time for some retrospective discussion on what’s been going on in the mobile game space, as well as plenty of trends and new games to discuss. So, who’s gonna kick us off? What are the big trends that you are seeing?

Supercell’s 2024 strategy shift

Erno Kiiski: Well, I was thinking maybe at first we could discuss a little bit about the games and, first of all, what are the trends in terms of genres and the new entries in the market? And what has been happening in the first six months before we go in any deeper on the game level feature level details or anything like that? But maybe let’s start off with mid-core stuff. To me, it’s definitely one of the biggest stories of 2024 so far. Supercell has never been out of the picture, of course, but they have made quite a big change of direction and have been scaling pretty much all of their games at the start of 2024. So now, naturally, they are pushing a lot with their live ops, adding a lot of live ops to their game.

Erno Kiiski: They used to be the whole kind of mentality of very tiny teams on these games and kind of like a light on live ops compared to many other competitors and markets, but still kicking ass, but now, especially, they have been ramping that up pretty much on all of their games. And that can also be seen in the performance, especially Brawl Stars, which is probably one game that has been covered most in the industry. So much talked about how they have turned the boat around and have been scaling like crazy, record numbers, record months, month after another.

Erno Kiiski: This game has been around for a while already. So why? Well, of course, I’m not going to tear down and go super deep into the game, but a lot of things are happening with its monetization, like how they overhauled their battle pass system and changed them. There was a lot of discussion when they removed the gacha system. Then there was a small, actual drop in late 2023, but now they figured out how to make that model work that they have. And, you know, how they overhaul their battle pass and, overall, how they are unlocking characters and the monetization. You could earn the currency back and buy the battle pass. But now I have to buy every season of the battle pass and so on. So, there are a lot of changes in terms of how the game works, how the game gets monetised, and especially then talk about the live-ops and how the whole live-ops and live-event framework is supporting the game.

Erno Kiiski: So, massive scaling. The same thing is true with Clash Royale. The game has been scaling, not as radically as Brawl Stars; we have to mention Squad Busters. I think Brawl Stars was Supercell’s last launch, so we finally have Squad Busters getting the game out there. And of course, I think, at least by their own quotes, it was like the biggest launch because it’s kind of like an effort for the launch of a game for Supercell than ever, massive marketing campaigns with all those Hollywood celebrities making the ads and pushing the game there.

Squad Busters: Launch and market reception

Erno Kiiski: Quite a solid start all the way to the top of the charts. But since the launch, I think they launched in May, end of May, it had declined a little bit around to kind of like a top 50 game or so on in the US charts. but now it seems to kind of stabilize around that area also with the download; it has, of course, gone down since the initial launch a little bit, but has stabilized. So now it’s an interesting part of the life cycle to see where the game goes. Are they able to do the same thing as Brawl Stars, add a lot of live events to the game, and support the game for the long run to sustain and stay at the top? That still remains to be a question.

Erno Kiiski: I remember one of our analysts who played that game very thoroughly saying that, at the moment, it’s a stable moment in the game, new content around the amount of live events is still quite light. So, where the game goes next will be a big topic in the latter half of 2024. My first highlight would definitely be the Supercell new game and all the game scaling.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. On Supercell, I have to say that, and when it comes to Squad Busters, specifically, like Erno said, this is the interesting phase where It’s still early to say anything definite yet. We definitely need more time to see how the game forms. But at the moment, I actually have more questions than answers. One of them has always been: How much is this game actually cannibalizing Brawl Stars? Even though it has that more PVE focus, there’s still quite a lot of overlap when it comes to the nature of the games. That’s always been in my mind.

Kalle Heikkinen: And then the other one, is that when it comes to this record-breaking pre-registrations, I think a lot of it was driven by players wanting to get the free skin that they could get out of by clicking that pre-registration button. So I’m just wondering how many of those players did that? Just because of getting that skin. so that showed up, of course, the downloads, but how are they gonna, you know, are they going to stay in the game or go back to the other Supercell portfolio games?

Supercell’s China strategy and Hay Day relaunch

Kalle Heikkinen: And then another thing that is more of a broad, Supercell, notion, which is actually not that much discussed, I feel is that in addition to all these, It’s like, for example, Brawl Stars breaking records with their performance and, and some other titles they’re doing extremely well. Supercell has also been active in releasing games in China. Just a couple of months back, they re-released Hay Day. Nowadays, if you want to do a China launch, you need to partner up with a local entity. Supercell has also had to take back its games and then relaunch them. They’ve been doing that gradually. The latest one is Hay Day, which has been able to sustain itself in China.

Jon Jordan: I guess one of the interesting things with Supercell is, or one of the arguments would be, the sort of the scale aspect. I’m sure they’ve done it in their own Supercell way, but to me, a lot of that is just them catching up to what the industry has been doing for the last three years. And they, they’ve always been, we’re gonna do it our way and have these, you know, super sales, very small teams and not have producers and all this sort, and to a degree, as I say, I’m sure they’ve done it with their own style, I think it’s them finally having to admit this is how the market is these days. And we can’t just be an exception. so they basically copy the best practices of a lot of these things that they haven’t been doing. So, I mean, it’s good to see. So it’s not a criticism, but I think the differentiation companies have now to sort of do their own thing and stand out is sort of now almost impossible. People know how the industry works and you sort of have to get with the industry. If you’re going To be successful. And it sort of shows actually, you know, that They make great products. So you’d almost expect them to use best practices of the industry. They’re going to get that extra sort of boost because they really know their games.

Jon Jordan: So it’s good to see. Is it a good point on Squad Busters? I guess there’s so much going on there that they’re not. It’s good to get the launch out, but they can now take a much sort of longer term perspective on these things and sort of run them as a portfolio. And there’s not so much pressure on one particular game now.

Supercell’s IP and interconnectedness

Erno Kiiski: It’ll be interesting to see because, like the whole Squad Busters, the idea of the game is this connection of the, all the Supercell IPs, will there be more actual interconnection, other than just, of course, the IPs Start to do more of this like portfolio interconnection, especially most likely there are a lot of overlap with the players of Specific games in like Supercell portfolio, but at the moment it’s been of course the IP same characters but will there be more actually like Even more interconnection between those games. Of course, they have the Supercell IP and all that stuff. So Very interesting to see if there will be something like that.

Kalle Heikkinen: Will they go deeper to the characters and to the lore of the Supercell IPs because I feel that, like, Okay, I’m not the biggest Supercell player out there, but I do feel that it’s not the most, I wouldn’t describe the characters or the background lore of these games being the deepest when it comes to different IPs and stuff like that. So interesting to see if they’re gonna, dig deeper into that, part and expand the lore and background of the characters.

Jon Jordan: You mentioned Kalle there about cannibalization and how they place everything within their portfolio if you want to think of it that way, and I guess over time now, we’re just looking at, not many companies had the experience of running successful games over 10 years. And you realize how you run games and how you push things in certain ways. There is a sort of rhythm to that, and how you place games within those rhythms is probably pretty complicated. But equally, yeah, that inter-sort of connectedness, almost like a, not quite a meta-layer, that’s probably putting it to a complex point, but having games that fit into where other games are moving away from will be fascinating over the next few years to see how they play that out.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, I guess in a way this is like a test to the Supercell IP, that how strong is it I’m not gonna say that, let’s say if Squad Busters is not gonna perform as well as everyone is predicting. I’m not saying that means that the Supercell IPs or the IPs of the different games are failing or anything like that.

Jon Jordan: It’s interesting as a company that their IPs, maybe with the exception of Hay Day, do feel like a very connected sort of selection of, Games and characters, and you know, I think that’s slightly accidental. They have tried other things in the past, but they have ended up with a game world, a Nintendo-type game world, where everything fits together. And not many companies in the world have that because it’s quite hard to do. So that’s another thing to look at on the IP side. Okay. But the mobile game industry is not just Supercell. So, should we break out of that and move on?

Asian publishers’ growing RPG presence in Western markets

Erno Kiiski: All right. maybe next, if we stick with the more, like, mid-core-ish titles, one thing that we have noticed, which is kind of interesting, knowing where the market is and how hard it is to scale, especially like this mid-core, hardcore type of games, is that if we look at like especially the U.S. market or the Western markets and look at the games that have been able to enter that top, top rankings for example, top 200 in the U. S. games that have been launching this year. So new games. So on, in 2024, there’s actually. many RPGs out there, considering the market situation at the moment. So, of course, AFK journey has a spin-off slash sequel to the highly successful AFK arena, an idle RPG with even higher production values, a bit of a different twist. They launched at the end of March. It has had a strong launch but has been going down a little bit, also not being able to sustain on the top, but still out there on the top 50 rankings. So doing okay, but maybe not as explosive a launch as somebody could have expected from AFK arena, especially what it was back in the day. So a little bit on a downward trend, let’s see, are they able to turn that one around. Then, there are other RPGs from Netmarble, who are pushing out so many turn-based RPGs, and especially with this kind of anime feel.

Erno Kiiski: If I understand correctly, there was this game called Solo Leveling: Arise, which is apparently an IP from a Korean webtoon. And that launched, I think, in May. Very strong launch, very kind of like a classic, what we see in the Western markets with this type of action RPG that has that huge spike. And then usually after the launch spike of this kind of like a niche audience they get that everybody’s all this is a game in the market, but it usually declines very quickly. But with this game, what is exceptional, at least at this point, is that it hasn’t gone down so radically, it is still able to sustain okay rankings, it has gone down. Yes, definitely. But it’s still able to sustain itself there. I’m in the top 50 and top 80 among the top-grossing games. So, it’s very interesting to see. Is it able to sustain itself for any longer term? It’s only been a month, but often, in these games, the initial launch spike has gone much more radically down in terms of performance. It remains to be seen, but at least so far, it has been able to sustain a bit better than your average similar type of anime-based action RPG in the West.

Erno Kiiski: And then there is the third one in the same category, Wuthering Waves, which is this kind of a cross-platform from PC mobile type of action RPG, again, anime-themed, pretty much a straight-up competitor against Genshin Impact. So open world, character collector, RPG, the differences in the combat, if I understood correctly, I haven’t played the game myself, this type of action RPG where you’re collecting characters, super high production values in Genshin Impact style, open world and all that stuff. Again, it had a quite strong launch, all the way to the top 10 and very top, but it had declined a little bit. But now again, when they brought the first, bigger content batch, at the end of June, a couple of days ago, if you look at Genshin Impact’s revenue graph, there is always a massive spike again when they bring new characters, back to the top, the same with Wuthering Waves. So, at least at the moment, let’s see where the baseline will find itself, but we’re doing quite well. We’re doing quite well, especially considering, again, it’s a game that’s cross-play. A lot of the players will be moving or will possibly play on a PC. PC with a bit of a better control for that kind of a game, but still doing quite solidly, after about a month, over a month of launch, in mobile. Overall, interesting to see that there are quite a few of these RPGs that have been able to sustain at least, over a month, in the market; a month is a short time. So what’s the long-term sustainability, but at least, some fresh blood on that section?

Kalle Heikkinen: And we have the, what? Zenless zone zero is coming, I guess. Yes.

Erno Kiiski: Yeah, Thursday, I think it’s 4th of July, a new game from miHoYo, so most likely will be on the very, very top again, like, you know, same as with Genshin, same as with Honkai, so definitely probably one of the biggest mobile launches of the year coming like in a couple of days.

Kalle Heikkinen: So, listening to what you just said, I feel like one of the trends of this year is most likely the anime-themed games, or at least anime-themed RPGs. Looks like we’ve had quite many of those. And I think one thing that links all these is also the fact that these all come from Asian publishers, right? So, I guess we can throw that out there as an example. I’m not saying that it’s been a trend for the last six months, but let’s maybe label it as an ongoing trend that the Asian publishers are just growing their presence in the Western markets.

Call of Duty Warzone Mobile: Cross-progression challenges

Erno Kiiski: Then if we move on from the RPGs, maybe the last that I would like to highlight in 2024 on the mid-core side, I would highlight Call of Duty Warzone, One of the biggest games on the PC and console side that there is, and the mobile version launched with cross-progression, which is also an interesting trend. We have been talking about cross-platform, and it’s, one of the trends that a lot of people talk about, actually cross-platform games and having the mobile version of the same game, But the difference with Warzone was that it wasn’t actually the same game in that way that you were not able to play against PC players or mobile players couldn’t play against the PC players and so on, but they had cross-progression. So there, you know, your progress vectors in the game that you’re collecting the weapons and progressing in the shared battle pass. So if you play on a mobile, and then hop onto the PC, that’s the same progression. So you are sharing that progression and, you know, can do the grinding on either platform.

Erno Kiiski: But then, if we hop onto the performance of the game, it’s not been very good. It’s struggling quite a bit. Of course, when it launched, it spiked there, but then it got down quite heavily. And nowadays, it’s not even among the top 200, like crossing games in the US. Compared to when Tencent published or developed Call of Duty mobile, it is still in the top 10,, still struggling. How are they able to get it? Players out of that mobile SKU that, you know, they have their players, they have their tons of skins already, haven’t been able to really pull off players from there. Not different enough. And also, if you compare it to like live ops machine, Tencent is able to kind of like push out on a weekly basis compared to what the Warsaw mobile is doing with the live event. It’s much slower, much more, and less content than Call of Duty mobile. So we’ll be interested to see what Activision is actually gonna, you know, keep the game alive, for a long term, because, at least in terms of performance, it’s not really, really doing it. But of course, there are the kind of like, might be, I don’t know how it has affected, for example, the PC side or like, are some of the PC players like, yeah, playing there, but all the monetization is happening on the chest of the PC client, for example, what’s that? So there’s that. It’s not visible on mobile performance, but yeah, to be honest, there’s no competition against Call of Duty Mobile.

Kalle Heikkinen: The only sensible thesis behind that is that they want to have the kind of mobile extension of the game so that people can also use it. Something related to Warzone, even when they’re not on their PCs. But other than that, as you said, it doesn’t look too good. But Erno, you forgot to talk about Love and Deepspace. So I want to mention this, of course, not maybe the biggest explosion when it came to long-term success. Nevertheless, this was one of the most interesting titles to hit the market, in my opinion. This is a hybrid dating simulator for anyone who doesn’t know what Love and Deepspace is. There are a lot of interactive story elements in the game, but interestingly enough, it also has an action RPG layer where you upgrade characters, and that’s a big part of the gameplay as well. In terms of performance, it is interesting that this was a successful game in multiple markets. So, in Japan, in China, and when it also launched in the U.S., I just looked at the data, and now it’s only peaking to inside the top 200 grossing, so it’s not sustaining there anymore. This was an interesting case and super high production values, by the way. The game looks absolutely phenomenal. So that was interesting and obviously comes from, I believe from China. So the publisher’s info Infold, I would assume that it’s from China, Hong Kong, or something like that.

Erno Kiiski: Yeah, when the game launched, it was at least, I don’t know how much of these types of games have been buried in Asian markets, but a game that was able to do okay in terms of launch of this type of. Pretty much an interactive story game, but with kind of like a depth of an RPG meta-system, which was very, very, usually you don’t see these games do anything in the West, but now it’s for a month or two, it was doing surprisingly well. So yeah, good highlight. All right. Should we hop on to the casual side?

Hybrid casual trends

Erno Kiiski: Maybe first we could talk a little bit about hybrid casual. And that’s also one of the trends, of course, hybrid casual, companies struggling with the hybrid casual model, moving to hybrid casual. And then also, these different types of, hybrid monetization models of different genres, adding ad monetization into the play and trying to get that Low CPIs in terms of gameplay to be very easily digestible, easy to get into, but then actually building it. So of course, it’s not like a new thing in 2024, but we have seen even more new games, different types of games in this, that could be categorized as hybrid as well. So, I would put these in two buckets. Are these real simple hybrid casuals, which have been mostly like puzzle games recently? If you look at IAP charts, as these are hybrid casuals, the whole point is that it’s hybrid monetization—there are ads, and they are IAPs. But even with just the IAP revenue, there have been multiple, different kinds of Hybrid monetized, hybrid casual puzzle games entering also the top charts with IAPs. And what is very interesting there is that there are a lot of different types of core gameplay involved. So there are games like Screw Jam, which is the game where you’re Screwing, screwing these jams and, you know, trying to figure out which screws you need to remove to remove this like block wooden blocks type of a puzzle game. Then there is another very similar game called Wood and Nuts, very well compared to those two games in that kind of core gameplay. Then there is a Twisted Tangle from Rollick Games, so from Zynga. Basically, these, like, you have these different ropes, tangled between each other and you need to solve that puzzle. A game called Hexasword, I think it was from Lion Studios if I’m correct, Basically this type of, different blocks of, piles of blocks that you need to move around and then figure out the same colors and stuff like that, but anyways, different types of core gameplay is like, if you think about the puzzle market or the traditional casual puzzle market, it’s very. There are specific types of core gameplay. It’s max three there. It’s merge or so on and so on, or like hidden objects and so on. And it’s always almost the same type of core gameplay. So what is interesting with this trend that we have seen with the hybrid monetization models and these types of games, there is a lot of, Variety in terms of like core gameplay, but what is common between these is, of course, a lot of them have like similar type of a monetization things for the IAP. So, you know, the usual puzzle things like a puzzle, like the boosters and the extra time or move or depending a little bit on what the core is like. Also, if you look at, you know, what makes them this hybrid casual, not hyper casual puzzle game is that they are adding more content, so more levels, on a specific cadence. And also, of course, it’s the live events and kind of like the live event framework that supports that core gameplay. So if you look at any of these types of games, the events that they are pushing on top of the game to give that kind of like more incentives to, for players to, you know, purchase things and play the game, engage players more into the playing the game. It is actually very similar to any type of puzzle game. So, that is very common, no matter what the core gameplay is or the event types and so on that support it. Across any type of puzzle game, whether it’s Royal Match, Match Three, Garden Scapes, or these hybrid casual puzzle games, many similar event types and event frameworks are used to push players for the core gameplay. So this is definitely one kind of a clear genre, these hybrid casual puzzle games with different types of core gameplay. How do you actually play those puzzles and solve those puzzles?

Erno Kiiski: And then the second bucket that I wanted to mention is this. What people still call hybrid casual, which is this Survivor IO type of game or Archer type of game. Both of these genres are commonly called hybrid casual in the industry, but they are very, very different in that way. If you play Survivor IO, for example, yes, it starts simple. The whole idea is that you can make very appealing, easy-to-understand games. ads and so on. But then when you play for it for a week, for example, then the game actually has the depth of any mid-core RPG in terms of features, in terms of different ways that they are monetizing those meta-features and so on. So this is like a different bucket of a hybrid casual. So yes, they are also monetizing hybrids. Insane amount of depth, in terms of its features, once you get deeper and deeper into the game, and there have been a couple of games, for example, this quite recent game, has been scaling goals. Some zombie.io, which has been, it’s basically a survivor IO type of a game, but it has a lot of innovative features. You put even more effort into a character collection and build a team, and then that affects the core gameplay. They have tons of depth into the game. It has 10 different progression vectors. So different ways that you can get stronger. And then, when you start the game, it’s like, ah, this is nice and easy to get into, but it is like a crazy amount of depth. And then of course, everything is almost monetized, both with ads, both with, you know, IAP. So there’s also a crazy amount of spend depth over there. So, one game in that category has been scaling and doing some innovative stuff. Over there, to follow.

Kalle Heikkinen: Okay, I have to say, you kind of stole my thunder when it comes to the hybrid casual stuff, that was really thorough, going through all the highlights of what is going on there. But I’m just trying to think of what I could add to that. And I guess I’ve always struggled with the definition of hybrid casual. Sometimes, it feels like if you have a game that monetizes both on IAA and IAP, that’s a hybrid casual. And if that’s the case, then you can. That’s a pretty vague definition. And then on the other hand, some people defined it as being like a combination of. mid-core, even hardcore elements in game mechanics-wise, but then combining that with a very casual, let’s say, art style or something like that. And there are other ways to think about it as well. So, I always struggle a bit with the definition, but nevertheless, I think the last six months have really proven that these hybrid casual games are able to not only break into the top 200 grossing but also sustain themselves there. So, for example, some of the games that Erno mentioned, like Twisted Dangle, that was released last December, and It’s still in the top 200 grossing, so, the formula has been kind of proven now. It’s not only about Archero anymore. a couple of years back when people asked, for example, for us, more analysis on hybrid casual games. We were like, well, there’s Archero and what else is out there? But now the market has definitely expanded.

Jon Jordan: So it sounds like it is interesting where you have the very casual starting experience to sort of encourage many people. And then you’re sort of filtering through that. And I guess at an original point, we would think when people play those games, some are going to monetize through adverts, and some are going to go through in-app purchases, but maybe as they get more complicated, the split between the monetization changes as people get further into the game. So you want to have those deep retention mechanics, you know, towards the end, simple at the start. And then, that’s sort of how that genre is expanding. But maybe some homework, come up with a new definition while you’re, Do a stamp on the industry.

Jon Jordan: I’ll make a note. There is lots of stuff going on there. It is funny how much of it comes back to thinking about LiveOps. That always springs out to me as you’re talking about these games, and the whole industry is always getting more and more deeply into live ops and even into what we might call casual experiences. And anything else that we have to add to this?

Microfun and merge games

Erno Kiiski: I think Kalle knows the company better, but I would if we talk about the more mid-core. I’ve talked about Supercell, but maybe you could talk a little bit about Microfun.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yes. So, Merge Two is definitely one of the genres that has been doing extremely well this year. It is mostly driven by games like Travel Town. Then we have Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape from Microfun. That company’s interest comes from China, and they clearly have this portfolio strategy. They do in-game cross-promotion, so you have these events going on where they advertise the other games in the portfolio so that if you download those games and engage with them, you get rewards in the app where you downloaded those games. That’s obviously a very clever way to move players around. Some studies have shown that People often have more than one merge game on their phones when it comes to the merge genre. So it makes total sense to advertise that they have, for example, merge three games also in their portfolio. So I have kind of a couple of different Takes on the merge and advertising them, pushing them to certain players can be very effective and for Seaside Escape and Gossip Harbor, that has been very beneficial. And also, on the product side, they’ve been constantly updating these titles; for example, Gossip Harbor, they added a race event just a couple of months back, which was, of course, interesting. We haven’t seen those much in the. Merge to side and, in general, in non-level-based games, not so much. For example, this was, I think, already from last year, but they have this, like a relationship, progression mechanic there where you can build your relationship with some of the in-game characters and, Have a progression vector attached to that not only Someone could say that Gossip Harper is very much inspired by Love and Pies but you could also make the argument that they have been trying to innovate and Add, new things to the game and also to the merge to genre in general.

Erno Kiiski: It’s kind of interesting in that way. I feel that it’s a company that hasn’t been talked about that much yet because, but, like, if you look at any of these games, like Gossip Harbor, it’s basically been doing bigger month, bigger month, bigger month in terms of revenue one after another. It’s a game that has been scaling constantly. And then, you know, nowadays it’s like among the travel town, which are advertised like moon active, I guess, nowadays owns the game and they’re advertising the game like crazy. But Gossip Harbor is a game that’s basically clear number two now in the merge two category; there’s Travel Down there’s Gossip Harbor. The second release, Seaside Escape, is another game from the same genre and company. It’s now also been scaling a lot. So, they are becoming a very interesting company in that genre. Gossip Harbor was, very much like Love and Pies, but they have been, again, Gossip Harbor has been pushing so much LiveOps into the game compared to maybe their competitors like Love and Pies, So a lot of, different types of events, not all of them, have been super innovative in that way that, you know, there are proven mechanics seen in the other genres, you know, like, for example, I think they just added this kind of like a Potion event that, I think Royal Match brought the end of last year or so and now Gossip Harbour brought it. But that was the first time in the Merge Two genre. So they are scaling a lot with the live events and a very interesting company that, yeah, is not talked about a lot, and it’s not very out there. I think it’s China-based, right, Kalle? So there is not a lot of information about the company out there, but in that genre, it is very much a scaling one.

Jon Jordan: LiveOps again. We keep coming back to it, but that’s sort of what it is, isn’t it? I mean, it’s always been that thing with mobile games. People have it on their phones. It’s always there. They always want something new. It’s hard to move people from one game to another. So you want to keep them in your game. If even Supercell doubles down on LiveOps, that’s the thing. Cool. Good. Well, that was a very good overview. Thank you, very much to Erno and Kele for their expertise.

Kalle Heikkinen and Erno Kiiski: Thank you.

Jon Jordan: Plenty of games to be checking out there. I haven’t heard of a few, so maybe the homework for everyone is to check out some new games and see how you get on with them. But thanks for listening to the podcast. Every episode, we discuss what’s going on in the world of mobile games. So don’t miss out, do subscribe, and we’ll see you next time.

Introduction

Jon Jordan (00:03.502)

Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, John Jordan and joining me today, we have two experts. So we have Teemu Palomäki, a senior games analyst at Game Refinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, Teemu?

Teemu Palomäki (00:23.732)

Doing great, great to be here.

Jon Jordan (00:27.309)

Good, good. Also joining us, we have Sonja Skoglund, who is a game analyst at Game Refunded by Liftoff. How’s it going, Sonja?

Sonja Skoglund (00:34.503)

Very excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jon Jordan (00:37.453)

Good good. The reason we have you two in particular is you are experts on the Japanese games market, which is useful because that’s exactly what we’re talking about today. So I guess Japanese mobile games often appear in podcasts. I don’t think we’ve done an episode on it for a while. I guess it’s interesting because it is one of the larger sort of games markets in terms of sort of economics and also, a lot of innovation has clearly happened there, it was actually one of the first sort of big mobile games markets. And also, culturally, it’s quite interesting because there are some things that really appeal to the Japanese market, which obviously appeal globally, and some things which appeal to the Japanese market, which don’t appeal anywhere else in the world. So quite interesting from various points of view, which we will discuss. Teemu, are you going to kick us off with a sort of high-level approach? What are the specific things that Japanese mobile gamers sort of really like? What characterizes that market?

Japanese mobile gaming preferences

Teemu Palomäki (01:35.668)

Well, if we look at genres, for example, one thing that we’ve recently talked a lot about is how there is the location-based trend, which is on a totally different level than in Western markets, especially compared to the U.S. So, like in Japan, we have more variety in location-based gaming. There is obviously Pokemon Go, which is the, sort of ultimate brand there. But they also have Dragon Quest Walk for those who like turn-based RPGs or older legacy RPG brands. Pikmin Bloom for casual audiences actually made its first appearance in the top 50 this month as we’re recording it. So that’s also going up there. They even have like 4X location-based game with Nobunaga’s Ambition and Monster Hunter Now that we have here, an action RPG. And there’s also like Eki Memo, you can collect those girls who are also like based on train designs. So there’s a lot of variety, and I think there’s innovation coming up with Kingdom Hearts Missing Link coming there. I think it’s going to have some sort of location-based gaming, but they are hinting that you could also move around the world from the comfort of your home. It’s so interesting to see how that turns out. So that’s one that is massively different from the U.S., but also, like RPGs, the popularity of RPGs. It’s like almost half of the top games in the market are RPGs. And you see sort of they have a lot of anime-based or game-based RPGs there. And if not the like brand actually being from an anime, they have a lot of collaborations with different brands to buff off the RPGs. But then we see also sports. Much more of those sports titles popping up in top 200 compared to the West. Sports based on animes or like cartoony approach, sort of this arcade approach. They can go really crazy. If you’ve ever seen Captain Tsubasa, the way they play soccer is really over-the-top moves. Same with sort of Prince of Tennis or Haikyuu!! for volleyball. So we’ve probably mentioned a couple of times Uma Musume, a game where girls are racing horses and they’re competing, running around the track. So it’s really… Those genres, for example, are really popular. And I think Sonja can maybe elaborate more about like idols and rhythm games as well.

Rhythm and idol games in Japan

Sonja Skoglund (04:58.087)

Yeah, those are, you mentioned, rhythm games and idol games, so-called. Those are two other genres that really do a lot better or exist in a much larger space in the Japanese market than in the Western markets. And well, I think it’s quite common knowledge that rhythm games are on a very different level, the popularity in East Asia in general, but especially in Japan, there’s a long history of rhythm games in the game arcades. And there’s also, they’ve come a long way from just those Dance Dance Revolution, small arrows, and there’s a lot of innovation in the core gameplay there. And then there’s these so-called idol games. There are actually sort of two types, and one is this idol management sort of game where you collect a group of, well, idols, which are like celebrities who are very purposefully produced for business purposes, and people create huge fan bases for these idol groups. So there are idol management games where you collect these idols and then train them in these training programs inside the game. And then there are usually some interactive story elements embedded also. So that’s one type. Then, the other one is actually rhythm games and idol games combined, where you get to enjoy being a fan of these idol groups while actually playing a rhythm game. That’s where the music is taken from the idols’ real-life produced music. And then there are some games that have a whole group of idols, which are completely fictional and not based on any real-life celebrities. So, just for the game series, they created these completely fictional idols and produced music just for the game, and then you can play it inside the game. And this actually interestingly ties back to the sports category a little bit with Uma Musume. And I know we’ve talked about Uma Musume, but it’s a very interesting, very Japanese combination of a lot of things because it is an idol game in a sense, where you manage these girls that are horses but are basically idols. And then there’s the sports aspect. And they also have these concerts. So it also ties back to music games. So that’s a really interesting game to highlight.

Cultural influences in Japanese games and Japanese mobile gaming culture

Jon Jordan (08:12.237)

Yeah, I’m not sure how to unpick all that stuff there. One thing I will say is is something’s getting confusing when you’re saying idol games. It’s that’s I D O L as in an idol game, something of a character you worship rather than rather than often we talk about idle games. I D L E, which are games where you just let the game happen, which are quite popular in the West. But I guess you could have an idle game about idol characters. That would maybe be much too much. But yeah, good. So it’s a good introduction. And I guess what you said there shows, you know, on multiple levels just how different, even in terms of genres, the Japanese sort of market is and so many things to unpick. It’s really interesting that location-based games, so many location-based games have been tried with the biggest brands in the West, Harry Potter [Wizards Unite], I guess being a good example. They just haven’t worked. Whereas in Japan, for various reasons that we can sort of discuss, you have already mentioned half a dozen thereof I guess they’re not Pokemon Go success stories, but they are, you know, they are successful sort of games. Did you think that the fact that, you know, Japanese society is so based on sort of manga and anime, and it’s, and the majority, so the majority of the games will sort of be viewed through that lens. I mean, are there any games, successful games that sort of come to mind that aren’t sort of an anime type game? I mean, are there, do they have the Call of Duty’s or, you know, those sorts of things? Or does that just really not appeal to the Japanese audience?

