Playrix: "We have nothing against clones of our games"

Mobio Talks within the framework of White Nights Moscow 2016, which took place on October 11-12, took several interviews with the speakers of the conference. Today we publish a conversation between Anton Krokhmalyuk, Marketing Director at Mobio, and Tanya Evdokimenko, head of the Kiev office of Playrix.

I must say that App Annie publishes ratings of not the best, but the most successful companies, so I would not offend other developers who did not get into this top. We have even more far-reaching plans: we want to advance in this top. Now being in second place after Supercell is very exciting, and they, like us, are focused on creating only hits..

Do you think it’s possible to clone your hits or Supercell hits, then make money from it?

We ourselves have never hidden that we are inspired by the ideas of other games. Nevertheless, we have never made clones, but we have nothing against making clones of our games.

The mobile games market is a rapidly developing industry. What was relevant 9 months ago, when, for example, you just started cloning a particular game, may not be relevant after a while, after the game has already been released. Plus, while you are making a clone, your main competitor is the one you rely on, does not stand still. He develops the game, implements improvements and rolls out a very serious content update every month.

Everyone likes to talk about their hits, but few people like to talk about failures. Tell us about your failures — were they in principle? At what point do you need to understand that it’s time to stop working on the game?

I like to talk about the files. If you don’t fail, then you never move forward. We openly talk about the history of the game Sky Charms, which was released this spring. We stopped operating on it because the game did not reach the level of a hit in our understanding. This is a very beautiful project with rich content, in which everything is thought out. But the retention was not enough to consider the game a potential hit.

Sky Charms rating, the number of downloads on Google Play alone is more than 1 million

Did you realize at the softlonch stage that the game should be closed?

We are releasing softloncha games already in an improved version.

We cannot afford such a luxury — something raw or MVP [minimum viable product – a product with a minimum of functions sufficient to draw any conclusions about its performance on its basis, – approx. App2Top.ru ] release to the market. Our TTM [time to market – the time from the outline of the project to the moment when it is ready for sale – approx. App2Top.ru ] is a little different from the traditional one, so the success obtained on the softlonch will not necessarily be the same as with the world release.

We spend a lot of time on analytics — we have certain numbers that we focus on. We do not hide them, they are well-known. When the game falls just a little short, we continue to refine. Sky Charms could not be finalized.

And where is the line between continuing to fight for the product or abandoning it?

At the time of the release of Sky Charms, we already had Township and Fishdom in the piggy bank of mobile hits, it was clear to us what to focus on. When we saw the Sky Charms metrics, we realized that for any other company in our genre, this would be considered a successful project. I can’t say that this is a financially unsuccessful project — it’s just not a super hit. He didn’t reach our internal metrics.

What did you do with this game then?

She is now in stores — we just froze her operation.

You release games for iOS, Android, for the web — you have a large zoo of platforms. What platforms do you focus on?

The main platforms for us are iOS and Android. In addition, we traditionally release games on Mac and feel good on Amazon.

And as for other platforms: Windows Phone or social networks — Facebook, VKontakte. Do you think it’s better to port the game to the maximum number of platforms?

The game should be available where the player is waiting for it. At Playrix, we are already focusing on the above-mentioned platforms and conducting experiments. Gardenscapes will be released on Facebook. We are not planning to release this game on any other social networks. If we talk about Windows Phone, then our Township has been released there for a long time. I can not specifically orient the timing, but our other games will also see the light on Windows.

We often hear that Windows Phone does not give such a significant effect in comparison with iOS and Android.

Of course, Windows Phone does not occupy a significant place in our revenue structure, but our audience is there, people are waiting for games from Playrix.

You have more than 400 people in your staff, how many of these people are engaged in promotion, and how many are engaged in development?

We have a strong promotion department — there are more than 60 people in it (the company has more than 450 employees in total). In addition to traffic managers or UA managers, there are programmers who set up analytical systems, analysts, designers, and so on.

Where do you get traffic for your games from?

We make purchases on all traffic sources that can give a high marginality. One of the most interesting sources for today is video advertising. Sometimes it can give up to 50% of traffic, the remaining 50% I would divide between Adwords, Facebook and other banner networks. We have plans to improve the work with existing channels and, perhaps, after some time, change the distribution.

How do you anticipate and plan virality? Do you have cases where you have implemented one tool and received a huge number of installations or shareware for free?

According to the viral mechanics, we look at the successful cases of competitors and implement these things at home. There are companies that, when calculating marginality and future income, lay virality. We don’t do that. We focus on getting features from platforms and try to make the highest quality games in order for platforms to feature our games without a twinge of conscience or even with pleasure. But basically, when calculating future revenues, we focus on the purchase of traffic.

How do you work with your audience?

First of all, we focus on the client: we are not making a game for a producer with his dreams, we are not making a game for the development team to make it easier and faster for them to do, we are making a game for the player, so we want to reach him in all possible ways: these are the mailing lists that we do after each update. We also have a very powerful community and support department. We communicate with players in all major social networks. By the way, I like the format: “Ask me anything”. This is when the development team answers any questions from the community.

Note new tools to attract users? We really believe in mobile retargeting. Are you doing it and are you using something else from the new?

For us, retargeting is a daily job, we can’t say that it’s a new tool for us. In the future, I want to work more with influencers.

At White Nights, and in the market as a whole, there is a lot of talk about the fact that soon the whole market will be captured by games for VR, AR. What needs to happen for Playrix to launch a VR or AR game tomorrow?

Personally, my opinion is that the industry and technology are not ready yet, and the market has not yet matured. In the future, some niche of the game store will be occupied by both augmented and virtual reality, but I would not say that today we need to give up everything and retrain for such a development.

How do I still launch the game and earn a lot of money? Highlight the three main steps.

Firstly, when choosing the setting, genre and platform on which you will develop the game, it is important to first determine the target audience of your game, who will really play it. Having decided on who you will make the game for, you need to understand who you will do it with. The team is the key to success. And the third is to understand what will happen next with the product. The game should not just be released: pre-production and production are just part of the game’s existence. It is important to understand how you will promote the game, you need to think about this at the stage of hatching the idea.