"A clean update without a feature gives an increase of less than 5% or does not give at all": VGTRK about children's applications

The children’s game “Mi-mi-bears” has gained more than 1 million downloads in four months in the CIS. In this regard, we talked with Alexey Ilyin, the head of children’s projects of the VGTRK gaming direction, about the project, its development and the children’s games market.

Hi! I want to congratulate you on the first million at Mi-mi-Bears! Please tell us about the project itself. What is he like?

Alexey Ilyin
“Mi-mi-bears” is the most fun and entertaining project released under the brand “Interactive Cartoon”.

This is a game with an open looped world where you can run around any cartoon character and explore it. Most of the objects in the world are interactive, the world is filled with dots marked with asterisks, in which a unique animation is played for each character, revealing his character, and there is also a set of mini-games. Each mini-game has an entry point from the map, but the child must find it and remember where it was.

We do not put explicit tasks in the game, encouraging the child to explore, ask questions and look for answers to them. We believe that the research component in games for younger children is extremely important, because it stimulates curiosity and allows the child to develop more correctly both in the game and beyond.

How long and with what composition did the studio make the game?

The development took about 6 months. At various times, 14 people worked on “Mi-mi-bears” in the studio, as well as several remote specialists. It is clear that most of these people did not work on the project constantly, but were involved as needed. The core of the team was around 5-7 people.

The gaming market is not the easiest. What do you think played a major role in the set of downloads by the project “Mi-mi-bears”?

The market is very complex, both for the developer/publisher and for the consumer. Parents have no sources of verified information. The main source of information about games for a parent is the app store. In such a situation, brand awareness and the degree of parent’s trust in the brand begins to play a major role.

In our case, I believe that the combination of a young fast-growing brand “Mi-mi-bears”, a very high-quality and polished product and a whole range of marketing activities (TV advertising on the channel “Mult” and other digital channels, advertising on the Internet resources of the holding, work in social networks, cross-traffic from other applications) allowed us to achieve such rapid growth.

By the way, even without a cross-promo, the release of a new application gives us an increase in traffic to other applications up to 20% for 1-2 months.

Have you tried buying traffic?

We have not tried and are not planning to in the near future for 2 reasons:

• the cost of installation is now off the scale due to the overheating of the market, and the user’s LTV is traditionally extremely low for children’s games, it is economically impractical;
• we have a fairly large number of shareware resources for promotion. Including the brand, which plays an increasingly important role in the release of children’s products.

What is the distribution of downloads by region and platform?

90% of downloads are on Android, 10% on iOS. The ratio would be different if we nominated the free version of “Mi-mi-bears” instead of the paid one for iOS-fitchering. On Android, we promoted the free version.

About 89% of installations are in Russia, another 6% in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the remaining 5% in the rest of the world.

The main region is Russia. And the international market? Are you going to go to it, what is in the way, are there any difficulties associated with it?

We plan to capture the international market in 2017. As I said earlier, brand strength is starting to play a key role in promoting a children’s product. If the Mi-mi-bears brand has already gained fame in Russia and continues to grow rapidly, then it does not exist outside of Russia. We have seen more than once that the presence of a famous character in promotional materials and app stores in the West increases the conversion rate and trust in a children’s product tenfold.

Currently, active negotiations are underway to sell the rights to the animated series “Mi-mi-bears”, “Papers”, “Arkady Parovozov” and “Fairy Patrol” to various territories. When cartoons will be broadcast there on TV, it will make sense to make a repeat push of the advertising campaign. Given that we have full control over the set of games released under our brands, we are confident that this approach will significantly expand the audience and improve the financial performance of projects.

It is believed that today one of the important criteria for success in the games market are regular updates and updates (and it does not matter whether the project is paid or not). How often do you update the game, how significant are the updates and how significant are the download spikes after them?

Updates, of course, are a key element of operating an adult frituplay project.

Based on the experience of operating 3 children’s projects already, I can say that updates do not play such a role. The main reason is that the appearance of the update does not remind the child of the game, because in most cases the parent is engaged in resource management in the preschooler’s phone. A child at this age, if he reads, then it is bad and certainly he is not interested in what they write in the description in the app store. A major content update in this case is mainly an occasion to remind the app store about itself, and if the content is good, then an opportunity to get into a selection of new and updates.

If you look at our statistics, then a clean update, not supported by a feature, gives an increase of less than 5% or does not give at all.

You probably have a project support plan. How long does it usually make sense to support a children’s game, what is its life span (and do they become obsolete at all)?

For ourselves, we have developed the following scheme: the release of the game, an update with the correction of key problems during the first 2 weeks, a content update in about a month, then bug fixes if necessary.

Practice shows that further active support is economically inefficient. Of course, except in special cases, such as the release of a new version of the operating system or the appearance of a new interesting feature of the platform. As an example of such a feature, for example, stickers in iOS 10, which we add to the “Mi-mi-bears”. In our opinion, this feature will allow you to actively promote the brand and will contribute to the spread of the game.

If we talk about the life span of a children’s game, then I would compare it with the life span of a brand, which in the case of childhood is very large. We estimate the lifetime of a good brand at 8-10 years. The market shows that old, but well-made products continue to live and remain interesting to the audience. If the game is also associated with the brand, then it has an additional level of trust. There is also a downside: brands oversaturated with gaming content can, due to an excess of new products, drown old products faster.

And the last question: what to expect from the studio in the near future?

We have a lot of new things!

On September 22, we are releasing “Magic Lantern” – very beautiful filmstrips with a retelling of classics of literature for the youngest, with interactive inserts inscribed in the plot.

Next, we plan to expand our educational line of “Multiznayka” with two more products. In early December, we are planning to release our first game for a more adult audience based on the animated series “Fairy Patrol”. It will be a children’s collectible RPG. There are also plans for a new game in the universe of “Mi-mi-bears” and a game based on the new animated series “Leo and Tig”, the first series of which will be released in September.

Thanks for the interview!