Teemu Palomäki (09:45.428)

I think there’s room for those games as well. We see games that are popular in the West also be popular in Japan. But I think it’s quite safe to say that if people are making a game with the Japanese market in mind, it’s going to be manga, anime, at least sort of influenced by it heavily. So sort of having that cartoony approach and even like, you know, when you watch an anime you can tell those character archetypes that are there. There are massive fans for specific types of characters, so you want to have those archetypes even though they seem like a cliche. People are really looking forward to specific types of characters. Some people are really into these tsundere characters who sort of look like they don’t like you at all, they hate you, but then kind of like when you get to know them, they might be a little bit shy about it and kind of like you. And so you have these different types of characters and archetypes that people really love, and it shows.

Jon Jordan (11:15.245)

And I guess it’s sort of hard for… I mean, I’m not an expert at all on Japanese culture, but obviously, I haven’t been in games for a while. But I think it’s probably hard to over-emphasize just how the whole of Japanese culture is driven by manga and anime as fundamental to the whole society, no matter whether you’re a kid or an adult in Japan. Even if you’d probably… I’m sure there are lots of people in Japan who don’t like… who don’t read anime books. But it’s just part of the culture in a way that we just don’t have in the West, whereas it’s much more, you watch cartoons when you’re a kid, and then you grow up to watch, you know, Marvel films or something. It’s just really not like that in Japan, in a way. It’s almost like, yeah, there’s a whole, it’s not a subculture. It’s pretty much culture is viewed in that respect. So that’s sort of something to try and get your head around.

Sonja Skoglund (12:03.847)

Yeah, that’s a good point. Like you said, it’s not only kids’ cartoons; there’s a lot of anime and manga specifically written and filmed for adults. And it penetrates through the whole culture. And obviously, we also see that in the gaming market. Even if it’s not based on an existing anime or manga series, the art style of anime or manga is very prevalent.

Jon Jordan (12:42.573)

And I guess, as you say, even some games that aren’t based around that, if they are successful, they do end up then having anime made about them because that’s how people consume that. Any successful culture will be consumed in that way. So it becomes self-fulfilling.

Teemu Palomäki (12:56.724)

Yeah, they even have like, I remember there was also a movie about a mobile game. So there was this, I think it was when in the West was called The Alchemist Goat. I remember that mobile game, they advertised that they had like a movie theatre run of like a film made of the world of that game. So, even mobile games can turn into like these big-screen anime movies.

Jon Jordan (13:29.741)

It’s interesting that I hadn’t really thought about the sports stuff you were talking about before. So, was it right that you said there was Haikyuu!! for volleyball?

Teemu Palomäki (13:40.532)

Yeah, Haikyuu!! is the name of the anime series. So it’s a volleyball anime brand, and they’ve released a really successful mobile game for that brand.

Jon Jordan (13:58.157)

And even in that small stuff, would you see? I guess there will be, say, realistic soccer games and baseball games as well, but there would still be quite a big proportion that would be cartoon, anime sort of stuff.

Teemu Palomäki (14:12.372)

Yeah, yeah, and when it’s realistic, it’s sort of, well, aimed at a more mature audience, maybe. And, you know, I think the realistic sports that we see are mainly soccer and baseball, which are the big ones in Japan. Of course, those are also popular on the cartoony side.

Jon Jordan (14:38.189)

Good. Okay, so we have… Go ahead.

Sonja Skoglund (14:39.943)

And then this… Yeah, sorry. It’s also interesting in this one cartoony, like an arcade sports game about baseball that I played. They have collaborated with real-life baseball players. So also this overlap or mixing of these anime and imaginary worlds with the real world is also something in what we see more in collaborations, I think, in Japan than in the West.

Jon Jordan (15:22.509)

So again, sort of collaborations are something that we, when we’ve spoken in previous podcasts about sort of live ops and that sort of stuff. Obviously, collaborations are a massive thing generally for any mobile game. But again, correct my limited knowledge, I suppose, but the anime scene often has lots of, you have collaborative, you know, the worlds between these anime things are sort of mashed up together in lots of, you know, in every sort of situation. And none of these things are sort of, you know, walled gardens that sort of here’s my anime characters, and they never interact. I mean, it seems like there are loads of them; basically, the whole thing is it’s like a mashup.

Teemu Palomäki (15:55.732)

Yeah, you can go crazy with the collaborations. It’s like the games can have so many different characters just interacting there. But I think it’s always like one collaboration at a time. So, it’s not necessarily like multiple brands clashing at once or anything. But of course, the collaboration stuff stays in the game and is available. So, I’ve built a lot of my RPG teams around collaboration characters. So no original mobile game characters, but all collaboration stuff. Because those can be really strong for a while, of course. When they sort of fall out, they fall out fast. You don’t necessarily release new upgrades for those characters. So that they’re really powerful for a while.

Jon Jordan (16:57.453)

So that’s sort of some idea of the culture and the genres. And I guess the other important thing that underpins this is that the Japanese market is one of the sort of most highly monetized from an ARPU basis. So for individual players, the average that they’re going to spend is going to be, if not the highest, one of the highest sort of territories in the world. And I guess that the combination of those things, having its own culture and having people that are going to spend hundreds, thousands of dollars a year playing these games sort of combines the fact that you can have these sort of what to us might seem weird niches because you don’t need so many players to make them profitable because you have this sort of quite high monetization. So, do you want to talk a bit about monetization and how the Japanese market ends up at these very high levels?

Monetization strategies in Japan

Teemu Palomäki (17:47.924)

Well, it comes with the gacha mechanics. They are more varied in there. And I think it’s also not just the monetization mechanics but overall game design. So, to make the gachas appealing, you need to have something interesting to pull. So I think the way that the Japanese market is so character-centric also plays into that. And the characters themselves, one thing that is interesting to note is that in the West, the characters talk about the world of the game, whereas in Japanese mobile games, the characters often speak to you, the player. They’re sort of interacting with you, so you are forming this relationship with the characters. They also have the systems to support that. But characters are everywhere when you have that kind of relationship with the characters. They’re relatable content. Then, when you go to the gacha and pull for them, you are more eager to get them, and you build that relationship. And, you know, gacha animations. If I finish my thought with this, gacha animations are a form of art in Japan. So my favorite one is from Fullmetal Alchemist Mobile, where you have this sort of rotary phone that is ringing or rotary phone that you spin a three-digit number on. And that’s the way you pull the gacha. So you put the digits in, it calls, and then a train arrives, and from the train come the characters that you obtained through that gacha. So it’s more interactive, creative, and memorable, and it feels a little bit like you can affect the rates. To this day, I think it doesn’t affect the rates at all, but it sort of adds that element. Like if you’re going to a slot machine, you might put that coin to your hands and blow a kiss or something like I’m gonna do this now and you place it, you put that, you have sort of belief that you, this is improving your odds. So if you put your lucky number in that rotary phone, it feels like you can get better props or something. So it’s a form of art, whereas in the West, it can just press the button, and then you pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, you get the couple of shards that you obtain from the gacha. So, the excitement levels are totally different.

Sonja Skoglund (20:46.279)

And also going back to monetization and this character-centric game worldview. One thing that came to mind is this, especially in games where you collect these beautiful, sexy ladies as your characters, like Teemu mentioned, from all of these different character archetypes like tsundere or cute or innocent or whatever. Especially in those games, we see these player polls where the game organizes a poll for the players where they can vote for their favorite character. Then they promise that in the next big event, they’re going to bring content related to the character that’s most popular. So obviously, that’s a great way of securing your gains in advance and really catering to the audience.

Jon Jordan (21:54.605)

And I guess for, just to explain, I guess most people know what it’s all gacha system is but it’s but it’s basically a sort of random drop system, which is actually, as far as I know, the Japanese game companies invented it would have been like sort of 20 years ago in the first mobile games came out it was a sort of random and it was sort of I guess inspired by Pachinko machines, I think that was the sort of original idea at least and when you’re saying that it’s very character based, would it be then that most gachas would be then creating, you’d be getting a character out of that rather than like in the West you might get sort of gear or sort of costumes or say shards or something like that. But would it be the case in general that most Japanese games would actually be about characters rather than sort of accessories around characters?

Teemu Palomäki (22:45.556)

Yeah, I think that’s the safest way to go because people form the best bonds with characters. The people I think next were some animal mascots, those kinds. And the more inanimate the thing becomes, the less attracted you are to it, the less interested you are generally in it. So characters are the safest way to go.

Jon Jordan (23:18.445)

Hmm. And I guess that’s sort of, I guess, we’ll go on to localization or culturalization. You know, that’s sort of quite fundamental to how those Japanese games are. Whereas in the West, just the game designer would see things in that’s, yeah, you would have characters as part of your gacha maybe, but you’d have a whole bunch of other stuff. You could think, I think all these other cool things I can put in my gacha system, which you think would be much more appealing, but it’s a very deep level. It’s just what people are attracted to, you know, but it’s just very different.

Teemu Palomäki (23:45.94)

Mm—mm. Yeah, and then also the way you advertise the gacha. Sonja had a good example of this, like how the gachas can be different in the West and Japan, with Legend of Mushroom, I think.

Sonja Skoglund (24:05.415)

Yeah, that’s an interesting case. So, actually, Legend of Mushroom was first released in Japan and then a little bit later in the U.S. And I’ve been playing both of those versions. It’s interesting to see the differences and clear localizations between them. One is that the whole game, a big part of the whole game, is constantly pulling this gacha, which is a magic lamp that appears in the main UI, and you keep constantly pulling it. In this case, it’s an equipment gacha, and the focus is more on the constant small dopamine hit that you get from the gacha pulling. The gear is also quirky and a little bit funny, mixing fantasy and modern elements. So maybe that’s like an Asian take on it. I’m not sure. But the interesting part was that when it comes to differences between the two versions, in the Japanese version, again, characters, it’s not just the lamp, but there’s this goddess of the lamp that’s always standing beside the lamp, and she’s very sexy and beautiful and she talks to the player. And then, in the Western version, there’s only a very minor tutorial character who only appears when they introduce new features to the player. But in the Japanese version, the lady is always there. And it was just such a clear way to implement characters yet again. And when they were advertising for the game, they actually hired this actress to cosplay as the lady of the lamp. And she was singing and dancing or at least playing the game. And she was a very attractive lady. And so that’s also like one thing, like cosplaying as the characters is of course, originally a Japanese thing from the conventions and although we have a lot of it in the West now and all kinds of anime conventions and stuff but…

Jon Jordan (26:39.245)

Hmm. It is interesting that you’re having this breaking of the fourth wall. So the characters talking to the player, which again would be, I can’t even think. I’m sure it has happened, but I can’t really think of that as something that I see a lot in mobile games. Whereas, as you say, that could be something that is sort of how players, you know, it’s a very subtle, but very significant change in how a player would interact with the game world where, you know, I’m in charge of the game, and I’m getting. I’m just telling people what to do in the game or getting my characters to do these things, whereas the characters talking back to you, it seems subtle, but equally, if you expect that, then games that didn’t have that, you’d feel sort of like you weren’t very engaged with them because the characters weren’t doing what you were expecting them to do, which is sort of, in any cold way, talk back to you.

Teemu Palomäki (27:35.06)

Yeah.

Jon Jordan (27:38.509)

So, there have clearly been some Japanese games that have been massively successful in the West, and some Western games have been successful in Japan. Are there any trends we’re seeing there? Is there more or less of that sort of stuff happening? There are now lots of good localization, culturalization, and outsourcing companies that handle these sorts of things, so we’re much more technically aware of what we need to do. But is there anything you can talk about there in terms of stuff you’ve seen recently of games doing either well or badly?

Content and events in Japanese Games

Teemu Palomäki (28:17.268)

I believe localization is always important. So, no matter what kind of game you’re making, if you want it to succeed in Japan, you need to localize it well. The way that you translate this stuff, these days it’s popular to just throw stuff through Google Translate or ChatGPT or whatever. But having actual people translate it, check it, that it works. We’ve seen some localization examples where words are broken in the middle. And it can look very cheap. So doing the localization properly, of course, we mentioned the way you can help the appeal is through the characters, bringing characters to the front. Also, like recognizing Japanese cultural events, seasonal events. We have Golden Week starting very soon. So that is something that is often recognized in Japan. So it’s like a week of vacations in Japan where everyone is off and it’s at the change of April to May. So not much is happening during that time. I notice it mostly in the mangas that I follow weekly. Those are on breaks during that time.

Teemu Palomäki (30:10.612)

so forth. So recognizing these events that are significant in there.

Sonja Skoglund (30:20.487)

And also actually Golden Week is sort of the opposite. Like Teemu mentioned that the mangas go on break, but looking at games, that’s when people are on holiday, so they have a lot of time to play. So that’s a really good opportunity to engage players. And actually, there’s another example of Legend of Mushroom and differences between the localizations, because right now there is exactly a Golden Week event in the Japanese version, but obviously not in the Western version.

Teemu Palomäki (30:58.836)

Yeah, but you don’t need to limit it. I think Supercell with Pearl Stars, they had sort of Golden Week event going on in the global version as well. It doesn’t really matter. Like it’s cool skins and there are Japan fans outside Japan who enjoy anything Japanese-y. So seeing these Golden Week skins with like these Japanese cats, I think it appeals to certain audiences and cool skin is a cool skin, doesn’t matter what it’s inspired from.

Jon Jordan (31:37.133)

Yeah. And then, have there been any sort of Japanese games that you think have done a good job of being very Japanese and appealing to that local market, but also sort of doing well globally? Because I guess it is a bit dated now, but sort of historically stuff like sort of Puzzles and Dragons massively successful game, one of the most successful games ever, just in Japan. You know, Monster Strike again, another enormously successful game managed and didn’t really work outside of Japan, even though it’s made a billion dollars. Do you think the Japanese developers are getting better now, sort of appealing to both sort of audiences?

The global appeal of Japanese games

Teemu Palomäki (32:16.276)

Hmm. Well, I’d say, well, first, the first one that comes to mind, Pokemon, but that’s, that’s Pokemon Go, it’s, it’s developed by Niantic. So it’s sort of Western in that sense, but it’s, it’s a Japanese brand. And, and thinking of more, more Pokemon games, I think the, the Pokemon Masters X that, that is, a game that is having decent spikes. And if the IPs are popular enough, I think Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis did okay for a while out there. But I think mostly if it’s these anime style games that are doing well in the West, it often comes from China, you know, Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. So those are sort of devouring the space from like the games of anime fans. But…

Sonja Skoglund (33:29.415)

Well, there are also the Dragon Ball games, which are… Well, Dragon Ball obviously is a huge IP, also in the West, like one of the few animes that everybody knows, and they are very old games, so that probably has an effect in the equation.

Jon Jordan (33:53.197)

And just to go back to Pokemon Go, obviously, you know, it’s a Japanese-originated IP developed by an American company. In Japan, was that, you know, would there have been any obvious sort of a Japanese person playing that, realise a Japanese company, that particular game, didn’t develop it? Or does that actually sort of show that, you know, for the best games it doesn’t really matter where you are in the world there’s enough knowledge now that these things can be sort of global even though Japan is a somewhat separate market for something.

Teemu Palomäki (34:31.06)

Yeah, I think they probably noticed that it’s not like a Japanese game because they have certain sort of habits when making UI and I could see there being maybe a little bit more gacha elements or stuff there. But like, you know, mobile games they have these Western games as well. So I think it’s also very, very good for them. Obviously, they have enjoyed it very much.

Jon Jordan (35:12.877)

Yeah, yeah. Cool. Lovely. Let’s give everyone listening a bit of homework. So I guess Legend of Mushroom is one. But if you were going to encourage someone to download one sort of characteristic Japanese mobile game to take a taste of what we’ve sort of been talking about. Sonia, what game would you suggest people download?

Sonja Skoglund (35:38.343)

I have to say this is my personal favorite but it’s Heaven Burns Red and it’s something that I would not expect to see in the West. It’s anime style and it’s from Right Flyers Studios and they are known for a very elegant and sleek design and very deep focus in the story elements. So I really enjoy the story and there’s a lot of dialogue and a lot of choices and you get to play as a female character interacting with other females and creating these meaningful relationships and of course enjoy a turn-based RPG.

Jon Jordan (36:34.029)

Good. Teemu, what would you recommend?

Teemu Palomäki (36:37.78)

Well, one thing that comes to mind is Memento Mori. I think that was really beautifully experienced. It’s more successful in Japan, not doing so well in the West, even though there is localized version. But it has this really beautiful watercolor art style. Like really it shows that you can make really these beautiful experiences and this is an idle RPG, this time I D L E. So that kind of idle RPG, but really beautiful music, really like sort of it’s a great experience and it’s showing that these different types of games can be really popular. It has beautiful soundtrack, each character has their own song. So that’s something to check out if you want to see something more interesting from Japan.

Jon Jordan (37:45.005)

Mm -hmm. Cool. Lovely. Well, thank you very much for your recommendations, and thank you very much for your expertise in the podcast. Thank you, Sonja and Timo.

Teemu Palomäki (37:56.244)

Thank you very much.

Sonja Skoglund (37:56.455)

Thank you.

Jon Jordan (37:57.997)

And thanks to you for watching or listening to the podcast, whoever you are consuming it. Every episode, we are talking about what’s going on in mobile games, which is now an enormously variation of gaming around the world and lots of different cultural cultures, lots of different trends going on there. So I hope you are enjoying our episodes. Please do subscribe and we’ll see you next time. Bye bye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is the podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and joining me today, we have no less than three experts from GameRefinery. So welcome to Kalle Heikkinen, Erno Kiiski, and Jiri Saarinen. And I think Jiri, first time on the podcast, so a particular welcome to you.

[00:00:28] Jiri Saarinen: Yes. Yes, it’s a hard name; it’s Jiri. It’s alright, it’s alright. It is a hard Finnish name.

Exploring LiveOps in mobile games

[00:00:32] Jon Jordan: Yes, sorry, yes, Jiri, I’ll try. Okay, correction’s out of the way. Right, so in terms of today’s episode, we are going to be looking broadly at LiveOps, but we are going to be looking at them in the context of the mobile game dev awards from Liftoff. Now, in their third year, they are looking at the power of LiveOps, obviously in terms of things boosting revenue. So we’re going to be breaking down the LiveOps ecosystem in terms of some of those categories. So we have collaboration, competition, immersive narrative, seasonal events and mini-games. So we’re going to be looking at those in that context. But maybe to kick us off, Erno, can you talk broadly about some of the stuff we’ve been seeing in LiveOps just to contextualise what we’re going to be going into?

[00:01:25] Erno Kiiski: Yeah, yeah, sure. Maybe just to start,  first of all,  why we decided to move in with our awards,  you say, this third time we’re doing it. And now we reiterate a little bit to focus just on the live events because, well, to be honest, there are all kinds of awards and different types of awards. And we were thinking about, how could maybe we, differentiate from the.. rest of the best game of the year type of things and stuff like that. And as we know where the market is,  where the focus is, a lot of the focus in the market is what we have been doing in GameRefinery.

A lot of our recent additions and tools and focus have been on live events. So how about we specify, be a bit more specific, and just look at the live events? side of things and what is happening there and who is innovating and who is doing interesting stuff because, to be honest, most of the innovation nowadays in the mobile game markets Or a lot of the innovation happens in the event space There are a lot of the same old games still in the market, but in the event space the innovation and new stuff is happening much more often than maybe new games appearing Which of course once in a while, still come not that much but once in a while.

[00:02:45] Jon Jordan: No, it’s true. It’s a very good point.

[00:02:46] Erno Kiiski: Well, Monopoly Go is one of the biggest launches ever, so no, of course, there are still those, but anyway. So, when we think about live events, how would I categorize live events? How do we think about live events, and how did we make these award categories, for example? So, of course, when you are adding live events, it all comes down to what is your goal. What are your aims for the event? So it can be so varied.

So it can be that you’re aiming to increase the retention, are you’re aiming to increase long-term retention? Are you trying to create a month-long event that may be connected to other events? Or are you trying to use your data to have a weekly loop, and then on Mondays, it’s always people are dropping off and are not very engaged, so you’ve asked yourself, what could we do in order to increase retention or engagement for those days for  short term, as an example. Or if it’s just you trying to increase daily playtime. So you see that, okay, our session lengths could be longer.

You are creating events that have then maybe more sense of urgency if we are thinking about the top dogs’. Royal Match, for example, has these events that you activate and then are active for one hour. It’s a very engaging short-term event with a true sense of urgency.

Alternatively, is your event about monetization? Are you trying to directly monetize and have some different bundles or then, of course, battle pass tying the engagement into monetization? Or are you thinking about that, okay, I’m gonna actually indirectly need to wanna increase the monetization, so through the retention, through the engagement and then exposing to players your usual monetization hooks. For example, a lot of the match-three games, that’s all of their events. They are not necessarily directly monetized, but they very, very cleverly engage the users in order to buy those extra moves and buy those boosters and stuff. Or if it’s you catering, you’re looking at your user base, and you’re seeing that, okay, we’re not catering to specific motivations enough. So if we think about social motivation as an example, let’s say we have a great game, but we could increase our motivation; how it induces different motivational drivers is we need a little bit more social in our game. We would need maybe competition in our game for the more competitive players in our game or incentivize them through that or maybe cooperation, something that is happening in some of those games. So, this is motivational thinking. Or even UA-driven thinking.

We have been talking a lot about mini-games, and mini-games are one of the topics that have been talked about a lot. And if you look at the top, especially strategy games, mid-core, hardcore games, a lot of them are pushing events also, not just to engage and monetize the users, but they are working together with the marketing department and creating these mini-games and that stuff and events and stuff that they can tie into their UA efforts. We’re gonna talk about mini-games more in the section discussing the different categories, but that’s just a couple of examples.

So there are so many ways that you can think about live events, but ultimately, it comes down to ‘what is your goal?’ I guess. That’s the key thing, and then even on top of that, when you decide, ‘Okay, this is what we are trying to do, ‘this is what we try to achieve with the events’, but then also how that event interconnects with your whole game and your whole gameplay loop. So it’s such an important thing to not just slap-slap an event. Then you see an event in a top game, and oh, that’s cool, but then it’s a totally different game.

The most important thing in your game is how it interconnects with all the other events and how it fits into your whole event framework I think a couple of examples great are Royal Match again, how they have a quite strict weekly framework, but how everything is so interconnected and gives these extra pushes to play another event and then play this another event. For example, they released their latest new event type called Archery Arena a week ago or maybe a week and a half ago. And it’s a leaderboard event, but then it has this win streak implemented into it. And it’s a one-day event.

So again, if you think about those things, what…it tries to achieve. Okay, so it’s a one-day event, so there’s a much more sense of urgency. It always happens during the week, and it gives that every single day of the week an extra push. Then there’s the win streak, and a loss aversion is tied into it. So there’s another there are multiple of these, I guess five to six different things that you lose if you lose a level or if you keep the win streak going, you get extra benefit status tied to it. So it taps into that, and then it ties again into the monetization. So you wanna compete, you wanna complete the levels, you don’t wanna lose the win streak, so you get the score. So then it ties into the monetization. So this type of a thing, how it interconnects with the rest of the events that you have and the whole game you have.

[00:08:38] Jon Jordan: Yes. So definitely enough there for an award, and I think it’s a good point you do say there, where certainly from the outside looking in at not a very deep level to some of these games, then sometimes they can seem very much, oh, ‘they’ve gone down the catalogue of LiveOps’, and they’ll have one of those and two of those and slap that in. And it is, I think, without telling everyone to use your tools unless you really have a very deep understanding of how these games are being played. It just seems a little bit chaotic, and you can’t really see the gearing of how all these things, when they work in a flywheel, really work well.

[00:09:14] Erno Kiiski: Yeah, it’s definitely, and it’s especially more midcore or hardcore you go; you’ve got more stuff there that has started to happen, for example, I’ve been just recently studying probably the highest scaling 4X game in the past year, Whiteout Survival and their live event framework. At first, at least for a couple of weeks, it feels like there’s so much going on and stuff happening all the time. But when you follow it for a longer pattern and over a longer time, you start to see those patterns that, ah, okay, this is why they have these on the same time. And you start to see that, okay, this event actually reiterates every two weeks or every three weeks, and this one is every week. You see these patterns and try to actually deconstruct why their event framework works and why it actually works, as well as why they work together. So that’s a very interesting part about deconstructing and analyzing these top games.

The power of collaboration in LiveOps

[00:10:13] Jon Jordan: Yeah, cool. Okay, so we’ll be doing that as we go through. So we’re gonna take these categories and go through them in a bit more depth. So, the first one we’re looking at is collaboration. So, Kalle, do you wanna take us through that?

[00:10:25] Kalle Heikkinen: Yes, so just adding to the great list that Erno just explained on the different kinds of objectives that developers might have when building these events. Virality is another and is definitely one of them related to what Erno just talked about regarding marketing efforts. So, how many social shares do you get for your events, and how much is it shared in social media these collaboration events are definitely something that, if successful, do get a lot of attention from your player base.

So IP collaborations obviously have two major potential benefits for your game. You get to re-engage your existing player base, but then at the same time, it’s possible to acquire totally new audiences as well. As a developer, you want to achieve both, of course, but depending on the game and the crossover IPs type, the focus then might be more, for example, on the re-engagement side, as opposed to user acquisition, or then it’s the other way around.

But anyway, in general, I would say that games shouldn’t be too conservative when considering these different IP crossover brands. I think we’ve seen some pretty wild combinations that have been greatly successful just recently.

Lords Mobile is collaborating with the car brand Pagani, for example, and we’ve seen Gucci in Tennis Clash and so on. But I guess it’s safe to say that we do see a bit more gaming and, for example, anime-related collaboration events on the mid-core side. And then it’s more common to see, let’s say, celebrities or consumer brands and popular movies, for example, collaborating in the casual space.

And of course, on the casual side, if we now go to the winners that we have in the GameRefinery Awards, there the winner for the best IP collaboration events was actually StumbleGuys. We didn’t choose that just for one specific event, but I think it’s safe to say that nowadays, if we think about Stumble Guys, the IP collaboration events that they have, they’re pretty much one of their key cornerstones when we think about their live up strategy overall.

So they are out there with, for example, Fortnite always having some interesting collaboration events going on with IPs such as collaborations with MrBeast, Monopoly and BarBeech, just to name a few.

And then, on the mid-core side, our winner was PUBG Mobile. There, we were especially thinking about the Dragon Ball event that they had, which was really cool, especially how they implemented the limited-time mode there. It did not just have some Dragon Ball skins for players to purchase, but actually, the entire mode was revamped to be a real Dragon Ball experience,  starting from the graphics and aesthetics to all the other content that was in the mode. So that was a really, really special moment for the game.

[00:13:50] Erno Kiiski: Yeah, maybe on my two cents on these two winners. Especially for the PUBG, it’s a game, and overall, shooters have been on the Western markets. Of course, in the Asian markets, we have seen many more collaborations even back in the day. But I think in the Western markets, shooters were one of the first ones to really kick it to the next level, with Fortnite, of course, and all that stuff, and PUBG has also been there, especially the mobile side, collaborating with tons and tons of brands over the years already. But with the Dragon Ball one, what I saw, looked into that specific event, the production levels were off the roof type of a thing, so, their whole game had a proper Dragon Ball makeover, and they were proper, skills and change the whole how you played the game for the short period. This is not just an event mode type of thing, but this is a whole movement of the game. Everything has changed, almost a big, a big event happening.

[00:15:06] Jiri Saarinen: Yeah, if I could add maybe a few thoughts.

[00:15:10] Kalle Heikkinen: Please go ahead.

[00:15:12] Jiri Saarinen: I feel the developers are understanding that players appreciate understanding the IP. It’s not just a random, just a skin, but adding more of the IP components into it; you have in the PUBG that you could do classic Kamehameha and whatnot, so it feels more like you’re actually understanding the collab IPs, and those are I think are pretty important and maybe in the party games maybe IPs start to feel they’re part of the core gameplay of the core game. So players are always waiting for the new IP that’s going to come into the party games.

[00:15:58] Erno Kiiski: Yeah, that is true and especially with the Stumble guys, it’s been so interesting to see ever since it got acquired by Scopely, how they have gone to the next gear, and they went to the next gear in terms of the live ops and how it transformed. When Stumble Guys came from Finland, it was a couple-person team, and now it’s this massive live ops machine where they have such big IP collaborations going basically all the time if you follow it, there’s always some collaboration going on. So it has become this, as Jiri mentioned, this game is almost a platform of IPs like we have seen in Fortnite or Roblox or stuff like that. It’s a crucial part of the whole experience.

[00:16:41] Jon Jordan: And I guess that particularly works where the game itself is very simple.  This was the way that the game was successful. Obviously, it was bringing something to mobile that was on PC. But you would think after a certain period of time, people would start to churn out if the game is that simple. And you saw, yeah, it’s got. Obviously, you’re playing co-op, and you’ve got your friends in there, and so there is that level as well. But then it’s really the, what you’re saying is that level, the collaboration is providing the long term engagement because if you just really love this game and the exciting things are going to happen next week, next month. You want to stay there to see what the IP engagement is.

[00:17:20] Erno Kiiski: Yeah, definitely. And that, I would see through the events, especially the IPs and then the UGC stuff that has now also been slowly added into Stumble Guys. Now, the EGGY Party, Stumble Guys‘ main competitor from NetEase, has just released, and the UGC is even on the next level. It’s had a very slow start at the moment for the West, at least. But, will be very interesting to see where that competition goes in the future.

Social and competitive elements in LiveOps

[00:17:47] Jon Jordan: Yes. Cool. Good. OK, so let’s move on to the next category, which is Social and Competitive.

[00:17:53] Erno Kiiski: All right, so Social and Competitive overall, of course, this is a huge category because you can look at it from many, many angles. So, well, first of all, social is one of the strongest retention drivers and glues that keep players in the game. If they get a community, if they get a sense of competition going on, it can be one of the most engaging motivational drivers that there can be, to be honest. So it can be looked at either on the competitive side where you are competing or then actually on the collaboration side. So, for the winners of this category, we will look a little bit across the board. So, on the casual side, we focus more on collaboration. Here, we chose the winner to be Monopoly Go with the partner events.

So if you’re unfamiliar with the partner events, basically in those events, you are teaming up with other individual players, and then you are progressing with them, on with the one-on-one, so two-player teams, you’re progressing through the event, reaching point thresholds and getting rewards, and so on and so on. And then there’s an extra incentive if you can complete the event with all of the four people you are teaming. So you are making these two people teams with four, four other people, I think it was. So if you’re able to complete the event with all of those, then you actually get even an extra reward. So you wanna, especially if you’re a hardcore and engaged player, you wanna team up also with the other players who are very engaged.

But why did we choose this one? To be honest, we have been talking a lot about increasing competition in casual games for years already because of this type of collaboration, even in this podcast. And it’s been a trend for a while. But this type of collaboration, especially outside of the guild. So you are teaming up at the start of the event and having done that with just a friend. The event is for just individual friends. So it feels a bit more personal than just having a joint goal with the 40-people guild or so on. So these types of events haven’t been really that common yet. And now, when Monopoly Go implemented the first iteration of this event, I think it was, was it in the summer of last year? And then they have had it once a month, every single month. about five to six-day events, something like that.

Very often, those days when this partner event has been active have been the best-performing days of the month for the game. That’s, of course, one example we are seeing in terms of the correlations between the performance with this social event. However, we have seen this exact event type so often with casual game events; when somebody comes up with a specific type of format, it starts to pop up all over the casual market. So now Monopoly Go brought this, and the same idea has been brought to Royal Match, Phase 10, and Clockmaker, just to name a few, so it has all a different core gameplay. It’s not just casual casinos but also puzzle games and stuff like that. But the same fundamental idea of this social collaboration event that they did worked really well for them. And now it’s been spreading, and it’s a trend already,  one of the trending event types in the casual. So, it’s definitely worthy of the winner spot over here.

And then on the mid-core side, we have League of Legends: Wild Rift implementing an event called Arena. So Arena was a new PvP mode. And why we especially wanted to highlight this one for this category was that it’s a good example of a developer trying something out, and getting really good feedback. They probably see good numbers in terms of engagement, at least, and then actually develop it further and implement it as a proper permanent mode in the game. So, this PvP mode they released called Arena first came as a test. It was a limited-time event that was around for a while, but it was so well received that Riot has actually developed it into a proper permanent part of the game that is over there. It has its own ranked mode and everything else. So, a great example of this is testing out something, then seeing the results and then moving on to a proper feature implementation.

[00:23:22] Kalle Heikkinen: I think that’s really a testament to how… Yeah, I was just to add that it’s a testament to the powerfulness of events in general that you can test out your ideas, your concepts, see how they perform, how players react, do they engage with the event, and in the best possible scenario if it makes sense, then you can do things in Wild Rift, you can make that temporary mode, a permanent feature in the game.

Seasonal events in mobile games

[00:24:03] Jon Jordan: Good, good. Okay, so now moving on, I guess to what we see as the first thing we had with LiveOps was seasonal events. So, it’s still going strong. Kalle, what do you want to tell us about the winners of seasonal events?

[00:24:19] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, I mean, I think when people think about live events in general, seasonal events, Halloween or Christmas, probably come to your mind straight away. It’s a low-hanging fruit out there. Oh, ‘we need a summer event or a Halloween event for our game’ and so on. And you can make any event a seasonal event. If an event is a Halloween event, it doesn’t tell anything about the nature of the event, just that it’s themed around Halloween.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why we feel, why I feel we see a lot of reskins of existing events, which with just seasonal wrapping. So, you change the name of the event to a Halloween event. And let’s say if it’s a match-three game, you match pumpkins instead of regular pieces. And nothing wrong with that, of course. And if you’ve had your game running for a longer period already, then you can start recycling some of the ideas, the mechanics and the assets you’ve used in previous years. So, just as an example of that, Merch Mansion, one of the most popular Merch 2 games out there, actually had a limited-time store open during Christmas time, where they sold their catalogue cosmetics from previous year’s Christmas events. So, players could then purchase some of the cosmetics they probably have, which they might have missed in previous years.

But yes, the winner of this year’s awards for the best seasonal event on the casual side was Phase 10, which was already mentioned in this podcast. They had a versatile package for their holiday event. So it had a bunch of something for everyone. So there was a mini-game going on. They had a renovation event, a competitive event, a social co-op event, and even some slot elements incorporated into the event. So, it’s really a nice package for Christmas. And I guess just in, yeah, please go ahead.

[00:26:37] Erno Kiiski: So yeah, for Phase 10, I just want to say that overall, it’s a very interesting game to… If you’re working in a casual space, it’s definitely a game to look into about LiveOps because, as Kalle mentioned, a lot of the especially casual live ops, there are a lot of these patterns that, maybe, the only seasonal thing is that, okay, your battle pass is now, Christmas battle pass and, and it’s a UI reskin of an existing event. And a lot of that is happening. And I said, nothing wrong with that. And it, of course, makes all the sense if you have a strong event framework. But Phase 10 is a very exceptional game in that sense that they innovate a lot and brought different gameplay mechanics and event mechanics and stuff that may be more than any other this top-performing casual game, so definitely a game to peek into if you’re interested in the variety of live events.

[00:27:48] Kalle Heikkinen: Yes. And I guess one thing that I would add about seasonal events is that if I had to give one tip, that would be to think about which seasonal events to address in your game. So, I would definitely look at which geos are most relevant to your game. And then not only that but also if there are any sizable ethnic minorities in some of the played in the game. And so then, obviously, how do we implement those, let’s say, Dragon Boat Festival events and Diwali events? Then, we definitely chill here. But definitely, I would look for GameRefinery’s implementation database and look for examples. We have all the relevant seasonal events covered over there. So, it’s definitely a good source of inspiration.

[00:28:53] Jon Jordan:

Cool, have we finished Seasonal? Do you want to talk about the mid-core winner?

[00:28:59] Kalle Heikkinen: I think we’re done.. Let’s finish this up. We can go to the minigames already.

The role of minigames in LiveOps

[00:29:06] Jon Jordan: Okay, cool, so there we go. Minigames.

[00:29:12] Erno Kiiski: Yes, minigames, minigames. As I already mentioned, it’s an interesting trend. So, this is something that we have been talking about in the industry quite a bit and for a good reason. So if we talked about a little bit what we mean by minigame and how, for example, I think about minigames, again, there’s such a variety of minigame implementations, and also coming back to the motivations of implementation. So with minigames, especially, we have seen the approaches for the UA-driven minigames and UA-driven minigame modes and minigame events  I talked about pretty much all the currently in the current market landscape scaling hardcore, midcore, 4x strategy type of a game is pretty much all of them, if you look at the recent hits, has been doing something in this space so some more casually appealing.

One very good example of a very interesting example is a game called Happy Match Cafe; it’s part of this trending subgenre of 3D match, which I mean by that is the game triple match 3D or match factory that came from Zynga. just recently. So these games, these puzzle games where you have a pile of items where you need to find similar items from the pile of 3D items and then clear the board type of a thing or find specific items to complete the levels and so on and so on. So there is this game called Happy Match Cafe, which is on top. I think it’s a top-grossing 50 game in the US, doing very well and originates from China.

But one very interesting thing in terms of minigames is what they do is that they have actually minigames as a permanent part of the game when you complete those  3d match levels, then on the side, you also have a progression for the minigame levels and what is even more interesting about that is that minigame that you have in your game is dictated by when you downloaded the app and what was the UA campaign active at the time. For example, we did an analysis of this game a while ago. So when I downloaded the game, there was this very beautiful pimple-popping type of mini-game which they, probably everybody, has seen some of those ads, but they were using that. And that was a mini-game in the game for me. But now, if you go, for example, to HappyMatchCafe‘s app store page, they actually are advertising with this drawing without lifting your finger or solving the puzzle without lifting your finger type of a minigame. And now, if you download the app, that is actually the minigame that you get. And I still have that old minigame. So, they are trying to change the minigame based on the UA campaign, which they changed. They see that, okay, this is probably testing it out, seeing that this is a campaign that seems to be working, then they are creating the minigame, then it’s part of the game permanently, and doing this evolving, changing minigames in the game and so on. So, very interesting tactics that they have.

But then, if we talk about on the other side of the spectrum, so if that is, to be honest, the main goal is UA driven. We have minigame events that are aimed at retention and engagement. And that is also more important than ever when user acquisition is harder than ever. So if we look at the top games, especially the top of the chart games, the mega games, and so on, They are, of course, getting bigger and bigger, and they are slowly turning, to be honest, into this almost platform offering a variety of experiences. If you think about Playrix, they have a different; it’s not just a match-three game anymore; they have Merge, and they have exploration and all that stuff implemented in there. But also, on a smaller scale, if you think about another type of game such as Royal Match, they have had these digging mini-games that you are digging treasures out of the board or stuff that. This type is a bit smaller scale, but they’re mini-games, after all.

And these are there to offer a little bit of variety for the game. And here, I also discussed at the start of this podcast that the important thing is thinking about how the mini-game fits in your game loop. So what is the goal? So do you want to just add a fun mini-game that keeps players engaged for  one day, and then they create a mini-game event that becomes a part of your whole event loop and reoccurs, and it’s actually interconnected into your gameplay loop, so there are actually reasons for players to engage after the initial ‘Oh this is cool something other mini-game’  fades out, so this also super important

And then if we go into the winners who I think tap into this aspect. So for the winner of the casual, we have Royal Match. We have already talked about it, and they have been adding these  I mentioned the Digital mini-game called Hidden Temple. They added it already at the start of the year, and that event type, again, is a bit similar to what I talked about with Monopoly Go, and it has been a trend. So this Digi mini-game that Royal Match implemented also has been popping up in tons of different casual games from Chrome Valley Customs, and even actually Monopoly Go added this digging mini-game, so they are going back and forth ideating and then taking the idea from the other and these top games with the mini-games. But the one we chose for a winner we haven’t really yet seen in many of the other games was…

Royal Match’s event called Magic Cauldron was added, I think, in September or October, somewhere over there for the first time, and it’s been happening ever since then once a week. So it’s part of the weekly framework, and how that event works is that you are actually solving these formula puzzles. You have potions of different colors and there’s only one right solution on which order you need to put those puzzles. And then if you put those, sorry, the potions. So if you put those potions in a specific order, then the game says that, okay, these ones were in the right spot, and these were in the wrong spot. So, what does this remind anyone of? So, of course, it reminds me of the viral hit, Wordle. So with that game, of course, it was all about figuring out the letters in the right spots. But here, it’s different coloured potions, and you have this a Wordle-like mini-game, and then how that is interconnected to the whole gameplay experience, that you get those potions by playing the core gameplay. So you are earning those potions, and then you need to play more levels to get those potions, and give that engagement loop, and then again, fits the whole match- three games, and creates those extra engagement incentives, and so on and so on. It so great, has great implementation and is very engaging; in my opinion, this is a mini-game to incentivize a match- three players as an example. Then, on the mid-core side, we chose Garena Free Fire for the event called Pet Smash. Maybe Jiri can talk a little bit more on this one, but maybe the one thing that I want to highlight over here again is the interconnection.

[00:37:44] Jiri Saarinen: Garena Free Fire is a shooter game, and they have all different cosmetics, and they have had these pets in the game for a long time already. You can get your pets that follow you, and so on. So now they brought an event that utilizes those pets. So you can give more reasons for you to have cool pets, and you actually engage with the pets more, giving more value for cosmetics and so on. Yeah, in the mode you play, there were three pets that you could choose from, and it was a Brawl Stars copy; typically, you just had two sides and three players on both sides, and you tried to kill each other’s pets kinda using different abilities and whatnot each pet had their own. But the reason why we chose this one is because in Free Fire, the whole live ops thing almost always has event calendars that are themed to certain seasons or some other things, and this event was a part of this team calendar.

So, playing the minigame event, you could also there was a couple of task missions that would link with this minigame. So, more reason to play the minigame.

[00:39:10] Erno Kiiski: Yeah, again,  in terms of interconnecting it with not just a mini-game that is slapped on top, but it’s very thought out on, okay, we’re gonna bring a mini-game. It might be engaging and refreshing, but then how it fits in the grand scheme of things where in Garena are. There are so many different kinds of events, and then how do you connect those and make everything engaging so that they work as an ecosystem, so to speak?

[00:39:38] Jon Jordan: And interesting having, yeah, literally having a shooter and having pets in there, I mean, that really seems a jarring thing, but now pets are in everything. So it’s, I guess, as the industry has moved, as what players expect to have in games, it’s broken out from the genres. It’s suddenly pets in the shooter game; just, yes, why not? So it shows how these things are becoming, I mean, in other ways or platforms for narrow.

[00:40:06] Erno Kiiski: Definitely.

Narrative-driven LiveOps events

[00:40:09] Jon Jordan: And that can bring us to the final category. So, the final category is going to be narrative, and Kalle, you’re going to take us through that one.

[00:40:19] Kalle Heikkinen: So the winner for the best narrative event this year in the mid-course section was the Cookie Run Kingdom with their Holiday Express event. So, the Cookie Run Kingdom celebrated the latest holiday period with an interactive story event, which was heavily inspired by AgatChristie novels. In the event, players followed this storyline and collected objects from different rooms so that they could present the right evidence, to say, in this murder case for the character of Jolly. And what we would say in general about Cookie Kingdom is that they’re just excellent at using narrative elements to help players build bonds with the characters in the game. But amongst all the events that they’ve had in the last year, this particular event, the Holiday Express event, really stood out for us.

And on the casual side, the winner we chose was June’s Journey with their story of the first battle pass. So June’s Journey finally jumped on to the season pass battle pass wagon last year with the travel pass event that happened last November, and it stood out for us as the best narrative event in casual, mostly due to its innovative approach to emphasize storytelling in the season pass format. So, narrative aspects were really at the forefront of this travel pass feature. And you could say that getting rewards from the pass was, you could pretty much almost consider that as the side benefit. The main beef was really to engage with the storyline. What also made this pass very unique was the player’s ability to influence specific narrative segments by making choices in the Battle Passes narrative storyline. This added a layer of interactivity and connection for the players to the event.

[00:44:30] Erno Kiiski: Yeah, that is very interesting, especially the June Journey one, I guess. Wooga’s thing has always been narrative. They’ve always been known for creating narrative things. And, especially with June’s Journey, it’s one of the things that did stand out from the market was the emphasis on the narrative. Now, they have had different kinds of events, and they have added narrative more than maybe other casual games into their events. But they’re very interesting now with the Battle Pass. Previous iterations we have seen usually don’t include them as they are not narrative features, so to speak, but now, with their implementation, they are at the forefront. You are, I think it’s called Travels. So it’s always when a new season comes, it’s a new story that you go and progress. And then you can, Kalle said, you can have an impact even on the story by making the dialogue choices and stuff like that. Something a little bit similar we have seen earlier on, Kalle mentioned earlier, the merge game, Gossip Harbor, has had a Battle Pass and small nuggets of dialogue, but not into that scale; I think that Wooga does. But they also had that, okay, if you wanna get the kinda a juiciest part of the story, that’s on the premier layer of the Battle Pass. So that was one of the. things that they try to sell to buy the premier layer of the battle pass. You are progressing similarly and getting rewards, but the narrative is a reward for a battle pass. So that’s an interesting new type of implementation happening in that space.

[00:47:49] Jon Jordan: Absolutely. Now, I guess over the whole, over everything we’ve spoken about, we’ve gone into a lot of detail on some of these games, but it shows on the whole how much innovation there is. And some of it’s, I guess, just good best practice, really well implemented, and not innovative in terms of coming up with something new. It’s using the tools that everyone has available in a really good way for the audience and the game. And it’s still fascinating to see people coming up with these innovative ways of using a battle pass. We thought we’d seen everything in a battle pass over the last five years, and now, suddenly, a very specific implementation for that very specific game, as you said, is really fascinating to see.

So thank you, everyone. We’ve covered a lot of ground there. I hope people are enjoying that. I hope you’re gonna download these games and check them out. You’ve had a lot of pointers there, so that’s a really fascinating course to action. So thank you to Erno, Kalle and Yuri, finally, for your expertise. And thank you for watching and listening to the podcast. Every episode, we are doing deep dives into the into the mobile games industry, which remains as fascinating as ever, whatever we are now. 12 years, 12 years into the free-to-play mobile gaming.

[00:51:44] Jiri Saarinen: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

[00:51:52] Jon Jordan: Industry is still expanding and really fascinating. So I hope you are subscribed, and I hope you’ll come back next time. Thank you very much for listening to this one. See you then. Bye. Bye

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends. I am your host, Jon Jordan. In today’s episode, we are looking at what’s going to happen in 2024. So, it is very exciting to have you join us as our experts in what’s happening. We have Wilhelm Voutilainen and Kalle Heikkinen, who are both Chief Game Analysts at GameRefinery by Liftoff. How’s it going, guys?

[00:00:33] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, it’s going really well. Thanks for asking. It’s really snowy here in Helsinki, so I love it.

[00:00:38] Kalle Heikkinen: All well, Jon, thank you.

[00:00:41] Jon Jordan: I was just in Helsinki this week, and I was surprised how cold and snowy it was. So there we go. Good. So, I mean, this is pretty straightforward. These are always the exciting podcasts to do, then looking forward to the crystal balls and what’s going to happen and all that stuff because no one knows if you’re going to be wrong. We can always listen back in six months’ time and see how right you were. But this is the fun stuff. So I think I’m going to kick off with some games to look forward to. That’s always the most interesting bit, isn’t it? We have some titles in mind that we’re looking forward to playing. Who wants to start us off on those?

Racing games on the horizon

[00:01:52] Kalle Heikkinen: I can go first. So, yeah, I think we could start with a genre that is not discussed that much in the mobile scene. So racing. So there’s a new title coming up, getting a global release, hopefully, next year, that is called Racing Master. It was launched in China this summer and has had a relatively good year thus far. So, Racing Space is something that has been quite stacked in recent years, but this is a title that could bring some new blood to the genre. So, it comes from NetEase, and Codemasters has also been collaborating with the game, and it looks just gorgeous. And yeah, just a couple of things to highlight about that one is that it has a very strong focus on a story-based carrier mode, which is quite interesting. There are a lot of customization options for cars. And I guess one interesting tidbit is that the game gradually suggests the player lower the level of control assistance as he plays the game more and more. So that’s kind of an interesting one there.

[00:02:40] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, I think like we have been definitely waiting for like a huge racing hit to finally come to the Western market, and yeah, I agree that Racing Master looks beautiful, and of course, there’s like other upcoming racing games, too like Disney Speedstorm for example more like arcade racing game from Gameloft that is actually looking quite good as well. I think it was supposed to be released this month already, but I think they postponed it to the January of 2024. But yeah, maybe we will finally get something going on in the racing space in the West.

[00:03:18] Jon Jordan: I guess it’s one of those genres that can be quite hard to innovate in because you either go down the hyper-realistic route, which is what everyone wants. Basically, people who make those games are normally massive petrolheads. So they want to make the most realistic thing, and then you end up with something that’s so realistic that hardly anyone can play it. And that doesn’t fit so well on mobile compared to PC, does it? So I guess then you’re like, how are we doing that with the arcade? I guess from a design point of view, you’re much more limited than you maybe would be in other genres. So maybe just go from you and say make it look amazing.

[00:03:53] Kalle Heikkinen: That is true. Or then you just have to take the theme and bring it back to a totally new genre, like they did with Chrome Valley Customs and MasterTree.

[00:04:12] Jon Jordan: Cool, Wilhelm, one from you. What have you got for us?

Anticipated RPG releases

[00:04:15] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, so I think we could look at the upcoming RPGs. So, of course, the RPG space has been interesting pretty much every year. Last year, we had Diablo Immortal and lots of other interesting games as well. But some upcoming ones are definitely interesting, such as Lost Ark Mobile. So Lost Ark used to be a really popular game when it was released on PC. So it is kind of like a top-down MMORPG type of game that used to be really popular in the West; I think it’s still really popular in Korea. So that’s going to be interesting when it’s going to be released on mobile in the West. Same for Path of Exile. So, one of the biggest competitors for the PC Diablo games is this kind of interesting free-to-play game on PC, but having no pay-to-win, so paying for convenience. And I think it’s going to be the same. I think the unknown is that it’s going to be the same on mobile as well. So, it’s going to be really interesting to see how they will compete against Diablo Immortal, which has these pay-to-win elements. And of course, the monetization challenges then, if we look at, because all of these games, all of these upcoming games, these Lost Ark and Battle of Exile, they are both single-character RPGs, so you’re not forming a team of characters. And those traditionally have not been that successful on mobile because it’s really hard to monetize them. All the top monetizing RPGs are character collectors. You collect the multiple characters, you form teams. So Diablo Immortal was thethe only success in a long time in that sense. So, well, it’s going to be interesting to see how Lost Ark and Battle of Exile will do on mobile.

[00:05:56] Jon Jordan: Hmm. I mean, do you think they are obviously, to some degree, competing with Diablo Immortal for an audience? And they are that game now old enough that there’s all of the people who have had been playing that not had enough, but they like hungry now for a similar or not similar experience, but another RPG that’s going to be deep, and I know.

[00:06:19] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, I think that’s a good question for sure. There might be players, of course, who are hungry to play Path of Exile, for example. But then, on the other hand, there are deep progression layers in Diablo Immortal. There’s also players who are super invested in Diablo Immortal. They have spent their time and their money on getting this massive progress of characters, so it might also be hard for them to swap.

[00:06:47] Jon Jordan: Yeah. You just don’t often see games that are growing the market rather than just competing within the market. I mean, I guess that’s always the great goal for game designers is to take a genre and expand it because that’s when you really get success rather than just like, oh, the cake’s this big, we just need to take a bigger slice from someone else. That’s a harder thing to do, isn’t it? And okay, so I guess another traditional IP coming to Mobile is Assassin’s Creed Jade, which should be great, shouldn’t it? Isn’t that what you’re going to tell me?

Assassin’s Creed Jade

[00:07:25] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, yeah, I guess this connects to the RPG side of things as well. So definitely one of the most interesting games to follow next year. But at this point, there’s actually not that much to tell about the game. Of course, we’ve seen some videos of the gameplay, and it looks exactly what you can expect from an Assassin’s Creed title. So I suspect that side of things they probably can nail. And the game looks very good, of course. But definitely, it will be interesting to see what their monetization approach is going to be with this game. What kind of social elements are they going to have there? And most importantly, I would say that what is going to be their level of commitment to the live operations of this game? And yeah, it’s actually interesting to look at the history of the Assassin’s Creed franchise on mobile because that’s quite interesting. Technically speaking, this is their 17th attempt on mobile with Assassin’s Creed when it comes to Ubisoft. But of course, many of those games were spin-offs of premium titles back in the day, like 2010, 2011, 2012, and stuff like that. But also, just recently, a couple of years ago, they tried making, for example, the runner game with that IP with the Assassin’s Creed free runners. So, it definitely seems to be an IP that they want to utilize on mobile as well. So let’s hope that they get it done with Jade this time around.

[00:09:08] Jon Jordan: I can’t say I’ve played all those 17 games, I’ve played some of them, but would you say this is much more like the type of Assassin’s Creed you’d expect on PC console on mobile, which they’ve, did you say they’ve tended to do things, genres within Assassin’s Creed that would clearly work well on mobile? They’ve not, really, it’s obviously very expensive to make these games. And so I guess that’s the interesting point for this one. This is like a console-type game for mobile.

[00:09:20] Kalle Heikkinen: Definitely. Definitely. So the marketing for this so far and the scale of things, if you look at the videos and stuff like that, it looks like that level of focus for this game is on, it’s something else when it comes to the stuff that they’ve done previously on mobile with us. So, yeah, it’s a very interesting one to follow.

[00:09:58] Jon Jordan: And I guess, as you also say, the tricky thing is not necessarily making the high-end game that fits there. It’s that success on mobile really comes through live ops. And as you highlighted, that’s not very clear. And that’s, I guess, sometimes what console developers have not understood. They’re just not set up in the way that mobile developers are to really optimize those live ops.

[00:10:23] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, that is the biggest concern I would personally have when it comes to the long-term success of the title. But as I said, there’s so little that we know at this point, so it’s really speculative still.

[00:10:41] Jon Jordan: Yeah, but certainly one you would think there’ll be headlines of when that game comes out because every Assassin’s Creed, it’s almost everyone wants to check it out even if they sometimes you get the feeling some people want to check it out to criticize it, which, but yeah, it will always get plenty of downloads.

[00:10:54] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:11:01] Jon Jordan: Cool, what are we onto next? Wilhelm, you’re gonna talk about some more RPGs.

Survival MMOs: Earth Revival and Fading City

[00:11:06] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, so I think, like, because now we’re talking about this really high production value, like almost like console experiences. It’s interesting to look at, like some other upcoming titles. So you have Zenless Zone Hero from miHoYo coming. So it’s going to be a similar game to Genshin Impact. But it’s more like this non-open-world game. It’s more about RPG action, where you’re playing like these smaller instances, but it looks, of course, it’s a miHoYo, so it looks the game looks amazing. You have another kind of similar games as well, Project Mugen, so it has a similar style to it also, I want to highlight here that what’s really interesting is that the themes of the games are a bit different than your usual RPG. Instead of being the fantasy team or sky-fighting, they are more about this street fashion team. I think this is also starting to rise in popularity in Japan and maybe in China as well. So it’s an interesting team to look at for sure.

The third really high production value is Wuthering Waves, which looks quite similar to Genshin. So it’s really interesting when they get released next year. And really, the big thing in those games, and like in many other of these games that we have mentioned already, is the cross-play. So cross-play has been growing in popularity. And I definitely see cross-playing being a huge trend in 2024 as well with these upcoming games. You have lots of benefits. You are unifying the console, PC, and mobile audiences. And it also helps we’ve been talking about the app store fee bypassing the web stores. So you can better utilize those as well. So it’s, well, the cross-play AAA titles coming to mobile. It’s an interesting thing.

[00:13:13] Jon Jordan: And would all those three come from APAC developers as well? So that’s because they’re just so expensive to make those titles that you want to be making those from slightly lower-cost regions.

[00:13:17] Wilhelm Voutilainen:  Yeah, yeah.

[00:13:30] Kalle Heikkinen: That would have been actually my question to you guys: what’s the common link between these titles that were just discussed? So yeah, they all come from Asia. I guess my question is, is it so that nowadays, Asian developers are the only ones who have the muscle to compete in this RPG space, which seems to require that the expectation levels are so high for this genre that – Are they the only ones who can deliver nowadays?

[00:14:04] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, and then you need to nail kind of having the AAA game, plus having the extreme mobile live ops combination actually to be super successful. So you need lots of production value for that.

[00:14:15] Jon Jordan: It’s even more expensive. And I guess the other thing is that people are interested in that because they’ve seen the success of stuff like Genshin, which was, obviously, an amazing game, and it cost a hundred million dollars to develop, but the success was amazing. It was really an outside success. As soon as you have one of those people, are prepared to invest that amount of money, or some people had to invest that amount of money to try and repeat it, but after a few people don’t repeat it and basically end up losing a lot of money, then people then look for another opportunity maybe, so maybe next year will be the high point of these super expensive 3d RPGs, and or if they’re successful, everyone will be making more of them, I guess one on the other. Okay, what else have we got? Um, Kalle, you want to talk about two games, Earth Revival and Fading City. Tell us about those and why you think they’re interesting.

[00:15:08] Kalle Heikkinen: Yes, yes. Just brief mentions about this one. Earth Revival and Fading City are two China-originated survival MMOs, so we are still continuing on the RPG tip here. Coming to the global market next year, Earth Revival is actually from NetEase, which has a very, very strong influence from the Last of Us series, like evidently there. So why I want to mention these titles because the main reason is the fact that there are publishers and developers out there that are obviously looking at AAA titles, and these developers see this as an opportunity to leverage those IPs indirectly. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re an IP holder of a popular gaming franchise, you don’t have a mobile presence. Well, guess what might happen. It might be that someone else will fill the void for you. And I’m afraid that these cases that I just mentioned, they won’t be the last ones that we’re gonna, we’re gonna see. So, of course, it will be interesting to see when these are globally launched, will they bump into some legislative issues, for example, because it is with these titles like I was looking at some trailers that they had, for example, from the Earth Revival, which is the Mass Effect kind of game. Like the editing on the trailers and stuff like that, it’s exactly the same as the trailers were for Mass Effect 3 back in 2009 or something like that. So it’s interesting to see if we’re going to see more of this. Let’s just put it that way.

[00:17:12] Jon Jordan: Mmm. Yes, I guess it’s you probably can’t copyright. If it gets there’s other things you probably could do, isn’t there?

[00:17:52] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, yeah, it’s like where you draw the line, but yeah, I would just say that, like for all the IP holders out there that like we’re gonna see some, I think we’re gonna see some interesting discussions going forward when it comes to this type of cases.

[00:17:45] Jon Jordan: And do you think, can those, you say those are from Chinese developers? So, is it enough that those games could just be released in China, which would obviously maybe curtail some of the copyright issues, and people just go, everyone’s already in China knows it’s inspired by Mass Effect or something, but there’s a different thing if you go global with it, I mean, I guess they could just be successful within China, but maybe if they’re, they’re being more aggressive in their attitude and they go well of course we’re going to be global?

[00:18:16] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, that’s a good point. Earth Revival has already been launched in China. It’s a top 50-grossing game title there. Yeah, it was just launched, I think, like one month ago or something like that. And yeah, it’s very successful there. So, yeah, I definitely there’s a point there that operating these games in China, probably from a legislative perspective, is much easier than when you then release them to the global and especially Western markets. So I think when that happens, yeah, let’s see. Of course, I haven’t played those games personally, so I’m not 100% sure what kind of things have been copied exactly, but looking at videos and trailers, it’s very easy to see what has been the source of inspiration for these games.

[00:18:21] Jon Jordan: Oh, is it? Okay. We’ll see, but you said it’s influenced by and inspired by others. This is a whole different debate. Everyone’s influenced by something, and it’s where it’s a case where the line is crossed. Moving on and talking about global launches, you want to speak about the Honor of Kings. I thought Honor of Kings was out ages ago, but you’re saying Honor of Kings isn’t out globally?

Global launch speculations: Honor of Kings

[00:19:27] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. Yeah, this is a confusing one. This is a super confusing one. So why I wanted to bring this up is that apparently there are again rumours that Honor of Kings, which, if there’s someone who doesn’t know, is one of the biggest mobile games in the world, at least if you think about the games that have crossed the most. So, there are rumours that it will get a global release in 2024. Honor of Kings was launched back in 2015 in China, and it’s been a success story, as I said. Always been a top one-grossing game in China, practically. And a Western version of Honor of Kings called Arena of Valor was released back in 2016. So that’s what gets us very confused about this one. But that never received really great success that at least would be comparable to Honor of Kings in China. But this new global version of Honor of Kings was soft-launched actually in Brazil last summer. You can take a look at some numbers and performance numbers of the game. They’re pretty modest when it comes to revenue and downloads. So yeah, it’s really has been in the soft launch there for six months. So let’s see what’s gonna happen. But the rumours are that they’re gonna make a global launch, launch. So let’s see. But personally, I’m just a little bit confused about Tencent’s plan here. So are they going to run both Arena of Valor and Honor of Kings in the West? Or will Arena of Valor be killed at some point? Or will the Honor of Kings Western version ever actually be globally launched? The mobile scene is very hard to enter, but I guess if someone can do it, then Tencent, of course, has the experience and resources to execute it. But then again, they missed those expectations with Iron of Valor already. So I’m really confused about this myself as well.

[00:21:38] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, I don’t know if Valor, it used to be in a kind of high ranks at the launch, at the beginning of the game, but obviously now drop away. They have really slowed down with the live ops of the game and the updates. There’s only like a couple of updates, new content per year, and they have really slowed down on that one, but well, it’s interesting to see how it does against Mobile Legends, Bang Bang and The Wild Rift, so two of the biggest mobile games in the West on mobile, so.

[00:22:10] Jon Jordan: But I guess if it’s just that they can consolidate the live ops and just have one live ops team doing both and that maybe that’s enough to, give it another try.

[00:22:19] Wilhelm Voutilainen: It kind of makes more sense to also have the same game with the same name as well, because they don’t feel so separate titles. So in terms of like, let’s say eSports, which is big in these mobiles. So, yeah.

[00:22:33] Jon Jordan: Yeah. Okay. One to keep an eye on. Good, good. What’s next? So, Wilhelm, shooters. We’ve talked a bit about racing games, but shooters are a perennial genre where everyone’s launching and loads of stuff going on there. So what are we looking there?

Exploring shooter games in 2024

[00:22:49] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, so yeah, Shooter’s definitely one of the hardest to enter. Still dominated by the big three games, Call of Duty Mobile, PUBG and Free Fire in the West. So there are really promising games coming in 2024. First of all, Warzone Mobile, which I would say is the game’s strength. So I would say that would be successful because it will have a cross-progression Battle Pass it has with the PC version. And of course, the PC version is an extremely popular game. So I think instead of directly competing against the mobile audience and against those big three, it can definitely bring the code Mars on PC players to mobile. Let’s say you have the Battle Pass plan, which is, by the way, in the PC version. It really takes time to progress because it’s a time-based progression battle pass plan. So you progress it by just playing the game, like, so time-based battle pass plan, that takes a lot of time to progress. So I personally wouldn’t really mind to sometimes, hopping on my couch, playing some Warzone Mobile and continuing the battle pass progression there so I can actually finish the battle pass in time. So I think that’s a big strength that can really, really work for them.

[00:24:16] Jon Jordan: It’s going back to your cross-platform thing, isn’t it? Yeah. The importance of cross-play is that it just gives you an embedded audience there, so immediately, you’re adding benefit to those people straight away.

[00:24:29] Kalle Heikkinen: And I was thinking that… Yeah, I was just adding that. At first, I thought that it make sense to cannibalize the Call of Duty mobile audience, but then again, I guess maybe it is more beneficial to have the players play the Warzone more than the Call of Duty mobile. I guess with Call of Duty mobile, was it Tencent that is the co-developer there? They get a certain cut out of the profits there. So with Warzone, they’re going to get all the cash for themselves. So maybe that’s something, too, to incentivize them to focus on Warzone.

[00:25:11] Wilhelm Voutilainen: And then, some other games, so Valorant and also Rainbow Six. So, more of these tactical shooters are slower-paced games compared to the other titles; the movement is slower-paced and more tactical. And of course, the time to kill is super fast, but, it’s really tactical. So I would say like right now there is. none of those kind of games in the really high-grossing ranks. I think the highest-grossing one in the Western/ West market is the Critical Ops, which is, I think, is an amazing game. And I personally think those games are one of the best shooters, one of the best shooter genre that works on mobile because of the slower pace and more tactical movement that really works on the works better on the touch screen, I would say. So, like, for example, Valorant, it’s a massive IP nowadays. It’s a super huge success on the PC. I don’t know if they maybe they will do similar. So I have cross-progression battle pass plan that would really work for them.

And then, of course, lastly, I want to really mention the Division Resurgence. So a looter shooter type of game. We have not seen a looter shooter in a long time, like being successful in the West, or on the mobile in general, I’d say. I think it’s going to be tough to make it work, because balancing this power progression shooter, can be really tough. How do you balance the gameplay and the monetization parts? There has been one game that has kind of made it work. So, Pixelcom 3D, one of the actually oldest shooter games on mobile there is, that is still live and going really well. They actually have a pro progression element. So, they have been able to make it work. So, Division Resolution, I think they have a chance at it.

[00:27:05] Jon Jordan: Okay. Good. So so plenty to go on.

[00:27:07] Kalle Heikkinen: I guess as a bonus I’m going to throw in just High Energy Heroes from Tencent. So we all know Apex Legends was cancelled, and killed in the West, but Tencent actually made a very similar-looking game, launched it in China this year called High Energy Heroes. If you look at the UI, it’s very similar to Apex Legends and stuff like that. The art style and aesthetics are a bit more leaning towards Asian anime looks. So it has performed pretty well in China still, I think in the top 50 grossing. So of course, like there’s no, I didn’t find any evidence that it would get a global release. But who knows? Maybe, maybe it could. But yeah, definitely When talking about new shooter games, it’s a game to keep on the radar.

[00:28:07] Jon Jordan: Again, to all playing going back to what you were saying about looking at gaps in markets where existing games, clearly in this case, there isn’t going to be an Apex Legends mobile because it’s dead. So for a team like Tencent, who probably got loads of developers, it’s worth a punt, isn’t it? I mean, probably maybe other High Energy Heroes. I mean, that could work in the West, couldn’t it? It’s maybe not the strongest, but we’ll see. Good. So plenty going on with shooters. Let’s get into some trends. Always talking about LiveOps. So hopefully, Kalle, you have a lot to say about LiveOps in 2024. What have you got for us?

LiveOps trends in 2024

[00:30:07] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, yeah. So let’s start with the obvious. So the cost scope and importance of LiveOps will obviously grow also in 2024. So if you’re launching a new game, the sad news is that all your competitors already have their LiveOps machines running. So you really need to have that LiveOps strategy in place. To be more specific, we’re seeing a lot of promotional collaboration events. So IP collaboration events in games and being very important part of their LiveOps palette. So for example, this year we see a lot of interesting ones in games like StumbleGames, for example, with Monopoly events and Barbie collaboration events. And whenever I speak actually with our Honor of Kings analyst, so we mentioned Honor of Kings already in this podcast, she always says that there is some exciting IP collaboration event going on. And then, would you, Wilhelm, agree with me that events, just in general, are becoming more surprising and exciting? So like putting out events that are like, just collect 10 pieces of golden candy and then, reach this threshold and get a reward. Uh, it’s just, it’s, it’s like, we’ve seen that and what, what is really resonating right now is that we’re seeing more of these like more non-traditional events and mini-games events and stuff like that.

[00:32:15] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, I would say that definitely the production values of events are getting higher, especially in this newer type of events. So, comparing, as Kalle mentioned, comparing a single simple task event where there’s literally just a task, do something in the core gameplay, get points, and get rewarded. Comparing that to an event, let’s say, where you do something in the core gameplay, then you play, let’s say, a mini-game with that or build something like the event meta game or something, or even have an interesting UI or a theme, it make it so much more interesting and engaging for the players. Some really good examples are phase 10, they run these themed events every month and they have exactly that. So there’s always a new mechanic tied to the event loop and a new team as well. And also like this more of this interesting one of them. One of the events and going like taking trends from other games like Lily’s Garden, they have run this makeover event. So it’s kind of liketakes inspiration from the project makeover. And instead of just, you playing the match three core gameplay, you’re getting points and rewarded, you’re playing match tree core gameplay, then you’re using the points you get from that to kind of like do a makeover for the game’s story character. And depending how far you get into the, in the makeover, the end, the story ending of the event gets better and better. So there are lots of these interesting elements to it compared to, traditional task event.

[00:33:54] Jon Jordan: Hmm, hmm. Definitely plays into the cost, scope and importance of live ops. It’s kind of crowed when it just becomes a, yeah, game within itself or, special, extra special rewards. I mean, that’s just that everything is becoming complex. It’s interesting, you said, Wilhelm, that a lot of those ones are social as well, the events now, so you it’s not just about you. It’s all about deepening the core community of the game by embedding people into things they’re doing together.

[00:34:19] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, you have social elements, you have meta elements, you have a story, many of those, and interesting stuff for sure. And then another trend is definitely, I would say, in terms of events, is the games are finding new ways to monetize their events. So like we’ve had, we’ve seen past year, we’ve seen lots of premium reward tracks in events. So like this mini parallel passes inside events, monetizing some of the events rewards.

And then we’ve seen that becoming more popular. And then we’ve also seen this kind of like event boosts. So boost doing something or purchasing something to boost your progression inside the event. That’s usually what has been happening lately a lot. If you have this event skin or this event character, your progression during the event is doubled. So, for example, Modern Warfare 3, which just got released on PC, is running events like that right now. So if you’re purchasing a single one unique operator that is promoted in the event, your progression is faster. But, so those are kind of like what’s already going on, but then what we have just recently seen, and I definitely see this becoming more popular in 2024, is this kind of like this pay-gated content. So events are locked behind a paywall. So, for example, Last Fortress is one of the top Forax Surge games. You have to purchase this premium building in the game to actually access at this mini-game event. So the only way to access an event is to purchase this premium building, which costs $50. Then on State of Survival, another super successful Foraxes, they had this Resident Evil collaboration event. And to play some of the events inside the huge set of events you actually had to pull, this represents an evil tractor from a gatcha. That’s the only way to participate in the event and get anything, and then the last really interesting example, Free Fire They had this top-up event. So top-up events mean that you have to spend or purchase a certain amount of premium currency in the game, and that way you would unlock this huge set of different events. So a whole massive set of events was locked on you spending or purchasing premium currency. So pay gated content is definitely gonna be a trend.

I find that very interesting because it’s like going back to the roots of the live ops in like AAA premium titles. I see this as a form of a DLC where you have gameplay content locked behind a purchase or a paywall. Of course the mechanisms are here not so straightforward and stuff like that but it’s like DLC in a sense.

[00:37:17] Jon Jordan: Definitely, that sounds like one to look forward to. Well, check out how it’s happening in 2024. And then last one, I guess we wouldn’t be allowed to do a podcast like this without mentioning AI. I don’t know how deep we want to go into it because it’s, I’ve just, there’s obviously very obvious things we understand about gen AI and how that’s impacting the sector. But I guess none of us are deep experts to exactly wheedle out. So, what’s exactly going to happen? But how do we think AI is going to, GenAI stuff is going to change? Is it, I mean, maybe the contrary thing, is it actually going to change stuff in 2024 or is, or is it just speeding up game development and making stuff cheaper and we don’t actually notice it in games per se? What do you think?

The role of AI in 2024

[00:38:00] Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, it’s like you said. We’re definitely not the experts, but it’s always fun to speculate. So let’s speculate. So, but yeah, I think it’s of course, like talking about 2024, like you just have to touch upon the topic of AI, I guess. And it surely has replaced blockchain and metaverses, the gaming industry passwords, right? And rightly so. I mean, the potential to disrupt how games are made is, frankly speaking, huge. So if we, for example, think about the high-level implications and what it means to the industry, developing games will get much quicker and much less complex. And I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, obviously, but it’s already, if you think about it, it’s already ridiculously hard to find an audience to your game. Like every day there’s 500 games released to the Apple App Store. There’s 40 games released to Steam every single day. And with AI coming into the equation, I think these numbers will explode. So it’s going to be really interesting to see how this will affect the marketing side of things and the UA landscape when the competition is going to get even fiercer and fiercer.

[00:39:18] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, and of course, the UI is a really good point for sure. And, of course, creating game content might become much easier and faster. So of course, might affect live ops; I don’t know if we’re gonna see all the casual games have massive live ops like Cod Mobile or something like that. Maybe we will see something like that. And also, talking about just, the scale of games that you can create. So we talked earlier about the Genshin type of games, which require a massive workforce to create all those huge worlds and the content there. So if that becomes easier, you can scale massive worlds. Could we see more of these open world type of games in the market? Could we see maybe the MMORPG tournament doing a massive comeback in the future? Can we see more of these metaverse types of games actually coming to live? I don’t know if it’s gonna be already in the 2024, but forward to that, yeah, might, might something interesting what happened there.

[00:40:24] Jon Jordan: I guess it’s whether AI just allows people to speed up what they’re already doing, which obviously it will do. Is that going to be the core result, at least in 2024, or is it going to allow totally new sorts of content to be made that couldn’t have been made before? Which I guess is harder because AI probably won’t come up with that itself; maybe it will. But there’s a lot of things to come up with. So is it just accelerating existing trends? Or is it coming up with totally new things? Yeah, that’s the… And I guess people, definitely people would be trying to come up with totally new things.

[00:40:56] Kalle Heikkinen: One thing I want to add to this that at the GameRefinery we’re obviously always on the lookout for any evidence of AI-generated content in games. In China, we actually we’ve seen it in use as the top MMO in the market called Nishui Han, which is from NetEase. So they have used these large language models to generate at least a certain amount of the narrative content that they have in the game. So they have used this; they have used AI to help them design the narrative there. So, yeah, will be, will definitely be interesting. And then I guess what I also believe is that this will probably result in even faster copying of game features and art styles and all kinds of assets that we have in the game. So, if you can just make prompts like, please generate a Clash Royale-like battle pass for my game and one click and it’s there. That’s going to be quite groundbreaking.

[00:42:12] Jon Jordan: Yeah, I guess also the other thing with anything like this that comes in is, it’s not the fact that you can see how it’s going to make all games better, but I think it’s hard for the individual developer to see how it makes them competitively, gives them a competitive advantage. If everyone has access to the same tools, then, maybe this, everything gets better, but how does that make your game stand out from all the other ones, particularly if it’s going to be loads more games? I guess that’s the really tricky thing that developers are going to have to come to terms with, which is what their competitive advantage is in that landscape.

I guess we’ll have to ask chatGPT to see if it can tell us. Cool, so there is plenty to look forward to. Thank you for the games as well. It’s always good to get some titles we can start checking out and look forward to. But thank you for your expertise, Wilhelm and Kalle.

[00:43:01] Kalle Heikkinen: Thank you.

[00:43:02] Wilhelm Voutilainen: Thank you.

[00:43:04] Jon Jordan: And I thank you for watching and listening to the podcast; however, you are consuming it. Of course, in every episode, we are delving into what’s going on in the mobile game space, which is the most dynamic and largest gaming sector. So we hope you are enjoying the shows. Obviously, subscribe to get all our episodes, and we’ll see you next time. Goodbye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the mobile games playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is the podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I am your host, Jon Jordan, and are joining me today to discuss what happened in 2023. We have Teemu Palomäki, who is the chief games analyst at Game Refinery by Liftoff, and also Inka Reinola, who is a game analyst also at Game Refinery by Liftoff. How are you guys doing?

[00:00:33] Teemu Palomäki: Been great!

[00:00:34] Inka Reinola: Great. Thanks.
[00:00:34] Jon Jordan: Good, good, good. Nice and snowy in Helsinki. I was just there earlier this week. So it was very, very Christmasy. Good. So we’re going to be looking at what happened over the last 12 months as ever shot past. So, there are plenty of trends and plenty to talk about in specific genres. I guess it’s interesting that after some really big years in mobile gaming and rising sales and everything, this year’s been a bit harder, I guess. And I guess we’ll talk a bit about that and see how the overall atmosphere in mobile games is playing out in terms of what games are working well. But I guess a big one that’s been happening for a while but is definitely accelerating is what’s going on with hyper-casual games, which over the years have been a big driver to the industry, certainly a driver of downloads. Even now, a lot of the downloads we see are hyper-casual. But Inka, you’re going to kick us off with this one. What’s been going on with hyper-casual? What are we seeing in that sector?

Shifting to hybrid-casual games

[00:01:35] Inka Reinola: We have definitely seen this shift to more hybrid-casual games rather than hyper-casual games. The reason for that is, of course, the IDFA, which is the identifier for advertisers. So Apple requires now the user’s device to have this like personalized number that the advertisers can’t get their hands into without having the user accept that they have to be okay with the advertisers to track their device with the ATT prompt. They have to first select that they’re okay with that. So after that, there has been, of course, a need to shift more from this in-app advertising to an in-app purchase approach. hyper-casuals have been reliant on this advertising income. But now there has to be more income from the in-app purchases. And therefore, hybrid-casual games like this are coming up. For example, My Little Universe is one of these. It’s like, you can see that it has this hyper-casual feel, but it’s actually a bit more in-depth from the hyper-casuals, they’re like, you open the game, and then you play it for like a while, and then you’re already like grasp what’s going on there. But for example, in My Little Universe, which is this kind of, you explore this world, and you try to collect materials, and you try to build the world and try to kill the enemies, and there’s like many different types of things you actually do rather than just like run a straight line.

[00:03:34] Jon Jordan: Yeah.

[00:03:35] Inka Reinola: And it actually combines these like both advertisement and the in-app purchases. So you can get the equipment items for the island by watching an ad, or you can get the cool skin for your character by purchasing the skin. So, yeah, the shift is more towards mixing these two types of systems together.

Making games deeper

[00:04:00] Teemu Palomäki: Maybe that helps to kind of make the games deeper in a way that instead of just having the players be excited enough to try the game and see a couple of ads in the process to generate revenue, you actually need to make it appealing enough for them to make purchases. So maybe gameplay-wise, this is good for these more simple games.

[00:04:32] Inka Reinola: Yeah, it’s much nicer to have a nice skin if you use it more, and it’s more in-depth.

[00:04:38] Jon Jordan: Hmm. Now, I think it is interesting that when hyper-casuals started, it was basically just incredible. Just the amount of downloads, you know, suddenly you had, it wasn’t surprising for games to get, you know, millions of downloads even. It, I guess, at that point, getting, you know, just more people to download more and more stuff was the flywheel. That was what everyone was trying to do. But then you get to this situation where if you’ve got someone to download your game, then actually you want to keep them in it. You want to keep them in that experience for longer, not just downloading maybe another of your games or possibly someone else’s games because there’s so many hyper-casual publishers now. I guess, although you said the IDFA changes from Apple have accelerated this trend. I guess it probably would be something that would happen anyway because what tends to happen is as new game genres come out. Then, the experiences get deeper over time because that’s just what game developers and designers are doing. I can put more stuff in there and that will keep people in there for longer. So I guess it has been accelerated by changes to add stuff, but it probably would have happened anyway. Is hyper-casual even a thing anymore? I mean, obviously it is because I see people still downloading and playing those games, but is that just legacy now? Or do we think there is still some value in those disposable experiences?

[00:06:07] Inka Reinola: Well, at least the bigger trend, as you said, is that, in general, the games have more diversity, and they add different kinds of game modes and everything. Even the most casual game has to have a narrative or some social elements. So yeah, I guess the bigger trend is that. Definitely, there are still some hyper-casuals, but it’s really hard to say if they have anything to add.

[00:06:35] Teemu Palomäki: Yeah, I think maybe hyper-casual is also getting a little bit damaged by the mini-game trend that we see in bigger games. So before like hyper-casuals where you’re going for that quick experience, that viral hit something. And now, through the mini-games and the fake ads and what’s on out there, the bigger players are also kind of entering the competition for players. So I think hyper-casuals in that sense might be a bit of a struggle, but there’s always room for these quick implementations of nice creative ideas, so I think there’s still going to be some room for that.

[00:07:24] Jon Jordan: Hmm. And I guess it’s probably still an easy place for game developers to experiment with concepts. Obviously, you know, as you’ve been saying there, Inka, that as the games get and become this more hybridized experience, then they become much, much more expensive to build out. And you’re not building them out in a week. You’re building that, and it’s probably taking months, so there’s more risk compared to reward there. So I guess there still is the opportunity for people to mess around with concepts and, you know, obviously see whether things are appealing to people. Obviously, that’s a lot of ad creativity and testing around that, and often that I’ve got games just come from a good ad, don’t they mean it’s often you hear people talk, okay, but we could add and then we made a game from it. But I guess if you are getting good downloads from a hyper-casual game, then the natural thing is just to add more things to it. So, so it becomes an inspirational point to make out some bigger games. So, are there any other trends in terms of engagement and findings from the market?

Engagement trends and market findings

[00:08:32] Inka Reinola: Yeah, so relating to that, there’s a much more mix and match of games and things have to be either more complex or not complex at all, but diversified. One big trend that has been occurring is hybridization. So games mix different kinds of genres together, for example, Fiona’s Farm, which has a match-3. But then it also has this game of tycoon crafting and then it also has adventure elements like this exploration. There’s a mini-game where there’s fog and you have to go through the fog to find some materials and all those different elements in this game enhance each other, and they enhance the monetization too. So it just gives many more opportunities for monetization and engagement. For example, you have to go through the exploration parts and then you need something from there for the core gameplay, the match three, and then they all just loop with each other. So this diversified experience is much more common. And it’s also seen in those mini-game trends. So you have more things to do and then they enhance each other. And also another thing that we can see is the innovative core gameplay. So games differentiate by having something a bit different and new, like, for example, Triple Match 3D, which was one of the first that mixed this match 3Ds item pile. You have a pile of stuff where you have to pick three different items for your match bar. This match bar was taken from 10-match. So this is one way to innovate and then differentiate from the competitors. So all this kind of mix and match and new ideas.

[00:10:38] Teemu Palomäki: Yeah, it’s really… We see a lot of games bring something that is different from the core. For example, I think the State of Survival is a 4X game, but it has this rogue-like survivor.io style of gameplay. We have an Idler game, I think. Idlebank Tycoon has a match-three aspect as part of the character development system in there. So games are really trying to be more diverse in their content, and they need to be. Like, you’re going for retention, it’s becoming more and more important. It’s been a trend now for the past year, and I think it will continue to be because If you want your players to stay in your game, you have to have things in the game otherwise, players would move and go for something else that they would consider a viral hit. So if other games are advertising some interesting merge elements, maybe you should consider adding them to your game as well in some form so they can spend that time within your game instead of the competitors, which might distract them and lead you.

[00:12:04] Jon Jordan: I mean, it’s interesting that the mobile games space has always been very focused on the KPIs, particularly, you know, retention and day, day one, day 30, all that stuff. But, I guess in the, as we’ve seen over the last year when it becomes when you have when the game companies have so little information now about their users compared to what they had before, then that also reinforces the fact that once you’ve managed to get someone to download your game. Then you really want to spend a lot more time keeping them in there because it’s not a simple case of just, oh, we just spend some more money and go and find out, you know, go and find a whole bunch of other people. So the whole hybridization thing is playing into a general market trend around. It is harder to find good players and retain them. And I think that there isn’t so much as a trend, but something that we’ve seen this year is, that some big companies have said we’re not really launching new games because it’s so problematic for them to launch games at the scale that they could have done before just by spending money. So there’s quite a lot of structural changes happening in the game, in the mobile game space. And I guess one way of dealing with that is just once you have got someone, make sure you can keep them for as long as possible. And having different modes in there is a way to do it. Although I guess it makes it harder because if you have a whole bunch of sub-genres, there are probably hundreds of sub-genres, which four do you want to put together? And obviously some wouldn’t make any sense at all, but how you do that as a game designer, I imagine, is probably quite a challenging thing.

Challenges in launching games

[00:13:44] Teemu Palomäki: Yeah, there are ways you can alternate between different modes. So like, for example, Playrix and Fishtum that I have experienced, and what they do is they have merge mode and exploration mode kind of alternating as a big event going on in there. So there are ways, but I think something we have seen is also when these developers launch new big games, they have them packed with stuff at the launch. And then the live-op side is forgotten. And if you’re doing a game as a service, it needs to have the service. You need to keep the content creation going on. So we’ve seen, I think, we look at live ops these days quite closely in GameRefinery. So what we’ve seen is there is a lot of stuff going on in the successful ones. And some bigger titles that launched this year with big IPs, Street Fighter Duel, and I think, Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, could also fall into this. But what they did is they had a whole lot of stuff packed at the launch. But then there’s just not much coming in later. So there are these console IP games. When brought to mobile, they tend to kind of go the console-like approach there. And it’s just not the way for mobile. So you need to really pay attention to how you keep the game running.

[00:15:33] Jon Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s still, that’s still how mobile is. Has all led the way that’s on top of MLRPG has always had that, but then, just the level of constant updates you need now in a big successful mobile game is staggering. Obviously, at this stage, the live ops teams are as big as the original development teams, and that’s a weird structure for a console company to have, and I guess we’ve even seen it. Some of the big ones are stepping back from that and saying, we were not a year ago on the console side saying they were going to do a lot of live ops. I think Sony, oh, and now maybe saying, maybe not gonna do so much because you suddenly realize just the, the constant size of these teams that you need to be banging out this stuff.

Mobile gaming trends in Japan

[00:16:18] Teemu Palomäki: Especially in mid-core. Maybe in casual, you can do something simpler, but in mid-core, it’s all about core having lots of stuff to play, so there it’s really important.

[00:16:27] Jon Jordan: Yep. So I guess inherently, what we’ve been talking about a little bit is more the Western markets, but always good to dip into other markets. And Teemu, you’re gonna talk a bit about what’s going on in Japan this year.

[00:16:42] Teemu Palomäki: Yeah, one notable thing in there is the AR market, which here in the West, you think of location-based gaming, and you’re like, okay, it’s just Pokemon Go and rest are going to fail. But in Japan, the numbers are really different. You have a lot of different games and a lot of really successful ones. They’re really high in the ranking. So what we have here, launched that last this year, we have the Monster Hunter Now, which also launched in the West. In the West, it’s not doing so well right now, but in Japan, the last time I checked, it was in grossing rank 8. So it’s really the best-performing AR game in Japan. And then followed after that there’s the Dragon Quest Walk, which I think they’ve been running for maybe five years or so now, and then there’s Pokemon Go, but it doesn’t stop there there’s a new game that launched around the same time as the Monster Hunter Now there’s a Nobunaga’s Ambition brand game, and that’s doing really well we’re still in the top 50s with these so we have already like four games in the top 50s in Japan. And then rest there’s Pikmin Bloom and then Eki Memo, which is anime girl collector, girls are trains thing. And there’s a new one also coming like from Square, the next year Kingdom Hearts, where you can kind of explore locations, you can travel without moving yourself.  And these are all aimed at different kinds of people.

So you have the action RPG in Monster Hunter Now, and then you have Dragon Quest Walk, which is a turn-based RPG. Pokemon Go is, well, Pokemon, and it is its own genre pretty much. And Nobunaga’s Ambition is, well, it’s a 4X. Didn’t think that was going to be a thing on location-based gaming, but it is, and Pikmin Bloom for casual, Ekimemo for anime girl collectors. So you really have this variety and it works really well in Japan. And that is because there’s, the lifestyle factor. Their lifestyle is more like, you’re not going by your own car to places so much. So you’re traveling on foot or by train. So you have idle hands to play these kinds of games. Whereas in the USA, you might be travelling solo on more occasions. You hop out of your house, you go into your car, and the next time you get out of your car, you’re at your work location or whatever. So there’s not that much room to play. So, in Japan, AR gaming is really big. And if you want to see any trends in that space, definitely look there. And it’s not just like whole games in AR. It’s that they have these side modes.  I think it was Puzzle and Dragons or Monster Strike that had this AR side mode in it. So that’s something to consider when going to Japan.

[00:20:15] Jon Jordan: And I guess it’s maybe one of the reasons is all those games, or most of them, are well-known game genres that have been going on for decades in Japan. So, in any game that comes out from Dragon Quest or Monster Hunter, there’s a fan base who are just like, right, this is what I’ve been playing, so check it out. So, it’s not to say that’s going to make it succeed, but that’s going to give it a good starting point.

Location-based gaming in Japan

[00:20:46] Teemu Palomäki: Yeah, definitely. IP plays a big part there. Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest, Pokemon, and Pikmin also have a big fan following. So that also plays a big part.

[00:20:15] Jon Jordan: But I guess, as you say, there is also some interesting when it comes to the location-based side of things, that is a very difficult market from, uh, yeah. Getting people to move around from a general point of view. So it may be interesting that the Japanese, just the way they move around Japan, may make that market good where it wouldn’t be elsewhere.

[00:21:21] Teemu Palomäki: Yeah, but I think we might be seeing some innovation in that sense. I’m really interested in what the Kingdom Hearts missing link is going to be like because they have a closed beta going on currently. And from some of the videos that I’ve seen, you can run on top of these buildings. It’s this Google Maps-style area like you see in Pokemon Go. But the buildings have a tallness in them. You can run around, you can control the character. I don’t know if it’s limited, but if you can, just from where I am in Finland, play some location in Japan. But if you have some freedom, say you have like a 20-kilometer radius around you that you can move freely around in, I think that would definitely help, especially up in the north where these kinds of games are really difficult to play during winter time, especially in Finland, it’s really cold. You don’t wanna take out your phone while on a walk outside. So something like that could kind of help these games in the West as well.

[00:22:42] Jon Jordan: Good, okay, another genre Inka, you’re going to talk about is Merge Gaming. So again, that’s now a  big staple of the, of the, I guess it’s casual-ish, but it has some mid-core elements as well. So, what’s been going on with Merge?

Rise of merge gaming

[00:22:56] Inka Reinola: Yeah, so I think Merge is quite interesting because, of course, it’s not like this year’s thing, but I think that there has been some stuff happening there this year, at least. And well, first of all, Merge two games, there have been some new ones coming to the top-grossing list, and I would probably point out two games that are like the most successful ones right now, at least and quite interesting. There’s this Gossip Harbour which has a lot of narrative in it, so the game has this story where the character is renovating the restaurant, and there’s this whole scandal that you want to learn more about, and then you merge items in the restaurant to continue in the story. And it was like at the start, it had much fewer features, but it has been like adding more and more these new kind of event types, new kind of features. For example, right now, it has Battle Pass, which has narrative-like rewards, and it has a decoration event that has a narrative, like so many narrative kinds of stuff. There is also a relationship system with the characters of the story, and you can learn more about them by unlocking some levels there. And yeah, and it has a lot of looping events, a lot of recurring events that come every three days or so. Or, like every three days or so, there is something going on. There’s always something going on in that game, and like there has been more and more stuff there. So that’s interesting.

Another interesting Merge-2 game is Travel Town, which apparently was the company that was purchased by Moonactive, which also makes Coinmaster. After that, it clearly changed its UI more into this Coinmaster type of game, or it looks a bit more like Coinmaster, even though it’s a very different genre. And some of the events or the reward stuff in there, it’s like copied from Coinmaster. So that’s interesting, and it is also like adding more content in the Merge 2 game. It’s like, at the beginning, there was not that much. It’s also this game where there’s quite a lot of narrative, not as much as in Gossip Harbor, but at least some level of narrative, and yeah, so, Merge Two games have been adding more content, and this is also related to the wider trend of casual games adding more content and players may be requiring more content. Also, this is a bit older trend, but it’s still going on, and I think there are more of these games. So the mid-core games also like to have this merge mechanic in there. Earlier, there were Top War and Kingdom Guard, at least, which are both like 4X games that also use a merge in some part of their gameplay. And now there is this new game Top Troops, which is a bit similar to Top War so it’s like but not a 4x but there’s like troops that you upgrade by merging and then you go to some battles, and yeah so like mid-core games, to use this merge mechanic also. Merge is very hot, so to speak.

[00:26:29] Jon Jordan: Merge is just a very nice genre to play, I think when people just have time on their phones, it’s all, it’s not, you know, like, match-three sometimes can be very complex about, did I get the right one? Or, you know, which is obviously a strong thing. It’s why there are so many match-three games out there. But Merge just has that much more like, oh, just do this, do that. You know, it’s not, at least when I play, I don’t feel like. I must optimize my strategy. I just, oh, I just merged some stuff together. So it’s a nice way of breaking up some other genres, maybe.

[00:27:04] Inka Reinola: Yeah, it’s nice to add that on top of everything. It’s very cozy and chill.

[00:27:07] Jon Jordan: Yeah, yeah. One thing we actually haven’t mentioned, I wonder, is you spoke so much about narrative there. I wonder, probably wouldn’t have seen it so much so far, but with the rise of stuff like Gen.AI (Generative Artificial Intelligence), you just wonder whether obviously narrative or, that’s what, certain elements of content become basically free now. So, you can imagine that certainly, for some, the genres where that fits in, you’re gonna get a lot more narrative because you can just basically generate as much narrative as you want for free, and if the audience wants narrative you can just give them more narrative.

Narrative and AI in gaming

[00:27:38] Inka Reinola: Yeah, and I have to add here, related to AI, there’s this new MMORPG in China called Nishui Han. It translates to Justice or something like that in English, I think. And there’s this new type of way you can interact with the NPCs that they’re like AI-generated discussions. And so it’s a much more personalized experience with the NPCs. And it’s quite interesting if we are going to see something like this in some other games too.

[00:28:10] Teemu Palomäki: I don’t know. Do we come to some point in a situation where just having a ton of content is… Like, instead of quantity, we want quality. So I think there’s definitely going to be a quantity of AI-generated content. No problem there. But to make it happen with quality for these kinds of interactions to build into something. I think that’s going to be important, especially I think on more narrative-driven games, maybe on console more because on mobile, the narrative goes on forever. It’s not really progressing that much. You have this interesting hook, like what is this mystery and this mystery, a merge game or something, and you never get an answer to that. You’re going around it, but you’re never getting it, so AI-generated content might be more fitting for this kind of never-ending narrative. If you’re going for a story that goes into something, that builds into something, then I don’t know how well that will work.

[00:29:35] Jon Jordan: Yeah. No, I guess that’d be really sweet. It’s a big trend for next year to see how people, how something’s built, how developers use something that’s so new. Obviously, there’ll be novel products arising from that, but then it’s a question of how that novelty is laid into the well-known game development strategies that we’ve been talking about, it’s probably not strong AI isn’t strong enough to be its own genre, but clearly it’s a massively important additional. So it’s tall for some dramas. We’ll see.

Okay, so we talk a little bit more about IP. We mentioned a little bit in the past How are we seeing? More maybe more in the West IP coming through, and the value of that in the mobile space.

IP-based games

[00:30:29] Teemu Palomäki: I think we see a lot of these IP-based games, be it console games or some other IPs. We had a Harry Potter game, The Magic Awakened, that was doing quite well in China when it launched. I think that launched in the West, but it was forgotten very quickly. It dropped out of the top 200 within a month. We’ve had bigger titles, you know, Monopoly Go, which was the massive game from 2023, launched in April, and then by July, it had become the top-grossing game in the US. So it’s been dominating since then. Having tried it out, I can see why. I think it’s doing really well with getting new users. There are a lot of these user acquisition trends we’ve seen previously, particularly the function of inviting your friends. It’s like the older Facebook games where it’s just invite friends, invite friends, invite friends. I think we haven’t seen that too much in the games in recent years, but Monopoly Go does it really well, and it’s a brand that is easy for people to hop into.

And we’ve seen Warcraft Rumble launch it. I think it did quite well. But what, well, if we look at the console game IPs, we have Street Fighter, we have Final Fantasy, we have Warcraft. I think maybe Monster Hunter in the West, in Japan, is doing well, but they fall off quite quickly. So the players are the things that they are expecting from the IP are different from what mobile games tend to be. So I think, well, in Japan, a lot of these games are doing much better. Final Fantasy Ever Crisis, it’s still in the top 50 in there. But they are built kind of like a console game, but then they lack the strengths of the mobile game and the player base just expects something a little bit different. There are a lot of things to kind of work on if you want to make the IP work. fantasy that the audience has with the original source material. If it’s not there, like, I mean, the Harry Potter game, it’s a card game. Is that something you remember from Harry Potter, or is it the one battle? I think Hogwarts Legacy did that well. That’s why it got huge sales in part because of that. So, if you’re fulfilling the same core fantasy that the source material has, then you’re more likely to succeed.

[00:33:57] Jon Jordan: Yeah, I think going back to Monopoly GO, that was interesting because it was, in many ways, didn’t innovate really. There’s been quite a lot of those. I think the first one was a Korean game, wasn’t it? I think that basic to move around a board and then attack other people. I know I played a few mobile games that have that mechanic. I mean, Monopoly obviously has that core theme of competing against each other, so you feel it a bit more. But it just seemed a bit more familiar because you’ve got all the Monopoly-type stuff in there, which plays really well for a Western audience, and it was very polished as a title you could just get that real feeling. But I guess the other interesting thing there was with the publisher Scopely, who are pretty well funded, got bought out this year, so as well as there’s lots of there’s no one thing where you can point to, I think with Monopoly Go say this that’s the reason, but there’s quite a lot of strong factors that stack up together to make it really one of the standout games of the year.

The success of Monopoly GO

[00:34:54] Teemu Palomäki: Yeah, they do their UI really well. So they get a lot of players to download it. And then they have the casual audience. They have a lot of low price point offers popping up. Like every time I open the Monopoly Go, before I get to play anything, I get at least two pop-up offers. Something like purchase this for two euros or something. And it’s, if you get these often enough, then you just might go for them. And it’s, I think, there is the audience for just casino-type gameplay where things are just happening. You’re getting excited because you see flashy animations, and it gives the reward feeling. And it’s something easy to pick up. Things happen, it’s exciting. You’re doing things, and inviting your friends, having the social pressure there, I think that helps. So there’s a lot of things that are really working well for them.

[00:36:07] Jon Jordan: Yeah, yeah. And actually, as you pointed out there, Inka, it did remind me actually a little bit of Coinmaster, and Coinmaster really popularized the layout of how you have those games and a lot of the social attacks things. And, you know, it did feel very much to me, at least like, you know, this is a building on top of those now very well-known mechanics. And then maybe, you know, with you saying that the Harbour Travel Town, that was, you know, the reason that they’re making that game more like Coinmaster is obviously they can then cross-market to the people who now really know how that UI works, it feels very familiar to them. But yeah, wrapping things up. Inka, is there any game that you particularly enjoyed this year that you’d like to highlight?

[00:36:47] Inka Reinola: This year, well, I really like merge games. I think they’re like chill and relaxing. So, that narrative, like a lot of narratives, is a nice thing to have. So I think Gossip Barber is pretty good.

[00:37:01] Jon Jordan: Yeah, yeah, good, good. Excellent. Well, thank you to Teemu and Inka Reinola for going back and looking at some of the key trends of the year. I guess maybe what we see as a slightly quieter year, I guess than maybe some other years for various reasons. I don’t know. I don’t want to downplay the year. But I think what’s interesting is when we do this time next year, I’m sure some of the trends we’ve talked about today will have fed through to some more significant things happening. I guess every year can’t be a ‘knock it out of the park year’. You have to have some ups and downs. So anyway, thank you for talking us through some of those trends.

[00:37:41] Inka Reinola: Thanks, Jon.

[00:37:42] Teemu Palomäki: Thank you.

[00:37:43] Jon Jordan: And thanks to you for watching and listening, however, you are consuming the podcast. Every episode, we are talking about what’s going on in the world of mobile gaming, the biggest part of gaming as it has been for a number of years now. So I hope you are finding these interesting. Please subscribe, and we’ll see you next time. Bye bye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the mobile games playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends. I am your host, Jon Jordan, and joining me today, we have two experts who are gonna be talking about the, I guess, as I say, the two sides of the coin of mobile advertising. So we’ve got plenty to talk about, and we have Kenneth Wong, who is the senior director of ads revenue at Scopely. How’s it going, Kenneth?

[00:00:33] Kenneth Wong:  Pretty good, nice to be on this podcast. So, I’m looking forward to chatting about all things industry-related.

[00:00:39] Jon: Good. And you’re on the ads revenue side of things. So, can you give us a little snapshot of what that entails?

[00:00:45] Kenneth: Yeah, so I manage the day-to-day operation for all the ad-related items for Scopely. So, we have all the different kinds of ad formats in our game. So there’s a lot of things, both in-house and external, in terms of communication that I manage, like partner relationships and internal partner relationships as well. So that’s a lot of things that we can go over in this podcast.

[00:01:13] Jon: Absolutely. Good, good. And I guess the other side of mobile ads is user acquisition. So, building out your audience. And talk about that, we have Yumin Gu, who’s the director of user acquisition. Let’s go, please. How’s it going, Yumin?

[00:00:37] Yimin Gu: Hi Jon, hi everybody. Hi, I’m Yimin, and I’m the director of Performance Marketing as we recently rebranded our team from User Acquisition. Yeah, so I’m leading the Performance Marketing team on the social side of the games for Scopely. Yeah, I’m super excited to be here and looking forward to chatting more about everything on the audience and growth side.[00:01:53] Jon: As you say, plenty to talk about. I mean, I think the mobile ads scene has been around for as long as the mobile gaming scene has been, but it seems to be from very much from an outsider’s perspective; it’s one of these things that is constantly changing. And I guess most people know it’s gone through some pretty big changes in the last two years. So, there is plenty to talk about there. But I guess as a  very headline thing, you both work at Scopely. One of the, I guess, one of the most successful mobile games companies over the last 10 years, I think, very, very successful over the last decade and still growing fast with a big acquisition from Savvy Gaming announced. They’re still fairly recent. So, I guess the best is yet to come for Scopely, but we’re not talking about Scopely per se. We’re talking today about ideas of performance advertising and ad revenue. So, what do you want to break down? User acquisition has changed a lot recently. Where do you think we are at the moment? Where are the things you focus on at the moment that may be a bit different from what we saw a year ago?

Challenges of user acquisition

[00:04:07] Yimin: Yeah, well, I think the industry is just an ever or ever-constant changing evolving space. And with it, of course, UA strategies and channels are changing too. In my opinion, the UA landscape as a whole is adapting to two main shifts. One is the way people consume content. And two is how the advertising ecosystem changes. For the first part, for example,  I think our audiences are more used to consuming content in different ways. Like they are watching short-form videos more and consuming influencer content a lot more than before as well. On our side, this has led to an expansion of marketing channels. I think a lot of the performance marketing teams are now leveraging more like influencer marketing or influencer performance marketing.

And another example, the way that people watch TV is also different now than before, right? Like, I think we used to be more watching linear TV, and now connected TV has become more predominant, especially with the younger demographics. CTV has now become more accessible and also a more versatile media platform. It’s also becoming a more leveraged media for performance advertisers. So yeah, I think more teams are just leveraging these emerging techniques like influencer marketing, like connected TV. Also, with all that, I think it requires tighter integration with internal brand teams’ communications to reach a broader audience, for sure.

And to my second point, with the change in the advertiser ecosystem, everybody knows about it. There have been so many changes around data privacy regulations, which has led to the rise of contextual advertising strategies that rely on content and user behavior more than personalized targeting. So, of course, more publishers are also trying to use AI and machine learning algorithms to optimize segmentation, predictive modeling, and campaign optimizations.

But yeah, overall, just to stay competitive in this industry, we just have to, I feel like, stay on top of all these new emerging trends and challenges. As of now, a  lot of teams are taking advantage of new marketing channels and leveraging AI a lot more than before to acquire new users and drive success, but we’ll just have to be very adaptive in this market.

[00:07:32] Jon:  I guess what you’re saying there is interesting because it’s the way I see things. Things were never simple, but definitely, before all the tracking stuff went. There was a general playbook everyone played against. I mean, whereas now you have, not only does that not work anymore, you have all these ever-increasing amounts of channels, and I guess the other thing is for you guys who have quite a wide range of genres that you’re trying to generate audiences for, then the thing that works for game A is probably, unless it’s exactly the same genre, it’s not gonna work for game B. So you have these multi-directional situations where everything’s changing, and that’s why stuff like AI machine learning comes into play because there’s no way that human beings could use that, deal with those amounts of variance in a logical way.

Challenges in user acquisition strategies

[00:08:42] Yimin: Yeah, for sure. I think because Scopely is structured, and different  UA teams support different clusters of games. And, of course, we communicate so often to keep each other posted on the recent changes we’re seeing. But again, to your point, Jon, it’s impossible to share everything on a tiny basis and to adapt and adopt learnings from one another very, very frequently. So, for sure, leveraging AI is one of the solutions that we are adopting more than ever. I think it’s just an inevitable trend and a more efficient solution than ever before.

[00:08:33] Jon: I guess it’s interesting because the basic thing you’re trying to do is, you’re trying to get people to download your games. I mean, that’s the highlight. And I guess the highlight is that you’re trying to get the people who are going to play your games a lot and spend money on those games. I mean, that’s the headline. That’s what UA is about, isn’t it? That’s why you now call it performance marketing, I suppose because it’s the performance of you’re spending money on this end, the end of the flow, you want to have more money being generated. That’s basic business 101. But, so with that thing, how does that play across  Scopely with all its games? As you say, there are different teams running different things.

Are there learnings that you can do across the whole portfolio, or does it break down very much into atomic learnings that worked really well for this channel for these months, and then you throw it away and start again? So you’re not too worried about having some logical system of how it works. You’re just looking at it, and it worked. Does that make sense as a question? I guess it plays into AI. I don’t know if this is the state you have at the moment, but you could imagine that in an AI or machine learning where the result is you put money in, and you get more money out, and you don’t really care what happens, or do you care what happens? Is that part, do you think of your expertise that there is that market knowledge that you have that can influence the system?

Complexity of game-specific UA strategies

[00:11:22] Yimin: Yeah, I think there are definitely things that can be applicable from one to another. But the reason that we now have to leverage AI more than ever is that we want to create more customized experiences for our audiences. Right? And we also want to create more cohesive experiences for our players. Our goal is not to just have them download the game. It’s as you said, play the game, engage with the game, and in the end, probably monetize in our game. To achieve that, we’ll have to make sure that our users have expectations when they see our ads. And then, when they land into the game, they see that the game actually achieved their expectation. And then they stay within the game, retain in the game. And continue engaging and monetizing in a game. That’s our goal.

And for that, we’ll have to do a lot more customization, which is for sure a lot of effort across different teams. We work so closely with our creative team. We work so closely with our product team, all that. So yeah, for sure. It is not just like once we do it and it can be applied to all strategies, it’s more like a catered and bespoke strategy per different gains.

[00:12:55] Jon: Yeah, I don’t know how much you can say about this, but I was reading an article a couple of months ago, and it was just about certain types of games and the amount of creativity they were generating was just like thousands and thousands of ads. I mean, it was just absolutely incredible now that the workflow required to create the ads to fit all these channels was always becoming like game development in of itself in just the amount of work that was required from art teams. And I guess, but I guess ALA solves that as well, does it? Or maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know.

AI in creative production processes

[00:13:35] Yimin: Yeah, I mean, I think generative AI is now also becoming a more leveraged tool in performance marketing as well. I’ve seen it being applied to a lot of creative production processes, especially with simpler assets like iterations adding voiceover or having some simple localisations. So it is, it definitely has provided a lot of value. But again, I think right now, it still needs a lot of more manual human input. For more complicated projects, I think we still need to rely on our internal creative team to produce the assets and cater for this more customized experience for our users.

[00:14:37] Jon: And I guess going back to AI solves it all, one thing that I could do if that was not bounded by your manual input is obviously you could come out with ads that were really successful or really successful in terms of driving audits, but they were not coherent to your game. And I guess in industry, there have always been people who have made up ads that had nothing to do with their game, which obviously works really well, but equally, that’s, I guess, from a reputation point of view, that’s not something that reputable companies like Scopely want to get involved with.

Importance of brand enforcement

[00:15:12] Yimin: Yeah, absolutely. I think we all know what type of ads you’re talking about, and we’ve probably seen them like a hundred times. That’s exactly why we still need to have human input into all this content. Having some core values and brand enforcement is definitely very important in all the messaging that we deliver to our audiences. So, for sure, as a UA team, we work closely with our brand team for a lot of the asset approval as well to make sure that we are following our brand guidelines to deliver the core values to our audiences.

[00:15:59] Jon: And one final thing on this point, you mentioned the influencers a few times, and I guess influencers, I don’t know, five or six years ago, when they first started coming in, we saw quite a lot of activity around that, but it seemed like in a lot of cases, it was not very, necessarily very sustainable, or it was quite hard to fit into the performance marketing flow because you talk back then at least when I was covering it you’d pay a 10 to 1000 dollars to someone to do a video about it and then they next week they do a video about something else and so it’s all quite hard to certainly be attributable. Have you found that the ecosystem is now more mature, and you can drive a sustainable audience through there? And because obviously there’s we always hear about these massive influences and on these channels bigger as ever, but I  wonder now whether, so we have this situation where there’s a lot more, I guess there’s a lot more smaller influencers who may not give you scale, but if you can handle a lot of influences then that gives you a lot of scale in a more coherent way than maybe some of these very top-end expensive ones.

Influencer marketing trends

[00:17:17] Yimin: Yeah, I think whenever there is a new trend in the market, we need to give the audience some time to educate themselves. I think over the past few years, our audiences are now more used to watching those influencer-promoted content. Now, they understand more that this is how influencers make their lives. And as long as I think the promoted content is more smoothly embedded into their content, then I think it’s probably a much better advertisement to the audiences. In terms of attributing performance, I think there are still two different types of influencer campaigns that we run, one similar to what you just mentioned. OK, yeah, we pay them differently. The pricing model is more on cost per content. They are not really compelled by how many impressions they need to deliver, how many clicks they need to drive, and how many installs they need to drive. So we still view those campaigns more like brand awareness driven.

But there are also, I think, a lot of the industry professionals from the performance marketing side are now joining a lot of those influencer agencies and not only influencer agencies, but there are also teams from bigger companies that are now sectioned out to dedicated to performance marketing. And the campaigns that they offer are more achievable and more performance-driven. And with those, definitely, it is a much better-fitted type of campaign for performance marketing.

[00:19:28] Jon: I think that’s a good point. It does maybe certainly journalists are always thinking of things happening all at once. And as you point out, it does take a surprising amount of time for the audience to get educated on how these things work. And I guess for these industries to grow up and certainly when it comes to things like being able to attribute audiences to different influences, that does take much longer than we think.

Okay, that was good. That was a good overview of where we are on the performance side. Thank you, Yimin.

And Kenneth, you’ve been very, very patient there. Raring to go. So, you’re the other side of the coin. And I have to admit, that’s an area that I  know less about. And I think it’s maybe an area that maybe has not been changing as dynamically. But what do I know about it?

[00:20:01] Kenneth: Oh no, no, I’m learning so much from Yimin.

[00:20:19] Jon: Tell me what’s been going on when it comes to driving revenue.

Transition and challenges in ad revenue

[00:20:24] Kenneth: Yeah, so like you already said, right, it’s the flip side of the coin. So whatever Yimin is faced with in terms of challenges, we are also facing the same thing. Primarily, the first, obviously, is privacy, right? Privacy is a lot like right now with Apple, with the IDFA we’re talking about, the industry averages around 25% ish in terms of people out of LAT.

So there’s a lot of people that we’re not able to talk to and serve targeted ads to. And it is a very chicken and egg thing, right? People are always like, hey, I don’t want to share my info. But at the same time, why are you showing this wealth of ads? And I was like, well, you can’t have it on both sides, right? So for us, it’s very difficult because they are complaining about wealth and user experience, about we’re not serving the right ads, but they’re not willing to pass the concept to us to serve them targeted ads. So I think that’s one key thing that hurts performance. Bidding, as we change into a model of bidding tech right now, most of the networks and partners we’re working with are heading that way. It’s really changed a lot of our operation, I guess, advantages of having any big team where we have the resources to dig into the data and optimize. And that really changes the landscape of where ad monetization is.

And then the other thing is about consolidation. Like in the last few years, there’s so much consolidation, so many M&As. Essentially, what it does is, if you think about the people in the auction house, you have fewer and fewer players. So you have fewer and fewer players who are willing to bid higher and higher to get the maximum performance and revenue for my side. So I think that’s another challenge.

Last but not least, Yimin talked about the shift in the performance marketing budget. So, a lot more money has gone to influencer CTV. Those will not get back to our pocket, like the publisher’s side pocket, right? So that also means that the pie might be, if it’s not growing, it’s standing still. So you add all these factors into it. We’re definitely not in the rosiest place. The huge growth that we’ve seen in five to six years is gone. So how, essentially, what we’re doing is keeping things afloat, and how do we look forward to the next big things that allow us to have the next growth, essentially?

[00:23:02] Jon: Hmm. Yeah. Has that influenced that slowing down? Do you think that has influenced the types of games, not maybe the sculpture making, but it’s all generally in the market? Obviously, if there’s a big growing way in which you can generate ads, money, or revenue from ads, developers are going to be like, right, let’s do more of those things. So do you think there’s been a  switch more towards, right, let’s really focus down on in-app purchases, or is that just too obvious?

Shifts in game development trends

[00:23:32] Kenneth: Yeah, I always think so. Yeah, definitely, there’s just a shift in terms of, if you think about maybe three, four years ago, the rise of hyper-casual, right? And where the state of that genre is right now, it’s not dead because we still very much need hypercasual because it’s fueling the ecosystem. But at the same time, you see less and less, and it becomes more and more difficult.  And that’s one of the reasons why that space might not be as, I guess, high growth as another genre. And there is always the preconceived notion that, at least for the developer side, it’s easier to convert people than to show them the ads because they are developers at heart, right? It’s like they want to make AAA titles. They want the user experience. They basically think ads are evil, ads are bad, like, you don’t wanna show any ads unless I have to, so I do think there is a trend. It is a common struggle with a lot of my friends in the industry as well to pitch ads internally as well.

[00:24:47] Jon: Mm-hmm. Do you think we’re talking about education around the ad model for influencers? Do you hold out any hope that education around gamers will mean that these opt-out rates change significantly? Or is that just yesterday’s model now? That’s gone now.

Addressing privacy concerns and user education

[00:25:08] Kenneth: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, we just have to find new ways to adopt these new rules, right? And I guess that’s the fun thing about being in this industry. You’re never at the plateau, like you always are, you’re never at a peak where the mountain is like, hey, I’m ready to retire. Like just sit still and just let things go. There are always new rules, new policies, new regulations that flow into the mix to make our job more difficult or more exciting. It depends on if you’re a half-full or a half-empty guy, right? So I think we’re adapting. We’re at the stage of how to get a new format into the game that talks about better user experience, less invasive, but at the same time is an additional source of revenue. I think there might be something on the horizon about that, but we’ll have to wait and see. Our industry sometimes doesn’t move as fast as I wanted to.

[00:26:02] Jon: But it’s in some ways ironic that the big battle that was won was incentivized ads in games, which, from all the data I saw, most gamers love those. They’d be like, can I have more ads? Because they give me the things that are in my game. And it’s ironic that the ability for gamers to love ads has now been taken away from them, and they get these ads they don’t want to see. And they’re not so valuable, so they don’t get the same incentives. It was absolutely, from your point of view, I’m sure it is absolutely the wrong thing to break on that.

The future of ads, privacy, and mobile UA

[00:26:35] Kenneth: Yeah, I mean, the fundamentals of the system, if you think about rewarded ads, opt-in ads, it’s still correct, right? It’s that the privacy itself, I think, goes back to platform education. I have discussed it with Google recently, and it’s like, hey, what are you guys going to do? Because soon they would follow Apple’s route in terms of removing the first-party data. So, like, are you gonna be as strict as Apple? Because that essentially is one of the reasons why my side of the coin is to have more challenges than ever before, right? It’s about if you look at the pop-up and say you have all these small tags, and then the next thing you see is ask the app not to track. Anyone who is not in our industry will click that button because it’s so obvious that you should not, and they’re not being specified what they’re tracking, not at least in a bold statement of, hey, we don’t care about who you are and where you live. We don’t know those things. We don’t know your banking information. We just want to serve you more reasonably, related to you. And that’s the experience that everyone wants. And I think that’s where it has to come from at the top, if you like, at the very top in terms of platform. If the platform does a good job in natural education, everyone within the ecosystem will benefit from it. So, of course, that’s bigger and easier said than done because they have a billion-dollar industry that is looking for a billion business today, and they need to run on it. So yeah, we’ll, we’ll see what happens, but I don’t think it’s the format itself, but more about the user education.

[00:28:09] Jon: Yeah. Good point. Well, as we come to the end, I guess I’ll ask both of you, Yimin, we’ll go for you first. What do you think in the next year or so, do you see, do you think there’s gonna be any sudden changes? Is there gonna be any step-by-step function going on there with something like AI coming in or, as much as anyone can see the future? How do you see that one playing out?

[00:28:46] Yimin: Yeah, I guess we’ve already touched a little bit, but the use of AI is definitely going to be more and more prevailing. We already are seeing it being used in creating advertising assets. And probably it’s also being used in, like, game art creation as well. Right? And I think as more companies are going multi-platform, there’s probably a growing effort to create unified user profiles across different devices and platforms while we still respect user privacy and everything. And I think AI is also probably going to be leveraged a lot in this whole process as well. The technologies have become more sophisticated, and they can already deliver more relevant content and ads, but I think in the future, it’s gonna get a little more advanced. And yeah, I think, as Kenneth mentioned earlier, we’ve seen a lot of M&As in the industry in the past years. Now, there are fewer but bigger players in the market.

And to this whole hit topic about more ethical and sustainable advertising practices, I think we need all stakeholders in the space to collaborate more and together, maybe we would be able to work towards establishing some better practices for user privacy and data management. Yeah, but like, I think it’s all my personal perspective into the future of mobile UA, but the industry is just so dynamic, and it can be influenced by a lot of unexpected events and new technical breakthroughs that we currently don’t know, right? So yeah, we’ll just have to stay adaptable and remain informed of the latest.

[00:31:20] Jon: It’s certainly interesting if there was, and I think there maybe is a long-term trend towards people owning their own data. And then that creates some interesting models about allowing you to track them and giving you their data for maybe in-game assets or something like that. And that maybe solves the interruption we’ve had at the moment with platforms breaking what was quite a good model. Kenneth, how do you see next year?

[00:31:49] Kenneth: Yeah, I mean, we’re definitely in the year of transition, right? So we’re definitely trying to understand what the new world is going to look like. I do believe that one of the formats I’m very interested in is in-game advertising. You see it a lot in terms of Netflix, right? Product placement is key to Netflix’s success. So, being in the amount of time people are spending in games, I’m still surprised at how it is not more, I guess, impactful in terms of mobile advertising in games.

But the good news is that there are more companies doing it now. I think it’s going to be on the rise. And I think that’s probably one of the better user experiences in terms of advertising that, hey, you get the brand in there, but then you’re still playing the game. You’re not exerting out. If anything, the user experience is probably the best. Right?

It goes to everything else about AI and privacy. And I agree Unified ID will be something very interesting. I hear some big platforms are thinking about in-game surveys, about things like what they can do in order to collect first-party data. And I think that’s the key, right? Collect as much first data as possible in the way that they play. How do we create a dynamic experience because of that? I think that’s another key point.

In terms of AI and ML, I think the machine learning part is more related to the UA side, but on AI for us, it’s definitely we are already using automated tools to help become more efficient in terms of a lot of the operational tasks, we automate it so that, we save time and use those time to do more like out on others things that might be, helping the business, right? In terms of thinking about A-B testing, thinking and segmentation, those are the things that are top of mind for us, for sure.

[00:33:50] Jon: So I guess that’s summarized that in the medium term, you get, or at least hopefully get, some optimisation boost from just this new technology. The AI stuff is clearly going to be important, but maybe in the long term as well, we hope that there’s going to be some more structural changes as everyone’s a gamer now. So I think, I think the nice thing is I think, people realized I’m giving my data to Facebook, and not only am I not getting anything from it, I’m getting ads or that data has been given out to people. I don’t want to have that data. Then that’s clearly one thing. But if it’s like I’m playing a game that I love and it’s not really my personal data, it’s my gaming data. And if I’m getting more stuff in the game that I love from doing that, then I think that’s a very different dynamic. So maybe, hopefully, in the long term, games will become more valuable for advertisers because it’s not your real-world data in the same way it is for these other products.

[00:34:47] Kenneth: Exactly, exactly. It’s a virtual world of data, for sure.

[00:34:51] Jon: There we go, that’s the hopeful future. Well, thank you very much to Kenneth and Yimin for their expertise and for helping us try and unpick some of these interesting dynamics that are going on in space. Thanks for your time.

[00:35:04] Kenneth: Well, thanks for having us.

[00:35:06] Yimin: Thank you for hosting us, Jon.

[00:35:08] Jon: And thanks to you for watching and listening to the podcast, or however you are consuming it. Every episode, we talk to people who are deep into the mobile games industry, the largest single part of the games industry and one that is reaching billions and billions of people and is really fascinating in terms of all the dynamics and what’s going on. So please subscribe to the podcast, and I’ll see you next time. See you then, bye-bye.

Introduction and celebration of the 50th episode

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Game Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. In fact, I’ve just been reminded this is our 50th episode. Well done to us.  If you haven’t listened to all 50, you need to have a look at your podcast history and see what we’ve been talking about for the last 49 episodes. Just a reminder, this is the podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends.

I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and joining me today, we have two experts to dig into a particularly interesting area. We have Kalle Heikkinen, who is the chief market analyst for China at GameRefinery. How’s it going, Kalle?

[00:00:40] Kalle Heikkinen: Very good. Thanks for asking. How about you, Jon?

[00:00:42] Jon: Not bad at all. 50 episodes, wow. That crept up on me there.

[00:00:47] Kalle: Wow. That’s amazing.

[00:00:48] Jon: Good. I think for the first time– It’s always exciting to have a new expert, so we have Inka Reinola. How are you doing, Inka?

[00:00:57] Inka Reinola: Inka, yes. I’m doing fine. How are you?

[00:00:59] Jon: Very good. You are another Chinese market expert at GameRefinery as well. Obviously, we are talking about China. It’s hard to know where to start with China, I think, with it being the largest mobile games market for quite a while just in terms of having a lot of people who play a lot of games, but increasingly also is the place now where games are made that are successfully globally, and not just in the Chinese or the Southeast Asian region. Kalle, you’re going to kick us off. Just give us a top overview to get our minds into shape around the Chinese mobile games market. Then we’re going to drill into some various topics as we go.

Overview of the Chinese mobile games market

[00:01:42] Kalle: Yes. I was thinking about what makes the Chinese market so special, and I really made it down to three major points, I think. I would say, first of all, it’s like you said, Jon, the market is huge. They have a big domestic market that has a big appetite for gaming. For example, last year, the market size was something like $45 billion. 500 million people in China play online games, which translates to 52% of the population. That’s quite interesting numbers, and that’s a huge market by any standards.

The second point is the access to capital in the market and access to a very talented and relatively inexpensive workforce. There is money to make investments domestically as well as overseas. That’s why we see these splashy investments: Tencent buys shares of Riot, Epic, Supercell, and stuff like that. As I mentioned, great access to relatively inexpensive labour then enables studios such as miHoYo to exist that have a headcount of something like 4,000 employees or something like that.

Then, as the third point, I would say the regulations in the way that they shield the domestic market from foreign games to enter the Chinese market. I know that we are going to discuss this topic later on. Let’s just put it that way: it has never been a very straightforward process for Western developers to enter the Chinese market and operate their games.

[00:03:31] Jon: As you said, we’ll discuss this; it’s not always been the easiest place for Chinese developers either.

China’s unique gaming history

[00:03:38] Kalle: That’s true as well. Also, I think it’s good to– People a lot of times ask why is mobile so much associated with Chinese gaming and stuff like that. I guess just giving a bit of context around that could be interesting as well. Concepts like games as a product, boxed products and stuff like that, and console gaming in general, never actually played a big role in China. There are various reasons for that. We don’t want to go there right now, but things like piracy and the fact that console gaming was banned for a long time in the country played a role.

The gaming population was always exposed to free-to-play and mobile gaming from the get-go. There wasn’t a big shift from box products or console gaming to free-to-play we saw in the West. Instead, what we saw is that for a lot of Chinese players, their first exposure to gaming was through mobile and PC, and the prevalent business model has always been free-to-play in China.

A lot of Chinese also live in relatively small and cramped apartments, and the families are big. There’s often multiple generations that live under a single roof, so it’s not easy to find a place where you can actually have your PC rig set up or TV console set up installed. Even if you did, gaming has never been commonly perceived as a healthy hobby. The underaged have always been forced to go outside or play secretly, and mobile devices allow you to do that if you understand what I mean.

[00:05:29] Jon: That’s a good point to know. I guess the point at which free-to-play mobile games were getting big was also the point at which you had this big change in the Chinese market as well. You have, obviously, a large population and a lot of very strong middle-class people developing there just at the same time when the world is really getting free-to-play mobile, and there’s just no history of gaming anywhere else.

You have that a little bit in Japan, but Japan would obviously be massively into consoles as well. In Japan, you have really strong consoles, not a lot of PCs, but a lot of mobiles, but in China, just all that growth and all those interesting games were just pushed into free-play mobile. That’s just why it very quickly became this enormous power.

[00:06:11] Kalle: Yes. That’s a good point. There are overlapping timelines there, for sure.

[00:06:18] Jon: Cool. That’s our headline. Now, Inka, you’re going to go into a bit more about what’s going on trend-wise at the moment, which is obviously– Give us some detail.

Current trends in the Chinese mobile games market

[00:06:28] Inka: Yes. It was a bit of an oral market at first, so Tencent and NetEase still dominate the market. Mid-core is still a big thing, but actually, interestingly, the casualness has been on the rise right now. It’s like last year: Mid-core lost 7% of the revenue market share, casual actually grew 4%, and casino 2%. There are a lot of different interesting things in the casual world that have been affecting this, and one of the most interesting is the game called Eggy Party. It’s this stumble guy type of game, which has very deep social experience. For example, you can walk into a shop and see other players at the same time there. Eggy Party was actually the third biggest in Q2, and it’s grown into this whole big thing within a year. That’s drawing a lot of casual players in. In addition to that game, there are also a lot of other casual games that are interesting. For example, there’s one merge game called Fat Goose Gym. Merge games are not very common in China, but that has been very popular. General-wise, there’s also a lot of interactive story games that have been published. Not quite recently, but there are new interactive story games every now and then, so it’s definitely growing. Also, there’s this cozy game thing. It’s also in China because there’s this one tycoon game, which is this very beautiful water-painted soothing game where you manage a village somewhere in the fantasy world. It’s very cozy and soothing and a nice gameplay experience. Also, feature-wise, there’s interesting stuff happening, like limits on gacha spook gacha discounts. They have all become more popular, and there’s a big difference between the top 20 games and other games. The overall idea is more casual, I think.

[00:09:01] Jon: You go ahead.

[00:09:03] Kalle: Go ahead.

[00:09:03] Jon: When you say cozy games, that’s more like a genre or a style of game that makes you feel comfortable.

[00:09:11] Inka: Yes. I think that’s also a Western thing. In general, people like to have these cozy games, and apparently, China also has this kind of thing happening that some people want to play these more chill games, not so stressful. Yes.

Social elements in Chinese games

[00:09:30] Kalle: I just wanted to add on the– Inka mentioned about the socialness of the game. If you look at basically all the top games in China, but also the casual games, we mentioned Eggy Party, which is obviously entirely based on social experiences. Inka mentioned the social hub that is there, and you can create your own home there, decorate it, invite friends to come over, decorate the home with them, and engage in all kinds of social activities in the game with your friends. Also, the Fat Goose Gym that you mentioned, the merge game–One of the things, there’s actually a lot of interesting aspects in that game because, in the West, the merge of two genres has been a little bit of– How should I put it? Stagnant in the sense that we haven’t seen large feature evolutions in the genre. I’m not saying Fat Goose Gym is doing anything super wild there, but what they have there is, for example, a chat function. They have friend lists and send-us features, which are something that we haven’t seen in the top-grossing Merge Two games. That just tells about the Chinese developers and their emphasis on the social aspects of games. No matter the genre, they are thinking about how we can add social elements into the game, which obviously, as we all know, is a huge weapon for you to utilize if you think about retention and how to make your players stick to your game and stuff like that. They are definitely masters of that.

[00:11:13] Inka: The Chinese people especially love the social aspect of the games, but of course, it’s like in Western games, it has also become more popular to have some kind of social elements. Maybe it has something to do with China having a lot, so we don’t know.

[00:11:33] Jon: I guess, again, very high level, not an expert view for me, but mobile apps in general are much more sophisticated in that respect in terms of China. People in the West say people are spending too long on their mobile phones or on Instagram or something like that. Obviously, in China, you have these– We’ll see what Elon Musk manages to do with X, but this idea of everything apps. You have these apps that are Facebook, Twitter, and shopping all merged into one.

I guess, in general, that audience just expects a more sophisticated experience from just it being a game that you have your game friends in there. People are just much more, I think, used to sharing that sort of stuff. At least, that’s my impression.

[00:12:25] Kalle: Yes, that’s a good point. There are a lot of gaming experiences in China that, like you said, they offer under one roof. As to say, they offer a lot of different experiences. Just to give you an example, you have Honor of Kings, which you all know is a MOBA game, but you can have four-guys mode there, you can have an auto chess mode there and stuff like that, or QQ Speed, which is a Mario Kart racer. You can have a dancing game mode there, you can have among us mode there and stuff like that.

They’re very quick to look at what’s trending not only in China but also in the West and then add those elements that they see trending to their own games. It doesn’t matter if the core genre or the core loop in the game has anything to do with that trend that they’re looking at. That’s always very interesting to see when those things happen.

[00:13:29] Inka: Yes. Also, the addition of something else in the core game is the thing. For example, in the Fat Goose Gym that you mentioned and I mentioned before, it’s a merge game, but there is this menu where you can access multiple different mini-games. You will never get bored because if you’re bored with the merge game, then you can play some other type of game mode at the same time.

I think the new games now have added even more of that stuff than before. There’s also this new MMORPG called Justice, and that one also has a really social wall where you can see where your game friends right now are doing whatever they are doing inside the game. I think they’re thinking about it even more than before.

[00:14:22] Jon: Maybe a silly question, but I have to ask it.  Obviously, you talk about games, which I guess the translation or the transliteration of something like Eggy Party or something like Fatgoose Gym obviously sounds funny in a maybe different way to us. In China, does something like Fat Goose Gym— Is that just like a translation of those words? In China, does that seem like in English, stumble guys?

[00:14:49] Inka: It depends on the game. Sometimes, they have their own translation name, but sometimes, we just need to put it into action by ourselves, and it might sound a bit silly.

[00:15:01] Jon: Yes, because I’m wondering, there may be phrases in Chinese that the game title plays off of, which would make sense to a Chinese audience, whereas for us, it just sounds like no one here would release a game called Fat Goose Gym, or I don’t think they would do that. [crosstalk] Maybe. I don’t know.

[00:15:17] Kalle: I know that Eggy Party, at least, is the official name that they use, but actually, with Fat Goose Gym, I’m not 100% sure if one of our analysts made it up or if we look it up from somewhere. That’s actually something that I’m not 100% sure about.[00:15:31] Inka: Yes, unless you’re a writer.

Changes in player demographics

[00:15:33] Jon: Yes. Interesting. From what you’re saying there, it’s interesting that mid-core, which is Chinese and Asian markets, has always been very focused on because that market size is better. I guess maybe if that’s going down a little bit, maybe the market will expand a little bit. Can we make that as a broad trend, or is that my making stuff up there?

[00:16:01] Kalle: You mean that the market expanded beyond mid-core to agile and other spaces?

[00:16:06] Jon: Are people playing less mid-core and moving on to these other things? I imagine over time, more people who wouldn’t call themselves gamers eventually end up playing games, so you have a widening of the audience but maybe becoming less concentrated in the more core element.

[00:16:25] Kalle: The way I see it is that I think we, as players, at times, might be motivated by different things. If we think about games, like I mentioned, that a QQ Speed has– Maybe a mid-core game is a better example. If Honor of Kings has a casual-ish game mode in there, I think a lot of people don’t mind playing that casual-ish game mode, even if it happens inside a mid-core game.

Especially these big games that have tens of millions of players, there are so many different player types and so many different motivations to play the games that a lot of them might have additional motivations and appetites for the game genres in addition to, let’s say, the mobile gameplay in Honor of Kings. I think that’s just adding more value to these players and giving something that they can– the specific motivations that they might have. I guess that’s how I think about that.

[00:17:55] Inka: In addition, I think that it might have something to do with the same thing as in the West, that the gender who play the games have also diversified. Maybe earlier, it might have been a more male-dominated thing, and then it’s more female players. Often, they play, for example, interactive story games, customization games, or something else casual. There’s a need for those genres to– Yes.

[00:18:29] Kalle: Yes, that’s a good point. I think it was researched some time ago that the demographics, for example, for Honor of Kings, was– The percentage of female players was really high. It was close to 50% or something like that, so that was really surprising. No wonder that they’re also looking to serve that kind of demographic.

Chinese games going global

[00:18:58] Jon: Honor of Kings is like a mobile MOBA; it’s effectively a League of Legends type game, isn’t it? That would be an interesting point of view if it were that the audience had a wider demographic because you have these games which are about one thing but have all these other things in there. That’s a more interesting audience. Whereas it is striking– In the West, I don’t know, probably culturally that if you had a shooter game and then put a merge in there, the family would be– Maybe this is me putting too much stress on the point, but it seems to me maybe that Western ordinances treat the coherence of the game as that’s quite important.

If you have a game, the game needs to make sense. You can do weird things in the game, but there needs to be some sort of reason why you’re doing weird things in the game. Whereas I think Asian markets, not just for China, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a shooter game and you put a merge game in there. If everyone likes it, that’s fine because we’ll get on with it.

[00:20:00] Kalle: Yes. Then, on the other hand, in the West, we’re seeing a lot of hybrid games, and we have things like puzzle RBGs that combine mid-core elements with certain casual elements and other examples like this. Yes, I get your point. Maybe in the West, it wouldn’t be that easy in a way to pull that kind of thing off.

[00:20:18] Jon: I think for a live game, you probably find the core audience. The core audience generally gets very moany about things they don’t feel are part of the core experience. Anyway, let’s move on. I guess one of the other big trends over the last probably maybe five years, more than that, but previously, Chinese were already good at making games for China, Southeast Asia, maybe Japan, Korea, but we’ve really seen now, I guess, Chinese games be very successful globally.

The Chinese developers co-develop or have access to IPs like Harry Potter and Diablo and all these things. Really that’s been, I think, quite a big change to my mind that Chinese games aren’t as big globally as they are in China. Do you think that’s a fair assessment? Is that a big trend, or am I overseeing that?

[00:21:11] Kalle: Chinese games not being so big?

[00:21:14] Jon: No, they are so big now. Previously, Chinese games tended just to be big in Southeast Asia or China or those areas, whereas now I think Diablo clearly was– There’s lots of discussion around that game and how grind it was going to be, but I think most people just think Diablo Immortal is a really good game. That’s my impression of it, at least, the fact that it was made by a Chinese developer. Call of Duty Chinese developer. Almost like all the big IP games now.

[00:21:46] Kalle: Yes. I think there’s been a definite change that we see a lot more China-originated games in the West and globally as well. If you look at, for example, the forex strategy space in the West, it’s all China games. Really, it’s dominated by them. We see they have a big presence in genres like RPGs and shooters. Where I think the next big move is going to be is going to be casual. We are already seeing some signs of that in Merge Three; for example, makeovers have origins in China, and games like Gossip Harbor by Micro Fun and stuff that I think will get bigger.

Chinese regulations in the gaming market

[00:22:41] Jon: Cool. One thing we headlined at the start was Chinese regulation. I don’t know how much detail you want to go into on that one because that could be a podcast in and of itself, all the changes that have happened.  How do you want to inform us about the Chinese regulation of mobile games and the impact that has?

[00:23:00] Kalle: I think, as you said, this could be its own podcast, and definitely, I’m not the expert out there when it comes to this topic, but it’s always been an interesting one, and definitely as a China analyst, you get exposed to this stuff. I guess what I want to just go through is the different types of regulations that are there because that’s also sometimes a bit confusing.

People talk about regulations, but what do they actually mean? Obviously, there’s regulations on the market entries for Western developers in China. You need that special license to enter the market. Maybe some of the listeners might know that there were several years when no licenses were given to Western games, but now, in the last year or two, these regulations have been slowly being eased off. That’s one thing.

The second thing is that there are regulations on children’s playtime and money spent. How they are tackling this is with different kinds of locking credential requirements and stuff like that, but according to some of the reports and research that I’ve found, apparently, the restrictions can be bypassed quite easily. Actually, when minors’ playtime has been researched after these regulations have been implemented, there hasn’t really been any major decline in minors’ playtime. It might be that these regulations haven’t worked as well as they were initially planned to work.

The third one is regulations on the content of the game. China being China, there are things you need to consider when it comes to LGBTQ content; for example, you cannot criticize certain things about China in games and also about sexual topics and stuff like that. That’s also a bit different when it comes to operating in the West, obviously. Then monetization regulations.

One thing that comes to my mind straightaway is, for example, that starting from, I think, 2017, all the games have had to disclose their gacha drop rates, for example, in the game. There’s a lot of different types of regulations. When people talk about regulations, it’s always good to clarify what kind of regulations they actually mean.

The challenge of Western games in China

[00:25:49] Jon: In terms of the first one, are there any notable Western-developed games that are doing well in China these days that would be good to point out?

[00:25:59] Kalle: There are some, but there is a clear change that has happened. I’ve worked here for seven years, closely following the Chinese market. When I started, it was very common for Western developers to have the same game with the same game ID that they have in the West in China as well. Whenever there was an update to the game, you could always rely on it. It’s the same build, the same ID, the same update, and the same content. Of course, they still could have the texts in the game, copywriting, translating, and stuff like that, but it was the same build, the same game. That has completely changed. I think the change happened three or four years ago.

Nowadays, you have all the Western games that we see in China, let’s say, Supercell games or Playrix’s games and stuff like that. They operate with their own IDs. They usually have a partner company that they’re cooperating with. Maybe it’s NetEase, maybe it’s Tencent, maybe it’s something else. If you look at the publisher of the game, that’s usually the publisher of the game.

They might have been not only translated but really localized. Maybe the live ops monetization has been localized to a much greater extent than what the differences were seven years ago. There has been a clear shift when it comes to that. You asked what kind of games there are. There’s a couple of Supercell games, Inka, you can actually correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Clash of Clans is in the top 200. We have Brawl Stars there. Then we have Homescapes: Gardenscapes, Inka, does something else come to your mind?

[00:27:54] Inka: No, I think that’s pretty much it.

[00:27:56] Jon: Really?

[00:27:56] Kalle: Yes. One thing to know is that the number of these games has been decreasing all the time. Now it’s a very interesting time to look at how things will evolve now that new licenses are also given to Western developers. Will we see new Western-originated games getting into the top 200, or is it going to stay the same?

[00:28:22] Jon: Certainly remember when Supercell started launching there, it was seen as a very big thing. I guess that was the peak of when the Chinese market was more open, and I think it’s been downhill since then. Actually, that did remind me of one thing we have mentioned in passing a couple of times, and it may be good to go into a bit more detail.

We do mention Tencent and NetEase as the two big companies in China. Can you give some idea of just how big they are? It is not like we’d say, “Oh, Activision and EA are quite big in the West.”? There’s quite a lot of other ones as well. I don’t know the exact figures, but they are just enormously bigger than anything else, aren’t they? It’s all a duopoly.

[00:29:04] Kalle: Yes. It’s a very drastic difference, especially if you compare it to the Western market, which is much more fragmented. If you just look at the, let’s say, top 200 grossing games, you look at the publisher, if you had an Excel CSV output of the publishers of the top 200 games, you would see a lot more fragmented charts of the publishers. Then, in China, NetEase and Tencent have a huge, huge market share of the top 200 games. I don’t have any exact numbers to throw at you right now, what is the exact percentage number, but the difference is like night and day if you compare Western and Chinese markets.

[00:29:49] Inka: Also recall that Honor of Kings takes a really big market share of overall revenue, and it’s the top one game.

[00:29:57] Jon: Yes. I think at one point it was– Was it 100 million DAUs or something? I think maybe it’s dropped a little bit since then, but it’s the biggest game in the world on any platform by miles.

[00:30:09] Kalle: Yes. An interesting thing is it’s still, I think, in the top 10 downloads. Even if it’s, I don’t know, seven, eight years old games. Yes. People, I guess, turn out for a little bit and then they reinstall the game, and it’s always at the top. Yes, interesting.

Future of the Chinese mobile games market

[00:30:27] Jon: Good. We’ve had a look at where we are and a bit of the past. How do we see the future of the Chinese market? What products are going to be there? Any significant changes, or is it going to continue in the gradual upward trend that we’re seeing?

[00:30:47] Kalle: Yes. When it comes to Chinese publishers, I mentioned this already, but they most likely will try to gain even more foothold in the West because the Chinese domestic market is– Of course, all the markets are highly competitive, but the Chinese market is fiercely so. The Western markets are very, very attractive for Chinese companies. We mentioned the acquisitions that they’ve made and stuff like that. I see them as an active player in the West in the future as well. I already mentioned that I think the next big moves are going to happen in the casual space.
One interesting example of that is Micro Fun. I mentioned this already as well. They operate the game Gossip Harbor, but they have several other merge games as well. Some of them merge three games, and some of them Merge Two games, but they have a clear portfolio strategy where they cross-promote inside one app the other app so that you get rewards in the app that you’re playing if you download the other app and do certain tasks there. They’re definitely trying to move their players across their portfolio games and then increase the overall value of their portfolio that way, which apparently is not–Let’s put it this way. I’m not sure if it’s 100% something that you actually are allowed to do in a sense in the West, but yes, that’s something that Micro Fun is doing. I think that strategies like this will be something that the Chinese publishers will definitely consider. Then, just regarding M&A, I think that in the future, they will most likely be challenged by Saudi money. We’re already seeing some big moves from, for example, Savvy bought Scopely and stuff like that.
In the future, with the M&A things going on, I think they’re going to get more expensive for Chinese companies to engage in just because of the fact that the competition of the investments is also getting higher. Of course, on a macro level, now the overall M&A market has cooled down a little bit, but in the longer term, I do think that it’s not going to be so easy for them for various kinds of reasons to engage in that strategy as well.

[00:33:37] Jon: Yes.

[00:33:38] Inka: I would also add that I think that because there’s a lot of these Chinese games that have been published in the Western market, they’re exactly the same, and sometimes it doesn’t work because it’s maybe a bit more Chinese in taste. I guess that they will get better at localizing them to the Western market in the future because younger people may understand better how to do that localization. I believe that they will get better at that.

[00:34:10] Jon: It’s almost the reverse of what you’re saying, Kalle, where, to begin with, Western developers were putting just their normal game into the Chinese markets and then hoping it did well. Maybe for the last few years, Chinese developers have been putting their Chinese game into Western markets and hoping it does well, but actually, they’ll realize, “The game we have for China it’s a good game, but we need to just–” Maybe some subtle differences or maybe some more substantial differences over time is a way to optimize that for different markets. Certainly, the taste of Western gamers is still quite different from Chinese and Asian gamers. Maybe it’ll be the reverse trend that they’ll be learning from that way. Cool. Good. Thank you very much to Kalle and Inka. I hope you enjoyed that. Every episode, now we’ll be episode 51 next, wow, we’ll be talking about what’s going on in the mobile gaming world. There’s just an awful lot going on, very dynamic. Very big markets and these big companies coming in, and it’s always changing. I hope you subscribe via your podcast channel of choice or by the video. Now, I am doing a video. Thanks for watching and listening, and come back next time. See you then. Goodbye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and joining me today; We have one expert, but what an expert he is, Teemu Palomaki. Good to have you back on, Teemu. Your official title is Chief Game Analyst Japan for Game Refinery, and you are talking about one of the most defining, I guess, Japanese games today. So you are the perfect man for this. Tell us what we need to know about Final Fantasy.

[00:00:36] Teemu Palomäki: Great to be here talking about it. I’ve played a lot of them. I’m hoping I will be able to shed some light on things that could be helpful for non-Final Fantasy developers today.

[00:00:54] Jon: Yes, it’s a massive subject, and it’s one of the longest-running. I mean, whether you see it as an interesting franchise, isn’t it? Because pretty much most of the games are single games, but to some degree in some shared universe. Then there are some direct sequels, but then there’s an awful lot of side-quests and multimedia, and over time, that’s become bigger. Very interesting from that point of view. Also, we’re timing this now because Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis has fairly recently been released as a mobile game. Again, that’s another retelling of the classic Final Fantasy VII game as well. That will be something we’ll cover. How do you want to start? How do you want to start this massive overview?

What makes Final Fantasy special

[00:01:42] Teemu: First, what makes Final Fantasy so special? Thinking about it. Obviously, as you mentioned, there’s connections. Some follow in the same universe, while most of them are totally different and maybe share only gameplay mechanics or themes. I think that’s what makes it so good, at least for me. The way they can keep things fresh. If I play Final Fantasy VII, which is a sci-fi world, and then I play Final Fantasy XVI, which is the latest one for PlayStation 5, which is sort of like Game of Thrones, like medieval Europe thing.

Those don’t have much in common if you look at them like that, but when I’m playing them, there are these elements that make them familiar and easier to approach. I think that the way the series evolves is the way that it catches people’s attention and keeps them interested in it for a long time.

[00:03:09] Jon: I guess there’s always the view that unless you really don’t like RPGs, which clearly that’s not the franchise view then. If you do, you’ll have a favorite, but you’ll probably have one or a couple of games that you really like historically because the story really worked, or for the more modern ones, it’s just something that really chimes with you. That means you’ll always be interested in the next one, even if the setting isn’t something that you like or, for some reason, you don’t like the one. It’s an interesting sort of what is very basic advertising. That’s one of the reasons it’s lasted so well.

Obviously, the quality of the games has been great. Anyone who’s ever played a Final Fantasy game and liked part of it is like, “Well, I wonder what this next one is going to be like.” It seems that sometimes, let me just say, with James Bond films back in the day, where everyone always watched the next one, even if the last one was rubbish. There was always that idea. You know, some of the Final Fantasy games are really actually not going to be very good, but there’s enough good stuff in there that you’re just like, “They’ve learned from their mistakes before.”

Hits and misses in the Final Fantasy series

[00:04:15] Teemu: Well, mainline Final Fantasy, so obviously, some games are considered massive hits. 7, I think, 10 would count as a massive hit. 16 is a really good hit right now, despite the smaller install base in PlayStation 5. There are those that people consider misses, like Final Fantasy VIII, which was a bit off-putting for many, and 13 is always getting a lot of hate from the fanbase. That’s the main line. That is also the case for the mobile games, the spinoffs that are on mobile. There’s been a lot of really weird ones that have not resonated at all.

One example was the Final Fantasy All the Bravest, where you just had a ton of different characters, no story, no anything. It’s just monetization, and not really much to do. There’s just a lot of effects happening on the screen, and players really didn’t like that one. There have been spinoffs from the Final Fantasy-type zero game. There was an Agito game about the school setting. Since Type-0 didn’t resonate well with the players, the spinoff didn’t resonate either. There’s been a lot of mistakes. Most recently, the Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier, you might remember the Battle Royale game. I think it lasted only four months before it was killed because it was trying to do something ambitious.

Personally, I liked the gameplay, what they introduced to the Battle Royale setting, and the way you can kill monsters; you can choose to go PvE to focus on the monsters or PvP and try to kill the players. It was interesting, it was fresh, but the game just didn’t keep me hooked long enough, and it seems like it didn’t find its audience at all.

Comparison of Japanese and Western audiences

[00:06:38] Jon: I guess generally, we’d be, say, comparing the mobile ones to the non-mobile ones. Clearly, mobile games are cheaper to develop, and so there’s a level of experimentation there that is more addressable. Then also you have this problem with mobile in a way that the– Particularly on mobile, the way the Japanese play mobile games compared to how non-Japanese or Westerners play mobile games is very different. Whereas if you know you’re making a console game, you have to make it work everywhere.

Mobile has more flexibility, but equally, it has more stratified audiences. Every Final Fantasy game has probably, we can say, sold more in Japan than not in Japan. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but you would think broadly that a lot of its hardcore audience is more Japanese than it would be globally.

The flexibility of the Final Fantasy IP

[00:07:38] Teemu: Definitely. Looking at the performance of different Final Fantasy games, as I was looking through them, they’re always performing much better in Japan. Where in Japan, gachas are more favorably looked at. Whereas here in the West, not so much, people tend to shun them. Especially the console game audience. You have to remember that these fans of this IP, they’ve played console games from, like, if they became fans somewhere between 1 and 12, they’ve never had enough purchases in those games. They grew up thinking that this is like a whole game, and any additional monetization feels like a scam for them or a rip-off.

Still, there are those success stories that still resonate in the West as well. I listed a lot of those games that were not received so well, but there are good games performing well. Brave Exvius is doing quite well. Brave Exvius: War of the Visions is also a spin-off from that mobile title. Then the Dissidia, Opera, and Omnia doing well. Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire is their 4X game. I don’t know how, but it found its audience. If I consider a Final Fantasy gamer, I don’t think of them as a 4X type of player but as an audience.

[00:09:31] Jon: That was quite an interesting one, wasn’t it? Because actually there is– Machine Zone, at the height of its power, was doing these massive complex 4x games with very mainstream advertising around it as a UA funnel. Then they signed a deal with Square to basically reskin one of their 4X games as a fun fan game, which is interesting in and of itself that Square, in a way, would, I’m going to say, allow someone to do that. Obviously, they do those things, those license deals are to make money. Equally, I think those machines owned 4X games, even at the time, they weren’t greatly loved among most people. People who played them loved them. It was an interesting use of the Final Fantasy license. Then there’s actually been another one, which hasn’t been so successful.

There are actually two 4X games from Machine Zone using the Final Fantasy license. That is interesting, it shows nothing to do with RPGs, but there is amongst maybe a small subset of people who really like playing and paying for games. Actually, Final Fantasy is a license that really works in a way that you wouldn’t think it would. That’s a positive to the flexibility of the license to attract an audience.

Experimentation with the IP

[00:10:56] Teemu: Yes. I think that’s one of the success elements for these games that the Final Fantasy mobile games have done well. If we look at Brave Exvius, it was developed by Alim, who was the maker of the Brave Frontier game. This Brave Exvius Final Fantasy game is basically like a reskin of the Brave Frontier game, but now with Final Fantasy and all the additional fancy animations, the CGX attacks. That’s the game that introduced us to collaboration characters of Ariana Grande and Katy Perry, who are now Final Fantasy characters as well.

Then the War of the Visions, a spinoff of the Brave Exvius, is developed by Gumi. Those are the makers of the Alchemist Goat game, which was really a popular crit-based RPG game in Japan. It was okay in the West, but it’s killed now. Once again, this game is pretty much a reskin of that game. There is an existing concept that they then mix with this Final Fantasy IP. If there is enough overlap with interest for players, then they succeed quite well.

Utilizing source material for success

[00:12:37] Jon: I think that’s a good point where you have these– Brave Frontier is a perfect example, I suppose, of an incredibly successful game, pretty much just in Japan. Western audiences, unless you’re really into JRPGs, it wasn’t mass market there. Final Fantasy is sort of that license that you can take something that you know works at least to some audience, and then Final Fantasy, by putting that license on it, you know you’re going to attract 10 times more people to at least download it and see what on earth it’s like. It’s a very interesting global play on that.

As you also pointed out, I think going back to the experimentation that Square Enix does on mobile, my impression is all those games that you just mentioned Square weren’t developing in them. They were publishing them, but they had well-known Japanese developers taking their style of game and then putting Final Fantasy in there. As you say, Final Fantasy games are often– These characters fighting against evil is a bit of a cliched thing.

Those characters always have interesting or interesting interpersonal relationships. Which I guess is something else, which is a characteristic of the Final Fantasy games that the setting doesn’t really matter there. Even if the storytelling and if that FMV stuff is somewhat a bit of a cliché, it actually works. They seem to elevate the story, the plot, and the characters to a higher level. Which may be, again, another characteristic of that franchise. I guess looking at JRPGs on a very broad scale, the other big comparison in Japan is Dragon Quest, which is equally as big in Japan, but just never has worked in the West for reasons I wouldn’t know.

Comparing Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest

[00:14:27] Teemu: Yes, maybe the Final Fantasy aesthetics work better for the Western audience. You mentioned a lot of these were created by companies other than Square. Square Enix has also had a good hit game developed by themselves for mobile, the Mobius Final Fantasy. Which was created by the big stars of the company who are like, the current brand manager for Final Fantasy was a producer there. The people who worked on that game are now working on the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth games and really filling big boots. They had made big mainline games before.

When you put the best people to work on these, those people that have made those great console games, when you put them to make the mobile game that is meant to be a great experience akin to the console gaming experience, then they can create something great. Mobius Final Fantasy was doing really well. I think part of the reason why they killed it might have been so that they could get those good people to work on the other project, which is the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy.

[00:15:58] Jon: I guess, if there’s a less experimental game that you know is coming with a Square stamp of approval, then you just push that out slightly. I guess the other thing is, we were talking a bit about the FMV, the full motion video where you’re funny that you’re playing with these slightly down red characters and then suddenly do an attack, and beautiful graphics come into play. Obviously, back in the day of Final Fantasy VII, that was the big thing, and that was because you couldn’t run those graphics in real time. Whereas obviously, now you can, but it’s still that nostalgia, even though technically you could do it all in FMV, I suppose. That’s funny.

I guess another characteristic of it is the audio and the music and all that stuff, which, again, is something that those games always have. They never have a bad soundtrack. That’s the absolute sort of– you know you’re going to start with good music.

Music and nostalgia in Final Fantasy

[00:16:50] Teemu: It’s Final Fantasy soundtrack. Those are always great. I think that’s also one thing that makes the games stick in your memory because when there are those impactful moments in the games when you hear the music in those, the music is memorable. It also hits your feelings whenever you’re listening to that soundtrack when you’re at the gym, or running, or commuting or whatever you are doing, working. Then you remember those moments, and it just builds the connection better. The sounds are always definitely important.

[00:17:34] Jon: You’ve been playing a lot of Ever Crisis, the latest one. Do you want to go into a bit of detail on that, obviously based on the Final Fantasy VII Classic World?

Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis

[00:17:45] Teemu: Yes. The Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis, is a really interesting experiment from Square Enix. I think it’s doing okay now, the little bit that we’ve seen its performance. What the game does is it tries to compile all of these different additions to the Final Fantasy VII World into a single mobile game. What they have done is they’ve remade the Final Fantasy VII original story, and they’ve also remade Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, which is the prequel one.

Then there’s also currently in the game the original story from The First Soldier, which was the failed Battle Royale game. There is a storyline about that game which is the mobile-only part of the story. What they can do and what they are planning on doing is also introducing playable content from the movie Advent Children and the novels Traces of Two Pasts or On the Way to a Smile. These stories that are not playable and novels I think most fans of Final Fantasy VII have not even read. Bring those new things in there. Really nice experiment on how to bring a console MIP to mobile.

The gameplay. I think the core gameplay is possible. It’s fun, but soon you move it to auto-battle. It’s nice that it’s easy to auto, but you can still kind of affect it. It shouldn’t get too boring, but I have to see a little bit of fan reactions, like how they take it. I think there is enough customizability through, like, what skills you can put in there that the fans will be okay with it. I think it is a good mix, but it remains to be seen. Story, obviously, the source material is really good. Then when you get to the first Soldier’s story, you kind of feel that it is the mobile game story because it starts lagging. In that, there’s a lot of this discussion that doesn’t lead to anything when compared to the original source materials, the seven, it just– here’s this important moment, here’s this next important moment. It’s constantly moving. You feel what is mobile only.

Monetization in Ever Crisis

[00:20:41] Jon: How about monetization? Have you got a feel of where it sits for that?

[00:20:48] Teemu: There is something really interesting about that. Usually, characters are what you get through gachas, but in this game, you unlock characters automatically. There is no monetization related to unlocking the characters. What you do unlock through gachas is the weapons for them and the skins for the character or armor. You can also use them as skins. That is really interesting. The way the gachas are done, you have the gachas, which give you those weapons, but if you want those armors they are not obtainable through the gacha drops, but there is a separate stamp system. With each pull, you get from 1-12 stamps, and I think for every 12 stamps, you can get the armor or skin for a character.

You have to pull multiple times to get those skins. I think that feature might be something that will turn off many console players who come from those games and are not accustomed to gacha monetization. It can get a little bit frustrating because there is a random element on top of the random elements.

[00:22:31] Jon: Did you say that that’s very in the Japanese mobile gaming psyche? They invented it, and as other territories or other developers are moving away from it in various forms, it doesn’t seem like that’s–. They’re just doubling down on gachas. It’s just a cultural thing, I suppose, isn’t it?

Gacha mechanics in Japanese gaming culture

[00:22:52] Teemu: Yes. On other monetization aspects, battle pass is there. It feels a little bit like an afterthought. Well, you get valuable items out of it, but it’s forgettable. The subscription plans, they have a couple of those, but they last for seven days. I think the price point was something closer to $10 for seven days, and I think that might feel a little bit steep for many players. The value increases your rewards from that quest. If you’re going on a seven-day grind fest, then it could be definitely worth it. I think many players will ignore those.

Interestingly for the weapons that you obtain from the gacha, the game has the highest rarity levels that I’ve ever seen on mobile games. Basically, you obtain 3-star weapons that can be upgraded to 5-star, but then on top of those 5-star, you can over-boost them. You can first over-boost them to 10 stars, then to 15 stars. Then after the 15 stars, this is based on what I saw in achievements. There are 15 stars plus 20 that you need to reach to get a certain achievement. I think you can go up to 35 stars. Before this, the biggest I remember was 10, in mobile games. They’re going really next level, kind of Final Fantasy, Brave Exvius War of the Vision surprised me with their gacha. Usually, you have 5 gacha banners, maybe 10 at most. I remember when I was analyzing one event for them from that game, and they had like 60 different gacha banners, and I was like, “Why do you need this many?” They like to go experimental on these amounts.

Unique weapon rarity levels

[00:25:12] Jon: A Final Fantasy game would be the one– thinking a Final Fantasy VII-based experience would be the one where you think somehow the nostalgia kicks into some of these middle-aged players who remember playing it on the PlayStation. There we go.

[00:25:29] Teemu: At least there’s a death there.

[00:25:32] Jon: Absolutely. I guess something else is passing. It’s interesting when I was just looking through the app store to see the Final Fantasy games and see all this list and stuff. As you say, a lot of the games you’ve mentioned have been in for a couple of years and then come out as many mobile games are. If it’s not economical to run them, but still, the vast majority of the games sitting on there are premium games.

It is interesting that you could almost see any new Final Fantasy free-to-play game being launched. It also highlights the fact that you’ve got maybe 10 of the old remakes of all the games that are– I think they range from up to $20, $25 for the most expensive ones sitting there as premium games. Which I presume our people are still buying because why wouldn’t they?

Premium games and mobile releases

[00:26:23] Teemu: Yes, the nostalgia there. It’s nice. Personally, I prefer purchasing them on consoles because that’s where I’ve played them. That’s where I feel most comfortable playing them. Having them available on mobile is something people can then play on the plane. They don’t need an internet connection for most of them. From one to nine, I think the remakes are there for the PlayStation, up to PlayStation One. They’ve also made Final Fantasy XII games for mobile, but those are cloud versions. Since cloud gaming never really got going that much, at least yet, those were interesting experiments, forgettable.

[00:27:19] Jon: Oh, okay. At the beginning, you mentioned there were some conclusions you thought for developers. What are those, then? Let’s really broaden it out.

Conclusions for developers

[00:27:34] Teemu: Well, I think the biggest thing to learn may be from these Final Fantasy mobile games. When you look at them, the successful ones play to the key strengths of the IP. If you’re making a console game or mobile game. I think many– At least Sony was very interested in this. If you’re trying to make a mobile game, then it just doesn’t resonate with your core audience. If I take, for example, Horizon Zero Dawn, you’re hunting these massive robot dinosaurs and animals with Aloy. If you take that concept into mobile and you go like, “Okay, everyone plays match-3 on mobile, so let’s make match-3 with Aloy and friends.” It just doesn’t resonate with your audience because there’s not much to match.

Now if you make it say base building, a 4X game where you’re fighting wars between these different tribes, still a little bit different than what the core IP is, but there is that appeal that, “Okay, there were those tribes, they were having these conflicts.” There is an interesting setting to this that could resonate to new audiences and resonate also with the older fans. If you want to make it really appeal to the fans of the IP, then you need to have an action RPG where you’re aiming for these different weaknesses of these robot dinosaurs and doing these stealth missions.

It just needs to have the same feeling, and the same storytelling. The more you can bring the source material, the better. Because if you look at Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius War of the Visions, it pretty much is Final Fantasy Tactics, but with free-to-play mechanics, and it resonated really well when it was launched. They knew what they were aiming for because they launched it with the Final Fantasy Tactics collaboration. This really highlights for the fans of that IP that there is a similar game, and you should be excited about this because we have seen these oversimplified games. There are a couple of these endless runners about Crash Bandicoot or Sackboy. Sure, there is a little bit of overlap there, but those were more like platformers instead of endless runners. You need to have full control of the character for it to feel exciting for fans of the IP.

[00:30:50] Jon: I guess on a broad level, that may be why a Final Fantasy Battle Royale doesn’t work because that’s clearly just about the shooting. The characters are there. Obviously, you’re running around with the characters. Whereas, as I remember from the 4X game, okay, 4X isn’t about characters, but it was a very heavy use of the characters popping up on the screen, and you felt they were playing into that in a way and making the most of the fact that Final Fantasy is about the characters. [crosstalk]

[00:31:23] Teemu: Yes. Then throwing is another one. Mobile gamers nowadays, even the more casual ones, are used to more complex mechanics. Oftentimes we might think that, okay, simple mobile game touchscreen, maybe keep it as simple as possible. People are looking for entertainment, and they are used to handling their mobile phones and doing stuff with them. You can be more brave with the mechanics. You don’t have to oversimplify it for them necessarily.

Experimentation and mini-games

[00:32:06] Jon: I guess not everyone has the resources of a Square, but clearly, at that level, Square have been very good at experimenting with their IP and seeing what works. I guess, mobile still is that place where the cost of experimenting, while it’s risen a lot in the last few years, it’s still a good place to experiment with finding audiences and doing new things.

[00:32:33] Teemu: Yes. We’re always talking about the hybridization and mini-games popping up in games. If we think of the most memorable Final Fantasy games, there are those mini-games that you remember. It’s not just purely that you make the same progress in the story and you fight the battles, but there are these moments where you play the game differently. For Final Fantasy VII, you have the bike chase, you have the submarine hunt, you have snowboarding. For some reason, after a very tragic moment, you’re happily snowboarding.

For Final Fantasy X, you have blitz ball that you play, and in Final Fantasy VIII, you play card games, also in 9. Those are the things that really resonate. Maybe they take that as learning for your mobile games as well, that you can have these different moments to balance the game experience because people like different things. It’s fun to have a break from the grind, do something completely different. If you manage to keep the player within the game during those break moments, that helps them to build connection with the game more.

[00:34:01] Jon: Cool. good. Well, I covered a lot of stuff there. Do you feel like you’re emptied of Final Fantasy now? You’ve dumped your expertise into the podcast.

[00:34:11] Teemu: Yes. Maybe.

[00:34:16] Jon: There’s always some more.

[00:34:16] Teemu: Now I’m just itching to play all these Final Fantasy games that I mentioned. I want to go back and maybe boot up my PlayStation 5 and continue a little bit more on Final Fantasy VI.

[00:34:27] Jon: That’s it. Always good to fire up the appetite for more gaming. That’s what we want to do on the podcast. Thank you very much, Teemu. That was great.

[00:34:36] Teemu: Thank you.

[00:34:37] Jon: Thank you to you for listening, watching, to the podcast, however, you are consuming it. In every episode, we are digging into the world of mobile gaming, which is ever-dynamic and ever-changing. We’ve got some good episodes coming up soon, so don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks for watching this one, and see you next time. Goodbye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This podcast is about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host Jon Jordan. And joining me today, we have two experts from GameRefinery. We have Teemu Palomäki, who is the Chief Game Analyst for the Japanese region from Game Refinery. How’s it going, Teemu?

[00:00:26] Teemu Palomäki: It’s going great! It’s great to be here.

[00:00:28] Jon: Good. And, doubling up on the Japanese brain trust, we have Milka Paunonen, who is the senior game analyst for Japan at Game Refinery. How’s it going, Milka?

[00:00:37] Milka Paunonen: It’s going great. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:39] Jon: Good. And the reason we have our Japanese Brain Trust on the podcast today is we are talking about a Japanese app. And a very particular Japanese app, Pokémon Sleep. So Pokémon Sleep, I guess, is now, I would say, following in the trend or lineage of a gamified health app from Pokémon.

So, we had Pokémon Smile, which is an interesting teeth-cleaning app for children that came out last year, and now we have Pokémon Sleep, which, as the name suggests, is all about gamified sleep and wellness in that area. So, Teemu, do you want to kick us off with, like, an overview, and then obviously we’ll drill down into very specifics of what’s going on there, but, for people who haven’t used it, including me, give me the rundown of Pokémon Sleep, what are we doing here?

Understanding Pokémon Sleep Gameplay

[00:01:24] Teemu: Yeah, so Pokémon Sleep, it was released, on July 17th, so relatively recently. It’s a game about, well, sleeping. You’re collecting Pokémon, or you’re observing how they sleep. So there are different sleeping habits in the Pokemon world. These Pokémon can have up to four sleeping styles. Like for example, Psyduck, the yellow duck, always has headaches but can sleep with a headache or have a tantrum or yawn in their sleep, or they can sleep on top of this big Snorelax Pokémon.

In the app, that is kind of the centre of your Pokémon Sleep observation area. So there is the big Snorelax there that you level up by sleeping. In the app, you level it up in one-week periods and then move to another island. Alternatively, you can stay on the same island but your progress with Snorelax resets. But the Pokémon you collect, you can update and upgrade by observing their sleep patterns, those you can keep and train and gain long-term progress, and, you know, based on your own sleeping style, you will have progress.

More generally, the app tracks how you sleep. The sounds you make when you’re sleeping, you can even listen to how you sound in your sleep when you wake up if you’re brave. I still haven’t been able to take that step yet. But there are different levels of sleep, whether it’s shallow or deep. In the game, there’s dozing, snoozing, and slumbering. Depending on which of these types is dominant for your night of sleep, the Pokémon related to that group can be observed and then caught.

Depending on how well and how much you sleep, you can catch them. I think for adults, if you sleep eight and a half hours, you can get the full rewards. But if you’re like me and have a toddler, you might sleep something like four and a half hours, and then you get lesser rewards. That’s basically how the base game runs.

[00:03:57] Jon: I guess at a very superficial level, the nice thing about it, and maybe one of the triggers they wanted to do, is it does play into the characteristics of some of these Pokémon. So, we could argue, or not, that it’s a little bit crowbarred in perhaps. Maybe Pokémon doesn’t immediately make you think about doing a sleep app.

But there are elements in there that, if you’re a big Pokémon fan, play into the fact that some of these have different characteristics, and some of them are sleeping all the time. So there is a nice holistic tie-in there to some degree.

[00:04:30] Teemu: Yeah. Completely.

[00:04:32] Jon: Milka, in terms of, obviously, it’s a playful app, a gamified app. It’s maybe more towards children just with the Pokémon franchise. But compared to the serious industry around analysing sleep and various things you can do there, various different apps and hardware like Fitbit, Whoop, or other healthcare apps, where does Pokémon Sleep compare to those things, or are we making the wrong comparison there?

Comparing Pokémon Sleep to other sleep-tracking apps

[00:05:09] Milka: Yes, actually, I use Fitbit quite a lot, regularly. I compared a bit of data from Fitbit to the Pokémon Sleep data. I was actually quite surprised; initially, I was a little bit sceptical about the Pokémon Sleep app. Yeah, it is a game essentially, so can it really be good for this kind of sleep tracking? I was quite amazed at how similar the data was to my Fitbit app data. So with all of these devices, they’re not exactly 100% accurate. You can’t really get accurate data on how long you are in the deep sleep stage or anything like that, for example.

So, in that sense, it doesn’t really matter if it’s not exactly the same. But for collecting data in a casual way, to get a general idea of your sleeping habits, I think Pokémon Sleep is definitely good enough. And it’s free, so it can be an alternative for those on a budget compared to these more precise devices. The looks of it, it’s a cute app with cute visuals. I don’t know if it has a lineage, as some people might think. It is quite catered to casual users and kids with visuals. But I don’t see any problem with the data.

In some ways, it’s probably even better. For example, I know for a fact that I woke up two times last night, and my Fitbit device didn’t track those times, but Pokémon Sleep could actually detect those moments when I was awake at night. So maybe it was because my heart rate didn’t fluctuate that much that Fitbit didn’t recognise it, but the app could. Even the Pokémon Sleep could give me more data about my breathing and stuff, like listening to me and tracking it during my sleep.

I don’t see any problem with it. So yeah, that’s my take.

[00:07:57] Jon: In terms of Fitbit, it is a specific hardware device you’re wearing, and the Pokémon-Pokémon Sleep is basically, you’re just putting your phone near your bed, isn’t it? Is that how it works?

[00:08:08] Milka: Yeah, yeah. And it is a different mechanic entirely. But in that sense, I must say for Fitbit, it is not the core function of the device. So although it is a fitness device first and foremost, it’s just an extra feature, you know, the sleeping tracking. But anyway, I found it surprisingly like Pokémon Sleep data; it was surprisingly good too.

[00:08:36] Jon: Good-good. And the interesting thing, just reading some of the marketing around it, is that it has this idea. You have your phone by your bed, which obviously lots of people say you shouldn’t have your phone right by your bed.

But the point is, when you wake up in the morning, you can immediately see what’s going on in the Pokémon world. So, it is quite an interesting retention mechanic they’ve got going on there. The first thing you do in the morning is check out your Pokémon. But is that the whole point of it?

Pokémon brand strategy and wellness focus

[00:09:03] Teemu: Yeah-yeah, it is. And it can also be like, kind of building the strength of the brand. I must say this is kind of like a style of gameplay that works only with Pokémon like similar to how we have Pokémon GO. It only succeeds in the West, at least, and it’s only with the Pokémon brand. Anything else Niantic has tried has kind of failed in Japan.

They have, I think, Dragon Quest Walk from Square and exist really well. That’s fighting-based, and it’ll be interesting to see how Monster Hunter now does when it launches later this year, which is also kind of fighting-based. Then you have the girl collector, it’s sort of like transformers, where you go around Japan’s train stations and capture these girls that have designs influenced by different trains. That’s also popular in Japan. But other than that, these location-based games are not a thing. But with Pokémon Sleep, the sleeping thing, I suppose you could make a side mode in a game. If you want additional rewards for a game, then you can track your sleep. But other than that, I think this is a very Pokémon thing to do.

But it’s frankly, it’s really just promoting the brand. Like, it’s the last thing you do before you go to sleep and the first thing in the morning, so your life is all-around Pokémon. And then you go about your day, and you play Pokemon. When you go brush your teeth with Pokémon Smile, then, you know, you walk to your work with Pokémon Go. It’s all Pokémon, Pokémon, Pokémon. So, I think it’s interesting to see what is the next wellness thing that Pokémon brings out.

[00:11:01] Jon: I mean, do you…

[00:11:03] Milka: Yeah.

[00:11:04] Jon: You go, Milka.

[00:11:06] Milka: Oh, yeah, I was just going to say that. It’s possible that Pokémon really wants to expand the brand to really be a part of people’s daily lives. Like, all parts of it, outside of gaming, and it’s a great way to introduce these, well, very simple but still probably addictive, lifestyle habit apps.

So, I was actually thinking, this is probably the perfect time for them to release apps like Pokémon Smile, and even Pokémon Sleep because Pokémon is becoming multigenerational. So, the brand is expanding to new demographics. The generation that was there for the original games is actually now having kids of their own, and, like, it’s a great way of introducing the characters through these apps, like, Pokémon Smile and, like, these games. And, well, I was also thinking, like, is it good to make it an app on your phones because it can be used as a reward mechanic for you? Like, if you brush your teeth, you get rewards out of these games. Is it good to make phones your method of reward? I don’t know, but yeah, it’s an interesting thing to think about, at least.

[00:12:28] Jon: I mean, as a parent, I can see the Smile one being a more useful lever because getting them to brush their teeth is just really difficult. You’re either doing it yourself, or they become of an age where you have to trust them. But you never quite trust them, so– And that seems like, you know, quite a nice little app that you could have, and you’re using it twice a day, and that’s what builds a routine around that.

The Sleep one, you know, it seems harder for me to work out, you know, is this a fairly lightweight thing that is, you know, they’re doing it as a very much an experiment, or is this actually quite a clever approach, as I say, to get people to use it. So the last thing you do at night is Pokémon, and the first thing you do in the morning is Pokémon. The fact that your sleep doesn’t really matter. There’s a quite subtle but strong commercial edge to it.

I mean, should we? Sorry, how do you think we should be thinking about this? Is this a serious Pokémon game that has not a lot of depth but has been clearly thought out and treated seriously, or do they expect people to be doing this every day, and being retained, so they can add a monetisation strategy in there? Or is this a bit more of a Smile-type app? You know, it’s an interesting thing that it doesn’t really matter.

Benefits and concerns of Pokémon Sleep

[00:14:00] Teemu: Well, I think this one is more serious. You know, Pokémon Smile it’s definitely aimed at kids. It doesn’t have any ads or monetisation mechanics. It’s just a way for parents to, well, get their kids to brush their teeth. You can think of it from a parent’s perspective, “This is to help my children to brush their teeth and become healthier,” in that sense for Pokémon. It’s like, “Okay, let’s make sure that Pokémon is present in their lives, and it becomes a meaningful part of their life, and then later in their years, we can sell them stuff.”

But, like, this is different. I don’t know if it comes from Pokémon Go’s success. So they have this and are thinking, “Okay, we improved people’s commuting habits and walking, so people became healthier. What is the next step we can do?” And sleeping is something that is often overlooked. If you think about what gamers are bad at, I think sleeping is very high on that list. Eating would be the other one, but eating, there are so many things to consider, like eating disorders and allergies and stuff that you need to be really careful with, and it’s harder to track. So I think sleeping is something that is easier to track, and that’s why they’ve gone for it.

And I think Pokémon is building this wellness brand and trying to be serious about it. And they have used similar monetisation mechanics in Pokémon Sleep that they do in Pokémon Go. For example, you expand your inventories, and you buy these consumable boosts with which you can catch these Pokémon and kind of upgrade them. So, it’s very similar to Pokémon Go in that sense. So I would say it’s a very serious app, unlike Smile.

[00:15:53] Jon: And it’s a good point that you do make there about Niantic, the US company behind Pokémon Go. I think it’s often overlooked how serious that company is about getting people to move. So the fact that they were so successful with Pokémon Go, I mean, that they’ve had various apps before that. The guy who founded the company actually invented Google Earth, or the company he invented became Google Earth. And he’s very active in changing people’s habits. He sees it as a mission to get people moving. That’s very much his thing.

The reason they were doing location-based games is he really wanted to get people out there and exploring. So, I think the fact that Pokemon Sleep is a game, there is a strong social mission that they do have behind some of these things. I don’t know so much about the sleep thing. I mean, there have been some issues with people with sleep becoming a performance mechanic. Do you think it’s just hype, or is it just headline-grabbing stories? I did see there were issues around the gamified process. When you gamify something, you put incentives on things, but sometimes they can overstep the mark, so that cannot be a good thing for a lot of people.

[00:17:23] Teemu: Oh, yeah. I think that’s definitely something to consider. If you’re building the habit that you are constantly kind of gaming, everything is a performance. You can’t actually enjoy anything. Especially if how well you sleep is tied to the rewards you get in the game, that can make sleeping more stressful. Yeah-

[00:17:46] Jon: And then, I mean, I’ve heard stories that people were taking sleeping pills, which just seems to be insane.  But maybe it’s just people who just do the silly thing and that it’s not really the fault of the app, but you know, there is that consideration.

[00:17:59] Teemu: Yeah, yeah. People do silly things, which is one of the risks of the game. Another risk, you know, is people also use these slightly damaged charging cables. Now, combine that with an older phone that you leave on your mattress next to you at night. Personally, I’m just waiting for the first headline that someone’s house caught on fire because of Pokémon Sleep. So I think that is a very real risk.

The radiation part is another risk. Phones emit a small amount of radiation. In modest use, it’s not a big problem, as far as I’m aware. But, like, in the long run, if you’re using your phone throughout the day and then during the night you leave it on next to you, that can cause trouble in the long run, like, decades later or something, you start seeing the impact. But yeah.

[00:19:12] Jon: I mean, it is interesting, isn’t it? Clearly, I think what they’re trying to do is something that is positive for people. As you say, most people don’t sleep enough. I mean, that’s the basic crux of the matter. So maybe we shouldn’t be complaining about all these edge cases. And I mean, Milka, have you, obviously, you’re someone who’s got a Fitbit, so you’re interested in that stuff anyway. Have you found Pokémon Sleep, has that made you think more about sleep, at least in a very passive case, that you think, “Oh, instead of playing another hour of whatever, some game, I’ll go to bed earlier and improve my Pokémon Sleep score”?

Because I guess that’s what they want, is they want that subtle nudge. Over time, it’s different from every day you’ll go to bed at eight o’clock to maximise your score because no one’s going to do that. But it’s just subtle. I mean, do you think that’s worked?

[00:20:00] Milka: Yeah. I actually felt that it did feel rewarding to me to actually wake up in the morning and see, “Oh, wow, I got this Pokémon.” And it actually felt quite rewarding, more so than just, you know, going to see your score in the app, and then it’s that’s it. So I feel like there’s definitely– It’s definitely motivating in that sense.

I was also thinking about the concerns about the game. Like when you have the phone next to you when you’re going to sleep, it may be a distraction in itself. And again, I’m going back to this, like, if there are kids who use it, can they control the urge to just take the phone and start doom scrolling or whatever. So that was something that I was thinking about, but for me, at least, it wasn’t a problem.

But some people may find it a little bit difficult to sleep with their phone next to them, and that’s why I’m quite disappointed that I heard that the Pokémon, the Pokémon GO Plus Plus device isn’t quite as good at tracking sleep, so I was hoping that it would be, so you wouldn’t have to take your phone with you to the bed but, –

Pokémon GO Plus device and sleep tracking

[00:21:29] Jon: Teemu, this is your-your opportunity to shine. Tell us about this little device and whether it works or not.

[00:21:38] Teemu: Yeah. I actually bought one for myself just because I wanted to kind of improve my sleep – Well, I say that I also track Pokémon GO at work as well, and I wanted to try Pokémon Sleep.

[00:21:50] Jon: Can you explain a little bit more because it’s not just for Pokémon Sleep, is it, that’s an ancillary, so what is that device? Why would you use it in general?

[00:21:59] Teemu: Yeah, so the Pokémon GO Plus Plus device is a device that can track your movement with Pokémon GO. So, while you’re playing Pokémon GO keeping the game open, the device is connected to it with Bluetooth, and then every time there is a Pokémon close by, the device starts vibrating and flashing colours. And if you press the button at the centre, then the game tries to catch a Pokémon, you have one chance with this device to catch them. So a lot of the Pokémon are going to run away, but you catch more than you would if you were just walking by and trying to get them on your phone.

[00:22:50] Jon: So effectively, you don’t need to use your phone. You have to have your phone in your pocket, and this thing buzzes; you press the button like automation.

[00:22:57] Teemu: Yeah, and the plus side is that it saves the battery. And it’s really nice in that sense, and it can be used to track your sleep with Pokémon Sleep. For me, the success rate was really low. I’ve tried it like, I think, four nights, and I’ve managed to track sleep with just one of them. So, we’re getting closer to the success rates of getting a five-star character in a gacha mobile game, which is really poor from the player’s perspective.

But it is a nice concept. I wish there was a small screen that would tell you what is actually happening when you sleep. Like, okay, the tracking started now, and this is what we’re tracking. You started tracking successfully, and then when you close it, then okay, the tracking ended successfully so that you would have some feedback instead of just these vibrations and stuff. But this device actually, well, people were incentivised to buy it so that you would get these special tasks in Pokémon GO. And here is the interesting part about Pokémon GO and Pokémon Sleep. Those apps actually communicate with each other. So, depending on how well you sleep, when you can connect a device again to Pokémon GO, you can get additional rewards there.

And then, depending on how many steps you’ve walked or Pokémon catch or sleep, you can get additional rewards for this special Pikachu that you obtain through this device in Pokémon Sleep. So, the apps are kind of communicating and building that lifestyle, the  Pokémon lifestyle, together.

[00:24:54] Jon: I mean, presumably, that device works in a different way, trying to track your sleep. It’s obviously a more movement-based thing, I would think. Would it be?

[00:25:03] Teemu: It is for Pokémon GO. It actually doesn’t track movement. For Pokémon GO, it’s just the app kind of sending the location data and stuff. For Pokémon Sleep, it has a microphone that tracks the sleep. So, yeah. So, it’s a listening device.

[00:25:27] Jon: Yeah, I mean, I guess the other thing is that, as people have had with Alexa’s and all those devices, having more microphones in the bedroom, again, is generally seen as not a positive thing. I’m sure Nintendo is more careful than most when it comes to the privacy of those things. I’m sure it’s not recording those things, but equally interesting that, to some degree, any improvement, any time a company wants to improve one part of your life, it butts up against other things that they shouldn’t, like the privacy of our bedrooms or having more screens in our bedrooms. There’s always this tension there.

Okay. So do you think this can be more than a gimmick? You know, I mean, obviously, you two are probably not the target audience, although you may be closer to the target audience than we think, but, you know, is this something that you think you would be regularly using or more generally, other people would be regularly used as part of their lifestyle tracking?

Market reception and future potential

[00:26:37] Teemu: Yeah, I think it could become an important part of life for many. For me personally, I have a toddler who likes to play with the Pokémon GO Plus device. It has flashy lights, so if she wakes up during the night and comes to pick it up because it’s a fun toy, then nothing is tracked. And, so, for me, it’s kind of tedious yet, but I can see it becoming a big part of someone’s life. I found it really interesting. I was hoping it could improve my sleeping. I know I sleep way too little for what I need, but I don’t know. It has some problems, but it seems to be resonating well.

If we look at my notes, in the US, it’s been high on the downloads, in the top 30 or so, quite recently as it also rose to the top 200 in rankings. Before that, it was outside of it. So, in the US, it’s small of a thing, but if we look at the Japanese market, ever since it was launched, it has been number one in downloads.

[00:28:10] Jon: Really? Wow.

[00:28:10] Teemu: Yeah. So, it is really downloaded there. And in the rankings, at first, it was around the top 30, then it dropped down to the 50s or so for a while, and last time I checked, it was somewhere around 15. So, it’s monetising really well, and people are buying stuff. They’re buying these items with which to catch Pokémon or with which to evolve or train those Pokémon. And, you know, they have a subscription model, they have a sleep pass, which, well, the first two weeks are free, but after that, you get a lot of these perks.

So if you form a habit of this game, I think that it can increase the experience. You can write, for example, notes about your sleep, so you can make personal notes that, “On this night, I did this, which caused me to sleep less,” or “This night was really hot, and that’s why I didn’t sleep well.” If you want to track more, you get more ways to track. And what I found interesting; they also have additional lavish rewards every three months. So, they’re incentivising keeping the subscription on because you get improved rewards every three months, which is something I haven’t really seen that much in mobile games. So, like giving additional rewards for keeping the subscription on. So, I don’t know.

[00:29:50] Milka: Yeah, I also thought that, in terms of, like, habit tracking, lifestyle and fitness apps, there are several titles that have gamified elements. But, in the sleeping tracking market, there are only so many gamified sleeping apps. So, for those people who need that kind of incentive to track their sleep and use these apps, there have been literally no options. So, now there’s an option, and it’s Pokémon Sleep. So, for those people who need that kind of gaming feeling in their lifestyle apps, it’s definitely a good option. So I feel like it has a market there.

[00:30:40] Jon: Yeah, no, it’s just like Teemu mentioned. Maybe there’s a geographical uptake, which is just some cultures will be more accepting of it because maybe they really like Pokémon more, or just the way they view day-to-day existence. It may just chime better. Whereas maybe in Western Europe and North America, we’re more nervous about the use of phones and devices, no matter whether they’re good or bad.

So, it may be that split, which will be interesting to see. I mean, I just kind of think, what will be interesting, I suppose, is if it actually becomes a strong definer of encouraging people to sleep more. But, basically, it will make people aware of that for the first time, and maybe only use it some of the time, but people can start thinking, ‘oh, I can get this app for free; let’s try it’. And when they try it for the first time, they use a sleep app, and they realise how badly they sleep. Particularly if they have children, they can look at the data and think oh ‘that’s shocking’. I mean, I’m quite into this stuff. I have lots of health trackers and stuff.

And when you really get stuck getting into it, you know, you realise that you do build these gamified loops to yourself. So, on the health side of things, those apps tend not to be gamified, but you can see over time, they’ll probably become more gamified. So, Pokémon Sleep is actually part of a much wider trend, I think. We’ll probably see people around all wellness and stuff.

Moving on, does Pokémon as a brand have the ability to do more things? I mean, I don’t know what more things you would do. You could imagine a food thing, couldn’t you? You know, you could. People take all these Instagrammable photos of their food all the time. You could imagine a Pokémon-themed thing around that, could you not?

[00:33:35] Milka: Yep.

Future possibilities for the Pokémon brand

[00:32:36] Teemu: Yes, it could be. That was the first thing that came to my mind. Then when I was thinking more, another one that came to mind, you know, from a fitness perspective, is to somehow incorporate Pokemon doing your exercises or stretching or whatever. They can have you on screen alongside a Pokemon to show you what to do. But I don’t know if that’s something they will have. And it might to even be an app, it could be a game. You know, Nintendo Switch has the Ring Fit Adventure with the kind of controls where you have a stretching circle thing. Something like that could definitely be Pokemon-themed. And depending on what moves you do, you can catch Pokémon if you do daily stretches/exercises. And there would be over a thousand Pokémon to catch now, so you could make a really big exercise game.

[00:33:42] Jon: Mm-hmm, yeah. And, as we discussed, Niantic is really interested in the positive being fit as well. I don’t know how successful the Switch game was, but it was a long time ago now. But yeah, there are lots of things we can potentially look forward to.

Lovely. Well, thank you, Teemu and thank you, Milka, for your expertise. In the next podcast, I expect you will both be looking much younger as you have all these enormous amounts of sleep. We’ll wait and see.

Thanks for watching and listening to the podcast. However, you are consuming it.  In every episode, we are looking at what’s going on in the space of mobile games. And as we’ve covered so many different things recently. We’re really moving around now, covering specific apps and whole genres and cultures and movements. So please subscribe and come back next time to find out what’s going on with the Mobile Games Playbook. See you then. Goodbye.

[00:34:52] Milka: Bye-bye.

[00:34:53] Teemu: Bye.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This podcast is about what makes a great mobile game, what is, and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan. And joining me today, we have two special guests. We have Paula Neves, a Senior Product Manager at Zynga. How’s it going, Paula?

[00:00:22] Paula Neves: Good, good. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:24] Jon: Absolutely. And also, we have Karen Chen, who is an Account Executive at Liftoff. How’s it going, Karen?

[00:00:31] Karen Chen: Doing well, thanks, Jon.

[00:00:32] Jon: Good, good. So, in today’s episode, maybe a little bit different to some of the ones we’ve done recently, we’re going to talk generally about women in games. Obviously, sort of a massive subject, and we can only sort of cover bits of it, maybe anecdotal bits of it.

But, I think it may be good to start off with you, Paula, and I think it’s interesting, one of the sort of issues we have, I think, in the games industry, is how women get into sort of the development, you know, industry side of it, so it might be a good starting point if you can talk us through sort of how-how you got into games.

Discussing women’s role in the games industry

[00:01:01] Paula: Yeah, of course, so I’ve always really loved gaming. Like, since I can even remember, I was playing Enduro and Keystone Kapers, you know, like giving away my age, but on the Atari. So, it has always been something in the back of my mind, but I’m originally from Brazil, and the industry there could be bigger and stronger.

I mean, it is strong in terms of, like, we have really talented people, but it’s not very big. There’s not a lot of investment. So, it was something that slowly I just pushed away from my mind, but my first experience was in this really small studio from Rio De Janeiro called Nano Games. And the way I sort of got into it, it’s because I had a friend that worked there, and we were like ten people, you know?

[00:01:54] Jon: Yeah.

[00:01:55] Paula: And they needed someone to help with everything like product development and on the marketing side of things, you know, those startup type of tasks, and I just went for it, you know. Because I was like, “Okay, this is my chance to start here and work in an industry I love.” So, yeah.

[00:02:12] Jon: And was it something that you thought was a bit weird for games to be a job? Or was that something that you just thought, “Well, of course, gaming’s a big industry? People get jobs in them all the time. Why shouldn’t I get a job there?”

[00:02:24] Paula: No, I didn’t think it was weird at all. I just think it was incredibly unlikely that anyone would land a gaming job in Brazil. And then, when I landed one, I was joyous. I just felt lucky. And then from then on, I think I worked in/for (at the time) most of the big companies in Brazil or Rio that were making and producing games, you know? And then, so I’d say I got pretty lucky. And, of course, I’ve now been in Montreal for four years. I’ve gone to a lot of events, and I know how big the industry is, but that first experience with my friend, that was the, I guess, the start of my workings in the industry.

[00:03:05] Jon: Yeah, cool. I bet it was very, well, quite different from moving from Rio to Montreal. But that’s another story for another time.

[00:03:13] Paula: Yes, that’s definitely, another podcast or webinar.

[00:03:16] Jon: Absolutely. Cool. And Karen, how was it for you [Breaking into the industry]?

[00:03:20] Karen: Yeah, I have a different experience from Paula, but honestly, on my side, advertising had never really seemed like an option before. You know, when you kind of grow up, you’re exposed to ads, and the mobile landscape seems a bit daunting. And so, again, I just kind of came into the industry not knowing much. You know, I completed a few college marketing classes that were telling me like, “Hey, this is what mobile looks like,” right?

So I understood the basic acronyms that I’m more familiar with now, but once I entered the industry, I then realized how big it was. And with advertising, gaming’s obviously a huge portion of that. So from there, I gained a lot of experience working with gaming advertisers across the board, from a wide range of companies, you know, from casual to mid-core type gaming apps. And yeah, I would say most of my experience has been exposure on the job, really.

[00:04:20] Jon: Cool. And this is for either of you to answer this one, have you found, and it may be easy for me to say not being a woman, but my impression of having been in the industry for a while is, as the industry’s got bigger and have more sort of jobs in the industry that aren’t specifically about you know, coding and game development, that in some ways has made it, I think, easier for women to get into the games sort of sector as a whole?

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easier. So how have you found it? Well, actually, over to Paula, as you’ve certainly been in the industry longer. Have you found that there has been a sort of appreciation in the companies you’ve worked at that it’s good to encourage more women to be in the industry, or, you know, I guess I would probably say, tell me if I’m wrong, things are probably moving in the right direction? Maybe they’re not moving fast enough. What’s your view on the trajectory in that respect?

Representation and gender in the industry

[00:05:12] Paula: Yeah, that was a good summary. As we’ve definitely seen, there’s been an improvement, but we are certainly not there yet.

So you do see, if you look at, from a general prism of gender within one company, you will tend to see more and more women representing and working in gaming companies, in general. But when you look at leadership, though, it’s still very, very different and difficult. If you look, women are minimally represented (at the leadership level).  And the problem is people talk a lot about companies investing in this (recruiting women in roles). And you see that, especially, like the bigger companies, they put a lot of effort into ensuring equality in the workplace and that women are represented properly, well, most of them. But the problem lies, at least from my point of view, is that it’s a lot like before, it’s only just changed at entry level.

For example, when I was at Gazeus Games, I was a director there, so I had a lot of access to the deciding making process. Interestingly, I was the only female director out of eight and we had a lot of push for hiring the LGBT community and putting them into jobs, and we pushed for women, for diversity in general. But we just wouldn’t get the CVs, we wouldn’t get the women through the door. And that’s because, well, I think, there are several reasons behind it. But once they don’t see themselves represented further up and throughout the industry, they think they need help to work in the gaming industry.

Also, because you go, at least in my time, if you went to university with the hope of getting a job in the industry or for anything that was like computer science, you would be the only girl in the course. And so then it’s something only some survive, right?

[00:06:52] Jon: Yeah.

[00:06:52] Paula: Then, you know, I’m going to give a long answer here, but the final thing I wanted to say is that there was this study created that showed that before the ’80s, a lot of women went into, like computer science roles. We have so many good examples of women programmers way back. Even Ada Lovelace, the first programmer ever, was a woman. And also Carol Shaw, you know, there are so many examples.

But then, things changed. In the ’80s, the personal computer started being a thing. It started being marketed as something for men, and following that, you just see the curve going down for women making it onto the type of courses and then even fewer women going to uni for these subjects. Then even fewer make it out of the class because it’s so tough on them. Especially when you’re the only girl in the class, so I’d say the funnel (of getting women into the video games industry) starts really early. That’s what I wanted to say, but in terms of companies putting in an effort, it’s getting better- it’s getting much better.

Diversity in roles and leadership

[00:07:55] Jon: I don’t want to be seen as sort of provocative, but I mean, do you think it that there are more women programmers specifically? I mean, do you think there are, you know, sort of specific roles that women should be in? Or is there a general rule? Let’s say we got to a scenario where it was 50% women and 50% men. You know, would it matter where they were working or the roles they were in?

Or do you think they should push women into different jobs, let’s say programmers specifically, do you think that would change the way that the sort of companies worked? Would it change the way games were made? What do you think?

[00:08:33] Paula: Yeah, I think we need representation across the board in every single position. Because if you look, it’s very skewed, right? You have a lot of women artists, and you have a lot of women in marketing but not in game development, right? And it’s important because I’ve been in discussions with developers where they were coding a character, and they were talking about stance and things like that. And, like, they weren’t sure. So, it’s always good to have representation. I don’t just mean only gender but diversity in general for a wide variety of people across all different types of roles, for sure.

[00:09:06] Jon: Great. So Karen, how do you see that? I mean, I guess, Liftoff is probably different because you’re an ad company, so you still have coders in there, I suppose, don’t you? So how do you find the sort of gender split between roles in the company?

[00:09:25] Karen: Yeah, I was just about to comment on the point that you were talking about, Paula. I think it’s important to have a more equitable gender across all different roles. Not just in the marketing and creative space, which I feel generally we will and are seeing more female positions in those roles, right? Personally, when I’m working with other UA managers across the board, I would say the split is pretty even. I’m seeing many women and males, like counterparts in that area. But, to the point of like game design.

From the conception of the game all the way to the characters, it’s important for us to have diversity and inclusion to ensure that we’re capturing a greater scope. When I think about myself playing certain games, some are more enticing than others, potentially, for these instances, right? These games could potentially appeal to someone not like me, and it would be nice to see us moving into that more inclusive culture.

[00:10:45] Paula: Yeah. Sorry, I just wanted to just interject because we didn’t touch on pay equity. I also think that that is improving, especially in the gaming and tech industries, you know, but like other industries, there’s still so much room for it to be more equal. Let’s say the Women’s World Cup is happening, right? And I love football. Side note, I’m trying to watch it, but because it’s in Australia (time zone), it’s tough. But anyway, there’s this football player, Abby Wambach, who was one of the biggest icons of the US team in the 2000s. And she won an award when she was retiring. That was huge, right? And on the same day, on the same stage were Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning. They all got the same award, right?

And while those two guys were thinking about their retirements and what they would do with the millions and millions to invest, Abby was thinking about how she would pay the mortgage that month, right? And that’s a story that I’ve heard from an interview that she conducted, right? So it’s still just bizarre. She’s as big as they are, she got the same award, but that’s the difference, you know? But yeah, I mean, sorry for that interruption.

[00:12:03] Jon: No, it’s interesting because it pulls apart two areas. There’s the pay side of it, as you point out, which is, again, not a sole problem, but a well-understood problem. And there are, well, very few companies in general, but even in the games industry that would have pay disparity, you know, for the same role.

I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but that would be sort of baked in now those game companies wouldn’t be doing that. Whereas I guess the other problem you’re pointing out, the more sort of pernicious thing, there are more people, in the case of the sports players, who have had 20/30 years at the height of their career, and that’s where the amounts of money been.

Whereas other people have had 20, 30 years as high of that career. But obviously, there needs to be pay equality across that period of time. So you sort of have this lagging indicator, I suppose, in terms of that particular sort of example, which is quite hard to deal with because it’s not a company saying, “We’ve want this producer and this producer, one’s a man, one’s a woman, and we’re gonna pay them the same.” But, I think those sorts of things are much harder to identify and deal with. because I guess they’re, what I’m trying to say is, they’re more cultural rather as a society than just individual company culture, and that, obviously, culture as a whole is a complicated thing.

[00:13:23] Paula: Yeah. Correct.

[00:13:24] Jon: So, I was going to talk a little about, more specifically, mobile games. So I think, generally in the video game industry, there are some games that have a skew of very male, and some games, they skew female, but mobile is sort of interesting as  I think, it is a sector that generally is, probably, more female-skewed, if anything. And I guess that would be one area where, I mean Karen is, you’re just sort of more in that space, that you could comment on. So, do you think that given the number of women playing and spending money on games, has it been surprising that there aren’t more women on the mobile game design side, in particular, that haven’t come through more?

Obviously, there are companies that do focus on female gaming and do have female designers. Still, it’s a bit surprising that it hasn’t over-indexed the other way, given how women are such an important audience for mobile games, in particular.

Gender in game design

[00:14:29] Karen: Yeah, I definitely think so given a lot of like the statistics that I was looking into about, you know, almost half, if not half of the women are on these mobile games, I do still feel like there’s a bit of a genre that skews more female. You know, or as I think about it, a Match 3 or some type of like simulation type game is skewed towards women. Or a game that appeals to adventure seems to be more female-driven, and yeah, I do think it is a bit surprising that the industry, as a whole, from the game developers, all the way trickling down, hasn’t been more skewed towards them.

[00:15:19] Jon: They say there have been studios that have tried to focus on women’s games, but actually, it seems to be something that’s quite difficult to make a specifically genre-specific game. I’ve just noticed sometimes that people will often sort of rate. Or not often, but some companies raise money, say we’re going to make games to focus on the female audience particularly, and that seems to be quite a difficult thing to do.

Is that because focusing on gender is actually not a great way to make a good game? Paula, have you got any thoughts on that? I mean, are good games, just good games, and as a result, we shouldn’t maybe worry too much about who we’re targeting in terms of gender or demographics.

Inclusive game development

[00:16:01] Paula: And yeah, I mean, of course, when it comes to UA, you have to know who your audience is and when you’re making games as well, you have to see if the product you’re building has product-market fit, so those things are still important. They can’t be ignored. But I hate, personally, the whole concept of games for women and games for men and for women I just hate that. Like, I’ve played shooters my whole life and all of these things. I go back to the football example, and you said it’s cultural. You’re right, it’s cultural. The problem lies therein, where people perceive that certain things are for boys, and certain things are for girls, when they’re not, right? And you know, that’s where the problem lies, really. And it’s really tough to change. But I grew up hearing all the time, especially growing up in Brazil and where it’s pretty chauvinistic and growing up I’d just hear all the time that the stuff I liked, I wasn’t supposed to like.

And when I was thinking of having a family, I was terrified of having a girl in Brazil. I was terrified. I didn’t want it to be a girl. I wanted it to be a boy. And then I moved to Canada because I didn’t want a girl to go through the stuff I went through it, and now that I’m in Canada, I got pregnant. I had my kid, she’s two and a half years old. It’s a girl, and it’s the best thing you know that it’s a girl, and she’s in Canada, and she gets to get representation all the time, you know? A little example of that cultural thing is when I was taking her to daycare, and she was on the carrier, and there was a renovation going on in the house, like outside. It was five women with hard hats, boots, everything, just women doing the renovation. And when we passed by, she was super smiley. She smiled and waved, and they all smiled and waved. So just right there, of course, she’s two and a half, but she saw a bunch of women doing construction work, you know, and that makes a difference. Construction work is supposed to be for men. So I think I still need to answer your question, but I hope that questions like that aren’t asked for women in the future. And it’s not against you, of course, but I hope that we-we live in a world one day that is not a, you know, a thing, you know what I mean?

[00:18:29] Jon: Again, it goes back to the sort of cultural thing, isn’t it? It’s not these types of things where you need laws for certain things, but there are the harder things to change, which are cultural and just general assumptions, I guess.

[00:18:43] Paula: Yeah, it can be ingrained, you know, like prejudices and so on.

[00:18:46] Jon: I mean, do you think one of your earlier questions, you were talking about sort of leadership, roles, which, you know again, that’s probably sort of a cultural thing to a degree, but it’s harder to do. You know, getting into leadership roles is partly due to the individual.

There may be ways in which you can make it easier for certain types of people. I mean, do you think that’s the main area we need to consider going, in terms of the games companies, you know, as a whole? Is that a key thing, given that there are many people, women joining the industry in various roles? You know, is it more about that, getting women into those sorts of leadership things now?

[00:19:31] Paula: We’ve seen great improvement in the leadership type of things. Looking at it from a general perspective. Of course, we need to continue improving, but it would be interesting if, yes, companies started focusing more on the leadership aspect. I’ve seen that some are much better than others. It makes a lot of difference. In a big company, like Zynga, for instance, in our game, the VP of product is a woman. And it makes a difference because women have a voice in leadership decisions. So it’s important to have people with voices that are mostly overlooked.

So, for me, It would be a big deal if we got to a point where it was almost half-half in terms of leadership. But women tend to think about the whole and not want to hurt people. So they tend not to step on-on other people, so they don’t get promotions as much. They don’t negotiate because sometimes they think it’s not fair. so it’s a cultural thing again, in a way, but companies can and should encourage women to come out more.

[00:20:49] Karen: I was going to say, I think it’s, it’s also important to show those who are younger, and just starting out, that there are people who look like me, are like me, and act like me, in roles of senior leadership. And that’s very important to mould the next generation, so to speak, to ensure that, you know, us women do have a voice and we can be influential in the decision-making process of the industry.

[00:21:16] Jon: It is not necessilary to dip down always to having rules around these things, but sometimes it’s about more subtle changes. If you think about it, crunch in the games industry.  Crunch is going to be bad for anyone who’s a carer or has sort of family commitments, which, in our society, tends to be more focused on women.

So it’s not necessarily that women are directly targeted. They’re indirectly targeted. And they find it harder to do management roles because they just can’t throw 80 hours a week at games in a way that men, who have less responsibility, maybe can because their partner or their wife is sorting childcare. Is that something that’s just going to change slowly, obviously, you know, crunch is something that the industry is dealing with on a more structural basis, so that’s a hopeful sign, I suppose.

[00:22:12] Paula: The problem lies in the women sorting out the kids, right? it has to be both, but again, it goes back to the cultural thing. I think that particular part is changing, at least in my generation, in my small circle of friends, at least.

[00:22:32] Jon: Yeah.

[00:22:32] Paula: Like the guys are dividing the work. With me and my partner, that’s exactly how it happens. And nobody says anything. For example, I don’t say, “Oh, he’s helping me.” No, we’re a partnership. He’s not helping; well, I don’t even use the verb because it’s not about help; it’s about dividing. So if he and I were working in a gaming company at the same point and if he was crunching too, that would have been insane for him to manage our daughter. So yeah, as a whole, crunch is bad, and it can’t be there.

[00:23:08] Jon: Yes, yes, yes.

Addressing toxicity and culture

[00:23:08] Paula: But, you know, the problem is it does affect more the women because not all families are like mine, and my friends and more of them should be equal, right?

[00:23:20] Jon: Yeah. Absolutely. So, you may be in the early stages, Karen, but in terms of your career, how do you see the games industry as a place that is now an industry where a woman can have a career for, you know, 30, 40 years? And is it just like any other industry, it doesn’t matter that it’s tech which, you know, it still probably needs to have a great reputation may be outside the industry.

[00:23:48] Karen: Yeah, I definitely think so, but I will say this is not an industry where you’re exposed to early on, especially when you’re growing up. Well, at least for me, it was not something that seemed like a possibility. Paula, you and I were very different in that sense, as I almost went through the normal gender norms way, where my family would take us to get-togethers, and it was just the boys playing Smash Bros in the game room. And it’s like if I play. The first few times I play this game, I won’t be good. I need to learn the controls. Otherwise will only win against you sometimes. And having those experiences affects how I think about gaming growing up in general.

So, there are certain games that I can play, right? I love Candy Crush. Everyone in my life knows that I love Candy Crush. I’m on level 6,000.

[00:24:49] Paula: Oh, wow.

[00:24:50] Karen: That’s how much I love it. But I think if I had kind of gone beyond those gender norms when I was growing up, things might be different in the interest I have for games in general. I might be interested in all the other types of games that are out there. Gaming seemed less accessible for me or, you know, the group of people I spent my time with. As they would say, “I don’t wanna play with you; you’re not gonna win.” and then say “So I’m just going to play with someone who’s-who’s good at it.”

[00:25:21] Paula: Yeah. The social aspect of it is really complicated. Right? I think maybe for me, it was different. I didn’t have a lot of friends so I would play by myself and I got good at playing them. So when I would play at a LAN house or something, I was already good at it because I was playing most of the time by myself playing the game. But there is definitely a divide. For example, I’ve played games for almost 40 years now. And I still haven’t played one single MMO because when I tried playing MMOs back, way back when it was just horrible when they found out you were a girl online, and it was just a horrible experience.

Although the industry is going in a very good way, the gaming industry that is, I feel that the gaming public is going the opposite way. Every time I play, it’s more toxic, and it’s only getting worse and worse from that perspective.

[00:26:20] Karen: Yeah, I’ve recently been on YouTube Shorts and TikTok, and it’s incredible the amount you hear about some of the horror stories of female streamers out there. And so I completely agree with that sentiment, Paula.

Changing perceptions and empowerment

[00:26:36] Jon: I guess the cultural toxicity is something that is spread across the industry and is not a male vs female thing. I think it’s a wider cultural standard we have accepted in gaming, where there’s an inability to be nice to people online. But let’s move on from that one.

So I want to talk about something when you were talking there, Karen, it was something I thought was very interesting. You were talking about, and I hesitate to broach the question, but as we, particularly with mobile games, and Paula, correct me if you need to. Although I know some very competitive women, women generally do not like, or at least most women don’t like competitive games. And I think having the more cooperative type of games, and more community-driven games like Candy Crush games, which do have strong social aspects in them but are not sort of not  “I’ve just shot you, and I’m gonna like trash talk you” as you do have on consoles-type games.

It’s quite encouraging, generally, to see how games are viewed in culture and probably within the industry. You were sort of joking there about how you’re such a hardcore Candy Crush fan that you have an insane amount of levels. So it’s never been the case that people who play casual games can’t be super hardcore about playing casual games, I think that has allowed a new community of hardcore gamers, who don’t see themselves as hardcore gamers, but they are in that specific genre. And I think that’s been welcomed in some way by women who don’t actually want to play Call of Duty online, for example.

[00:28:21] Karen: Yeah. That’s a very interesting point. So, on the hardcore casual gamer, if you will. I’m not a big user, and I have not spent much money, but anytime I get a little promotion of 99 cents for an hour of unlimited life, I will sit on the couch and play for an hour. And my partner jokes around sometimes because he plays games, mostly on his PC, but he’s like, “You know, you’re a gamer too, right?” and then says, “You like to sit down for an hour, and you play Candy Crush, and you’re just there.” He’s like, “That’s what I do on my computer, just with my friends,” or whatever it is that he’s doing. So I think that’s a really interesting point.

[00:29:05] Jon: In fact, there was a wider point around that where people– I can’t remember which game it was, or just a few years ago. They were doing surveys with people who were playing games, and there was this sort of state where they said to people, “Are you a gamer?” and lots of women would go, “No, of course, I’m not a gamer, I have no console.”

And then they go, “How many hours do-do you play on your phone?” And they’d reply with something like, “Oh, that’s three hours a day or something.” And the research would be like, “What? You do know that’s the definition of a serious gamer”

[00:29:29] Karen: Yeah, that’s pretty hardcore.

[00:29:30] Jon: If they were playing World of Warcraft, then we’d consider it hardcore gaming, you know, so those, I think, hopefully, over time that that’s changing, and I think the fact people don’t call themselves gamers, I think is probably a good thing because now we know, that three billion of eight billion people in the world are gamers, and if the other five billion people had mobile phones, they’d all be gamers too.

We’re all gamers, well, almost. So, that’s maybe a bit more of a positive view towards the future for women in games. As we’re finishing up now, are there any closing remarks you have or anything you think should be important for the industry to be thinking about to accelerate the sort of changes we’re seeing, hopefully?

[00:30:13] Paula: I think that, as Karen said in one of her answers, representation is really important. More women need to see women there to be able to think, “Okay, I can do that too.” So, if, as a company, you have speaking opportunities, and you can send women, send them. Again, as a company, if you have a few women in leadership roles, try to put them there and then try to understand women from that perspective. From the perspective of how women grew up in culture and society, they want to tend to everyone and take care of everyone.

They won’t push hard for it (promotions), but as a leadership team, you have to go and do more of the pushing yourself to see if she’s interested. So, that’s why we don’t see that much out there. It needs an extra, and it needs a female eye to begin with, right? To be able to get those promotions and to get those things right.

You need those strong leaders to say, I’ve been in their position, and I needed encouragement. For example, I’ve been in interviews for companies and was in a position to say something. I wasn’t the person that was hiring like I didn’t have the veto power or anything. Still, I was talking to the person who said, “Listen, we’re interviewing a girl; you need to go this way with your questions. Because if you do, she will give you more information, and she will start self-affirming more and start giving you the answers you want to hear” You know? So yeah, you need a female eye, and companies should be doing that and trying to figure out, “Okay, if she’s the best candidate for the promotion, she’s not pushing for it. Let me push for it on her behalf.”. Representation over and over and over again.

[00:32:11] Karen: Plus one to everything you just said, Paula. I think taking things may be more specific to the gaming community in general. It would be great to foster an open community for kids and girls in general. To show them that you can grow up and understand that there is a community for everyone in this world. It’s sometimes tough to understand, again, from my perspective, that gaming is not male-focused; it’s for everyone.

So how can we combat some of these more innate,  what you’d call, gender norms? How do we break across that so there are opportunities for all of us? I’m hopeful we’re able to see that through the years ahead.

[00:33:08] Jon: Well, thank you very much, Karen and Paula. Thank you for your expertise and for discussing the subject. I hope you found that useful, and thanks to you for watching, listening, or however you are consuming the podcast.

In every episode, we are talking to people in the mobile games sector, so there are different aspects I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, which is slightly different to some of our other ones, but please, come back next time to see what’s going on, in the world of mobile games. See you then, goodbye.

[00:33:13] Karen: Thank you.

[00:33:13] Paula: Thank you.